621: I'll Meet You Any Time You Want
09 Jan 2025Breaking news and in-depth coverage from our reporter at CES.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Our AirPods are trying to talk to us but we can’t understand them
- Follow-up:
- That gas car review post that Marco was thinking of
- The Find My app can make Macs make noise (via Miles)
- Maybe iOS 18’s Photos app isn’t all bad? (via Tim Luft)
- The Magic Mouse
- The Apology Mouse did not have side buttons
- The Mighty Mouse did
- MKBHD’s blind ranking interview with Tim Cook
- What will the new one be?
- Apple already makes Wi-Fi & Bluetooth chips (via Ian Williamson)
- Meshtastic is another application for John and Casey’s new favorite thing, LoRa (via James Andrews)
- CES 2025
- TVs
- What’s John got his eyes on?
- Sony 💔
- Samsung’s new QD-OLED
- LG’s flagship goes MLA → Tandem OLED
- Panasonic talks about the new LG panel
- “Primary RGB Tandem OLED Panel”
- HDTVTest on the Z95B
- More “AI” coming to TVs ☹️
- Big TVs are big
- LG Unveils UltraFine 6K Display with Thunderbolt 5
- Recent ATP Overtime on monitors was in Episode #618
- Dell UltraSharp 32 6K Monitor “U3224KB”
- Dell no longer makes XPS computers
- Mocked at their own launch is not a great look
- Engadget’s take
- Nvidia’s announcements
- TVs
- TestFlight access to John’s app is [likely] coming for ATP members only
- Post-show:
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Apple Intelligence summaries may get warning labels
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- DeleteMe: Making it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online.
- Wildgrain: Free croissants in every box and $30 off your first box.
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Chapters
- Sad AirPods noises
- Follow-up: Gas car review
- Found MacBook Air
- iOS 18 Photos follow-up
- Mouse rumors & feedback
- Sponsor: Wildgrain (code ATP)
- Follow-up: Apple Wi-Fi/BT chips
- LoRa follow-up
- John’s CES TV coverage
- Dell Pro Max
- Sponsor: DeleteMe (code ATP)
- NVIDIA 50xx, Digits
- Storacusa TestFlight plan
- Ending theme
- Thank you, patrons!
- Marco bought something
Sad AirPods noises
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve got a problem. I don’t understand the noises that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my AirPods Pro I call them the mark 2 so this is the AirPods Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the better ANC But before you could get the USB C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charging case I don’t remember the technical term for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. AirPods Pro 2 because the ones of the case are AirPods Pro 2 parentheses USB C Right. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re saying the same thing. Yeah, so they’re a little bit older now I have had no, you know, battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey issues. I’ve had none of the crackling or whatever it was that a lot of people, including I think Marco, had at some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was the first gen AirPods Pro 2, or the AirPods Pro 1. That had those. I haven’t heard of any of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those issues with the AirPods Pro 2, and I certainly haven’t had them myself.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, likewise. I’m still waiting for you to close that parentheses, Casey. You’re killing me. Keep going. Which, which, which parentheses? I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John know if that- I’ve got a problem with the AirPods, and then you went off on a tangent about which model you had. I know what problem you have, as we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John it before we started recording, but please get to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Okay. So let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John get to it. I got a problem. You tell the story.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So here’s the thing. I will put one or both of the AirPods back into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the charging case, right? And I not infrequently use them in mono
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode. You know, I’ll have only one in my ear, the other in the case, but I don’t think it really matters. I’ll put one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them back in the case and I’ll hear some sort of noise. And it sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a sad noise, almost as though they’re not able to charge. It’s like a do do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do do do or something like that. That’s probably wrong, but I can’t remember exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It’s like drums?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s, is it from the case or from the pod?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m pretty sure it’s from the case. These are all fair questions, but I think it’s the case saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something about this is unable to charge. But the problem is the extremely useful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey error information I get from the case, other than this just completely indecipherable noise, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the light is orange. Is that a good orange? I don’t know. Is it a bad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey orange? Maybe, who could know? So there’s like that noise that happens from time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to time. And then I feel like there’s a doo-doo or something like that that happens from time to time. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wish I’d had the patience, the energy, and the time to record these on the microphone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we could play them now, but unfortunately I had none of the three things. So I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what the noises are that my AirPods slash the AirPods Pro 2 case makes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I try to reinsert an AirPod. And I did like five seconds of Googling trying to figure this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out and couldn’t find anything. I feel like somebody needs to, and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, maybe Steven Robles or something put a YouTube video up or something like this, but somebody needs to have like a knowledge base
⏹️ ▶️ Casey page or some YouTube video that goes through, here’s all the different noises your AirPods can make and here’s what they mean, because
⏹️ ▶️ John help. If only you understood the binary language of moisture evaporators, you’d know what they’re saying. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John have AirPods 4, the non-pro, AirPods 4, and these are the first AirPods that have been trying
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey way that your iPods are trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John speak to you. And like you, Casey, I don’t know what they’re trying to say exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John I give the sound designers credit for being able to convey some sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of emotional state through the beep boops. Because my old ones did not make noises like
⏹️ ▶️ John this. The cases make noise, the AirPods make noise. When I plug the case in, it makes a noise.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I take them out, it makes a noise. When I put them in, it makes a noise. And sometimes the light is orange, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure what it means, but I kind of like emotionally feel what
⏹️ ▶️ John the AirPods need. Seems like you want to be charged now. Like orange makes me think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not fully charged and it needs to be. And sad noises make me think your battery is running low.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I just kind of like intuitively do what I think the AirPods need me to do, but you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John absolutely right. That’s like, I get this product that has no on and off switches and just one light that changes
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of different colors. And it speaks to me with these little beeps and boops. and I just have to sort of like do
⏹️ ▶️ John my best. It’s like having a baby, like you don’t know what they want, but you just gotta try to figure it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, there were two good episodes of the podcast 20,000 Hertz that went through like Apple sound design and like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they had some Apple sound designers on there to actually interview them. They were great episodes, highly recommended. And they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did mention the AirPods, do do do do do do do, kind of sad battery noise. But that comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the AirPods when their battery is low. It sounds like what you’re talking about is different. But yeah, there are so many more noises than that. But give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them credit for like, you can describe it as a sad noise. Like you recognize, like this is a sad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noise versus the bing when you plug it in. Like, oh, okay, I’m plugging it in and now it has power, yay. Like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know that kind of instinct. Like, you know, there’s no manual that tells you when it dings, that means I’m getting power,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you learn that. Well, it
⏹️ ▶️ John might’ve been a little piece of paper that no one ever looks at, like the tiny sheet of paper with microscopic writing on
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I’m sure there’s a webpage somewhere, just like there is for every like appliance where it’s like, if the white
⏹️ ▶️ John light blinks three times with two second gaps in between, and that means this, and if it blinks once every one second,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re like trying to gauge, is that 1.5 seconds between them, or one second, and you’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to stopwatch, and it’s like, we’re crying out loud, people, just this is not a great, I know you wanna save money, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s like, it’s like Telegraph, we can do everything through Morse code, all we need is a single LED, we
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t need any buttons, any displays, any readout, we’ll just make people go to this webpage and decipher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to say. And the bad part about using sounds is that you can’t really copy and paste that into a search
⏹️ ▶️ Marco engine. So you can’t go to Google and say, what does it mean when it goes do do do do do do? Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John you spell that? Right, you end up Googling for like blinking white light or whatever, and very
⏹️ ▶️ John often it’s good that you’ll find these thousands of other people who are like, what does it mean when my washing machine
⏹️ ▶️ John blinks a white light or something? But if there’s only one light and they use that with like, oh, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not blinking as fast as I, sometimes the setup instructions say that. If you have a gadget where it’s like, during setup, press
⏹️ ▶️ John and hold this button until the white light turns green, stays green, then blinks red two times, then let go,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s like, what the hell? Like, what am I, what are we doing here? It’s so, so Byzantine. So it
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of makes you wish for a terribly designed app on your phone to do it all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, no, it’s very funny because some local friends of ours had some internet issues with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their Fios. In fact, it’s still going on. One way or another, we went and looked at their ONT,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their optical network terminal. So we opened it up and I had my friend take a picture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it, you know, so he could call Verizon and be like, well, these are the lights that we have that are flashing at the moment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Meanwhile, he then Googled and found statuslights.com, which I just now, as we’re recording,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey realized apparently that’s based in Richmond. And they have photos of all this different like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer equipment and telephony equipment and whatnot, and they show exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what lights should probably be lit up and what each of the status lights means. And so I need this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but for AirPod noises. So please, somebody get on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I see this list of vendors on statuslights.com and Apple is notably absent from the A section.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I know, exactly, exactly. But anyways, I would just love if somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could please point me to the thing that I should probably be able to Google on my own and apparently could not. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey explains with little audio clips, what are all the noises that AirPods could make. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just before we leave this topic, I wanted to reiterate what Marco said. I can’t remember if I ever talked about it on the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey earlier, but the sound of Apple 1.0 on the Sound of Apple 2.0, which are the 20,000 Hertz episodes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from a couple of months back, maybe a few months back now. That whole podcast is tremendous. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love it. It’s incredibly, incredibly good. However, even if you’re not into it in general, anyone who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enjoys this show would absolutely enjoy those two episodes, which we will link in the show notes. So you should definitely check
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s an episode on Rivian too, didn’t they? Wasn’t that the same?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I think that’s right, yes. Yes, it is. I believe
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s right. So, and then Rivian Noises, by the way, I know what I mean. Like the noises that Rivian makes inside the cockpit.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco talked about it on the show, anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that was one where they’re like, well, we take this raindrop and then we distort it like crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these 10 different ways so it sounds nothing like a raindrop, but nature.
Follow-up: Gas car review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. The gas car review post that we’ve been talking about for the last couple weeks, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey started in overtime, or in the bootleg, a couple of weeks ago, then we did some follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last week. We thought we found the actual link that Marco was talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, and it turns out we didn’t, but now we have! So, Kay writes, Is this the gas car review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco was trying to find? It’s the one I remembered, and shout out to Kagi for making it pretty easy to find when searching for, quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey funny review of gas car quote. And this is jeff.grier.fm and it’s a gasoline
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car review which is a lot less looking down the nose than the one that we thought was the right one for a brief
⏹️ ▶️ John To explain what we mean is a humorous review of a gasoline engine car as if it
⏹️ ▶️ John had been reviewed by someone who’d never seen one to highlight how there are lots of weird things about gas cars
⏹️ ▶️ John that we don’t think about because we’re used to them as quote unquote normal and every review of an electric car is like can you believe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s electric car let me me tell you about it. So that’s the that’s the conceit. And there’s just so
⏹️ ▶️ John many of these posts. This is apparently the one Margo was thinking of. But there are so many more people keep sending to us. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not just the same post sent over and over again in different places. There are variations on them. And now with
⏹️ ▶️ John AI, they’ll probably be even more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And I like this one the best in part because I think honestly, I think it’s better written than the others. Also, I think the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole arrangement of it around comparing electric cars to an old Miata, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just kind of charming and fun, especially because I used to be able to borrow an old Miata sometimes and drive it, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what I learned to stick on. So I kind of have some fondness for that vehicle. But anyway, this was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this I think was the better one. And this was indeed the one I was thinking of. So thank you people for finding it.
Found MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to Marco’s lost MacBook Air, first of all, Marco, have you found it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did indeed find it. It was in a tote bag on a coat hook behind three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coats in the closet. How did you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? So the way I found it was I first went to Backblaze. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I said I couldn’t see it in Find My, and I guess I must have had it disabled, I don’t know why. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I went to Backblaze, because I think, I’m like, Backblaze has some kind of finding functionality. And I hadn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparently enabled they have like a whole map functionality where you can actually locate your computer if you enable location services.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hadn’t done that but it did tell me the last IP address that it backed up from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was my house IP address and it said that the last backup was basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while I was it was like you know a day or two before while I was gone still. So I knew okay it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my house somewhere. So I basically just exhausted every possibility.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I searched everywhere, upstairs, downstairs, kitchen. I even looked in the garage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did I somehow leave it in the garage when doing something and forget about it? I looked everywhere, but yeah, after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about two days, I found it and still had 5% battery life left.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, well, look at that. But yeah, it turns out you can use Find My to ping or make a sound on a laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is good to know. And thanks to Miles for reminding us about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and if you want a backup, locating option for your laptop, Maybe go to Backblaze and enable that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco map functionality.
iOS 18 Photos follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to iOS 18 Photos, we mostly got agreement from feedback, and this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not a vote. It’s fine if you agree or disagree. I’m just saying, you know, the people who decided to share with us, I think mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agreed with our assessment. But Tim Luft writes, I prefer the new Photos app. I really do think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s an improvement once you dial in your setup. Pinned collections are one of my favorites as they add a section at the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the edit page called Any Collection or Album, which allows you to add more granular collections like media
⏹️ ▶️ Casey types or utilities. Also, John can rearrange his albums by opening it, opening it into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the list view of albums, then tapping and holding on the album to move it up and down the list. When
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you come back out, that’s the new order.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would never have discovered this for multiple reasons. So first of all, the convention for reordering things on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John is either it looks like a thing that you can reorder or that you can go into that mode where it puts the little grippers on them. You know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John three little lines, right? This does not have that. It’s a totally like unique view that has a bunch of rounded recs
⏹️ ▶️ John separated by margins with like shadows underneath them. And then And if you hold down on one of those things,
⏹️ ▶️ John it brings up a menu, like a press, like a long press menu, like an actual context menu, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But like so many things that are elsewhere, like if you hold down and the menu comes
⏹️ ▶️ John up, but you ignore the menu and you swipe, then it like releases into your hand and you can move it around.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then, all right, so now you’ve got it. You’re like, aha, this must be reorderable. As you drag it,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you drag it over another one of the rounded rectangles, it like highlights it. it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John pop up a dialogue, at least there’s a confirmation, thank God, it says, do you wanna merge these albums? You don’t want that to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John What you wanna do is get it to release from its current position, drag it and get it to start
⏹️ ▶️ John displacing the other items so they scurry out of the way and leave an empty spot, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John so I went to this list and I found one of my albums that I wanted to be at the top, and it’s way down on my list of like
⏹️ ▶️ John dozens of albums. And I got it to lift up and I started moving it and I realized
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t want it to highlight another thing. And so I got it to open a little gap in a space And then all right now
⏹️ ▶️ John I just need to drag it up to the top of the screen so it starts you know scrolling paging down and it starts paging and paging and paging
⏹️ ▶️ John and I get to the very top and once I get to the very top with that thing in my hand, no little spaces are opening
⏹️ ▶️ John up for it. Nowhere, I can’t drag it anywhere. I’m still holding down on it, right? I’m dragging
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I’m dragging it over the top of things. I want it to be the number one item, but I would settle for the number two or the number five or
⏹️ ▶️ John anything on the first page, but no space will open up for it. So I give up and like
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to find a safe place to release it because I can’t hit the escape key on like a mac OS. I give up a drag it aside, let
⏹️ ▶️ John go scroll down again. Maybe if I go real slow, you know, like the gap or I get the
⏹️ ▶️ John gap to open up and now I just need to like push it up to the top and the gap opens up and it goes gap gap gap gap. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna do it. I’m just I’m just leaving my finger right here. I’m not going to move it. It’s a gaps are opening up and it gets to the very top. And lo
⏹️ ▶️ John and behold, the gaps are gone again. And I had to take like seven trips, seven partial trips, always
⏹️ ▶️ John being sure to drop it in one of the gaps before the gaps stop appearing. Oh my god, what
⏹️ ▶️ John is the same people who worked on like control center and rearranging springboard make this interface
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, I thank Tim because I did eventually get through by fighting with the system that I just described,
⏹️ ▶️ John I did eventually get my top four or five albums to the top of that list that I had
⏹️ ▶️ John never thought was reorderable, never thought would have any effect on anything else. But now, in theory, every
⏹️ ▶️ John time I go to get the list of albums, those will be at at the top. So thank you, Tim. And no thank you to whoever made that
⏹️ ▶️ John interface and iOS 18 photos because it’s bad.
Mouse rumors & feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we have a whole bunch of feedback with regard to the Magic Mouse. And John, apparently you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got a little bit confused with regard to side buttons. Do you want to fix your story?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I said the Apology Mouse had side buttons. Easy mistake to make because the Apology Mouse has things that
⏹️ ▶️ John look for all the world, like the side buttons that would eventually appear on the Mighty Mouse, but they are not in fact buttons.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone sent me a video of the Macworld keynote where the Apology Mouse was
⏹️ ▶️ John introduced and talking about it and saying how Steve Jobs on stage, saying how everyone hated
⏹️ ▶️ John the hockey puck mouse or whatever. And I said, I’m in the audience in that video because I was there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I got the apology mouse for free. I think Apple did very rarely, but one of the times
⏹️ ▶️ John they did it, everyone who was in the Macworld keynote got a free Apple mouse. Can you imagine a free
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple mouse? The other thing, by the way, it’s like remembering the old days of Steve Jobs was part of the presentation was,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, here’s our new mouse. People didn’t like hockey puck, here’s our new mouse. We think it’s a great mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s standard on every Mac that we sell. Remember the old days when Steve Jobs was like, as soon as you make a new thing, the old
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is dead to me, right? Just like, forget it. The old ones don’t exist. And now Tim
⏹️ ▶️ John Cook’s like lightning accessories. Yeah, we’ll keep selling them forever. Anyway, my apology for getting
⏹️ ▶️ John the side buttons on the apology mouse wrong. Apparently it didn’t have them, but the mighty mouse did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m glad that we got that resolved. And speaking of getting things resolved, MKBHD’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interview with Tim Cook, which all three of us were casting about, trying to remember the exact circumstance of it. John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can you tell us what that really was all about?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so as we established on the show, it was WWDC 2024, but I didn’t remember the exact
⏹️ ▶️ John context. So I watched the video again. Here was the context. It was a blind ranking, which I didn’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John it was until I saw this video and then forgot and then saw the video again and was reminded. A blind ranking is where
⏹️ ▶️ John the interviewer tells the interviewee, I’m gonna list the top five things
⏹️ ▶️ John here and you have to rank them, but you don’t know what the next ones are gonna be. So if we’re ranking
⏹️ ▶️ John like your favorite foods, and I said, tomatoes, you don’t know if my next one is gonna be chocolate or prunes.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what do you rank tomatoes? It’s a blind ranking. If you rank it, you’re number one. What if something comes along that’s better?
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you, you know, so it’s, I don’t know, try it, it’s a fun way to try to get your true feelings about something
⏹️ ▶️ John and have a, you know, a fun game where you never know what the next item is gonna be and you may regret your earlier ranking.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s MKBHD saying to Tim Cook, I’m gonna rank these. And Tim Cook’s like, well, is this supposed to be my top
⏹️ ▶️ John five and Marquez is like, oh, it’s just a top five. Anyway, he does blind ranking of a bunch of things.
⏹️ ▶️ John He lists a bunch of items. Eventually one of the items he lists, he says the magic mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s it. He’s just like, the first one is, you know, I forget what the products were, but it’s like this product, that product. Then he says the magic
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse. And he doesn’t say it in a snarky way or anything, but it really looks like a total,
⏹️ ▶️ John like self-owned by Tim Cook, who’s first of all, Tim Cook essentially, if at the first
⏹️ ▶️ John item, refuses to rank them. Like he won’t give them numbers. You’re supposed to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, you know, apples is my number two. And then the next one they say chocolate. Ooh, that’s my number one. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John they say something like better than, you know, he doesn’t give numbers. He says, I’m not going to rank them. So StimCook just refuses to
⏹️ ▶️ John play the game, which fine, whatever media training, you don’t have to answer the person’s question. I love all of my products
⏹️ ▶️ John he does compare them to his children. But when they get to the magic mouse, he could have just said
⏹️ ▶️ John something, anything about it, but he goes, the magic mouse. And he’s like, do we make
⏹️ ▶️ John a mouse? And then he said something really awkward, like it was such an incredible moment. Like, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, Tim, it was not an incredible moment. And you don’t remember when it was introduced and nobody does, because it’s just the magic mouse. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I stick to what I said last week. I don’t think Marquez was coming
⏹️ ▶️ John out and saying, hey, Tim Cook, everyone hates the magic mouse. But Tim Cook’s reaction to it made it clear
⏹️ ▶️ John that he was not prepared for this question. And then, so we’ll put a link in the show notes to the video with a timestamp, as we did last
⏹️ ▶️ John week. And then we’ll also put a link to a very editorialized YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John short made by the MKBHD channel folks that makes it seem like, does the like 10,000
⏹️ ▶️ John years later thing from SpongeBob or whatever, to make it seem like Tim Cook was bowled over. But if you watch the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John video, they’re just playing the blind ranking game. Tim Cook is refusing to do it. And they get to
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the items. And I think the only thing Marques says is the magic mouse. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Cook self-destructs. So that’s the context. can take a look at it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the editor editorialized short is a little bit over dramatic, but it is one of the rare
⏹️ ▶️ John cases where Tim seemed flummoxed by not even a question by just I’m listing
⏹️ ▶️ John items in this blind ranking game and the next one I’m listing is a proper noun that is the name of one of your products go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I do think that toward the end, it was a very short segment, but toward the end of this 35
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seconds of awkward, Tim starts talking about how they really had to work on, I think, the ergonomics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that. And Marques is like, the mighty mouse. You know, he’s kind of saying to himself,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in so many words, you’re talking about the, he didn’t say this, of course, but you’re talking about the ergonomics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the friggin’ mighty mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But all- He’s the magic mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s just trying to think of- Sorry, yeah, sorry. He’s just trying to think of something, Tim is just trying to think of something to say. Like, it’s so clear. He’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what can I say about this that is Tim Cook approved? What are mice like?
⏹️ ▶️ John like how often does he use one? When’s the last time he touched one?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my word. It was very funny. Uh, we also didn’t touch on the most ridiculous of the most recent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mouse rumors Uh, this is from mac rumors, uh late late late last year a report
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from korean leaker Y e ux1222 this morning suggested that apple has created
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a prototype magic mouse that includes a mix of touch voice controls and hand gestures
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay Mark Gurman says, Voice control in the new Magic Mouse I wrote about this month
⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes sense in light of AI and the fact that Apple is on a decade-plus cycle. From
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I’ve heard, big focus is ergonomics and gestures and a relocated USB-C port. I’d expect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new keyboard, too. Coming back to Mac rumors, it reportedly plans to, Apple reportedly plans to release
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new Magic Mouse alongside the OLED M6 MacBook Pro in 2026.
⏹️ ▶️ John So Gurman says a lot of things, and this is just a real winner-like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John the voice control voice rumors make sense in light of AI? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t. They don’t make sense. Well, hold on. I have one theory. But before you get to
⏹️ ▶️ John the theory, I want to talk about this Logitech thing that was in the notes before, I think it was before we had overtime, but it was
⏹️ ▶️ John in the notes and it didn’t make it to the show ever, but it was in there for a long time because Logitech,
⏹️ ▶️ John the mouse maker, came out with an update to their mouse driver that incorporated chat GPT
⏹️ ▶️ John into their mouse driver. So you could like use the mouse and map a button on your mouse to like it would
⏹️ ▶️ John open up a thing. And then you could, I forget if you could speak a chat GPT query, you typed it, but the point was they
⏹️ ▶️ John added LLM chat GPT integration to their mouse driver. That’s immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John what I thought of when I thought of rumors that the magic mouse is going to conclude voice controls. All right, so go ahead, Marco. What,
⏹️ ▶️ John tell, convince me that voice control is going to be a good feature for the new mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I didn’t say a good feature, but here’s, here’s how this might make sense. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, the report from the leaker says they’ve created a prototype that does this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That doesn’t mean they’re gonna release it, but let’s set that aside. Here’s why they might put a microphone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a mouse. The people who buy mice are generally using them either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with desktops that have built-in microphones or maybe a laptop. Now, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that laptop is closed, the laptop’s built-in mic is disabled in hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so if Apple is leaning very heavily into voice control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to command your computer to do things, microphones are very cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware wise. So maybe, because it also mentions the new keyboard, maybe they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to put a microphone in the new keyboard and a microphone in the new mouse and a microphone in a new trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that way whatever your setup is, if it includes any Apple peripherals,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the computer can always hear you tell it a voice command. Because that way, even if you have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco closed laptop docked to a monitor that does not contain a microphone, one of your peripherals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would contain a microphone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Where is this microphone gonna be that’s not smothered by your hand?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, I mean, maybe on the side? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I mean, this is- I gripped my mouse on the side. I didn’t say this was a good idea, but I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see, like, and also, oh, keep in mind, if they indeed have raised up the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco profile very slightly to accommodate a USB port somewhere on the front, then maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they could put it next to that. I don’t know. So that’s all I can think of. Like why would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have a microphone and a mouse for quote AI? I think it’s just like, give one more input
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Siri in the new AI version of Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might someday be out and might be good and might work. People are dying to use that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, give one more input. And that way like we will hear you or maybe we’ll hear you a little bit better. Maybe we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can hear you if you talk a little bit quieter, in case you’re in like an office situation and you don’t wanna like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be yelling all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could pick the mouse up and hold it to your mouth and you might say
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey perhaps- God damn it, John. I wanted to make the same joke. Why do you take it from me? You already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the- Now I don’t get any gold stars.
⏹️ ▶️ John You wanna do the voice? Casey, you can do the voice, go ahead.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hello, computer. No, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John terrible. That’s your Scottish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accent? No, I can’t do James Duhon. Duhon, Duhon, anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’m so mad at you because I’m getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no gold stars from you for thinking of the exact same reference. Does Marco have any idea what we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, however, that being said, that actually, honestly, that could be a feature. Because again, imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re in an environment where you don’t want to be talking very loudly. If you’d pick it up to your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mouth, and the sheer act of picking it up triggers the microphone. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t, you can use accelerometers to say, oh, it’s picked up now. That could activate the microphone, and you could say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, open up mail. You could say something really quiet. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I’m on a workout movie. That’s not that crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe we should put that as our next member special.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should. Oh, that’s such a good idea, because Marco will hate every moment of it. It’ll be delightful.
⏹️ ▶️ John right. I think that’s going near the top of my list. I think we should do that. No more discussion
⏹️ ▶️ John of it, Casey. We don’t want to ruin it for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco. OK. I really have a lot of things I want to discuss right now, but that’s fine. OK. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also have some more mouse-related feedback. Mike writes, I feel like you missed the obvious change
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a new mouse from Apple. The current mouse still has a physical button. I’d expect a new mouse to replace that with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two or three Taptic engines to provide clicking like every other device they make and probably haptics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on movement as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is a terrible idea, but I also think Mike is very right
⏹️ ▶️ John perfectly in keeping with the Apple hardware design ethos. I think it’s a terrible idea just because it’ll be draining
⏹️ ▶️ John your battery for no reason because you just do so much clicking. I think it’s a terrible idea because I think it would find it annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I also think it’s totally something Apple would do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, it’s fine on the trackpad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but the trackpad has a way bigger battery. Oh, that’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, is it fair actually? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John know. I assume you’re right. I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John weight on the mouse is more important because you’re actually moving it. The trackpad doesn’t go anywhere. We’ll see, you know, if they pull it off, well, fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John But honestly, like, is this necessary? Like on the trackpads, it makes some sense because it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John such a limited space and not having it move has like space benefits. But like a mouse, there’s plenty of room. It’s out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And on the trackpad too, like the, you can click anywhere on the trackpad and it feels about the same, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is good. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge area. So to have that, like in the olden days, when the trackpads were like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big, they called them diving boards or levers. Hinged on one side. Yeah, you hinge on the top, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco click it on the bottom generally with your thumb, and that felt good. But if you clicked it near the top, it wouldn’t click or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you wouldn’t- It was harder to press, you had less leverage. Didn’t they even put the feet as the clickers in the first
⏹️ ▶️ John There was one that did feet clickers, which was another clever idea, but yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, so the mouse though, you’re always clicking the mouse in a reasonably short area,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s the same small area. So I don’t think that this is solving a problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the mouse and there would be the downsides as you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John mentioned. That hasn’t stopped
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like I also don’t think it’s solving
⏹️ ▶️ John a problem, but Apple loves Taptic Engines.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, I’ve used these mice for a very long time. I’ve never had the button go bad, like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s easy to make micro switches, but Apple loves Taptic Engines, so we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple also loves profit margins. I bet Taptic Engines are more expensive. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true too. I don’t know. And then we got feedback from Calamity Jan who writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if Apple makes the mouse charge wirelessly, another reason to buy a MagSafe puck, they could make it symmetrical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey under rotation, which means they could design it to be configured for right or left hands. See the Apple Watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could wear it on either wrist and orient it with the crown facing in or out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, this is a terrible idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, there’s a lot of terrible ideas and the question is, is this a terrible idea that Apple would find attractive? I
⏹️ ▶️ John think no on this one because I think it wouldn’t be attractive enough to be symmetrical under rotation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I think they just want like actual, actual vertical symmetry period, not symmetrical under rotation.
⏹️ ▶️ John And a lot of people did suggest wireless charging of various kinds. Obviously they’re just putting it on your MagSafe puck.
⏹️ ▶️ John People suggested you could put it, they could work with the watch charger. They’re obviously charging mouse pads that lots of vendors have.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although I think Apple thinks mouse pads are gauche, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John say. In fact, in the Steve Jobs keynote with the apology mouse, he’s like, and we had, it’s the first optical mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple has made. That means you don’t even need to use a mouse pad. I don’t think Steve Jobs like mouse pads either. I still like mouse pads because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m old and they’re nice, but whatever. Yeah, there are lots of different ways to potentially wirelessly
⏹️ ▶️ John charge your mouse. That is one way they could solve the harpoon turtle problem. The other
⏹️ ▶️ John way is they could just put a port on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t it doesn’t it doesn’t solve it because all that does is give you another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason you can’t use the mouse while it’s charging. But now it charges more slowly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And I’m pretty sweet. I know I saw this solve in scare quotes like
⏹️ ▶️ John like you said, with the voice thing. We’re just trying to think what will Apple do? Not necessarily. Is this a good idea?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Uh, Karan J. Writes the Logitech MX anywhere is a symmetrical low ish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey profile and way more comfortable than the magic mouse. I hope Apple copies this and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll put a link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It looks exactly like every other mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. I think it’s still too ugly for Apple. Like I agree. It’s a low profile. It is symmetrical. also too ugly.
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Follow-up: Apple Wi-Fi/BT chips
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We got some very fascinating feedback with regard to Apple’s Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips. We were talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the last episode, maybe the one before, about Apple potentially making their own chips for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Ian Williamson points out, Apple already makes the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth silicon in the Apple Watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is the Apple Silicon W series. The Apple W2 used in the Apple Watch Series 3 is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey integrated into the Apple S3. What is it? SIP system in package?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you. Apple claimed the chip makes Wi-Fi 85% faster and allows Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to use half the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey power of the W1 implementation. The Apple W3 is integrated into the Apple S4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through S10 SIPs. And then additionally, Winnie Lewis writes, to aid John in developing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excitement for Apple-designed Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips, I’ve created this crackpot theory. Apple made radio chips are the first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey step toward an Apple mesh Wi-Fi system. No way, but that’s awesome. Keep hope alive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this is about Marco saying, you know, if Apple made their own chips, that could have big power advantages to the watch. And I agreed,
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like they already did that and we forgot, sorry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did either of you know this? I did not know this at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John I, when, as soon as they said it, I’m like, oh yeah, that rings a bell. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes sense that they’ve already done it on the watch. And like, you know, so they have the H1 chip that
⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about on the show is their chip for handling wireless stuff inside AirPods. And it has
⏹️ ▶️ John special sauce that we think makes them better than just plain old Bluetooth. That was one of the examples we used.
⏹️ ▶️ John should have remembered that along with the H1 there’s also the W1, W2, and W3 for the watch,
⏹️ ▶️ John but apparently on the Max they’re still using Broadcom chips, so this is just continuing along the
⏹️ ▶️ John path they’ve already started down. And as for making it more likely to have a wet mesh system, there’s just so much more
⏹️ ▶️ John to a Wi-Fi mesh system than the wireless chips. We all kind of wish that Apple would go back into that business,
⏹️ ▶️ John but, But I’m still waiting to hear those rumors and so far I haven’t heard anything.
LoRa follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, in our final piece of follow-up for this week, James Andrews writes, one of the coolest low-raw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey projects, if you recall, low-raw is long range. It’s what powers the Yolink stuff that John brought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the show and has now ruined my life because I want all of it. Anyways, James writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the coolest low-raw projects is Meshtastic. It’s more of a Radio Ham-esque thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s super cool and a quote, unquote, fun time sink. And this is described from meshtastic.org
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as meshtastic is an open-source, off-grid, decentralized mesh network built to run on affordable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey low-power devices. I actually exchanged a couple of emails with James about this, or maybe it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey massed on post. It doesn’t matter. Anyways, James was saying that what you basically do is have a Bluetooth-powered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey low-raw receiver that works with Meshtastic. And that allows you to basically send text messages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and potentially other data back and forth to other people on the mesh network. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the sort of thing that I would probably spend way too much time messing with, so I don’t ever want to think about it again. That’s kinda
John’s CES TV coverage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do our first real topic. And Marco, I think you and I can buzz
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off from here on out, because we’re going to talk CES 2025.
⏹️ ▶️ John You two aren’t reporting from the show floor?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nope, sure aren’t. And I really don’t care that much about TVs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’re certainly not in the way that you do, John. So take it away and wake me up when you’re ready.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you should care a little bit, because a lot of this TV tech eventually comes to computers. And there is some computer tie-ins.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, a lot of this is about TVs. CES is the time of the year when television manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ John show their new TVs for the year, but then don’t tell you enough about them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And certainly don’t have them for sale almost ever. Although TCL did something a little different this year. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John just to set the frame here, tons of TVs are announced at CES.
⏹️ ▶️ John I only care about a small subset of them. I care about the quote unquote best
⏹️ ▶️ John TVs. The one with the best picture quality, the ones that most accurately reproduce
⏹️ ▶️ John the picture of how it’s supposed to look according to the people who made the TV show or movie, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because they make the thing in a certain way, the video is supposed to look this way, I want the TV to show it the way they made
⏹️ ▶️ John it, and I want it to do the best job possible. So I only care about the top
⏹️ ▶️ John highest end TVs. On that front, Sony has decided for the past few years, they’re gonna be like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple and say, we’re not even gonna show at CES. Everyone else can announce their TVs, we’re gonna have a separate
⏹️ ▶️ John event later in the year just for Sony so we get all the attention and we don’t have to compete with all your other
⏹️ ▶️ John TV announcements. And so far that’s been working okay for Sony because Sony is the big dog. And so that’s what they’re doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony was at CES, Sony was showing other stuff at CES, but not TVs. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, Sony, you do you. Samsung, maker of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Quantum Dot OLED screen, the best available screen technology for televisions, has
⏹️ ▶️ John predictably a new generation of their QD OLED screen. I’ll put some links in the show notes to videos
⏹️ ▶️ John that will tell you about it. And the main thing that OLEDs, including
⏹️ ▶️ John QD OLED, have been doing over the past several years is trying to get brighter. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John OLEDs in general are the best screen technology because every single pixel is individually controlled. And so you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to worry about backlight regions bleeding through and dynamically controlling them. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John individual pixels. You turn them on and off. When they’re off, they’re totally off. When they’re on, they’re on. One pixel doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John affect the ones next to it. There’s no blooming, like it’s the best technology, but the one weakness
⏹️ ▶️ John it has, if you can call it that, is it can’t get super, super duper bright. Of course, the TVs that can
⏹️ ▶️ John get super duper bright that aren’t OLED have all the problems with that bright backlight bleeding through surrounding pixels and doing all sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ John other stuff. But anyway, people who wanna get the very best TV, but also wanna watch
⏹️ ▶️ John it with bright sunlight coming through their windows and hitting the TV screens, they’re trying to help you out.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this year, here are the specs for the new generation of QD OLED that Samsung
⏹️ ▶️ John has. They’re given in terms of how big a region of the screen is
⏹️ ▶️ John lit up, because if you light up the whole screen, you can’t make it as bright as if
⏹️ ▶️ John you light up a small percentage of the screen due to power and heat reasons. So the
⏹️ ▶️ John way they describe that is an N% window. So, and a 3% window, meaning there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a rectangle in the middle of the TV that is 3% the size of the entire screen, the new QDO LED
⏹️ ▶️ John gets to 4,000 nits. At a 10% window, it gets to 2,200, and full field, whole screen, 400.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that may be shocking to you, but that is how LEDs work. 4,000 nits at a 3% window, 2,000 at a 10% full
⏹️ ▶️ John field, 440. Now what’s the reason for that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it heat? Like, why is that? Yeah, it’s heat and power. Both
⏹️ ▶️ John heat and power. Because you’ve got, you know, it’s organic and you’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John the burn-in issues or whatever, it’s both heat and power, so it’s a problem. You like you may be thinking like
⏹️ ▶️ John is I think that may actually be true of Apple screens as well like their laptop screens But they
⏹️ ▶️ John say you can go to 600 nits But I wonder if you make the entire screen white on your MacBook Pro if it
⏹️ ▶️ John is 600 nits or if it only counts as a Percentage what probably does because they’re not OLEDs. But anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John Even though these numbers don’t sound impressive. They’re way better than last year, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John Samsung put this new panel and its flagship television the s95f They also offer the
⏹️ ▶️ John S95F in an 83 inch size, but beware, even though Samsung is being annoying like Apple, they
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t tell you the 83 inch size does not use a QD OLED panel. They can’t make it that big yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John The biggest one is still 77, but it’s the same product. It’s like, you know, if you buy these sizes, you get a QD
⏹️ ▶️ John OLED. If you buy the biggest size, you don’t. And Samsung will not tell you that, but people just put their phones up to the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and take a picture of it and go, yep, that’s not a QD OLED. So beware of that. And also there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a new version of Samsung’s anti-reflective coating, which is very controversial because some people really like it because they insist
⏹️ ▶️ John on watching their televisions with giant bright lights on the screen and Other people hate it because the anti-glare
⏹️ ▶️ John coating You know diffuses light and so if you have any light falling on it It sort of makes
⏹️ ▶️ John it hazy and black and makes the blacks not really black Hazy and gray rather makes the blacks not true
⏹️ ▶️ John black. That’s one of the reasons you’re getting an OLED So anyway, I don’t like Samsung TVs, but it’s important to talk about them
⏹️ ▶️ John because they make the QD OLED They’re the only manufacturer in the entire world that makes QD OLED screens,
⏹️ ▶️ John and QD OLED screens are the best OLED screens for reasons we’ll get into in a second. So next up is LG,
⏹️ ▶️ John the biggest OLED TV maker. LG had a technology that they called MLA, micro
⏹️ ▶️ John lens array that we talked about on past episodes where they put literally thousands of lenses on each
⏹️ ▶️ John pixel. Not on the screen, on each pixel has thousands of micro, when they say micro
⏹️ ▶️ John lens array, they mean micro lens. And they did that to try to make their screens
⏹️ ▶️ John have a better viewing angle, because one of the advantages that QD OLED have is an amazingly good viewing angle because the color things are really
⏹️ ▶️ John close to you and the polarizer is like behind them, whereas in traditional LEDs it’s reversed,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But the main advantage QD OLED has over non-QD OLED is non-QD
⏹️ ▶️ John OLEDs like LGs are WRGB panels. They have a red, a green, and a blue sub-pixel, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John a massive white sub-pixel next to it. And they use that to achieve good brightness, but they’re mixing
⏹️ ▶️ John white with the red, the green, and the blue. And as you can imagine, it washes out color. So QD OLED screens have
⏹️ ▶️ John the best viewing angles, the best color volume, they can make the most different colors, and the best color
⏹️ ▶️ John brightness. They just have RGB, just plain old RGB, and they just make the R, the
⏹️ ▶️ John G, and the B brighter to make the screen brighter, which is how you would think they all work, but that’s not how any other OLED
⏹️ ▶️ John works. So QD OLED, still the king, but LG is trying to catch up, and they were using the micro lens array last
⏹️ ▶️ John year, and I think the year before that. This year, they have dropped the micro lens array from their flagship television.
⏹️ ▶️ John So how are they gonna make it as bright to try to compete with the QD OLEDs. They did it by using our
⏹️ ▶️ John old friend from the iPad, Tandem OLED, which still I don’t have a really great explanation
⏹️ ▶️ John for, other than there’s an additional light emitting layer in the stack, in the OLED stack. They just add one
⏹️ ▶️ John more thing that emits light and somehow the other thing that emits light shines through. Anyway, multiple layers,
⏹️ ▶️ John Tandem OLED, just like on the iPad. I think LG makes the Tandem OLED for the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget, we’ve talked about it in past shows and I’ve already forgotten, but anyway, Keep an eye on Tandem OLED because they
⏹️ ▶️ John got rid of MLA and one of the disadvantages of MLA is if light hits the screen at an angle,
⏹️ ▶️ John it hits those micro lenses and scatters and again gives like a gray haze across the screen, which you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want, it’s messing up your black levels. So they got rid of MLA, brought in Tandem OLED. Still
⏹️ ▶️ John WRGB, still has a white sub-pixel, still doesn’t have the same color volume as QD’s OLED, but LG
⏹️ ▶️ John is trying to do what they do. They don’t know how to make QD OLED, only Samsung does. And by the way, Samsung gives
⏹️ ▶️ John these, sells these screens to Sony, which is why Sony is able to make great TVs, but we don’t know what they’re doing this year.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here are the specs for LG’s flagship. 3% window is 3700 nits, 10% is 2400 nits, and full field is 308. So it is not as good
⏹️ ▶️ John as QD OLED. It’s a little bit better than the 10%
⏹️ ▶️ John window. These are estimates, these are not measurements, these are estimates. And then the previous ones were claims
⏹️ ▶️ John from Samsung, so we’ll see when they review the TVs. But LG’s hanging in there. It’s interesting to see they ditched
⏹️ ▶️ John MLA, and it’s interesting to see the resurgence of tandem OLED, I don’t actually, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the tandem OLEDs in the iPad are just RGB and not WRGB. So keep an eye
⏹️ ▶️ John out for Apple slash Mac caliber
⏹️ ▶️ John screens from both of these technologies. One of the advances in QD
⏹️ ▶️ John OLED this year was they were bragging about is now we can make QD OLED smaller, which is a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John to brag about, but you got to make the subpixels smaller. And so they were showing a 4K 27 inch QD
⏹️ ▶️ John OLED, which is not right for us Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John folks. We want it to be 5K at 27 inch, but then they had right next to it, coming soon,
⏹️ ▶️ John 5K QD OLED 27 inch. It’s not an announced product,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we’re getting close. That is like, if you could get a QD OLED 27 inch 5K screen, that
⏹️ ▶️ John would be amazing. And of course Apple will ship it, you know, 15 years
⏹️ ▶️ John from now, or the hell they update their monitors, but keep an eye on that. And as
⏹️ ▶️ John for the LG panel with the, the drop the microphones array, LG was pulling
⏹️ ▶️ John a Samsung and saying, we’re not talking about, we’re not gonna tell you what we’re doing. Don’t, like, they didn’t stop them from
⏹️ ▶️ John taking their phones and holding it up to the screen and being like, take a picture of the sub pixels. What can you see, right? They didn’t stop
⏹️ ▶️ John them from doing that, but LG refused to say anything. Panasonic on the other hand said, oh, totally, we’ll tell you all about our screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John We call it the primary RGB tandem OLED panel. Everyone’s got different branding for this, but the fact is Panasonic buys
⏹️ ▶️ John their screens from LG. Everybody knows they do. And Panasonic is branding their LG OLED as primary
⏹️ ▶️ John RGB tandem OLED, which I don’t know, whatever. They all make up their own marketing names, but Samsung was
⏹️ ▶️ John out of the TV game in the US for years. They came back last year with two new TVs. Now they have three. Their top
⏹️ ▶️ John tier one is the Z95B. It uses this tandem OLED from LG.
⏹️ ▶️ John Looks really good. Unfortunately, Panasonic uses the Fire TV software stack that
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone hates. which is a bummer. One of the things they were advertising on their TV
⏹️ ▶️ John was that it had a improved chimney cooling system, takes cool air in from the bottom and sends it out the top.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, heat power levels, they’re trying to work on that, but it’s notable that Samsung is gonna come back.
⏹️ ▶️ John And second to last on TVs, predictably, everyone’s been adding more annoying AI stuff to their
⏹️ ▶️ John TVs. To the point where there’s like Microsoft CoPilot like integrations,
⏹️ ▶️ John which okay, I guess. I mean, it’s basically like you can access the copilot web app through the TV. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John LG has an entire AI section on its TVs, including an AI remote.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the controversial moves is they remove the input button from the remote in place of like some stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John AI thing that you have to like hold down and then it will bring up the input panel. I
⏹️ ▶️ John have AI upscaling, AI auto HDR, AI remastering, AI adaptors,
⏹️ ▶️ John everything. Everything is AI. They will literally let you talk to voice assistants and LLMs through your television.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whatever, it’s just making everyone feel like they need to do it, but none of these things make TVs better,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just FYI, that’s what everyone’s doing this year. And finally, big TVs are big.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s been the trend for the past few years. Everyone wants to come and say, forget about those TVs that look good. Ours is really
⏹️ ▶️ John big. And they were just getting bigger and bigger. Even Samsung
⏹️ ▶️ John has its cheat 83 inch flagship TV that’s not even a QD OLED. TCL last year
⏹️ ▶️ John was showing off 115 inch TV. Now TCL is saying, here’s our 115 inch TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s the mid-range model. And they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John showing you what the top end one is. So it’s probably bigger than 115. I don’t know where people live, that they fit
⏹️ ▶️ John these televisions. Cause I don’t know if you have realized how big 115 inch television is. It’s really big. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so now that’s not even their biggest size. What is it going to be, 130 inch? Like soon you’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to get it in people’s doors. I know. Like they don’t roll up, but just
⏹️ ▶️ John FYI, they keep making these things bigger because they can’t make them better. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you can’t make it better, just make it bigger. And you know, everyone loves big TVs. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s all the TV talk just to keep update. The upshot is QD OLED and LG
⏹️ ▶️ John are still duking it out. QD OLED still seems like it’s on top. I hate Samsung’s TVs. So I’m waiting to see
⏹️ ▶️ John what Sony does with that QD OLED panel. What Panasonic does with it is also gonna be good but I don’t really like the Fire TV
⏹️ ▶️ John OS. So now that I’m in the market for a new TV, I’m just, you know, watching as a fan, but later in the year
⏹️ ▶️ John when Sony announces their new TV with the new QD OLED, that’ll be interesting. And it’s also interesting because
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony this last year didn’t even get the new version of the QD OLED from last year.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just kept selling their TV from the year before and it was still the best TV you could buy, right? So they’re just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re sitting out a year, we don’t need to bother. I don’t know if it’s because Samsung wouldn’t give,
⏹️ ▶️ John Samsung wouldn’t sell Sony the latest generation of QD OLED and they were keeping it for themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m not sure how that relationship is shaking out, but I hope Sony is able to give Samsung enough money to get this
⏹️ ▶️ John new QD OLED panel. I think they will, because Samsung is this giant conglomerate where there’s one
⏹️ ▶️ John part of it called Samsung Display that sells their displays. And there’s another part called, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t remember, Samsung Electronics that makes the TV. And they’re two different things. Samsung Display wants to sell displays
⏹️ ▶️ John to Sony because their profit and loss is how many displays did we sell. And Samsung TV totally
⏹️ ▶️ John does not want them to sell displays to Sony, but that’s a different part of the company. So yeah, real
⏹️ ▶️ John healthy over there, but that’s just the way it goes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I’m impressed. That took a lot less time than I expected. Well done.
⏹️ ▶️ John And coming back to computer stuff, LG has announced a computer display. Indeed.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is called the UltraFine 6K
⏹️ ▶️ John with Thunderbolt 5 support. And as is traditional with CES, they won’t tell us anything
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to know about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Does it at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have like the right density to be a Pro Display XDR competitor? Is it like, you know, 6K at 32 inches?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re not releasing that
⏹️ ▶️ John information today, Marco. No. They literally won’t tell you the resolution. It’s like, well, what will
⏹️ ▶️ John you tell us? So here’s the reading from, where is this from? Mac Rumors. Details are scant,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t say, but we know that the LG UltraFine monitor, and they get the model number, features a nano IPS
⏹️ ▶️ John black panel delivering a wide color gamut covering 99.5% of Adobe RGB, 98% of DCI-P3.
⏹️ ▶️ John LG has not revealed the exact resolution. Another thing is unclear is whether it’s 60 Hertz or 120 Hertz
⏹️ ▶️ John and the price has not been revealed. So what do we know about this? It is 32 inch, the 6K
⏹️ ▶️ John is in the name. The specs of the panel make it seem like not quite as good as the
⏹️ ▶️ John XDR. Every story about this mentions the monitor that we’ve talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John in the last year, which is the Dell UltraSharp 32 inch 6K monitor, which is for sale and
⏹️ ▶️ John has actual specs. It’s 2,500 bucks, 32 inch, it’s 60 Hertz, no HDR. It is slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John higher res than the XDR, so it’s not the same panel. It’s a 6144 by 3456 instead of the XDR 6016 by 3384.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s 99% P3, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming that the LG uses a panel like that, a 6144 panel, but who knows? LG is not telling
⏹️ ▶️ John us, but the density is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John in that ballpark and it is 32 inches. I don’t like, I don’t know why they bother showing
⏹️ ▶️ John something at CES if they’re not gonna tell you like, here’s a monitor, here’s a size, let me tell you
⏹️ ▶️ John how much of the color space it covers, but resolution? No, we can’t tell you. No, refresh
⏹️ ▶️ John rate? No, we’re not telling you that either. They never reveal the price, fine. You don’t, maybe they don’t even know the price yet because it’s not out yet,
⏹️ ▶️ John but this is the thing to keep an eye on. The LG UltraFine 5K was the
⏹️ ▶️ John UltraFine alternative to Apple’s 27 inch monitors. Maybe the
⏹️ ▶️ John 6K will be as well. One thing I can tell you about the 6K is it is not as homely as the
⏹️ ▶️ John 5K, because they copied Apple more faithfully this time. It looks like
⏹️ ▶️ John a not quite as elegant XDR. It may be cheap and plasticy, we’ll find out,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think it is more attractive.
Dell Pro Max
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of copying Apple, it’s the end of an era because Dell is no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey longer making XPS computers. This was the, generally speaking, the good line of Dell computers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since forever, basically. Reading from Ars Technica, Dell is killing the XPS branding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that has become a mainstay for people seeking a sleek, respectable, well-priced PC. This means that there won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be any more Dell XPS laptops or desktops. Dell is also killing its Latitude, Inspiron, and Precision branding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it announced today. Okay, I mean, I’m not really sure why that was necessary, but surely you’ve come
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up with something that’s better, right, Dell? Right? Right. Here’s Dell’s new branding.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can get Dell, Dell Pro, or Dell Pro Max. Folks, that is not a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey joke. That is not a joke. This is legitimately real.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I first saw this, I thought there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John way that’s real. It has to be a joke.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, before we move on from this, like, XPS, Latitude,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know those names despite never owning a Dell, never wanting to own a Dell. So they are throwing away
⏹️ ▶️ John some substantial decades long brand equity from XPS and Latitude and Inspiron and
⏹️ ▶️ John Precision I hadn’t heard about, right? But like, it’s not just, this is not like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, you know, they have a new line of things and here are the names. It’s let’s throw away the names that did have name
⏹️ ▶️ John recognition. Maybe they have bad recognition. It’s like when telecom companies change their names because everyone hates them.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, let’s talk about their new branding.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, so you can get a Dell, a Dell Pro, or a Dell Pro Max, but because it’s Dell and because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s the PC industry, it’s not quite that simple. You can get any of the following computers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can get a Dell Premium, a Dell Plus, a Dell Base, a Dell Pro Premium, a Dell Pro Plus, a Dell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro Base, or a Dell Pro Max Premium, a Dell Pro Plus, or a Dell Pro Base. Max. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of those exist. So Dell was apparently mocked at its own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey press event for copying Apple’s naming convention. This is reading from 9to5Mac. This is so delicious,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh my goodness. Reading from 9to5Mac, if Dell hoped nobody would notice the origin of these names, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disappointed. Quote, I’m wondering why you guys didn’t choose something original because you essentially have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s branding here, one audience member quipped. Another said, quote, your branding sounds a lot like Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aren’t you just following them? Despite claiming it did this purely for simplicity and not to copy Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dell actually managed to make its PC lineup even less comprehensible than before. All three tiers are subdivided
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into base plus and premium variants. Is a pro plus better than a pro max base? How about a pro premium versus pro max plus?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Engadget, and we’ll link them as well, notes that things descend entirely into farce when Dell also throws
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in size labels for its desktop PCs. Engadget writes, just try to read the names Dell Pro Max
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Micro and Dell Pro Max Mini without having your brain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John self-destruct.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yes, you can expect these machines to have their own plus and premium sub-branding. So yes, there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really is going to be a Dell Pro Max Micro Plus. It’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I just, it’s for all the things to copy from Apple, don’t copy their bad ideas. Like if you’re copying Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John naming, it’s probably a bad idea because Apple’s not great at naming. They get away with it because their products are good
⏹️ ▶️ John and the names become associated with the goodness of the products, but you probably can’t get away with that. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John second thing is, you know, come up with your own names. Like you want, like they had, they had their
⏹️ ▶️ John own brands. Again, maybe they had bad, you know, maybe people hate XPS or
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Latitude or whatever. I don’t think so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really don’t. I mean, people hate Inspiron, I can tell you that, because they were very crappy laptops. But, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco XPS was fine. But I mean, is anybody buying Dell desktop PCs, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alienware, which I think are good, actually.
⏹️ ▶️ John Alienware actually had some CES news, by the way. Apparently people have been angry about Alienware for
⏹️ ▶️ John years, because they will sell you an Alienware computer and it didn’t take standard components. Like you needed to get an Alienware
⏹️ ▶️ John power supply, like it wasn’t just like an ATX case.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh yeah, that’s fine. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John annoying for everybody. Finally, Alienware is saying their new line of computers will accept standard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. Their branding has always been very separate. Who is buying like a Dell tower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and cares what the heck it’s called? Like, aren’t these mostly bought by companies?
⏹️ ▶️ John I would imagine, but who even knows? But yeah, like to copy Apple’s naming
⏹️ ▶️ John is bad because the names aren’t good. They’re not good when Apple does them, they’re not good when you do them. And then to somehow find a way
⏹️ ▶️ John to make it worse, not once over, but twice over. Because adding premium plus and base is terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then adding sizes to that, like you can’t just keep tacking around these meaningless suffixes, right? It’s bad
⏹️ ▶️ John enough that you have, you know, like they kind of make the mistake of like, Apple does like
⏹️ ▶️ John the M4, the M4 Pro and the M4 Max, but there’s no M4 Pro Max. But the phone had Pro and Max
⏹️ ▶️ John and it had a Pro Max, right? Like Apple kind of learned from its phone mistake when it did the chips. But
⏹️ ▶️ John then once you do Max, now you’ve got Ultra, which is higher than Max. And if they were making extreme, Like, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has painted itself into a corner with its names. They’re not great. Don’t copy them. And then certainly don’t copy
⏹️ ▶️ John them and make them worse. So, bad show, Dell.
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NVIDIA 50xx, Digits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey NVIDIA announces next-gen RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 GPUs. Reading from The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Verge, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang revealed the RTX 50 series
⏹️ ▶️ Casey GPUs during a CES keynote, announcing a $2,000 5090, $1,000 5080, a $750 5070 Ti,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a $550 RTX 5070. So
⏹️ ▶️ John when we had a question on Ask ATP, I think a few months ago, they were like, oh, the rumors
⏹️ ▶️ John of the big M4 chips with their big GPUs, the ones that aren’t out yet, like the M4
⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra, if they ever make such a thing, their GPU, that GPU could be amazing, or even an M4 Extreme,
⏹️ ▶️ John the GPU could compete with the 4090. How is that possible in such a tiny chip that sips
⏹️ ▶️ John power? And the answer to that question that I gave was, A, the M4 Ultra is not gonna be a tiny chip
⏹️ ▶️ John that sips power, it’s gonna be big, really big, and hot and take a lot of power, but yeah, it’ll be relatively,
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna take huge amounts of power, but still way more power than like the M4, M4 Pro, or even
⏹️ ▶️ John M4 Max takes. And B, it doesn’t really matter if it competes with the 4090
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of bragging rights, because by the time that chip is out, Nvidia will have replaced the 4090,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is already multiple years old. They’ll replaced it with their 5 series. And here we are at CES,
⏹️ ▶️ John Nvidia is announcing their new GPUs. Apple hasn’t even released an M4 Ultra or anything higher
⏹️ ▶️ John and already Nvidia has its next generation of GPUs as predicted and the next generation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nvidia says the RTX 5090 will be two times faster than the RTX 4090 thanks to DLSS4 and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Blackwell architecture. John, do you want to take a little pause and explain to me what the hell that means, please?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll pause at the end. All right, fine. But it will come at a cost. The RTX 5090
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will have a total graphics power of 575 Watts and a recommended PSU requirement of 1,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watts. That’s 125 watts more than the RTX 4090. And let me just tell you, so we had weather come through over the weekend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s not worth talking about, but suffice to say, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had charged up that tailgate battery pack that I use that provides full-on AC power.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a 20 pound battery or whatever. And I charged that up just in case we needed it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they tell you in the manual, you should store it at about half juice, like 50%. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so now that we’re through the weather, I decided I’m going to go discharge it back to 50%. The easiest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way for me to do that is to hook my UPS up to it just for a few minutes, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, 10, 20 minutes, whatever, because my UPS has got three monitors,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a MaxBook Pro, you know, the Synology, the Eero router, all sorts of stuff hanging off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this, right? All off of my UPS. And I know you’re not really supposed to, you’re not really supposed to like hook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a UPS up to a battery pack. I’m just doing it temporarily to discharge a battery pack, right? Well, the battery pack will show you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the usage is, you know, how many watts you’re using as you’re using it. My
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entire desk setup, a six base Synology, three 5K monitors,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two of which are the UltraFines, which were probably not efficient at all. My MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my CalDigit TS4, I forget what else is on here. All of that together is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about 500 watts. And we’re saying that these graphics cards are 575. Yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, this is why like, you know, when we’re talking about, when we’re comparing Apple’s GPUs to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nvidia desktop GPUs, these are very different types of products.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re literally talking about like a 10X level power difference here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, this is like, you know, Nvidia is being limited by how much power you can draw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a standard US outlet at some point for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco total PCs that are, you know, because like, you know, you can draw about, I think, 1500 to 1800 watts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sustained like for most us circuits so like when you’re when your gpu alone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses almost 600 not to mention the rest of the pc like you’re you’re really pushing boundaries here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um you know at some point like gaming gaming desktops are going to require like three-phase power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something like so you know this this is a very different type of product this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not made for power efficient PCs, portable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything laptop, anything like compact desktops. This is like, what is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco highest level of performance we can get from a GPU at any cost, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is $2,000, at any cost and at any size, and heat and power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco efficiency be damned. Because there are applications for that. Not just games, although games are a big one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but of course all the AI stuff these days. There’s lots of applications for like, I don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much power it uses, I just need the highest performance. That’s what NVIDIA delivers with these.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is not what Apple delivers with their computers. Now, we can and have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had the argument of like, should the Mac Pro be that? Because the Mac Pro before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple Silicon transition was that. The Mac Pro, the Intel Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro was actually sized to have a power capacity to fit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just under a US outlets power draw. Because you
⏹️ ▶️ John could put multiple of these 400 watt GPUs there. And by the way, pricing wise,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, oh, $2,000, that’s so expensive. Apple has sold many GPUs, one of which
⏹️ ▶️ John is in my computer right now for way more money than that. And they were not nearly as powerful because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re like the MPX modules are like two times the cost of the actual GPU. You know, they’re all AMD
⏹️ ▶️ John things in there. So yeah, pricing wise, it’s shocking to PC people, but we’re like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can buy an eBay today, a crappy GPU in an MPX module for an Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro that will cost you more than the 5090 and will be like 1 15th the speed.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, the pricing is all out of whack. But yeah, the case, Apple’s Mac Pro case has the power supply
⏹️ ▶️ John for it and it has the cooling for it, importantly. It has the cooling for it. One of the things that boggles my mind with
⏹️ ▶️ John the high-end NVIDIA GPUs is how gaming PCs and
⏹️ ▶️ John how the cards design their cooling. This card, the reference design for this card and all the companies that have their,
⏹️ ▶️ John NVIDIA shows a reference design and then like ASUS and Gigabyte and all these other companies make their cards from,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re all selling basically the same GPU but with their own cards and their own coolers on them. The reference
⏹️ ▶️ John design has three giant fans, like, I don’t know, five inch fans, whatever. A full,
⏹️ ▶️ John like three giant fans slap to the side of the video card.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if they’re blowing air into it or sucking air out of it, but the point is they’re like, picture a card slotted into a motherboard
⏹️ ▶️ John and on the card, on the video card, are three giant fans attached to the card, blowing
⏹️ ▶️ John into the card or away from the card, right? And you’re like, well, how does that airflow
⏹️ ▶️ John work in the case? And then you see in the case, the case has like three fans on the ceiling of the case
⏹️ ▶️ John and then two fans on the back of the case. And then the three fans on the card are facing down at the floor
⏹️ ▶️ John of the case. Like, is there any rhyme or reason to the airflow? It makes Apple’s design so like,
⏹️ ▶️ John cold air in front, hot air in back. Like, there’s one direction of the airflow. There’s one set of
⏹️ ▶️ John fans that just, the air goes from the front to the back and gaming PCs are like, just
⏹️ ▶️ John put in a bunch of fans. Doesn’t matter which direction they’re facing. These ones face up, these ones face down, these ones face left, these ones face right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just turn them all up really high. Everything will be fine. It’s like, guys, like, get together
⏹️ ▶️ John on which direction you want the fans to be facing and you’re figuring out where the airflow is gonna come. Where does the cold air go
⏹️ ▶️ John in? Where does the hot air go out? And come to an agreement and they’re like, nope. And so it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John cause they can’t get together on it. So like I see these video card fans, like they’re basically
⏹️ ▶️ John pointing either upwards or downwards in a case that has openings in the front and the back. And that’s why they’re so loud.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, gaming PCs. And as for the AI thing, Apple, not Apple, Nvidia makes dedicated
⏹️ ▶️ John AI cards that cost way more than this and are way more powerful and are totally dedicated to AI.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that is why Nvidia was briefly the most valuable company in the world and still is in the running,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s not this. But anyway, yeah, they are making even more powerful cards and it’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as Casey just said, they’re claiming it’s two times faster and they’re talking about DLSS4.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is an upgrade to their DLSS stands for Deep Learning Super Sampling Technology. It includes
⏹️ ▶️ John new, this is reading from their copy, There are the Verge’s article about it. New neural rendering capabilities
⏹️ ▶️ John that on systems with the new RTX 50 series can do multi-frame generation, generating up to three additional frames
⏹️ ▶️ John per traditionally rendered frame working in unison with the complex suite of DLSS technologies to multiply frame rates
⏹️ ▶️ John by up to 8X over traditional brute force rendering. Then they show a bunch of bar graphs from NVIDIA’s presentation
⏹️ ▶️ John showing, look at this, the green graph shows the RTX 5090 and then the gray one shows
⏹️ ▶️ John the 4090. The 4090 used to be amazing, but look at these green lines. They’re over twice as tall as the gray lines.
⏹️ ▶️ John Isn’t this amazing? Now, if that just sounds like an alphabet soup,
⏹️ ▶️ John you may be thinking, all right, so NVIDIA came out with a new card and it’s twice as fast as their old one. That’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you know anything about the alphabet soup that I just read, you’re like, okay, wait a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John What does it mean to have up to three additional frames
⏹️ ▶️ John per traditionally rendered frame and up to 8X over traditional
⏹️ ▶️ John brute force rendering.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey they talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about? Let me tell you what they’re talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ John video games have to draw a picture on your screen and
⏹️ ▶️ John every 160th of a second or whatever, they have to draw a new picture if you want 60 frames per
⏹️ ▶️ John second, right? So there’s a deadline. They’ve drawn a picture. They’re gonna need that next picture in 160th of a second
⏹️ ▶️ John if you wanna have 60 of these frames every second. And the old way of
⏹️ ▶️ John having higher frame rates is can I draw the frame in less time? Because if I can draw the frame in 1 1 100th
⏹️ ▶️ John of a second, then I can have 100 of those frames per second. But if it takes me 1 20th of a second, then I can only have 20 frames per second.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we want to take less time to draw the frame. Several
⏹️ ▶️ John years ago, all these companies decided that’s hard to do, so I’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John a better idea. Instead of asking the video card to draw every frame, how
⏹️ ▶️ John about we have the video card draw a frame, and then we ask the video card what it thinks the next frame
⏹️ ▶️ John would look like if it could draw it. Based on the frames that had come before
⏹️ ▶️ John it, what do you think the next frame’s probably gonna look like? We don’t have time to render it. But can you just
⏹️ ▶️ John like, think about what it probably is gonna look like based on the frames that came before
⏹️ ▶️ John it? The answer is yes, and that’s DLSS. Does this like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how does this work? So like, is this like motion smoothing on a TV? Like is this, do gamers actually
⏹️ ▶️ John want this? Yeah, so this is very much like motion smoothing. There have been many versions of DLSS.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is version four, and every company has their own version of this under a different alphabet soup acronym.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, they would do it based on the frames that had come before it and the pixels that are nearby.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the whole point is, if you can do this faster than you can actually render a frame, you can double
⏹️ ▶️ John your frame rate, because you get one, quote, traditionally rendered frame as an actually
⏹️ ▶️ John rendered frame, and then you get one, we made this up frame for free, essentially,
⏹️ ▶️ John while your game is rendering the next real frame. So you could double your frame rates. If you had
⏹️ ▶️ John a slower, older PC, but it supported DLSS, you could say, I can’t, when I put this game into 4K resolution,
⏹️ ▶️ John I get 20 frames per second. But I wanna play at 4K, because it looks real good. So I’ll turn on DLSS, and now
⏹️ ▶️ John I get 40 frames per second. And there’s a little bit of artifacting, and sometimes like a little bit janky,
⏹️ ▶️ John and every version of DLSS gets a little bit better of being sort of temporally stable and not having weird
⏹️ ▶️ John artifacts or whatever. But that’s been a trade-off the gamers have been able to make. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John always just do the traditionally rendered frame way, which is like, I’ll just buy a more expensive CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John or GPU and increase my frame rate. But if you have an older CPU or GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John and an older computer and you just want higher resolution, you can use DLSS. The innovation this year
⏹️ ▶️ John with DLSS 4 is, instead of looking at previous frames that the card had rendered and
⏹️ ▶️ John the pixels that are surrounding the pixel you’re thinking about for the next frame. DLSS4,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s the first one to do this, but I’m not entirely sure. But anyway, DLSS4 uses,
⏹️ ▶️ John can anyone guess? AI, because why
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco would it not? Of course.
⏹️ ▶️ John It uses an AI model that they trained on video games. So it’s not just
⏹️ ▶️ John guessing what the next frame is gonna look like based on like the pixels that came before it, that were just rendered on this card.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s an AI model that has been trained on millions and millions of frames of video games.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it has a better idea of what the pixel should be in this position in the next frame. And
⏹️ ▶️ John DLSS4 will not just make one fake frame, it can make up to three fake frames. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you get one quote, traditionally rendered frame, and then it can make three frames
⏹️ ▶️ John out of that and say, I think I know what the next three frames are gonna be. So that’s why you can, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John triple, quadruple, whatever your frame rate, because you get one regular frame, and then we make up three
⏹️ ▶️ John frames, and by then you got one regular frame again, and your frame rates go up, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not just based on the three, four dozen frames that came before it, it’s based on this AI training model that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John been trained on thousands and thousands and millions and billions of frames of video games. It’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ John very clever, but now I want you to look again at the chart. Look again at the chart and see
⏹️ ▶️ John those lines where the green lines are much higher than the gray lines, and look underneath it in tiny text that says
⏹️ ▶️ John DLSS on them. Look at the one all the way on the left where it says Far Cry 6,
⏹️ ▶️ John And it says RT, which I think stands for ray tracing, but it doesn’t say DLSS
⏹️ ▶️ John Suddenly the green line is not that much higher for the 5090 than it was in the four. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John higher It’s higher than the 4090 and other and ray tracing games are often limited
⏹️ ▶️ John not by the GPU power But by like the ray tracing components of the GPU and so this is
⏹️ ▶️ John not really a fair comparison I’m not saying that the 5090 is only like 10% faster than the 4090
⏹️ ▶️ John But what I am saying is that Nvidia’s marketing materials are leaning heavily on the fact that the 5090 is
⏹️ ▶️ John really good at making up up to three fabricated frames for you to increase your frame rate, so
⏹️ ▶️ John this is an interesting turn of events where like They’re they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John content to brag about the actual increase in Frame rendering
⏹️ ▶️ John performance of their GPU they want they’re more interested in telling you we can
⏹️ ▶️ John make up frames that are so convincing you won’t even be able to tell that we made them up. And they’re mostly right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like to be fair, they’re mostly right. Like a lot of the reviews of this are like, we are taking great pains
⏹️ ▶️ John to try to, granted on YouTube it’s hard because YouTube will only do 60 frames per second, I believe. So they already have to show it at half speed
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s doing 120 frames per second. But the 59E will do like 240 frames per second. There are screens that they were showing
⏹️ ▶️ John at CES and they’re already out on the market that will do 500 Hertz, right? And how
⏹️ ▶️ John are you going to fill 500 frames per second? you need to make up frames. And DLSS 4 is pretty amazing,
⏹️ ▶️ John and regular people probably won’t be able to tell it, just like you’re getting performance for free. But just FYI,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re doing it in a different way than you might expect. And yes, it is very much, like you said, Marco, like motion smoothing, where
⏹️ ▶️ John the show, this movie is 24 frames per second, but you want to see it at 30 or 60 frames per second,
⏹️ ▶️ John so we’ll just make up the in-between frames, and the TVs do a terrible job of this compared to DLSS 4. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John TV manufacturers don’t care, that’s why everything looks all janky and terrible. DLSS4 is amazing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is a little bit, it’s not shady, it’s not misleading,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just, it’s interesting that that’s how NVIDIA is framing their graphics performance.
⏹️ ▶️ John saying they’ve given up on making the performance better just by like, as they say, traditional
⏹️ ▶️ John brute force rendering, also known as rendering. But yeah, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John are, like they should be proud of DLSS4. It is amazing, they’ve been working on DLSS for years.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every other manufacturer has similar technologies, but I think the LSS4 is the best. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco manufacturing
⏹️ ▶️ John three frames for every one that actually gets rendered, but that’s their sort of like
⏹️ ▶️ John their big selling point. That’s the thing that’s making their graph so high and it is worth noting
⏹️ ▶️ John that this is happening in the graphics world. Eventually, why not just have the card make up all the frames
⏹️ ▶️ John and not have the game render them at all, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, look, for whatever it’s worth, I think it’s very impressive that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the GPUs can make up frames faster than they can just render new ones. And when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think about like, how many milliseconds do they have to make up each
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frame? It’s not very
⏹️ ▶️ John the good thing about making up the frames is I’m pretty sure when they make up the
⏹️ ▶️ John frames, they’re essentially working in a 2D world, whereas rendering the
⏹️ ▶️ John frames is this world of polygons and light rays and like just, you know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so like the problem space is massively narrowed. It’s like, you just need to make every pixel in this 4K image and I need you
⏹️ ▶️ John to make three of them. Whereas rendering the flame for real is like, hey, there’s 10 million polygons,
⏹️ ▶️ John 50 lights bouncing around and ray casting and like just so much stuff going on to figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out what those pixels should be. Whereas if you have an AI model and you, you know, and you just have
⏹️ ▶️ John to make a grid of pixels,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is amazing that they can, the thing that’s amazing is that they can do it in a way that doesn’t look horrendous, right? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John how does it not just become a smeary, blurry, ridiculous mess and that is the magic but I kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John understand how it could be faster than doing it the real way. Every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hand gets five fingers every four frames. Honestly it is kind of impressive like you know if they’re using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any kind of you know who knows what they mean by AI I don’t know the details of DLSS but
⏹️ ▶️ John they like models that they train they trained it on video games by showing it frames and video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but to to execute any kind of like reasonably modern AI model even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a small one to execute it like 50 times a second or whatever this is maybe more than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that while also being a GPU to render the rest of the game the rest of the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is a pretty impressive amount of just computing accomplishment right there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that being said you know I don’t know I don’t know anything about this maybe I shouldn’t even be talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it but it does seem like gamers are pushing their monitors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well into territory that human vision cannot perceive and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very much like when when when like high end audio files are like I run my deck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at one hundred and ninety two kilohertz and it’s like you can’t hear the difference between that and cd quality dude
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you’re telling yourself you can, but like science is telling you that you can’t. I don’t know where that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line is with refresh rates for monitors, but I’m pretty sure gamers are past it now.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, they’re not they’re not they’re not quite past it yet. I mean remember the thing that I had my blog that shows the like
⏹️ ▶️ John a responsiveness to drawing on a tablet. Do you remember that video that I’m always linking
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to? Oh, yeah, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. Right, there actually is a pretty long way to go when you start. It’s not like, can you see the
⏹️ ▶️ John difference? Is because you’re doing input. Now, granted, you’re not drawing on the screen, but like when you’re moving the mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever to like aim, because your input is influencing what’s on the screen, it is much more
⏹️ ▶️ John like the scribbling on your finger demo, in which case there’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ John a pretty long way to go. But the other thing to consider is, you don’t always get your peak frame rate. like
⏹️ ▶️ John frame rate varies throughout the thing and they just wanna make sure like, to get to make sure your minimum frame
⏹️ ▶️ John rate is in that good responsive threshold like scribbling your finger on the screen, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John To make sure that’s your minimum, your maximum is gonna be at absurd levels. The other thing is that
⏹️ ▶️ John traditional LCD displays become smeary messes at these refresh rates and they have to do all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ John of weird tricks to make that not happen that make the screen uglier. But OLED, OLED’s response
⏹️ ▶️ John rate is insane, right? As you know from like the stuttery effect that some people don’t like with OLEDs
⏹️ ▶️ John at 24 frames per second, the response rate of OLED pixels is incredibly fast. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so those two things combined to say, we’ve got OLED gaming monitors and they
⏹️ ▶️ John like 240 Hertz on an OLED gaming monitor actually works like it fully 100% works.
⏹️ ▶️ John It does not become a blurry mess. You don’t have to compromise the image quality. So those two technologies
⏹️ ▶️ John go hand in hand as does variable refresh rate And all that other stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John G-Sync is NVIDIA’s technology for this. So I think they’re making some good progress.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it is still an appreciable improvement in games. And we’ve just got so much farther to go in terms of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is the game actually rendering and how is the game world modeled? So as always, gaming will absorb
⏹️ ▶️ John every ounce of money, technology, and power that you have, and it continues to do so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of NVIDIA, they announced a $3,000 personal AI supercomputer called Digits.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hate how much I love this name. That’s very, very good. Reading from The Verge, NVIDIA
⏹️ ▶️ Casey announced that it’s launching a personal AI supercomputer called Project Digits in May.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The heart of Project Digits is the new GB10 Grace Blackwell superchip, which packs enough processing power
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to run sophisticated AI models while being compact enough to fit on a desk and run from a standard power
⏹️ ▶️ Casey outlet. This kind of processing power used to require much larger, more power-hungry systems. This desktop-sized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system can handle AI models with up to 200 billion parameters and has a starting price of $3,000. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey product itself looks a lot like a Mac Mini. Each Project Digit system comes equipped with 128GB of unified
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coherent memory and up to 4TB of NVMe storage. For
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even more demanding applications, two Project Digit systems can be linked together to handle models with up to 405 billion parameters.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Meta’s latest, excuse me, best model, Lama 3.1, has 405 billion parameters.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The GB10 chip delivers up to one petaflop of AI performance, which means it can perform
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one quadrillion AI calculations per second at FP4 precision, which helps make the calculations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey faster by making approximations. And the system features NVIDIA’s latest generation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CUDA cores and fifth generation tensor cores connected to an NVLink C2C to a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Grace CPU containing 20 power efficient ARM-based cores. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this is, the idea behind this is so, well, they’re taking, there’s things to note here. First to note that they have an
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM-based CPU. It’s like a 20 core ARM CPU. It’s probably pretty good, but that’s not even the important part of this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just setting that aside for a second, because we’ll get to that in the next item. NVIDIA making ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John CPUs, like just general purpose CPUs. And then they stick with it, one of their big giant GPUs, but this
⏹️ ▶️ John one is tuned for AI type stuff. This is letting you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a thing in your house that can run pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John big LM models. Right, again, they measure a number of parameters, 200 billion, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can get two of them to do 400 billion. Instead of going over the network and using one of NVIDIA’s real like $30,000,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I figure what they are, the H100 series or whatever, and NVIDIA sells GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John that cost as much as a car that go in data centers that are running like chat GPT and everything. That’s where NVIDIA
⏹️ ▶️ John is making all their money. Those are just so much bigger than these, so much more expensive. But if you want to have something
⏹️ ▶️ John in your house that can run a reasonable AI model, NVIDIA is making this little Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John mini type thing, which I’d say the pricing puts the Mac mini to shame considering what you get in this box,
⏹️ ▶️ John but what else is new? Anyway, I don’t know if there’s a market for this
⏹️ ▶️ John product. Maybe people who are like doing experiments with with models and they
⏹️ ▶️ John like they think a 200 billion or 400 billion parameter model is something that they could toy with. But it is
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting that this type of product, like that they’re starting
⏹️ ▶️ John to release a type of product saying like, Yeah, it’s great that you can have computers in the
⏹️ ▶️ John cloud that do all this stuff. But usually we charge you money for using that. If you just want
⏹️ ▶️ John to have it quote unquote, on prem, but not really, because it’s literally in your house and not in a data center,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get your own one of these and stick it on your desk. And actually, it’s not that big. Actually, it’s just like a little Mac Mini. And you can just
⏹️ ▶️ John have it sitting there headless and do your you know, model development on
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing. Now, I think when they say that it can run these models, I think they
⏹️ ▶️ John mean that you can do inference on them, as in you can put the model on there, run it and then and ask it questions.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they mean that you would use this to train because training costs hundreds of millions of dollars and huge data centers and
⏹️ ▶️ John long periods of time. But still worth noting two things. One, NVIDIA is continuing
⏹️ ▶️ John to make hardware that’s starting to look a little bit more PC like and two, the idea that
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a thing that you could have in your house to do what ChatGPT or Google Gemini
⏹️ ▶️ John or Microsoft, Microsoft is opening, what’s the third one I’m forgetting?
⏹️ ▶️ John llama models would do the stuff that’s happening, Claude or whatever is happening over there in a data center. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can have that happen in your house, and it will be closer, and it will run on hardware. You control could potentially be
⏹️ ▶️ John more private, and you can use it for development, and the other thing like that is that this tiny little Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John mini is ugly as sin because they’ve got some weird particle board salt and pepper notebook fake
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco thing going on. Interesting. I don’t know. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like to me, it’s kind of like the cyber truck. It’s like I don’t think that’s attractive, but I’m glad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are trying new things. Like it does not look like it’s copying Apple, unlike much of the industry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So hey, good for them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t tell even what they’re going for. But anyway, yeah. And so the final item I thought I think we have time for
⏹️ ▶️ John today because believe it or not, there is more from CES, but we can’t get to it all. The final item is the next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang can set plans for its own desktop GPU, CPU,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excuse me, CPU. It’s long been rumored, reading from the Verge, that NVIDIA is planning to break into the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey consumer CPU market in 2025, and we may have already had our first look at its new processor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On Monday at CES, the company unveiled Project Digits, a $3,000 personal AI supercomputer powered by a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new GB10 Grace Blackwell superchip. Reuters reports that yesterday, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hinted to investors and analysts that there are bigger plans for the ARM-based CPU within that chip,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey co-developed with Mediatek. Quote, you know, obviously we have plans, Huang said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey during an investor presentation. referring to the new 20 core desktop CPU, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he said that he would, quote, wait to tell you what they are. Co-developer Mediatek has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey its own ambitions though, and Huang suggested that it may also bring the CPU to market, independent of NVIDIA.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now they could, this is a quote, now they could provide that to us and they could keep that for themselves and serve the market.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so it was a great win-win, Huang said. Yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ John Mediatek. Mediatek makes many chips in the industry. One of the things they’re known for making
⏹️ ▶️ John the chips that power a lot of the TVs. There’s a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John disappointment with MediaTek over the past several years because their chips that are in the
⏹️ ▶️ John televisions have not had support for the
⏹️ ▶️ John latest HDMI standard on all the ports. So for example, my television, it’s a Sony television, it uses a MediaTek
⏹️ ▶️ John chip for a part of its processing to handle like the HDMI and stuff. And it only supports
⏹️ ▶️ John two HDMI 2.1 ports that do 48 gigabits per second. And then the other two
⏹️ ▶️ John ports are lower bandwidth. The companies that don’t use MediaTek and make their own chips, which includes
⏹️ ▶️ John LG and I believe Samsung, their chips can have four HDMI 2.1 ports
⏹️ ▶️ John and have for many years. And every year there’s a new MediaTek chip that comes out. It’s like surely this year,
⏹️ ▶️ John the MediaTek chip will support four HDMI 2.1 connections. And finally, this weird limitation where
⏹️ ▶️ John you got two good ports and two bad ports, that’ll be gone. And insert TV brand here, will be just
⏹️ ▶️ John like LG and Samsung and they’ll have full four ports. And here we are at the advent of HDMI 2.2. And
⏹️ ▶️ John MediaTek still, still does not have a TV chip that can support four HDMI 2.1 ports and we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John about to have HDMI 2.2. So I’m a little bit angry at MediaTek, but let’s set that
⏹️ ▶️ John aside. Nvidia, why would they be interested in making anything
⏹️ ▶️ John on the desktop for desktop CPUs? Well, we’ve talked about this before, Microsoft with its Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John on ARM and the, what was it called? The Copilot Plus PC branding thing where they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM based Windows computers are required to have certain minimum AI capabilities.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Nvidia must be looking at this and saying, we could do that. We’re the best at AI. We have the best
⏹️ ▶️ John GPUs. We’ve got this sewn up. All we need is a little ARM CPU and we’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John some of them and we have some partners that help us and ARM has chip design that’s like, we can do this in our sleep.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I have to say, of all the different companies that are making chips that are embarrassing, Intel’s
⏹️ ▶️ John sad chips, you know, the ARM chips made for Windows PCs, Nvidia
⏹️ ▶️ John would probably be really good at it. Like, they’re pretty good at making chips. They’re definitely good at making the AI and
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU parts. They’re actually pretty good at making mobile stuff. We don’t have time for it today, but we’ll get to it in a future
⏹️ ▶️ John show, maybe talking about, there is a mobile 5090. Like Marco has got those gaming laptops with
⏹️ ▶️ John mobile Nvidia chips in them. They do make mobile chips. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John them. Yeah, low power is not Nvidia’s strength strength, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John that like this little, this little Mac mini thing that we just talked about, the digits thing, it’s a tiny little computer. It doesn’t take a
⏹️ ▶️ John huge amount of power and it’s surprisingly powerful. So this is something to watch. Like if Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John is gonna be having its problems that we’ve discussed on past shows and Microsoft is trying to go
⏹️ ▶️ John to ARM, and as you know, I’m rooting for them to go to ARM so I can play Windows games on my
⏹️ ▶️ John future ARM Mac. Still probably not happening, but anyway, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John love it if Nvidia said, you know what? All right, fine, fine. If no one else is gonna do it, we
⏹️ ▶️ John will become the new Intel in the PC world. We will make not just the best GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John in the world, but also we’ll make the CPUs too. We’ll put them on a little SoC, we’ll put them in your
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops, fine. Like they could be essentially the Apple of the PC
⏹️ ▶️ John world where they make the best silicon that everyone wants to put in their high-end things or whatever and
⏹️ ▶️ John so far they’ve just been like, why would we do that? making so much money making these AI, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I don’t figure what they call them. They’re not really called GPUs, but these AI things that cost as much as a
⏹️ ▶️ John car that people buy by the hundreds and thousands to train their models. We’re making so much money doing that, why would
⏹️ ▶️ John we even bother? But I think they’re kind of like in their eye and saying, if no one else is gonna do it, maybe we will. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so I’m rooting for them. I’m not rooting for MediaTek cause I’m still mad at them about the HDMI thing, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Nvidia should just make its own CPU and they’ve already got their own GPUs and they should just take over
⏹️ ▶️ John the entire PC industry and provide competition for Apple.
Storacusa TestFlight plan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so John, it seems like every week we get at least a little bit of an update on your app. Can you give us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even just a very quick update as to the state of the world?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m getting to the point where I’m going to start doing test flight beta of
⏹️ ▶️ John my app. And one of the things that Casey did with his last
⏹️ ▶️ John app was open up the test flight to ATP members
⏹️ ▶️ John by, did you do it just by putting it on like the member page? Yep, that’s right. Yeah, but
⏹️ ▶️ John putting the URL to get on the test flight on everybody’s member page So that would be a way
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of sending out like invitation emails to everybody you would just
⏹️ ▶️ John to your member page and you’d Say hey, do you want to try the test flight beta of John’s app? Here’s the URL for it
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m thinking about doing that. I’m probably Going to do that not a hundred percent,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m probably going to do that when I’m ready to do it Which means that but I do actually do that
⏹️ ▶️ John There is multiple factors. One, I have to tell everyone the name of the app, which I haven’t yet. You’d
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco find out when the test flight came in,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Two, probably on a future episode, I will have to give this whole big
⏹️ ▶️ John spiel about what it’s going to mean to be on the test flight for this app. I’ll probably do what Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John did, which is like, okay, if you’re an ATP member, you get access to the test flight. If you don’t want it, fine, just ignore it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you do want it, you get it. But when the app is finally released, all
⏹️ ▶️ John those test flights will expire. Like it’ll be a separate group just for ATP members and it will just
⏹️ ▶️ John be for the lead up to the release. So it’s not a way to get a free copy of the app. Although
⏹️ ▶️ John unlike Casey’s app, if you got on my test flight and use my app during the test flight period,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could use it to find all the duplicate files in your drive and then just never have to buy it. And so maybe this is just
⏹️ ▶️ John an incredible money losing proposition for me. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John still leaning towards doing it just for multiple reasons. One, Casey has told me he found the test flight beta giving it
⏹️ ▶️ John to ATP members valuable for his development. I mean, if you want to expand on that, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, we don’t need to belabor it, but very briefly, I had a pretty robust test flight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crew, if you will, of I want to say 20 to 40 people that were friends or even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somewhat distant friends, but friends that I thought would want to be able to give me some useful feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Opening it up to a far more international audience, opening it up to people who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are of different abilities and different familiarities with English, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just take different approaches to watching movies and TV shows and things of that nature, it really, really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, made the app a lot better. It also showed me that there were some things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that even though I feel very strongly about them, I need to cave because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty much all of my users disagree with me. So a great example of this is I didn’t include ratings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anywhere in the app when it was starting the test flight cycle, and if it were left up to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would still not have them in the app because I find ratings to be silly and useless and I don’t like them at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think they’re a waste of time. However, everyone said to me, where are the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ratings? I must have the ratings. So after being browbeat for literally months about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, I eventually added the ratings. And I think even though I don’t like them being there, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for my users, it was the right call. So that’s a silly, you know, anecdote about why I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey opening it up to a much broader audience really helped make the app that much better. Not to mention, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bug fixes and things of that nature, which are obvious. So I really enjoyed that process.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Obviously I caught everyone off as soon as the app was released and I think, you know, for various,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey several reasons, I think John, you should do the same. But yeah, I definitely enjoyed it and I definitely think it was
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I will definitely need like a lot of, a lot of people to try the app. This is the app
⏹️ ▶️ John that I described as an incredibly dangerous app on a previous episode, especially in the test flight beta because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John messing with files on your disk. And if something’s gonna hose them, it’s probably gonna be a beta. So just FYI,
⏹️ ▶️ John for people who are considering getting on TestFlight, really think about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John The first several versions of the TestFlight, the first many versions of the TestFlight won’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ John do the final replacement of your file with clones. It’ll do everything up to that point.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, I would just love to get a larger group to try it out and send me all their error reports. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ John our listeners tend to be tech nerds, so I bet they’re good at providing good bug reports and
⏹️ ▶️ John all that stuff. So yeah, I’m definitely leaning towards doing it. Like the big downside, like I said, is that all I’m basically
⏹️ ▶️ John doing is eliminating all my potential customers because the only people who are ever gonna buy this app are people who listen to the show and I
⏹️ ▶️ John give the app to every one of them for free and they get rid of all their duplicates. There’s no reason ever to buy the app. Unlike Casey’s
⏹️ ▶️ John app, because they’re constantly watching new movies and TV shows and wanna know who’s in them. My app, they just fix everything on their
⏹️ ▶️ John disc and they’re like, well, I don’t need to buy this cause it got on the test slide.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still probably gonna do it. More news on that in future shows.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thank you to our sponsors this week. Wild Grain and Delete Me. And thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to our members who support us directly, you can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the perks of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus segment. This week on Overtime, we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be talking about the news that Apple Intelligence summaries might be getting warning labels or some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other kind of hedging features on them or reporting features on them as a result of some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco BBC News headline drama recently. So we’re gonna be talking about that in Overtime. You can join and hear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that and all of our other Overtimes all of our previous and future member content, https://www.attp.fm.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks everyone, 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,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh it was accidental John didn’t do any research,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental And you
⏹️ ▶️ John can find the show notes at atp.fm And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re into mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they did it mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check podcast
Thank you, patrons!
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, before we get to our proper after show, which will be a Marco special, I wanted to take this time, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve had this, I didn’t have it on my calendar, but I had it in my mind, that at least once per year, I’m gonna do
⏹️ ▶️ John this, which is I want to thank the ATP patrons. And I don’t wanna do it constantly,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t wanna have it be a thing that’s in the show all the time, but once per year seems appropriate to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John You may be wondering, what the heck is an ATP patron? Am I an ATP patron? You would know if you were. Here’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP patrons are. First of all, you wanna find out? go to atp.fn slash patron. ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John patrons are people who choose to become ATP members, but they want to pay
⏹️ ▶️ John more money than we charge for membership. Yes, you heard that right. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco why does this
⏹️ ▶️ John exist? Because people asked for it. They said, hey, I’m an ATP member, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish there was a way I could give you more money. And we’d be like, oh, that’s very nice of you. But eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John several years in, people kept asking about it. I’m like, you know what? They keep asking us for a way to give
⏹️ ▶️ John more money. I’m gonna make it. And so I did. I called an ATB patron, atb.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John slash patron if you’re interested. Obviously not a lot of people do this. I think I
⏹️ ▶️ John tried to explain it well on the FAQ that that URL
⏹️ ▶️ John leads to. But they’re a small number, but they’re very special to me for multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John reasons. First of all, isn’t that nice of them? They want to support the show above and beyond what membership does.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t want to keep buying t-shirts and other things like that that just want to give more money on a monthly or
⏹️ ▶️ John annual basis above and beyond what we charge. Second reason is back last
⏹️ ▶️ John year, or yeah, I think it was last year, when we did the annual discount, so it was the decrease the price of
⏹️ ▶️ John annual membership, we’re so nervous about that, we did all these surveys about it because like as soon as we do that, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John just multiply the number of your annual memberships by the discount, that’s how much money you’re losing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you hope you’re gonna make up that gap by more people signing up. But let me tell
⏹️ ▶️ John you, when we did that annual membership, more people did sign up, but I had this thing that I was running, they’re like, are we in the black yet?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is this, you know, because on day zero, it’s a money loser, right? And then you’re like, okay, we’re getting closer and closer to break even, closer and closer
⏹️ ▶️ John to break even. It didn’t look like we were gonna make it. And you know what put us over the top? ATP patrons.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s not a lot of them. I could read their names in the show if it wasn’t a privacy violation, and I won’t do that, right? There’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of them. But I look at the list of them all the time, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it gives me warm fuzzies, and it literally gives me additional dollars, and it literally made our annual membership
⏹️ ▶️ John get past break even. So I just wanna take this time once per year, I’m gonna do this again next year. Thank you
⏹️ ▶️ John to every ATP patron. The small number of, I feel like I could meet you all and shake all
⏹️ ▶️ John of your hands. Even the people who choose to pay one more dollar than the list price
⏹️ ▶️ John for membership, we appreciate it because that really shows us
⏹️ ▶️ John your ability to pay for it, your desire to pay for it, you wanted a way to pay more and now you have
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So I wanted to thank everybody out there. Thank you for being an ATP patron. That’s all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, thank you for me as well. And I’m sure Casey too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, very much so. I mean, any member, of course, you have our undying love and gratitude, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the patrons have just that little bit more. So, thank you to all of you.
Marco bought something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So in the show notes, uh, Marco is done what Marco loves to do and,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and has written something deeply vague in the show notes or our internal show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes. It says Marco bought something, which honestly is evergreen because I feel like that’s every episode,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but then it says parenthesis long parenthesis. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh no. What have you done this time?
⏹️ ▶️ John What did he buy something long
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey or is it going to be a long segment about something that he bought?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. I’m guessing the latter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably the latter. I have bought the second worst
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing someone can buy.
⏹️ ▶️ John A boat? It’s not a boat, that’s the first worst thing. Bingo. Let me try to guess what it is. The second worst thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John A pickup. An Italian sports car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, if only. I would say some sort of vehicle, I’m not clear what kind though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, I want to first preface this by saying I’m only sharing this information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I really trust our audience to be good. Please don’t make me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regret sharing this. Please don’t be creepy about this. Please don’t make this weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, is it golf clubs? No, it’s much worse, Perks, just than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right. Now, this was also never part of my plan,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but sometimes life deals you a different hand than you expected,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and your plans change. Now, in the context, last winter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re in the middle of a giant house move and a renovation of the new house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This was a massively stressful and disruptive time for my family, our home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life, our logistics. Also, last winter, I’m in the middle of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the giant overcast rewrite. This is a massively stressful and disruptive time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my professional life and my app as well. So this is just a massively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco busy, disruptive, hectic time. And last winter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the owner of my favorite restaurant… Oh no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh no! Oh my f***ing god, you did not buy… I don’t want to name it, but you did not buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a zoo! The owner of my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who is in his late 70s and wants to retire, says, I’m gonna sell the restaurant.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, no. No, we need you on the show. You don’t have time for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John this, no. We
⏹️ ▶️ John need you not to drain your fortune into this terrible money losing business.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, I went back to Tiff and I was like, oh my God, they’re selling. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco his family has been running it, but his kids don’t live nearby, so they’re not gonna run it after all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never thought it would be for sale in the public market. And I went to Tiff, I’m like, crap,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re selling, you know, what a, what a shame it’s our favorite restaurant. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tiff’s like, should we buy it?
⏹️ ▶️ John You try to give her the blame for this. Is this what’s happening now?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, I, I, I cannot stand for this. I can’t, this is not making me happy. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting so stressed out just listening to the story.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I was like, well, can we buy it? Like, what would that look like? We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to this restaurant all the time. Everyone there knows us. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know everyone there. The first thing we wanted to do was we met with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the person who would probably manage it if we did it. And we met with her and we’re like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how could this work? Could we buy this? And could you run it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It went great and she was very, you know, very enthusiastic about the prospects and very supportive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you talk to anyone else who has ever owned a restaurant besides the person who was going to be getting money from you
⏹️ ▶️ John to run this restaurant?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the reason this even seemed plausible is that relative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to other restaurant situations, this is less difficult. So it wouldn’t be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco starting a restaurant from scratch. It wouldn’t be changing a restaurant. It wouldn’t be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buying a failing restaurant. Have you seen The Bear, by the way? Yes. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at this time, we were watching The Bear. It made you say, you know what, that’s for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we went back and we’re like thinking about it. We started looking at like if we bought it, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would we pay for it? How would this work? How would that work? And we were waffling over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and as we were trying to figure out whether we should do it one night Tiff said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me. Could you imagine our life here without this place?
⏹️ ▶️ John You should have said yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the thing is, if we didn’t buy it, I know what would happen. I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the people at the beach who would have the money and the motivation to buy restaurants. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would not be the same. And this restaurant is a beloved community restaurant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like all the locals go here. Everyone loves this place who goes here.
⏹️ ▶️ John What would happen to the restaurant if the other people bought it? Tell me the nightmare scenario. Give me the
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a wonderful life nightmare scenario.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Either rapid changes into mediocrity or a gradual slide into mediocrity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What makes this place, the reason why everyone loves this place is that it’s very good. It isn’t just good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the beach because you know the beach it’s a captive audience. It’s like living in a baseball stadium.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Everyone there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is guaranteed a certain number of customers just because they’re a captive audience and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not everything is good or you know sometimes things are overpriced or whatever like It’s not an amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco environment for quality. Like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. Right. This place is just good in absolute terms. Like it’s better than it needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be given where it is. And more importantly, it’s consistent. It’s always been consistent. And that’s something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I cannot say about almost any other place there. And so everyone loves this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place. Like the locals are always there. The people who are like spending all summer there. It’s where you go when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what’s good. You go here. So when she said, what you know could we imagine a life without it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like no like because that’s that’s our place it’s it’s a bar and a restaurant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s our bar and it’s our restaurant.
⏹️ ▶️ John now apparently. Did you tell her you’d meet her anytime she wants?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we have bought it we bought a restaurant. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my god congratulations but I cannot believe you’ve done this and please don’t quit the show. Can you quit Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before you quit the show please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here’s no I’m not quitting the show or Evercast. Here’s why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we thought we could do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know you can buy boom boom sauce like from pens. You can bulk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey order the stuff. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John need to buy an entire restaurant to get it.
⏹️ ▶️ John The most convenient way to get unlimited supply of boom boom sauce.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So here’s why we because look and we were talking to everybody you know we were talking like the the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accountant, the bank, the lawyer, everyone. You would say, you know, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna wanna do this, and every single time, everybody would say, why?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are you sure? And of course, the second question was always, do you have any experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running restaurants? No. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve both worked in restaurants, but that’s not the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. So the reason why is because we know all the people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everyone except the owner’s family, everyone else is staying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The chef, the entire kitchen crew, the front of house staff, our manager, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assistant manager, everyone else is staying and they all support us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know how to run a restaurant, but they do. This is gonna be a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life change and a huge challenge, I know that. I am not so naive to think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is, I’m just gonna be able to breeze through this. I mean, I’ve been working on the acquisition for a year. I already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a liquor license. I’ve already filed paperwork with the town. Like, there’s all that, like, we’ve already done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the stuff. Like, most of the setup paperwork. That’s already behind me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was doing it while we were renovating our house and while I was rewriting my app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there were a few ATP episodes last year as well. So this has all been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going on for a year. I think we can do it and I think we can do it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we care so much, we love the place, and our priorities are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maintaining the quality, maintaining the standards, and maintaining the really good staff that it has. has and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think with that drive as opposed to like, you know, the thing is and this is you know, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a position of privilege here like this will not be our family’s only income
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if it if it makes less money one year or if there’s you know, some like, you know, like a natural disaster that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really impacts the beaks that read that reduces things to the point where we actually lose money in a year will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be okay. We can take that.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I was gonna ask. Does this restaurant make money and do you plan on it making money? Is this just a charitable thing that you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John center or do you actually expect it to be a source of income and has it been in past years?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so as part of the deal, they shared their accounting of previous years with us and we had our accountant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at it and just make sure everything looked on the up and up and there were no weird tricks or anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything looks good. The fact is, so first of all, it’s also a seasonal business. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re only needing to work on it for six months a year and it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make money Because again, the beach, like certain things about working at certain things about operating at the beach are harder or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more expensive. But also you do have a lot of customers. There is not that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much competition and there can’t ever be any more due to local zoning regulations. People want to go to the beach
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and go to a restaurant and go to a bar. So they make good money consistently. And you know, we’ve run the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco numbers a bunch of different ways and I think we can keep it making money while also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having a general manager do the vast majority of, of, you know, the owners were previously doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I know this is going to be very, very hard. Again, sometimes life deals you a different hand than you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expected. I didn’t ever want to own a restaurant or plan to own a restaurant. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never thought this particular restaurant would be for sale. I assumed it would have stayed within the family. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the kind of place where in town people would… It’s the kind of place you would describe as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an institution, like some old steakhouse. That’s what people think of this place. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco summer, we decided to buy it and after we were under contract, Tiff and I, you know, they were still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open for the season and we would like, you know, go there all the time, of course, and we’d look around and be like, look at how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone loves this place. Like you look around and you see, because you know, it’s a small town, we know a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people in town. So you look around and you see like, oh, they live here, they live here, we know them, there’s our neighbors, there’s our friends, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you see everyone and everyone just goes to this place to enjoy themselves. Again, that’s not true
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of everywhere, like you know, different places have different clientele, different dynamics and like, This is like the home base of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco town. And if this would get worse or go away, that would be a big loss
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the community. And so we partly saw it as an act of community service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or an act of like historical preservation almost. But also it is also a successful business. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only reason that they’re selling it is because the owner is old and wants to retire. Like that makes sense. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fair. You know, he’s worked his butt off for a very long time. We kind of felt like it’s us giving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to the community. And again, and this is from a place of great privilege that we could buy it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reality of what would happen if we didn’t would be a group of investors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have to buy it probably because prices are high out there. Because it’s New York, it’s fire round, it’s real estate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It includes the building. So that is part of the reason why it’s a safer business for us because we own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the building too. Again, it’s one of the reasons that makes this easier than many restaurant businesses. It’s like when you own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your own building, that’s a pretty big deal. And we know that anybody else who would have bought it, Again, it would have been a group
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of dissociated investors. And when I see how that works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in other places in town, it doesn’t lead to quality very reliably.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sometimes it can work, it often doesn’t. And we just didn’t wanna take that risk for a place that was so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important to us and the community. And we knew that we can do this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with our priorities and with our resources, we think we can do a good job.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if it turns out we can’t, we can sell it again down the road. But I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that will happen. I think we will be in this for the long haul. I mean, in the CGP Grey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cortex, you know, theme parlance, I kind of see this as the year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of new challenges. In a lot of other areas of my life, that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the tech areas, I kind of feel like I beat the game and I’m just walking around now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know? Like, it isn’t that there’s no challenges left me in tech, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have done a lot in tech already and I realize that not everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my life needs to be tech. What I’m itching to do right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not launch a bunch more apps. I like the app I run now, it’s great. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not all I want to do with my life is just make another app, then another app, then another app. I like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app and I’m going to keep running it. I like this podcast and I’m going to keep doing it. I also have other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things in my life, other things I do, and I think this is going to be a big addition to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the things that I find lacking in tech is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in-person connection. You know, we’re really good at other kinds of connection in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tech. We built amazing communication platforms and media platforms and networks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but when you’re really having a challenging time or you really want to hang out with your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco friends, nothing beats in-person. And one of the places in-person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happens is at a bar or a restaurant. And the beach is a very special place to me. It always has been.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so for this to be my restaurant, my bar at the beach, it’s such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a community hub there, which is already a very special town to me. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a place where I’ve gotten a lot of in-person connection.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also doing this will allow me to broaden my horizons in a bunch of ways. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, probably the scariest one, but one that I’m, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m ready to tackle. I’ve never managed people. I’ve never had a staff,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was one of the first things I thought about is that this, this man who says he would be a terrible boss and never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wants to be a boss, has now bought himself a staff of 10, 20, 30?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 30. Yep. Oh gosh. Oh no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And again, granted, we are delegating most of the operations to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the general manager. I’m sure some of it will land on us, but we have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good staff in place and we have a really good manager and that will help
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot. Like a lot. We wouldn’t have done it without that in place.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you know, obviously there will be challenges, managing a staff. I’ve never even operated a physical business.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even just the basics of like, real, like business real estate. Like I learned that you pay very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different rates for power and internet service when you are a storefront.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s all sorts of like, just realities, like different types of insurance I have to have now. Different, you know, liabilities,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco workers comp, like all, there’s so much stuff I’ve never had to deal with because of the types of businesses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I’d be running. real life business things that I’ve never had to tackle. And yeah, some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them are pains in the butt, but most of them are learning experiences. There’s also a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of tech in a restaurant, a lot. Like there’s like, you know, there’s all like the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I love the acronym, the POS, the point of sale system. I laugh every time I see POS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those are all iPads and tablets now, they’re networked. One of the complaints of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco staff from the previous setup is that the networking wasn’t very strong because some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wall blocked the signal. I’m like, hey, I don’t know how to run a restaurant, but that part, that I can fix.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s opportunities like that for me to help out in ways that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know how. Yeah, I can transfer the website to a new domain, no problem, I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our email set up. I got
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you make the menu not a PDF?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, of course.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, yeah, I’ve made fun of restaurant websites so much over time, and now everyone can come and make fun of mine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and then the hours and the phone number
⏹️ ▶️ John at the top, the top and the phone number and the address. Oh my god.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, there’s like there’s there’s so much. Look collaboration like today. I was trying out notion and base camp.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m trying to figure out like, you know, how do I organize tasks between you know, like like me tiff and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco manager like how do how do we do that? Like there’s just so much stuff that huge areas of tech that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never had to use. There’s things like, how do you have a TV signal that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco broadcasts two TVs in the bar that shows the same thing on both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the source is some kind of internet smart TV based like HDMI,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, encrypted thing? And I don’t, I just, the answer like, do you strip HTCP somehow? Is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that a thing? Like, I’m still working on that one. I don’t, I don’t know how to strip HTCP. If you know, tell me.
⏹️ ▶️ John They make splitter and repeater boxes. Is they use them on, I know about them, but they use them for TV reviews when they want to show the
⏹️ ▶️ John same signal on three different TVs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does it work with HTCP? Yeah. DRM ruins everything. Alright, anyway, so we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that. But like, there’s all sorts of, and part of it also, like, because it’s at the beach,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are huge areas of complexity that we don’t have to deal with. For instance, at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the beach, there’s no delivery drivers, because there’s no drivers, because there’s no roads and there’s no cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you don’t have to, we don’t have to deal with like DoorDash and UberEats and that, you know, there’s so much stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t have to deal with there. So there’s all sorts of opportunities there for me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to explore new tech. So don’t worry, there’s going to be plenty of show content possibilities as I discover like, wow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco POS is kind of suck. Or all the different… Hey, you know what? You can’t just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco play music over the speakers. That’s not legal. You can’t just show pay-per-view sports on the TVs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s also not legal. There’s all sorts of stuff like that that I can discover that many of our listeners
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably might use in their lives that we’ve never had exposure to before. But also just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purely from the angle of personal development and new challenges,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m very much looking forward to this. It’s a brand new type of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of it I’m going to be good at just because I know tech and I’m good at paperwork. I’ve had a lot of business. I’ve done a lot of paperwork.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So some of it’s just that. A lot of it I’m going to be terrible at. And there’s going to be a huge learning curve.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And one of the biggest things, I’m going to have to learn to delegate and ask for help, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am never, I’ve never been good at those things, but I’m gonna have to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think it’s gonna be really interesting. I know on paper, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a stupid thing to do. That’s why like the accountants and the bankers are like, why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are you doing this? Because on paper, this makes no sense. But the people who know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the restaurant and who know us, the reaction from them largely has been,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank God we bought it that someone else didn’t. And that makes me feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like we’re really doing the right thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So having watched now hundreds of hours of people rebuilding boats on YouTube,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to say that I think the boat would probably be easier.
⏹️ ▶️ John But, but I will say this after hearing your whole story, two things. One, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, this restaurant sounds like it is much more likely to either make money or break even in the boat, because boats
⏹️ ▶️ John really are a money pit. Whereas this is a business that already makes money, and worst case scenario, you sell it because you have the
⏹️ ▶️ John real estate. That is your main asset, and that is going to appreciate. So even if you lose money on the restaurant every single year,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could still come out even or ahead long term on this just by selling the property. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John great. And two, everything you’re saying about doing this as a community service makes total sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, we all know what happens when, in the business world, private equity or in the, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John physical world, like, uh, investors come and do like, they want to buy this thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John makes money. And the first thing they want to do is how can we cut costs so that the profit
⏹️ ▶️ John increases? And so how can we cut costs? Let’s, you know, fire people, make everything cheaper, anything we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John spending too much money on. Can we find a crappier version of that that is still marginally acceptable?
⏹️ ▶️ John And you just drain every ounce of value out of the business by cutting costs and squeezing
⏹️ ▶️ John everything and just making it miserable until eventually it goes bust and then you’re like, oh well, we made money
⏹️ ▶️ John during those years and it’s just, it’s a terrible thing. And I know you’re not saying to the people who would have bought
⏹️ ▶️ John it instead of you are that bad, but it’s the same type of dynamic whereas they don’t care about
⏹️ ▶️ John the restaurant as an institution, they see it as a business, which is why I think the bankers and the accountants
⏹️ ▶️ John are saying, as a business move, this makes no sense. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’d be better if you just took this money and invested it somewhere. But as a way to
⏹️ ▶️ John prevent someone who sees it as a business from buying this business and treating it like a
⏹️ ▶️ John business and immediately cutting costs and decreasing quality because, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a captive audience and you’re gonna be making money anyway and essentially ruining your favorite restaurant, it does make some sense. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is a noble thing that you’re doing. I think it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not gonna say foolish, I’m going to say, let’s say brave. Let’s use that, let’s say it
⏹️ ▶️ John is a brave thing that you’re doing. like you’re doing it for the right reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What’d you say that Marco has courage?
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s not removing a headphone port from the restaurant. We’ll continue to have headphone ports.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like I said, I feel like in like now that you told me that they own the building and you’ve got the property
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes me feel so much better about and the fact that the business has been making money up until that point, that worst
⏹️ ▶️ John case scenario, oh well, you will be able to sell it. That real estate
⏹️ ▶️ John will even when when the hurricane comes and washes every building off of the island, you will still be able to sell that real estate
⏹️ ▶️ John because it will still be worth money to somebody who’s going to rebuild after the hurricane
⏹️ ▶️ John wipes all the structures off. Right. So I wish you luck. I hope you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get too distracted from ATP and I think you are trying to do a very good thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. I mean, look, how have I been the last year?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, have you ever met anyone who runs a restaurant? Do they seem relaxed to you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I appreciate, I I appreciate what you’re saying. And what you said a minute ago about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pressures of investors who treat it as a business, that’s why we didn’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to a group of investors. Because even, again, even if they have the best of intentions, the reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, if you’re looking at it as an investment, you want to return on your investment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You want to make
⏹️ ▶️ John money. How can we reduce costs and increase income? And that’s not what you’re trying to do. You’re literally
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to say, how can I make this not become bad? Right, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John is a different motivation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and what I’ve told the GM is, if you have to make a decision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between something that is doing something the best way or the right way or something that might save
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit of money, do it the best way, I’d rather be the best and make less money than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maximize for money. And that’s something that groups of investors don’t have the privilege of doing. Like, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to make money. And they can go into it with the best of intentions, but the reality is that over time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what they want. That’s what they need. So that tends to happen over time with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything that has a bunch of investors. Whereas we can actually just treat it as a labor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of love. That’s not to say it’s going to lose money. It won’t, but as maybe the first year, because we’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do some upgrades here and there, some kitchen equipment and stuff like that. But for the most part, we intend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this and we think there’s a pretty good chance that it will be a profitable business. It’s not going to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the margins that software has, because our margins are embarrassingly great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will be a business and we can still make a profit while also making it really great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, do I need to have a backup cell connection on the internet connection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that we can have our TVs and our POS work during a power outage? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business-wise, that’s probably 60 bucks a month we don’t need to spend. But I’m gonna spend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, because I want it to be good. Well, you know, one of the other things, like, there’s so many opportunities in restaurants. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see it, again, these are seasonal businesses. in a place where it’s expensive to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get stuff shipped to it. A lot of businesses have to cut costs just to stay afloat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on little shortcuts here and there. And one of those things might be like, towards the end of the season, if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run out of their main kegs, they don’t order new kegs, if they’re gonna close in like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three weeks. Because well, a keg is 100 bucks or whatever, and we might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not make that much on it. I’m gonna direct the staff, whatever is our set that we have, two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beers at the end of the season. Just keep them in stock. If you wanna just order another keg,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s fine. I would rather the customers know that they can get what they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want until the day we close than to go there and be disappointed. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all sorts of opportunities like that for like, you know, I am not a good restaurateur
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet. Maybe I’ll become one someday. Maybe I’ll never be one, I don’t know. But I am, I know people, I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business stuff like that. From my appins, I know a lot about things like pricing psychology,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco customer feelings, customer loyalty, customer satisfaction. I know a lot about that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there are things I can bring to this business, even if it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything regarding the actual logistics of running a restaurant yet. So I do think this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is gonna be very interesting, but I like the new challenge of it, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the diversification of it, and I like the community service angle for it. And even though I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna be totally underwater this summer, hopefully just figuratively,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with all sorts of work and just a hectic situation for a little while,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also know I’m not doing it alone. If I try to do it alone, I will definitely fail. But I also know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I can’t and am not doing it alone. Tiff and I are both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this together and we have a really good staff. I cannot keep saying that enough. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not saying this as a like, you know, Apple support the troops kind of thing. They really are an excellent staff and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why we are doing it. That’s why we knew we could do it. And I think we will be pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at keeping the good people. At getting the best people and keeping the best people. And because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we will be good at that, everything else I think will follow. We are good at keeping good people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the beach. So we’ll see how it goes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you should do, I don’t know if this is helpful for the show, maybe good for after shows, is what I think you should both do is
⏹️ ▶️ John you should all do every job at the restaurant over the course of the summer
⏹️ ▶️ John period of time. You’ve got to be a waiter. You’ve got to be the hostess. You’ve got to wash dishes. You’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a line cook. Well, maybe not a cook. Everything that you think you could conceivably do that you
⏹️ ▶️ John would hire someone for the season to do, you should also do just so you understand that job and
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can have hilarious stories about how bad you are at it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am so here for this. No, I want to take a moment and echo what John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, that while I, as your friend, I am deeply worried that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are biting off so much more than you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John can chew. You’re such a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worrier. I am. And I am naturally a worrier. And I’m also worried that, you know, that it’s going to have an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey impact on the show some way, somehow. And I don’t mean that to be a turd. I’m just saying, you know, this is a, this is going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an incredible time suck. Hopefully it isn’t, but it’s likely to be an incredible time suck. So I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that things are still kosher with the, with, you know, getting everything done in, in,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a timely fashion and so on and so forth. But with all that caveating aside, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when we joined our local pool, which I’ve talked about from time to time on the show, this was, I want to say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 2022, I might have that wrong, but we joined our local pool and it’s a very unremarkable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pool. In fact, in a lot of ways, it’s kind of a crappy pool. Like the facilities are not great, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s not the point. The point is it’s a place where we can go and swim around in the summertime, or at least that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what we thought we were signing up for. In reality, what we signed up for was a third place.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, we’ve talked about this, I think in the past, but for so many people, there’s your home, your work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a third place. And maybe that’s church or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe it’s a club or something like that. But our family, the List family didn’t really have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey third place for a long, long, long time. And obviously none of us really did during COVID.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, coming out of COVID, we decided to join the pool in, even though we wanted it as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a place where we could go and have some fun during the summer, you know, just the four of us, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very quickly became our third place. And as someone who did not grow up with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any particular organized religion in my life, which I would argue is mostly for the best, but that’s neither here nor there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t really ever have a solid third place. You know, I had work or school
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that was it in home. You know, I never really had a third place. And the pool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was an incredible, incredible, valuable addition
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to our lives. Not because it’s some hoity-toity fancy pool. Again, it was built in like the 70s. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey arguably falling apart as we speak. It’s not fancy, but that’s not the point. The point was, it was a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey place where we could gather with friends. And I would pay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe not literally, but I would figuratively pay any amount of money to keep that alive. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it became incredibly important to our family. And since you and Tiff are in the position that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey literally pay some money to keep your third place alive, it does make perfect sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I fear for you, but it makes perfect sense. And I echo what John says, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is a very bold thing to do. It’s… If you’re gonna have a midlife crisis, this is a fun way to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do it. And I hope it remains fun for both of you for a very long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Way more fun than maintaining a boat, I can guarantee you that. And to be clear,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the show and your worries, I would give up Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before I’d give up ATP. I don’t think I’d need to give up either one, honestly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This has been quite a year trying to get the Overcast to rewrite,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the move, the house move, getting all this stuff done during this year while also going into contract
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do the financing, going into contract for this, getting the liquor license temporary approved, all this stuff that I’ve been doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All of that stuff in the other world, in the Overcast world, the huge amount of time Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco took in 2024, it’s not going to take that much time in 2025 in all likelihood.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The massive rewrite is pretty much done. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole app isn’t done, but the rate at which I need to be writing code every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day has dropped dramatically. In tech, I kind of feel, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just that I kind of beat the game, but like the world of tech that is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s say, above us, like larger things, larger moves, larger trends,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco larger companies, the big social networks and the big tech companies,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of the fun has drained out of that for the small players like us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And look, I’m going to love computers forever. I love Apple products, even as Apple the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company is being a little bit turdy in certain areas. I love Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products, I love computers, I will want to talk about these forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But all the stuff about Meta’s social
⏹️ ▶️ Marco policies and all this stuff, I am getting so worn out and burnt out with that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of stuff. when you look at like you know a lot of these bigger companies the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world of big tech the nerds left the stage a long time ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the business people have been running things for quite some time and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world of big tech looks a lot like the world of any other big mature industry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the higher up you go or the bigger you try to get the less I’m interested
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like the small stuff I like I mean you know besides the fact that Apple’s the biggest corporation whatever let’s set that aside. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I love Apple stuff, but like, I love Apple stuff to do small stuff. I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to start the next giant AI startup to replace millions of people’s jobs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, that’s the last thing I want to do. I don’t want to run a social network where I’m having to make really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difficult moderation decisions and deal with all the problems that result from running a social network. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to have my platform be the one that people are harassing people on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or controlling elections or causing world events to shift. Like, I don’t want any of that. That’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that sounds incredibly unappealing. I don’t even want to be on those platforms, let alone run one. Or, you know, I don’t even want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be in, be using those apps, let alone own one. A lot of tech,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like the nerds are in our area over here off to the side.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the rest of big tech has gone somewhere else without us. And that’s a place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often that I don’t want to go. But our nerdy world is still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here and will always be here. Just there’s now this other bigger world that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t really care about us, maybe uses the libraries and stuff that we write. But for the most part, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re off on their own doing their money thing and their business thing. And us nerds were over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here doing our thing. And they don’t care about us anymore if they ever did. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s less and less overlap between those two worlds I think over time. So I am exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I want to be in the world of tech. I don’t want to expand my tech footprint anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I frankly am not that interested in a lot of new areas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, how could I make a startup that expands and gets really, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really don’t want that life for myself anymore because the world that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to do that in is not the current world. The current world is very different and requires very different things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So my passion though for tech stuff is still very real. Like, you know, just the other day I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking about the cool terminal e-ink thing and I still love buying all this Apple. Guess what I’m gonna fill the restaurant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with? Apple hardware and Ubiquiti hardware and like possibly even some low raw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco equipment because what’s gonna go in the walk-in freezer to detect a water leak? Probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Yolink low raw thing. Like there’s a lot of ways and I love all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so that’s the area of tech, the application side of it, the enthusiasm side of it, like the nerdy stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the smaller areas. I love all that stuff and I always will. So I’m happy to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco continue to embrace that part of tech, but not to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in like, you know, the tech startup scene or even any larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a role in the tech press scene, because that’s not really my scene anymore. And so this is, I’m enjoying this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as, you know, diversification and new challenges, you know, both diversification
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my income and diversification of my skillset, I’m gonna really enjoy, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think, having a restaurant. And yeah, it’s gonna be really hard. And I’m not gonna enjoy it every day. I’m sure there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be days where I’m like, why did I do this? But I think there will be aspects
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it that I really enjoy and really feel proud of at the end of the day. And I think it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bring me a lot of satisfaction.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, congratulations to both of you. Best of luck. When I visited you, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey during the winter, almost a year ago now, or a year and a half ago, or something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it was November, wasn’t it? And the restaurant at the time was not open,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I thought that was a seasonal issue, maybe it was a time of day issue, but I never got to experience it, and so now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have yet another excuse to find a way to come up to Fire Island and come visit. It says, I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to try this pizza with boom boom sauce, damn it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not my restaurant. Oh no!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Damn, I thought it was. Well, now I feel like an idiot. All right, well, that’s okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, we currently don’t have anything on our menu that has boom boom sauce, but that doesn’t mean we can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, well, see, look, changes are already being made. Well, now I feel like a real big dummy, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay. But nevertheless, I will look forward to visiting the restaurant at some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point and eating whatever it is you are willing to serve me. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want, the Boom Boom Sauce Pizzeria building is for sale. You can join me in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey First of all, I’m sure I don’t have that kind of money available, and secondly, no.