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

682: Medium Core

12 Mar 2026

MacBook Neo details, Studio Display XDR tech and impressions, Marco tries a Garmin, and Casey tries to watch F1.

Episode Description:

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

Chapters

  1. ~60-second pre-show
  2. John’s post that broke containment
  3. MacBook Neo follow-up
  4. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
  5. More Neo tidbits
  6. Sponsor: Claude
  7. P-cores, E-cores, M-cores?
  8. MBP storage isn’t cheaper
  9. New key labels
  10. Third-party displays for Macs
  11. Studio Displays
  12. Sponsor: Quince
  13. Casey’s F1 takeover
  14. Samsung Privacy Display
  15. Ending theme
  16. Marco tries a Garmin

~60-second pre-show

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is in the show notes document. There is something that’s pre show colon. Casey

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has something that’s about 60 seconds barring tangents. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is us,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Although I think he’s he’s talking about himself.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco He calls his own

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey tangents in the middle of his own thought and that

⏹️ ▶️ John leads to long digressions.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know that remind me. No, I’m just kidding. So I have to bring us to our

⏹️ ▶️ Casey favorite our mutual the three of us our our collective favorite corner, which is… anniversary

⏹️ ▶️ Casey corner. Because today, as we record, is March 11th of 2026. I think you should force us both to guess,

⏹️ ▶️ John because I have no idea what this is the anniversary of.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Marco, you

⏹️ ▶️ John have any idea?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it… I mean, it could be our show. We started it sometime in the early part of the year.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, it could be the show. I’m gonna say the show. I thought it was February.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, uh, neutral was January 11… or something like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that, maybe 17. I’ll go look it up, but I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John forcing myself not to. But I honestly have no idea what this is the anniversary of, Casey. Please tell us.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So I will put a link in the show notes. But this is a tweet

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the 11th of March, 2013, from Casey Liss. Listen to Marco Armin, Syracuse,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I talk tech. If cars isn’t your thing, the Accidental Tech Podcast at ATP.fm.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we are 13 years in as of today, gentlemen. Look at us go. Very nice. That was the publication

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of episode one? I believe that’s right.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’d have to look. I think that’s right. Yeah, hold on. We have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco really good URLs,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John so it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey won’t be too long. Yes, we do. Oh, but that was,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John no, it wasn’t episode one. No,

⏹️ ▶️ John see, look, I was right.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, you were right. February

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 7th. All right, my bad. So, but

⏹️ ▶️ John that

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey was,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, sort of- It was that easy URL, it’s atp.fm slash one. You never double checked it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, no, because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you recall, the first few were actually on SoundCloud or something like that. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And we didn’t have our own website yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we didn’t have our own website. Yeah, check

⏹️ ▶️ John out my SoundCloud. We should have said that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s right. But anyway, episode four was released the 11th of March 2013 and is a scant one hour, 18 minutes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and 47 seconds. Yeah. Well, yeah. Episode one is 14 minutes. Can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you imagine?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Never did that again.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey It was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think we’ve done a pre show in 14 minutes until maybe, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John today.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is the 60 second one with no tangents. We’re going to do it.

John’s post that broke containment

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You had talked last week about one of your posts breaking containment. I don’t know if we would go

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so far as to say it went viral, but it certainly got some attention. And Thomas Dixon

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, I guess, the first person of many to point out, oh, people probably don’t know that the Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Casey exists. And assumed you were talking about the MacBook Pro, which starts at $1,700. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think Thomas is right.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is my post that broke containment being seen by an audience that has no context for me or my

⏹️ ▶️ John deal or the anything. And so when I posted about comparing the MacBook Neo’s

⏹️ ▶️ John performance to the Mac Pro’s performance in single threaded and the price of the two of them and yada yada,

⏹️ ▶️ John people misinterpreted it in various ways. And I got a lot of people correcting me on the price because

⏹️ ▶️ John I said that Neo is whatever $600 and the Mac Pro is what is

⏹️ ▶️ John it 7000 or something? I don’t know. Whatever it was, I looked up the prices. I put them in there. The prices were correct. The product names were correct. And

⏹️ ▶️ John people like, oh, I’m sorry, it’s $1700. You got the price wrong. And I thought most of them were confused

⏹️ ▶️ John because when I wrote MacBook Neo, they were reading MacBook Pro because $1,700

⏹️ ▶️ John is the price of the MacBook Pro. Lots of people wrote in and tell me they thought people were confused,

⏹️ ▶️ John not that MacBook Neo was being misread as MacBook Pro, but rather that

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro was being misread as MacBook Pro because some people call the MacBook Pro

⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro because I touch, you know, people will just and and it’s not no confusion for them

⏹️ ▶️ John because they have no idea that a computer recall the Mac Pro exists. So some people did confirm some of the confused people

⏹️ ▶️ John when I corrected them did confirm they said, Oh, I misread Mac Pro to be MacBook Pro. I

⏹️ ▶️ John think some people also misread MacBook Neo to be MacBook Pro. Anyway, misreadings go in both

⏹️ ▶️ John directions but two people did say specifically that they they read

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro and thought I meant a MacBook Pro and I I think I have heard people in real life say,

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I don’t have a Mac Air or I don’t have a MacBook Air or whatever, I have a Mac Pro. And

⏹️ ▶️ John they mean MacBook Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have definitely heard people say that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And

⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of people pointed out that one thing that certainly doesn’t help, even for people who are kind of into Apple is that

⏹️ ▶️ John at this point, Apple stores just do not have the Mac Pro at all anymore, like on display. So you would never

⏹️ ▶️ John encounter one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s true. I mean, I think if you showed most people a picture of the current Mac Pro, they would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like, what is that? Like they wouldn’t recognize it. Space eater. Yeah. oof

MacBook Neo follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then with regard to the MacBook Neo, we have a bunch of follow up, of course, John, you had some thoughts about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey color and whatnot. Can you tell me about that, please?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I had lots of discussions on other podcasts and YouTube channels and stuff about the colors, about,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that they people were happy that you could see the colors on like on the MacBook Air. It was clear which

⏹️ ▶️ John one you got. But some people wanted them to be sort of more saturated, more

⏹️ ▶️ John forceful. And a lot of the discussion centered around the things that Apple has rumored to have said or whatever, like

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they tested it and when the colors are really bold, that it just gets tiring to look

⏹️ ▶️ John at that all the time. And I get where people are coming from and I get the idea

⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, maybe you might think you want like a bright red laptop, but after a while

⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll become wearing on you. But I never heard anyone mention this and it’s my immediate thought when

⏹️ ▶️ John I saw these and I understand why they didn’t do it, which I’ll get to in a second. Apple has done this with the

⏹️ ▶️ John iMac, where they use bold, saturated colors on the back,

⏹️ ▶️ John but on the front, in the chin where you can see it, decidedly more

⏹️ ▶️ John muted. So they went with extremely bold, saturated colors and the iMacs looks great and product shots

⏹️ ▶️ John look great from behind, but if Apple is concerned that staring at a bright red or bright green or whatever thing

⏹️ ▶️ John is gonna wear on your eyes, don’t worry, when you’re looking at the front of your iMac, you don’t see that saturated red or green

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Well, with a laptop, you could make the thing bold and saturated

⏹️ ▶️ John on the top and bottom. Oh, but then when you open it up, inside it would be more muted. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the reasons they probably didn’t do that is that would be more expensive to do like two different anodizations on a single solid

⏹️ ▶️ John chassis. So I kind of understand why they don’t do that on their cheapest laptop. But for future reference, Apple, on

⏹️ ▶️ John perhaps a more expensive laptop, if you ever do decide to do colors, make it as bold and as red

⏹️ ▶️ John or as green or as yellow as you want on the outside. And then when you open it up, have it be a

⏹️ ▶️ John more muted color so it’s not screaming in our face. That’s my idea. Yeah. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey appreciate it. All right, Pierre-Luc Gagnier writes, I’m so sorry, Pierre-Luc, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there were others that said the same thing, but here we are, the M1 MacBook Air deal at Walmart has always been

⏹️ ▶️ Casey US only. Even in Canada, where we have Walmart, we never got that deal. So it’s huge

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the Neo is hitting worldwide. That’s a really good point that because we’re Americans and tend to think only about America,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think any of the three of us considered.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the rest of the world is real excited about the Neo because we were comparing it to the M1 MacBook Air a Walmart

⏹️ ▶️ John for 650, which is still a great deal, especially if you like that design, because as we noted in the last show, it comes with lots of stuff that

⏹️ ▶️ John the Neo doesn’t. But if you never had that deal because you don’t have a Walmart, then

⏹️ ▶️ John the Neo is great. Finally, you get access to an inexpensive Apple laptop as well.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and this could really help open it up to a lot more markets. I mean, you know, in a lot of different countries

⏹️ ▶️ Marco around the world, the idea of spending, you know, even for like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the base model MacBook Air all these years, which is always like around $1,000,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe 900 through certain channels are on sale, maybe at the absolute lowest, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’d see something for like eight or 850. In a lot of places, either

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that amount of money directly or what the price ends up being after all the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco import duties and taxes and everything, it was just out of reach for a lot of people in a lot of countries.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so this will open, by cutting it roughly in half,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this will open up a lot more customers to Macs that they were just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco inaccessible before. That’s a really big deal. As the Neo reviews have come out and more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are doing analysis and more people are chiming in with their thoughts and their opinions

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what’s going on in different markets, the more we hear about it, the more I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a really big deal. And the reviews which we’ll go through will bear this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, but this is a big deal because it expands market a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot for the Mac. And as Mac fans and Mac users, that’s only

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good news for the platform. So this is, you know, we’ll keep going, but so far MacBook Neo

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like a home run.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, not to get ahead of ourselves, but can you imagine if the iPhone company

⏹️ ▶️ Casey suddenly became the iPhone and Mac company again? That would be, that would be amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know, I know, I know, but still it would be cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But think about it, like there’s nothing else they could have done in the modern market

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no other change they could have made to significantly boost the market share of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac from where it already was like they’re they they already cover the high-end

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty well I know John but you know they already cover

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the high and expand the market yeah

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah exactly like high-end customers high-budget customers are covered very well

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the Mac and the Mac does well among those groups you know where Apple had never really served very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well is low cost and they still you know, low cost is relative.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, what we mean as low cost as privileged people in the US is very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco different from what many places around the world and what many markets need for their low cost. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all that being said, Apple has never really served low cost that well. But with this,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re going way further into it than they were before. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John huge.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if anything, you know, I I think Apple’s marketing angle of like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at what PC laptops give you for similar prices. That’s a smart play, because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you look at what PC laptops give you for similar prices, it’s not good.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And certainly Chromebooks and other PC laptops are available for less,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not that much less, and they’re not that usable. So this,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, like nothing else they could have done have expanded the market the way this did. But by roughly cutting the price

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in half, by going to, you know, a $600 entry price, like that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good. And I think when you compare the Neo to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other things in that price range, it’s going to compare really well for a lot of people’s needs.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very much so. Going back to Pierre, does the Neo run Rosetta 2? There were all these statements that the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey M chips provided silicon that simplified the job of Rosetta. Is that silicon in an A-class chip.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have any idea, but we’re going to talk about this among other things in overtime this week as it turns out. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, what’s the answer here?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m pretty sure that, you know, I remember that when Apple was talking about that, like with the M1, that it had stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John that the phone chips don’t, but we’re a long way from the M1, and you know, they really beat things up. So whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John thing might have been missing, we talked about last episode that like, it’s kind of clear that Apple didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John build the A18 Pro with the Mac in mind based on how difficult it was to add a second really slow USB

⏹️ ▶️ John port. It’s clear that Apple wanted to add a USB port, but it had, you know, it had limited options

⏹️ ▶️ John They needed a cheap chip. The A18 Pro was the chip. It didn’t support two USB. They could have just included

⏹️ ▶️ John one It would have been like, oh we always only wanted one This was actually made for that, but it wasn’t. They wanted two and they had

⏹️ ▶️ John to hack it in So it’s clear that the A chips, at least the A18 Pro anyway, are not ideal

⏹️ ▶️ John for the Mac in terms of the, you know peripherals and stuff But I’m betting whatever things that it needed for

⏹️ ▶️ John Rosetta are there. I haven’t seen anyone say Oh, and by the way, the MacBook Neo doesn’t run Intel apps. And yeah, we’ll talk

⏹️ ▶️ John more about this in overtime. So I’m going to assume that it does and whatever it needs to have for it, it has.

⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it doesn’t support virtualization at the hardware level. That’s that would be a question. But I think if it didn’t, we would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have heard about it by now.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, yeah, it’ll be interesting to see when people start stress testing things. But the thing is, like

⏹️ ▶️ John all those differences between the M and A were emphasized when the M first appeared. But we’ve had so

⏹️ ▶️ John many A’s since then. I feel like most things have trickled down, except for stuff that is really about no

⏹️ ▶️ John use to the phone because, you know, two USB ports on the phone is not a useful thing. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John where the Neo got hamstrung. But all the other stuff I think probably is useful, whatever, whatever things are needed for Rosetta

⏹️ ▶️ John and so on.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Actually you know what? Remember we heard back when we were first

⏹️ ▶️ Marco discussing the rumors of what became CarPlay Ultra, we had heard that the way that was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco implemented was basically a virtualization layer on the phone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that ran the like gauge cluster version of CarPlay

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in like a virtualized real-time OS and then the rest of the iOS platform

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ran on its slice of whatever. I don’t think we ever got good confirmation on that, but if that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was true, then recent iPhones would have had to support hardware virtualization

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the processor. And assuming that was all true. But anyway, even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that’s not true, even if that was like the direction they might have gone or a direction they were experimenting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with, they would have added that support if it wasn’t already there. So it is probably there.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m assuming this stuff Rosetta needs is like, you know, some instructions that make certain things faster

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And as the the arm instruction said version has crept up since the M one,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, anyway, we’ll we’ll find out if someone gets these in their hands or someone discovers. I tried to run an Intel app

⏹️ ▶️ John on my MacBook Neo and it didn’t run at all. But yeah, anyway, see over time I’ll talk more about this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would bet that if it is supported, I bet most Intel apps

⏹️ ▶️ Marco run faster on the Neo than they did on the last Intel Max.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s always, that’s the way it’s been on Rosetta for a while.

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More Neo tidbits

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Andrew Larson writes, the keyboard case for the iPad Air, and I think also for the regular iPad, has a moving trackpad and no backlight,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just like the MacBook Neo. The keyboard case for the iPad Pro has a haptic trackpad and backlit keyboard. Actually

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s not 100% true, I think it’s 98% true. My iPad Pro, which I’m using

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the original Magic Keyboard, the original cantilevered Magic Keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from way back when, I’m almost certain I’ve never bought a second one. So I had this from, you know, whenever

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it came out originally sometime during the pandemic that track pad is not haptic.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am 99% sure. And now the current ones, I think Andrew’s right. The current ones are haptic, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s an interesting point that they’re, maybe not literally, but kind of sort of recycling the iPad keyboards and track

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pads for

⏹️ ▶️ John the- I don’t actually know if they’re physically the same. It’s just pointing out that Apple, I think I had said in the last episode that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John hadn’t shipped a physical moving track pad in a while, but they have just not on the Mac. It had been on those iPad keyboards.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jason Snell actually mentioned exactly this on Upgrade yesterday. Pretty much the same parts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from that first Magic Keyboard.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Verge has a review which is worth reading, but among other things in their review, they talk about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey SSD speeds. And John, you’ve been kind enough to put a table in here for us, which is in our

⏹️ ▶️ Casey internal show notes. But the short, long and short of it is MacBook Neo, the 256

⏹️ ▶️ Casey gig version anyway, will read and write 1.7 gigabits per second. Gigabytes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s what I said, gigabytes per second. The M1 MacBook Air with a half terabyte

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is 3.4 gigabytes per second. The M5 MacBook Air with a one terabyte

⏹️ ▶️ Casey drive does double that. So we’re basically doubling each step, does double that at seven

⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigabytes per second. And the M5 Max MacBook Pro with four terabytes will do 13.6 gigabytes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey per second. So it’s basically, maybe not literally, but effectively doubling each step of the way. And this

⏹️ ▶️ John is getting to what I was I was asking last time, I was like, okay, well, what are the SSD speeds gonna be like? Because people tend

⏹️ ▶️ John not to benchmark the quote unquote SSD speeds on phones, and this is a phone chip, and it

⏹️ ▶️ John turns out it’s about half the speed of the M1 MacBook Air, which is a shame and not ideal for a Mac, but it’s fine

⏹️ ▶️ John for the Neo, but I think it’s another place where the A18 Pro is not really

⏹️ ▶️ John designed for a Mac, because the bandwidth we expect out of a Mac and the size of the SSDs

⏹️ ▶️ John and how much IO goes on and so on and so forth, the expectations are different on a Mac. wonder if that

⏹️ ▶️ John will change in the a19 a20 or whatever you know as the neo evolves i’m going to keep an

⏹️ ▶️ John eye on this because this is a you know quite a regression in ssd speed from from the walmart

⏹️ ▶️ John m1 macbook air which had twice as fast speeds and then it also denote i mean we didn’t make

⏹️ ▶️ John much of this when we talked about it but like when the m5 macbook pro came out the plain

⏹️ ▶️ John non-suffix m5 macbook pro came out a while ago it was noted that um the ssd

⏹️ ▶️ John speeds basically doubled because I guess they doubled the bus width or whatever they did. Anyway, the M5 MacBook Air

⏹️ ▶️ John benefits from that as well, as does the M5 Max and M5 Pro, MacBook Pro. SSD

⏹️ ▶️ John speeds are just getting better and better, so that’s great.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Peter Puliejo writes, with regard to John talking about the cost savings for the embossed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple logo on the MacBook Neo and the more expensive inlaid alternative, Peter writes, I wonder if

⏹️ ▶️ Casey he was actually, if John was actually thinking about the iPhone 5 intro video where where Johnny Ive explains how they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey used high-powered cameras to determine which glass cutouts best fit the inlay of the device

⏹️ ▶️ Casey body. I did not remember this until I watched the video and either Peter or John was kind enough to put a timestamp

⏹️ ▶️ Casey link in the show notes, which we will put in our show notes. But yeah, I do remember this having seen it and that is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty bananas.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s the technology involved. I swear I saw one for the Apple logos as well, but who knows, I

⏹️ ▶️ John could have been mixing it up with this. But Jason has some more info on this topic.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So with regard to our dear friend, Jason Snell over at Six Colors, he writes, the Apple logo on the top

⏹️ ▶️ Casey has changed too. It’s still a separate part, but made of anodized aluminum rather than polished steel

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a slightly different color shade than the rest of the device’s body. So this

⏹️ ▶️ John answers the question I saw a lot of posts saying, oh, the MacBook Neo, it’s not a separate piece, it’s just like carved

⏹️ ▶️ John into the surface. So it’s just one big piece of aluminum and they kind of carve out a recessed area that’s Apple logo. No,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s still a separate piece, it’s just not polished steel anymore, it’s aluminum. I don’t know if that saves any money because I was saying

⏹️ ▶️ John the Inboss logo is a money saving thing because it’s cheaper to just carve a little apple shape in it than

⏹️ ▶️ John it is to, you know, have those computer controlled cameras match up the parts and do the inlays. No, they still did the inlay. The

⏹️ ▶️ John only difference is it’s not two different materials. Maybe that makes it easier because they expand and contracted the

⏹️ ▶️ John same rate because they’re both aluminum or something. But Apple going to Apple, they could not bear to not

⏹️ ▶️ John have their extremely precisely inlaid Apple logo. Next time you’re looking at the top of

⏹️ ▶️ John your laptop when you’re when you’re cleaning the fingerprint smudges off the shiny Apple logo on the back of your laptop. Look

⏹️ ▶️ John how well it fits. Look how well it fits in the aluminum. Try to find like a place where it’s like doesn’t fit or there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a gap or something that’s pretty amazing. And I guess the NEOs are just as amazing as just aluminum in both places.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And speaking of that fingerprint magnet polished Apple logo on the laptop. I wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mind if that, you know, got a different finish in a future design because it’s a fingerprint magnet and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco any little tiny scuff or scratch, you will see that there forever. Something a little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit more brushed or textured like what they did on the NEO. I think that would be a welcome change for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco future redesigns.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dave2D, the YouTuber, did a pretty good and relatively short review of the Neo, but among other things,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dave took off the back cover. So we got a view of the back cover or what’s under the back cover, I should say.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, Dave measured that the Neo takes up to 30 watts from a charger,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey although it only comes with a 20 watt charger in the box. Whoopsie-dipsies. But under the back cover,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can see that there’s a bunch of different like components, But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not nearly as jam-packed. Well, maybe it’s jam-packed. I don’t know how to describe

⏹️ ▶️ John this But it’s not jam-packed the battery as we noted is real is so much smaller It’s like a third smaller

⏹️ ▶️ John than the MacBook Air. So normally when you open these things up, it’s like battery everywhere this has

⏹️ ▶️ John battery in the middle and Then of course the trackpad in front of that but then to the left and the

⏹️ ▶️ John right of the trackpad instead of there being more battery there is speakers Plastic space

⏹️ ▶️ John fillers. I’m gonna say because there’s no way the speakers are filling all that space I mean wouldn’t be so sure

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you look at the design of modern iPads with good speakers This is kind of similar to what they do where they have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a big internal cavity that works as like a speaker You know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John sound channel

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which so I think Obviously like I think the priority here was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course it was cost and I’m sure one of the biggest reasons the battery it does Not fill the whole thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is cost So I think they had space and I think they chose to use that space

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, let’s make good speaker acoustic channels in here. So that is almost certainly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what

⏹️ ▶️ John those are. Or do they best they can with it. Let me just open that up to see if like the speaker port is like,

⏹️ ▶️ John I know there’s lots of different ways you can make sort of a winding tube inside a speaker body to enhance bass and stuff like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John But this is excessive. If you look at how the much better speakers in the MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ John Pros, how little space they take up. And you’re right that the iPad ones do take more space, but like, I

⏹️ ▶️ John feel like that’s the same issue, especially on the big iPads. It’s like, well, we’ve got the space. We might

⏹️ ▶️ John as well use it for something. But the point is on all Apple’s other laptops in recent years, every

⏹️ ▶️ John ounce of space is filled with battery but not on the Neo for cost-saving reasons. You know, it has

⏹️ ▶️ John a smaller battery because it can get away with a smaller battery and still have comparable battery life.

⏹️ ▶️ John And less battery costs less money. That’s what it comes down to.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was looking at a teardown. It wasn’t the iFixit Teardown, I’ll put a link in the show notes, it was somebody I didn’t recognize but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some Australian, and they took apart the entire MacBook Neo.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now granted, they accelerated some parts, like there were literally, I think, 15 screws or something like that around the battery.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But what was fascinating about this Teardown was there was almost no adhesive anywhere

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this thing. It was pretty much all screws, top to bottom, which is extremely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey unlike any other Apple product Teardown I’ve ever seen, which is very cool. So I’m really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey into that. They were this person was concluding this is likely the most repairable Apple laptop ever.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and speaking of the trackpad, the day 2d video shows some of that as well. If you’re wondering how it works, basically,

⏹️ ▶️ John there is a, a button underneath the trackpad dead center. And then

⏹️ ▶️ John there is a little pin in the trackpad that presses that button. And that little pin or nubbin

⏹️ ▶️ John is attached to a sideways H shaped piece of metal. And so

⏹️ ▶️ John wherever you press on the trackpad, it presses down the entire

⏹️ ▶️ John metal H, which presses down the center thing, which presses the button that’s in the center. And then there’s these two kind of leaf springs

⏹️ ▶️ John on the left and right in the spaces of the H to push the thing back up. So he shows how it works. Again, I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ John if that’s also how it works on the iPad ones, but Jason says it is.

⏹️ ▶️ John And Dave also tested the speakers. If you look at the, what do you call it? Frequency response

⏹️ ▶️ John lines. This shows the MacBook Pro versus the MacBook Air versus the Neo. Suffice

⏹️ ▶️ John it to say that what you actually want to see here is essentially a straight line from left to right.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the less it is straight, the worse it is. And yeah, the Neo is not as good as the Air, which

⏹️ ▶️ John is significantly worse than the Pro. So that’s what you would expect for the price.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then he also did battery tests, which I thought was interesting. I’m not sure how he did them, but he divided it up into heavy load and

⏹️ ▶️ John light load and it demonstrates a few things. demonstrates that the Neo does have less battery life

⏹️ ▶️ John than the MacBook Air which has a battery that’s one-third bigger so that

⏹️ ▶️ John makes sense and then the MacBook Pro this is the m5 max version

⏹️ ▶️ John gets worse battery life than the Air which you would expect because of the bigger power demands

⏹️ ▶️ John and also you can see the thing that we’ve talked about in the past where if you max out

⏹️ ▶️ John the max chip it will use a huge amount of power and drain your battery

⏹️ ▶️ John very quickly. So the heavy load time, the M5 Max gets the slowest

⏹️ ▶️ John heavy load time because it has the most machinery to use energy. I think you can get like 70

⏹️ ▶️ John watts or something when you go all out on it. So yeah, that really demonstrates, although it’s kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of not a fair fight because what they’re doing is we’re gonna run you under heavy load until you run out of battery power.

⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas if you have a fixed workload, the M5 Max will use more power, but it will get it done more quickly,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and then be idle again, the race to sleep phenomenon. So keep that in mind. It doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John mean that you will get worse battery life from your M5 Max than either of the other computers doing a specific task,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it does mean if you just run a benchmark and leave it running until the battery drains, it’ll drain first

⏹️ ▶️ John on the M5 Max.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, before we leave the Neo, going back to the repairability angle and the design of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco repairability, I think that is also like more important than

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever for this type of price category. Because when you have a less expensive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco product, you’re going to sell it to, first of all, kind of fleet users, think like schools

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff like that, that have a whole bunch of them. And those need to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be repairable oftentimes, like quote, in the field. Like the school IT department sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco does that themselves and they need to be able to make simple repairs. And so that’s important

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that. But then also, when you look at different markets around the world that these are sold. There’s a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of places out there that rely on much like lower,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like less equipped or lower cost repair networks. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you think about like, if there’s a country that doesn’t have Apple stores or that doesn’t have a lot of Apple stores, or if you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco live many hours from one, or you’re relying on a network of third party

⏹️ ▶️ Marco repair shops or kind of more local options as a result of that, the simpler the product

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to repair, first of all, you need the product to be cheaper usually to sell to a lot of those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco markets, but then the simpler it is to repair also over time, that makes it more accessible to more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people, it makes it last longer for the people who need it and people who use it. So all of that goes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, like repair and cost go hand in hand. And this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is again, like a huge step forward for making Macs more accessible

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to more places around the world. That’s a huge deal.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Couldn’t agree more. For what it’s worth, I did go to the Apple store earlier today in order to look

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the Neo and the displays. And I don’t have that much to say about any of them, but I will

⏹️ ▶️ Casey say I did like the colors. I don’t love the color matched keyboards

⏹️ ▶️ Casey personally, but that’s because I’m a bit of an old man. But I liked the colors. I thought they looked really great

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for what it’s worth.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I love that they matched the color, the keyboards to it. Cause like that’s, again, like when you’re, when you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at like what brought us all to Apple in the first place. It was little, delightful,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco attention to detail kind of things like that. And even if you don’t like the, you know, the P color

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard or whatever, it’s like, you know, even if you don’t like the colors they chose, I’m glad they did

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly that. You know, that when apparently also like they, they pre-configure

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac OS by default to use the tint color of the hardware, like of the case,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that’s a great idea. How, you know, little accents like that, That matters, that adds up.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s how you win over new people to like, oh, I’m so delighted by this Apple product. People who’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco never had a Mac before, if they go for this, all those little delights, they’re gonna be seeing those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the first time. That’s how you build loyalty and that’s how you build a customer base. And again, this is why we’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all here, is for stuff like that, little delights over time that at one point, it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was our first time seeing that. And again, broadening the market. It’s such a nice thing. This

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a hit as far as I can tell.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And also,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco before we leave the Neo too much here, I wanted to briefly comment on, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco been a couple of videos out here and there. Our friend Tyler Stallman did a great one about basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pushing what the Neo can do. People often assume that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco low-end computers can’t do some kind of perceived to be high-end

⏹️ ▶️ Marco task, whether that is stuff like software development or running Xcode. the most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco common thing people always cite is video editing. Then this has been a thing that we’ve been saying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, oh, you need a insert high-end model here to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do video editing. But we’ve been saying that for a long time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Neo has approximately the performance of the M1

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in many ways, or better. It’s like M1 or better in most, in almost every performance metric.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But when the M1 came out, when it was the high-end

⏹️ ▶️ Marco chip, you know what people did on their computers? They

⏹️ ▶️ Marco edited 4K video. That was a common task that you would advertise the capability

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of doing on high-end computers of the time, edit 4K video.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So today, when the M1 is the low-end model, it didn’t become

⏹️ ▶️ Marco less able to edit 4K video in the intervening time. Also, you know what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco else edits 4K video all the time? The iPhone.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, this is a chip from the iPhone, from the good iPhone too. And iPhones

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been shooting and editing 4K video for many years now. So the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone processor can of course do that. I think we often get lost in our perception

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like what we need hardware wise and like our kind of, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, hardware needs Overton window shifts forward as hardware gets better. We always look at the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco current product line and say, oh, well, we are professionals. So we need the MacBook Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We need the M whatever Pro chip, and we need the Pro resource levels for everything. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what that means shifts up over time. Now, granted, so does software. Like software will use more resources over time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as they are available. But I think it is wise for us to not assume or state

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that a product can’t handle some high-end application unless we’ve tried it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or unless we’ve seen somebody who’s tried it and seen the results and actually compared them, actually look at benchmarks or actually look

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at tests that actually do exactly that thing. The MacBook Neo is not right

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a lot of people, that’s fine, but it can do almost

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything that almost everyone wants to do with their computer. It might do it more slowly.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It might not, you know, I think the RAM is probably the most limiting factor for a lot of those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, but again, this is a Mac, so we have swap and it’s fine. Most things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can be done that most people will want to do, including photo

⏹️ ▶️ Marco editing, video editing, all those things that we think of as high-end that you need a big computer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for. Big computers will do it faster, better, and nicer maybe, but you don’t necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ Marco need it. It’s again, it’s wise to keep that in mind. Like even low end

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware these days is so good that it can do almost everything,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just maybe more slowly.

⏹️ ▶️ John My, uh, Tahoe dev machine is an M1 MacBook Air runs X code. I open as many things as

⏹️ ▶️ John I want. No problem.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are sponsored this week by Claude. So let me tell you a true story.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This really, really is true. Earlier this week, I thought to myself, you know, Claude has sponsored the show

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if I’m a dummy or if the documentation is awful, but one way or another, I just could not get my

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P-cores, E-cores, M-cores?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of CPUs, then, let’s talk about performance cores versus super cores. Brendan

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Shanks writes that new in Xcode 26.4 Beta 3, CPU family

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ARM Sotra, which is H17S, that contains P cores and M cores.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now there’s a cluster type M enumeration to go with type E and type P. John, can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you translate all that for me, please?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so H17S is the code name for the M5 Pro that was missing.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I remember that rumor was like, oh, there’s a bunch of these code names in a new version of whatever OS it is, but there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ John H17S. Where’s the M5 Pro? Well, I don’t know why it wasn’t in there, but it’s in there now.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the M type is the, you know, it’s medium. It’s between the E

⏹️ ▶️ John efficiency cores and the P, which are not the performance cores, but are the super

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco cores. This is, can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we just like, I’m just going to adopt this, the nomenclature of just like small, medium, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco big. Cause that’s what they are. Like there’s the big cores and you know, they call them super now. The big cores are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco super cores. Okay. The smallest cores are what are called efficiency cores

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the base chips. Okay. And then the Pro and Max now have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new medium core. The base chip has small and big. The Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Max have medium and big. and it is indeed a

⏹️ ▶️ John new core. Yeah, and they used M probably, I mean, I don’t know if they meant medium or whatever, because it’s not like it’s large and

⏹️ ▶️ John small, but anyway, M is a lot easier to remember. We’ll see if the eCores ever gets phased

⏹️ ▶️ John out, because the plain M5 has them, but maybe like the plain M6 won’t, but we’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so that simplifies the nomenclature a little bit more, and then Quinn Nelson

⏹️ ▶️ John had some more info on this.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, so as per Quinn, The M5 Pro and M5 Max are on N3P,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey while the M5 Plain was on N3E. Additionally, citing Baidu

⏹️ ▶️ Casey leakers with regard to the cores, the SuperCores are 4.61 gigahertz with 10-wide decoding. John, what does

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that mean? That

⏹️ ▶️ John means that when you’re decoding instructions, you can do 10 at the same time. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like how wide is the superhighway running through the chip, sort of.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gotcha. The Performance Cores, which are M-Cores, are 4.38 gigahertz with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey seven wide decoding. So about 70% of the performance of a super core. It also

⏹️ ▶️ Casey inherit, or they also inherit the dual operating mode of the efficiency cores, which is to say that they can drop to a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey low power state for background tasks. Then the efficiency cores are 3.05 gigahertz

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with six wide decoding.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so I mean, that’s small, medium, large, like Marko was saying, 10 wide, seven wide, six wide.

⏹️ ▶️ John So the width is not that much wider than the efficiency core, but the clock speed it can go up to 4.38 instead of 3.0.

⏹️ ▶️ John So it seems like the clock speed increase alone is the main source of, you know, what makes an M-core faster than

⏹️ ▶️ John an E-core. It’s just, it goes up higher. It’s just clocked higher, and it is a little bit more wide.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you can see how it’s within, you know, shouting distance of the 4.6 gigahertz of the

⏹️ ▶️ John big super cores.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica has some more differences between the chips with regard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to L2 cache. The super or P core has 16 megs. The performance or M core has eight

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the efficiency or E core has six.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s interesting that in cash, the medium is closer to the small that

⏹️ ▶️ John it is because it’s the largest twice as much. So that’s like what, what makes a super core super? One of the things

⏹️ ▶️ John is they just spend more transistors and more space on cash.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The minimum clock speed, we were just talking about maximums, but the minimum clock speed for a performance or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a super, excuse me, is 1300 megahertz. 1308 megahertz. The performance is 1344 megahertz

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the efficiency is a scant 972 megahertz. Yeah, so

⏹️ ▶️ John the medium ones don’t go as slow. They actually don’t even, the big cores actually go

⏹️ ▶️ John slower than the medium cores and they don’t nearly go as slow as the efficiency cores. Although I do wonder if this is

⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that Quinn posted about inheriting the dual operating mode to go to a low power state.

⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder if there’s actually a lower clock speed below the 1300, but who knows. Then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Frederick Orange writes, fusion architecture in one slide. This slide is not the reality. It’s just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to show the main IP blocks. I think the green surface is probably smaller. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll put a link to this in the show notes, but suffice to say, it appears to me that the CPU die

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is pretty much the same across the M5 Pro and M5 Max, but the GPU die is quite

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bit different. And there’s some sort of interposer-like thing connecting the two.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so that’s the thing about this drawing. I put this in here because I wanted to, you know, someone was just coming up with like, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John it looks like this inside the chip because we haven’t seen a real die shot. And so this is kind of just, you know, I think the GPU

⏹️ ▶️ John thing is accurate. It’s clear that like when they just chop off half the GPU, that’s, it’s gonna look like half the GPU is chopped

⏹️ ▶️ John off. We’ve seen that before with the M1 and M2 Max and Pro, but I don’t think there

⏹️ ▶️ John is a, you know, those green strips, those interposer things, I don’t think that’s how they’re doing it. The whole point with the

⏹️ ▶️ John new TSMC process of the 2.5D stacking thing, SOIC-MH,

⏹️ ▶️ John is that it doesn’t have that, but I don’t know enough to know So, we’ll wait to see an actual die shot, but if you want to get

⏹️ ▶️ John an idea of like, what kind of stuff is in the chip, even if this is not how it’s arranged or how

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s connected to each other, this, which is basically a repurposing of die shots of earlier M-series

⏹️ ▶️ John chips, gives you an idea of what the difference is between these two chips and the

⏹️ ▶️ John relative sizes of the parts.

MBP storage isn’t cheaper

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We also need to perform a correction from last week. Richard Allen writes, MacBook Pro storage

⏹️ ▶️ Casey upgrades didn’t actually get any cheaper. It only looks this way because the base storage was doubled across the lineup.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey For the M5 or M5 Pro, this was accompanied by a 100-pound increase to the base

⏹️ ▶️ Casey models, previously a 200-pound build to order. In effect, this means that the price for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey storage is 100 pounds cheaper across all storage configs in the last gen, but the gaps between storage tiers

⏹️ ▶️ Casey remains the same.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I asked how he was figuring this out because when I was trying to get this info for the review I made the mistake

⏹️ ▶️ John of missing the deadline to Check apple’s website for the upgrade prices

⏹️ ▶️ John like the they do the thing where the store goes down Anyway, I I couldn’t go to apple.com

⏹️ ▶️ John And actually use the configurator for the old things So I did what I usually do which is go to archive.org

⏹️ ▶️ John To use the configurator as it existed before the new products came out but archive.org

⏹️ ▶️ John cannot handle whatever JavaScript redirect stuff the Apple Store does and I could not

⏹️ ▶️ John get to the screen where I could choose the storage size options. And so I asked Richard, what are

⏹️ ▶️ John you basing this on? Is it just based on your memory? And he said it was based on the Mac Studio storage prices,

⏹️ ▶️ John which you can still go and configure because that hasn’t been updated to the M5 yet. And also his memory of what it used

⏹️ ▶️ John to be. And obviously this is in pounds because he’s in the UK, but yeah, it’s tracking

⏹️ ▶️ John the price delta changes across generations is made extremely difficult when archive.org fails me. The

⏹️ ▶️ John next time I’ll have to remember to get all of the upgrade prices before the machines come out.

New key labels

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, there’s also new keyboards on the MacBook Pros, at least here in America.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dan Morin writes, interesting change between the M4 and M5 generations of MacBook. Apple’s replaced some of the keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey labels with glyphs alone, Tab, Caps Lock, Shift, Delete, and Return. Function, Control,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Option, Command, and Escape all retain their labels. So let me repeat that. Now there are just glyphs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Tab, Caps Lock, Shift, Delete, and Return. The following remain as words, Function,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Control, Option, Command, and Escape. Also we are aware as Dan writes that this has been

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the case outside the United States for some time, but it’s also the case here now too.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And it’s kind of weird cause there’s only a few keys. It’s not like, you know, it’s like they’re saving money by not having to localize

⏹️ ▶️ John those or whatever, but it’s, you know, most of the keyboard is the same, but they’re just standardizing.

⏹️ ▶️ John Um, I don’t know. I think it’s fine. Like I think it’s useful because the menus

⏹️ ▶️ John use these same symbols. Like they use the up arrow for shift. They use the little returning glyph for return

⏹️ ▶️ John and the thing, you know, So if someone is looking in the menu and trying and seeing a keyboard shortcut They’re like what key is that

⏹️ ▶️ John telling me it is it is good to see those same symbols on the keyboard I’m not sure you had to remove

⏹️ ▶️ John the word because you know command and option stuff have both the symbol and the word But that’s because command

⏹️ ▶️ John option so on and so forth are sometimes spelled out in Apple’s own documentation They

⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t just use the symbols. They actually usually use the word So, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll get used to it, I guess. get used to it, I guess, and the rest of the world’s been used to it for a while, I suppose.

Third-party displays for Macs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We got a lot of questions about what are third-party alternatives to Apple’s displays.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, say I want something akin to the Studio Display or even the XDR, but I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to pay Apple pricing, what should I get? John, what are your thoughts on this?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we’ve talked about a lot of alternatives in many, many past episodes, and I’m sure we’ll revisit

⏹️ ▶️ John this topic in a future episode, but at this point, it’s best to wait until all the CES announced displays

⏹️ ▶️ John are actually shipping and have been reviewed. We talked about some of those displays on past episodes, but they’re not out yet.

⏹️ ▶️ John So rather than, uh, you know, sort of go through a list of good alternatives now

⏹️ ▶️ John and say, this information will be out of date in a month, we might as well just wait until all the displays that were announced to see

⏹️ ▶️ John yes, are released and then we’ll come back to it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then, uh, Dan Boyle writes, I’m listening to the studio display XDR discussion. And there

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a comment about third-party monitors, missing integration features that Apple monitors have. I’ve been using a Mac as my primary

⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer since around the turn of the millennium and haven’t used an an Apple branded standalone display for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably two decades. What have I been missing on the integration side, aside from not being burning a couple hundred extra dollars

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with each purchase? Uh, I mean, I haven’t used, I I’ve used the studio

⏹️ ▶️ Casey display and I have these LG 5Ks. I think what you’re missing is that it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything is just a touch better. So like the panel on the studio display, this is the OG studio

⏹️ ▶️ Casey display is better than the panel on the two LG 5Ks that I have, the, the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey LG 5Ks like to occasionally wake up slightly dimmed. Why? I don’t know. They

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just do. The speakers on the LG 5Ks are absolutely terrible. Now, I haven’t used any of my computer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey monitor speakers in like a year, thanks to my Sonos setup, but the studio display was reasonable.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And allegedly, the new ones are much better. The LG 5Ks were truly terrible. Additionally,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by and large, I don’t really long for having buttons. I did at the very beginning

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when the studio display had a a little bit of software quirks to it, but I haven’t thought about the software

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the studio display in like three years after the first six months or so they got that under control.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I think what you’re missing is just having a nicer version of everything,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t know what am I not thinking of?

⏹️ ▶️ John I think you’re missing some integration stuff. So the Apple monitors, everything works on them. So there are

⏹️ ▶️ John keys on your keyboard to adjust brightness. Those are going to work with an Apple monitor. If the monitor has

⏹️ ▶️ John built-in speakers, Those are gonna work with Mac OS. Does it have a built-in camera? That’s gonna work with Mac OS.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now all of that is true of my LG 5Ks, but what I didn’t consider is stuff like True Tone and Night

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Shift and all that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John junk. All that stuff, if there’s adjustments in system settings that adjust things like when should the monitor

⏹️ ▶️ John dim, when should it not, should we use Night Shift, should this, should that, that’s all going to work. Also,

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS knows about all of Apple’s monitors, so they will come out of the box when you plug them in.

⏹️ ▶️ John Your Mac knows about them, knows what color profile to run on them. like they’re calibrated at the factory and

⏹️ ▶️ John so are a lot of third-party displays. But if you get Apple displays, I mean, again, like the Asus

⏹️ ▶️ John advertising was talking about at CES, if you open up your Mac laptop screen and look

⏹️ ▶️ John at that screen, and then you connect an Apple screen to the laptop, the external screen is gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John match the built-in screen on the laptop in terms of color and all that other stuff. And Asus was advertising that

⏹️ ▶️ John they can do the same thing because they have a color profile that matches it. All this is to say is that they’re calibrated

⏹️ ▶️ John to be accurate out of the box. I’m not even sure if the studio display actually has a different panel than your LG,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s clear that it looks better than your LG possibly just because it’s calibrated better and has more sophisticated

⏹️ ▶️ John circuitry driving it. But it’s mostly stuff like you were saying. Does it wake up when

⏹️ ▶️ John my Mac wakes up? Do I have to plug and unplug it? Do I have to turn it on and off? Does the brightness feature work? Does

⏹️ ▶️ John it default to maximum brightness when I reboot my computer for some reason? Do the brightness keys on my keyboard not work? Do the

⏹️ ▶️ John sound keys on my keyboard not change the volume of the speakers that are in the thing? all of that

⏹️ ▶️ John integration stuff, like the hardware software integration. And like I said, if there’s a camera built

⏹️ ▶️ John in, you said your LG has a camera and it works with macOS, but maybe a new version of macOS

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t support it and you have to install a third party driver. It’s that type of stuff, that type of hardware software

⏹️ ▶️ John integration. It’s not to say you can’t get it to work with a third party monitor. The problem is most third party display makers

⏹️ ▶️ John do not care enough about the Mac to support the features in their monitor in macOS.

⏹️ ▶️ John Or maybe they support the features in their monitor Mac OS when the monitor was released. And then as years

⏹️ ▶️ John go on, they’re like, oh, we’re never going to make new drivers for that. And the drivers stop working in a new version of Mac OS or something. So it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not really a technical hurdle. It’s that Apple cares enough about the Mac to make

⏹️ ▶️ John sure all the features in its monitor work when you buy it and continue to work when future versions of

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS come out. Yeah.

Studio Displays

⏹️ ▶️ Casey MFaz asks, would you recommend getting a new Studio Display XDR or a used 32-inch

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro Display XDR for around the same price? I am going to give you the correct answer to this question,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then these two knuckleheads will give you the wrong answer. The correct answer is you get a new one. And yes, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand that 32 is more than 27, but get a new one. Everything about that screen is better with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the exception of size. So get the new one. Now, gentlemen, what’s the incorrect answer?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say you are correct for one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey reason.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t know if there will ever be a good first party Apple 6K option again.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what John was just saying about how third party monitors and what Casey was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just saying, all the things that make third party monitors not very good of an experience

⏹️ ▶️ Marco using with Macs, you are better off having an Apple monitor. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you go 6K, once you expand your monitor, going up in monitor size is glorious.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Going down in monitor size is painful. So if you never use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 6K monitor, you’ll never get used to a 6K monitor. So stick with your 27-inch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 5K size and get the best one that now exists, which is Apple’s new Studio Display XDR.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Get that while you still can. Don’t become a 6K addict like me. You can never go back.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know what I’m going to do if I ever have to go back. I mean, look, the answer is I would suffer through, you know. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you never try 6K, you will never know 6K. And in every other way,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new Studio XDR is the better choice. So go with that.

⏹️ ▶️ John I replied to this person I’m asked on, and I said, I would get the used 6K display, but if you’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John never used a 6K display, get the Pro Display XDR. For the reasons Marco said, like if you’ve never

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco got used 6K,

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t do it. Like, just like, you’re fine. You don’t know what you’re missing. Get the, like Casey said, the

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro Display XDR is a better looking, sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco The Studio Display XDR

⏹️ ▶️ John is a better looking monitor. And if you’ve never used 6K, you don’t know what you’re missing, so that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John what you should get.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about the Studio Display RAM and storage. Apparently,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as per Mac rumors, the Studio Display has an A19 with eight gigs of RAM and 128 gigabytes of storage.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why? Who knows? The Studio Display XDR, the A19 Pro, has 12 gigs of RAM and 120 gigs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of storage as well. Yeah, it’s kind of a shame

⏹️ ▶️ John that you can’t boot macOS on these things because let’s be honest, like as someone was saying, like

⏹️ ▶️ John this is vastly more powerful than the 5K iMac was. It is a powerful computer. It’s more

⏹️ ▶️ John powerful than MacBook Neo, obviously. Now I know that that A19 Pro in there

⏹️ ▶️ John is presumably doing stuff for the monitor, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I kind of feel like it could do the stuff for the monitor and also run macOS. Imagine if you, I mean, you’re paying

⏹️ ▶️ John three grand for a studio display XDR anyway, shouldn’t it also just be a Mac if you wanted to? And yeah, 128 is tight,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s kind of cool that your monitor could be a Mac. I’m sure someone will figure out some way to hack it someday maybe when

⏹️ ▶️ John these things are old, but yeah. And why does it have that much storage? Probably

⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s just, those are the chips they have left over for the didn’t work in phones or something.

⏹️ ▶️ John And they just, they came with 128. Like I don’t even know, like, is it less expensive to

⏹️ ▶️ John get 128 than it would be to manufacture a 64 or whatever. Cause remember the,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, these are phone chips with like integrated storage, not integrated, but like it’s, they’re manufactured

⏹️ ▶️ John with, for use in phones. And they have the storage that they have. You don’t need 128

⏹️ ▶️ John to hold the OS, that’s for sure. And I don’t think it’s actually storing any data at all there. And if it was, it wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be, it’s not gonna be filling 128, but that’s what’s in there. A fairly powerful

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac caliber chip that is more powerful than and has more RAM in the case of the

⏹️ ▶️ John studio display XDR than the MacBook Neo.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And speaking of the XDR, um, I went to the Apple store today, as I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, briefly earlier, uh, and I checked out the Neo

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I checked out the, uh, the studio display and the studio display XDR.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Interestingly, the studio display was made into a MacBook Neo.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The XDR was made into a Mac studio. And I got to tell you,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they were, I don’t know, two feet apart from each other. And there weren’t that many people in the store at like two o’clock in the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey afternoon on a Wednesday. I went back and forth looking at the two of them. I used, um, the UFO

⏹️ ▶️ Casey test website that we used for something in the past. I don’t remember when it came up, but we used it for something. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I used that website to try to like, see what the ghosting and blooming looked like.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I kept looking back and forth between the two monitors. And honestly,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my eyes, in a bright Apple store on a very sunny day in Virginia

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a Wednesday afternoon, the only way I could tell that the XDR was the XDR was that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 120 hertz scrolling, I can tell immediately. In the same way that people

⏹️ ▶️ Casey who believe in Celsius say, oh, you can’t tell one degree Fahrenheit difference. I can tell. So can John. So can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey In the same way, I can tell the scrolling. just using Safari, I could see the difference in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey scrolling between 100, the 120 Hertz studio display XDR and the 60 Hertz studio display.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That being said, for my admittedly crap eyeballs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in terms of like blooming and stuff like that, I really couldn’t tell

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the difference.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I mean, there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ John bloom. There’s no blooming on the plane studio display because there’s one big backlight. What you should have just done is like run a movie in letterbox.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so you can see the black bars above and below.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That’s how you

⏹️ ▶️ John would notice that the black bars are gray on the studio.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And by the way,

⏹️ ▶️ John this brings up another aiming problem, a naming problem that we’re gonna have. We have been referring to my and Marco’s

⏹️ ▶️ John 6K monitor as the XDR for short, and that doesn’t work anymore

⏹️ ▶️ John because there’s two Apple displays that have XDR at the end of them. So this is gonna be tough. But I guess

⏹️ ▶️ John as our displays have been discontinued and fade from history, XDR will start to mean the studio display XDR.

⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, you’ll notice if anything that has to do with black levels. And remember also we talked about

⏹️ ▶️ John that Safari, is there some setting in Safari that makes it only do 60 Hertz unless you flip the

⏹️ ▶️ John setting and let it go higher?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I tried to do that and I think I succeeded on the XDR. Obviously it didn’t really make a difference on the non-XDR

⏹️ ▶️ Casey studio display on the studio display plane. But I could, again, I could absolutely tell,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even just scrolling my own website, you can see the difference.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because to be clear, that extra setting was only to update the content

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the web page at more than 60 hertz, the scrolling of the web page, which I think is where you notice it the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most, is already 120 hertz.

⏹️ ▶️ John I was talking about the Blurbusters UFO thing. That’s where you need that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which I did try to set. I’m not saying, this was a very unscientific test. I didn’t think I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would even have time to go to the Apple store today, had I realized I was gonna have time. And I had a short window of time

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with which to do it. So if I had had the time, I would have better prepared for this experience and I would have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, you know, figured out some video to watch or like figured out a good YouTube example. whatever the case may be. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t take this, you know, don’t hear what I’m not saying. I’m not saying don’t buy a studio display XDR or anything like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I was not as impressed by the mini LED portion of it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I expected in my extremely unscientific test.

⏹️ ▶️ John You didn’t watch it, you should have pulled up an HDR photo. Like that’s the other thing you should have done. Cause you’re not used to even doing

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that. Cause you don’t have any HDR monitors. But like that’s makes it,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll notice it immediately.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s true. I didn’t think about that. Again, I should have done more research, but John wouldn’t let me. That’s how

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the song goes, right? Yep, totally. All right, so there are some videos of the Studio Display

⏹️ ▶️ Casey XDR, video reviews of the Studio Display XDR. MKBHD notes that the power cable remains

⏹️ ▶️ Casey non-removable, just like the OG Studio Display.

⏹️ ▶️ John Although I have to think, I haven’t looked this up, but I have to think it is non-removable, just like the quote-unquote non-removable

⏹️ ▶️ John power cable on the big home pod. It’s totally removable.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I think you can. In fact, I thought, was it Panzerino that ripped it out of the Studio Display?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think we talked about it when they first came out. But what they mean is it’s not a plug. It’s not a standardized plug

⏹️ ▶️ John that you could plug and unplug. So they’re like, oh, well, if the power cable fails, you gotta throw out the Hamada. No, you can yank it out.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just not a standard connector and it’s very difficult to get out, but it can actually be removed and replaced,

⏹️ ▶️ John just not by the end user in theory. But having yanked the power cable out of a big home pod,

⏹️ ▶️ John I can tell you it is possible to pull it out and put it back in. It’s just way harder than you think

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gonna be.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Kevin Sleitch writes that the Studio Display XDR technology white paper goes into a lot of detail on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the new technologies into Apple’s best desktop monitor. And I completely meant to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey read this earlier today, and it slipped my mind. So I have not done my research again. Five demerits for Casey.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But John, you did do the homework that this song asked you to do. So tell me about what’s going on in here, please.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’s a few things I pulled from the document that I thought were interesting. First, Apple is touting the super wide viewing

⏹️ ▶️ John angle. This is quoting from the document. An Apple-designed, industry-leading polarizer technology

⏹️ ▶️ John maintains accuracy and contrast for large viewing angle. So

⏹️ ▶️ John when Apple puts stuff like this in here, they’re always like, this part of the monitor is Apple designed. I’m like, all right,

⏹️ ▶️ John well, obviously Apple didn’t make the panel. They’re not a panel maker. They got a panel from somebody else. The panel

⏹️ ▶️ John makers often offer various options for things they can put on in front of the panel.

⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s like, well, no, Apple designed this polarizer. It’s a special Apple. Like, did they just make a bunch of requests?

⏹️ ▶️ John Did they just give a bunch of specs and say we want a polarizer that does X, Y, and Z, but suffice it to say that

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple claims that the thing on the front of their monitor that spreads the light out so it has a good viewing

⏹️ ▶️ John angle is an Apple designed thing and it is quote unquote industry leading. So take that for what you will.

⏹️ ▶️ John Again, as another potential thing of like what makes a difference between an Apple monitor and a third party one, Apple will tell you that their

⏹️ ▶️ John polarizer leads to better viewing angles. I’m not sure this has been measured, but it’s a thing they claim. And

⏹️ ▶️ John speaking of Apple claiming things that they made that they’re super proud of, You may remember

⏹️ ▶️ John the abbreviation acronym T-CON, which stands for timing controller,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is very strange because the T is for timing and the C-O-N is for controller.

⏹️ ▶️ John They were touting their T-CON in the 5K IMAX. We

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco made a special timing

⏹️ ▶️ John controller because you have to basically run two displays and we combine them into one with our special

⏹️ ▶️ John timing controller. Well, they’re at it again. As they say in the document, timing controllers are used to control the timing

⏹️ ▶️ John and display of the pixels on an LCD panel, Studio Display XDR introduces an advanced new Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John design T-Con, they love designing T-Cons, with four processing pipelines, five embedded

⏹️ ▶️ John microcontrollers, and a local frame buffer. The T-Con controls the LED and LCD layers of the display separately,

⏹️ ▶️ John treating them as two distinct displays with custom algorithms to seamlessly synchronize them into the final image. So

⏹️ ▶️ John what they’re saying is like, there’s the LED backlight, which has like whatever, 2,300 little LEDs, and then there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the LCD layer, which has the millions of colored pixels. and those

⏹️ ▶️ John two things are controlled independently. Continuing from the document, it also stores and applies

⏹️ ▶️ John calibration data to the pixels and the individual light characteristics for each of the 2,304 LED zones.

⏹️ ▶️ John Local dimming is controlled at eight times the display’s maximum refresh rate to ensure seamless synchronization

⏹️ ▶️ John between the LCD pixel switching and LED modulation. So I think what they’re saying is that they

⏹️ ▶️ John can turn on and off the backlight at eight times the refresh rate, so eight times 120,

⏹️ ▶️ John which in theory would make sure that the backlight isn’t ever lagging

⏹️ ▶️ John behind the LCD. I’m not sure why it has to be 8X, but that’s what they say. Anyway, continuing. The T-Con continuously

⏹️ ▶️ John monitors the brightness histogram and performs machine learning based content analysis to understand the content’s

⏹️ ▶️ John blooming potential on the display, then adjust the lighting to minimize bloom. The T-Con

⏹️ ▶️ John also detects certain patterns that may be difficult for the LCD panel to display and optimizes the display

⏹️ ▶️ John at the pixel level to minimize artifacts. This is the kind of crap that you have to do when you

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have per pixel lighting control. TV makers have been doing this forever, which is like, I’ve got all these backlights.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got 2000 backlights, I got millions of pixels. How do I decide which backlight to turn on

⏹️ ▶️ John and how bright to make them? Because I wanna minimize blooming, but I also wanna have those bright brights.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a very difficult thing to do and they’re always coming up with better and better algorithms to figure out

⏹️ ▶️ John what is the right, at any given moment, at apparently eight times the screen’s refreshed, right? Which

⏹️ ▶️ John LEDs should be on and how bright should they be based on what I know is coming in the screen that’s going through

⏹️ ▶️ John our T-con controller. So, I mean, that’s reason number a million why I’m always in favor

⏹️ ▶️ John of ProPixel lighting control because all these problems go away when you don’t have to do this, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Which parts of the backlight should we turn on? You just turn on the pixels, right? There are other problems that go with that. So hard enough just to figure

⏹️ ▶️ John out just turning on the pixel, but now you gotta add this into the mix. It makes it more difficult. So they have had

⏹️ ▶️ John to do, and I’m sure they did this on the MacBook Pros as well, so I’m not sure why they didn’t tout it there, but like any mini

⏹️ ▶️ John LED backlight screen has to do this type of stuff to figure out how to

⏹️ ▶️ John minimize blooming, essentially. And the early, very primitive mini LED backlit TVs

⏹️ ▶️ John did like a really primitive job of this. They would just look at the image and say, okay, well, based on the

⏹️ ▶️ John brightness of the image, this is where it should, and they had awful blooming. And it’s not like, what has changed?

⏹️ ▶️ John Have we gotten better at milling the LED backlights? Mostly we’ve gotten better at controlling the backlights to minimize blooming based on

⏹️ ▶️ John what’s on the screen. But challenging situations like say star fields are always gonna be challenging because you want

⏹️ ▶️ John pinpricks of light on a fully black background and that’s tough to do when you have

⏹️ ▶️ John millions of pixels and thousands of backlights. On the topic of calibration,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re touting this, Apple displays undergo state-of-the-art calibration process. However, as new display technologies

⏹️ ▶️ John including KSF LED backlight, I don’t know what the KSF stands for, QD conversion

⏹️ ▶️ John sheet, that’s quantum dot conversions, and OLED have emerged, even displays calibrated to identical

⏹️ ▶️ John targets using current standards can exhibit significantly different appearances. This

⏹️ ▶️ John has revealed limitations in the standard color metric system derived from CIE 1931

⏹️ ▶️ John color matching function or CMF, widely used in the industry for display calibration. Apple has

⏹️ ▶️ John developed Apple CMF 2026 to address the limitations of CIE 1931 CMF

⏹️ ▶️ John and the Studio Display XDR is the first Apple display to support it. So basically they’re saying

⏹️ ▶️ John the standards that we use for calibrating monitors aren’t sufficient anymore to,

⏹️ ▶️ John because if you calibrate two monitors using it and they’re like, oh, okay, they’re both calibrated. Then you just look at both monitors, they’re not the same.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so they’ve come up with their own calibration standard that is presumably better and takes into account all these new technologies like the

⏹️ ▶️ John variable backlighting and OLED and so on and so forth. So, and of course they named it after themselves, the Apple CMF 2026.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s what they’ll be using on their displays going forward, I would imagine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey To be fair, the CIA 1931, I’m pretty sure 1931 is the year in which it was concocted.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s probably about time for something new.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Is

⏹️ ▶️ John it actually?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s right. I may have that wrong, but I believe that to be true.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, it is an older standard, that’s for sure. And it is, I’m sure it’s a standard that predates mini LED backlighting and OLEDs

⏹️ ▶️ John and quantum dot conversion of colors. And finally, and I think most interestingly

⏹️ ▶️ John or strangely, They talk about display optimization modes. Studio Display XDR

⏹️ ▶️ John can optimize performance for the needs of different workflows. The default mode optimizes for lower latency

⏹️ ▶️ John to balance image quality and responsiveness, resulting in performance similar to other local dimming LCDs

⏹️ ▶️ John from Apple. So the default mode is basically will behave like your MacBook Pro’s mini LED

⏹️ ▶️ John display. Reference modes optimize for higher quality, prioritizing temporal

⏹️ ▶️ John image quality over frame timing precision, Temporal image quality and frame timing precision

⏹️ ▶️ John over maximum responsiveness. In this mode, incoming frames are delayed by a small amount to perfectly synchronize

⏹️ ▶️ John the LCD with the backlight. This eliminates temporal artifacts that can occur with local dimming displays.

⏹️ ▶️ John You know all these problems you get when you don’t do OLED? This added delay is also used to reduce the stutter

⏹️ ▶️ John that can occur from maintaining front of screen quality as the refresh rate varies. So they

⏹️ ▶️ John give a diagram to try to explain this. Like the default mode is it just works like your MacBook Pro

⏹️ ▶️ John one, but they have this reference mode where it’s trying to avoid

⏹️ ▶️ John situations where the screen isn’t behaving quite the way you want especially in situations where the refresh rate is changing because

⏹️ ▶️ John the adaptive refresh can You go up to 120 and down to like 47 and everything in between But if you’re watching

⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re like using it for video and you want to see 24 frames per second video You want it to refresh at 24? So the diagram

⏹️ ▶️ John they give is trying to show like here’s one frame one is ready here’s when frame two is ready and here’s when frame three is ready.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then here’s what’s actually put out on the display. And the optimized for lower latency one,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can see that in the little timeline in the diagram, if you love the document, it shows a

⏹️ ▶️ John one, a two and a three, and they’re equally spaced in the timeline, but you can see, oh, frame two

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t get displayed when it was ready. Frame two, it couldn’t get displayed because when it was ready,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s too late. The, the system had already redisplayed frame one again because the frame two wasn’t ready

⏹️ ▶️ John yet. So frame two had to wait a little bit before it could go in So now the actual gap between when

⏹️ ▶️ John frame one is displayed and when frame two is displayed is Longer than the gap between two and three and that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a stutter You want your frames to be 1 24th 1 24th 1 24th and now that’s not the case But it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John optimized for a lower latency, which is like look as soon as it’s ready. Put it out as ASAP The optimized

⏹️ ▶️ John for higher quality one shows one two and three equally spaced and it shows them being

⏹️ ▶️ John spaced out such that two becomes ready But it’s like oh you’re ready, but we’re not gonna display you we’re gonna delay

⏹️ ▶️ John you So you equally spaced between one two and three and it redisplays frame one again anyway the diagram is

⏹️ ▶️ John very confusing but it’s basically like a trade-off that I think would only be important to like

⏹️ ▶️ John I Guess video or anything else where it is really important that you see the actual frame rate and not

⏹️ ▶️ John get any weird Stuttering that is a result of the display Changing refresh rates

⏹️ ▶️ John or the display. It’s it’s not the same as v-sync where it’s like I won’t display this frame until

⏹️ ▶️ John the the electron beam goes back to the top, but it’s similar in Similar idea like

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think either mode has tearing because that’s not a thing. There’s no electron beam here, but it’s like deciding

⏹️ ▶️ John Should I display this frame ASAP or should I delay it to make an equal

⏹️ ▶️ John cadence? I don’t know how you pick between these modes I don’t know if the application

⏹️ ▶️ John tells the OS that it wants this mode or if it only works in full screen or something like that but it does remind me a lot

⏹️ ▶️ John of the the modes that are possible in gaming displays, which have different goals, obviously,

⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s a million modes and technologies to try to make games look better and play better.

⏹️ ▶️ John And this seems more about fidelity to media, but this is apparently only a feature on the Studio Display XDR.

⏹️ ▶️ John And like the calibration stuff, only of interest to people who are willing to spend $3,000 on a monitor

⏹️ ▶️ John because they want the highest color quality and the highest possible fidelity. And also

⏹️ ▶️ John this whole thing is dealing with, as they say, temporal artifacts that can occur with local dimming

⏹️ ▶️ John displays. Those OLED displays can’t come soon enough. And by soon enough, I mean, I guess

⏹️ ▶️ John in another six years? Oh, gracious. I mean, we’re not holding our breath, right?

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show.

Casey’s F1 takeover

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so I thought I would take over

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show for the next little bit. I don’t think I need either of you two anymore. Let’s talk F1.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco what do you think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the Mac Pro? Oh, God, you see, you there’s been so many hours of Mac Pro content. You

⏹️ ▶️ Casey owe me like 20 minutes of F1 content. Thank you very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco much.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, so Formula One is, you know, a bunch of pretty rich people

⏹️ ▶️ Casey spending money going around the world racing pretty big, pretty and fast cars.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I really enjoy it. I’ve gotten into it over the last several years. And there’s been a lot of F1 news,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey particularly for Americans over the last month or two, because Apple has taken over

⏹️ ▶️ Casey rights to broadcast all of the Grands Prix. I think I have that right. Basically all the races

⏹️ ▶️ Casey here in America through Apple TV, which is super duper exciting. And I think we talked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it very briefly when that news had first landed here on the show. But now the season

⏹️ ▶️ Casey has begun. We had our race in Melbourne or Melbourne if you’re Australian. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was this past weekend as I record this. This coming weekend as I record this is the Chinese Grand Prix.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I have done a little bit of Formula 1-ing, if you will. I’ve gone racing through Apple TV

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I wanted to talk about it a bit. First of all, right before the season started, I think it was the week,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so early last week, there was genuinely bombshell news that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey had arranged with Netflix, of all people, to do kind of a content exchange where

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Netflix is going to air a couple of the Grands Prix or races. I think the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Montreal Grand Prix in particular, which obviously is in Canada. There might be a couple others, I forget off

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the top of my head. But they’re going to air that on Netflix as well as on Apple TV.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But interestingly, Apple TV, you can now use your Apple TV

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or Apple One or what have you account to play the Netflix show Drive to Survive,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is fascinating and extremely cool because Drive to Survive

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is basically like a drama documentary about the prior Formula

⏹️ ▶️ Casey One season. They have a new, you know, like five to 10 episode run every year, typically coming out

⏹️ ▶️ Casey shortly before the season starts. And it is an incredible way to get into F1. If you are curious

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about F1 and really want to get into F1, I cannot recommend Drive to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Survive. And And you can now watch it on Apple TV, which is really cool because I cancelled Netflix like three years ago

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I was really excited to be able to watch it and as it turns out for reasons

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are not exceedingly important last season was very very interesting and very very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey exciting and Actually this season that just started is also interesting and exciting and we’ll probably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about or hopefully get to get to talk about why here in a second but Drive to survive is a great

⏹️ ▶️ Casey way to do a recap of last season and kind of understand who the players are and raise the drivers are,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should say, but also, you know, the team principle, which is to kind of like the coach

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and all the different teams and understand what made last year so interesting. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey got to tell you, it is weird whiplash going into the Apple TV app, which I rarely used to begin

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with, going into drives to survive and then immediately being presented with a Netflix

⏹️ ▶️ Casey done from the Apple TV app. It melted my brain,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fellas. It was so weird and there’s There’s nothing wrong with it. It was just the weirdest feeling

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that somehow I’m watching Netflix via the Apple TV platform. Very, very weird.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple has also provided a bunch of previews for the 2026 season. I’ll put a link to a,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s 20 minute video that they’ve created, or perhaps Formula One has created that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can watch in Apple TV. Just to give a very quick pitch for the 2026 F1 season,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey every five to 10 years, I think it’s like five-ish years, there’s a set of regulation changes that define

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how you build your race car. And this year, in 2026, we have a new set

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of regulations around not only the car, but the power unit, which is a combination

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a gasoline and electric motor. And so the cars are smaller,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they’re not as long, they’re not as wide, which means on certain tracks

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s likely to be more passing just from a space perspective. The

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco way they- So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they define a formula to make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cars?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, they define one formula for all the cars. That’s exactly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. Honest question, is that why it’s called that?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, truth be told, I’m not a big enough F1 fan to know. I’m sure we’re gonna get a million pieces of feedback about this. I’m honestly not sure.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe that to be true because there’s Formula 2, Formula 3, et cetera. Oh, I don’t think I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco knew that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, yeah, they’re like, you know, in the same way that there’s, you know, double A baseball, triple A baseball, et cetera,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which probably doesn’t matter. I don’t think I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that either.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, either

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way. No, I honestly, I didn’t know about double A. I did know about triple A because the Columbus team,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Columbus Clippers when I was growing up was a triple A baseball team. And as somebody

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who likes hot dogs and having fun but doesn’t care about professional sports,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was a great combination because you could go to a baseball game, which we did all the time, like on school trips and stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You could get great seats for not that much money. Everything was easier. You know, it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nearly as hard for like, you know, parking and tickets and you know, all the prices of everything. And you know, the crowds,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s like baseball, but fun. Gracious.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, you can send email to Marco about that. But anyways, uh, so the new season,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they have different regulations with regard to aerodynamics, different regulations with regard to basically the engine,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, all, everything is turned upside down and inside out. Not literally, of course. And so this is an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey incredibly good time to get into F1 because all of the people that have been winning for years.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is unlikely they will keep winning. Basically every time they do regulation changes of either aerodynamics

⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash body styles or power units, usually the entire grid gets switched up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the people who sucked suddenly become good. The people who were good suddenly start to suck. Uh, but now we’re getting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a switch of everything, the power units and the aerodynamics. So if you were even lightly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey interested in F1, I cannot stress enough. Now is the time to jump in, particularly if you’re American,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because you can get F1 for quote unquote free as long as you’re an Apple TV subscriber.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, they made a lot of noise. Apple did about how there will be quad box, uh, which is Jason

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Snell’s favorite thing. I like it as well, which is to say, um, when you’re watching an F1 race, when you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey watching it live and we’ll get there in a second, you can do like one main feed and a trio of feeds

⏹️ ▶️ Casey off to the side. So let’s say you have the main race feed kind of front and center. And then off to the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey side, you have maybe your three favorite drivers, or maybe you have a map of the racetrack

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and two of your favorite drivers. Or maybe you have a map of the racetrack and the state of the tires and one of your favorite, you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, your absolute favorite driver. And allegedly, there’s also,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually reading from Jason Snell’s coverage, there are 30 extra feeds, including a racetrack or driver data

⏹️ ▶️ Casey podium channels as well that show the video of whichever cars are in the first, second, and third places, which is very clever,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and all 22 driver cameras. So every single one of these cars has telemetry. Every single one of these cars has a camera

⏹️ ▶️ Casey strapped to it. well, maybe not literally strapped to it, but you get what I mean. And so you can watch the race

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the perspective of your favorite driver, if that’s what you want to do. All of this is really incredible. And I’ve been living

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this world over the last couple of years, which we talked about several episodes ago, through the really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey genuinely excellent F1 TV, which is Formula One’s first party TV package

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they use everywhere else in the world and is available here in America,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you can’t pay for it anymore directly with F1 as you used to be able to do, and as I did,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the tune of like $120 a year. But now, if you’re an Apple TV subscriber, you can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey link, and I’ll put a link in the show notes of how to do this, you can link up your F1 TV account with your Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey account, and then you get the super mega ultra baller version of F1 TV with full 4K

⏹️ ▶️ Casey feeds and the whole rigmarole for quote unquote free, which is really great. And this is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey incredibly important right now for Americans because the Melbourne Grand Prix was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at like, I think 11 p.m. local time. So I stayed up to watch the first like three laps that I passed out.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Chinese Grand Prix, I think is that like one in the morning this coming Sunday or something like that. I forget exactly when. Obviously

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as they move to Europe and then to America, these races become a much more tenable time of day for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Americans, but it’s not great right now. Well, I decided to watch the race replay

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Apple TV on Sunday morning after I’d woken up. And I quickly realized

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that on Apple TV, You can’t do multi-view when

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re doing the replay. And in fact, you can’t choose any other

⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio feed. So a lot of people really like the Sky Sports Crew, which is a British TV channel,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess a cable channel if I’m not mistaken. And when we got these things on ESPN, we would get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey their commentary, which was hilarious, as has been mentioned on Upgrade many times. Because you’ll hear

⏹️ ▶️ Casey these commentators say, and on your Sky Sports box, hit the red button to do blah, blah, blah, sys, boom,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bah. And this is being broadcast on ESPN where we don’t have Sky Sports, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very unusual. But a lot of people really like those commentators, despite the fact that they’re deeply, deeply

⏹️ ▶️ Casey biased for anyone British, not that I’m grumpy about it. So anyways, so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can’t switch to the Sky Audio in the replay, you can’t get any other cameras, you can’t switch to Sky Audio.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The replays kind of suck on Apple TV, which is really surprising

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me. And perhaps they’ll get better and I’ll follow up in the future if they do. but they really kind

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of suck right now. And it’s funny because you can switch over to the F1 TV app, which is genuinely pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. And you can get the replay with multicam with the Sky Sports commentators and the whole rigmarole.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The other fascinating thing, and I would love for anyone who’s listening to try this, even if you could not possibly care

⏹️ ▶️ Casey less about F1, when I did the race replay, first of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all, it included like an hour of pre-show, which in the F1 TV app is separated into its own thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I didn’t really love that. but the very first thing I saw was a f***ing ad for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey American Express. That was the first thing I saw when I started the replay. What are we doing?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What are we doing? The whole value ad for Apple TV is, so I’ve seen f***ing ads, and now I’m seeing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an ad for American Express front and center immediately. Sorry, John, front and center.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, I think Apple has been very, very clear that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple will put ads that it wants to put wherever it wants on all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of its products, on all of its services, usually for its services. I mean, this is usually this is a little bit,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but Apple has already, you know, by their actions over and over again, over

⏹️ ▶️ Marco many years, has already said, we don’t care about showing people ads. It’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We will take that trade off. Like they have already sold out that part of the user experience many years ago.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that is, I don’t like that. I don’t accept that. But that is true

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they They don’t care about showing you ads and promos as much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as they want when it suits

⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. Yeah, and I don’t love it. I really don’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco neither do I.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, to be fair, I have not seen a live race yet, and this coming week is not going to be that week

⏹️ ▶️ Casey either. So I would presume, well, certainly the multi-view thing will get better in the live race. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know if there’s going to be a pre-roll ad or something like that in the live race. I really have no idea.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the other thing that’s kind of chapped my bottom is that in the upper right-hand corner on and off throughout

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the race. It said in like a little, like a half opaque, you know, a fate,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not faded, but for lack of a better word, faded display in the upper right-hand corner broadcast presented

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by American express pipe, Apple TV. What are we doing? What are we doing?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I that that’s not shown on F1 TV. I don’t see any of this bullshit on F1 TV, but I have to see it on the,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, the special Apple we are. We believe in design. We believe in nice. And I’m seeing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this on Apple TV. Like what are we doing here? I don’t get it. I don’t get it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are there ads on the cars? Oh god. Yes But I mean that that’s just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey noise at this point.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I’m sure there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco infinite ads in the video Yes, you’re watching a bunch of billboards

⏹️ ▶️ John traveling 200 miles an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hour. That is true. You’re not wrong. You are not wrong

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that’s every sport.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I’m a little annoyed. I didn’t think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it that way until just now, but you’re not wrong But I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ John on that topic though. I have a question technical question I know you haven’t been watching F1 that long, but you were talking about the driver cameras

⏹️ ▶️ John and how you couldn’t switch through them and the replays and so on and so forth and how they have a camera on every driver’s car.

⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t think of any other sporting event where such an integral

⏹️ ▶️ John part of the broadcast is attached to the competitors. I know in other sports, like they

⏹️ ▶️ John have the camera that flies over the football field and the NFL and the wires, and in other sports

⏹️ ▶️ John they have a thousand cameras around the stadium, but they’re not physically attached to the competitors. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, I think maybe in the NFL, they’d put like helmet cams on for something, but they’re not literally on every player. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ John not an integral part of the broadcast, where if especially people get used to this, the expectation, first of

⏹️ ▶️ John all, it’s the expectation of the producers of the show that they can choose any driver to show at any given time to build the broadcast. But second,

⏹️ ▶️ John with these apps, now the viewer also gets to choose, I want to see my favorite

⏹️ ▶️ John driver or whatever, right? So this leads me to think, all right, What happens

⏹️ ▶️ John if the camera on whoever, like the first or second place person is, fails in the middle

⏹️ ▶️ John of the race? Do they treat it like, you know, whatever, like accident on the track, everyone goes slow,

⏹️ ▶️ John and they like fix the cameras or

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey something?

⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, no, no. Or do they say, well, tough luck, the camera broke, but we’re not like, we’re gonna tell him to

⏹️ ▶️ John stop because that would really screw up the race because, you know, he’s in the lead now. And I mean, I guess, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John all I know about F1 is from the F1 movie with Brad Pitt, so God knows what I know. Like there are things that can happen on the track

⏹️ ▶️ John that can really mess things up for you if you are in the lead, because like if there’s a crash, it’s a safety concern, everyone

⏹️ ▶️ John has to like stop racing essentially. Um, and same thing with, you know, people going to the pit stops

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. So has this ever happened? My question is what happens when the camera breaks? So surely this has happened at

⏹️ ▶️ John one point or another, what do they do?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so as an example, when I’ve been watching the F1 TV app, there will often be a crash.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there was a couple of years ago before I was an F1 TV subscriber where Roman Grosjean,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey his car caught on fire. It was awful. I genuinely thought that the children and I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey had just watched this man die live on air. It turns out he was fine. It’s an incredible

⏹️ ▶️ Casey story. It’s worth looking into if you’re interested in that sort of thing, because you know that it worked out all right.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But before I realized how dire it was when they were still assessing the situation,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or I guess it wasn’t that crash, it was a different crash, but you could go back and look at the perspective

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that driver as they’re about to crash. And again, in the four or five years I’ve been watching F1,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this gross John one was the only time that I genuinely thought this man is either dead or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey severely injured. All these other crashes, they’re usually up and out of the car almost immediately.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a surprisingly safe sport given the danger involved with it. So anyways, when a crash

⏹️ ▶️ Casey happens, what you can do is you can flip over to that camera and watch their perspective

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the crash. And then you’ll see the driver get out of the car because the camera’s like over their shoulder.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then they’ll show like the crane picking up the car. And then at some point, one of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the directors or whatever for F1 TV will be like, well, that’s enough. And then they’ll just put up a logo of the team and that’s that. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the entire rest of the race. If you go to that camera perspective, you just see a logo for like Red Bull

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever. So they do not stop the show if the camera goes bad.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Now with-

⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s for a car that crashed. I’m saying the car is racing, the person’s in first place, but oh, their camera broke,

⏹️ ▶️ John a wire got loose.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Who knows? Technical

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John issue. I totally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand. I’ve never seen that happen.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m not saying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it hasn’t happened,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I mean. I wonder if they have backup cameras, like they have a second one or whatever. It’s just interesting to like, you know, the reason I’m thinking

⏹️ ▶️ John about it is because like, oh, a team could sabotage their own camera and you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John make it break at an opportune time for them, such that blah, blah, anyway, again, all I know is this stupid

⏹️ ▶️ John Brad Pitt movie. So who knows how realistic this is, but it is a challenge because if you’re a viewer and the

⏹️ ▶️ John person who’s in first place, It’s like first and second place are dueling and you wanna see through their camera and their camera breaks.

⏹️ ▶️ John You miss out on that part of the brawl. You’re never gonna get that footage back. So it’s like, it’s, you know, and every sport is like

⏹️ ▶️ John that. You’re like, you know, if it’s a dramatic play at the end of the Super Bowl or something, which rarely happens, but anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a thousand cameras in that stadium. And if one of those cameras break, don’t worry. There’s plenty of other cameras. Like they’ll get

⏹️ ▶️ John the angle. They’ll get the play. Like this, it’s their job. They’ll get you the content. But if it’s in

⏹️ ▶️ John a car, like you can’t, the car is going zoom. You can’t sort of hop onto the car, like

⏹️ ▶️ John a little droid and fix it for them, they’re too busy racing. So anyway, that’s my question about cameras.

⏹️ ▶️ John What do they do when it breaks?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey To answer that a little bit, I’ve forgotten that as you’re talking, it reminded me

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I believe all the cameras have, or excuse me, all the cars have three cameras. They have the standard camera, which is over the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey shoulder of the driver. They have one that’s really down low on the front wing of the car and one that’s pointed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey behind the car. And so I would assume that if one of the three of those cameras fails, they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would just lock in for lack of a better word on one of the other cameras. I don’t know that for certainty, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what I would assume they do.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’ve watched too many YouTube videos about plane crashes. It’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey what

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco about

⏹️ ▶️ John when all

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco three cameras

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey fail? That will never

⏹️ ▶️ John happen, right? Don’t watch YouTube videos about plane crashes. It’s not healthy.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not a good idea. But yeah, I mean, as negative as I am about the advertising, which obviously

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m a touch negative, I do think that this is, on the whole,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really great for Americans, really great to make the sport more accessible to Americans. Now admittedly,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ESPN is not that hard to come by. And you know, basically anyone with a cable subscription had ESPN or has

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ESPN. But I do think that it’s really neat that this is something that Apple is exploring.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I bet you that whenever the time comes in a couple of weeks that there’s a race that I can watch live,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I suspect I’m going to be very enthusiastic about the live experience. I also didn’t mention

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that on the Vision Pro, I think you get five camera angles instead of four, which is exciting.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But again, maybe they’ll make the replays better as well. I mean, I’m not certain that that’s going to happen, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I presume it will at some point. Um, but sitting here now, I’m kind of meh

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the experience, but I do think it has incredible potential and I’m really excited

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for them to realize that potential or in their defense, I guess they have realized it. It’s just, I can’t tell because I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey here in America where, you know, the races are on in the middle of the night so far. But again, I can’t stress

⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough for the two of you and for anyone listening, if you’re even vaguely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey interested in, in technology and engineering and cars going fast

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the drama of, you know, these incredibly big, loud personalities,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really do think F1 is worth a look. And another thing that the F1 TV app does, and I’m pretty darn

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure I guess Apple TV does do it as well. They’ll also do a race in 30. So if you wanted to dip your toes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in several hours after the race ends, they’ll do a 30 cut of the race where they show

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the exciting bits. And I can tell you the first race of this year, the first half, the first 30 or so of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 50-ish laps that they raced were really good and really, really exciting. The back half was kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a snooze. But this is such a good time to jump into it. There’s plenty of content out there, both

⏹️ ▶️ Casey within Apple TV and elsewhere, where you can check out what is F1 about, how does it work, et cetera.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is a great time to do it. And if you are an American Apple TV subscriber, you really owe it to yourself to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just give it a shot and just see if nothing else, how are they handling these things? Especially when I can tell you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at some point, multi-view is good or excuse me, replays are good now and they have multi-view. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even if you don’t do it now, you should do it later, but I think you should check it out. And I think the two of you, I don’t know if you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have the attention span for two hour race, either of you, but I think especially the race

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco in 30 might

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be interested enough, interesting enough to you to give it a shot and see what you think.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll watch the F1 sequel movie.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. So, yeah.

Samsung Privacy Display

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in the last week or two, I forget exactly when it was, Samsung had their big announcement

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for their new phones or I guess the new Galaxy line of phones, if nothing else. And they announced

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Galaxy S26. And it has a feature. I didn’t put this in the show notes because I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey kept forgetting. I’m assuming John did. But I’m really glad that John or whoever put this in the show notes because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really wanted to talk about this. The S26 has something called the privacy display.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you’re listening to this in a situation where you can watch a video for a few minutes, I strongly suggest

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you pause me for a moment and go watch Samsung’s announcement video starting at 31 minutes and 10 seconds. We’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey put a link in the show notes that hopefully will have a timestamp on it, but one way or another we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a link in the show notes for you. This is incredible. So I have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some friends, some dear friends that live locally, right around the corner from me basically, and the husband

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and wife, they both have these privacy screens on their phones. before, where you can only

⏹️ ▶️ Casey see what’s on the screen, basically, if you’re looking at it dead on. And if you’re looking at it off, you know, on an angle of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey any sort, the screen is just like a deep gray or even black. It is annoying as

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hell when they show me their phone, because they want me to see something on their phone. But if they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not tilted exactly right, I can’t see a damn thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it basically makes the phone unusable in many common situations to get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the privacy.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s, you know, that’s not even taking into account the fact that the color is all like weird

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and everything looks kind of milky for lack of a better word. It’s not for me, not my color.

⏹️ ▶️ John And these are, I’m not familiar with this. I’ve seen them of course, but I always assume it’s a thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that you attach, that you lay on top of

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco your

⏹️ ▶️ John screen, like a screen

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco protector.

⏹️ ▶️ John Are there any phones that have a privacy display like that built into the phone or is it always an

⏹️ ▶️ John aftermarket thing that you stick to the front of your display?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s always an aftermarket thing until now. So the Galaxy S26 has

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what they call privacy display. And I’m very unclear on how this works. They

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John did try to explain it. I can explain it to you. It’s in the video.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and I watched the video, and it went right over my head. So we’ll come to how in a second. But what the net effect

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is is that you have software control over whether or not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the screen is in privacy mode or not. So you can control via software on the Samsung Galaxy S26. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey presume there’s maybe a subset of the S26s, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John whatever. I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the S26 Ultra. I forget.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You

⏹️ ▶️ Casey get the idea. So you can control via software whether or not the screen

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is visible off axis, right? Which in and of itself, I think is super freaking cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But then they went all Apple on it. You can, with software, say, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anytime I open the Wells Fargo app, blank the screen, or not blank the screen, you know, make the whole screen

⏹️ ▶️ Casey privacy mode. So that anytime you open your banking app, the whole screen goes into privacy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode. So presumably the only person that can see what’s going on is you. But then it gets even freaking better.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then they have, I don’t know the specifics about it, but they showed like a notification

⏹️ ▶️ Casey coming down from the top of the screen where only the notification is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in privacy mode. So a subset of the screen is in privacy mode. That’s the coolest part. This

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is so freaking cool and I wanted on my iPhone yesterday.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure you do, but first let me say one thing about this. We’re calling it privacy mode. And what it

⏹️ ▶️ John means is you can only let you have to be looking dead on at it has to the screen has to be like perpendicular

⏹️ ▶️ John to your eyeballs. Right? If someone is shoulder surfing you,

⏹️ ▶️ John it is very possible for them to be pretty much as perpendicular as you are and

⏹️ ▶️ John see the screen. It doesn’t make your screen invisible to other people. It just makes it way

⏹️ ▶️ John harder to shoulder surf you because you have to get right. You know, You have to be similar

⏹️ ▶️ John angle to the person viewing it. So if you think this is like, now only I can see the screen.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John not true. Especially like, I mean, if you’ve ever spied at someone’s computer or

⏹️ ▶️ John phone screen, like on a, for example, on a plane, where often you have a view that is fairly direct angle at the thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John because you’re right behind them and you’re looking through like the crook of their ear and their shoulder and

⏹️ ▶️ John their neck at their phone screen, and they’re holding their phone in their left hand and it’s actually facing you just as much as it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John facing them. So just don’t, uh, if you get a privacy display, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John like a, a stick on thing or this technology, don’t assume it literally makes it invisible because people can

⏹️ ▶️ John still shoulder surf your, you know, passcode if you have a numeric passcode or something like that, or see your

⏹️ ▶️ John messages or whatever. So there is that. But the other reason you probably don’t want this is how it’s implemented.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I, I, that’s the reason I looked at this video and got the timestamp out because I wanted to know how they implemented it and

⏹️ ▶️ John they implemented it in a clever way, but also a kind of way that makes you go, uh, no, not great.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey All right,

⏹️ ▶️ John tell me more. So what they’ve done, the video is to be believed. The video is computer

⏹️ ▶️ John graphics. It’s not showing like microscopic images of the screen, which I haven’t seen yet. But

⏹️ ▶️ John conceptually, they’ve taken the screen filled with pixels, and each pixel has an

⏹️ ▶️ John RG and a B subpixel in it, according to this video. Who knows if that’s true and it’s more

⏹️ ▶️ John common. But anyway, every pixel has an RGB subpixel. And they basically checkerboarded

⏹️ ▶️ John it, like a checkerboard, where every other square, red, black, red, black, red, black, so the

⏹️ ▶️ John picture of the whole display, every square on the checkerboard is a pixel, and each

⏹️ ▶️ John one of those squares has an R, a G, and a B, okay? Let’s say the red squares

⏹️ ▶️ John on the checkerboard are regular pixels with huge wide viewing angles.

⏹️ ▶️ John The black squares on the checkerboard have RGB subpixels, but then they have in front of

⏹️ ▶️ John them, a like a pushed away from them a little screen with tiny little holes

⏹️ ▶️ John in it and That means that the only light that leaves those pixels is the light that is going straight

⏹️ ▶️ John because any light that’s going on an angle Hits the little screen thing. So basically 50%

⏹️ ▶️ John of the pixels are normal pixels and 50% of the pixels are quote-unquote privacy

⏹️ ▶️ John pixels When they enable privacy mode what they do is turn

⏹️ ▶️ John off all the pixels that are not privacy pixels So 50% of the pixels turn off for

⏹️ ▶️ John the regions of the screen that are privacy pixels. You can imagine that might have some

⏹️ ▶️ John problems. For example, some of the reviews said, hey, when I turn on privacy mode for the whole screen,

⏹️ ▶️ John the screen gets a little dimmer because you’re literally turning off half the pixels. Now they probably drive

⏹️ ▶️ John the remaining half higher to try to counteract that, but that’s how it works.

⏹️ ▶️ John And when you see that it works that way, like, okay, now I totally make sense. And by the way, it also essentially halves the

⏹️ ▶️ John effective resolution or whatever, however you want to do it. Again, it’s a checkerboard. Half the pixels are turned off.

⏹️ ▶️ John So the PPI is cut in half for any region of the screen that is in privacy mode,

⏹️ ▶️ John because some pixels, the regular wide angle pixels are just plain turned off and only the privacy

⏹️ ▶️ John pixels are turned on. And the way they showed in the video is literally the privacy pixels are a regular pixel, but then

⏹️ ▶️ John floating over it is a screen with four little holes in it for the R, or three little holes for the RGB. I

⏹️ ▶️ John think there might’ve been a white sub-pixel, I forget. So it’s just like shining a flashlight and the flashlight has a really wide

⏹️ ▶️ John angle, but if you put a huge piece of paper in front of it and cut a tiny little hole, now the only light that

⏹️ ▶️ John comes out of that piece of paper is the light that’s going straight through that little hole and all the rest of the light just hits the piece

⏹️ ▶️ John of paper and bounces back. So it’s very clever and that’s how you get per pixel

⏹️ ▶️ John control, but there’s nothing, you know, there’s no moving parts, there’s no, you know, thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that is switching on and off. They’re just turning off half the pixels for the regions that are in privacy

⏹️ ▶️ John mode. And I think that may become feasible if you have like a 4X density thing, cause

⏹️ ▶️ John like you don’t need the extra density or whatever. And if we can eventually drive the pixels bright enough. And by the way, when you’re in

⏹️ ▶️ John regular mode, the privacy pixels are on. So in the regular mode, half of your pixels

⏹️ ▶️ John have a wide viewing angle and half of your pixels have a narrow viewing angle. So even that I feel like has got to hurt

⏹️ ▶️ John the viewing angle of regular mode, because you’re losing, some of the light is not spread as wide as it should be.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the worst obviously is privacy mode where half of your pixels are literally turned off. So very clever, very cool,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m not sure I’d want an iPhone with this feature because I don’t think I, first of all, I don’t need the protection

⏹️ ▶️ John it provides. Second, if I didn’t need the protection it provides, I’d think very

⏹️ ▶️ John hard about whether I should be using my phone at all, because I think this type of feature

⏹️ ▶️ John gives some people a false sense of security, because if someone really wants to shoulder surf you, they just need to

⏹️ ▶️ John move to a different angle to catch what you’re doing. And granted, it makes it way harder. It is way better than not

⏹️ ▶️ John having it for privacy, But if you really need privacy, try not. If you can possibly avoid doing things

⏹️ ▶️ John that need to be private in a public place, do that instead.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thank you to our sponsors this episode, Squarespace, Claude, and Quince.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This

⏹️ ▶️ Marco week on Overtime, we’re gonna be talking about the future of x86 instructions running in Mac OS.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Join us to hear at atv.fm slash join. Thank you so much, everybody. and we’ll talk to you next

⏹️ ▶️ Marco week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh it was accidental John didn’t do any research, Margo

⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it

⏹️ ▶️ John was accidental And you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ John Mastodon,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s K-C-L-I-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental Check podcasts so long

Marco tries a Garmin

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Few episodes back I in the pre-show gave a big rant, but you agreed with Casey

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the workout app changes In watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey OS 26.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s driving me bad. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really bad and And I mentioned I’m like, oh, I’m kind of eyeing a Garmin.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know I you know, I had never explored the world of third party smartwatches

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for iPhones before well Let me let me give a bit of background

⏹️ ▶️ Marco For the last few months, I have been training for a very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco large walk. Um, there is an event that takes place every spring in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Manhattan. The, this group, uh, called the shore walkers arranges something called the great

⏹️ ▶️ Marco saunter, which is a 32 mile walk around the perimeter of Manhattan

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in one day.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whoa, that sounds awful and awesome

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco all at the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey same time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco same time. Yeah, I’ve been getting into longer distance walking. It kind of started as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a tribute when I lost my dog this past summer and you know kind of walking in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco his honor and then it just kind of grew from there into oh I want to do this crazy thing which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happens in May. And so you know you don’t go from you know a routine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of one or two mile dog walks to be able to walk 32 miles in one day without

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hopefully you know some intervening steps in the middle of of training for longer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco walks. And so what I’ve been doing is over the last couple of months like slowly ramping

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up the amount I’ve been able to walk. And so what that means is taking a lot of long

⏹️ ▶️ Marco walks. But of course, being the nerd, I’m like, obviously I need to optimize

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the gear for this. And I’ve optimized the shoes. I use the toe socks, which look

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stupid, the Injinji toe socks. They look ridiculous. They are a pain in the butt to put on and take

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off, you don’t get blisters at all and it’s amazing. And thanks to a tip

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from our friend, underscore David Smith, I’ve been using those toe socks, thin version of those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco toe socks with an outer sock so that you get even more cushioning in a nice wide shoe.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been having great luck with the Altra Tauren 8 wide shoe and it’s great. Okay,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all that stuff aside, I hope that’s useful to somebody. But of course I’m optimizing the gear. The first thing I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, well, can an Apple watch go that long? I want to track the entire

⏹️ ▶️ Marco walk. Now there are breaks. You know it. No one’s gonna walk 32 miles without taking a break. It takes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 13 hours. You know, so it’s a long time, but you can you can stop here and there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, over the course of the day, you have time for maybe an hour and a half total of breaks

⏹️ ▶️ Marco throughout that throughout the day.

⏹️ ▶️ John You have to stop at every pizza place and have one slice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Anyway, so you know, I can stop

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know, top off an Apple Watch with a charger, you know, a couple times throughout the day if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need to. But of course I’m like, well, what if I had a smart watch that was better for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? And literally like two days after I had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco said on our show that I was annoyed at the Apple Watch’s workout redesign,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went on a very long, like a 17-mile practice walk. We did

⏹️ ▶️ Marco north to south of Manhattan.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Um,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I was using

⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple watch ultra.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And at one point I had like, you know, I’d gone until I had coffee shop to get some coffee

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the morning. And I paused the workout. Cause of course he yells at you. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then I know you can turn that off, but every so often the Apple watch resets all of my notification

⏹️ ▶️ Marco settings. And I don’t know why. Um, and so I get, I start to get reminded to like stand every so often, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which just fun when you’re on a flight. Or you get the notification saying,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks like you’ve been walking, do you wanna start a workout? And it’s like, I’m just walking across the street, like, you know, it’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or it’ll say, if you stop for a second while you’re on a walk, you should pause the workout.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what I did in the coffee shop. I forgot to unpause it, and I only realized that like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a mile and a half later in the walk. And so I just lost that mile and a half

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of recorded progress in the Apple Watch. And this, you know, the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Watch, it’s very much like the Apple TV. This is a product

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is kind of half-assed by Apple. It could be so much better if they put more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco effort into it, but they seem like they’re fine mostly not doing that. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t seem like, like, they’re not stepping on the gas on this product. It’s fine. It does

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. You know, it does well for them, like, in the market, and they don’t seem like they need to try very hard. because they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think they need to try very hard on this product. And that’s look, and for the three

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of you inside Apple who get to work on the Apple Watch and who are trying very hard, more respect to you, but I think the company is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not giving you the resources this product deserves.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I was annoyed at the Apple Watch. I’m like, you know what? Let me see what else is out there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So later that night, I ordered a Garmin to try.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, I should disclaim, I probably got the wrong one for me. So the one I got

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the Venue 4 because it came in a small 41mm size

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and because that size has dual band GPS support, which I’ll get to in a second. In

⏹️ ▶️ Marco retrospect, that model was probably a little too

⏹️ ▶️ Marco small for this particular use, like battery life-wise and feature-wise. I probably should have gotten

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the 4Runner models. The Phoenix 8 is also like their flagship thing and that comes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a 43mm size. But when I see these watches and other people,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re so big and they’re so bulky. And they’re big and bulky to achieve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco goals that I don’t necessarily need. Like, you know, certain durability. Like, I’m not going to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco climbing a mountain face, slamming my watch against a rock. Like, that’s not me. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Garmin’s credit, they serve a huge range with their products. Like, they have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many different models. But what I was looking for was something that was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco small enough to be comfortable and not look too ridiculous on my wrist and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco also good battery size and What I was especially looking for was dual

⏹️ ▶️ Marco band GPS This is what I thought was only on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple Watch Ultra in the Apple world so the reason why this is important is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, you know, most GPS receivers that we grew up with over time with most phones and most smartwatches until

⏹️ ▶️ Marco relatively recently was single band GPS. More recent advanced

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones, Apple first started talking about it with the Apple Watch Ultra, which is the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only Apple Watch that has support for dual band GPS. When you have dual band GPS,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you generally get more accurate GPS and faster locks and faster and better

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tracking, especially in places like lower Manhattan, where you have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very tall buildings that are very close to the street, like the streets aren’t that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wide. So the buildings are close to each other and very tall, and it’s hard for GPS signals to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get properly recognized and received by little receivers on your wrist or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your pocket. So dual band GPS was very important to me. Now I thought

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was only in the Apple watch ultra, and I even had a thought, I’m like, why don’t apps like Google

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maps on the phone use the GPS in Apple Watch Ultra when you have it on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get dual band support? And then I did a bit of research and quickly learned

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that actually iPhones also now have dual band GPS. And in fact, most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern smartphones do. So the iPhone Pros have had it since the 14 Pro. The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco non-pro iPhones got it this year in the 17 and the Air also has it. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all current 17-ish model iPhones, I don’t know about the E actually, I didn’t look that up, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least the 17 Air and 17 Pro all have dual-band GPS. If

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have a Pro from the 14, you have it. And even like Google Pixels have had it since the 8 Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or all 9s and 10s. I didn’t look up Samsung’s because there’s too many of them. But anyway, dual-band

⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPS, I thought it was a requirement. The Ultra is the only one in the Apple product line that has it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other brands, including Garmin, also Suunto was another brand I looked

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at. They have lots of options that have dual-band GPS. So anyway, so I got

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Venue 4, the Garmin Venue 4. Again, I probably should have gone with the 4Runner 570 or the Fenix 8,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but oh well. And the experience of trying a non-Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco smartwatch for the first time. First of all, there are just paper cuts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everywhere. Like the whole, so first of all, the experience of managing a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Garmin in particular, Garmin has like two or three different apps

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you have to use for different things. Like there’s one that connects to the watch, but there’s a different one that you use if you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanna buy watch faces and stuff and apps. And like, so it’s already like off to a rough start.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco When you put the watch on, you know, you quickly notice, oh, Apple watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bands are really nice. These bands are not.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s like, it’s something that like, if you would never worn an Apple watch, you would think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other smartwatch bands were fine. But Apple, like one thing the Apple watch has gotten

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right since the start, they have really good bands compared

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the entire rest of the watch business. Their Apple watch bands are really nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re comfortable, they’re functional. They don’t necessarily always look the best, but they are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very nice bands. Especially their rubber is really nice. Back when they made leather, their leather

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was really nice. They’re great bands. Okay. So Garmin Watch has a really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap crappy feeling strap. Now you can replace it with any standard, you know, that one was an 18 millimeter strap. Most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them are 20 or 22, whatever. You can get those on Amazon for nothing. So you can put third-party bands on it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the rest of the watch world, but you’re missing out on the nice Apple straps. The charging situation, it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a proprietary charger, again, just like the Apple Watch. It looks like an old phone charger, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco before phones had USB. Like one of those kind of custom, like couple of prongs on the end of a black

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just kind of an inelegant charger. Eh, small thing, but again, little paper cut. All right,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I start to use the watch. And first of all, it’s very Android-y in the way everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco works and flows. I don’t know if it actually runs Android. I assume it might, but little things about Android that bother

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone users, like there’s no scroll bounces on the end of a scroll view.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That kind of thing, those are everywhere because of course it’s a different platform. And you don’t realize it when you’re not used to, when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re used to the Apple Watch. And also watches have very small screens

⏹️ ▶️ Marco relative to other computing devices and relatively few buttons, but they usually have some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of buttons. And so you have to kind of learn to navigate a watch. And you don’t realize how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much like muscle memory you have for navigating the Apple Watch until you have to try a different kind of watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and when you go from an Apple Watch to a Garmin, the navigation of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything works differently. From simple stuff to like, you know, what direction you like, do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you swipe up or down? Do you swipe left or right to navigate certain things? How do you go back? What are the buttons do?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Where are the buttons located? Like all of that stuff is different. So there’s a pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco steep learning curve and most of it I don’t think was better. It was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just, oh, I just have to learn this thing that’s different. And at this point I will say,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sorry, Casey, round is not the right choice for a smartwatch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen.

⏹️ ▶️ John Really? I was gonna say this when this came up when we talked about it before, but we moved on to something else. But like,

⏹️ ▶️ John round is totally the apple shape for a smartwatch because it is

⏹️ ▶️ John impractical and some designer would insist upon it because it’s circular

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s so perfect and it’s round and it’s just like the most inside area for the least outside

⏹️ ▶️ John area, you know, mathematically perfect circle. But Apple didn’t do that. Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John was pragmatic. Apple made it rectangular because they knew that most of the content besides the watch face

⏹️ ▶️ John was going to be like text and buttons and other stuff that’s used to being a rectangular screen. So despite YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ John both complaining, oh, I do believe, you know, Apple doesn’t make a round display or whatever. If Apple had made a round display, all

⏹️ ▶️ John three of us would be saying, why didn’t they just make a rectangular? So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re a tough crowd out here. Yeah, and really like and that’s a good point John, because like when you think about when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple Watch was designed, this was like peak, you know, Johnny

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ive had the least editing and had his head furthest up his own butt at that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. That’s how we got a gold one. He did get no ports on the watch. Right,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John yeah, no ports. So it’s more the point of the Garmin

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, which is a port. Yeah, sort of, yeah. But yeah, like if there was a time when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple would have done something totally over the top for the sake of design, you know, purity.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Apple Watch, the original Apple Watch design was the time for Johnny Ive to do that and even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then he didn’t. And I, and it took only a couple of minutes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of using the round watch for me to say, oh yeah, this is, this is the wrong choice. Now Garmin

⏹️ ▶️ Marco does actually sell a square model but it doesn’t have dual band GPS. So I didn’t, I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco consider that one. As you’re, as you’re looking at anything, scrolling anything, going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco through lists of anything, reading text from notifications, which I’ll get to in a second. Like doing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of those actions, everything you would commonly use a smartwatch for,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a round screen was worse than a rectangular screen. I wish that wasn’t the case

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I think round watches look nicer as watches. Like as a thing that you wear, round

⏹️ ▶️ Marco does look better, but it doesn’t work better for a smartwatch. And anytime

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s any text, it just hurts because you just feel like you feel like you’re fighting the hardware

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just to do the most basic thing of reading text on the screen because there’s you to scroll everything to see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything in every list. I would say otherwise like the available watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco faces, they’re a little loud visually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my taste. The screen was nice it was fine but like the watch faces were…

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way their complications worked, the complications kind of sucked if I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco honest. There are third-party watch faces that look alright.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t explore it much because I decided this watch was not for me a spoiler but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I decided I wasn’t going to like you know start buying watch faces for two bucks each to look at them but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the experience of using a non-apple smartwatch on iOS

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is also pretty restrictive and this is almost entirely Apple’s fault. This is not Garmin’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fault. This is this is entirely on Apple and we’ll see if someone like the, you know, the regulatory stuff, especially in the EU, we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see if this changes things much. But the biggest things you notice when you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have an Apple Watch, when you have a third-party watch, are you don’t have watch access

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Siri, which is, it turns out I do that a lot. A

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of times, the reminders that I create for myself through Siri, a lot of those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do from the watch. Like I’ll just hold it up and say, hey, remind me to whatever. Also, speaking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of reminders, Another restriction is you can’t respond to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco notifications, including you can’t like use the extra buttons that show up on a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco notification. So when I get a reminder alert and I wanna hit snooze, I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that on a third party watch. Only Apple watches have access to do that. So this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not necessarily, it’s not Garmin’s fault, but it is Garmin’s problem.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that just, it makes the experience much worse. And there were

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically every part of it was full of more paper cuts to me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I realized I would take it off, but if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t power it off, if it was just off my wrist,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like sitting on my desk, if I wasn’t using it, every notification that came in on my iPhone,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Garmin watch would buzz, it would vibrate. And it’s sitting on the desk, so it’s, it’s very loud,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco inelegant. And literally every, even though it is off my wrist, so it knows, you know, it has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a sense like the Apple Watch, it knows I’m not wearing it, but it still chooses to vibrate on every single one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe there was a setting somewhere to change that, I didn’t get that far with it, but it just became very obvious to me, oh yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not working for me. Like, I had to decide, like, how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much do I hate the Apple Workout app? Do I hate it so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much to put myself through all of that? You know, just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, like, how many paper cuts am I gonna tolerate on this other platform that is really optimized

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for very different things than what I care about? How many paper cuts will I endure there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to spite the Apple Workout app for that one big paper cut of how, you know, starting a workout is clunky now?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it was too far in the other direction. It was too clunky for me. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead, I went back to the Apple Watch, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did, let’s see, one or two more practice walks since then.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there was an app, people were, obviously, there’s third-party apps

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can use. There’s third-party workout apps. And I first asked our friend, David Smith, I said, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco should I be using Workouts++ for this? And he informed me that that no longer exists, whoops. But,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still have it on my phone, like that’s how I view my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John workouts.

⏹️ ▶️ John He’s got hiking features in Pedometer++ these days, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly. So first, other people online recommended that I try an app called Workoutdoors.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Workoutdoors, I tried it out. It is hyper customizable. I would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco say if you are looking for something like Workouts++ that is still being made,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s something to look at. It’s more like a workout app construction kit. I found it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco too much, like a little too nerdy for me. If you remember like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco old downcast, like back before I made Overcast, the podcast app I used on my phone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was downcast. I don’t know if it still does, I haven’t looked at it in a long time. It’s still around, but I don’t know if it’s still like this, but it has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like every option under the sun. And that’s part of what I liked about it was like, it had the options I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted, but it was an intense app in terms of like settings configuration. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the vibe I got from Workoutdoors. If you want something super custom, you can probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco build it with work outdoors as options and stuff. But that was, it was way too much for what I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was looking for. And then I remembered, oh yeah, Underscore added a whole bunch of like long

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hike options to Pedometer. Maybe, you know, Pedometer++, maybe that’s the app

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should be looking at here, especially since I already have it. And I had it on my watch, I just didn’t like, there’s a whole

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, like walking mode, like a hike mode of it that I just hadn’t really explored before.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I tried that on my last practice walk a couple of days, uh, this past weekend. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was great. It was, I downloaded the offline map to it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So as I was walking around Manhattan, uh, this past weekend, I was able to, it showed a little arrow on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screen. I was able to, you know, go around all nice when the screen was in, um, like dim mode

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Apple watch. Um, it shifts to red, which probably saves

⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhat on energy, but at least looks cool. It was like the the experience

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of using pedometer plus plus as my walk tracking app was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way nicer than the built-in Apple workouts app. It was way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nicer than any other apps I tried and it was way nicer than the Garmin’s built-in stuff. I recognize that like the Garmin

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that world again they have a lot of needs they cover that Apple doesn’t cover.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, if you’re going to be on a hike somewhere for multiple days, you don’t want an Apple Watch.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You want something like a Garmin, and you want one of the big ones that has like, you know, the eight day battery, like you want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you know, or if you’re going to be doing some kind of extreme sports that that need that kind of physical

⏹️ ▶️ Marco characteristics that the Garmin’s have, that’s going to be better for you. But for me, where I’m mostly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just doing walks and, you know, you know, I do my other workouts Like, you know, I have like a kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a strength training kind of set up over here. I have a trainer that, you know, I do over FaceTime,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like that’s, any Apple Watch can do that. It’s one hour mixed workout. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watches do that just fine. For these long walks, I’m using the Ultra, because, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for battery life and for that dual band GPS. And for that purpose, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think Pedometer Plus Plus with the Apple Watch Ultra is gonna be my,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, my ongoing setup now And when I do the real great saunter, the real 32 mile walk

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a couple of months, I’m gonna use that, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So all of this to say, you just needed a different app on your Apple watch.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, basically. Yeah, that’s- All

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey right,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good deal. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. Do you have any desire to try any of the other Garmin, Garmin’s, Garmin,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, so I think the, from what I have heard from people in this world, I think the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco next thing I would try I would probably be the Suunto. Like they have a model called the Race S

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that looks like it would be a reasonable size and it would have the dual band GPS

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I’m looking for. But it also just seems to me like the experience of using

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a non-Apple smartwatch with an Apple platform just has too many paper cuts and limitations

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I don’t think any of them will be necessarily worth it for me. Now, again, if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had like a need for some of their physical differences that the other brands

⏹️ ▶️ Marco offer. I would consider that, but the reality is the Apple Watch Ultra

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will serve this need just fine for me. I will, based on what people are saying, if I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want like, you know, full GPS and full heart rate for the entire walk, I might not necessarily need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the full heart rate, but if I want that for the entire walk, the Ultra might not last long enough.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I might have to charge it like at one of the stops, but it’s fine. I’m sure I can, you know, charge it at the halfway point when I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stopped for like, you know, a drink of water and a meal for a few minutes, and I’m sure that will be fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I’m glad you went on this experiment so I didn’t have to.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you were right on the verge. Yeah, I really was. But yeah, I think you would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hit all the same paper cuts, and I think they would irritate you just as much. And I think you’d be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very disappointed in the reality of using a round screen smartwatch.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think you’re probably right. And I do freaking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hate the workouts app. workouts app. I hate it. Just today, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was scrolling through the workouts app and I found the workout I wanted, which was not dead center. It was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one off from dead center and I tapped on that workout and started the actual workout that was dead center because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I went to tap it, the stupid play button came up. Oh my God, I hate it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey God,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hate it so much. When we had that rant, a few people did write in and be like, it’s not that bad. It’s fine for me. It’s not that bad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you always do the same type of workout. Like if every day you wake up and you do outdoor run and you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do an outdoor run every morning and that’s all you do with it, it’s a lot less bad. It’s when you change

⏹️ ▶️ Marco between, like I mentioned, I do my workouts with my trainers, I do indoor other for that, but then I’m on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these walks, so outdoor walk. Or I might do an indoor row if I’m using the rowing machine. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will frequently switch between two or three different workout types. I almost never do the same one twice in a row.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so almost every time I’m using the Apple Workouts app, I am changing, the first thing I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing navigating to a different type. But even that, like, and, oh, and people also have mentioned,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco including people in our chat are saying now, like, you can just also start workouts via Siri. You can also do it via shortcuts.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s fine. That also works kind of frustratingly slowly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and about 80% of the time in my experience, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John not 100%.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like, it’s not that much better. Like, I usually just, I keep the workout complication

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the face as one of my main any complications I could just tap it and you know go from there but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is no like you know good reliable fast option that is anywhere near as fast as just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco older versions of the workout app were. Also you know I mentioned earlier the thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where the I got mad because it you know I forgot to resume it when I left the coffee shop and I lost a mile of my workout

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know from being tracked. The Apple watch when it started out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a thousand years ago it had to be really careful with battery. Now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it still has to be careful but it has to be a lot less careful because we have way bigger batteries now that’s how we can have things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like always on screens cellular modems like you know we can have all that in there because the batteries are getting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger and especially when you look at something like the Ultra it’s way bigger.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I wish they would do is be a little more forgiving about the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco workout app. So one thing they do for instance is when you when you have the feature

⏹️ ▶️ Marco enabled that it prompts you to start workouts if it detects that you’re doing one if you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco leave your house and start walking on the block and a half a block later it says hey it looks like you’re walking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to start a workout if you say yes it includes the data from that first half

⏹️ ▶️ Marco block once it figured out that you look like you’re working out it starts recording that data that’s great

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because what that means is if you mess up in some way like if you start a walk without starting the workout

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have like an undo you have like a save there like oh I didn’t lose that progress

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you saved it for me thank you I would like to see that extended so first

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think anything any pause it should like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you start like if I have a walk and I pause the walk because I have stopped moving

⏹️ ▶️ Marco once I leave the location I am at it should be smart enough to say hey you know what maybe I should

⏹️ ▶️ Marco prompt you, because you just left where you were. Maybe I should prompt you, and maybe I should start recording this information. So when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you say, yes, I did in fact leave, you can patch that data in, or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep recording it in the first place. Obviously with limits over time for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery life, but if I’m only pausing it for a few minutes and I forget to unpause it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could record that for an hour afterwards and be fine, especially on the larger model watches.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I would love to have like a little bit of more forgiveness there, like spend some of the power budget

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to build in forgiveness so that people don’t, so that people have more of those opportunities to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco save themselves from their own mistakes. Secondly, every single thing in the Workout app should be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco undoable. And right now, I think none of it is. For instance, I am terrified

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that on this walk I will accidentally end the workout early and I want it to be one big one. I know that’s stupid, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can just do another one. But right now, like you can’t, I guess maybe some app

⏹️ ▶️ Marco might exist that can take two workouts and merge them, but Apple’s doesn’t do that. And I don’t know if it’s possible. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, so like the workout app right now, if you accidentally end the workout, you can’t undo that. If you pause

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the workout, you can’t undo that. If you accidentally hit some button that adds like a segment or something, you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco undo that. There is so much about the workout app that’s incredibly unforgiving.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I wish it wasn’t because it’s a computer and we have the technology to do that. So there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much about it that I wish was, this is true of the whole Apple Watch platform. It

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the best, I think, of its category for most people. And again, I can say

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same thing about the Apple TV. The Apple TV compared to its competitors

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the best of its category for most people. But it could be so much better

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they just put more effort into it. And it seems like they took their foot off the gas with the Apple TV because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s fine. And I think the Apple Watch is not that much better. The Apple Watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, for most people, the best smartwatch for them. Certainly for iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco users. I think it is the best smartwatch for almost all iPhone users’ needs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it could be so much better if Apple just put more effort into it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They just seem to think they don’t need to, or the things they do to it are things no one’s asking for, and the things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we keep asking for, they just ignore. One of the many things that can make it better is just some attention

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to some of those workout mechanics. Like, first of all, obviously fix the horrible UI regressions

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that made it much harder to use and more error prone and take longer to start up. But also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco consider fixing some of those problems of just like, yeah, let’s make this thing a little more humane

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a little smarter. And let’s give people opportunities to do what they want,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to save themselves from mistakes, to prevent mistakes in the first place, and to save their data. Because that stuff matters.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if you track your workouts and you just lose some of it, that is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very demotivating to a lot of people. That can make somebody like, you know, quote, fall off the wagon or whatever and like stop working out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or if you know, if you lose a streak, if you break a streak, like those have real psychological

⏹️ ▶️ Marco implications for a lot of people. Those have really measurable drops

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in things you want to optimize. You want people to keep working out. You want people to feel good about their working out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You want them to like, to be consistent with their routines. So if you, if they like have some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of discouraging problem, like losing a workout or losing progress somewhere that can make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them stop doing that or, you know, it can really demotivate. So anyway, that’s what I want to see with the Apple watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like, we are in a new era now with the Apple watch where you have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much more power available to you because the hardware is so much better than it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to be. I want to see them move some things forward. And that’s, that’s one of the big ones.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so I’m going to do this live and Marco will cut it out if it isn’t right. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the things that drives me freaking crazy and is just another perfect example

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of how broken the workouts app is, is that on the weekends, Aaron and I will go

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on walks of our neighborhood together. As it turns out, our neighborhood is like almost to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the meter a 5K walk if we go through all the cul-de-sacs and so on and so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey forth. It’s like a 5K. And so typically, Aaron and I will, for the weekends, for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey our exercises on the weekend, we’ll go on a walk together and the kids will come for at least a portion of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it and we’ll do the full 5K, about 3 miles. And if it’s raining

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or if it’s extremely cold, instead what we’ll do is we’ll use our elliptical that we have in the house that’s a very unremarkable,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very not impressive elliptical, but it does the job, right? And depending on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how much time I have and whether or not I’ve been fairly active already during the day, I might go anywhere between 20 and 30

⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes on the elliptical. And in order to do that, I need to open the workouts

⏹️ ▶️ Casey app, and here I’m going to do it live. I open the workouts app, and I’m presented, and I scroll down to elliptical. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you just tap on the icon for elliptical, which is what I would do by default in order to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey get more details about the workout I’m about to do, it does nothing. It just sits there. Great.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. So, in the northeast corner, there is, or at least on my watch right now,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is something that looks like a timer. And so, OK, fair enough. So I hit that. Great.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so it says, your workouts. Time 25 minutes. Well, I don’t want to do 25 minutes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I guess what I need to do is I need to edit this 25 minute thing. OK, fair.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in the corner of this little button that says time 25 minutes, there’s a little pencil icon.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I tap on that. OK, fair enough. So then it says time 25 minutes, start workout,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey share workout, delete workout. Hey, well, I don’t want 25 minutes. So the time, 25 minutes, I tap that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So now I’m presented with hours and minutes. I’m going to go back to 20 minutes, let’s say.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m presented with the two spinners for hours and minutes. On the bottom, there’s a giant

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yellow button that says Done. In the upper left, there’s a Back Chevron. So I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to change from 25 minutes to 20. And I’m going to hit Done. And I’ll give you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one guess what is on the prior screen, goes, you know, navigates pops, pops up to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the prior screen. And I’m now looking at the time start workout, share workout, delete workout. Would

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you like to guess after I hit the done button, after changing the spinner to 20 minutes, what this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey prior screen shows still f*****g shows 25 minutes. So what I need

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do is instead I need to go back in and I make this mistake every

⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. So I’ve gone back in, I’ve hit the same button I just hit. Now I’ve got the two spinners again. instead

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of hitting the giant button that says done, I need to hit

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the back chevron. And now the prior screen says 20 minutes. In what way does this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey make sense? In what way does this make sense? Will do the people that work on this app

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever work out? Ever, ever. I don’t understand. I don’t understand.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco See that overall feeling, a lot of the details about the Apple Watch,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think like, you know, Apple historically has had really talented

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who have really great taste. You know, I started with Steve and then of course, you know, he instilled that culture

⏹️ ▶️ Marco among the company and people who had that kind of great taste were attracted to work there. So you have all these people who have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really great sensibilities for like, what a good experience is, what good design is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how things should work in clever, delightful, useful, helpful ways.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And every single Apple employee that I have ever seen outside of the company

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wears an Apple Watch. So I know they’re using it. But it’s like, I don’t get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the impression when I’m using the Apple Watch that a lot of those people in Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who have those opinions, who like, are they being

⏹️ ▶️ Marco listened to with the Apple Watch? Do they have the resources that they need to make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple Watch that good of an experience? because it just seems just like a solid,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all around B plus kind of product. And Apple strives

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to not make B plus products. They strive for better than that. And again, in some ways, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watch is great. But overall, it could be so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much better. It’s a computer. It can do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything. And they just don’t do it. They don’t let it do it. They

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t put in the resources to do it. They don’t put in the flexibility to do it. The faces are still a disaster.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re still like, they’re still like, I still, when I look around the built-in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco complications for so many things that just aren’t there, like why is there no, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sunrise and sunset complication for this certain size? Why does the one that’s there always

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have text all over it? Like there’s so many little things. Like when you try to,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you look around what complications are available from Apple for their built-in apps and features,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re just so half-assed and limited and the watch faces themselves,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that’s a whole thing where that’s a whole half-assed situation as well. And it just like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are they, do all those people who care and see these problems

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and limitations, like what do they need to make the Apple Watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco better? Because whatever it is, the company’s not providing it to them. And I wish they would Because this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform, it is the best of its category for most people. But it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean they can take their foot off the gas. It doesn’t mean that they can’t make it better. Apple’s ethos

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in so many ways has always been like, don’t just be satisfied, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you are dominating a category, like that doesn’t mean you should stop making good stuff. I mean, I know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more recently there’s been a lot more exceptions to that, but I wish they would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco push a little harder on the Apple Watch Cause it, it has so much potential and it has a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty good foundation. Like you can do a lot with what they built here. Um, but they, they’re not doing a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they could

⏹️ ▶️ John get in line behind the Mac. Speaking of platforms that are best in category,

⏹️ ▶️ John but that Apple is not improving at the rate we wish it was. And in some ways making it worse. Sound

⏹️ ▶️ John familiar.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the Mac is in a way better starting place though, than the watch. Like, you know, the, the Mac is like a mature

⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform that already does everything we wanted to do. Like it’s already built. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco already great. The Apple Watch, like, you know, the Mac is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to have questionable leadership and resources now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because in the past it had all the resources. Like it was the main focus of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco company for so long. And that’s when all this stuff was being built. It’s when it built this foundation of awesomeness.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Apple Watch never had that. It was never the focus. It was never like the the golden

⏹️ ▶️ Marco child, it was never getting all of the attention from the company. It was always kind of this like side division,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seemingly, that always got what appeared to be very little resources from the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco company. And so it doesn’t have that basis of laurels to rest on.

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