catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

612: Screen on Face

07 Nov 2024

More details about the new Macs, M4 Pro and Max benchmarks, why Apple TV isn’t a game platform, and future hardware possibilities for the Vision Pro line.

Episode Description:

Sponsored by:

Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!

Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

  1. The show must go on
  2. ATP Store 🖼️
  3. New Macs follow-up
  4. M4 Pro/Max performance 🖼️
  5. Misc hardware follow-up
  6. Sponsor: 1password XAM
  7. Apple TV vs. gaming
  8. Keyboard-cleaning tricks
  9. Apple buying Pixelmator
  10. Apple buys some of Globalstar
  11. Sponsor: Squarespace
  12. Future Vision Pro hardware
  13. Ending theme
  14. Post-election feelings

The show must go on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco As we’re recording this, this is the day after election day. We just got Trump

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a second term. None of us are happy. We’re gonna save

⏹️ ▶️ Marco our sadness and wallowing and feelings about that for the after show.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we’re gonna do a regular show. You can go back and listen to our episode

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in November 2016 titled The Show Must Go On, where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we said something very similar. and we’re gonna do something I think very sadly similar.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you know, the show must go on. We’re gonna try to have this be again, our

⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular computer tech show because in challenging times people need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco normalcy from wherever they can get it. So here we are, we’re talking about tech now and we will talk about our feelings

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the election in the after show.

ATP Store

Chapter ATP Store image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey With that in mind, let’s talk about something that I think we can all agree is pretty awesome, and that is the ATP

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Holiday Store. You can go to atp.fm slash store and you can see

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all sorts of absolutely awesome merchandise. We’ve got M4 shirts, we’ve got M4

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro shirts, M4 Max shirts, we’ve got monochrome colors, we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Casey got monochrome comma, colors comma, sorry that all kind of ran together, we’ve got monochrome colors.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you can have monochrome colors, as long as it’s singular colors each. Like that is a thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly. But anyways, we’ve got all sorts of different shirts

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can put these on. We’ve got tanks, we’ve got tees, we’ve got long sleeve, we’ve got pullover hoodies,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all sorts of different stuff. We have brought back the ATP Pixel shirt, which I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Casey had at least a couple of people say to me or reach out to me and say, you know, I didn’t go for the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pixel shirt, And then I saw one or I saw another picture of it or something like that. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I messed up. I should have gotten a pixel shirt. So you can. Yeah. This is your opportunity to grab one of those.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Let me let me tell you the like when when we design the shirts, we don’t get advanced

⏹️ ▶️ Marco copies of the shirts. They’re printed all at once. So we see the shirts for the first time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you see the shirts for the first time. And yeah, when the pixel one showed up, I was like, Oh, this is this is a special one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is really good. So yeah, if you

⏹️ ▶️ John missed it the first time, we did test prints of the the pixel ones though, by the way. We did test prints of the original pixel one, and then

⏹️ ▶️ John in this store around, the new addition to the pixels, you can get it on sweatshirts, and we didn’t know if it would work on that, so

⏹️ ▶️ John I saw a picture of a sweatshirt test print, and it seems just as good as the other style shirts. But yeah, we don’t get

⏹️ ▶️ John them in our hands, but we do at least, if we’re nervous about it, we get a test print and take a look at it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because the pixels one in particular, that takes a lot of, I think, precision and skill from the printer,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s a pretty hard thing to screen print a very large number of very small, differently

⏹️ ▶️ Marco colored blocks and have them all line up correctly and have the right gaps and everything and not bleed and all this stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like so this that it was a risk for sure to make that and Cotton Bureau of course rose to the challenge and did a really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good job with it. So yeah, definitely pick up the pixel shirt. That’s a really good one.

⏹️ ▶️ John The other degree of difficulty on that one is that so you know, ever as people know, hear us complain about this all the time,

⏹️ ▶️ John the more colors you put on a shirt, the more it costs do the way screen printing works. So obviously we’ve got our rainbow stripe

⏹️ ▶️ John colors on the ATP logo, but the Pixel shirt, all the stripes and

⏹️ ▶️ John all the letters also have shadows, which is a darker version of the same color.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s brutal. But anyway, Pixels, yeah. And by the way, speaking of the Pixels design, which people, this is only the

⏹️ ▶️ John second time we’ve sold it and people seem to like it. Getting lots of emails from people saying, hey, when are

⏹️ ▶️ John you gonna sell the insert shirt we’re not currently selling again? And I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have answers for them. Maybe someday we’ll sell a particular design again, but we just have

⏹️ ▶️ John so many products, we can’t put them all on sale at the same time. So my advice to you is, if you see something you like,

⏹️ ▶️ John buy it, or maybe buy two, because who knows when it will ever come back. Some things we’ve only sold literally

⏹️ ▶️ John once, some things we will probably never sell again since there’s such narrow interest. Some things come back once every three years.

⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, don’t just assume, ah, I’m not gonna get it this sale, I’ll get it next sale. Maybe it won’t be for sale

⏹️ ▶️ John then. The only thing we always sell is obviously our logo shirt with our plain ATP logo on it,

⏹️ ▶️ John but everything else is a rotating collection. So if you want them, get them.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And it’s not like a Disney vault sort of situation. It’s just that generally speaking, we have at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey least a pretty good idea of what, what people are interested in, what’s going to sell. And generally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaking, the kind of more esoteric stuff, for example, the ATP Polo, which is available right now.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love it. Not everyone else does. And so that will do every like second, third or fourth sale.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So like John said, it’s not that we’re saying it’ll, these things will never come back, although we’re making no promises either.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, but you should definitely grab at least one, if not a couple, if there’s something that you like that’s available.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we’ve also got the zip hoodie. We’ve got pullover hoodies. That’s a new one. We’ve never done pullover hoodie before.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ve got the mugs that have come back in white and like a deep, deep, deep blue ish purpley. What’s the official

⏹️ ▶️ Casey name for this? John Cobalt. Thank you. Uh, we’ve also got the ATP hat. Uh, all sorts

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of stuff is available. All of it is available until I believe it’s Sunday, November 17th.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, Sunday the 17th at basically end of the day, New York time, and literally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey end of the day, not end of the business day, not close to business, not COB, but EOD. Uh, that’s just for you, John.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But, um, anyways, so you can order until the 17th of November. You can go to hp.fm slash store.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, John, I have two questions for you. Number one, what should you do if you’re a member? And number

⏹️ ▶️ Casey two, what if you want to become a member and aren’t, and maybe don’t want to pay for it?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so if you are a member, you have a 15% off discount code that is on your member

⏹️ ▶️ John page. Go to ATP.fm and log in and go to your member page. You’ll see the code there and you can copy and paste

⏹️ ▶️ John it into the little promo code field during checkout. Or if you are logged into ATP.fm, when you go

⏹️ ▶️ John to ATP.fm slash store and click through on any of the products, we will auto fill your discount code

⏹️ ▶️ John for you just so you don’t forget it. But anyway, it’s on your member page if you want to copy and paste it. 15% off,

⏹️ ▶️ John totally worthwhile to use that. if you are not a member and wanna become one, just so you can save 15% off,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can easily make up the cost of membership with the amount that you save. Go to atp.fm slash

⏹️ ▶️ John join. You can join for one month and get the discount and be done with it. And of course,

⏹️ ▶️ John we also have ATP gift memberships, which you can buy for someone else in your life who you think might wanna

⏹️ ▶️ John be an ATP member. Or if you’re a member, you’ll see a link that lets you send

⏹️ ▶️ John that link to somebody else and say, hey, buy me ATP membership for my holiday gift or

⏹️ ▶️ John for my birthday or for whatever. So those are also available to you right now on the store

⏹️ ▶️ John page and also on your member page.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, if I’m already a member, a paying member, and somebody gets me a year subscription, what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey happens?

⏹️ ▶️ John It just tacks on to the end of your current subscription. Now, gift memberships never expire, so you can just

⏹️ ▶️ John hold them and not redeem them, but you can also just redeem them immediately. They just add time to your

⏹️ ▶️ John subscription. I think there is like a sane limit where it’ll always just keep

⏹️ ▶️ John adding time, but due to a limitation in Stripe, if you add like four years of membership, or maybe it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John longer than that, maybe it’s like seven years of membership, we can’t, we won’t continue your membership

⏹️ ▶️ John after your gift membership’s run out because Stripe has a limitation in the way we’re handling recurring

⏹️ ▶️ John subscriptions. Anyway, you will always just add time. The only difference is at the end of seven years,

⏹️ ▶️ John we won’t continue your subscription. You don’t have to do that manually. But anything less than seven years or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John the ridiculous amount of time is, we will just add, we will just continue your subscription, you’re paying subscription

⏹️ ▶️ John after your gift subscription runs out. So, uh, yeah, gift membership has the gift

⏹️ ▶️ John that keeps on given.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed it does. And remember you get a whole plethora of, uh, member specials if you become

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a member and again, you get 15% off at the store, atp.fm slash store.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will do our visualization exercise that I know all of you love so very much. If you’re driving, if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey walking, you can either use your turn signal because you’re an adult or you can, you know, get to the side

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the sidewalk whatever the case may be, maybe you’re biking, you know, use the little arm signals if you need to, but one way

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or another, pause and go to atp.fm slash store and spend all of your money, I mean, uh, by

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the things you are interested in buying. Or if you are not in a position, you can do that. Where are you going

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or where will you have some free time later? Visualize that spot. Maybe it’s your desk at work. Maybe it’s your desk at home. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s somewhere else entirely. Maybe you’re going to Wegmans to do work like I do most Wednesday mornings in order to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey prep for the show, wherever you may be heading, think about what it’ll be like to go to ATP dot

⏹️ ▶️ Casey FM slash store and buy some stuff when you get there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can also set a reminder with your voice assistant of choice. You know one thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have learned now that I have CarPlay, which is amazing, is that…

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh wait

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are we team CarPlay now?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course we’re team CarPlay! I was always team CarPlay. Well yeah there were times when I said

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s fine I can do without it if I have to, but I always wanted it if it was available.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And over time the I can do without it if I have to has gotten smaller.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep. But anyway, one thing I discovered is that when your phone is connected to CarPlay, you can usually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just say into the air in your car, hey thing, remind me in two hours

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go buy ATP merchandise. And it will almost always pick it up without any waiting.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t have to say hey thing and then wait for the car to be like, waiting, waiting. What do you want to say?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can just say in one phrase, hey thing, remind me in an hour to go buy ATP merchandise.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And usually that will work. So even in Casey’s case where like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, oh, you can just try to think about it later. If you’re anything like me, you will forget immediately.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, I, thinking back to like my life before

⏹️ ▶️ Marco being able to set reminders via voice assistance that would then beep in my pocket and wrist, you know, at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a certain time, like, oh my god, how did I ever get anything done? I mean, the answer is I didn’t. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how did I remember anything? I didn’t. How did I get through life? I got in trouble a lot. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now we are in a better place where we can be reminded of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things with very little effort by sitting around pretty much wherever we are.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s wonderful. So you can use that ability to say, Hey thing, remind me in an hour to buy ATP merchandise.

New Macs follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. We have some information with regard to the Mac Mini,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as is expected, and other Macs as well. Let’s start with headphone jacks. Where’s the headphone jack

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the Mac Mini, John?

⏹️ ▶️ John We didn’t talk about it last time, but it’s in the front, which is interesting. So here’s the

⏹️ ▶️ John thing about the headphone jack. I don’t think there’s any perfect place

⏹️ ▶️ John to put the headphone jack on a computer the size of the Mac Mini, because you can make an

⏹️ ▶️ John argument for the front, you can make an argument for the back, you could probably make an argument for the side. I bet somebody can make an argument

⏹️ ▶️ John for the top because that thing is so little, you can put it in so many different places. It’s you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John people who want a clean setup but they don’t want to see that wire, they’d rather have the wire going from the back and underneath

⏹️ ▶️ John the desk and I don’t know, snaking up through some other thing. People want it on the front because they’re constantly plugging and unplugging it.

⏹️ ▶️ John People want it on the top because it’s, the Mac Mini is on a little thing next to them and they have good easy access to the top.

⏹️ ▶️ John If it’s underneath your desk all this changes. But so they had to pick somewhere to put it and they pick

⏹️ ▶️ John the front, which is so much more defensible sort of front and top are so much more defensible in a giant tower computer,

⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s just so hard to reach around the back of a giant tower computer, especially, you know, like it’s but the mini is so small,

⏹️ ▶️ John it could be literally anywhere on anybody’s desk. So I kind of feel for Apple in choosing the placement.

⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, they chose the front and I don’t think you’ll see a lot of pictures in Apple’s PR photography

⏹️ ▶️ John showing a wire connected to the Mac Mini anywhere in the front, let alone a headphone wire connected

⏹️ ▶️ John to the front, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there it is. Yeah, I think we’re lucky that they still have one at all. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, you know, let’s, let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth too much, but also I think, yeah, if you’re going to have a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphone jack on a, on a desktop computer, the best places for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it are either the front or the side. And if you look at the Mac Mini, like there’s not really anything on the sides.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you put it on the side, that kind of restricts certain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco positioning of the Mac Mini. So yeah, I think this is fine.

⏹️ ▶️ John People like the back too, because they don’t wanna see the wire. Now, I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco always wonder- Well, it depends what you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John plugging into it. You’re right, so you don’t see the wire. It may say, like, I never unplug it. I just want something plugged in the back. Like, say you have

⏹️ ▶️ John it hooked up to some other, like, bigger, more complicated piece of audio equipment than

⏹️ ▶️ John just headphones. It’s like, I don’t wanna see that wire. Like, imagine if, I don’t know, you explained to me they have, like, headphone amps or something.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even know what kind of things is you can connect to that jack. But if it’s something permanently connected and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not your headphones, like it connects to some other box that connects to a thing that connects to your headphones

⏹️ ▶️ John or connects to big speakers, you wouldn’t want that connected to the front because now you’ve got to like immediately turn the wire

⏹️ ▶️ John around and have it go backwards. Like, it’s just so dependent on what your setup is, what you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John going to have plugged in there and how often you’re gonna plug and unplug it. But then there’s the break. I guess if you

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t like it, you can get one of the, you know, USB audio connection and use one of the back USB ports. So you have options,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s difficult to choose where to put the ports. And I just think it was interesting for Apple for so long,

⏹️ ▶️ John really not, pretty against ports on the front of their computers. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ John even the tiny Mac mini. That is not just the headphone port, but other ports in the front of it as well. The Mac studio has

⏹️ ▶️ John an SD card slot in the front of it, plus ports. It’s a brave new world.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and that is where you’d want an SD card slot. Cause it’s-

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yes, yes. But no, I mean, keep

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in mind, like, you know, with, first of all, if you do, we know what John said of like the nightmare

⏹️ ▶️ Marco scenario having a permanently plugged in cord into the front of your Mac mini, and you hate that it has to snake around to the back.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let me advise you on something, get a right angle headphone plug. Like you can get a right angle cord from Amazon for like $3.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that helps a lot because then the cord goes straight down. I have a couple of things on my desk where I have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, a wire that would stick straight out and I just, you know, went on Amazon, it’s paid the three bucks to get a right angle

⏹️ ▶️ Marco plug on that one that was exactly the right length so it wouldn’t have too much excess and it made a much cleaner setup. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, yes, if you really are gonna be doing something permanent, that you always

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want something at the back and you want a really clean front, odds are somewhere in this setup you’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a place to put a USB audio device. And that, whether you call it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a DAC or a speaker amp, these are all the same, or a headphone amp, rather, these are all the same things. It’s just a USB

⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio device that has a headphone output of some kind, and you can bury that wherever you wanna bury it in your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco setup. So you have lots of options. Also, one thing to consider, I was just looking up the weight

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the Mac Mini. It’s only 1.5 or 1.6 pounds, depending on configuration.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is, you know, less, substantially less than a MacBook Air

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in weight. That’s still going to be a little bit dense, but it is possible

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you had a headphone jack on the back and you tugged on that a little bit, you could like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco twist the whole Mac Mini around. You could like, you know, move the physical Mac Mini with the motion of your headphones

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you pulled hard enough, because again, it’s only one and a half pounds sitting there on the desk. So that’s another consideration. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve made this so small and it’s getting lighter over time. So you don’t want it like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco being scootered around the desk needlessly either. So yeah, another reason why being on the front is fine.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s the Apple TV problem. And I bet it’s true of the Mac Mini too. If you connect cables to all the things

⏹️ ▶️ John in the back, power, a bunch of USB, ethernet, those cables, the force

⏹️ ▶️ John on those cables, the stiffness of those cables, already may be like tilting your entire Mac mini like

⏹️ ▶️ John on an angle off of the surface. Or like pulling it to the side, you try to align it

⏹️ ▶️ John so it’s like parallel to the side of your desk and you let go and it just slides another two degrees because the cables are too stiff.

⏹️ ▶️ John The cable, like it’s so small compared to the strength. I have the same problem with Apple TV Pucks. Like sometimes you can

⏹️ ▶️ John find a place in your entertainment center where it sits just fine, but sometimes it just wants to move because, I mean, HDMI,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you have HDMI and you’ve got a really thick HDMI cable, it’s a problem. I don’t know, maybe you can

⏹️ ▶️ John just, everyone, every Mac mini should come with like a custom made exactly the same

⏹️ ▶️ John proportions as the top of the case, like tungsten slab that you can just put on top. Probably not good for cooling

⏹️ ▶️ John though. No.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then Quinn Nelson was perhaps the first person to point out something that we’ve heard pointed out

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to us many, many, many times. Quinn writes, you can buy another

⏹️ ▶️ Casey base model Mac mini. So this is 16 gigs of RAM and a 256 gig SSD

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the price that it costs to upgrade a single Mac mini to 32 gigs of RAM and 512 gigabyte

⏹️ ▶️ Casey SSD. So let me repeat that. If you have the base model, you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can, in order to get to a sum total of 32 gigs and 512 gigs,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can buy an entire second Mac mini for about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same price as it costs to upgrade the original Mac mini with the same specs. It’s bananas.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, if you, well, it’s $1 less. Yeah, if you double the RAM and storage, it is double

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the price of the base model Mac mini. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I wanted to break down, we talked about this before and we didn’t say, they don’t want to go into numbers, but here let’s go into numbers.

⏹️ ▶️ John How does this work out? So the base model is 599. Okay, that’s 16 gigs of RAM, 256 SSD. When you do the

⏹️ ▶️ John RAM upgrade to 32, that is plus $400.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s adding 16 gigabytes to the base 16 at $25 per gigabyte and you may be wondering how much does

⏹️ ▶️ John that cost for real? Not an Apple fantasy land I tried to find something comparable same speed RAM

⏹️ ▶️ John to the best of my knowledge and I was super fair with this because I’m Comparing it in this case to

⏹️ ▶️ John crucial which is a name-brand 32 gig LPDDR 5x

⏹️ ▶️ John 7500 memory right but this crucial thing It’s an entire printed circuit board with

⏹️ ▶️ John associated like capacitors and resistors and multiple chips And oh, yeah, also the two

⏹️ ▶️ John NAND chips when you upgrade the RAM on the Mac Mini

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just two different RAM chips That are soldered into the package that

⏹️ ▶️ John the SOC is on It’s not a whole other circuit board with its own associated circuitry

⏹️ ▶️ John coming with it. It’s not a separately packaged retail product All right, so anyway this crucial 32

⏹️ ▶️ John gig thing is a retail product And it costs a hundred and seventy

⏹️ ▶️ John four dollars ninety nine cents on the crucial comm website Which I’m sure it’s not the cheapest place you can get it

⏹️ ▶️ John Doing the math on that Apple’s RAM upgrades are six point five times more expensive

⏹️ ▶️ John than buying a

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey separate

⏹️ ▶️ John Retail packaged printed circuit board complete memory module, and this is one of those LP

⏹️ ▶️ John low pressure compression attached memory modules for like a laptop or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John So this isn’t even apples to apples. Apple is just taking two RAM chips and putting in two different ones.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just, it’s insane. So 6.5 times more expensive. The SSD upgrade to 512,

⏹️ ▶️ John you go from 256 to 512, that’s a $200 upgrade. And that’s adding 256 gigs at 78 cents per gigabyte,

⏹️ ▶️ John which sounds cheap, but the actual retail cost per gigabyte of this type of storage is 12 cents per gigabyte.

⏹️ ▶️ John And again, an extremely fair comparison. A Samsung 990 Pro, one

⏹️ ▶️ John terabyte PCIe 4.0 SSD. The price per gigabyte is 12

⏹️ ▶️ John cents per gigabyte, which is once again, amazingly exactly 6.5 times more

⏹️ ▶️ John expensive for the Apple upgrade than a separately packaged retail product that has its

⏹️ ▶️ John own printed circuit board, a whole bunch of other support chips, a heat sink, a box, everything associated

⏹️ ▶️ John with it. And when you do an SSD upgrade on a Mac mini or any of the other Macs, you can see people do

⏹️ ▶️ John them on YouTube. They will desolder the two NAND chips that are soldered

⏹️ ▶️ John onto the logic board. It’s just two NAND chips, and they will buy two bare

⏹️ ▶️ John NAND chips and solder them in place. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff you have to do to get the OS to recognize it, whatever. But what I’m saying is

⏹️ ▶️ John the components that you are getting for this additional $200 are so much more

⏹️ ▶️ John minimal than the components in this standalone retail product printed circuit board

⏹️ ▶️ John that yes, also has NAND chips on it, but a bunch of other stuff from Samsung name brand 990 Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s ridiculous, 6.5 times more expensive. So again, that’s $400 for the RAM, $200 for the SSD, total upgrade price, $600.

⏹️ ▶️ John So you got your base Mac mini, you wanna bump it up from 16 to 32

⏹️ ▶️ John and from 256 to 512, or do you want an entire

⏹️ ▶️ John separate Mac mini? Like if you could somehow harvest

⏹️ ▶️ John the 256 gig N chips 16 gig NAND chips that come with the second Mac Mini

⏹️ ▶️ John and somehow harvest the SSD, so the stuff that comes with the other Mac Mini, and then throw

⏹️ ▶️ John away the rest of it, it would probably be the same price. It’s ridiculous. Anyway, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John so that the Mac Mini with 32 gigs of RAM and 512 SSD is $1,200 or double the price of the base model. That’s what we mean when we

⏹️ ▶️ John say Apple’s upgraded prices are ridiculous. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not

⏹️ ▶️ John like they’re just a little bit more expensive. When I say like six times more expensive, I’m not exaggerating.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s literally what they are in the most generous possible comparison. If we actually compared

⏹️ ▶️ John like, what is the retail price of just those NAND chips? I couldn’t find that.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I had to go for a Samsung 990 Pro to get the price per gigabyte. But be assured that the

⏹️ ▶️ John actual retail difference in price is probably more like seven or eight when you get down to apples to apples.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then obviously the wholesale price that Apple pays for this is, you know, 1 18th of that, but whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Boy, it’s a lot, it’s a lot. And what are you really gonna do? You’re not gonna buy a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey second Mac mini, you’re gonna upgrade as you need to, but it’s gonna hurt. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John gonna- And the

⏹️ ▶️ John storage, at least you can buy external and tack it on and deal with that, which is annoying, but at least you can do it. But the RAM, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not really any option. The RAM is soldered on and it’s also a part

⏹️ ▶️ John of the SOC package. So like I said, I’ve seen people do SSD

⏹️ ▶️ John upgrades by desoldering and resoldering, which is an incredibly difficult operation to pull off and requires a lot of expertise

⏹️ ▶️ John and skill and the know-how to get the OS to recognize it. But at least it’s possible, but I’ve never seen

⏹️ ▶️ John one attempt it with the RAM. So yeah, you’re kind of stuck. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. All right, so with the iMac, things seem mostly okay. However, if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of those people that really loves to have two pointing devices, both a Magic Mouse and a Magic

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Trackpad, well, tough nugs, because Apple apparently has removed the option to buy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey color-matched trackpad and mouse together, reading from 9 to 5 Mac with the M4 model.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can no longer get both the Magic Trackpad and Magic Mouse. In the past, you could optionally buy both iMac accessories

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as part of your purchase. This means that if you want a trio of color matched Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey simply out of luck or you’re going to eBay.

⏹️ ▶️ John Or you go into your Apple store and like Marco said, give them your iMac serial number and tell them you lost your trackpad

⏹️ ▶️ John when really you didn’t, and really you bought it with a mouse. There’s probably some way to do it, but this is just another consequence of

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple being weird about the color things. And it’s kind of sad that you used to be able to do it, but now you can’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s also been a little bit of grumbling about SSD limits. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the M4 versus M4 Pro and Max have different SSD size limits, and they’re also different between

⏹️ ▶️ Casey devices, if I’m not mistaken. So the largest SSD you can get as an example

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the M4 Mac mini is two terabytes, but the largest SSD you can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey get with the M4 Pro Mac mini is eight terabytes. What’s going on with that, John?

⏹️ ▶️ John So sometimes it’s the case that Apple is just not offering certain sizes

⏹️ ▶️ John and certain products for whatever reason, like there’s too many combinations of products, they decide like, I forget what are

⏹️ ▶️ John the ones off the top, but it’s like one of them doesn’t come with 32 gigs of RAM on the laptop, but it does

⏹️ ▶️ John on the mini or vice versa or something like that, right? But for the storage size, we don’t know this

⏹️ ▶️ John for a fact, but it is reasonable to assume based on the M1 and M2 and M3, the

⏹️ ▶️ John M series SoCs have the SSD controllers controllers on them, essentially,

⏹️ ▶️ John and they have limits on the number and capacity of NAND chips

⏹️ ▶️ John that they can address. And it is reasonable to assume, again based

⏹️ ▶️ John on the plain M1, M2, and M3, that the M4 actually can’t address more than 2TB,

⏹️ ▶️ John given current NAND sizes and number of chips that it can address. But the M4 Mac Pro can,

⏹️ ▶️ John so it’s not like Apple is refusing to let you buy a plain M4 Mac Mini with 8TB. I

⏹️ ▶️ John believe it is probably the case that it literally can’t address that given current NAND sizes.

⏹️ ▶️ John So keep that in mind and you know, there are plenty of places where Apple subdivides its product

⏹️ ▶️ John line based on, you know, capacities that don’t really make any sense and it’s just a way of minimizing

⏹️ ▶️ John skews and finding the ones I think they’re gonna make the most money on, but the plain M series very

⏹️ ▶️ John often in the past have just simply not been able to address as much SSD space as the larger

⏹️ ▶️ John ones and that is almost certainly the case with the plain M4 as well.

M4 Pro/Max performance

Chapter M4 Pro/Max performance image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then tell me about performance, specifically with the M4 Pro and M4

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro Max. So

⏹️ ▶️ John unlike what we’ll talk about in the after show, there is some really good news in the world to

⏹️ ▶️ John the Macs, believe it or not. We talked about it when they had, what was it, Mac Week? That’s what we could have called it. We could

⏹️ ▶️ John have done a pun on the publication that you two probably never read. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey when

⏹️ ▶️ John they released all those Macs on, you know, the iMac, the Mac Mini, and the new MacBook Pros with the new M4 processors,

⏹️ ▶️ John and we talked about how great they are. Now, since that show came out, there have been sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John preliminary, unconfirmed, uploaded Geekbench benchmarks

⏹️ ▶️ John for the M4 Pro and the M4 Max and various devices. This time is always so

⏹️ ▶️ John weird because technically these things shouldn’t be in people’s hands, although some plain M4s were shipped in

⏹️ ▶️ John Russia a while ago. But anyway, they’re showing up in Geekbench. When people get

⏹️ ▶️ John their retail products in their hands, Geekbench sort of incorporates all of the measurements and they end up on the leaderboards or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John but for now if you explicitly search for the CPUs by the Mac identifiers, you can

⏹️ ▶️ John find results. We’ll put links in the show notes so you can look at the results for yourself. Again, they are preliminary with

⏹️ ▶️ John a few number of data points, so take that for the grain of salt. And as I always say, Geekbench, like all benchmarks,

⏹️ ▶️ John may or may not be representative of anything you care about. Making a good representative benchmark is very difficult. In the

⏹️ ▶️ John end, what you care about is, does it do the thing that I need it to do faster than my old thing? Whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John that thing is, are you rendering things? Are you compressing audio? Are you compiling

⏹️ ▶️ John an Xcode? Whatever it is that you’re doing, all you care about is how fast does it do that? But things like Geekbench

⏹️ ▶️ John try to be a representative benchmark for the various parts of the computer

⏹️ ▶️ John so you have some way to compare it. So here they are with all those caveats in mind. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ John some amazing stuff going on. We’ve talked before about the M4’s single core performance being amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ John We only really had measurements of that in the iPad Pro because that was the only thing the M4 was in.

⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, now the plain M4 is a route. The M4 Pro has the same amazing

⏹️ ▶️ John single core performance as the M4, but a little bit better because it’s probably clocked higher and has better cooling. So

⏹️ ▶️ John M4 Pro is reaching 3,900 in the single core Geekbench

⏹️ ▶️ John benchmark and has that compared to its predecessors. That is a 26% increase over the M3 Pro. It is also a 26% increase over the

⏹️ ▶️ John M3 Max because single

⏹️ ▶️ John core really doesn’t change. Pro max whatever like maybe they’ll be clocked higher Maybe they have better cooling for a sustained throughput

⏹️ ▶️ John But single core is usually similar this was true back in the Intel days too by the way Very often if you want to get the

⏹️ ▶️ John fastest single core performance You would get like an iMac or something with a smaller number of cores because the big

⏹️ ▶️ John like 24 core or 12 core whatever was back in the day the big multi-core thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that was in the Mac Pro Had lower single core performance because they couldn’t clock those single cores as high because the chip

⏹️ ▶️ John was just so big and hot But anyway, so no core is still great Versus the M2

⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra, which is the fastest SoC that you can get in the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John Studio and the Mac Pro, the M4 Pro single-core performance is 41% faster.

⏹️ ▶️ John Multi-core, now we start to get interesting. Multi-core, remember the M4 Pro is 14 cores, it

⏹️ ▶️ John has 10 power cores and four efficiency cores. Multi-core is 22,000. That is a 48%

⏹️ ▶️ John increase over its predecessor, the M3 Pro. The M3 Pro

⏹️ ▶️ John made some very different choices. It was the 6-6 arrangement, six efficiency cores, six power cores.

⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s bound to not do as well in multi-core. The M3 Pro is just plain aiming for like,

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess, better low power performance for lots of non-demanding jobs, but Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John has changed its mind. The M4 Pro is really cranking it up. The M4 Pro’s multi-core

⏹️ ▶️ John performance is 8% faster than the M3 Max.

⏹️ ▶️ John So now it is better than the previous Max chip. Oh, and by the way, the M4 Pro’s

⏹️ ▶️ John multi-core performance, and this one really hurts, 6% faster than the M2 Ultra.

⏹️ ▶️ John Ooh. Remember we’re talking about the M4 Pro here. This is not the best M4 chip. This is like

⏹️ ▶️ John the middle one. There’s M4, then there’s M4 Pro. It’s multi-core performance

⏹️ ▶️ John is better than the M2 Ultra. That’s bad. Wow.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s real bad. Oh, that’s great.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is a great problem to have. This is

⏹️ ▶️ John what

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco happens when you don’t update

⏹️ ▶️ John your chip for two years. Yes it is. Right? I mean, M2 was old. Obviously you can just look at the number M2, M3,

⏹️ ▶️ John but the M4 Pro, and by the way, this is not reflected in our shirt sales. No one wants to buy an M4 Pro shirt. You

⏹️ ▶️ John should. The M4 Pro is crushing it this generation. It is most improved.

⏹️ ▶️ John And granted, part of that is because the M3 Pro was so weird and different in how it arranged itself, which

⏹️ ▶️ John is why you get that big jump. But just forget about the M3 Pro and the 48% jump from the M3 Pro. It’s better

⏹️ ▶️ John than the M3 Max. it’s better than the M2 Ultra in multi-core. It crushes them all in single core too, by the way,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s still better in multi-core. So what the hell is the M2 Ultra actually even good

⏹️ ▶️ John for? When you go look at memory bandwidth, again, huge jump over the M3 Pro, so

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s 70% faster than the M3 Pro, because the M3 Pro actually went down in memory bandwidth from the M2 Pro, I believe.

⏹️ ▶️ John But it is 50% slower in memory bandwidth than the M3 Max. So that’s where you’re spending your extra

⏹️ ▶️ John money, and it is 200% less memory bandwidth than the M2 Ultra. So if memory bandwidth

⏹️ ▶️ John is your concern, the M2 Ultra still is twice as big. And by the way, the memory bandwidth is 273 gigabytes per second,

⏹️ ▶️ John and then, you know, the M2 Ultra is 819, right? The Metal score,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s like the GPU benchmark, mostly the GPU benchmark that you care about. I didn’t even look at the OpenCL one because Apple does everything

⏹️ ▶️ John in Metal these days. Metal score is 110K. That’s 41% faster than the

⏹️ ▶️ John M3 Pro. It’s 40% slower than the M3 Max, and it’s 100% slower than the M2 Ultra.

⏹️ ▶️ John So when you, you know, like, why would anyone want an

⏹️ ▶️ John M2 Ultra at this point? Well, really you shouldn’t, but

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco if you

⏹️ ▶️ John have one, take heart to know that you have double the memory bandwidth and you are twice as

⏹️ ▶️ John fast as the M4 Pro in GPU benchmarks. But boy,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you have one of those older, beefier CPUs, it’s kind of, or SOCs,

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s bad when the mid-tier M4 is kicking your butt in a lot of ways. All right, so anyway, we go

⏹️ ▶️ John to the M4 Max. The M4 Max is the first personal computer chip in Geekbench

⏹️ ▶️ John to break 4,000 on single core. I believe the M4 was already like the top single core performer, but

⏹️ ▶️ John the M4 Max has a bunch of ratings in there to like 3,900, 4,000. So single core is even better than

⏹️ ▶️ John the M4 Max. Why is it better? Is it just because it’s clocked higher? Is it just because they had better cooling? Is it just because someone got

⏹️ ▶️ John lucky on a run or put it in an ice pack? Again, unconfirmed preliminary reports, but just know single

⏹️ ▶️ John core in the M4 is like the best in the entire industry. And these are chips that are in laptops, by

⏹️ ▶️ John the way. And iPads. You can go search Geekbench for like, what if

⏹️ ▶️ John I wanna buy a really big, really hot, high TDP Intel

⏹️ ▶️ John desktop CPU? Surely that is faster. And the answer is no, it’s not.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can search the results. Again, it’s just a benchmark, but single core is amazing. So the M4 Max is 29% faster than the M3 Max

⏹️ ▶️ John and 46% faster than the M2 Ultra. On multi-core, it’s 26,000, which is

⏹️ ▶️ John not much higher than the M4 Pro, but still it’s 27% faster than the M3 Max and 24% faster than

⏹️ ▶️ John the M2 Ultra. And then memory bandwidth, it’s 546 gigs a second, 33% faster than the M3 Max,

⏹️ ▶️ John but 50% slower than the M2 Ultra. And then in metal, 24% faster than the M3 Max

⏹️ ▶️ John and 15% slower than the M2 Ultra. So the Max continues to pace from the M3.

⏹️ ▶️ John M3, the M4 Max is, you know, just a steady upward climb, But because the M3 Pro

⏹️ ▶️ John took that diversion into not quite being as fast, it’s got this huge boost.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so if you’ve got an M2 Ultra and you bought it back when it was new, there are still some things that it does better,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it has been handily surpassed by the mid-tier laptop chip in single and multi-core performance.

⏹️ ▶️ John That is just, I really hope this whole thing with the Pro

⏹️ ▶️ John series is just an anomaly and they don’t plan on doing this because you can’t release a bunch of Pro products, never change the price,

⏹️ ▶️ John and then not update them for two years. Otherwise you’re gonna get embarrassing things like this. I mean, if they just keep up with this pace,

⏹️ ▶️ John the phone chips will be faster in every measure as well. But it’s a great time to buy

⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac and it’s not a great time to want to buy one of the desktop

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro Macs because they have fallen behind.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, but maybe they’ll come screaming back. We’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ John There are rumors to that effect. And the main rumor that we talked about before is about

⏹️ ▶️ John the, and we’ll find, the reason I mentioned this now because I hope we’ll find this out by next episode, someone needs to get

⏹️ ▶️ John an M4 Max and cut the thing open and show us what the die looks like. Because remember on

⏹️ ▶️ John the M3 Max, someone did that and they said, hey, look, there’s no interposer. You can’t take two M3

⏹️ ▶️ John Max and stick them end to end and make an M3 Ultra. And that seems

⏹️ ▶️ John like it was true because Apple never did make an M3 Ultra. And maybe it’s because they never planned to

⏹️ ▶️ John and they didn’t put that interposer on the M3 Max and you can’t stick two of them end to end. So, when

⏹️ ▶️ John someone gets an M4 Max, they need to cut that sucker open and say, hey, is there that little strip in the bottom

⏹️ ▶️ John that looks like the silicon interposer where they take two Maxes and stick them together end to end? Because if that’s not there,

⏹️ ▶️ John what that means is either Apple’s never gonna make another chip better than the Max, or when

⏹️ ▶️ John the M4 Ultra or whatever comes out, it won’t be two Maxes stuck together. But as

⏹️ ▶️ John the rumors suggest, it might be an entirely new chip that is just simply

⏹️ ▶️ John even bigger than the Max, but it is not made up of two Maxes. And that would be smart because we’ve discussed in the past

⏹️ ▶️ John putting two maxes together You end up with a lot of wasted stuff that you don’t need doubles of right? You don’t need doubles

⏹️ ▶️ John of all like the media encoders and all the other stuff like you could just it’s more efficient to make one Big honkin chip

⏹️ ▶️ John more expensive much more expensive potentially But more efficient in terms of bang for

⏹️ ▶️ John your buck out of the not bang for your buck Bang for your square meters of the silicon area for

⏹️ ▶️ John your buck It’s probably worse because the bigger you make the chip the more expensive it is to get one out that works So I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John looking forward to that as soon as someone cuts one of these open will know If we’re in for a surprise,

⏹️ ▶️ John but if someone sees an interposer and it’s just two m4 maxes stuck together Which to be clear would be great,

⏹️ ▶️ John but boring

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right And then a handful of people wrote in to correct us when we said oh you can’t buy a Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with 8 gigs of RAM anymore au contraire Walmart is still selling that m1 Macbook air

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with 8 gigs of RAM for $700. Although as we record this it’s actually on sale for 650

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, that still exists. That’s still a thing in their lineup.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I give that a pass. I mean, like it’s amazing that they went back and updated the M2 Air in addition

⏹️ ▶️ John to the M3 Air to be 16. They could have updated neither of them and just waited for the M4 Air in the spring

⏹️ ▶️ John to go to 16, but instead they went back two whole product lines. They just didn’t go back

⏹️ ▶️ John to the M1 and upgrade it, which is fine, right? No problem with that whatsoever.

Misc hardware follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The new USB-C accessories, including those color-matched ones that we were talking about a little

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit ago, apparently they require macOS Sequoia because they do not work with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything before it or even the 15.2 beta, which is too bad reading from MacRumors.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey New USB-C accessories require macOS Sequoia 15.1 to work properly and as noted

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the MacRumors forums, earlier versions of macOS do not work. There are reports from users running macOS Sonoma

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Ventura who are having issues with the new devices. With the keyboard, touch ID and function keys don’t work, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the Magic Mouse, the scrolling doesn’t function. In some cases, the accessories are recognized as older devices,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey inhibiting proper functionality. And this isn’t a problem, limited to just people running older versions

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of macOS, because there are also reports from developers who have installed the first macOS Sequoia 15.2 beta. It

⏹️ ▶️ Casey appears that the macOS Sequoia 15.2 beta was released before Apple could add in support for the new Magic Mouse,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Magic Keyboard, and Magic Trackpad.

⏹️ ▶️ John Whoops, see this please. developing story, because don’t you think it should be super prominent on

⏹️ ▶️ John these product pages? Like, don’t buy this keyboard if you

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have at least 15.1. That seems like something really important. And it’s not like there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John some special feature that gets enabled by having 15.1. It’s like the basic functionality of the input

⏹️ ▶️ John device. So like, if you buy a Magic Mouse and you come home and you connect it to your computer that’s running,

⏹️ ▶️ John let’s say, Sequoia 15.0 and the scrolling doesn’t work, you take it back to the store

⏹️ ▶️ John and say, this mouse is broken. They say, oh, you should have known when you bought that mouse. It requires 15.1, you need to update

⏹️ ▶️ John your OS. That is super weird to me. Like what, I mean, is it because of like the USB control?

⏹️ ▶️ John Like backport this Apple, like provide an update at least to like 14 and 13, like.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even just like, how long did they know ahead of time that these products were being released? Like, did they, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco did no one tell, like did one team have talked to the other? And like, what, like, surely, surely these had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco been in the works for at least months. Like, why wasn’t this in.0?

⏹️ ▶️ John Who

⏹️ ▶️ Marco knows?

⏹️ ▶️ John And why don’t they just work out of the box? Like, it’s just, it’s literally the same keyboard, but with a USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ John thing. I’m sure there are like third-party USB-C keyboards that you can buy and just plug

⏹️ ▶️ John into a Mac and they just work. Yes. Like through some generic keyboard driver, but the Apple branded one, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why I couldn’t believe this story and I thought it had to be a mistake or whatever. So I hope by next week

⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll be like, oh, that wasn’t really true. it was just some other issue or whatever. But this seems ridiculous to

⏹️ ▶️ John me. So be aware, as of the time this story was written, which is

⏹️ ▶️ John granted October 31st, people were buying the new keyboards and mice and

⏹️ ▶️ John discovering that they don’t work right unless you have Mac OS 15.1 or later, but not too much later because

⏹️ ▶️ John the 15.2 beta doesn’t work either.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Daniel Luz writes that the Apple $69, one meter Thunderbolt 5

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cable is a passive cable. One meter is the USB, what is IF here? USB IF.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Industry

⏹️ ▶️ John forum or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco something? Yeah, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey the USB standards

⏹️ ▶️ Casey group. Thank you. The one meter is the USB IF’s limit for passive cables. This is expected. Every

⏹️ ▶️ Casey compliant passive Thunderbolt 4 or USB 4 cable is compatible with Thunderbolt 5. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey unclear to me, writes Daniel, what the situation is for Thunderbolt 3. There appears to be a Gen 3 that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey works. If you have an old USB 4 cable, you might already have a Thunderbolt 5 cable as long as it’s passive

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and at most one meter long. So perhaps the only difference between this new Thunderbolt 5 cable and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one that chips with the studio display is higher power delivery.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think there’s a little tiny five, a little tiny light gray five in a square

⏹️ ▶️ John laser etched on the metal part of the USB-C connector as a further eye test of old

⏹️ ▶️ John people. But yeah, last time we said these cables are expensive because they have little chips on them, but apparently under one meter,

⏹️ ▶️ John no chips. Apple itself says this is a passive cable. So it was just a very well-constructed, well-insulated,

⏹️ ▶️ John $70, one meter long Thunderbolt 5 cable.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No capes! Daniel Nelson writes that there is at least one dock that supports 10

⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigabit ethernet, the OWC Thunderbolt Pro dock. I think I was the one who had said, as far as I know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are no docks that exist that have 10 gig ethernet. I knew that my beloved CalDigit

⏹️ ▶️ Casey TS4 has two and a half gig, but Daniel points out there is this one from OWC that does

⏹️ ▶️ Casey include 10 gig. iFixit has torn down the iPad mini A17

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro to see if there’s any physical or hardware reasons for jelly scrolling

⏹️ ▶️ Casey improvements. And after watching this like six or seven minute YouTube video, I can tell you that no,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there doesn’t appear to be any hardware changes, but they do put the old one and the new

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one in super duper slow-mo, or they take super slow-mo videos of them. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can see that it is unquestionably better now, but not perfect.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s better enough that lots of, seemingly all the reviewers except for the one from The Verge said, oh, it’s cured, no more jelly

⏹️ ▶️ John scrolling. But if you watch it in super slow-mo, you’ll see it is just much improved, but it still exists. And a

⏹️ ▶️ John lot of the theories people have with the old ones is like, oh, they need to take the video controller and attach it to the screen

⏹️ ▶️ John from the top instead of the side, because when they do it from the side, it ends up driving the display in a way such

⏹️ ▶️ John that one half of it doesn’t update as fast as the other half, and you get the jelly scrolling and yada yada. So they opened this

⏹️ ▶️ John thing up and said, what do they do to fix the jelly scrolling? Did they do all those things people suggested? the answer was no. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John just exactly the same as the previous one. The hardware looks the same, is in the same place, it’s connected the same way. So

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it was just 100% a software fix or there’s something about the fix that

⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t detectable by iFixit, something inside the chips that they can’t see or something. But yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John what a weird situation. Like this complaint about the iPads was existed for so long and

⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve seemingly all but entirely fixed the problem without changing

⏹️ ▶️ John the hardware in a way that I think it could detect.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this episode by one password extended access management.

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t think so. So next question, how do you keep your company’s data safe when it’s sitting on all

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Extended Access Management for sponsoring our show.

Apple TV vs. gaming

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Killvore writes in regarding the quote unquote fork in the road for Apple TV, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey IE, whether or not it wants to keep pursuing GPU and CPU power beyond what is needed for streaming video so it can play games better. The latest Apple TV is actually

⏹️ ▶️ Casey worse for games, even if the chip is better on paper, since in practice it thermal throttles a lot earlier. This is according to an old colleague who was working on an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple arcade title, absolute monkey’s paw. Yeah, that’s such a weird thing. Like far be it for me to argue for fans, but the Apple TV is a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey weird

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, like far be it for me to argue for fans, but the Apple TV had a fan

⏹️ ▶️ John that I couldn’t hear. And when they got rid of the fan, it’s like, oh great, they don’t need the fan anymore. But apparently they did.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re running games on it, the fan apparently helps. So these passively cooled ones

⏹️ ▶️ John that seem to be constructed much more cheaply than the much more expensive ones that had the little tiny silent fan inside it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, maybe those were the good ones. So yeah, I guess that’s another fork in the road for them. If they want to pursue gaming performance, they

⏹️ ▶️ John probably need to bring that fan back.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, in all honesty though, like the Apple TV is not a gaming platform. They, you know, they, when they first

⏹️ ▶️ Marco revamped it as the app powered platform years ago, they tried to make it everything. They tried to make it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, you’re gonna, you’re gonna browse real estate listings on here. You can do your, your online shopping on your Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV. You can play games and yeah, you can also watch TV shows. And, you know, similar to the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Watch, we very quickly realized, okay, all of these things that this launched with,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, claiming to do, we really only want to do like one or two of them. And the answer with Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV is, yeah, this is really good as a TV, like, watching thing, a video watching

⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform. It’s not a great game platform. And it’s not because of hardware reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I think this is one of the… Obviously, with the exception of this throttling issue that this person brings up. But like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think one of the things that’s hard for nerds like us to get used to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that we can have devices in our computing lives now that have the computing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco power to be really good game platforms, but just aren’t for other

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons that seem like insufficient justifications for it not being a game platform.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like the Apple TV is a terrible game platform for two big reasons. Number one, just, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple and gaming, they just, you know, they, they mishandle it in so many ways and, and what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco brings so many games to the iPhone does not bring games to the Apple TV. Number two, it doesn’t come with a controller. And also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the way, number three, um, the weird on-demand resource loading on Apple Apple TV makes it hard to deliver

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good games. So the Apple TV, it has the hardware

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a great game platform. There’s nothing stopping it hardware-wise from being a great game platform,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s all those other ecosystem problems around it that make it so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s pretty much not going to be a thing. And we have kind of an embarrassment of riches

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in computing these days that the good thing is we don’t need it to be a game platform. Like if you want to play

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty good games on your TV, you can get like a $30 Raspberry Pi

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and install packages on that, especially if you’re into emulators. Like that’s a great platform for that. But like, you can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get a Raspberry Pi with game support that you can plug into your TV and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty good quality games for less than the cost of an Apple TV game controller.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, we have lots of other ways to play games, but it is frustrating as nerds to see something like this that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can have the ability to play really great games and just for kind of crappy reasons doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really get there.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and that’s the fork in the road that Apple has. Do you want to keep making the Apple TV have better and better

⏹️ ▶️ John SOCs in it? If so, to what end? And even just taking away the fan, like maybe, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, makes it cheaper, fewer parts, you know, no potential for fan noise, though again, the old one was silent,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it makes it the worst gaming platform. Like I said, last time I tried to play a game on the Apple TV there are games that play perfectly

⏹️ ▶️ John fine on the Apple TV. It’s surprisingly powerful for its size and cost. And they were taken away from, like they

⏹️ ▶️ John were no longer available. I’d played them on Apple TV before and now they weren’t there anymore. And that’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John a great experience. I can’t remember the last time that happened on any other gaming platform or console.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s not even, it was like it was available on an older version of Apple TV. It was just, it was removed from Apple Arcade or it was removed

⏹️ ▶️ John from the Apple store or whatever. And that’s frustrating. I’m not expecting it to play like

⏹️ ▶️ John super duper fancy, you know, triple A games with like, you know, I’m not expecting it to be a gaming

⏹️ ▶️ John PC, but for the games that do run comfortably on it, it’s nice that it runs games. I think it should run games

⏹️ ▶️ John and it can run them comfortably with its current size SoC, but Apple’s mishandling of games ruins that. And going

⏹️ ▶️ John forward until we get to 8K or something, there’s not really much

⏹️ ▶️ John reason to double the power of the CPU and GPU, because it can already play all your streaming

⏹️ ▶️ John apps without breaking a sweat. So yeah, what is Apple gonna do with this device? I assume

⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll just keep upgrading the SoC just because they don’t wanna keep manufacturing the old ones. And at a certain point, it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John less expensive to turn off the, or stop paying for the seven

⏹️ ▶️ John nanometer line to be manufacturing chips and just take the five nanometer ones or whatever. But

⏹️ ▶️ John I personally hope they keep increasing the SoC because I believe

⏹️ ▶️ John there is a potential future in it as a casual game platform for the television. I prefer

⏹️ ▶️ John it to, I certainly prefer it to buying a Raspberry Pi and hooking it up. And I prefer it to having to log

⏹️ ▶️ John over one of my big game consoles, because right now it’s the only gaming thing I have connected to my big TV.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s just there for like brief casual game sessions or a few particular games that are available on

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV. But yeah, it’s it’s, uh, well, we’ll find out when they release the next one.

⏹️ ▶️ John Find out what they do. Have they made it more powerful? Have they made it more expensive? Have they added a fan or is it just status quo?

Keyboard-cleaning tricks

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, in follow-up, keyboard cleaning corner. We were asked about this, I think, in an Ask ATP,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but basically, you know, how do you clean your keyboard when you’re powering off the computer and then mashing on any

⏹️ ▶️ Casey freaking key? We’ll turn it back on. And I think we had a couple of solutions at the time, but I also

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted to bring up, a friend of the show, Guy Rambeau writes and makes Cleanup Buddy.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll put a link in the show notes, which is another one of those tools that’ll basically disable the keyboard for a little while. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then Daniel Piper, or maybe Pepper Piper I believe, wrote in and said, Cleaning the keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on an ARM Mac can be achieved by doing the following. Hold down the left

⏹️ ▶️ Casey control and left command keys and the right shift key for seven seconds

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then while still holding down those keys, press the power button for another seven seconds. After that, the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer can only be powered on by using the power button. I tried this and it didn’t work. Then I turned

⏹️ ▶️ Casey off my computer and I tried it again and it didn’t work. and I tried it, I turned my computer back off, tried it for a third

⏹️ ▶️ Casey time, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t work. And it really does do exactly what Daniel said.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess I just screwed it up the first time, and I think your computer has to be off to actually

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have it engage.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not an easy thing to do. And when he first sent this, I replied and I said, that sounds like the way you did an

⏹️ ▶️ John SMC reset on T2 Max, but actually that particular finger twister is

⏹️ ▶️ John slightly different. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that one. So even though it sounds like something you might’ve heard before, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John different. And Daniel said he tried it while listening to the show just to make sure it works.

⏹️ ▶️ John And sure enough, it does. So it is complicated and it can be done. Lots of other people are like, why do you have this problem? Just turn on the screen saver.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because if you turn on the screen saver, like with a screen lock, the only way you’re gonna do anything damaging to your computer is if you

⏹️ ▶️ John accidentally fat finger your password into

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the lock thing

⏹️ ▶️ John or touch the touch ID thing with your fingerprint. So this is not that big of a problem, but if you

⏹️ ▶️ John really do want your computer to be off, it is frustrating that it keeps turning itself back on. So

⏹️ ▶️ John if you wanna fix to that problem, this will apparently work. I do wonder what this is doing.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, that’s why I was like, oh no, is this doing SMC reset? Is it gonna reset some firmware things? Is it gonna like turn

⏹️ ▶️ John on the boot chime when the boot chime was off? Have you noticed any ill effects Casey from trying this?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, except that it only does it until the next boot. So you can,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, clean your keyboard, do whatever, as long as you don’t touch the power button. And then once you turn the computer back

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, it forgets that this is the mode it was in and it goes back to any button can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey turn the computer back on again, which I don’t like. I wish I could make this like a permanent setting.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they should just put this, like instead of these weird, you know, key combo and things and holding stuff, just put

⏹️ ▶️ John it in like the recovery thing or put it some, like they have a place where they have like the, so you wanna do a weird thing to your computer,

⏹️ ▶️ John like when you boot in recovery mode or you hold down the power button or whatever, put this there with a GUI

⏹️ ▶️ John or something, or add a feature to macOS, maybe they’ll get to it eventually that just says, I’m going to clean my keyboard,

⏹️ ▶️ John lock everything up. And I guess they would probably just say that’s the screensaver, but anyway. Like the

⏹️ ▶️ John boot chime, right? So on Macs from the very first Mac, when you turn them on, they would make a

⏹️ ▶️ John chiming sound and Apple has changed the chime over the years. And then eventually they added the ability

⏹️ ▶️ John to turn off that chime. And that used to be like a firmware setting, but now there’s actually a

⏹️ ▶️ John GUI for it. That’s a perfect example of something like, some people don’t want their Mac to make a noise when it

⏹️ ▶️ John boots or restarts or whatever, and some people do. Some people don’t want their Mac to turn on and they just hit

⏹️ ▶️ John anything on the keyboard, and some people do.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Make

⏹️ ▶️ John the default what you think the majority of people want, and for everybody else, just put a little

⏹️ ▶️ John tiny switch buried somewhere in system settings. We’ll find it eventually.

Apple buying Pixelmator

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So for topics, we have some somewhat breaking news from a little less than

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a week ago. Apple has come out of left field and has bought Pixelmator,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I don’t think I certainly didn’t see coming. I don’t know that anyone really saw it coming, but there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a release on Pixelmator’s website. In part it reads, Pixelmator has signed an agreement to be acquired

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by Apple subject to regulatory approval. There will be no material changes to the Pixelmator

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps at this time. Stay tuned for exciting updates to come.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Whoa.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think a lot of, some people did predict this. I’m not in the world of seeing who’s going to get acquired

⏹️ ▶️ John by Apple and image editing apps, but some people in that world said, oh yeah, they expected this for a long time. Pixelmator

⏹️ ▶️ John is highly regarded company with highly regarded products that have received awards from Apple in the past.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how many awards they’ve gotten, but I think it’s multiple. They’re good apps.

⏹️ ▶️ John They are Mac apps, I believe, at least Pixelmator is written with AppKit because

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s that old. And I’m not sure what their other apps are written in, but they’re good apps, they are Mac apps,

⏹️ ▶️ John they are award-winning. I think I own all of them except for maybe the iOS one, because

⏹️ ▶️ John I mostly do the stuff on my Mac. And Apple bought the whole company.

⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple being Apple, they’re not gonna tell you why they bought the company other than giving, you know, like hand

⏹️ ▶️ John statement, they have like a tech expanded shortcut that says, Apple buys small companies from time to time and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like they

⏹️ ▶️ John never tell you what they’re buying it for. But for those of out here who like

⏹️ ▶️ John and use some of these apps, you’re immediately worried and saying, what’s gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John happen to Pixelmator or Photomator or whatever it is that you’re doing. Obviously the press release

⏹️ ▶️ John says, no changes are planned at this time. But the big question is, did Apple buy this

⏹️ ▶️ John so they could continue developing the Pixelmator family of photo

⏹️ ▶️ John editing apps? Did they buy this so they could incorporate that functionality into their own Apple Photos apps?

⏹️ ▶️ John Or do they buy it just as an acquihire, where we don’t care about your apps, we just wanted the people, because

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s really hard to find excellent Mac developers. Hey, there’s a bunch of excellent Mac developers,

⏹️ ▶️ John let’s buy the company as a way of hiring all the people in the company and put some golden handcuffs

⏹️ ▶️ John on them that says their Apple stock doesn’t invest until X or Y number of years, and then just allow

⏹️ ▶️ John Pixelmator and Photomator to just wither on the vine and eventually stop working. Which

⏹️ ▶️ John one of those things is going to happen? I don’t know, but I’m kind of not

⏹️ ▶️ John happy about this acquisition.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think if you use the Pixelmator family of apps, you probably should be a little wary

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this. You know, Apple’s track record here, from the point of view

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of you, the customer of these apps, is not promising. Now, again, who knows what will happen.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a new situation. They could always do things differently now than they’ve done in the past, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not a great track record. So, when they say nothing will change, or no changes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the apps at this time, well, that doesn’t mean anything. They posted this a few days ago. They could

⏹️ ▶️ Marco change it tomorrow. Like, so that means nothing. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very careful to not make any claims about the future, really, that are substantial.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what we know is that Apple has bought the company. It certainly seems like the team

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a huge part of it. I do think it’s probably, like, you know, there have been speculation on how much money it had to be because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re seeking regulatory approval and everything. It’s probably, if I had to guess, too much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco money to pay just for a talent acquisition. They are not probably gonna spend

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much money to just get a handful of people to work for them. That doesn’t seem like it’s worth it to them for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that amount. So it is probably about buying at least the apps as well, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you look at what are the likely outcomes here, I think the most likely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that they water down some of this and integrated

⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the photos app. So these apps then go away. That is the most likely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my opinion. Second most likely is these continue to be standalone apps in some form

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then maybe Apple bundles them together with Logic and Final Cut and makes a pro bundle.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe they give it away for free. Maybe it’s a $200 new version of Aputure. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they keep the name, maybe they don’t, but either way it still remains separate apps. That’s possible.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just don’t think that’s the most likely. I think by far, in my opinion, the most likely outcome

⏹️ ▶️ Marco here is bits and pieces of this get integrated in possibly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a watered down way into the Photos app. That I think gives Apple the biggest bang for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their buck, because I don’t think Apple cares about the existing customer bases of these apps,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really. They just care about like, what can we do with this asset? And I think that’s the way Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will get the most bang for their buck in their view. That although you know, that is pretty rough for the customer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we can hope what I’m hoping for is more of an aperture situation more of like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they they use this to, you know, to continue their own

⏹️ ▶️ Marco efforts into making, you know, high quality pro apps. But the reason

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m a little wary about that is that we really haven’t seen a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco evidence to suggest that they’re looking for that right now, or that that’s an interest for them.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well we have a couple of examples, one from recent history and one from

⏹️ ▶️ John ancient history. The recent history one is workflows. Apple bought workflows and

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they…

⏹️ ▶️ John Workflow. Workflow, sorry, singular, and incorporated it into the OS

⏹️ ▶️ John and continued to enhance it. It’s shortcuts now. And they didn’t just like, oh, we’ll fold it into the OS and then just like never update

⏹️ ▶️ John it again. they’ve continued to work on shortcuts. It has sort of become an essential

⏹️ ▶️ John headlining feature of their operating system. They essentially bought from a third party and they didn’t just

⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, obviously shortcuts, the app went away, but not shortcuts, workflow, the app went away, but it was pretty

⏹️ ▶️ John quickly replaced by shortcuts. And it’s for the people who liked workflow, I think they also

⏹️ ▶️ John like shortcuts. So that’s probably the best it could possibly go if Apple buys you and

⏹️ ▶️ John decides you’re gonna be part of our existing platform, right? You’re not gonna, we’re not gonna continue to sell

⏹️ ▶️ John you as a third-party app. You’re gonna literally gonna be part of iOS or you’re gonna be part of an existing app like Apple Photos or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s like the best it can go. That’s normally not how it happens. Most of the time when Apple buys small companies, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John they were making is never seen again. Now, the bad story about pro apps is Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ John many, many years ago, went on a series of, you know, buying sprees, buying

⏹️ ▶️ John up all these pro applications to essentially make its own pro suite of stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John Final Cut Pro was bought from Macromedia, maybe. They bought Shake

⏹️ ▶️ John and Motion. Logic, I think, was purchased. Aperture, I forget

⏹️ ▶️ John if that was purchased or they just purchased the people who were writing it or hired them, but anyway, they

⏹️ ▶️ John had a bunch of pro apps that they were making. They used to sell for a lot of money. And one by one,

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has lost interest in those pro apps. Aperture went away, Shake went away.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think they sold something called Color as a color correction. They sold these things for hundreds of dollars trying to sell them to professionals.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then eventually Apple was like, we’re losing interest. Final Cut somehow has survived

⏹️ ▶️ John barely, but a lot of the other ones went away. And so now when

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple buys an app like Pixelmator, any youngster who’s like, wow, they’re gonna make a Photoshop competitor. It’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John look, been there, done that. Apple had a brief moment where it’s like, we’re gonna make apps that compete with Adobe.

⏹️ ▶️ John And they gave up. Like, it’s not because the apps were bad or terrible,

⏹️ ▶️ John but the Apple stopped putting money into the development of them and you will never compete with Adobe if you do that. Adobe

⏹️ ▶️ John will continue to put money into Photoshop. And so if you’re gonna compete with Photoshop, you can’t like make

⏹️ ▶️ John the app once and ship it and say, huh, isn’t it great? Maybe we’ll update it again in six years, but we’re not gonna tell you.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s not how to compete. So Apple needs to decide, do you wanna make pro applications

⏹️ ▶️ John at all? If so, you could make a Photoshop-ish

⏹️ ▶️ John competitor product product out of the pixel matrix we get of things, but if you do that anyone who’s old enough

⏹️ ▶️ John to remember Aperture and so on will go yeah, no, thanks. Apple doesn’t seem like they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John Really committed to this whole pro out thing I’m not gonna switch my whole life

⏹️ ▶️ John to their platform and get all on board for it Just when I’m just when the finally the good version of

⏹️ ▶️ John Aperture comes out It’s the last version and they’re never gonna make it again. And now you know, I’m screwed. So So

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s that sort of past trauma of pro apps, which makes anybody over

⏹️ ▶️ John a certain age look at this and say, there’s just no way they are going to continue shipping

⏹️ ▶️ John and developing Pixelmator to the degree that the Pixelmator company was. Pixelmator, the company,

⏹️ ▶️ John was making new versions of Pixelmator Pro, improving it over time, adding, when the AI features came around, Pixelmator

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro was one of the first apps to have it. They have a really good equivalent of Apple’s cleanup tool where you scribble

⏹️ ▶️ John over something to erase it or whatever. That’s one of the first things I bought it for. It’s great at, right? In addition to just being

⏹️ ▶️ John a general purpose photo editor. I cannot imagine Apple deciding,

⏹️ ▶️ John we wanna be in that business, we’re gonna keep developing Pixelmator Pro. And even if Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John did that, everybody with a memory is looking at them and saying, I think I’ll take a pass. I think

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll stick with, insert whatever they’re using now, whether it’s Photoshop or Figma or

⏹️ ▶️ John any other of the big apps that compete in that realm or something smaller like Acorn

⏹️ ▶️ John where you’re like, I don’t want something that big and complicated or whatever. Now, if Apple does take

⏹️ ▶️ John the guts of these apps and try to shove them into photos, again, especially with additions

⏹️ ▶️ John of like the cleanup feature and everything, does that mean Apple’s not going to take

⏹️ ▶️ John Pixelmator’s AI cleanup thing? And maybe it spoils for overtime, we’ll probably talk about some of these features

⏹️ ▶️ John and how they compare later in the show. Or

⏹️ ▶️ John like if you look at the feature list, Well, they say, okay, well, 90% of these

⏹️ ▶️ John overlap. So which one do we take? Do we throw away all the photos features for adjusting

⏹️ ▶️ John levels and curves and saturation and brightness and brilliance and all those other things and highlights and shadows or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John and swap them all out for the Pixelmator Pro equivalents? Or do we do 50-50?

⏹️ ▶️ John Or do we just delete the entire code base of Apple Photos and replace it with Pixelmator? And how does

⏹️ ▶️ John that work across platforms? Like, I don’t, as great as Pixelmator Pro is,

⏹️ ▶️ John unless photos is going to become a Pixelmator Pro caliber image editor, I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want them to take the subset of features that are in Pixelmator that are in photos and extract

⏹️ ▶️ John them from Pixelmator Pro and shove them in photos because as a user, the result of that is the next

⏹️ ▶️ John version of photos I get has all the same features, but it’s code

⏹️ ▶️ John that was ripped out of another app and shoved into an existing app. And it’s probably buggy because of that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Not because it was buggy when it was Pixelmator Pro, but now they’re just like ripping the guts out and shoving it in there. And from my experience,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not any different. Did you add any new features? Well, no, but now they’re Pixelmator powered. Does that make a difference to me?

⏹️ ▶️ John Are they appreciably better than they were in photos? Like, I don’t understand this, which is why when

⏹️ ▶️ John I look at it as an acquihire, you said like they probably wouldn’t have paid all these potential millions of dollars

⏹️ ▶️ John for developers. But there is something

⏹️ ▶️ John to be said for exactly how difficult it is to find good Mac developers. As we’ve said many times, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John not sure how many good Mac developers there still are inside Apple, let alone out there in the world.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so this is just like a unicorn where it’s like a group of dedicated, hardcore Mac developers familiar

⏹️ ▶️ John with Apple’s platforms who are actually good at making Mac apps. I think Apple does probably want those people.

⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, but yeah, it’s probably too much money to just pay for the people. So I really don’t know where they’re going to use for the, use these apps for.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I mean, I think the obvious answer is to suck some of particularly photo mater

⏹️ ▶️ Casey into photos, but I don’t know. I don’t know what this is about. And I,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I’ve used photo meter, but a couple of times, uh, I definitely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do use pixel meter as my, um, image editor of choice, but that being

⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, I almost never, ever, ever edit images. So I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a whole lot of experience with their stuff, but I will say that the experiences I’ve had is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they are, as you said, Mac asked Mac apps, Like they really, really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are Mac apps. And I could imagine it as an acqua hire, but it,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, it seems like a whole lot of money to pay and a whole lot of effort

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just to get people to work on. On your stuff. I mean, it seems to me

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it would, it would be more than that, that this is more of a test.

⏹️ ▶️ John Again, we don’t, we don’t know the actual numbers. We’re just guessing because people are saying like, Oh, they, they wouldn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ John needed to submit it for regulatory approval unless it was over some amount. Like Apple to be clear no one announced how much this

⏹️ ▶️ John acquisition is for so we don’t actually know so That is an unknown another angle on this is how people are

⏹️ ▶️ John saying is like boy if pixelmator can’t make it as an independent Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John Software developer, how can anyone because they were so good at what they did there you again award-winning

⏹️ ▶️ John They made amazing apps. Everybody loved them and they can’t survive as an independent company, and I don’t think that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the case I think they could survive as an independent company, but when Apple comes knocking with a giant bag of

⏹️ ▶️ John money if you want a giant bag of money, you take it. Like everyone has their

⏹️ ▶️ John price. I don’t think Pixelmator was like, at least I hope, or if it was on the verge

⏹️ ▶️ John of like financial ruin, it was mismanaged because they made really good products with a not too big company. They

⏹️ ▶️ John should have been profitable and sustainable. I think they were profitable and sustainable, but Apple can solve that problem

⏹️ ▶️ John by showing up with a sufficiently large bag of money and saying, you know, so I don’t think this is a condemnation

⏹️ ▶️ John of the Mac market. It’s bad for the Mac market because I liked them being an independent company that

⏹️ ▶️ John caused Apple to have to compete and caused Adobe to have to compete and gave me an alternative to an Adobe subscription.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like I loved when they were independent. So I feel for the people who are like, oh, that’s one of our

⏹️ ▶️ John last great independent Mac software developers gone because they

⏹️ ▶️ John got absorbed by Apple. That does suck, but I don’t think it says anything about the viability of making

⏹️ ▶️ John good software for the Mac. I think if you make good apps like Pixelmator did and

⏹️ ▶️ John sell them on the Mac platform, you can make money. if you do so in a way that doesn’t require like 10,000 engineers

⏹️ ▶️ John over the health where it used to have, right? So, yeah, in overall, I think this

⏹️ ▶️ John is bad news. It’s bad news for me, because I like Pixelmator Pro. It’s bad news for the Mac market because I took a

⏹️ ▶️ John great player off the table. It’s bad news for Apple’s awards because who are they gonna give them to now, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John But maybe it’s good news for a bunch of really good developers inside Pixelmator.

Apple buys some of Globalstar

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Meanwhile, Apple is still throwing money out the window because they apparently have put

⏹️ ▶️ Casey $1.1 billion into GlobalStar’s satellite network. And that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey includes an ownership stake. So reading from Six Colors, Apple’s satellite partner GlobalStar has disclosed changes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to its deal with Apple, including a new influx of $1.1 billion from Apple tied to capital improvements and $400

⏹️ ▶️ Casey million in equity, which gives Apple a 20% stake in the company. This is quite a bit of money, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not necessarily a huge surprise. aren’t that many companies around with this, with these kinds of capabilities.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And by locking down investment, GlobalStar, Apple ensures bandwidth and access. This is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the company that they use for the satellite texting, satellite emergency stuff, et cetera.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is what I kept asking. What is Apple going to charge for that? They’re like, oh, it’s free for the first year, but now it’s free for another year.

⏹️ ▶️ John And now it’s like, yeah, we’re part owners of the company. So I guess this will continue

⏹️ ▶️ John to be free. Like it’s not, like this is one way to resolve it. It’s, you know, we keep saying like,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s difficult for them to charge for this emergency type feature. And we came up with all sorts of schemes and how they could like

⏹️ ▶️ John charge for it, but retroactively after you’ve been saved, right? So they’ll charge you at the time of using it. But if you live

⏹️ ▶️ John through the thing, they can send you a charge or something. But it’s like, actually, maybe we’ll just invest $1.1 billion and get a 20% stake in

⏹️ ▶️ John the satellite company. And this is one of those situations, kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ John TSMC and other things where it’s like, you can shop around for somebody who has a bunch of satellites

⏹️ ▶️ John circling the earth or around the earth if they’re stationary, but anyway, there’s not a lot

⏹️ ▶️ John of options, right? There’s this, there’s Starlink,

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess. Like how many choices do you have? And if you’re Apple and you want to essentially

⏹️ ▶️ John protect yourself both by making sure that you can continue to offer this feature

⏹️ ▶️ John on your product, because there’s a lot of iPhones out there, and so you need a significant amount of capacity potentially

⏹️ ▶️ John so you wanna say, we don’t wanna stop shipping this feature, we build it into our phones, we wanna keep shipping the feature. you can

⏹️ ▶️ John sign a contract with them or something. But an even better way is to invest in the company and become a part

⏹️ ▶️ John owner and that you have much more control over what they do. And you wanna lock that up because if some

⏹️ ▶️ John other company comes in before you and buys them and kicks you out and now you can’t make contracts with them or you have to deal with Elon

⏹️ ▶️ John Musk, which no one wants to do, that’s bad for the company. So this seems like a relatively

⏹️ ▶️ John smart investment. Although I do have to say, 1.9 billion seems a lot for

⏹️ ▶️ John a feature that I personally view as one of those like cool, like

⏹️ ▶️ John off in the corner features of an iPhone. It’s great that they have it, but it’s not something hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ John that everybody uses every day. I know they allow you to text from it now, but like it’s really just for

⏹️ ▶️ John emergencies and for people who find themselves in an area without coverage and they still wanna text people. Like that’s what this is for.

⏹️ ▶️ John So it is a boon for them to put it in their products, but it’s not as strategic as

⏹️ ▶️ John say, investing in someone to make Silicon chips or like a new factory in Arizona that we might talk about in the future

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. So it is a lot of money, but I guess space equals a lot of money.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, this makes a lot of sense to me and I don’t blame Apple for doing it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And certainly the idea of this satellite features remaining free is appealing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it seems like it would be crummy, not, you know, Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not above it, but it seems like it would be crummy to be like, well, we’re perfectly happy to save your life if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out boondocking or hiking in the middle of nowhere, as long as you pay for Apple one,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that’s not, that’s just not a great look.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re never going to do that. They could charge you retroactively. But the thing is like these satellites as amazing

⏹️ ▶️ John as they are, they’re never going to be a major part

⏹️ ▶️ John of data communications on phones because there’s just not enough bandwidth, right? It’s not like, Hey,

⏹️ ▶️ John you won’t need a cell provider. You’ll do everything over satellite. I don’t think the GlobalStar satellite network, even

⏹️ ▶️ John with this $1.1 billion investment, has any hope of becoming a replacement for

⏹️ ▶️ John the cell network. That now Apple doesn’t need carriers because they do everything through satellite. Setting aside the speed of light

⏹️ ▶️ John delays and all that other stuff or

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is no small thing to set aside by there because I believe they operate geostationary satellites. In which case,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is no way that’s ever going to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John compete.

⏹️ ▶️ John So what I’m saying is this is an investment purely for the types of things they’re currently doing. There’s no

⏹️ ▶️ John future scenario where this has some amazing new use that we’re not even thinking of. It’s never going to be high bandwidth,

⏹️ ▶️ John low latency. Like it’s not going to they’re not going to stream Apple TV over

⏹️ ▶️ John to everybody’s phones like that’s just not going to happen. This is purely for, you know, when you absolutely

⏹️ ▶️ John need to connect and there’s no other option, outer space. Right. And that is a very it’s a great use

⏹️ ▶️ John case and it’s an important one. And it adds value to their products, but it is never going to replace any existing thing they

⏹️ ▶️ John do. So maybe 1.1 billion is just pocket change from Apple. So maybe it’s not a big deal. But

⏹️ ▶️ John and again, with them investing in the company, maybe Apple foresees other companies wanting

⏹️ ▶️ John to do the exact same type of thing, whether it’s a car company or, you know, Android phone seller

⏹️ ▶️ John that also wants to have the same sort of SOS type capabilities, powered satellite. If Apple is

⏹️ ▶️ John a part owner in the company, they get a share of that profit as well. So maybe it’s just a smart business move.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, real time follow up. They’re actually not geostationary. They’re actually low Earth orbit satellites from Globalstar. I did not know that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I would not have guessed that. But that means they can be significantly lower latency than geostationary ones. However,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like they’re not anywhere close to the high bandwidth usage of something like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Starlink.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’s just not enough of them. I mean, as many as there are, and there are too many Starlink satellites. But as many

⏹️ ▶️ John as

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey there

⏹️ ▶️ John are, there are far more cell phone towers in the United States. And they’re closer to you. Those cell phone

⏹️ ▶️ John towers are much closer to you, and there are way, way more of them. So that is it’s going to be

⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to compete with that with things that are flying over you in space.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s also I mean even with Starlink like it’s still a heck of a lot cheaper to build a cell phone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tower than to launch satellites.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco remain that way for a very long time.

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Future Vision Pro hardware

⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s been some new rumors and rumors about changed plans for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey future Vision Pro hardware. Apparently, Apple hasn’t totally given up on it. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey according to Ming-Chi Kuo, production of a cheaper Vision Pro has been delayed beyond

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 2027. This means Apple’s only new head-mounted display device in 2025

⏹️ ▶️ Casey will be the Vision Pro with an upgraded M5 processor. Additionally, Mark Gurman

⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, I also continue to hear that Apple is seriously considering a device that offloads the computing components to an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone and serves as an accessory for watching movies. That’s something that would be roughly akin to the glasses

⏹️ ▶️ Casey offered by companies like Xreal.

⏹️ ▶️ John So the MingTree Core one, I don’t know if this throwing in this aside about the 2025 one

⏹️ ▶️ John is like reinforcing a past rumor or how well sourced it is, but the cheaper

⏹️ ▶️ John Vision Pro is what we talked about in the past. And that’s why this is a change of rumored plans. again, this is all rumored, but

⏹️ ▶️ John the plan that we heard about was, oh, they’re not going to make another high end one. First, they’re going to concentrate on the cheaper

⏹️ ▶️ John one and the cheaper one should be coming. And we talked about maybe like fifteen hundred dollars and how can they make it cheaper and blah, blah,

⏹️ ▶️ John blah. And the cheaper one will be coming like next year or something. Right. And now the rumors

⏹️ ▶️ John have changed. So, you know, that cheaper one, twenty, twenty seven. So it’s like, OK, well, if that was the only

⏹️ ▶️ John rumor when I first read this, I’m like, oh, that’s not good because if they’re the cheaper one is going to be the next one and

⏹️ ▶️ John the next one is going to be in twenty, twenty seven, that means we’d be stuck with the original Vision Pro until 2027 with no

⏹️ ▶️ John changes, that is grim, okay? But here comes this other rumor, it’s like, and that means if the cheaper

⏹️ ▶️ John one is delayed to 2027, all we have is the 2020 fine version, which is basically

⏹️ ▶️ John today’s Vision Pro upgraded to an M5. And that’s not bad, honestly. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, remember the Vision Pro is M2. Upgraded to M5, maybe it’ll have like an R2

⏹️ ▶️ John processor in there or something, presumably with the same screens and probably around the same price or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John but that is a better Vision Pro. The rumors are that it will be able to do Apple Intelligence because it will have more

⏹️ ▶️ John RAM. M5 is going to be massively better than the M2. Same resolution on the screens,

⏹️ ▶️ John means it’ll be breaking less of a sweat while doing all of its stuff. Maybe it’ll even get better battery life. Like that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a second version of the existing Vision Pro. The cheap one

⏹️ ▶️ John being delayed sounds real bad, but if they have the essentially upgraded Vision Pro

⏹️ ▶️ John in 2025, I think that does show basically the minimum expected

⏹️ ▶️ John level of commitment to the product. Again, ask Apple about the Mac Studio and Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s commitment to its various products sometimes waivers but not having another Vision

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro product to 2027 is just untenable. People would forget that it exists, right? And of course they’d be selling

⏹️ ▶️ John the M2 model for $3,500 still 2027, which is ridiculous because by then like the Apple Pencil

⏹️ ▶️ John would have more CPU power. But yeah, an M5 version 2025 actually doesn’t sound that bad to me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, this, I consider this the minimum to keep this product going, but like if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the change is just taking the existing one, upgrading the processor, and maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco making a few tiny tweaks around here and there, that’s not gonna move the needle on sales.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No one is looking at the current Vision Pro and saying, well, I would have bought it if it was faster.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, I think it’s just what you have to do for the people who already want a Vision Pro to not

⏹️ ▶️ John feel like they should, to not be repelled by the fact that it still has an M2 in it, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John You want it to get better, you know, on some reasonable schedule. And so this is sort of just, think

⏹️ ▶️ John of it this way, it’s just maintaining the existing product. It’s not making a new Vision Pro, it’s not making a Vision Pro successor,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just like, hey, the existing Vision Pro, every once in a while we do need to update these things because they get old.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and more importantly, it’s not going to expand the market at all. Like, I think what they have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hopefully, by now, learned, is like if they want to expand the market for their AR, VR

⏹️ ▶️ Marco product category, they need to go in a different direction in some way, whether it’s a substantial

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheaper design or the glasses or just some other direction

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be required. But yeah, you’re right. It is nice that they will be updating this product eventually, maybe.

⏹️ ▶️ John And pushing the cheap one out to 2027, to me basically reads like they couldn’t figure out

⏹️ ▶️ John how to make a cheaper one in 2025. We talked about where are they gonna get that cost from? What components

⏹️ ▶️ John are they going to remove and scale down? And you can rip out all, they rip out the eyeballs in the front,

⏹️ ▶️ John make the case out of plastic, try to put a cheaper SoC in there. But like those

⏹️ ▶️ John screens, if the screens don’t get cheaper and Apple has limited control over that, like there’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not a lot of components you can totally remove and not a lot of ones that get cheaper. So I think they just did the math and said,

⏹️ ▶️ John we can’t actually make a substantially cheaper Vision Pro. Even though I’m sure they

⏹️ ▶️ John want to, because again, if you’re gonna move the needle at all this market, you have to do something. And one of the things

⏹️ ▶️ John is make it way, way cheaper. And maybe they just said, we can’t do it. Or we could make it, you know, if I make it $3,000

⏹️ ▶️ John and $3,500, who cares? Like that’s that doesn’t do anything. So hopefully in 2027, they think they have promises from their parts

⏹️ ▶️ John suppliers that will be able to get you screens that are good, that are half the price

⏹️ ▶️ John of the current screens. And you’ll get rid of the front facing eyeball screen and you’ll put an M5

⏹️ ▶️ John processor in 2027, which will be plenty fast. But it’ll be like a two year old chip by then. Like, I

⏹️ ▶️ John think that’s what that rumor means. And then German’s rumor about glasses that offload their stuff to the phone,

⏹️ ▶️ John yada, yada, like that will obviously happen eventually, but I have trouble seeing

⏹️ ▶️ John how, unless Apple is just gonna like throw another like dart at the dart board and say, hey, people sell

⏹️ ▶️ John products like this, like the X-Real ones where it’s just glasses and it’s just like another way to have a screen. Why don’t we try that?

⏹️ ▶️ John Sure, you can, I guess, but like that’s not even in the Vision Pro family, is it? Cause that’s just basically like screen

⏹️ ▶️ John on face. that thing’s not going to be watching your fingers for tapping and doing all. It’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not it’s not a vision pro. It is a way to look at movies on the plane

⏹️ ▶️ John in glasses that are smaller and lighter and cheaper. And I don’t I mean, I haven’t actually ever tried

⏹️ ▶️ John any of those products. I’ve seen lots of reviews of them, the things that are glasses with

⏹️ ▶️ John usually cheap, not very good looking screens inside of them. But it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John certainly a way lighter weight way to look at a movie on a plane. for example,

⏹️ ▶️ John than strapping on a gigantic Vision Pro headset. Like they don’t look like glasses glasses, but they look like

⏹️ ▶️ John dorky big computer. They’re like kind of like, remember those things you had Marco, like the Bose.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the audio sunglasses.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they’re bigger than that, but not much bigger. Nothing compared to a Vision Pro and they’re way cheaper and they

⏹️ ▶️ John look worse. And it’s like, okay, that’s a product that exists. Seriously considering

⏹️ ▶️ John though, this is a German rubber, so I can’t totally dismiss it because he’s usually got pretty good sources, but I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know how people would try to sell that. It’s like, hey, we make this Vision Pro thing that does all sorts of amazing stuff, but nobody wants

⏹️ ▶️ John it because it’s too expensive. Do you want a worse experience and lightweight glasses? Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, I mean, I can kind of see the argument there. So, okay, two things we’ve already talked about. Number

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, the Apple Watch. The first Apple Watch launched with all this functionality. They tried to sell it as doing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a million different things. And we ended up learning it was really good at like two things. And that’s enough of a product right there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What we’ve learned so far with the Vision Pro, Admittedly, it’s not much, because it’s still super young and super small and there’s nothing there,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco et cetera. But what we’ve learned so far with the Vision Pro is people seem to like it a lot for watching

⏹️ ▶️ Marco movies, and some people want to be able to use their Mac screen in it. Although,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know there’s news in the beta there that’s apparently better, but we’ll see how that plays

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out for everybody in practice. But for the most part, a large part of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the good usage experiences experiences of the Vision Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco come down to either using it as a screen for something else or watching movies on it, which is a fancy way of using it as a screen for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco something else. So if that, if it turns out that is a huge

⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of what people want to do on this device and people keep saying I would buy one if it was cheaper,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well if you can deliver something that gives people those use cases for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot cheaper, because again like, you know, and the rumors that we were saying earlier about like there’s rumors of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a cheaper Vision Pro. That’s not to say a cheap Vision Pro, just a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco less expensive one. You know the the rumors that we’ve heard so far about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the full-blown Vision Pro getting cheaper over time, peg the price at something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like $1,500 to $3,000 instead of $3,500. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco still way too expensive for most people to want to buy this thing. But if If most people just want a fancy movie screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a fancy external Mac display, then it turns out you can do that for a lot less. There’s a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the Vision Pro that you don’t necessarily need or that you can downsize or adjust in different ways. So if that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ends up being a good market for this, I think that’s fine. Because again, going back to our Apple TV discussion

⏹️ ▶️ Marco earlier, computing on the Vision Pro, and this is something, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasn’t really able to say this for NDA reasons, for the lab, but this is something I felt immediately

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I started using the Vision Pro in the lab and certainly once I bought my own I felt it as well.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Using, like trying to compute on the Vision Pro, getting, you know, using apps, moving

⏹️ ▶️ Marco around apps, navigating, trying to get things done, or you know, certainly doing any kind of text, but you know, just any kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco working in the Vision Pro or operating apps in the Vision Pro feels a lot like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco operating apps in the Apple TV in the sense that you have a very large but kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of far away canvas, it’s hard to get a lot of information density

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a way that’s useful to you with the perspective that you have. You have these kind of course input

⏹️ ▶️ Marco methods. You don’t have a lot of input precision. Text input is pretty rough. Certainly you don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be doing a lot of like editing, moving around like fine motor movements. It’s not very good at that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It feels like using apps on an Apple TV. Well, what if it turns

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out again, like just like I was saying earlier, the Apple TV has the hardware capability to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a gaming platform, a real estate pricing platform, a shopping platform. But what people actually end

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up doing with it, what it’s actually best at and easiest to do on it, is watching video. But what if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Vision Pro, what if it turns out that what most people want to do with immersive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco VR glasses is either play games, which Apple we know is not going to be amazing at,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or watch immersive content, or use it as a screen for something else.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that outcome not only is likely, I think that’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Certainly that will change what the product should be, and maybe some of the things they’ve invested in won’t end up

⏹️ ▶️ Marco panning out in that way. But that is very possibly how this category

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will end up, and that’s fine. And if it ends up that they mostly sell much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco less expensive glasses or headsets that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are mostly just being relatively simple screens, that’s still

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a perfectly fine market. And this whole market with AR and VR, I mean, obviously

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s been all this news with Meta’s glasses they came out with and the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird Snapchat things they came out with, or Meta didn’t come out with them, the glasses they demoed and the Snapchat

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. And you look at like, what are we working towards with all of this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge investment with AR and VR, but mostly AR now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what are we working towards with all of that? What demand are we trying to solve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with these products? And I think that the tech industry that is making

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these so far has not done a great job of convincing me that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people want what this offers. They’re convincing me this is really cool. Like, they’re making

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that are really cool, that demo really well, but then when you actually, like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get one, maybe use it for a few days. And then it’s like, hmm, well, my work

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is better on my laptop or my Mac. My portable needs are better

⏹️ ▶️ Marco done by my phone. My movie watching is better done on my TV because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I watch it with other people or whatever. Like, what we’re finding is we’re putting a whole

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bunch of massive investment and product development

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and money and hype and time and attention into this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dream of like, when we finally get AR glasses, it’ll be amazing. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually don’t like, I think we might be putting too much on that as an industry in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco terms of like our expectations and our attention. In the same way that again, like when the Apple Watch was new,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone was like, this is gonna replace phones. And it just didn’t and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t. That doesn’t mean it’s a failure as a product. It just means that the role of this product was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not what everyone expected at first. And everyone expected to replace phones, it will never do that. It’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of not physically right for that. What if AR and VR glasses

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are mostly just good for watching movies? That’s not bad, it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the next big thing. And that’s okay. There’s room in tech for lots of different things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that do lots of different roles. But it seems like everybody wants AR to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like the next big thing that replaces everything. And I just, I don’t know. I don’t, when you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at the physical realities of this, I just don’t see it.

⏹️ ▶️ John So the tech’s just not there yet. I mean, I feel like the things like X-Real and stuff are kind of like, let’s meet,

⏹️ ▶️ John let’s take this product and meet the tech where it’s at today. And you know, is the tech

⏹️ ▶️ John there to do something with the Abolition Pro? Not at a reasonable price and a comfortable thing. So

⏹️ ▶️ John what can we do with today’s tech that makes a product that is actually somewhat attractive

⏹️ ▶️ John and useful? So cut out everything that you can’t do well. And just, you know, oh, I just want to watch movies on a plane

⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t want to do it on a laptop, right? So that’s where you get these glasses. And I’m not sure if that product is super successful but

⏹️ ▶️ John it is really cutting down and saying, we’d prefer to do much more, but we can’t. We literally can’t. The tech is not

⏹️ ▶️ John there. And no matter how much money you spend, it just gets bigger and bulkier, heavier, and it’s not like the balance

⏹️ ▶️ John is off. So where is the sweet spot with current tech? It’s kind of like Palm OS versus the Newton, right? The

⏹️ ▶️ John Palm was worse, but the Newton was too big, too expensive, too heavy. It did so much more than Palm.

⏹️ ▶️ John This OS was so much better, didn’t matter, wasn’t as good a product. So the Xreal, I feel like, is trying to find that type thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John But with Apple investigating this, unlike with the Apple Watch, where they’re like, oh, we introduced this product, it’s basically

⏹️ ▶️ John like a little tiny iPhone, and it can do all these things, and then they found out what the things that people wanna use it for.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the platform didn’t really have to change radically. It was still called Apple Watch, it still ran Watch OS. Obviously, they

⏹️ ▶️ John changed WatchKit to whatever the successor was. But in general, you could still call it Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John Watch, and it was fine, right? With them coming out with something like this, like the Xreel thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John which doesn’t watch where your hands are, doesn’t track your eyeballs, doesn’t let you use your virtual

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac, like is that even the Vision Pro platform? Does it even run Vision OS? Like, can you

⏹️ ▶️ John sell that as a Vision with no pro suffix? Or can you say, actually this is the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John Studio Display eyeball, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Is it just a display? Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John is it even the same platform? Which

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s fine

⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. Who cares if it is? Like, is it this platform that has no content and no software? I know, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what I’m saying.

⏹️ ▶️ John Would they even try to connect it, branding-wise and computing-wise?

⏹️ ▶️ John Would it even run apps? Or would it just be a screen? I’m not gonna say when you get it so wrong like they

⏹️ ▶️ John did with the Vision Pro, but if you decide, let’s try a different

⏹️ ▶️ John Avenue, and that Avenue is sufficiently different from the one you tried before, you do have that question

⏹️ ▶️ John of, wait, are we rolling out a new platform? Is this a new platform?

⏹️ ▶️ John Are we gonna try to say that this is the same platform? They kind of did that with like the home accessories.

⏹️ ▶️ John Granted they have no screens and people don’t really know it’s running audio OS or running a variant of TV OS or whatever. It’s kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of hidden, but like they had that same thing. And then we’ll see when they do with the home device that is running with

⏹️ ▶️ John the screen. Like, is that a new platform? Are we gonna just pretend that’s the same platform

⏹️ ▶️ John as the HomePod and the HomePod mini, even though that platform has changed a lot under the covers, like the thing with the screen, what

⏹️ ▶️ John platform is that? What app does it run? like with the whole backdoor of like, it’s not really

⏹️ ▶️ John another platform, it’s just a thing that runs iPad and or iPhone apps, right? Like Macs

⏹️ ▶️ John run iPad apps, Vision Pro runs iPad apps. Is the Mac and the Vision Pro an iPad?

⏹️ ▶️ John No, but it’s a way for us to take a platform that actually has apps for it and shove it onto other platforms that don’t, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s so weird. So this, I mean, this is just a rumor, they’re considering it or whatever, but like

⏹️ ▶️ John that’d be the thing I’d be watching for here. Not so much the product that they roll out, because again, there’s a bunch of existing products on the market

⏹️ ▶️ John like this. And I don’t think they’re setting the market on fire, but they are certainly cheap enough for

⏹️ ▶️ John someone to buy as like just a impulse purchase for like a toy and people seem to like them and they’re cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John Is it better than watching a movie on your laptop on the plane? I kind of like watching

⏹️ ▶️ John a video on my OLED iPad. A cheap pair

⏹️ ▶️ John of glasses is honestly not going to have the image quality

⏹️ ▶️ John as my very expensive OLED iPad does. But then again, it’s private and it’s smaller than an

⏹️ ▶️ John iPad and it stays with me wherever I look. So it does have some advantages, but I think

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is going to, if they pursue this, they’re going to have some very difficult decisions to make about

⏹️ ▶️ John what exactly they’re doing. And the thing I suggested before of saying, this isn’t a platform,

⏹️ ▶️ John this is a monitor. That is kind of like sidestepping at all and just saying like, look, it’s a monitor, updated

⏹️ ▶️ John every six years. It comes with an A13 inside it. It runs a variant

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco of iOS, but

⏹️ ▶️ John basically it’s just a really cool screen that goes on your face.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And that is no power button.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco exactly. And that

⏹️ ▶️ John is saying we are not ready to do AR, but we are ready to put screens in your eyeballs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco A while ago, we floated the idea on this show. I think I think every time Apple is rumored to update the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Watch SE and then and then it comes out and or and like the price doesn’t go down or it doesn’t get an update.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we we frequently float the idea. does the Apple Watch SE or does the low-end

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watch even need to run apps? And if you look at other

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wearables that compete with the Apple Watch, you know, obviously there’s like the Android smartwatches

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have feature parity and stuff, but, or at least in the ballpark. But then also there’s this whole

⏹️ ▶️ Marco category of things like Fitbits, like smaller wearables that are mostly just activity trackers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that either have no screen, like a ring, or they have smaller

⏹️ ▶️ Marco screens that are basically just displaying the time and your step count or something like that. Like much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco simpler devices that are not running full-blown third-party app platforms in them. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are able to be substantially smaller, substantially cheaper, and therefore, they get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge market share. Well, there’s not much pressure on Apple to do that necessarily for the watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the Apple Watch is a hit. It has been successful and has been selling

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in large volumes since it was introduced. But what if the only way they could make the Apple Watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the platform that they shipped, you know, with software and apps and everything, such as they were at the beginning, but you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if the only way for them to do that was for it to be $2,000 and have a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of trade-offs also? Then, you know, it wouldn’t have sold very well and then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe there might have been more pressure on them to be like, okay, listen, if you wanna make a smart wearable that people buy,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to cut it down, it has to be simpler. And then maybe they would make something like a Fitbit.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s kind of the situation the Vision Pro is in. They shot for the sky with this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, they put in so much tech, and the software platform is quite advanced,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s so much there. There’s engineering, there’s amazing hardware, amazing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco software, the capabilities that it has are just incredible, but that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gave it some really bad trade-offs and made it very expensive. Meanwhile,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are industries, if you look at the smaller gaming headsets

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or things like these extra glasses, which yes, they are just screens in your face and that’s not a very big industry, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you start to see, if there is pressure from down below in the price curve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for these other products that people are choosing instead of the Apple Vision Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Apple has this giant app platform building this thing that’s not really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco working very well for them, then maybe the answer really is to make something simpler. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if everyone is saying we want this to be not only cheaper, but we need it to be a lot cheaper

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than what the current option is, they’re not going to get there by retaining all of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco functionality of the Vision Pro as we know it today. So that they can either wait a very long

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time for all of that approach to get cheaper, and of course they can revise the hardware

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be cheaper, things like, you know, different manufacturing techniques, simpler materials, maybe get rid of the weird

⏹️ ▶️ Marco external eyeball display, stuff like that. There are ways to make it a little bit cheaper, but if they need to make it a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheaper, that’s going to take a very long time, unless they dramatically cut scope.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now granted, Apple’s a very patient company, so it would not surprise me if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they really did just want to wait, you know, 10 years for those little tiny screens to get cheaper or whatever. It

⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be their plan. I would be surprised if the product lasted that long, if that’s their only plan.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But hopefully it’s not. But also, you can look at, does this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco category of product need to be what we shot for? They were so ambitious with trying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get us to all start talking about computing. What was it? Is it ambient computing?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that what we called it? Spatial computing. Spatial, that’s it. I already forgot the term. It’s been a week.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Spatial computing. That’s the term. No one said spatial computing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco before Apple did. That was not a term anybody used. Or since. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But what if the whole concept of spatial computing was not the right direction to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco go? That’s what I’m saying. If you try to compute in the Vision Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in regular productivity, switching around in apps kind of ways, it’s not very good for that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What if that’s just the wrong approach? and what if the right approach is something much simpler, like just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco making it mostly about video playback or whatever? I don’t think that’s unreasonable to consider.

⏹️ ▶️ John Or the right approach for this time. The right approach for this time and for this

⏹️ ▶️ John current state of technology. I think Apple should continue to pursue the high end because that’s how you eventually get to the good version of

⏹️ ▶️ John that, but it’s too expensive now. So like, what can you do with existing tech? What is the Palm Pilot version of this?

⏹️ ▶️ John Again, with this rumor, I think another thing leaning in the direction of it being more like a monitor is they’re basically saying offload

⏹️ ▶️ John computing to the phone, but you don’t want your phone doing that much

⏹️ ▶️ John heavy lifting in service of projecting an image onto your glasses.

⏹️ ▶️ John But it can, you know, if you just ask it to project video, if you’re watching a TV show or a movie or a YouTube video, well, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John hardware decoding for the video, and that is actually one of the lighter things that your phone can do. It doesn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ John to show the video on its screen, so it’s saving on battery life on not lighting up its screen, right? It’s using the

⏹️ ▶️ John battery that’s in your glasses, but it’s just, it’s, you know, it’s, it’s doing networking. It’s getting, it’s downloading

⏹️ ▶️ John the video or if it’s already downloaded, it’s streaming it off the SSD, it’s decoding the compressed video. It’s sending the image,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Anything more than that, where you’re asking the phone to like track objects in 3D

⏹️ ▶️ John space and do stuff like the Vision Pro does to make like a stable floating window in front of you. Your phone battery is going to

⏹️ ▶️ John get slaughtered, right? I mean, hell, the Vision Pro with a huge battery that’s bigger than the iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ John itself, two hours battery life. No one is going to want to sacrifice their phone battery. That’s what I was saying with the Orion glasses

⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s a separate puck or whatever. It’ll be that way for a while yet because what we ask

⏹️ ▶️ John these glasses to do in the sort of maximal Orion or Vision Pro type feature set

⏹️ ▶️ John is just too computationally expensive. It will burn your phone’s battery and no one wants to spend their battery on that.

⏹️ ▶️ John But if it’s just watching video, I think people would, first of all, we know people will use their

⏹️ ▶️ John phone battery for that because they literally watch movies on their phone on the plane. And that’s lighting up the screen and sometimes they’re using the phone

⏹️ ▶️ John speaker, which blows my mind because you cannot hear anything on planes. But anyway, people do it. You hear them on the subway,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve got their phones, they’re blaring audio, they’re watching video. It’s rude, but it also kills their phone battery,

⏹️ ▶️ John but they do it. That’s what they wanna use their phone battery for. But yeah, a glasses

⏹️ ▶️ John device that uses the phone for compute, I think the correct balance would be, hey phone, all you gotta do

⏹️ ▶️ John is networking and video decoding, and then you just project to me.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know how I feel about this. I don’t think that Apple wants

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to admit defeat on the Vision Pro, I don’t think they want

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go that much simpler because when they, they simplified the Apple watch, the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hardware was largely the same and actually got more complicated. It was the software that,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they focused. And I, I agree that using the Vision

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro as a computing platform in my personal experience is trash

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you don’t have a T or don’t have a TV, when you don’t have a keyboard connected. Um, and it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stellar when you don’t have a keyboard connected. And for me, the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey only time the Vision Pro was really great as a computing platform was when it was simply a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey monitor for my Mac. And I have not yet tried this new version of the display where you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can get wide and I think ultra-wide versions of your Mac’s display. It

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sounds incredible, but it requires a beta of macOS, which I am not going to be messing with, as well

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as the beta of Vision OS, which I would mess with. But the only time that the Vision Pro has really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey been a productivity tool for me was as a monitor for my Mac. And a lot of that is probably because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m an old man who just prefers using the Mac. But I think a lot of that is because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an imprecise tool. It’s just not as precise as, you know, a Mac is or an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad or an iPhone. And so embracing what it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is or what it’s best at, which is to say a really, really nice screen that you happen to be able to strap

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to your head. I get that, but I just, I don’t know. I find it hard to believe that Apple would completely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and totally get rid of basically all the smarts and just have a dumb display, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes me wonder, okay, well, what’s the Apple way of doing a display such that it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey smart, but not quite as smart as a vision pro. And I don’t, I don’t have an answer for that. That’s why Apple is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple. And I’m just talking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John about it.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s like a phone accessory. That’s like an attachment to your phone sales. And by the way, with the Apple watch SE example, that’s kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of an example of. of what I imagine Apple’s currently planning to do with the big expensive

⏹️ ▶️ John Vision Pro because today’s Apple Watch SE is massively more powerful than the

⏹️ ▶️ John original Apple Watch, right? What they basically did was, let’s just keep making Apple Watches

⏹️ ▶️ John until we can make a cheap one that is actually way more powerful than the first one that we rolled out, just due

⏹️ ▶️ John to the advance of technology. The screens are better, the battery life is better, it’s thinner, it’s lighter, like

⏹️ ▶️ John they just waited many, many, many years. And lo and behold, we have an Apple Watch SE They didn’t have to go

⏹️ ▶️ John like the X real rumored route ahead of saying like, we gotta make a cut down version of it. It’s gotta compete with Fitbit. They’re like,

⏹️ ▶️ John nah, we’ll just keep making Apple watches. We’ll just keep plugging away. An Apple watch is an Apple watch. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ John no platform bifurcation. There’s no limited version. Only does certain stuff. We’ll just patiently sit here

⏹️ ▶️ John because as Marco pointed out, the first one wasn’t with the exception of the gold one, thousands of dollars, right? The first one was

⏹️ ▶️ John in the ballpark price wise. And they just did like they did with the iPhone. Mature the product,

⏹️ ▶️ John start diversifying the product line. Eventually you can make a pretty good Apple Watch for cheaper and just keep iterating on that and lo

⏹️ ▶️ John and behold the Apple Watch SE now Would have been amazing if you had taken it back in time to the original Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John Watch introduction I think Apple would love to do that with Vision Pro They’re just many years away from getting there

⏹️ ▶️ John But in the meantime, but the Vision Pro is so much farther away from the bullseye than the Apple Watch was

⏹️ ▶️ John I can imagine them considering things like this again This is just a vague rumor that Apple is seriously considering

⏹️ ▶️ John it and Apple was so slowly even if they did roll it out I’m not sure how they do it but when I pictured it in my head, I pictured

⏹️ ▶️ John it as an iPhone accessory that is essentially a monitor

⏹️ ▶️ John that only has enough smarts to communicate with the thing that is rendering the video and that’s basically all I use it for.

⏹️ ▶️ John And for that purpose, Casey, when you’re like, oh, I wanna play and I wanna take out my Vision Pro from my giant backpack and put

⏹️ ▶️ John it on and be that guy, even if the video quality, even the image quality wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John quite as good as a Vision Pro, I think you might prefer these little monitor

⏹️ ▶️ John for your phone things to watch a movie on a plane simply because they’re so much smaller and lighter and the

⏹️ ▶️ John thing itself would be cheaper. And you just, you know, if the image quality isn’t quite as good, that’s fine. It’s still better than watching on your tiny

⏹️ ▶️ John phone screen on a tray table.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thank you to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and 1Passport Extended Access Management.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic that is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exclusive to members. This week in Overtime we’ll be talking about our experiences so far with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s been released from Apple Intelligence. So you can hear all about our Apple Intelligence experiences

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far in Overtime by joining at atp.fm. Thanks everybody

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’ll talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental John didn’t do any

⏹️ ▶️ John research,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco and Casey

⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t let him

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental, oh it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental And you can find the show notes at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP.FM And if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John into mastodon, you can follow them at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s K-C-L-I-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, check podcast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so long

Post-election feelings

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. I, I,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me start by reminding everyone, uh, this is going to be group therapy for the three of us.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you’re not interested, that’s fine. If you disagree with the way we feel about this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey election, that’s fine, I guess. Um, you don’t need to tell

⏹️ ▶️ Casey us about it. That’s fine. You can skip this chapter. This is why chapters

⏹️ ▶️ Casey exist. Just move right along. I think the three of us need this for the three of us and hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe it’ll be a little cathartic to at least one of you. Um, last night

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was watching the coverage and as early

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as like eight, eight 30 Eastern. I was like, this doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel good. And by nine 30 Eastern, which is when the first

⏹️ ▶️ Casey real big batch of polling started coming in properly. Aaron and I looked at each

⏹️ ▶️ Casey other and we were like, I don’t think I want to stay up for this. Like I was planning to stay up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me because we typically go up on a school night at like 10 ish at the latest. And I was thinking I was going to stay

⏹️ ▶️ Casey up till like 11 or maybe midnight and just ride this baby out and watch it come in. And I was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mostly excited for it, to be honest with you. And 9 30, the two of us looked at each other and we were like,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t like how this feels. I’m just going to go to bed. And we went to bed. I slept like trash.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And at about five, I gave up and woke up, looked at the news and saw, oh no,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh no. And by the time I actually hauled myself out of bed at like 630 ish,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, what was a theoretical ending became a official in the terms

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of like the AP called it, CNN called it, they called it for Trump. And,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, I’ve, I’ve been really sad. I’ve been really sad all day. I’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really dejected all day. I’ve been really worried all day. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not as much about me particularly. Um, but I’m worried

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a fair bit for the women in my life. Um, you know, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, I’m not too terribly concerned for Aaron because, you know, we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are officially done having babies. We are surgically done with having babies. So short of something very unusual happening.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, all of the baby related stuff I’m not too worried about, but there’s a lot of lot of women’s health care that is not strictly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about baby making, despite what many men seem to believe, and that concerns me. And I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very concerned for Michaela. You know, she’ll be 10 when this, well, she’ll be 10

⏹️ ▶️ Casey four years from now. We’ll see if that’s the end of this term of presidency.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m worried for her, but the people I’m really worried for are the people

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that don’t And I’m very scared for them.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I am at a loss for what to do. I’ve been interrogating within myself and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking with friends about like, how did we get here? And we can talk about that if the two

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of you want to. I don’t have any strong answers. I have theories, but no strong answers. But I’m just,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m really, I’m really sad. I’m really sad that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we as a country have decided that this is what we want. that this is what we want. And, you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, even despite our full-throated endorsement last episode, which I stand behind, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all three of us could make passionate arguments. And, and well, well, let me just speak

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for myself. I can make a passionate argument that Kamala was not a stellar choice,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it was the choice we had. And so that’s the choice I went with. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, I feel like it’s hard for me to wrap my head around and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s hard for me to figure out, how do I tell my kids

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that a man who is convicted of how many felonies, a man who

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least suggested, if not caused, an insurrection on the capital of the United States of America,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that seems to be saying very, very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey full-throatedly that he would like to prosecute or otherwise

⏹️ ▶️ Casey imprison or get rid of the people who are, he considers his enemies, be they domestic or foreign,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just, how can I look at a man who’s a pathological liar, a man who’s cognitively falling

⏹️ ▶️ Casey apart? How can I look to my kids and say, there are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey consequences for your actions when, as far as I can tell, he’s never had a consequence for his action other than failing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey upwards. And, and how do, how do I, how do I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accept that half of the country is enthusiastic about this. And again, I have some theories,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s just hard to wrap my head around. And, you know, we’ve got, we got some feedback from last

⏹️ ▶️ Casey week’s episode. Most of it was very positive and I very much appreciate it. Uh, some of it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Was not so positive, but thankfully it was mostly presented

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with respect, which I appreciated. Um, but you know, a couple of the people who wrote

⏹️ ▶️ Casey us were like, you know, I couldn’t believe that anyone could vote for Joe Biden, I couldn’t believe that anyone would

⏹️ ▶️ Casey vote for him. Like, I feel like our country’s going down the tube when we elected Joe Biden. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t doubt that that’s how they felt, but like, I tried to wrap my head around,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the hell, why? Why did you feel that way? And I got no answers. Like, I just got no answers. Like, the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey man was, especially this election cycle, you know, he bowed out because he was also cognitively

⏹️ ▶️ Casey falling apart. But I don’t think Joe Biden was a bad guy, Whereas

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Trump is a bad man. And like, I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey where do we go from here? What do we, what do we tell the women in minorities and, and, you know, the LG, LGBTQIA

⏹️ ▶️ Casey community, like, what do we tell these people? What do we do other than try to defend them when we can? And I, it’s, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know, what the do we do?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is obviously going to be a much bigger topic than we can cover. Um, my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco feeling on this right now is I’m just massively depressed about it. I am fortunate that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t typically suffer from depression, but I certainly feel depressed about this right now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, likewise. You know, like, you know, I woke up this morning and just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco couldn’t do anything. And I still, you know, I’m going to be like this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while probably. Just, you know, hard to focus on anything,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard to do anything, certainly hard to be be motivated

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do anything and hard to think about anything else. Um, well, you know, I, I think right now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m in coping mode. Um, you know, this is this, this pretty bad thing that has happened.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, you know, and, and the reality is like the, whoever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the president is. Affects different people in different ways in your day-to-day life.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco For most Americans, it won’t affect you much at all. in everyday

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways. It will probably affect you in kind of big picture, long term ways,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in lots of ways that are not good. And if you are one of these people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who is only being affected in bigger picture, long term ways, you are lucky and you are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco privileged. Because there are a lot of people who are affected in much more significant ways,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right from the start. Right now, I don’t want to even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to address that because there is just no way to give it justice. Right now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m in coping mode, and everyone copes differently. I would encourage

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you as not a licensed psychotherapist, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead as a person who talks about computers and the internet, so take this with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a grain of salt,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would encourage you to let yourself feel your feelings. Don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to hold it in, don’t try to hide it, don’t try to follow what other people telling you to feel, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you feel, let yourself feel it. And I wouldn’t at this point

⏹️ ▶️ Marco start pointing fingers and saying, this is where we went wrong, this is where the campaign or the candidate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was too wrong or whatever. This is not a productive time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do that. Right now, just let yourself feel it. If you are mad, be mad. If you’re sad, be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sad. If you want to be furious, be furious. If you want to be despondent, be despondent.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is the lyrics of a terrible song. Figure out, right now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we were just hurt significantly. Deal with the pain. Deal with it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t just try to shove it down and process it later. No, process it now. This

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is what’s going on right now for you. You’ve got to figure out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is helpful to your feelings and mood and what is not.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have an open mind to that. I have found so far things that do not help me

⏹️ ▶️ Marco include reading the news because I know it’s bad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t need to keep reading articles telling me how bad it is I’m very aware of how bad it is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we went through this already in 2016 through 2020 we went

⏹️ ▶️ Marco through this we’ve seen roughly how this is going to go now in some ways,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, in some ways it’s less of a shock because this happened already.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we can expect largely many of the same things to happen in the second term

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than what happened as what happened in the first term. It’s probably going to be a lot of similarities. If you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are like me in the sense that reading the news does not help you feel better about anything or move on with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your life in a significant actionable way, what we saw the first time was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically a constant barrage of fire and motion in scandals.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Every

⏹️ ▶️ Marco day there was a different scandal. It was overwhelming. It was basically a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco DDoS attack on everyone’s attention because there was no one scandal

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for anyone to focus on for more than a few days at a time because after a few days there would just be another one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And can you believe what he did or said today? And that just kept happening

⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost every day. That’s going to happen again. We’re going to have that just overwhelming

⏹️ ▶️ Marco barrage, that DDoS attack of just scandal after scandal,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lie after lie, awful, unethical, or illegal thing he does after

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an awful, unethical, legal thing. It’s just going to be a constant parade of those things. That’s how he

⏹️ ▶️ Marco operates, and nothing bad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will happen to him as a result. You know, Casey, you said how you’re going to explain to your kids that this person

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can, you know, commit literal crimes and have no consequences. And the answer is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rich and powerful people often don’t pay for their… they often don’t pay consequences for their actions. Like, that’s just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reality of the world. And that’s what’s happening here. He’s a very powerful person

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a lot of very powerful friends. And an important lesson to learn is that those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people don’t often pay consequences, especially Republican politicians,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their base does not hold them to those standards. So they like Republicans

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do not care what their candidates do as long as they win. They don’t care about any other factor.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Priority number one above all else, above morals, above religion, above legal,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the laws, certainly above standards, number one is winning. And they don’t care what their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco candidates do or what they’re like. Now, in terms of what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people, you know, trying to understand what people voted for here,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they voted for a worldview. The people who vote for him are not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking at every single action and saying, well, I wonder if I can still vote for him even though he

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lied 14 times in the appearance he made or whatever. No one who

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is voting for him is thinking that way. It’s tribal, it’s almost

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a religious style thing, it’s a worldview. They are voting for a worldview.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now they have been convinced that their worldview is the correct one. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone has different reasons why, and most of those reasons honestly are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco factually wrong, or at least massively distorted. But the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reality is they were sold a worldview successfully and they voted

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it. And that’s what we’re going to have to contend with. That people knew exactly what they were

⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting here. They knew they were voting for a liar, a fraud, a criminal,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a rapist, somebody who’s done many worse things. They knew that, but they were voting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the worldview. And we’re also, I think, going to have to cope with the fact

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Democrats don’t act as a block together. We never do. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so a huge challenge Democrats always face is how do we get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more people who are already Democrats to vote for our candidate? And that’s a problem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the Republicans don’t have. Their people will show up and vote for any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco criminal as long as they bear that party name, because it’s all about winning

⏹️ ▶️ Marco first and anything else is secondary. But again, that’s not how Democrats work. So Democrats need a different You

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, I’m not a smart enough person in politics to be able to say what they should do next,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but we’ve seen over and over again, you know, how we lose

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe we can figure out, you know, new things from there. there. But, you know, the reality

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is half the country is not, you know, stupid or nuts. Like, they were sold

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bill of goods and we have to figure out, you know, if we’re on the other side of that, we have to figure

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out how we can reach them at all or how we can reach our own people in enough numbers to overcome

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. And that’s something to do over the next four years. But in the meantime, you got

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to find out what helps you. You know, how do you get through this? You know, I mentioned

⏹️ ▶️ Marco earlier for me, reading the news does not help me. There’s a reason why I did not read

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much news between 2016 and 2020, because it was just destroying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my mental state. It was making me just angry and stressed and afraid

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time. By the way, you asked earlier, Casey, why somebody

⏹️ ▶️ Marco could possibly feel very strongly about Joe Biden. I honestly, I agree.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know why people could possibly hate him so much. He seems like a really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of neutral person to me, but the reality is that’s what they have—people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that political side of the aisle, they have been fed a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco constant worldview stream of anger and fear and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco claims that make them hate this very neutral, like very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco milquetoast kind of candidate that makes them hate him. can’t stomach him because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve been sold this incredibly severe worldview. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Trump’s entire campaign was basically anger and hate and xenophobia.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was everything he ever said was angry. He was constantly talking about how much America

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sucks. His entire campaign is everything sucks and is awful and it’ll get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco worse if you don’t elect me. That was his entire campaign, but that reach enough people to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco matter. So again, these people, it’s hard to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco understand them when we’re on the other side of the aisle, but they got there for a reason.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, so anyway, all this is to say, find ways.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right now, it’s a fresh wound. Right now, stop bleeding. Find ways to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cope. Experience your feelings. If you want to feel

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a certain way, let yourself feel that way. You know, if you want to be mad for a while, be mad for a while. If you want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go into mourning for a while, go into mourning for a while. Figure out what helps and what doesn’t. So for me,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reading all the news does not help. Reading social networks does not help.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’ll probably be seeing even less of me on the social networks as you were already seeing, which already was not a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently. One thing that does help me a lot is I’m a very social person.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Being around people helps me a lot. Exercise and especially

⏹️ ▶️ Marco spending a lot of time outside. Today I took a big walk. It was a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice weather day and I just took a huge walk even though I picked the wrong shoes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they were a little bit too tight and it was a little uncomfortable. My feet were a little bit hot too, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it didn’t matter. I was outside. It was, that helped a lot, spending

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of time. And then finally, I have found that when I withdraw

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the news cycle and put my time and attention into

⏹️ ▶️ Marco making things or doing work, like being productive or being creative

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or producing output, that also helps me a lot. Find

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever that is that helps you. It’s not gonna necessarily always be obvious, especially

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you don’t frequently need to deal with this kind of feeling. But what will probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco help, honestly, I think what helps me, I think will have a lot of overlap, and what helps a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people, not everyone is social like me, but certainly I think most people tend to feel better with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exercise outside time and productive time, and most people tend to feel worse

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doom-scrolling social networks and reading terrible news. So maybe if you don’t know what to do,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe take that as a starting point. But otherwise, look, we’ll get through this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We got through it the first time. It was not a cakewalk. there were a lot of problems that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco resulted. There’s a lot of damage that was done the first time that will not be undone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a long time. That’s gonna happen again. And we just have to be prepared for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I rode the ferry today, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ferry being a boat on Long Island has a giant American flag on the top, they always

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. Listening to my headphones, listening to music, trying to get my mind off of things, and I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened to look up at the sky there was the flagpole flying the American flag, you know, boldly and proudly.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I gotta say, I had very mixed feelings about that when I saw it in that moment. So I was like, man,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is some complicated feelings I’m feeling right now, looking at the flag of my country

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this particular day with these feelings. But America is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about democracy. And as I mentioned last time, like anything that tries to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco subvert or suppress that is the most anti-American thing you you could possibly do. In

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this case, this was, by everything we know now, it seems like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very clear democratic result, that this is what the voters voted for. This

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is America, and it doesn’t always go your way, and it doesn’t always progress. It doesn’t always

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make positive forward progress or forward motion. There’s bumps along the way, there’s regressions,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what happens. That has definitely happened right now, and we’re gonna have to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just keep plowing forward and figure out what’s next. And it’s going to be messy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s going to suck for a while for a lot of people. There’s going to be damage done that will be that will

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not be able to be undone for decades. That is what happens with America. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re just we’re going to be in a dark time for a while and hopefully sometime down the road we will come out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Make me feel better, John.

⏹️ ▶️ John For anyone who’s listening to this who is On the opposite side of us and somehow managed

⏹️ ▶️ John to make at this point Congratulations on your hate listening

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whatever email you’re writing you can just delete it, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John No, they just want to hear they want to hear the rest of things you say so they know exactly how much they should Hate us, but like I bet

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the things you’re thinking is like this is so overblown You know you all you’re so sad you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John because your team lost the Super Bowl who cares like get over it But they all you’re depressed. That’s ridiculous. Like what’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the big deal? I should try to explain like You know,

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re saying our real feelings here, but you may think our feelings are ridiculous. But to try to explain why this is different,

⏹️ ▶️ John like I’m old enough to have lived through the election of many presidents that I didn’t want to win the election,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? I’ve lived through many Republicans. I didn’t want any of them to win. They did, right? None

⏹️ ▶️ John of them felt like Trump, you know, term one and term two.

⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s a reason for that. Like this, this is different. All the people, all the people

⏹️ ▶️ John in your life, you see, you’re like, Oh, you’re so sad about the president election. Get over it. Why is it a big deal? Why are you so sad about this?

⏹️ ▶️ John This is worse than it has been in my lifetime, uh, for presidential elections.

⏹️ ▶️ John When George W. Bush was elected twice, like I, I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like the first time I couldn’t believe he was elected the second time. Why are we doing this again? Are you kidding me? We learned nothing. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ John as this because George W. Bush, for all his faults,

⏹️ ▶️ John and there are many, and for all the terrible things his administration did, and there are many, had

⏹️ ▶️ John sort of minimum baseline level of humanity and at least an attempt

⏹️ ▶️ John to pretend to care about the duties of the presidency and the people who live in the country.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the whole thing with Trump has been like, there is no floor. He doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know anything. He doesn’t want to know anything. He doesn’t care about anything.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like trying to decide who’s going to fly your plane. And like, I don’t care if this person knows or cares anything about

⏹️ ▶️ John planes, knows what a plane is, has ever flown anything before, cares about any of the people on the plane,

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t actively want to kill everybody on the plane. None of that matters. Right. Trump is just like

⏹️ ▶️ John the bottom. Like I can think of worse people to be president, but it’s hard

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s below it’s below the baseline. And so for people on our side, when we see him elected not

⏹️ ▶️ John once but twice, We think, you know, how many millions of our fellow Americans

⏹️ ▶️ John think this is acceptable and we’re sad about that. Yes, obviously we’re sad

⏹️ ▶️ John about all the people who are going to be hurt and, you know, and killed and have terrible things happen to them under

⏹️ ▶️ John his administration. But what big component of the sadness of both elections is all of us thinking

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re in this country with these millions and millions of people who think this

⏹️ ▶️ John is acceptable for the presidency. Right? Like, and

⏹️ ▶️ John that, it’s not a good feeling. Can you imagine if you are on the other side of this? If

⏹️ ▶️ John the Democrats elected somebody who said, we should kill all puppies. It was a big thing on their

⏹️ ▶️ John platform. We should totally kill all puppies. And that person was a,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, had murdered their wives and was convicted but got off on a technicality. So it was, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John it was a murderer. And he said, we should kill all puppies. He’s not actually killing all puppies, but he thinks we should kill all of them.

⏹️ ▶️ John And we elected him president. Wouldn’t you be sad thinking millions and millions of people think it’s okay that the person who wants to kill puppies

⏹️ ▶️ John and killed his wife should be president? And you’d be like, really? The puppy killing guy?

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I know he hasn’t actually killed any puppies yet, but he said he wants to, and he’s gonna really try

⏹️ ▶️ John to? That’s okay? And we’d be like, well, forget about the puppy killing. We like the

⏹️ ▶️ John other parts. But like, wouldn’t you be sad thinking that so many of your fellow citizens think that’s okay.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I know it’s ridiculous, like, oh, Trump doesn’t want to kill puppies or whatever, but like, it’s the same type of deal. Like there’s just a minimum level of care

⏹️ ▶️ John and humanity and knowledge that Trump does not pass. And

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s hard living in a world where you think that’s okay for a lot of other people. It’s hard thinking

⏹️ ▶️ John all the bad things that he says are okay. Like you can say, well, I don’t believe in all the things he says, I just like him and I just ignore

⏹️ ▶️ John all the bad stuff. But like at a certain point, knowing that your fellow citizens are on board with all of that,

⏹️ ▶️ John not on board with it being done, but on board with saying the guy who says all that,

⏹️ ▶️ John he’s my guy. I don’t think he’s ever going to do that stuff, but the guy who says all that, he’s my guy. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a sad feeling, a sad feeling to know your fellow humans, forget about citizens, your fellow humans

⏹️ ▶️ John think this is good. And knowing that you’re in the same country with them, subject to the same laws under

⏹️ ▶️ John the same government, and you have to deal with the consequences of their vote.

⏹️ ▶️ John And again, uh, that happens all the time. Sometimes your person doesn’t win. I did not feel like this when George

⏹️ ▶️ John W Bush won when George HW Bush won when Reagan won I mean I was young man, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John It didn’t feel like this at all. This feels different. This feels worse

⏹️ ▶️ John because it is worse That’s why some people in your life are really sad

⏹️ ▶️ John right now Maybe they’re special snowflakes and they should just get over it and not be sad or whatever, but it is worse.

⏹️ ▶️ John We feel worse so I whatever I I posted this morning, I’m asked on like

⏹️ ▶️ John national sex, say your stomach day. I didn’t feel like this in any other presidential

⏹️ ▶️ John election when quote unquote, my person didn’t win. This is different. This

⏹️ ▶️ John is worse. And you know, we know what we’re in for and it’s going to be bad.

⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, and I feel like the, you know, if you look at all the, if you study history and see

⏹️ ▶️ John what it takes for a governing system to be sort of be sort of broken apart

⏹️ ▶️ John and broken down so that what was once sort of a functioning society that

⏹️ ▶️ John tried to raise the standard of living for everybody and do better over time becomes the domain of

⏹️ ▶️ John dictators and warlords. And I mean, it happens all the time throughout history. Like how, how did these, these societies

⏹️ ▶️ John end up in a situation where there’s like one super powerful person who’s like oppressing everybody and doing terrible

⏹️ ▶️ John things and everyone else is suffering. How do you end up at that situation and the whole American experiment is to try to design

⏹️ ▶️ John a system where that’s harder to do. But people are constantly trying to find a way

⏹️ ▶️ John to break down that system, to break, to break away all the things that are keeping us from becoming

⏹️ ▶️ John like a lawless, becoming from Mad Max, right? Like just a warlord state, right? And

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve made progress. If you look at like, you know, uh, Casey’s reading the power broker and learn all about, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John as a side effect, Tammany Hall and all like the, the political corruption machines where politics was

⏹️ ▶️ John just a way of like, it was basically like street gangs essentially. And when you got elected, you gave money and jobs to the people who

⏹️ ▶️ John supported you and like, you know, graft and bribery. Like that was, that was,

⏹️ ▶️ John was the system and that was a bad system. And we had reformers who said, Hey, this

⏹️ ▶️ John is no way to run a government because it lets like the people who were loyal to the political machine. It was, it was like organized

⏹️ ▶️ John crime essentially, but that was the government system of government. That’s bad because the citizens suffer and

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the same reason having, you know, organized crime families battle each other is bad. Even if

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not killing each other in the street, they’re hogging all the money and good stuff for a small number

⏹️ ▶️ John of people, and everyone else suffers. Let’s reform the system. Let’s add laws and ethics and

⏹️ ▶️ John try to have a different way of governing ourselves. It doesn’t involve patronage and graft.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that took years and years of reformers battling to try to make our system better.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s the example off the top of my head, because I’m listening to the Power Broker podcast, too, and I’ve read the book several times.

⏹️ ▶️ John But like that, that’s the history, not just in America, but over

⏹️ ▶️ John the entire world. It’s difficult to make a governing system that doesn’t,

⏹️ ▶️ John that is resistant to people chipping it away. And if you don’t constantly resist

⏹️ ▶️ John that, you end up with a small number of very wealthy, very powerful people living

⏹️ ▶️ John really great lives and everyone else suffering. And the American system is currently

⏹️ ▶️ John in a regression where we had all these things that we’re trying to be sort of bulwarks against

⏹️ ▶️ John that terrible thing happening that are being eaten away slowly but surely. Citizens

⏹️ ▶️ John United, all the Supreme Court justices letting the president do whatever he wants as long as it’s part of his official

⏹️ ▶️ John duties, reversing Roe v. Wade, like, you know, installing judges who are loyal to Trump

⏹️ ▶️ John instead of the law, like, all the checks and balances that we had are being chipped away in service

⏹️ ▶️ John of bringing us back to essentially Mad Max and Warlords, which, by the way, is not a good system of government for the general

⏹️ ▶️ John citizens, right? That’s that whole uh, you know, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John thought experiment of like, uh, if you had, you know, pick a time in history that you want to travel,

⏹️ ▶️ John you have a time machine, you can travel back in time to any point in history, pick a time in history. The only wrinkle is you

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t get to pick, uh, what role you have in that society when you land in it. Right? So you said,

⏹️ ▶️ John I want to go back to Roman times and I’ll be like Caesar. It’s like, oh no, you don’t get to pick to be Caesar. You

⏹️ ▶️ John are just like a Roman slave. Now, do you want to go back to the Roman times, everyone wants

⏹️ ▶️ John to be in whatever time in history they glorify, assuming they’ll be at the top of the hierarchy, right? An

⏹️ ▶️ John actual good functioning society is one where you would say, yes, I do want to

⏹️ ▶️ John travel in time to that society, and you can randomly place me anywhere in that society, and

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll be fine because there is not an underclass that is trod upon by the upper class.

⏹️ ▶️ John And in America, we are unfortunately going in the other direction where we are chipping way the institutions that try

⏹️ ▶️ John to make life better for everybody in service of making life better for a small number of people

⏹️ ▶️ John while everyone else suffers. And part of that is convincing most of the population to vote for you to do

⏹️ ▶️ John that by feeding them information that makes them think that what they’re doing is in their own in this interest when it really isn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ John And we will obviously disagree on that. But every time I even think about the idea of like, talking

⏹️ ▶️ John to somebody and trying to convince them of my political position, I I think of like the, the, uh, the concept of trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to, you know, speaking of going back in time, I’m gonna go back in time to the 1800s or, uh, in America

⏹️ ▶️ John and trying to convince somebody that women should have the right to vote. I don’t think like, I, if you

⏹️ ▶️ John really want to understand, like another depressing thing that, uh, people are upset about, um,

⏹️ ▶️ John like, do you think you could go and convince somebody that women should have the right to vote in the

⏹️ ▶️ John 1800s? How difficult would that be? Presumably you believe it. You’re a modern person. You’re like, of course, women should have the right to vote,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s stupid, right? Now go back in time to the 1800s and try to convince literally one person that that should be

⏹️ ▶️ John true. And everything you say, they will have a comeback to and it will just,

⏹️ ▶️ John your brain will explode. And you’re like, but, but, and they’ll be like, it’s ridiculous, women should vote, what’s next? Dogs voting?

⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t make any sense, right? That’s how a lot of us feel trying to say, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t vote for Trump. But people did it. And trying to convince them makes my brain

⏹️ ▶️ John explode in the same way that trying to convince someone the 1800s, the women should vote would explode. There’s nothing you can say to convince them.

⏹️ ▶️ John They have a completely sealed, completely logical, completely sensible,

⏹️ ▶️ John functioning, like Margo said, worldview that does not include the idea of women voting.

⏹️ ▶️ John It took, you know, decades and decades of people fighting for it for us to finally

⏹️ ▶️ John get that done. And these days I often think that we would never get a constitutional amendment to

⏹️ ▶️ John give rights to a minority group just because our current system of government has been so degraded

⏹️ ▶️ John that will literally never happen because as long as one side doesn’t like it, it’s never going to happen. So anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve rambled on too long. I just wanted to explain, try to explain to the three people still listening,

⏹️ ▶️ John why people you know might be sad in a way that doesn’t make sense to you and seems dumb. I

⏹️ ▶️ John understand why it seems dumb, but I want you to know that it’s not just people overreacting are

⏹️ ▶️ John being overly dramatic. For those of us on this side of the aisle, the two Trump

⏹️ ▶️ John elections feel different. I think they should feel different to any other human being, and I think across the globe they

⏹️ ▶️ John do feel different to most human beings, but not apparently for half of the voters in this country.

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