637: Rotate Those Tennis Balls
01 May 2025The ruling against Apple, the Slate Truck, and using a reMarkable e-ink tablet.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco reaches another milestone
- New ATP Member’s Special: ATP Insider: School, Then and Now
- Follow-up:
- A surprising Vision Pro corner:
- D. Griffin Jones reviews the Sigma BF
- iPadOS window affordances (via Ole Oskar Eriksen)
- Synology’s En💩ification (via Erin Power)
- Judge tells Apple “yeah, no”
- Marco returns to YouTube
- Ask ATP:
- Is it even possible for Siri to get good? (via David MacQueen)
- Do we stll carry wallets? (via Stephen Klinck)
- How do we share photos outside of a family unit? (Dylan Copeland)
- Post-show Neutral: Slate Truck
- Members-only ATP Overtime: AI continues to eat the world
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Chapters
- Laptop glasses
- Special: School, Then & Now
- A good content snack
- Sponsor: Factor (code atp50off)
- AirPods-case update
- Sigma BF reviewed
- John on Thoroughly Considered
- iPadOS window controls
- Synology and refurb disks
- Sponsor: MasterClass
- Judge rules against Apple
- Using reMarkable
- Sponsor: Wildgrain (code ATP)
- #askatp: Is good-Siri possible?
- #askatp: Still need a wallet?
- #askatp: Shared album vs. library
- Neutral: Slate Truck
Laptop glasses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have finally reached an important milestone You already got glasses if you bought a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boat I? Regret to inform you that I now need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use reading glasses when using a laptop I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally crossed threshold that when the laptop is on my lap that Distance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has finally gotten a little fuzzy
⏹️ ▶️ John So did you get the ones that the two lenses magnetically snap to each other or did you
⏹️ ▶️ John just get a regular one that’s on a like a string around your neck?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright so far here’s my glasses situation and setup so far. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a pair of progressives that I believe I mentioned or they got it I got about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know like around Thanksgiving I started wearing them. So I got a pair of of progressives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is nothing on top and reading on the bottom. I’m wearing them almost all the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, like doing stuff around, but I, the problem with progressives is that the part that is in focus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the reading is really only like the bottom middle of your, of your field of view.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So as a result, those are actually pretty bad for computer use. Cause for computer use, you want like a large
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flat rectangle to be entirely in focus not just like the part of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that your head is most pointing towards near the bottom. So progressives I have found are great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for pretty much all of the rest of life except computers. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if you’ve heard I do occasionally use computers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Would you say you’re doing a lot with computers right now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah as always. So progressives are there it’s again they’re wonderful for all the situations but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computers they’re they’re not so great for. For computers I I just need reading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glasses, just like low power, like you know,.5 or.75 reading glasses for computer use. Did you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them already? So I’ve tried a bunch of, I have a bunch of like, cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones from Amazon basically, and they’re fine. Like the one that I carry around in my backpack,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s this company that makes these really flat folding ones, they’re called ThinOptics,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re like $40, which for a pair of Amazon reading glasses is very expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, what’s great about the ThinOptics is that their case folds completely flat. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it ends up being, like maybe like three or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four millimeters thick. And it closes magnetically. The case is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty fragile. I’ve already broken one case, but the glasses themselves, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re super, super flat, they’re not very attractive. It almost looks like the 3D glasses you get in a movie
⏹️ ▶️ Marco theater, like that kind of construction of just like really like thin, bare metal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say, I recommend if you get them, The ones with the round clear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frames are the ones that I like the best. I have like the rectangles and the rounds. The rounds I think look a lot nicer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re not like fashionable enough that you’d wanna wear them in public more than you had to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but in a pinch, like you can always have, like it’s so thin you can keep that thing in your pocket. Like I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have like some folding ones where you can like stick on the back of your phone case. I saw our contractor who did our renovations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, he had one of those, like the ones that stuck to the back of his phone case all the time. And he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pulled them out constantly to refer to stuff. So that was, I thought a good move. Can you give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ll get one for the show
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I’m picturing you like an anime villain now. Of like flat, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you go to thinoptics.com, it’s spelled exactly as you would expect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I just got them on Amazon. I don’t know if they have like an official store. They don’t ship super fast. They usually, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually like a week out. But I have found like if you want a pair of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reading glasses that you can literally have all the time with you without just doing like the chain around the neck thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have found those to be the best, but again, they are very thin, a little bit odd looking and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awfully expensive for reading glasses. So my other strategy for reading glasses is just like, I just have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap ones all over the house. Like I get those thin titanium,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess, temples, the sticks, what are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John we? Is that what? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so thin titanium sticks with like the frameless plastic ones, plastic lenses that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get for like 15 bucks. Like I have those all over the place. And that’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my strategy for like nightstands, you know, next to the living room couch, that kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Holiday gift idea. You gotta get them around your neck. Then you can have one
⏹️ ▶️ John perched on top of your head and also one around your neck and be looking for your glasses. Awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I feel, I know, I can tell already that I’m maybe one year away from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glasses at my desk for my desktop computer too. It isn’t that different of a distance. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can tell it’s close. Like the desktop monitor is arm distance. I’m not quite there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m getting close. I can feel it.
Special: School, Then & Now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have some great news. We have a new ATP member special, ATP Insider
⏹️ ▶️ Casey School, then and now. This was a question from a listener. Forgive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, I don’t recall who it was offhand. And John, you kind of brought this to us. So do you want to give us the nickel tour of what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the member special is?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the idea was, the question was like, what do you think school is like for your kids?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because we all have kids who are either in school now or have recently been in school. And how do you think your own
⏹️ ▶️ John self would have fared in today’s school versus what school was like when you were a kid. So that was the jumping
⏹️ ▶️ John off point for the special. And we ended up basically talking about what school was like for us and what school was
⏹️ ▶️ John like for our kids. And we did try to imagine ourselves in the current scenarios and various permutations.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it really just ended up being a big exploration of schooling from the perspective of parents
⏹️ ▶️ John who have kids in school and obviously from the perspective of people who are once kids who are in school. Uh, and,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, I, I was there representing the eighties and, uh, you two were representing the nineties
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and then our kids
⏹️ ▶️ John have been spread pretty well over the, uh, two thousands.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Uh, this, this was one of those member specials slash topics where I thought,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I said, Darren, before we recorded, eh, it’ll be like half an hour, which I know enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about us to know how it’ll be longer than that. We ended up going damn near two, I think. So there was more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here than I thought, which is typically how it works out. But, uh, but it was, it was, it was a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a lot more interesting than I expected. I came into this slightly begrudgingly and I’m pretty happy with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how it turned out. So, uh, HP insider school then. And now if you are not a member, you can go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ahead and join at atp.fm slash join where you get our not guaranteed, but almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guaranteed monthly member specials. You can no longer get your limited time or discounts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on limited time merch sales, which actually come to think of it, I have yet to see anyone say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I missed it. maybe you’re learning, maybe you’re learning not to admit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You want to know, I actually almost missed it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t miss that part of it because I don’t, I, I pretty good about doing that. But what I did miss
⏹️ ▶️ John is, did you notice I didn’t do my normal, like there’s one hour left, there’s five
⏹️ ▶️ Casey left. Oh, that’s true. And
⏹️ ▶️ John no frame game. Did you miss it? I mean, I kind of did say like, it was earlier in the day. I was like, oh, there’s 10
⏹️ ▶️ John hours left. I’m like, I should wait until there’s like three hours or something. And then when it came time to be around two or three hours, I think I
⏹️ ▶️ John was watching a TV show And I said, and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco then by the time TV show
⏹️ ▶️ John was over, I’m like, oh, the sales are. Whoops. So sorry, everybody, but let this be a lesson to you. You can’t rely on me nagging
⏹️ ▶️ John you the last. Oh, I wouldn’t I would have would have gotten it. But I didn’t if I hadn’t seen your
⏹️ ▶️ John one hour to go thing. You just got to plan better like this three weeks to do this anyway. So I’m happy that I didn’t see anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John complaining about the fact that they missed it. Yes. Everyone is all learning together that three weeks
⏹️ ▶️ John is plenty of time to get your orders in. And we just want to see those Mac Pro believe shirts at WWDC as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hmm. So anyways, I got myself sidetracked. I apologize. But yeah, if you want to hear this member special or any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the others, what did we say we’re up to, like 15 or 20 at this point? I don’t remember. A bunch. Go to http.fm. Thank
A good content snack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we need to do some follow-up. I haven’t been this excited about follow-up in a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have done the unthinkable. I’ve asked Marco to do even more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey homework, and not only that, consume yet another content snack. And I’ve done it for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good reason, which we’ll discover here in a minute. What have I asked you to watch, Marco? Well, it’s a new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Vision Pro Adventure episode called Hill Climb. And this is about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a woman who is attempting to climb up Pikes Peak, which is a,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess a hill or mountain in Colorado here in the States. And she’s trying to be the first woman to do it in under 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes. And this, I thought was incredible. In a car. In a car. Sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Thank you. Yeah, you’re leaving that part out. That’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco detail. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is a very important detail. It would be really hard to climb a mountain in under 10 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was a critical detail that I 100% left out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Racing up a mountain in a race car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up a mountain in a race-prepped Toyota Supra. So, Marco, what did you think of it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was, I think, the best one of these I have seen. Good. The best one of the adventure ones I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have seen. Possibly my favorite of the immersive films so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far. I think my favorite might still be the submarine one, because I think that one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looked a lot more like a stage play, which I think the Vision Pro is very good at.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This one relied a lot a lot on you know motion showing a car and stuff so it was like a little bit I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got a little bit motion sick with this one and I would say if you are motion sensitive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you probably shouldn’t watch any immersive video but especially probably not this one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I liked it I think it did still repeat some of the mistakes that I’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or like the the non-ideal choices that we’ve talked about before of like being super close to people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like where it’s kind of creepy, having a lot of cuts in certain parts, a lot of motion, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite being sure where to focus. But what was nice about this one is that there was almost no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soft focus. Almost all scenes were set to basically infinite focus. And so you didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have like focus problems looking like, you know, in different parts of the frame. And it was a pretty, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, fun story of like this woman racing up this mountain. Like it’s a dramatic thing and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the car looked cool and the lighting was cool with the sunset and everything. Like it was well done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it was still just a content snack, but it was a pretty good one. And afterwards you won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want any real snacks because you’ll feel a little bit sick. So it actually is also good maybe as a dieting tool.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, just to save us from people sending this in because Mark had mentioned stage play,
⏹️ ▶️ John not this week, but next week, we will talk about that service that it says they’re going to record a bunch of stage plays
⏹️ ▶️ John and release them on Owl Vision Pro. So we do know about that. We’ll get to it next week. Yes, thank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. Also, we’ll probably talk in the future about the YouTube promo that has also just dropped, I think like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an hour ago. But anyways, what did you think of the star of the film, Laura Hayes?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Me? I don’t know, she was cool. I mean, I didn’t know her before this. Are we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like following her career or something? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Would you do me a favor, please? Would you go ahead and open the short audio clip that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had prepared for you before the show?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, one minute, I have not heard this yet. Here we go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So before you play it, to be clear, Marco has not heard what he’s about to hear. This is only like 10-ish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seconds. And I told him under penalty of death, he is not allowed to listen to this until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God. This was from when we went to driving school. Was she the instructor who drove us on the hot lap?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey She was the instructor that drove you on the hot lap. I was watching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this and I’m sorry, I was watching this and I f*ing sh myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I saw her because I was like, oh my god, oh my god, is that, oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey god, that’s the same Laura that was so to back up in 2013, underscore said to Mark
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I we’ve told this story before and we did a whole neutral on it but in 2013 we underscore said to us I’m turning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 30 and I want to go to BMW performance driving school in South Carolina and I’d like you you two to go with us, or to go with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. And of course, Marco and I didn’t even take a breath before we said, absolutely, yes. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco drove down to Northern Virginia, picked up Dave, the two of you came here, and if I recall correctly, spent the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey night, and then we drove down in the M5 down to South Carolina, and we did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a two-day performance driving school. And Laura Hayes, the star of this Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vision Adventure thing, was one of the instructors at BMW Driving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey School when we were there in 2013. How small a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John world is this? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was so desperately hoping that you would not place her because this would have been so boring if you did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I totally didn’t. Like, I mean, that was so long ago. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey was, it was.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I remember the lap. Are we all, can we just sit back and be amazed at the fact that Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes! He can’t remember what we talked about on the podcast last week, but he remembers in 2013,
⏹️ ▶️ John the person who drove, not him,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but someone else
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco around the track at
⏹️ ▶️ John the BMW racing school.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was a hell of a laugh, by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m gonna go for,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a theory on this. I’m gonna go for the arm in the bucket of ice water theory that I’ve talked about in Rectifs.
⏹️ ▶️ John You do experiments where if you put someone in discomfort while asking them to memorize something, it sticks in their
⏹️ ▶️ John memory better. So not just discomfort, but like any sort of dramatic thing, which is why like memories of trauma
⏹️ ▶️ John are big. The ice bucket thing is they just had someone memorize a list of pictures. They just show you a bunch of pictures, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John later you have to repeat back what they showed you. And one group just did it normal, and the other group did it with their arms sitting in
⏹️ ▶️ John a bucket of ice water. And the ice water people crushed it because being in discomfort and pain
⏹️ ▶️ John causes the memories to stick better. So the excitement of going to the BMW driving school and potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John the discomfort of high G-forces while going around the track and just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey generally having an
⏹️ ▶️ John extraordinary experience made the memories stick, whereas our podcast is just too boring for Casey to remember
⏹️ ▶️ John what happens on it. That’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what my deal is, but I think it’s because that two days was so much fun. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with some of my best friends, but also having an experience so unlike anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d ever done before and mostly since, I thought it was incredible. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m watching this thing with a vision for all my head, and I see her and I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey holy crap, I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the lady from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey driving school. And I did just a quick spot of Googling and sure enough, I was right. And so I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flabbergasted. Now I did the same thing with Underscore. Like I didn’t speak with him verbally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I sent him the link to the Hillclimb thing and I said, you know, what did you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And he said, oh, it was good, you know, whatever. And I said, what did you think of the host or the star or whatever?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And he basically said the same thing. Oh, she was cool. I was like, did you recognize her? No. Wait. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so, yeah, I am not only stunned that I remembered, well, anything, but I remembered something that Underscore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t remember. And that, my friends, is an actual miracle. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco in any case, that never happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I just thought that was hilarious. And as much as I did genuinely enjoy the hill climb, like 10, 15
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minute thing, it was just such a weird small world moment. Like never in a million years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did I think when we were on episode like 20 or something like that of ATP,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then, well, I mean, neutral was dead, but only just at the time. And here it is 12
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years later, and we’re talking about one of our instructors at driving school. What a weird, small world.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, that was pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll have a link in the show notes. You can watch a video of Marco being driven around the track by the star
⏹️ ▶️ John of this new hill climb vision project.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey This is the same lady. It’s on Vimeo.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how old the video is. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Vimeo. Yeah, I had uploaded it. Now, I had uploaded it, but Marco was the key to this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because when we were at driving school, they had these, at the time, relatively advanced, but looking at it 12 years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, very rudimentary, like performance computers, or really data loggers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and camera capture things. And they gave you a USB key when you got there. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could plug in your USB key as you’re doing your instruction and whatnot. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have videos and recordings of what you were doing, which is super cool. But the key was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the end of the two-day experience, they said, hey, you’re all dismissed, in a happy sense. You’re all dismissed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can leave if you want. But for what it’s worth, if you would like, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go on what they called a hot lap with one of the instructors. And you would pile in these then new BMW M3s. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were E92 M3s, so V8s. And they’ll take you on a lap of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey track of the driving school. And I believe it was right before this, and I will never forget this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the head of the driving school, Donny Isley, which is another name that I somehow remember, I don’t know why,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said to all the instructors that were going out, hey, it’s October, And we’ve already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used up our tire budget for the entire year. I don’t know if you remember this, Marco, but we’ve used the tire budget
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the entire year, please go gentle. And that lasted for maybe the first half of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first turn. And then all of the instructors were pretty much freaking sideways the entire time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was amazing. And the key here though, is that Marco, unlike me, Marco had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the presence of mind to plug his USB key into that car’s, you know, receptacle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco you call it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you had on your key a recording of your hot lap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now I was the car in front of your car, if I recall correctly. And at one point we actually like clipped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a cone or something like that, and you commented on it in the video. But you at least had the presence of mind to record
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it where I did not. And so this is all, it’s on my Vimeo account, which I haven’t looked at in years, but it’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thanks to your smart thinking at the time in October, 2013.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will take a bow at my own awesomeness.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Please do. So yeah, I just thought, I mean, I wouldn’t have generally made you do this content snack. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to your credit, you did not whine at all, but I hope you see now why I was so insistent and persistent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about you consuming this content snack.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, OK, that is fair.
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AirPods-case update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a little bit of quick follow-up. I mentioned offhandedly, I think, last episode that, or maybe it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple episodes ago, that, see, I can’t remember, John, my AirPods Pro charging case,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or excuse me, my AirPods Pro Mark II charging case, wasn’t charging via Qi charging. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had a listener reach out and through a weird circumstance and series of events, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a charging case that they weren’t using. Trust me, it makes sense. It’s which is not worth getting into. And they offered very kindly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to send it to me so that I would have a charging case that would work, you know, via G charging.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I only just got it connected, I think it was either yesterday or this morning, I forget which, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve only tried this a couple of times. So take this with a fair bit of salt. But interestingly, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brand, well, brand new to me, I don’t think it was a very old, I mean, the thing is in pristine condition. This charging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey case still isn’t working. So it’s the same buds,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a totally different charging case, still doesn’t want to charge via Qi. Why would it have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything to do with the buds, whether or not the case is charging? Now, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t done a rigorous testing on this. And I also have a slight theory that it relates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to whether or not the right AirPod is in the case, because I feel like it did charge a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit when the right AirPod was in my ear, perhaps I’d set it next to the case for testing purposes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree, John, that’s not the way you should normally use AirPods. But some weird is afoot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what it is. I gotta do some more testing, but if you’ve heard specifically of something like this, please feel free to reach out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me. I’d love to hear what you have to say. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, it’s- You can go to the Apple store. I mean, I know they’re not on a warranty or anything, but they can probably diagnose it for it. Like I’d imagine, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John anything about cheap, but is there some kind of handshake procedure before the charging begins? And if you have a wonky
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think so. Oh, and I should mention, I tried it on like a piece of garbage, like 10 or 15 buck. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even remember what it is, like a Belkin charger or something like that. But I also charged it or tried charging it on a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey modern MagSafe puck. And the same behavior was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exhibited in both cases. So again, I got to do more testing, but it’s so freaking weird that I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, you know, cast about and see if anyone has any experience with this.
Sigma BF reviewed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, a friend of the show, D. Griffin Jones, reviewed the Sigma BF, which I believe we talked about in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the after show a couple of weeks ago. This is the Apple-inspired, I don’t know if they would say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it that way, but that’s how I look at it, the Apple-inspired camera that’s like a, basically a block of aluminum,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it looks really nice and looks really expensive, and it turns out it’s really nice and really expensive. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since somebody from our neck of the woods had their hands on it, we thought you might wanna check it out, so there’s gonna be a link to both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey D. Griffin Jones’s Text right up as well as their video review video video
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I sent you to a link to one of my camera review people pooping on this camera and I
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t too big on it when we talked about it either and there is a actually a
John on Thoroughly Considered
⏹️ ▶️ John relevant podcast link, I was recently on the Thoroughly Considered podcast with Dan
⏹️ ▶️ John and Tom from Studio Neat. It was very good, by the way. They have you pick, I forget what the premise
⏹️ ▶️ John is, like pick one object that you really like the design of that you’re gonna talk about, and what did I pick? Of course, I
⏹️ ▶️ John picked the 2019 Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna hear me talk at length about why I like the design of the Mac Pro, and while you’re listening,
⏹️ ▶️ John think about how it is different than the Sigma BF in so many of the ways that I care about.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a good sort of compare and contrast. The Sigma BF, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John is too much design for form and not enough for function. And the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro certainly has a lot of design for form, but the balance between form and function is more to my liking,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s like an hour long podcast where you can hear me talk about why if you’re interested.
iPadOS window controls
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to iOS, Ulay Oscar Ericsson writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John says Apple hasn’t brought window controls to the iPad because they’re not willing to dedicate space in the UI for it, except they already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did. Every window in iPadOS has window controls at the top, also in regular old single
⏹️ ▶️ Casey window mode. It’s even signified by three dots like on the Mac. There’s an option to close as well as minimize.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Resizing also has dedicated visible controls, although they look different between split view and stage manager,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while it’s a hidden gesture on macOS. I had thought about this and knew about this and I either didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interrupt forcefully enough to say something or I just forgot by the time I had the chance to come back to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. So yeah, this was a really good point and this was one of many people reporting in the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I did mention the three dots on the show. Of course, Casey’s not going to remember that cause it was a whole episode ago, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I did mention the
⏹️ ▶️ John three dots. Uh, and this like, obviously I’m aware of three dots, although I would say that they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John really evoking the stoplights. It’s more like the ellipsis type dots for menus. But anyway, yes, It’s three dots.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re kind of my point, that Apple is unwilling to sort of dedicate the space for window controls.
⏹️ ▶️ John When Apple introduced the three dots and does other things like this, they basically do it
⏹️ ▶️ John by not really stealing space from content. Like I may be
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong about the three dots, but at various times on both iOS and iPadOS, when Apple has introduced
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that belongs to the system, sometimes if they need space, they’ll adjust
⏹️ ▶️ John the safe area insets, which is a thing that you’re programmatically able to tell which area
⏹️ ▶️ John of the screen in the case of the phone or window or whatever, as safe
⏹️ ▶️ John for me to draw content because there’s no stuff covering it. Same thing with the three dots. You’re like, well, the three
⏹️ ▶️ John dots are kind of gonna eat into your space, but if you don’t have anything there in the UI, you can sort of kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of pretend like they’re not there, but I don’t even know if they adjusted safe area insets for the three dots or not, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what I’m talking about. Apple has not put a title bar on, because in Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS, when there’s the title bar, although you can get around this now too, but in general, the title bar, you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t draw your content there. Your content begins below the title bar. Yes, I know about unified tile bars and all the other things you could do
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac, but that’s what I’m talking about. Really dedicating, set aside, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna eat into your content, it’s not visible to you, you can start drawing at zero, zero, but not really, because it’s the lower left
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac, but whatever, forget about coordinate systems, it’s complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what they’re not willing to do on iPad OS, because they don’t want to junk it up with stuff that is not relevant
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re only doing one thing at a time on the iPad. Same thing with window resizing or even scroll bars, which yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can grab the scroll, even on the phone, you can grab the scroll thumb and move it, but then it gets fatter when you can
⏹️ ▶️ John grab it, but then it gets skinny again, and then it disappears entirely. Like they’re not, they’d rather have stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of kind of edge into your content or like be over your content briefly and then disappear, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not doing the dumb thing, which is like, you know, window Chrome. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that was my point. And so yeah, Apple’s, uh, Apple’s three dots and their pull down menu
⏹️ ▶️ John and their incursions into the content area to try to add controls is them sort of pussyfooting around because they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to do the obvious thing. And I’m not even saying that’s the wrong decision because honestly it would make
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad worse for, I think the common case of people not doing 20 things at once. Uh, so
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the problem they face and we’ll see when WC rolls around what their new solution to that is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this WWDC is potentially going to be quite bananas because of some breaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John we’ll get there on
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey This could be
⏹️ ▶️ John a triumphant and disastrous on many fronts for Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. And likely it will probably be both. All right, continuing the follow-up.
Synology and refurb disks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to Synology, Melvin Gunlock wrote, one issue with the Synology branded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drives is that Synology doesn’t offer anything above 16 terabytes at any price, while Seagate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is already at 24 terabytes. It’s a good point, hadn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John considered that. Yeah, that is kind of crappy. Like we didn’t mention that last time. Like, oh, well, they’re just relabeled drives and they cost a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John more, but what if they don’t relabel the drives in the capacity that you
⏹️ ▶️ John want or the speed that you want? Like, it’s just, that’s part of the first party thing is you get, what choices
⏹️ ▶️ John do you have? the ones that they are willing to put the Synology branded sticker on, and that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Aaron Power writes, one of the biggest points of in-poopification
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was left out. Of course the drives are priced relatively competitively today because those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new Synology NASs have to compete with all of Synology’s older stock. Once this has actually been fully rolled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out across their product line, they will increase the price because that’s when they have a captive audience who can only use Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drives with their Synologies. Additionally, The price comparison was always comparing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new drives, which is wild because if you’re in an individual or small business who wants a lot of storage, you’re almost certainly not buying new drives,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re buying recertified drives. Right now on serverpartdeals.com, you can get a recertified 22 terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drive for 232 euros. The same drive costs roughly 420 to 450 euros used.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you’re buying just two drives, that’s 464 euros recertified versus 840 to 900 new.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With the savings from the recertified drives, you could literally buy a new dedicated Synology 2 bay DS723 plus for them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s why people are upset because that’s what the actual markup looks like for people.
⏹️ ▶️ John So first, I don’t know if you’re buying recertified drives. Yeah. Has
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not saying it’s not done. I’m saying it is common, but is it the majority? I,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I think it’s actually more common in the enterprise. I’ve seen a lot of people buying recertified drives for scenarios
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. But, uh, well, first of all, let’s just, we’ll put a link to serverpartdeals.com. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re interested in recertified drives, yeah, they can be a good deal. Just like refurb max, but I kind of like buying max.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think most people don’t buy refurb.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This email was written as if like everyone does this. What are you talking about? And I’ve, I’ve literally never heard of anybody doing
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe, maybe hobbyists do it more like if you, again, if you’re trying to save money, but anyway, as for the
⏹️ ▶️ John first part of the email of like, well now once, once there is fully rolled out, then they’ll turn the screws and
⏹️ ▶️ John open up the money spigot. Like I said last week, Synology is in a competitive market. There
⏹️ ▶️ John are alternatives to Synology. You are not locked in. It’s it’s network attached storage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of vendors make it. And if Synology does things that drive its customers away, like
⏹️ ▶️ John cranking up the prices once they have a monopoly on Synology branded drives, other people are willing to swoop in and
⏹️ ▶️ John grab those customers. It’s you don’t have it’s not the type of lock in of like your platform of
⏹️ ▶️ John choice. You haven’t brought a bunch of apps. There’s a little bit of locking with the Synology apps, but anyway, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what makes me less upset about this is because it is actually a competitive market. And honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John if part of your hobby is like finding the best capacity drives or finding a
⏹️ ▶️ John good deal on refurb drives and stuff like that, it’s kind of also part of your hobby to look at
⏹️ ▶️ John a new vendor for your NAS to see if there’s something better out there. Kind of like part of the thing Casey’s doing with his whole Ubiquiti
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is he doesn’t currently have a Ubiquiti setup. He’s got a different setup and going to a new setup, That’s part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the whole fun and deal of it. It’s like now it’s a new thing with a new brand, with new products and new
⏹️ ▶️ John possibilities because that’s a competitive market too. So it’s kind of crappy
⏹️ ▶️ John what they’re doing. I don’t want to pay more for my drives, but I’m not as pessimistic as Aaron
⏹️ ▶️ John that they somehow are gonna turn on the money spigot and crank up the prices across their whole line of drives
⏹️ ▶️ John as soon as they can. They’re already charging more than they would be otherwise, but you have
⏹️ ▶️ John other choices. And to the degree that they screw this up and alienate their customers,
⏹️ ▶️ John someone else will grab them.
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Judge rules against Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, as we alluded to earlier, there is some breaking news. And to be clear, we are recording this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the evening of April 30, Wednesday night, and this broke like 10 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before we started recording. So these are very, very, not hot takes, I guess, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John hot off the presses.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, there you go. Thank you. So what are we talking about? So Epic Games claims
⏹️ ▶️ Casey victory as Apple is sanctioned for defying court order over App Store rules reading from nine to five Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Judge Yvonne Gonzales Rogers found out Apple in willful violation of a 2021 injunction
⏹️ ▶️ Casey designed to stop the company’s anti competitive app store practices. Let me
⏹️ ▶️ John pause you here for a second. Not to go off on too much of a tangent. But if you’re like me, you’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John watching with growing impatience, the various court cases involving
⏹️ ▶️ John our government, and, you know, temporary restraining orders and judgments and blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John That has Casey just read, this This is about the Apple versus Epic case,
⏹️ ▶️ John and in particular, the result of that case from 2021. It’s now 2025. So what
⏹️ ▶️ John is, hey, in 2021, you lost a court case and the court said, Apple, you have to do X, Y, and Z.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, in 2025, we have a decision about, did Apple do X, Y, and Z,
⏹️ ▶️ John or did they not do it? So if you’re following any current court cases that are winding their
⏹️ ▶️ John way through the American justice system, think about this when you try to put realistic timelines and when
⏹️ ▶️ John you should expect literally anything to happen. Anyway, continue.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, reading from 9to5Mac, according to the 80-page order, Apple, quote, thwarted the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey injunction’s goals, quote, by imposing new fees and obstacles that continue to stifle competition despite clear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey instructions from the court. The judge didn’t just sanction Apple. She referred the matter to the U.S. Attorney’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Office for possible criminal contempt proceedings. Oh, damn.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love this. This is getting interesting. Apple’s vice president of finance, Alex Roman, was found to have lied
⏹️ ▶️ Casey under oath according to the document. Internal documents contradicted public testimony
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and showed Apple knowingly chose anti-competitive options. All right, now I’m going to throw in a little bit of commentary.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if this is just my upbringing or, well, not even upbringing, but it was drilled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into me. I don’t know how or why, so I’m struggling not to say this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is an American thing. Maybe, I don’t know. Maybe this is an American thing. I don’t know, but for me, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like it is like a cardinal sin to lie under oath, not only because it’s very illegal,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but like you just don’t do that. You either plead the fifth, which is to say I won’t incriminate myself,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you don’t, or you tell the truth. You don’t lie. Like that’s real bad news.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can lie. You just have to say you don’t recall.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, Reagan defense. Fair. But to say that Alex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Roman is apparently, you know, lying under oath. That is a big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deal. Continuing on, the court has now barred Apple from charging its 27% commission. I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco hard not to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laugh. From charging its 27% commission on external purchases and ordered it to immediately stop interfering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with developers’ ability to communicate alternative payment options to users. The judge specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey called out Apple’s use of full-page, quote unquote, scare screens designed to deter users from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leaving the App Store payment flow. It’s a requirement that developers use static, non-dynamic URLs when linking to alternative
⏹️ ▶️ Casey payment methods, and its policy of still claiming a commission on web purchases made outside the App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey These design choices, the court found, were engineered to introduce friction and suppress user conversion.”
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, they absolutely were.
⏹️ ▶️ John As you’re reading this, you may be thinking, didn’t you talk about this in the show like years ago? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey But the judgment came
⏹️ ▶️ John because there was a judgment, and Apple lost the lawsuit. And we saw what they did. And we said, here’s what Apple’s doing in response to that judgment.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re going to like, they’re still charging money, but it’s 27% instead of 30%. And they don’t want you to tell people about payment methods
⏹️ ▶️ John except in a special way. And they’re doing all these things. And we were like, this just seems so restrictive. And just like, it just didn’t seem to us
⏹️ ▶️ John that whatever they were doing was in the spirit of the judgment. It was like, well, whatever, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the years roll by, that was back in 2021. Like, I guess it was fine. No, it wasn’t fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John It wasn’t fine at all. And it just, it’s frustrating to me that it’s like, we talk about it. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, this just doesn’t seem like they’re doing what the court told them to do. And the court’s like, four years later.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you’re not doing what we told
⏹️ ▶️ John you to do. It’s so frustrating to me that it takes this long because they essentially got four years of taking all that money from people. You know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I mean? So. Well, I mean, is anyone taking them up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you’re right. They were able to exploit the system to have four years of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco non-compliance. And we’ll see if, I mean, I don’t know, can they appeal this? I’m sure there’s like, I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not over. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was like, whenever I’m reading these court judgment articles deciding whether they go into the show. It’s like, I just, I’m just waiting
⏹️ ▶️ John for the last sentence, which is like, uh, Apple will of course appeal and the blah, blah, blah. Like how many more
⏹️ ▶️ John years do we have to wait? So I don’t actually know the answer to this cause then this is breaking like, you know, the hour where we’re recording the show. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we didn’t know the details, but it is satisfying to see it’s common.
⏹️ ▶️ John What, what seems like from the outside of the legal world, cause very often common sense doesn’t lead you to the correct legal conclusions cause the
⏹️ ▶️ John law is not common sense. They, there’s very little overlap between them in many cases.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But just to see like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they were told to do a thing by the court and they did something not that. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and sometimes we yell, it seems like, sometimes you say like, it seems like the judgment wasn’t good enough. Is
⏹️ ▶️ John that, that was kind of the angle I felt like we often took. It was like, the judge sort of said different things because
⏹️ ▶️ John based on what the judge said, Apple seems to think this is complying with it. And we’re looking from the outside going, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re missing the point. This isn’t complying at all. But it just turns out that Apparently the judge didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need to say anything different, just needed to wait four years for Epic to appeal. And they didn’t appeal,
⏹️ ▶️ John Epic complained essentially, hey, we won this court case. And Apple says they’re doing what you told them to do, but
⏹️ ▶️ John we think they’re not. And so that’s what this case is about. And it’s taken four years for this to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s just, it’s maddening, but it is good to see sanity prevail, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, you know, you can’t just like, see what the court says to do,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then just do something that you feel like doing. That’s not what the court said and say, done and done.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco At least once
⏹️ ▶️ John in this case, Apple is being held to account. Do you think this will stick?
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, because I was almost wanting to push this the next week because I don’t know what is the appeal process, Ken.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how far this will go. Anything being referred to the government, like, oh, they’re referring criminal
⏹️ ▶️ John charges to the government, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, but what government are they referring to? It’s like, pfft.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything’s up in the air about the rule of law in this country these days. So I don’t actually know how this
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to go there. I wanted to pair this story with a topic, a bunch of topics that we’re not going to get
⏹️ ▶️ John to this week about EU stuff that is not as close to home as this is,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s very much in the same vein of someone told Apple to do something, then Apple did a thing and we all looked
⏹️ ▶️ John at it and said, you’re not doing what they told you. And nothing happens for years. Well, that other shoe will probably
⏹️ ▶️ John drop next week. I mean, again, it’s an old, it’s actually an older story than this, but in all these cases,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just, it is satisfying to see someone officially saying, no, Apple, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not doing what they told you to do, which is something that we’ve all felt here on the outside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because like, here’s what’s going to happen. Like if, if for some reason,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we actually, you know, luck out and Apple is forced to let people link
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out to websites to make purchases, oh my God, the sky is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco falling. Like, you know, if this actually happens, which that’s a huge if, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, They can just keep probably appealing or arguing or deferring or delaying or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all their various delays and tactics they’re going to use. But if this actually happens,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how I expect this to kind of settle out and end up is a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high profile games will have their own payment things. Some other services will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crop up and offer payment gateways for the rest of us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some people will use them. people won’t and it will be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t expect Apple to go down quietly. Maybe if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this, they’ll say you can’t use in-app purchase then, which would actually be a pretty interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, speaking of sticks that Apple has to wield, we will actually finish with
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing because we’re not actually done with the scathing comments about Apple. I just kind of paused in the middle here. but like
⏹️ ▶️ John one of Apple’s tools here as a bad actor is okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll finally do what the court’s told us to do. But guess what? Everybody’s app has to go through app
⏹️ ▶️ John review. And lots of things can happen in app review. Yeah, it’d
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco be a shame if something happened to your app. It’s a nice app you’ve got there. It’d be a
⏹️ ▶️ John shame if it’s held up for a really long time in app review over a bunch of BS. I mean, we know they’re gonna do that regardless.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but that’s hard to litigate against. And you just know, kind of like lots of apps
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, apps that do things that Apple looks askance at, even if they’re technically
⏹️ ▶️ John allowed, those apps tend to get hung up a little bit more. It’s like, does Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John like what you’re doing with your app or do they not like it? And let me tell you, any app that tries to use a payment processor
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not Apple’s, where they’re paying 0% to Apple, and can link out and do whatever they want
⏹️ ▶️ John and tell people like, those apps, I can imagine them having a little bit more difficult time in app review,
⏹️ ▶️ John and good luck challenging that in Corpus. Now it’s like a, you know, a pattern of behavior.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are they really biased about like, that would be such a hard court case to win because you have to show
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple’s intentionally slow rolling or screwing, because like, and in Apple’s defense,
⏹️ ▶️ John they would say, we do this to everybody. It would be really hard to prove that they’re doing it more to apps that have this, but they’re totally going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to. That would, to be clear, I believe be against the judge’s order because it would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John considered some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco retaliation. But you’re, and by the way, and I’m glad judging Gonzalez here, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a little bit more verbose. This time, I remember her initial order. Remember there was that whole thing about buttons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and links, and there was a missing Oxford comma, and it was kind of vague as to what would qualify.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco She used a lot more words and commas this time, and so it’s very clear. She left
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot less room to wiggle and argue about, maybe she wasn’t being so firm. No, this was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really firm. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re seeing, again, not to get into too many contemporary court cases, but you’re seeing similar things where judges
⏹️ ▶️ John give rulings in the sort of normal expected way, expecting
⏹️ ▶️ John people to understand them the way, you know, like expecting them not to be malicious, expecting
⏹️ ▶️ John them to just like, oh, this is how I always give rulings. And they usually get done. Not accounting for
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact, for something that we all know, which is like, no, you have to really be much more precise because they
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to. They’re going to weasel out of this like a five-year-old trying to get a later bedtime.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco They’re going to do
⏹️ ▶️ John every trick in the book. And it just, you know, the judges almost often seem naive. They’re like, they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John just do what I said, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John know, second time’s the charm, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I think this is, what’s going to happen here is, yes, if Apple can still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fight this, they will continue to. And if they are forced to comply, as it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they might be, they will do it as maliciously and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as pettily as possible. Because John’s right, like, we have a history with Apple. We know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are personal and capricious and vindictive with app review. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were trying to make a case that Apple is arbitrary and capricious, look at the App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We know the actual people all the way to the top regarding the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco App Store are personal and vindictive and capricious. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a huge history of that over time. So we know that. So we know, of course, they’re gonna do this kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of stuff. But, you know, we’ll see. Big companies will keep suing them, and they’re gonna keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being jerks, and you know, eventually, eventually stuff will settle out. But, you know, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what will end up happening is another version of Apple totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taking the wind out of the sails of everybody else. And it’s just going to be a matter of how they do that. And so, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, you know, John, you’re right. I think some App Store, you know, mystery delays are very likely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even if you get past that, it would not surprise me if they did a rule change of like, well, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this, you can’t use our in-app purchase system. And if they do that, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco puts a real hurt on games, which are the big whales here that they make most of their money from.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause when you look at like, you know, the big companies like, you know, Netflix, HBO, or whatever they’re called now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like those companies all bouted of apps, apps, uh, of in-app purchase years ago. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not like none of those big apps actually use in-app purchase.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they might come back now if they don’t have to pay Apple or anything. Don’t you think they’ll just re-add to their, their apps, their, uh, their
⏹️ ▶️ John sign up through the phone flow?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m saying like, you know, what revenue is actually at risk here from Apple? It’s not Netflix,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because like, you know, like those big apps don’t use it anyway. Is this the money they’re already not getting? Yeah, like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already not getting those. They are getting a lot of money from whales in games. Like that’s where they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting a lot of money. And so what is at risk is that game money. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if Apple said, you can’t use our in-app purchase system if you do this, which I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be against the judge’s order. You need another four years to determine that. Right. If they say that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if most games would do that because a lot of games are used by kids
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on parentally controlled devices. And a lot of those will like, you know, they won’t allow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, you know, the parent won’t give the kid the credit card, but maybe they’ll have, you know, in-app purchase allowed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the parental approval situation, which is what we’ve been, we did with our kid for many years. We still do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so like, you know, the kid has to like ask for approval for each purchase, it pops up on our screens, the through apples in a purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. If a game that’s played by kids, which is most games, can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that, it might not be worth them giving up Apple’s cut. So we’ll see, like Apple still has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of levers they can pull to keep all of their money, believe me. But even if you set all that aside,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they follow the judge’s order, allow links out to the web to make purchases, even if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of big games and a bunch of big apps actually do that and actually offer that as an option,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and using that purchase, I bet Apple still doesn’t lose a noticeable amount of money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because most people will still choose an app purchase because it’s convenient and already set up. That was the whole value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back when it started. Like the whole value of App Store purchase methods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that when the App Store launched, everyone who had an iPhone already had like an iTunes account
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a credit card linked to it. And so now if you have like an Apple ID or now Apple account,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you probably have a payment method of some kind on it and you can use Apple’s in-app purchase system to make purchases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s convenient. So Apple will still get most of those convenience purchases. And for the ones that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to like, you know, maybe try a little harder to get, oh darn, they’ll have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to compete. Oh my God! What a tragedy, what a hardship.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel so, so sorry for the challenges they’re going to face. No, really, I mean, it’s about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time they started competing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this might actually benefit Apple because I just saw more breaking news that
⏹️ ▶️ John Epic is saying, Hey, Apple, we’ll bring Fortnite back to the App Store if you let us just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John reinstate our developer account and we’ll bring Fortnite back because now we don’t have to pay you for any of the transactions. And honestly, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Margo is saying, like, you’re not losing any money. They weren’t you like you weren’t getting this money anyway. So it’s not like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John losing that much. A couple of games will do it and you’ll get Fortnite back on the store. So the net result to Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John despite their stubbornness, if that actually goes through, is that they might actually be in a better position
⏹️ ▶️ John because the value of Fortnite being on their store is probably higher than the
⏹️ ▶️ John value of money they’re going to lose from the handful of people who actually
⏹️ ▶️ John use the in-app thing. And maybe it’ll change or actually make their own payment process. Maybe that will change, like you said,
⏹️ ▶️ John if third parties start springing up to make third-party in-app purchases as seamless
⏹️ ▶️ John as Apple’s, but those aren’t going to pop up overnight.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If this thing actually sticks, if people are actually allowed to link out without paying Apple a fee, there’s going to be a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services that crop up that offer payment processing for 6% or whatever. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the EU will have to say, well, the fact that those services can’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John a parental pops up on their phone and lets you approve a thing is anti-competitive and Apple needs to allow that, but
⏹️ ▶️ John only in the EU. Because that’s the final barrier. It’s like, why is
⏹️ ▶️ John it not going to work for kids’ games? Why can’t third parties just have a thing pop up? Well, because you can’t have a persistent background
⏹️ ▶️ John process that runs on all the parents’ phones all the time that can do this, only Apple can do that because they control the platform
⏹️ ▶️ John and they don’t expose that. And that would be yet another thing that falls under the EU’s
⏹️ ▶️ John judgment of this is not allowing enough competition.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, if I’m a revenue cat and or Stripe, I am, you know, if I’m Stripe, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working on APIs and, and trying to get those squared away. Maybe they already exist for all I know, but working on APIs to make it easy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to collect money, you know, from iOS apps. And if if I’m revenue cat, I’m implementing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or integrating rather with that API to have like basically a store kit as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done by revenue cow, which they kind of already have, but you obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John can’t do the payments.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. So it’s a heck of an opportunity if the sticks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everyone and by the way, everyone is going to do like discounts to like everyone’s going to offer like you can buy within an app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purchase for $10 or you can go to our website and buy it for $7 or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like they’re gonna 15%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Yeah, you know, they’re gonna they’re going to highly incentivize that. Or, you know, create an account on our website and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pay that way and we’ll give you a free hat in the app or whatever, you know, like that, you know, they’re going to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Continuing from 9to5Mac, the judge ascribed Apple’s behavior as a blatant attempt to sidestep
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the court’s authority, writing that the company’s response quote, strains credulity quote, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amounts it to a cover-up Apple seemingly believed the court wouldn’t uncover. Oh, geez.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now reading from the Verge, well, I will put a link from the Verge in the show notes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but this is actually from the injunction itself. This is a quote I pulled from the injunction. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an injunction, not a negotiation. That’s big like mom and dad talk right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. Time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is of the essence. The court will not tolerate further delays. As previously ordered, Apple will not impede
⏹️ ▶️ Casey competition. The court enjoins Apple from implementing its new anti-competitive acts to avoid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compliance with the injunction. Effective immediately, Apple will no longer impede developers’ ability to communicate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with users, nor will they levy or impose a new commission on off-app purchases.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it sounds like this will take effect immediately, and then if any legal challenges or follow-ups, or again,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what avenues are open to Apple, but it seems like in the meantime, while Apple is pursuing
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever it can potentially pursue, you gotta cut it off. You gotta stop doing it right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what does this look like then? It’s just instructions to app review not to reject these sorts of scenarios,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess. Yeah. I mean, again, uh, giving instructions to app review, does it, does that seem like a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that you could reliably do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Could you like just put it in that little like notes to app review field when you submit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just link to the verge article on this decision.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause like Apple says is this is the two aspects of app review that the frustration is one is the
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of like Marco saying the personal nature of Apple being vindictive and not treating apps equally. if it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like the app or the company or whatever. That is a thing that happens. But the other side of it is just
⏹️ ▶️ John the random inconsistency that’s not because they hate you, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just because, I don’t know, like, who knows the reviewer you happen to get. So when Apple says things
⏹️ ▶️ John like, we’re going to do a new thing where now bug fix updates won’t be held up, even if there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John another problem with your app. That’s the thing that Apple wanted to do. Like, I don’t I trust that they were serious
⏹️ ▶️ John about that. Like, I think that’s the thing they wanted to do. And they told that review, hey, if there’s some issue, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just a bug fix, let the bug fix go through so they can fix the issue in the next one. I bet they told that review to do
⏹️ ▶️ John that. But it’s been years and it happens all the time. Some will say, hey, it’s supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to remember that rule where they’re supposed to let bug fixes through. Well, they rejected me. And I said, but it’s a bug fix. And they said,
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t hear from them or whatever. Like they can’t. It seems like they don’t have control over app
⏹️ ▶️ John review. Like even when they want to have control over it, like that it is just too
⏹️ ▶️ John inconsistent and amorphous and they can’t make it do
⏹️ ▶️ John much. Like if there’s some big directive that comes down that everybody knows about, fine, but when they
⏹️ ▶️ John try to do stuff like that, especially when they try to do nice things that they actually wanna do, like let Buckfizz, like how
⏹️ ▶️ John is that still inconsistent years after that supposedly even policy? And it’s true of so many of their policies. People are like,
⏹️ ▶️ John but this is your policy and this is supposed to be okay. And you can’t have a conversation with AppReview
⏹️ ▶️ John if you can’t get anyone to reply to you. So some
⏹️ ▶️ John reply comes back from AppReview and you read it and it’s like, I don’t think they understood what my app
⏹️ ▶️ John is or what my explanation was. It seems like maybe they didn’t read it at all. I don’t understand what they’re asking
⏹️ ▶️ John me. So you reply back and you hear nothing. And while this happens, your app is still just rejected.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the Kafka-esque experience of AppReview. And so forgive
⏹️ ▶️ John me if I’m not enthusiastic or optimistic about them changing something
⏹️ ▶️ John about app review in response to the judgment and having that change, which they, in this case, they definitely don’t wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John do, result in a visible, consistent change to app
⏹️ ▶️ John review. Because what are you gonna do? You submit your app, they reject it because you link out to third party services. Do you
⏹️ ▶️ John start a four year journey, four year multi-million dollar journey for a court case to get a judgment in your favor? No, you
⏹️ ▶️ John just sit there and take it because you’re an indie developer and you can stare at the Verge article all you want and read the judgment
⏹️ ▶️ John and feel good about it. but the fact is your app was rejected. What are you going to do?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s something. I’m really curious to see how this plays out. And, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, it’s just, we don’t need to get into it much, but it’s just too bad that it takes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a very pissed off and justifiably pissed off judge to get to this point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Apple has no choice, but to let people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through basically. And I get that Apple put in a lot of work and a lot of money to make,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, iOS to make AppKit and UIKit and SwiftUI and all that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco but like… That didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco AppKit, that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My eyes are rolling out of my head right now with this stupid argument they always make. I know why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re saying it, but this is the stupid argument Apple always makes, and it’s like… And it’s dumb. It doesn’t make sense. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the argument that tells us that they are trying to say that our apps add nothing to their platform, that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are purely taking… There’s no other way for apps to contribute value to Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform besides through in-app purchase commissions. That is what that argument says, and they keep making that argument.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s one of the many reasons why, whatever you want to say about Tim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cook as a CEO, I have zero respect for him as a person.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, it’s bananas that this is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey argument that Apple keeps making. And again, as I’ve said many times and lamented many times,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they feel so entitled that they are owed this money. And it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no. It clearly—literally, no, according to this judge. So, I don’t know. I’m very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey curious to see how this shakes out. I’ve got my popcorn ready. You know, the tea is getting spilt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as as we speak, so I’m excited for it.
Using reMarkable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of things I’m excited for, some weird YouTube channel rose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the dead yesterday, I believe it was, as we record this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And it was not Casey on Cars. It was Marco’s YouTube channel. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is one of those times that you didn’t tell us anything, not that you have to, but you didn’t warn us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or tell us or anything like that. Just all of a sudden, boop, there’s a new video on Marco’s YouTube channel. So what is going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few, almost a month ago, I decided I was finally going to try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an E-Ink note-taking tablet. I’ve been seeing for years the ads on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instagram for the Remarkable tablet, and I always thought that thing looks so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool, and yet I don’t take notes, so what am I doing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never bought it, because I know as cool as that is, I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco E-Ink, as I’ve described when talking about e-readers and and stuff and the terminal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love E Ink and as a screen technology. I just don’t read that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much. So even though I’ve had a Kindle at some, you know, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the last, you know, 10 to 15 years, they’ve been out since 2007, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve had a Kindle for most of that time. Quick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interruption, quick interruption here. Do you happen to have another box of Kindles ready to go out somewhere? Because mine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just died and I could use a hand-me-down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe, the only Kindle I own right now is the previous generation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the paperwhite, you know, whatever like the nicest paperwhite is, but not the newest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, if you want to give it a good home, I am accepting. So we’ll talk after the show. One of Marco’s
⏹️ ▶️ John old Kindles actually finally died over here, as in will no longer take a charge. So we’ve actually been recycling
⏹️ ▶️ John some of those out. We had to actually buy a new Kindle for the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. Going back into the box for the next one? No, just,
⏹️ ▶️ John just, it’s e-waste now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sorry. So I love e-ink screens. Actually, I do have a Kobo e-reader, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just trying that. Anyway, so love, love, love, love e-ink screens, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just, I don’t read that much. In fact, one thing I would have, I think I would have enjoyed more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these days, when Kindle’s first launch, or like, you know, in their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first few years, they had deals with like newspapers and magazines to basically have Kindle versions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like the New York Times every day. And it was really nice. And in fact, that, the Kindle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco periodical format is what I hacked to make Instapapers digests that have like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the navigable links and the tables of contents and stuff like that. I figured out the data format through some sleuthing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff like that. And I let Instapaper generate those. And so Instapaper would generate like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same format that you’d get like from the New York Times or whatever. And that program with like the Times and everybody else, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole Kindle peer articles program ended years ago, they don’t do it anymore, which is a shame. Because I would love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, but I just, for whatever reason, Amazon dropped it or the companies didn’t want to do it anymore or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so I don’t read, really. Getting back to this, I basically don’t read.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yet I still love E-Ink. And so when I saw these note-taking things, I’m like, man, that would be great, but I don’t take notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I started having in-person meetings for the restaurant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Granted, everyone who’s worked in an office, this is gonna sound like kindergarten, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have hardly ever had in-person meetings. Certainly not in the last 15 years. Also
⏹️ ▶️ John known as meetings. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks. So I really don’t like taking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes in meetings on a computer. First of all, they’re big, they take up your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole lap, but also when you’re actually typing into a computer, number one, it’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the other person to tell whether you’re paying attention to them or not, or like doing something else on your computer. And number two, there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are a thousand other things on your computer for you to do. So I don’t like taking notes on a computer in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person with other people. It just feels inattentive.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want to tell you from experience in meetings for many, many years, people take notes on
⏹️ ▶️ John computers in meetings. It’s very common.
⏹️ ▶️ John not to say that you, this is the thing that you need to do. I’m just telling you that I think the standards
⏹️ ▶️ John of the business world have long since accepted the idea that you will be taking notes on a computer during a meeting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they have. And I get that, but it doesn’t, when you look around the room at a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meeting and you see a bunch of people typing on laptops, I bet most of them are not taking notes. I bet most of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them are typing emails and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John They’re not paying attention.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it depends on the meeting, I suppose.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so as we’re meeting with our manager and the staff and the chef,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted something that I could just take notes on. And so I’ve tried two things. I tried paper,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like actual just paper. Barbaric, I tell you. And the problem with paper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is you just can’t move stuff around, you can’t, I mean you can erase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, I guess that’s a form of deleting stuff, but it’s not a very good form of it. So you can kind of delete,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a pain, it’s slow, it’s dusty, and you have to be using pencils. You can kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of move stuff around in the sense that you can tear the paper off and move it around, or you can rewrite stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a bit of a cumbersome process. Certainly there’s no like, you know, undo, redo. There’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John We should invent something to help with that. Another thing, by the way, that I’ll add about paper
⏹️ ▶️ John is that you have to draw a little picture of every letter. I’m not sure if the remarkable
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to help you with that, but I just want to throw that out there. Okay, thanks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so I also, you know, because I have an iPad and an Apple pencil, I tried that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I tried one of those textured films, not the paper-like, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new one, like I think it’s the AstroPad or something. It’s the one that has like a custom metal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nib for the Apple Pencil that you screw on. And the film is magnetic, which is kind of fun. Anyway, tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, which is like the most paper-like film by a lot of people’s metrics or whatever. Plus I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried the Apple Pencil just by itself on the glass. But the problem with using the iPad this way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, even with the films and the special pen tips, it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty slick surface. Which actually I think makes it a little bit more difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to write small and precisely. I found like, you know, because the pen just, like it slips
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really easily. And I found that it’s kind of an unpleasant writing experience. And the iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it’s a little bit like chunky and heavy to hold in one hand. And no, I’m not gonna spend like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thousand dollars on a new iPad Pro for a device I hardly ever use. And then I also realized like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, one thing I would like is something to like sit on my desk and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know be kind of like my to-do list for the day or the week and again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paper is fine for this but something digitally better so I tried the iPad just as like a test
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the problem with the iPad sitting on your desk as like a to-do thing is that first of all like it’s sitting there glowing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know it’s it’s it’s lit so it’s a screen it’s it’s a little distracting every notification that I would get that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would come in on my phone it would like sync to my iPad that would light up and it would come up on there too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would occasionally turn itself off and I’d have to unlock it or I’d have to turn it on to have it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set it to never go to sleep, in which case it would burn through the battery and just be slowly warming up my desk all day. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no good either. So it’s not a great fit for that. And then also the iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I’m getting those notifications coming in and stuff like that, I’m always tempted to just switch away. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem I have with my presumably undiagnosed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ADHD, one problem I have is that if something is out of sight,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s out of mind. And this is the problem why I don’t just use Apple Notes for my to-do stuff. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as soon as the Apple Notes window is behind anything else, I never think to check it again. As soon as the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco note that I’m in is not the currently selected note, I’m never going to see it again unless I search for it. If something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is out of sight, I will not go back and remember to go check it or remember to go back to it. Like I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t. And I can set reminders and alerts and stuff, which I do constantly. But there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only, once something is out of sight, I’m never going back to it. So I wanted something to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be on my desk, not on my computer screen, and something that wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a full-blown app platform like an iPad, so that I couldn’t do anything else with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because then, whatever is like my scratch pad or my whiteboard to-do list thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s sitting there, that’s just always what’s on screen. Like it never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goes away. It can never be anything else except that. Which again, paper works great for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has other shortcomings. So anyway, I decided after having a few meetings with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco restaurant staff, I’m like, you know what? Let me try the Remarkable. So I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Remarkable 2. There is also a more recent device, the Remarkable Paper Pro, which is larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and color e-ink and has a backlight and a few other little improvements. I decided not to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Paper Pro because the Remarkable 2 is smaller, lighter, cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you don’t want color or don’t need color, there’s a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things about the Remarkable 2 that are actually a little bit better for my purposes. You know, the screen is a little bit, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a little bit higher contrast, like for the black and white. The refresh is, you know, quite different and simpler.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it fits better in my hand because it has a big left margin that the Remarkable Pro doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I love the Remarkable 2 physically and shape-wise, and I don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the light or the color of the Pro. So anyway, I got the Remarkable 2, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I used it for a week or two. And then I started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing all these people, like Matt Gemmel was on Mac Power Users. I saw him mention,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ve seen a couple of people mention these devices called the SuperNote, which is a competing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing to the Remarkable line and these other E-Inks. also like there’s the books tablets,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are some large e-readers now that have this functionality built in like the Kindle Scribe and the Kobo Elipsa.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, it’s a pretty big market now. There’s a couple of Chinese companies on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon that have like AI e-ink tablets that I didn’t look too much into. It’s a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco large category, but it seemed like for my purposes, Remarkable seemed like it was like the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple-like design. So I decided to go with that. But then when I saw the people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking about the SuperNote changes, I’m like, ooh, some of that stuff I would really like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the big things is that you can link between notes, you can draw your own links and link them to different pages and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different notes. I’m like, ooh, I would love that for certain types of organization. That would be really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it had the higher resolution screen and the nicer pen tips. I’m like, all right, let me try one of those before the remarkable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco return window elapses. So I ordered a SuperNote, the big one, the SuperNote Manta.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that was also really good. I carried that and used that for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of my task management for like a week and a half or so. And that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. However, then when I went back to the Remarkable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to clear it off to return it, I was like, oh my God, this is so much faster and more responsive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It kind of ruined me. I’m like, oh man, I do love some of the Supernotes like geeky stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Super Note had other problems too, like the sync situation is terrible on the Super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Note. Whereas the remarkable sync situation is amazing. So anyway, I made a quick YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video comparing these two devices. I didn’t want to get too far into the weeds on the comparison
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, because it’s better to see it visually. So go look at my YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video, it’s like 19 minutes or so, I think, of just me kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comparing and contrasting these two tablets. showing like what I like and don’t like about the Super Note Manta versus the Remarkable 2.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was like a quick like all you know straight one take you know iPhone being held above my desk on a stand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like just looking straight down just looking at my hands operating these devices. So it’s a quick you know fairly dense YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video if you want to see these two devices and why I ended up choosing the Remarkable 2.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what I’ve been doing is I just have like three pages on the remarkable that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I swipe between. I have my personal to-do list, my restaurant to-do list, and my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overcast to-do list. And whatever I’m working on like that day, like when I’m at the restaurant,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the restaurant to-do list is facing up. It’s showing on the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it just sits there all day next to me in the office in the restaurant. And so I can have to-dos, I can write down,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jot little notes down there. I can see what I’m doing that day or that week. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finding it really really nice to just always have that there. Cause like when these devices, when they go to sleep,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they just display whatever they were last displaying. Like it goes into a low power state after a while to save
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery, but like the Remarkable can sit on my desk all day, displaying the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing and be totally fine. And when I wanna like actually do something, like, you know, take the pen off and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco write on it, it wakes up in like a second, like it’s so fast. So I have found it’s really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice to have this kind of the second surface, It’s barely even a screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was gonna say second screen, but it’s like barely a screen. This like second surface of just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this electronic notepad for me to show my to-dos that are always there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I’m working on whatever I’m working on. You know, on overcast days, I’ll flip to the overcast page. On
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other days, I’ll flip it to the personal page. And like, I’m getting a lot more done now because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unlike every other like computer-based to-do system I’ve ever tried,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t just get buried when I forget to look at it. Like it’s always there on my desk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s never swiped into a different app. It’s never like turned off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hidden behind things for very long. Like it’s just there on my desk. So, so far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am really enjoying this. And so I did make that YouTube video. Check it out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re curious. I didn’t really go into like my workflow much in that. That was really just a comparison of the Supernote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus the Remarkable. But this here is kind of how I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using these devices. And so far I’m really enjoying it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a lot of money to spend on a to-do list, but I do get the appeal. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve never really played with any E-Ink, like interactive E-Ink thing. That’s not the word I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking for, but I’ve never drawn on anything that has E-Ink as a display mechanism. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the video, it looked like it was reasonably good performance in terms of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, it’s not one of those situations where you’ve moved the pen like three or four millimeters, but the ink that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey supposedly flew, came out of the pen was three or four millimeters back or what have you. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seemed like the refresh rate was decent. The only thing that I noticed in the video, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey found somewhat off-putting is it seemed like a pretty violent, like full screen refresh every once in a while.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s E-ink for you. It’s a limitation of the technology.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the E-ink refresh. Now I’ll tell you two things on that. Number one, so on the pen latency, like input
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the pen, It’s great, it’s way better than I expected it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be possible. It is really good. And I should say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not a pen nerd. I’m not a pen and paper user in most other parts of my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I was never that into the Apple Pencil in part because of that. The Apple Pencil probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beats it on that kind of latency.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It absolutely does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s close enough that it doesn’t really matter. Like it’s close enough for my purposes. Like I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing super precise work. I’m not doing fine artwork. I’m doing to-do lists. I’m treating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like a little whiteboard. And so it’s totally fine for my purposes. And certainly when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are using it, you don’t notice the latency. And regarding the full screen refresh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s just like a Kindle. Like when you’re reading a Kindle, you don’t really notice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the refreshes. Like you might notice the first few and then you stop noticing. That’s how it is when you’re using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of these things. Like you stop noticing the refreshes after a few minutes at most.
⏹️ ▶️ John So someone in the chat room was asking what their refresh rate was. And I think that’s one thing you should have gone into in the video.
⏹️ ▶️ John The refresh rate is not the right thing to think about when you thinking of ink, because it doesn’t work
⏹️ ▶️ John like a regular screen. If you visualize what it actually is, it makes much more sense, which is just a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of imagine a bunch of tennis balls. Half of them is painted black. Half of them is painted white. And you can rotate them. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the black part of the white part is facing up. That’s an ink screen. Only the tennis balls are really, really small.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so nothing happens. Like, remove all power from the device. The black tennis balls that are facing
⏹️ ▶️ John up are still black, and the ones that are white have is facing up are still white. It’s just, there’s no power required to do
⏹️ ▶️ John that. There’s nothing being projected, just setting aside any backlights and stuff like that. That’s what the screen is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Only the parts that change need to be changed. So if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John drawing a line, all the other tennis balls are just inert. Nothing is happening to them. They’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John refreshing. There’s no sort of refresh rate. It’s not like an OLED or an LCD where it changes the refresh rate
⏹️ ▶️ John based on how many times it has to update. If you’re drawing on it with a pencil, it might update a lot. But if you’re just sitting there
⏹️ ▶️ John like the Apple Watch, it might update once a second. No, those are the tennis balls are not doing anything. They’re they’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, only the part that you’re changing has to change. The downside is it takes a
⏹️ ▶️ John long time to rotate those tennis balls. And that’s why it looks
⏹️ ▶️ John fairly horrendous when you, for example, not just not drawing because drawing is just turning a bunch of tennis balls to be black
⏹️ ▶️ John side up, okay. Uh, and you drag something, I’m gonna take this drawing from
⏹️ ▶️ John the upper left and drag it to the lower right. That has to erase where the drawing was a moment ago and then
⏹️ ▶️ John draw the drawing in a new position and then erase where it was and draw it again and erase where it was and that’s a lot of tennis ball turning.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, and you can watch the video that it looks like, it looks worse than like a
⏹️ ▶️ John passive matrix LCD screen from the 90s because you just can’t rotate the tennis balls fast enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that is not the strength of this device. And it’s not because like, again, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think of it as refresh rate. Like what is the refresh rate of the screen? Is it 30 frames per second? I can tell you based on like
⏹️ ▶️ John early E-Ink screens, the Remarkable is in fact remarkable that it can do this at all. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, if your expectations are calibrated to like, you had like one of
⏹️ ▶️ John the older Kindles, you’d be like, how does the Remarkable do that? But if you’re thinking it’s gonna be like a modern
⏹️ ▶️ John LCD screen or OLED screen, it’s not like that at all. So, and so that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why I said like, if you’re going to draw with it, the Apple Pencil is amazing for drawing, is one of the lowest
⏹️ ▶️ John latency things that you can get. If you’re drawing letters, if you’re drawing little pictures of letters like Marco’s doing, you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t really care. Like you’re not doing quick strokes and sketch, like that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, you know, for like, as Marco said, the qualifier he added, for his purposes, the screen is
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing, but don’t expect Apple Pencil style responsiveness and don’t expect
⏹️ ▶️ John anything like a computer screen if you’re trying to move stuff around.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I should say too, one thing I like about the Remarkable is, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I say this not flippantly or not without consideration, they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very Apple-like design and it runs deep. Part of what you might not like about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Remarkable versus competitors is that it is a closed system. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add whatever you want to it. You can’t run whatever apps you want on it. It has a limited tool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco palette to be simpler and kind of chunkier and easier to use. The design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very nice, but the features are very limited. You have to pay for its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sync service, which is this proprietary sync service, and it works really well, way better than the Super.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It works really, really well for sync and that kind of thing, but it’s all managed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you have to pay for it and everything, and so that rubs a lot of people the wrong way. But the result
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the Remarkable, This is a, the Remarkable 2 is a five year old device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it performs better than the brand new SuperNote by a lot. It’s not even close to how,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the responsiveness and everything. It’s way better. And in part that’s because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they engineered the crap out of their own, you know, version of Linux and everything. But in part, it’s also because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they choose to do less. Like the SuperNote has a lower resolution screen that probably makes certain things a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster. The Super, I mean, sorry, the Remarkable rather has the lower resolution screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the SuperNote. So it makes things a lot faster. The Remarkable is doing a lot less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco detailed analysis of what you’re writing. It’s not doing live handwriting recognition. The Remarkable, as far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I can tell, the handwriting seems to be pixel-based, whereas on the SuperNote it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be vector-based. So the SuperNote is doing a lot more advanced technical things, but the Remarkable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a result of its choices and engineering, is a much nicer overall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience, but more limited. And if you’re looking at one of these things or one of the books, tablets,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or any other kind of, the big E-ink tablet category, there really isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one recommendation I can give because it depends on how you use it. You can use these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tablets in about as many ways as you can use paper. And there’s a lot, if you ask somebody,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what paper should I buy? It’s like, well, you’re gonna have some follow-up questions to give a good recommendation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to what exactly you mean by that and what your needs are and what your priorities are. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same thing applies here. Like there’s a million different ways to use these things. I’m barely scratching the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surface by using it as basically a desktop to-do list in whiteboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s a cool category of device. And I would suggest if you are, if any part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this resonates with you of like, you know, having something that’s kind of always there with your task
⏹️ ▶️ Marco list, it’s like separate from your computer. If that resonates with you, maybe give one a shot. I mean, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good thing about Remarkable too, is like they, you know, Amazon has them. you can get them overnight. Like they’re very popular,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you can get them very quickly. If you don’t like it, you can, you know, it’s Amazon, you can always return it, but like, I think you, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s worth a try. One other thing that I’ll mention, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for workflow purposes and productivity purposes, generally like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as, you know, again, part of my like self-diagnosed probably ADHD, I like to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a queue of possible things I can work on, because I don’t necessarily know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what kind of time, conditions, and motivation I’m going to have on a given
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day to be able to get stuff done. So I like, if I’m like feeling motivated to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do a certain type of thing, or I have a certain block of time, I like being able to choose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a medium-sized collection of things to do. And so something might sit on that list for a while,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but then one day I’ll knock out ten of them. Like that’s that’s kind of how that’s how I’ve always worked like in bursts and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of having a selection the problem with that system Is that if the queue gets too deep and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff gets buried it never gets done So what I like about this in part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again because it’s always being displayed I can always see it and so it never gets too buried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also what I like is Trying to keep each page each category personal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco restaurant and overcast trying to keep them to one page It actually keeps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my to-do queue to a reasonable size, because as I start having to write
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller and cram stuff in and move stuff a little bit tighter together, I start realizing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should just do some of these things to make some room.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did see that the Remarkable has a zoom feature, so that might be your enemy
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco here. It does, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because you’ll be pinching to zoom to write tinier, but then you’ll never zoom back out, so things are now
⏹️ ▶️ John below the fold, you’ll never find them again. Well, the good thing is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like E-ink is so sluggish to use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, you don’t want to do the zooming. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t actually, yeah. Zooming is unpleasant enough that you don’t really want to do a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I can see your future here though, Mark. What you’re looking for is like a device that is always in view, that isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John annoying like a screen, that doesn’t have notifications, blah, blah, blah. Boy, when we get those AR glasses
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can just glance to the upper left, wherever you are with one of your umpteen pair of AR reading glasses you have
⏹️ ▶️ John scattered throughout the house and your to-do list is always in your field of vision, but just up and to the left,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will never leave you. It’ll be with you all the time because you’ll be wearing glasses all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That sounds like hell.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you know, you’re carrying around this remarkable so it can be in your field of view to remind you that you have to do things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Imagine if it was just in your field’s view magically.
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#askatp: Is good-Siri possible?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some Ask ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and David McQueen writes, is your or Apple’s idea of properly functioning Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Casey achievable given the current state of the art, meaning current engineering capabilities? Another way of thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this is to ask whether the expected or desired behavior of Siri can be achieved by more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and better engineering effort or does the underlying science or theory not yet exist? In my somewhat informed opinion,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the latter is the case. Achieving something like the expected behavior of Siri is an unsolved research
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem, not an engineering problem. You may argue that someone like Google has already demonstrated success with a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Siri-like utility, but that just may mean that they have been more clever about implementing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a fake version of whatever Siri is meant to be. So it seems quite likely to me that Apple management has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey simply misjudged what is currently possible in terms of Siri’s kind of quote-unquote intelligence,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and perhaps the engineers working on Siri are not able or willing to fake it better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey haven’t used like a Google’s agent in maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever. And so, well, outside of Aaron’s car, I should say, because it’s in her car to some degree.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But certainly the demos that I see and the advertisements that I see,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I presume unlike Apple are actually real, they seem a heck of a lot more impressive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And a heck of a lot closer to my expectation of what Siri could and should be than,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than anything that Siri has ever done, which leads me to think, yeah, it is possible now, granted,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I don’t, I don’t think it’s terribly reasonable to say, oh, Siri, remember that thing that I did three weeks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago with the person, go email them and ask them to do that thing again, or whatever the case may be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And, and so I don’t think that’s really feasible, but a lot of the stuff that. And I think even Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey started to talk about this at WWDC last year, things like, you know, make an appointment for the thing that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my screen right now or add the thing that’s on my screen to the calendar. That I feel like is an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey achievable, achievable problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think this middle paragraph nails it. Other companies have done it. It’s not like we’re asking for something that no
⏹️ ▶️ John one else has done. This is a thing that people have done. The, you know, Amazon’s a voice
⏹️ ▶️ John assistant and Google assistant before it. Forget about LLMs. Predating, entirely predating LLMs.
⏹️ ▶️ John What those other Siri-like products we’re doing then without LLMs, that’s what I would consider
⏹️ ▶️ John a quote, properly functioning Siri. Don’t need any LLMs, no world knowledge, no
⏹️ ▶️ John friend that you can have a conversation with, no, none of that. Just the basic
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that Siri is supposed to do that other assistants did faster and better with
⏹️ ▶️ John more flexibility. And if anything, it seems like Siri is backsliding being able to do less today
⏹️ ▶️ John than it could before LLMs arrived. And so, yeah, I think it’s entirely achievable. I think the mistake is
⏹️ ▶️ John believing that a properly functioning Siri is like a magical little person that you can talk
⏹️ ▶️ John to. No, that’s that’s not properly functioning Siri. That’s a fantasy for everybody. Nobody has that. And LLMs
⏹️ ▶️ John can give us a glimpse of some aspects of that and blah, blah, blah. But forget about that. We just want to be able to talk
⏹️ ▶️ John in a normal conversational tone of voice without being careful about exactly how we phrase it
⏹️ ▶️ John and getting it to set timers for us and answer answer the phone and turn the volume
⏹️ ▶️ John up and add a reminder and you know, that type of stuff. That’s what I would consider a properly functioning
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri. When you can ask it things like you know, how many days until Thanksgiving and it gives you the correct
⏹️ ▶️ John answer. No LLMs are required for this, I promise you. Like doing date math, knowing when the Super
⏹️ ▶️ John Bowl is, like being able to have some integration with Apple’s own services,
⏹️ ▶️ John like when does is the next episode of Severance Air, like these are all achievable.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no quote unquote AI required. That’s why it’s so frustrating. So yeah, I think it is
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely achievable because other people have achieved it because you can ask Google Assistant things with,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it gives you much better answers. And again, forget about world knowledge, forget about how tall is Tom Cruise, forget about anything
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. Just, you know, setting reminders, setting timers, doing all that. It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is so far behind here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like we don’t even have Siri doing the basics that it used to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliably. Like we’re so far behind. Like what I expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of a quote, properly functioning Siri, like what I expect there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not the concept video they demoed last year at WBC about like, we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look through all your email and find out your mom’s flight for you. Like it’s not even like, that’s pretty ambitious.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not the stuff of like, we’re gonna have this be able to book flights for you and book an entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vacation. Like, no, not even, you know, all that garbage that the other tech companies keep like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco demoing in concept videos or promising for the future, like that’s not what we’re asking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or expecting. We just want it to do things that we know it can and should do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because every other voice assistant has been doing them for years. Like it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that complicated or impossible because we know, we’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it be done by Google Assistant, Alexa, we’ve seen them do these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for years now. So we know it’s possible. We know that the state of the art is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very capable. And we’re not asking for the world. We’re asking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for basic functionality to be more reliable and a little bit smarter.
#askatp: Still need a wallet?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Stephen Klink writes, with the near ubiquitous presence of Apple Pay these days, do you still carry a wallet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on you most of the time? Even if it’s still something you usually bring with you, do you ever take trips without it and just rely on your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone for payment? I see a ton of younger folks just assuming Apple Pay will be accepted wherever they go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How long do you think it’ll be before I, as an older person, will feel comfortable leaving my wallet at home?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For me, comfortable leaving the wallet at home? Pfft, never. I’m also the kind of idiot that carries
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit of cash with me all the time because I’m that old, kids. But for me, I do carry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a wallet. I should have brought it in here with me. I forgot to. But off the top of my head, it has in there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my driver’s license, the one credit card that Aaron and I use for like 90% of our purchases,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the business credit card just in case. I think I have our personal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey debit in there if I’m not mistaken. And then a couple of insurance cards because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we are a failing backwards nation that needs that sort of thing. And a little bit of cash.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I don’t really feel right if I don’t have my wallet with me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as long, you know, outside of the house. Um, I don’t typically ever leave it at home on purpose. There
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have certainly been occasions that I’ll leave the house without it. Um, but I don’t care for it and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generally do it. And that’s in no small part because oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes if I’m leaving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the house, I’m driving somewhere and I need to have my driver’s license and I think that there’s some sort of like grace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey period where you can provide a driver’s license later in Virginia if you don’t have it when you’re driving, but you’re certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey supposed to have it. Um, and we’re not one of those cool States that lets you do the driver’s license on your phone thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, so yeah, I, I don’t, I don’t know that I would ever really feel comfortable without it. Although I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say that I believe home Depot finally caved with regard to Apple, Kroger, Kroger finally caved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to Apple pay. Uh, we very rarely go to Walmart, but we do occasionally go to Walmart. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is, I think maybe the only holdout, cause I’m pretty sure Kroger was the last big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one. So yeah, I mean, Apple Pay is pretty much everywhere now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anywhere, I’m sorry, anywhere that I frequent, but I don’t think I could go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without my wallet. Let’s end with George Costanza and start with Marco, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s one of those questions where it depends a lot on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what kind of situations you find yourself in and how predictable and known they are. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you, suppose you live in most of America, Like in most of America, you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a ton of like independent stores you’re going into a lot. You’re going into a lot of like, you know, chain stores,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big retailers, big box stores. You’re very likely that those stores
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are going to take Apple Pay. But if you’re somewhere with like, you know, like a little dense town
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever, and you have like little mom and pop deli or whatever, like that’s gonna be a lot less likely for that to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always work. And when you see like, you know, What Stephen asks here is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they say, I see a ton of younger folks, just assuming Apple Pay will be accepted wherever they go. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you’re seeing there is youth. And young people oftentimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not prepared for some situation in the world, not because that situation doesn’t exist,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but because they haven’t seen it yet. And so you can’t really necessarily look at young people and be like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t even have to consider this. So maybe it’s going away. That doesn’t necessarily follow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We see what we’ve seen a lot in technology is when when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people have young kids and we’ve all been these people when people have young kids they’ll they’ll use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iPad and we’ll say kids in the future don’t even care about computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they just they’ll just do everything on iPads until they get old enough and they start caring about computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then it’s like oh okay well that that was just youth that wasn’t that wasn’t that computers are going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away, it’s that these young people, you know, these kids,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t have a need for a computer or weren’t motivated to use a full-blown computer because an iPad solved their needs. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re like, you know, a teenager going around town like you could just have a phone and beep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into everything and it’s probably fine. You might have to occasionally like ask before you sit down somewhere, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you take Apple Pay? Like, and sometimes you won’t, sometimes the answer will be no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, you’ll have to go try somewhere else. you might assume a place takes Apple Pay, sit down,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realize they don’t, and then God knows what you have to do, you know, jump through some hoops to figure that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. Eventually, when you have like, you know, dads,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the three of us, like when you have us walking around, it’s like, we’ve seen situations,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve been in situations where we weren’t prepared, and it kind of, you know, it kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of scares us a little bit too deeply, so now that’s why we carry around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cases carry around like, you know, cash from, you know, maybe like some Canadian bills in case we end up there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an HDMI cable, like you never know when you’re gonna need this stuff. The reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, again, it depends a lot on where you go, what you do during the day. If you’re just going to work and going to the gas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco station and going to the same two restaurants most days and you know all those things take Apple Pay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, then that’s fine. I think most people tend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to need a credit card and or cash at some point in regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyday life still. And so to answer the question, I still carry a wallet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the time, not around my house, but if I leave my house, there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a wallet in my pocket and it has a bunch of credit cards and it has some cash and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has my driver’s license and the usual stuff. It’s not even a big wallet, it only has a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cards, but like it still has cards and I think I’m going to need them for quite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some time. And once you’re carrying a wallet at all, whether it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one card or three cards and some bills, doesn’t actually really make that big of a difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like, once you’re carrying it at all, you might as well prepare yourself for more situations and have a bit of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cash too. And you know, say if your one card is an American Express, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also maybe carry a visa, you know, like that kind of thing too. Like, you know, there’s all these considerations.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like once you want to be prepared for most things, you know, you can add more things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in there. But all this is to say that I think the dream of having no wallet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, and rather I should say I guess because you can always have one of those like phone back things, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dream of carrying no other cards and just using Apple Pay and no cash, no cards,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not having a driver’s license for some reason, like I think that’s still a dream for most people and I don’t think we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, before we have John answer the question, do we remember what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP recording it was? I remember being in Marco’s hotel room in San
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Francisco. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John too bad we weren’t on a BMW race course, huh?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, right? Yeah, you remember every detail of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly. John held up his absolutely ridiculous Costanza wallet, and I will never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forget it. There is a picture of it, which I’m trying to dig up.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was San Francisco, so you should go back to the San Francisco years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No promises, but I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John see if I can dig it up. I
⏹️ ▶️ John can find the picture of it if you want, cause I have a two. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, either way. Uh, so John, have you paired down your wallet? Any or is it still 14 feet tall? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John first I want to talk about the, uh, the youth thing, right? That’s a slightly different take on that. So, um, having
⏹️ ▶️ John seen my kids go through this, uh, at first, the reason, well, the
⏹️ ▶️ John reason my kids anyway, and it may be different for your kids as they come upon the stage, my kids,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, started paying for things with Apple pay. That was the first way they essentially paid for things period.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s because kids generally can’t get credit cards until they get a little bit older. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a very, I don’t know for a 15 year old to have a credit card, but even when you get a little bit older, it’s not as easy as you would think
⏹️ ▶️ John to get a credit card and kids aren’t gonna do it on their own. But because of the magic of
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Pay and parental things and Apple Pay Cash or whatever, all my kids had the
⏹️ ▶️ John ability, they had essentially money on their phone. We would send them through Apple Pay Cash thing with the Apple Pay family
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. They could pay for things with their phone before they ever had a job, certainly before they ever had credit
⏹️ ▶️ John cards. That becomes their experience of paying for things, and that leaves an impression.
⏹️ ▶️ John When they get older and actually have credit cards and have jobs and do get paid, still they never come in
⏹️ ▶️ John contact with cash because they’re paid direct deposit into their account, and they still wanna pay for things
⏹️ ▶️ John with their phone. I’m not sure my son has ever paid for anything with cash.
⏹️ ▶️ John Grant, he doesn’t buy too much stuff. My daughter has paid for things for cash, but she only does it grudgingly
⏹️ ▶️ John and considers any place that doesn’t let her bloop with her phone to pay for things as just hopelessly
⏹️ ▶️ John backwards. You know, and that’s, but it doesn’t mean they’re not carrying wallets though, because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re kind of in the same situation I’m in where the wallet essentially becomes, like Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John said this too, a conveyance for your driver’s license. Because our state doesn’t allow
⏹️ ▶️ John you to have any kind of phone-based driver’s license. And once you’re driving, you need to have your license on you. I don’t know what the rules
⏹️ ▶️ John are about not having it. I don’t want to take that risk. You need your license when you’re driving. So
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s in my kids’ wallets? Their driver’s license. Is there any cash in there? Almost never.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or if there is, like it’s because they blooped for somebody and that person gave them cash and they’re like, what do I do with this paper? And they just shove
⏹️ ▶️ John it in there and never look at it again. Like cash is not a part of their lives. I actually think
⏹️ ▶️ John we are way closer than it seems to not having to deal with cash because I’m seeing two
⏹️ ▶️ John people grow to adulthood and basically ignore the existence of cash and credit
⏹️ ▶️ John cards despite having both of them in favor of using their phones to pay for everything. And then before
⏹️ ▶️ John I get to myself, I’ll say that my wife’s angle on this, it’s my experience that, well, at least
⏹️ ▶️ John my wife anyway, has a wider variety of ways
⏹️ ▶️ John she can carry stuff out of the house. She has a bunch of different purses. She has a bunch of different bags for
⏹️ ▶️ John work. She has luggage when she’s traveling for work. Like there’s lots of different combos you can do, but
⏹️ ▶️ John one of her mainstays is that she has transformed her phone into a wallet with
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s little MagSafe wallet thingy. So her phone has driver’s license and credit cards on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s like, do you want to just go out with your phone or do you need to have your wallet? What if your phone is your wallet? What if you bring your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John with you and it also has your credit card and driver’s license in it? Then you’ve basically got that coverage. She also has purses
⏹️ ▶️ John and things with increasingly large collections of credit cards and
⏹️ ▶️ John room for cash and all that other stuff or whatever. So there’s a lot of variety there, but I think it is actually possible
⏹️ ▶️ John to go out with just your phone without leaving behind your credit cards. It’s very hard to put cash in there,
⏹️ ▶️ John but certainly you can have credit cards and driver’s license and stuff. As for me personally, I still have that giant wallet
⏹️ ▶️ John that Casey was talking about. It doesn’t have as much stuff in it before. Was it pared down on some credit cards
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff? But it has a surprising amount. It’s got my driver’s license. It’s got my like Casey, my main
⏹️ ▶️ John the main family credit card. It’s got my business credit card that I pretty much never use, but it’s in there. It’s got
⏹️ ▶️ John health care card for me and my kids because I take them to doctor’s appointments. And so it’s handy to have their cards
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s the other thing. Like, why don’t your kids have the health care cards? What would they carry it in? Their wallet? Are
⏹️ ▶️ John they driving? No, then they won’t have the card with them. Like, that’s just a fact of life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hold on. In all fairness, regarding health insurance cards in the US, my current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco health plan just never mailed us cards. I haven’t had a health insurance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco card for like a year and a half. And it’s been occasionally annoying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the sense that when a doctor asks like, like, all right, can I see your card? I every time have to say, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t have cards, but I can give you the numbers. I can give you like my subscriber number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the plan name and whatever else. And so far it has worked every time. It’s been fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, unlike driver’s license, you don’t actually have to have the card, but they do always ask for like a scan of it. It’s like, can
⏹️ ▶️ John I just, Apple, can I just airdrop you a JPEG? And the answer is no. Like whatever, like you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John actually need it, but I do have it because it does come in handy and it just simplifies things. And also the healthcare
⏹️ ▶️ John card that we have or they’re not credit card thickness, they’re really flimsy or whatever. Anyway, and I do
⏹️ ▶️ John also have my debit card in there as well, and my AAA card. AAA,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco a lot of cards. AAA
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can do in the wallet app. I think you have to install the AAA app, which stinks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I should try
⏹️ ▶️ John that thing because I would gladly get rid of that card. It does seem like a lot, but it’s less than I had before. But I also
⏹️ ▶️ John do have a part of my wallet that contains cash. I do find myself having to use it sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ John For example, the person who cuts my hair, The haircutting place lets you pay for the haircut with credit card, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t accept a tip on the credit card, you have to tip in cash. They used
⏹️ ▶️ John to accept tips in Venmo, but they stopped doing that I think when Venmo changed the rules or whatever. So anyway, it was all like tax avoidance
⏹️ ▶️ John crap, but tipping for my haircut, I always got to make sure I have cash. Where else do I need
⏹️ ▶️ John to have cash? There are other instances, places in the North end that only take cash because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re old school, right? So I do tend to want to have cash on me. I don’t always, because my
⏹️ ▶️ John wife has cash on her much more reliably than I do. I don’t know if she encounters more places where she needs cash
⏹️ ▶️ John or she just feels comfortable. But very often I will see that there’s not been cash on my wallet for three weeks. I’m about
⏹️ ▶️ John to go to haircut and I gotta go ask my wife for cash so I can have money for a tip.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m not opposed to going out with only my phone, but because
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to have my driver’s license with me, most of the time, even if I’m not driving,
⏹️ ▶️ John like if I’m going somewhere and my wife is driving and I’m just the passenger, I still bring my license because
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, what if she doesn’t feel like driving home or what if she wants to drink at the restaurant
⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t, and then I can drive home. You know, like I’m just always, I want to always want to be ready to be a driver even if
⏹️ ▶️ John I am not actually the one who’s driving. And I, even though she loves the magnetically attached wallet
⏹️ ▶️ John thingy, I’m not big on that. I feel like it could
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m just, yeah. So I’m, I’m always going, I’m out with my wallet and my phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and my wallet is too big. I grant it’s too big, but it’s slimmer than it was. Like all of us,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re all maybe a little bit too big, but if you’re slimmer than you were, you’re going in the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right direction. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m working on it. And the other thing, I have a lot of sentimental value for that wallet, because I’ve had it, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think longer than my kids have been alive. It’s maybe a 25 year old wallet. That tracks. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a little worse for wear, but I- Also tracks. It has a lot of sentimental value to me. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I like my wallet, I’m gonna keep my wallet. But if I had my driver’s license on
⏹️ ▶️ John here, And I do have like all the cards that are my wallet or on here And if I can get a triple-a card here, I would gladly go
⏹️ ▶️ John with just my phone it’s just that as you both said I do have a lot of experience
⏹️ ▶️ John of situations where My phone is not enough and not everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John in a group traveling needs to have all the things at all the times But I do feel like it’s kind of my role to the backstop
⏹️ ▶️ John against the people who didn’t bother bringing cash And who didn’t who didn’t remember to bring the health care card and
⏹️ ▶️ John who don’t know what their triple-a number is and the cards not there like that’s me. So that’s the role I fell.
#askatp: Shared album vs. library
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then finally, Dylan Copeland writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recently a friend and I went on a holiday together and as a way to share photos, I created a shared library and manually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey added the relevant photos to it. It has seemed to work great as the photos turned up on her
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone. She now has added photos to the shared library, but they are not appearing on my devices. I’m trying to research this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m now wondering whether we should have done a shared album instead of a shared library. I’ve read through several
⏹️ ▶️ Casey articles on the differences between the two and one to use each. And I am none the wiser. Shared library seems to be the one that does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I want, I think. Apart from each of us actually being able to see the photos the other has added to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the shared library, I’m paying for iCloud, so I want the photos to be counted against my storage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey limit. Anyway, that’s the issue in a nutshell. Any clarification or advice would be greatly appreciated. I feel like I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lost track on what the right guidance is here. So not because of Dylan, just because in general,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I understand what the best-est answer is. So if one of you has it, please feel
⏹️ ▶️ John Already responded to Dylan about this just didn’t leave me hangs. I don’t even know how long this has been in there
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve got a we got a long queue of ask ATP. Anyway, this is part of the problem with Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Progress on photo sharing stuff They have this legacy of features that they’ve added
⏹️ ▶️ John before they got around to adding the one big feature that I want Which is the shared library which allows
⏹️ ▶️ John my wife and I to contribute our photos to one shared photo library That feature’s
⏹️ ▶️ John great. I waited for over a decade for it. It finally arrived. It seems to be working well, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it has serious limitations in that I believe still this is the case. You can have
⏹️ ▶️ John one shared library. So Dylan went on this vacation and made a shared library. And it’s like, the functionality worked
⏹️ ▶️ John great other than that bug, which that just sounds like a bug to me. Like it should work both ways. But anyway, shared library is the
⏹️ ▶️ John richest way to share a bunch of photos with another person that Apple provides. But you
⏹️ ▶️ John only get to do it once. And I guess you could destroy that shared library or leave it or abandon it or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John and then start a new one. But it’s not, in the sense of like, what should I do if I
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna have a shared album of my vacation stuff? Shared library functionally for
⏹️ ▶️ John that particular instance is the right answer because a shared library is just like you having a photo library. You can see the photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can tag them, you can edit them, they’re full resolution, they sync to iCloud. It’s like, it’s just, it’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ John photo library. It’s fully functional photo library, but two people can see it. It is a shared
⏹️ ▶️ John library. But only having one of them, only having one of them is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, this is great for the me and my wife solution because we just need the one, although honestly, I would like to have one with me and my
⏹️ ▶️ John kids too. But anyway, but that’s just such a severe limitation. Your other choice is
⏹️ ▶️ John shared album, which long predates shared library, but that is lower resolution,
⏹️ ▶️ John no editing, a terrible interface and all the apps to adding and removing people.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can allow other people to add things to the album, but it’s not particularly granular.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I wouldn’t want to share vacation pictures that way because you want the full res ones. Like if you took a really good picture of the
⏹️ ▶️ John two of you, I know kids don’t care these days and they just mash the side buttons of their stupid phone to
⏹️ ▶️ John take a screenshot when a picture they like comes on the screen and they think they’re saving photos. Kids, come on, man.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, if you want, it’s like, these are the best, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John beautiful sunset when you’re on vacation, get the full resolution one. I forget what shared library cuts them
⏹️ ▶️ John down to but like, it is a pale shadow of an actual shared library,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you can have multiple shared albums and I believe there’s like a 5000 picture
⏹️ ▶️ John limit for each shell album. So there are limits there or whatever. But anyway, I wish Apple would just do away with shared
⏹️ ▶️ John albums convert everybody’s shared albums to shared libraries and allow you to have an arbitrary number of shared libraries. That would
⏹️ ▶️ John be great. But we don’t live in that world. So So to answer Dylan’s question,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad you enjoyed the vacation with the shared library, but it’s one, you only get to do that once.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now you have to decide, do I want to coordinate with my friend to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, I’m going to remove abandon slash delete this library. So please harvest all the pictures from
⏹️ ▶️ John it because I can only ever have one of these and I just realized that. And then the fallback is a
⏹️ ▶️ John shared album. Honestly, use a third party service, put it in your own photo library, you know, upload them using like
⏹️ ▶️ John the smug mug app or I don’t even I’m sorry, smug mug is out of business. I don’t even know what the current landscape looks like. Use
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Photos. Use a you know, what I do with on vacations. It’s all my photo library and then I
⏹️ ▶️ John export the edited full res pictures and then upload them to a Google Drive and send the link
⏹️ ▶️ John to everybody. It’s it’s not great. This is something that Apple should solve. It took them over a decade to get sure to get one
⏹️ ▶️ John shared library and it seems to work pretty well. So maybe within the next decade we will have n shared libraries.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thank you to our sponsors this episode, Wild Grain, Masterclass, and Factor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the perks of membership is ATP overtime, our weekly bonus topic. When you join as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a member, you can hear that and all of our other member stuff, including our member specials, as we mentioned earlier, everything we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done in the past there and present and of course future, as long as you’re a member, you get access to all that atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join. This week on our bonus topic on ATP overtime, We’re talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is apparently, has already apparently added AI generated review
⏹️ ▶️ Marco summaries to the App Store. So you’ll get to see all sorts of fun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI work in App Store reviews. What could possibly go wrong? Thank you for listening everybody, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll talk to you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John ♪ Now the show is over ♪ ♪ They didn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John begin ♪ ♪ Cause it was accidental ♪
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it was accidental. John didn’t do any research.
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him. Because it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental. And you can find the show notes at
⏹️ ▶️ John atp.fm. And if you’re into Mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them at c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O, A-R-M, Auntie
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R,
⏹️ ▶️ John A-C, USA Syracuse. It’s accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to, ♪ Are you accidental? ♪ ♪ Accidental! ♪ We’ll be back,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasting so long
Neutral: Slate Truck
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are any of you thinking about buying a $20,000 pickup? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not actually thinking of it, but I’m kind of thinking of it. So what we’re talking about is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this broke, entered my world via The Verge. We’ll put a link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But there was a post by Tim Stevens talking about how there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was announced a new pickup called, I think the Slate pickup? Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey truck, I’m sorry, which allegedly is under $20,000 after incentives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s an electric pickup. It has no radio, it has no touchscreen, it has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically nothing. It doesn’t even have paint. We’re bringing back the ghost of Saturn where all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the body panels were like some polycarbonate or something or other, not polycarbonate, but something, some sort of plastic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. And so this is absolutely bananas. It looks, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think the proportions are more like a key car than a traditional American pickup.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, they’re like a traditional American pickup from the 80s.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, right, which is basically a key car now. But anyways, this thing looks so cool,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I kind of want one, even though I am the last person on earth that should buy one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that they’re doing this. I love, first of all, I just love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when car companies do risky things like even you know even the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stupid cyber truck like I at least I know there I know it has more you know political
⏹️ ▶️ Marco load these days and that’s with good reason but I at least I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glad that things like the cyber truck are still they still exist like people still take design risks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with cars because they sure don’t take many of them like if you look at every other car on the road it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like we have you know twelve companies making the exact same car all of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We just have so little variety. And so to see somebody like Slate here doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something really different, like this is a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bare bones car designed to be kitted out and DIY’d later and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco customized like crazy. It’s basically like the framework laptop of cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That sounds awesome. Even though I don’t think I would have a use for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would not say I would never have a use for one. You know? And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s such a great idea to strip stuff down to basics, because obviously the people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know about car manufacturing are saying how genius it is to not have paint, because apparently painting and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco painted panels and paint management is one of the most costly parts of making cars, and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes sense. And they just don’t have it. These are all just plastic panels. They’re meant to vinyl wrap them if you want to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You kind of do what you want there. It’s a really good idea. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea of making cars cheaper, you might think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this would be great for hobbyists and everything, and it might be. But what I’m thinking is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is genius for fleet vehicles. Because you look at what are the top
⏹️ ▶️ Marco selling cars in the US every single year? Fleet vehicles. It’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco F-150 basic pickup. And the reason why is because your local power company buys thousands of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like there’s like, you know, and every contractor has, has one of those, those white
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pickup trucks. They’re everywhere. Every utility, every contractor, every government employee,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like every government agency, they’re all driving around like white fleet vehicles. So something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, I think would actually have a pretty large potential sales volume because those vehicles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually are cheap, low, you know, low frills. Like, you know, because when, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the government is buying cars for the water department, they don’t care to outfit it with leather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seats and stuff. They just get the basic, whatever is cheapest. So I think this could be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty big in that market. And I think for the DIYers, I think it’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be really fun. I love this idea so much, even if I don’t think I would have a need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for one right this second, I love this idea so much.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the difficulty with cars versus, say, the framework laptop is that the barriers to entry
⏹️ ▶️ John to making a car of any kind for a new car company are very, very high. We’ve seen this with
⏹️ ▶️ John how many, you know, the electrification and EVs has given the chance for lots of new car companies to
⏹️ ▶️ John potentially emerge, to be nimble and move faster than the big companies. And it’s real hard.
⏹️ ▶️ John A lot of them try and they fail, they disappear. And even the few that are out there still struggling, like
⏹️ ▶️ John Tesla and Rivian. I mean, Tesla is the one big success story and Rivian’s still fighting the good fight, But
⏹️ ▶️ John like for every Rivian, there’s like a Fisker or like there’s companies that never even got to the point where there
⏹️ ▶️ John was a car that anybody could buy. And Lucid’s still out there struggling despite tons of money
⏹️ ▶️ John funding it. Like just getting to the point where you can sell a car, one car, your first car
⏹️ ▶️ John to an arbitrary person in the United States, there’s so much you need to do. It’s a very regulated industry. It
⏹️ ▶️ John costs a lot of money to build one of these, to build a factory, to go through our regulations. You got to deal with, even
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re an upstart car company, you’re like, we’re going to do everything differently. well, you kind of have to deal with the
⏹️ ▶️ John giant industry behind the automotive industry that supplies parts and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can say, well, we’re not gonna do that. We’re gonna make all our own parts. And that’s really difficult to do, ask Lucid.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you end up having to deal with the same parts manufacturers as everybody else. And that sort of drags you back towards the middle and it’s hard to stay
⏹️ ▶️ John unique and everything. And then crash testing, reliability. How easy is it to make
⏹️ ▶️ John your first car and not have things fall apart on it? Ask again, ask Tesla, ask Rivian. The first few years,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a little rough going. And those are the success stories. So even if
⏹️ ▶️ John you have the best intentions and a lot of money and the right idea, it’s just so hard to get that
⏹️ ▶️ John one first car into customers’ hands and not have like the wheels fall off of it or pieces of trim fall
⏹️ ▶️ John off or some catastrophic problem because cars are complicated and you’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ John made one before as a company. And even if you hire experienced people, Just something to be
⏹️ ▶️ John said for the decades and decades of experience in large car companies of honing
⏹️ ▶️ John the parts of their products that you don’t think about. And I hesitate to even say this, but things like door handles
⏹️ ▶️ John or rear view mirrors that you can aim where you want and they stay where you go, like
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter what the temperature is over a decade of use, so like just the minutia,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the little tiny parts, I was gonna say knobs, because cars don’t have them anymore, but like just any little part
⏹️ ▶️ John of a car, It’s like, oh, we don’t need to do that. We can just make one of those. And you haven’t thought about the 17 ways
⏹️ ▶️ John it can fail. So you should just buy the, you know, whatever, the alternator
⏹️ ▶️ John from the company that everyone else buys an alternator from because manufacturing an alternator yourself or going with a
⏹️ ▶️ John new company that has never done a car alternator before, it’s gonna come back and bite you. And there’s 50,000
⏹️ ▶️ John parts like that in there. So as much as I’m rooting for Slate, it’s got that thing of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, if I get one of these, where do I get it serviced? So I go to a minor key and
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll service it for me. Well, it’s like DIY, it’s DIY because you might be doing a lot of it yourself because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not going, you know, a car company coming from nowhere is not going to spring up and have a dealer that is
⏹️ ▶️ John close to you as the local Toyota dealer because they’re not as big as Toyota. And so it’s so hard to get that ball rolling.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why a lot of these big car companies like Tesla and Rivian and Lucid start with the rich folks
⏹️ ▶️ John because like, well, okay, we’ll only have our dealerships in the major cities where all the people with lots of money live and our car
⏹️ ▶️ John will cost a hundred grand and there’ll only be a few of them anyway, and it’ll work out versus coming from this direction,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is $20,000 pickup truck. You need some place where people can service these. And you can
⏹️ ▶️ John say, oh, you can do everything yourself. And like we’re partnering with, I forget what they said they were partnering with, was it Meineke
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they’re saying like- I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John they named it. Yeah, bring like some existing national chain of places that does like oil changes and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ll do all the service on your car. It doesn’t make people feel comfortable. But anyway, for DIY
⏹️ ▶️ John people who are willing to take that risk want to have as Marco says a baby car. This is cool. The
⏹️ ▶️ John other aspect of the one I’m most excited about and the innovation that I like to see a car company take on
⏹️ ▶️ John as much as I love my beloved lucid and the you know, Rivian doing things in the high end and stuff that’s really
⏹️ ▶️ John cool and everything. The slate car here the slate truck or whatever and you can put
⏹️ ▶️ John like a cap on it and make it more like an SUV and everything which is what most people want. But anyway, this slate thing the most important
⏹️ ▶️ John innovation that two part most important innovation is that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an electric vehicle with a smaller battery. And we talk about this all the time that it’s like, you can’t sell
⏹️ ▶️ John an EV in the U S unless it gets a whole jillion miles range. And that means it needs to have a hundred kilowatt hour battery.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that means it’s got to weigh 5,000 pounds or 7,000 pounds. If you just make the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller, the thing gets lighter. Oh, and the range goes down. Well, no one’s going to buy it. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John what if I told you it was 20 grand? Now can we finally put a smaller battery in an EV? Can
⏹️ ▶️ John we do that? Because we said a million times that Casey’s getting by with his behemoth vehicle with like a 30 mile
⏹️ ▶️ John range. He’s using an EV with a 30 mile range that’s lugging around a gigantic internal combustion
⏹️ ▶️ John engine. And it’s fine. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John huge SUV with 30 miles of range. But also it’s also got hundreds of miles of range if
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey he wants the engine, but he doesn’t use
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, you have to trick people. I wish you could like sell them a car and say, oh yeah, it’s got a V8 under the hood, but it’s all paper mache.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco actual V8 there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s just a tiny little battery. an EV, like, so yes, if I hope this gets popular,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I hope people pick up on it, I hope it becomes like a cool fad or whatever, because you’re tricking people
⏹️ ▶️ John into buying an EV with a small battery, because EVs are great, people love them, the
⏹️ ▶️ John small battery makes a better EV, not a worse one, as long as you’re within the range, because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a lighter vehicle, everything about it is better, you need less
⏹️ ▶️ John power to move the things and it’s gonna be so fast anyway because it’s an EV, $20,000 EV, small battery. and
⏹️ ▶️ John a pickup truck, perfect, perfect. Like, cause don’t make a $20,000 EV with a small battery that
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like a little turd. Americans don’t buy that. You gotta make it a pickup truck because pickup trucks is what Americans want
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t just, I don’t like pickup trucks, but Americans do. So if you’re going to fool an American into a buying
⏹️ ▶️ John an EV with a small battery, which they will love to be clear, make it a pickup truck. And they’ll be like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s my cool little, and by the way, and a small pickup truck. Like I can’t tell from the pictures, but this looks, doesn’t this look small to
⏹️ ▶️ John of a normal car. Like it’s not something where it’s like, you know, they do the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey diagrams of like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John cars have moved on in the last 30 years. Do you need to as well? Well, they should be giant. Like I’m talking about the diver. I’m not saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they should be, but I mean, I think you, you continuing to bemoan the fact that they’re all giant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not terribly useful.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, it is useful. Like I was going to say the, the diagrams, they would show you like a, how far in front of you does
⏹️ ▶️ John a five-year-old need to stand before you can see them. Uh, and those diagrams do not fare well
⏹️ ▶️ John when comparing to modern pickup trucks, especially because the trend in modern pickup trucks is to make the front
⏹️ ▶️ John of them as tall as possible because that’s manly. There’s no functional thing. It’s actually worse for aerodynamics, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John have to be like that and not sloped because that looks macho and tough and it just makes the visibility worse
⏹️ ▶️ John and makes you much more likely to run over a bunch of kids. Anyway, the whole point is all that space, all that
⏹️ ▶️ John giant hood, especially on an EV, even if you’re putting frunk there, that’s mostly wasted space. You want
⏹️ ▶️ John better aerodynamics, you want a smaller car that’s easier to park, that if you’re going to be doing a 30 mile commute from your
⏹️ ▶️ John house to your office, a giant pickup truck with capacity for 75
⏹️ ▶️ John people that still can’t put a put a piece of plywood in the bed because the bed is shrunk into this tiny vestigial
⏹️ ▶️ John little pouch because everything you have don’t have enough room once you’ve done all the manly things that your car needs to have.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is so much better because I people people enjoy small nimble cars. Very
⏹️ ▶️ John often people have fond memories of that first car which is probably a small nimble car because you can’t afford a big car
⏹️ ▶️ John and later when you know I want a big car that’s luxurious and whenever you get a bigger and bigger car But then you try a smaller car even if it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John sporty car like oh It’s so much easier to park it feels so much more fun to drive around because there’s lighter weight
⏹️ ▶️ John and I can zip through things And I don’t feel like my side mirrors that they’re sticking out so far that they’re gonna smack the mailboxes
⏹️ ▶️ John as I drive down the road So I think I wish this company luck There’s everything
⏹️ ▶️ John is stacked against them in terms of making literally any car ever that is successfully sold and
⏹️ ▶️ John works and is reliable But I love the fact I want to see more people making EVs with
⏹️ ▶️ John small batteries This is like because first of all I would buy one If I there was an
⏹️ ▶️ John EV with a small battery because it would be cheaper It would be lighter and I don’t need to go very far and it would
⏹️ ▶️ John fill a perfect role in my life My problem is most of the EVs with small batteries are just completely unappealing to me and I’m hoping
⏹️ ▶️ John for the people who love pickup trucks Hmm. There you go an appealing cute
⏹️ ▶️ John fun pickup truck. That’s an EV with small battery I wish them the best of luck
⏹️ ▶️ John and by the way, I think the plastic thing is a great idea Saturn’s were ugly as sin this seems nicer
⏹️ ▶️ John looking but like one of the great things about it besides not being painted and letting you do vinyl wrap and saving
⏹️ ▶️ John money and blah blah is the Same thing that Saturn used to tout which is not only are the panels plastic,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re in theory I know this always hasn’t worked out But in theory the plastics is the same color through the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole thickness So if you get a scratch, it doesn’t reveal like oh the outside
⏹️ ▶️ John is gray But when you scratch it now There’s a big white line because the inside of the plastic is white, but the outside is gray in theory It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the same color all the way through so scratches won’t show up that much I love that for a pickup truck
⏹️ ▶️ John for a little fun pickup truck $20,000 small battery no radio bring your own
⏹️ ▶️ John phone DIY vinyl wrap sounds great
⏹️ ▶️ John I I think more companies should be doing this. I’m not going to buy one, but I hope lots of people do. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A couple of quick points. First of all, I do agree with you that American cars are too big, including
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our beloved XC90. You’re not wrong about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that. At least yours can hold
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. But the ship has sailed, is all I’m saying. And it’s not for the best. It’s probably for the worst, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ship has sailed. But speaking of the beloved XC90, I posted on Blue Sky earlier today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Erin got gas in her XC90 today. It is the fourth tank of gas if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I recall correctly that she’s put in the car since we bought it in July So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was around 300 ish days ago that we bought the car We put a the very first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tank of gas we put in September November January and now in April this is the end actually coincidentally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the last of her next to last day of each month so September November January in April
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Her cumulative miles per gallon, which is BS because it’s not a fair
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assessment given the car’s plug-in hybrid. But the cumulative miles per gallon is 111, which
⏹️ ▶️ John Just think about how much better range you’d be getting if you could leave that V8 engine in your house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s an inline four, first of all. But second of all, you’re still right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s very true. But it’s been astonishing how infrequently, and again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m now just making your point for you, it’s astonishing how infrequently we need to use the gasoline in that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car. I mean, it was sitting at a quarter of a tank, which which is lower than I prefer, but it’s her car. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sitting at a quarter of a tank for like a month, maybe two, because she just never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uses the gasoline.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And how much
⏹️ ▶️ John horsepower is your engine, your motor? Not the electric motor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The electric one or the gasoline one? The electric one. I think it’s either just below or just over 100 horsepower.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if someone tried to sell you a car the size of the XC90, and they told you it has 150 horsepower and 30 mile range,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco out of here. $70,000 for a car that has 30
⏹️ ▶️ John miles of range and 150 horsepower. Giant like, there’s no way I would buy that.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s such a, and so, well, look, look how much room it has. It holds like eight people
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, it’s stylish. It’s got all these fancy interior features. It’s like, but it’s 30 miles of range and 150 horsepower.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s ridiculous. I can’t live like that. And you are living like that, but you also paid for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco an internal combustion
⏹️ ▶️ John engine that you’re not even using. And so when they say $20,000 EV, that probably also has like what, 200 horsepower
⏹️ ▶️ John in a car that weighs half as much as yours does, I’d
⏹️ ▶️ John tell it, like, for people who haven’t driven EVs, like when they say, well, 200 horsepower, that’s not enough for me. I need, like, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John spoken like someone who hasn’t driven an EV and doesn’t understand what the EV driving experience is like, because it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like a 200 horsepower internal combustion engine. So yeah, I just, I want more people to, I
⏹️ ▶️ John wish the big car companies that people aren’t afraid of would have the guts to try this. And arguably, you say, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John Nissan does it with the Leaf, but the car is so ugly. Like, they need someone to have a combination of the good idea of small battery EV,
⏹️ ▶️ John and also make a car that is appealing and not say, we’re going to make this the weird snail car for
⏹️ ▶️ John the weird snail car people. Like, this is not the weird snail car. This is a cute little pickup truck.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I mean, to be clear, Aaron’s car is sufficiently mobile. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was going to say fast, but mobile when on full electric, which is how she typically drives it. But if you are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever in the need to actually get up the road with a quickness, you need the gasoline. It’s either like 80 or 120 horsepower.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t remember off the top of my head, and I was trying to find it real quick and I couldn’t. But anyways, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey electric motor is not really sufficient for being the only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey motor. But obviously, if this was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John for electric.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s first of all, it’s a giant SUV. Second of all, it’s carrying around a not small internal combustion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey motor. And if this was the EX90, which is the all-electric one, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that would have a lot more battery, a lot more electric motor, et cetera, et cetera. But it’s been astonishing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how well She’s been able to get on with a not really sufficient amount
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of horsepower. Like just the other day, I, oh, I washed it and I didn’t have a lot of time to like actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey properly dry it. So I just took it around the block basically. And I had it in pure mode,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is to say all electric, like the only way it will turn on the gasoline is if I do the little step down that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your car doesn’t have, cause you insist on Japanese cars. Marco knows what I’m talking about from his BMW days. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but anyways, uh, if I hit the little step down, it’ll turn the gas on, but But otherwise, I could floor it, and it’ll just stay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in electric. And let me tell you, I floored it from a stop, and it was not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quick. It was really hurting trying to get up the road with a quick. It’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for regular driving, but in terms of it was not really quicker than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is when I’m at half throttle. Whereas that car, when both are in use, when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I stand on the gas, when it’s willing to turn on and I allow it to turn on the gasoline engine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that car is properly fast. Much faster than you would think a SUV that weighs as much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as my house could or should be. So I wouldn’t like it always in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey battery mode the way it is right now, but I also fully recognize that that’s not the way it would be if it was a full