686: Write Two Letters
09 Apr 2026John’s next Mac is going to be very expensive.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: The new Ceramic Shield 2 in the iPhone 17 Pro is the real deal
- 🗣️ ATP STORE IS LIVE! 🗣️
- Follow-up:
- Studio Display XDR price drop‽ 😱
- Stephen Robles
- Casey’s snarky toot
- Tangentially related: John’s Google One price drop
- John’s upgrade cycle (via Ryan Himmelwright)
- How much hotter can a Mac get?
- Apple’s implementation of Passkeys (via Ben Frearson)
- Apple subsidiary fined over $500k for breaching Russian sanctions
- RetinaDisplays.com
- CIE 1931 & Apple’s 2026 CMFs
- They’re more than just a monitor calibration standard (via Eric Portis)
- The GOAT, Bartosz Ciechanowski
- CIE updates from 2015
- On Apple’s CMF
- Long Island and “mainland”
- Studio Display XDR price drop‽ 😱
- The Greatest Podcast Ad Campaign of All Time
- Marco’s letter to John Ternus
- Ask ATP:
- How does Apple Silicon RAM work, anyway? (via Johnny “Decimal” Noble)
- Post-show: Marco Garmin-watch update
- Members-only ATP Overtime: The Claude Code leak & how Claude “actually works”
- Regex to detect user anger
- “Undercover mode” (via Aral Balkan)
- Future plans
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Chapters
- Cascades Shield
- ATP Store
- XDR VESA price drop
- John’s upgrade cycle
- Mac Studio thermal headroom
- Passkeys and Apple IDs
- Apple broke Russia sanctions, too
- RetinaDisplays.com
- CIE 1931 and Apple 2026 CMFs
- Bartosz Ciechanowski is amazing
- CIE 1931 and Apple 2026 CMFs
- Long Island vs. “mainland”
- Please don’t email us LLM output
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Knob Feel
- A letter to John Ternus
- Sponsor: DeleteMe (code ATP)
- #askatp: How “unified” is our RAM?
- Ending theme
- Smart/sport watches, part 2 🖼️
Cascades Shield
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For spring break last week we went on a tour of Southwest Virginia which was a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of fun despite there being very little in Southwest Virginia. We found what there was to do and did it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now we’re gonna hear from all four people who live there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah right and I say that as someone who went to school in Southwest Virginia and actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wasn’t planning on talking about this but it occurred to me in the hotel in Blacksburg the hotel room had the unthinkable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey within it and it made me exceedingly happy. What do you think was in that hotel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey room? Internet port. Correct. Nailed it. Not only was there an Ethernet jack, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was connected and worked,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incredible. So I was very, very happy using my little Unified Travel Router
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to connect to the Ethernet. But anyways, that’s not actually why I’m bringing this up. I’m bringing this up because there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trail, like a hike, about half an hour outside of Blacksburg, which I had heard about so many times when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was in school that, oh, you know, we’re going to go hike the Cascades. We’re going to go do the Cascades. The Cascades, Cascades, Cascades.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’d never actually done it when I was down there, but, uh, the kids and Aaron and me, uh, we all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did some hikes a couple of spring breaks ago in the Shenandoah National Park. Really enjoyed that. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey during this, uh, three night vacation slash tour, we did a trio of hikes as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the biggest one was this first one at the Cascades Trail. and you basically drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from nowhere to further nowhere and then drive through a neighborhood
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and spontaneously just come out at like a parking situation and like a little hut with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bathroom and then you start on this hike that goes to these really beautiful waterfalls.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the waterfalls, you know, have the water cascading down them. I presume that’s the genesis of the name, right? Well, anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the way out of the hike, the hike. We did the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two miles out, two miles back. Kids were absolute troopers. Did a great job. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was going to get in the car and I was wearing my beloved workout shorts and one of my ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exercise t-shirts, which we’re not really going to talk about in a second. And what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do I hear as I’m getting into Aaron’s Volvo for the second time in the last, whatever it is, seven months,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hear, clunk, clunk, crash.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want to pause here for a second and ask the longtime ATP listeners, how long into that story,
⏹️ ▶️ John did you figure out that Casey was going to tell us that he dropped his phone again?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That is a great, great measure. Obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey are cheating because we
⏹️ ▶️ John see the show notes and we know where he’s going with this, but just I’m just curious for the people listening how you’re listening.
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey’s winding up. He’s got a big wind up on his pitches. He’s going along. When did you figure out,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, Casey dropped his phone again, didn’t he? I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as soon as I said hike is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John when it was. Was it hike? Was it just like going on vacation? Was it middle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it’s so true. I want to be so mad at you, but I, I, you’re absolutely correct. But yes, so at the end of the hike,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re getting, I’m getting back in the car and I hear thunk, thunk crash. And sure enough, my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had fallen out of my workout shorts, which has just happened from these same shorts once before you think I would have learned,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but no, no, I didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Get some new shorts with bigger pockets, get pockets with zippers, something, anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey These, these shorts actually do have zippers, but the zipper broke, unfortunately. And so here we are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, this, this is a problem of my own creation. But anyways, I looked down and sure enough,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the pop socket had yeeted itself halfway across the parking lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are we allowed to say yeet? We’re not too old to say that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no, we are, but we-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John No, I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John your generation. No, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s- It is? No, it’s-
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, isn’t that a millennial thing? Yeet? I think it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it’s absolutely much younger than us.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. Well, anyway, I say you can say it. I declare that you can say it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because it’s out of style now, so it’s a suitably unfashionable thing. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, it’s definitely a style now that we’re using it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco right. That’s how you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell, yeah. So the pop socket had launched itself across the parking lot, and sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough, my phone was face down, and it was on blacktop cement, whatever it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think to myself, oh, all right, it’s been about six months. That’s probably about due for me to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shatter the phone. And I picked it up, and it was pristine. It was perfectly fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is the second time this has fallen from a Volvo XC90 out of my pocket, onto
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the pavement, face down, both times, it has been pristine. Is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John a case on it or no?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No case. No case? I think, now I’m going to absolutely jinx myself, so let me do a little Foley
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work and knock on wood. I think I can declare Ceramic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Shield 2 the real deal. And so I went back to the keynote from September
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see who was introducing it, what they said, and it was Kayane Drance. And she said very little about it, But she did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say there’s three times better scratch resistance and that they like infused
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a ceramic in a different way and different like molecular or chemical bonds or whatever. But the only real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like marketing phrase was three times better scratch resistance. I got to tell you so far,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I might, I think I might’ve noticed like a little baby scratch, maybe, which by now every prior phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve had has been freaking ruined. That’s why I went to the screen protectors for the last phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I was going through like water because I was constantly scratching up my phones, the face of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my phones, the screen of my phones. There’s maybe, maybe one itty bitty scratch and it has fallen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from like waist height onto pavement, face down twice, hasn’t shattered yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have to say, I’m very impressed. As much as I’ve been pissing and moaning about the fragility of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the screens up until now in the 17 Pro, it’s good stuff. I’m very
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I would strongly recommend Casey that you’d not get the foldable iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve actually I don’t want to belabor this pre-show, but I’ve thought a lot about what I’m gonna do with that and I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is classic Casey. I don’t think I want a foldable phone because I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that’s too much and I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I Acknowledge, I fully acknowledge this classic Casey a hundred percent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mm-hmm. What do you think John one week after it’s released?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John No, no I’m just saying that the screen on
⏹️ ▶️ John that one is not going to be as durable as this one. I guess it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John good that he can close it when it’s closed, like the screen won’t be, there’ll be an outer screen. Anyway, it doesn’t seem like it’s the product
⏹️ ▶️ John for you, is what I’m saying. Yeah, you can break three screens at once. Damn. New frontiers in screen breaking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, but I’ve been thinking about, like, I think for me, I’m not in love with spending $2,000 on a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone or whatever it’ll end up being. I’m not in love with, I don’t think I want or need a foldable in my life, which again, classic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey, I recognize that. But most importantly, I don’t think I wanna drop any of the three camera
⏹️ ▶️ Casey situations on my current phone. And everyone seems to think it will be one or two lenses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the foldable phone. And so I’ve been wondering, what do I do? And I think what I do is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assuming they all come out at the same time, which is also under debate, I think I do try a foldable phone, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if nothing else, I should do it for the show. And then maybe on that jerk that returns it within two weeks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or it returns it on day 13 after having tried it, because I decide it’s really not for me, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Two cameras, by the way, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s your position on having test devices for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your life as an iOS developer?
⏹️ ▶️ John the ready reason to buy a new thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was gonna say, I see the loophole building as we speak. I mean, that is fair, and maybe that is the right-est
⏹️ ▶️ Casey answer, is I use a carry phone that is the 18 Pro or what have you, and I have the foldable as the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey test device. I don’t know, that’s an interesting point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reason I ask is that one of the excuses I’ve always used over the years is that when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is a reasonably new and different form factor of a device,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like I should probably have one as an iOS developer. Not only just to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extra devices to put betas on and stuff, but also if it’s a different form factor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should know how that handles. I should know how it feels in the hand. Where should controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be? How big should controls be? How should things be laid out? And sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can just guess. When the phone gets a little bit bigger, if things are generally the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other than a small size difference, that doesn’t usually require… I don’t have every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone model. I have a few. But when something is as different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as going from iPhone to iPad, you should probably have an iPad if your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app runs on iPad. I think going from regular iPhones to the folding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone, that’s pretty different physically. And there might also be very different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software features. And yes, we will have a simulator that you can see how your app is laid out in the simulator.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can deal with probably whatever the multitasking system ends up being, like I’m sure you can simulate all that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I don’t think it’s going to replace the experience of actually handling it in terms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of knowing how your app should look and work on that device.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think any iOS developer responsible for design and layout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and controls who has any budget ability to do this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably gonna wanna have an iPhone Fold of their own. Even if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not their daily carry phone, it’s probably a good idea to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and maybe live with it for a week or two or something just so you can figure out how it handles and design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your app accordingly because that is going to be a pretty different experience apps if the rumors are at all true.
ATP Store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we have some important breaking news. The ATP store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is back, baby. You can go to ATP dot FM slash store where John will proceed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to take us on a nickel tour of all the different things that he has in store for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, this is in fact, the WWDC 2026 store. Seems like the WWDC store comes earlier every
⏹️ ▶️ John year, but really it’s always around this time. Um, we tried to get people their items in time
⏹️ ▶️ John to attend WWDC, which is a thing that is rare these days because it doesn’t hold a lot of people and most people don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get to go. But, you know, that’s the theory. So that’s why it’s so early. FYI. So get your orders in now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s what we’ve got. The first product is actually four products. It’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John opposite of the iPhone intro. And I’ll explain why. So this is
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a T-shirt and it’s ATP Neo. And these are shirts inspired by the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Neo because they come in the color combinations that the MacBook Neo comes
⏹️ ▶️ John in. They’re called ATP Neo Indigo, Blush Citrus, and Silver. Here’s the concept.
⏹️ ▶️ John The shirt should be more or less the color of like the body of the Neo,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the logo, it’s just the monochrome ATP logo, should be the color of the keyboard. And as you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, the keyboards on all the MacBook Neos are color matched to
⏹️ ▶️ John the device. So even though when you look at like the pink one and like the yellowy citrus one, you’re like, oh, they both have white
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboards, they don’t. The pink one has like a lightly pinkish keyboard and the citrus one has
⏹️ ▶️ John like a lightly yellow keyboard and it’s the same for all of them. The keyboards are not the same color on these devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the logo is not the same color on these shirts. And that’s why they have to be four
⏹️ ▶️ John separate shirts because the way Cotton Bureau does it, if you have a different ink color, that’s a different shirt because you’re printing
⏹️ ▶️ John a different thing on it. So, and the other thing is to get shirts that are colored like the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Neo, we unfortunately don’t have the clout to say, make me a shirt that matches this color. No, we just
⏹️ ▶️ John have to look at every shirt that’s available for us to, you know, order blanks of and then
⏹️ ▶️ John find a company that makes a shirt in a color that’s close to the laptop color. And that’s what we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John done. And we’ve picked out four shirt colors here. I think the silver one is the farthest off because it’s a little bit too dark, but
⏹️ ▶️ John we did the best we could because we got all four shirts from the same company, the same like shirt model
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And that means that there’s only t-shirts. So
⏹️ ▶️ John even though we’ve been rolling at all sorts of varieties or whatever, we can only get these colors from this one specific brand
⏹️ ▶️ John in T-shirt. So it’s just T-shirts, indigo blush, citrus and silver with an
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP logo on it, color match to the thing. The pictures don’t really do it justice. We’re trying to make it look
⏹️ ▶️ John subtle like the keyboards do on the MacBook Neo, but anyway, there’s four shirts. And unfortunately, because there’s four,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s like a minimum threshold before they’ll print each one. So I hope enough people will buy each one of the colors that they
⏹️ ▶️ John actually get printed. If they don’t, oh well, lesson learned. That’s ATP Neo, our tribute
⏹️ ▶️ John to the MacBook Neo, great new Mac that everybody loves. And moving on to
⏹️ ▶️ John a very old Mac that nobody loves except for me, we have the Mac Pro Memorial shirt.
⏹️ ▶️ John We had the products for the store all set to go before they killed the Mac Pro, and so we kind of had
⏹️ ▶️ John to scramble on this one. And what you get is exactly what you would expect. In hindsight,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, I don’t know, foreshadowing that the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro Believe shirt also looked a little bit like a tombstone
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because now what we’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ John is take the Mac Pro Believe shirt and instead of saying Believe underneath that picture of the Mac Pro, now we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John just got birth year to death year, 2019 to 2026.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Shout out to, I forget the listener’s name, who made a mock-up that said bereave.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that’s a good one too,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it requires you to know the other shirt and honestly, it’s not really bereaving because they really needed to be canned. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, it’s just, you know, the year range. And some people thought it should have the year like of the original
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro, but no, it’s the thing that’s pictured on the shirt. The thing that’s pictured in the shirt was introduced in 2019 and killed in 2026.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yes, I have already ordered one of these to go to John Ternus.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s incredible. And we are under the impression that he did receive the original Believe shirt,
⏹️ ▶️ John did. I know for sure that he did. All right, and that one, again, that’s two shirts because the darker color shirts
⏹️ ▶️ John have light ink and vice versa, so it’s Mac Pro Memorial, Mac Pro Memorial Dark, again, ink color thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then we have two shirts that probably should have been in the last sale, but I don’t know, maybe it would have been too much, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John last sale we did ATP T568A and T568B, our ethernet wiring standard shirts, where
⏹️ ▶️ John we replaced the Apple six color stripes and the ATP logo with the colors
⏹️ ▶️ John of the conductors in an ethernet cable according to the T568A and B
⏹️ ▶️ John standards. Well, this time we have two more shirts, T5 to 68 A and B,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re crossover cables.
⏹️ ▶️ John we put links on the store page. You can go to like the Wikipedia page. I’m pretty sure I got these right. I quadruple checked
⏹️ ▶️ John like a million times and did so many Google searches. Here’s what Wikipedia says, here’s what these things say. I’m pretty sure that
⏹️ ▶️ John these are the correct wiring arrangements for a gigabit, not a hundred or 10, a gigabit crossover
⏹️ ▶️ John cable, which isn’t really a thing I think you need anymore because don’t all the ports auto sense and switch or whatever. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John crossover cables are still a thing that exists. And so now the colored stripes, the top half has like what one
⏹️ ▶️ John end of the connector cable should be, pins one through eight, and the bottom half has what the other half should be.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yes, there are different crossover cables for T568A and B. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we have the two crossover shirts. And they’re really pushing the limits. Like last time we have like ugly shirts, like, cause the internet
⏹️ ▶️ John wiring colors are not particularly attractive and now they’re even less attractive cause the colors are all mixed up, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you nerds love it. love those networking nerds want to have the most obscure shirt that
⏹️ ▶️ John someone is sure to ask you about then you get to explain about ethernet wiring standards.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then we have the M5 Pro and Max shirts because since our last sale those two chips came
⏹️ ▶️ John out. Those chips are good, they deserve shirts. There are no chip designs in the back because we haven’t done that in a while,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we’ve got M5 Pro and M5 Max in all the usual shapes and sizes. We
⏹️ ▶️ John do like to bring back one old shirt in every sale. And this time we’re bringing back
⏹️ ▶️ John a shirt that we sold a couple of times that has been very popular. ATP pixels is back. This is the one with
⏹️ ▶️ John the six color ATP logo on it, but it’s drawn in pixels, which is quite
⏹️ ▶️ John a printing challenge. I guess people who bought the shirt a while ago know how well it held up, but I have one as well. I think it looked,
⏹️ ▶️ John it came out really good. It looks really good. It’s chunky as the description says, it’s non-retina.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can see the pixels. It’s chunky pixels. It’s the ATP logo in a bunch of chunky pixels. extremely
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to manufacture, seemed to come out good last time, fingers crossed for this time. And then of course we have our
⏹️ ▶️ John traditional ATP shirt, our traditional ATP zip hoodie, we’ve got the ATP polo because it’s short sleeve
⏹️ ▶️ John weather, and we have the ATP hat. That is our WWDC 2026 sale. If
⏹️ ▶️ John anybody orders a Mac Pro Memorial shirt and happens to go to WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John and gets it in time and can wear it there, make sure you stare Apple executives straight in the eye and look as
⏹️ ▶️ John sad as you possibly can, and then just point to your shirt. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey what we want. We want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel terrible. Oh my word. Now, if you wanted to save a little bit of money
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on your order, John, how do you go about doing that?
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP members get 15% off everything in the store. If you go to your member page, which is linked at the top of the store
⏹️ ▶️ John page, you will get a code. Remember that if you are logged in to ATP.fm, just by logging
⏹️ ▶️ John in through your account and you are an ATP member, then all the links that
⏹️ ▶️ John you click on should automatically autofill your discount code. But if it doesn’t do that, you can always go to your
⏹️ ▶️ John member page and copy and paste it the old fashioned way. And based on how
⏹️ ▶️ John much these shirts cost, and yes, I know they’re tremendously expensive, especially if you’re in Europe, we apologize for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It behooves you to become a member, at least just for one month, just to get the discount on the shirt,
⏹️ ▶️ John or two or whatever you buy, because it’s worth it. You’ll end up coming out ahead in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John how much the membership costs. And again, we apologize for how expensive these things are. This is not like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll buy a shirt to support the show. You want to support the show by membership. Membership supports the show. Shirts are a fun
⏹️ ▶️ John thing we do together. So we have cool nerdy podcast shirts. That’s what it’s for. They’re not economical. They’re not a
⏹️ ▶️ John big way to support the show. But they are fun. And we do it for the people. And we try to come up with good
⏹️ ▶️ John shirt ideas every year. So yeah, if you want a discount, become a member atp.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are links to that on the store page as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excellent. And I will do my normal pitch. If you are driving, perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey signal and then pull over. If you’re walking, pull over to the degree one can pull over while walking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but do yourself a favor and write yourself a reminder. Send yourself an email, do whatever you need to do. Use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the DUE app, use Marco’s not yet released reminders app. Do something to remind yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make this order because the sale ends on Sunday, April 26th.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And every single time somebody writes, usually me saying, Oh no, I missed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Don’t care. Do it now or leave yourself a reminder. ATP.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve almost missed it several times. Uh, it’s a buy. I remember to do the John Turner’s thing now cause I had
⏹️ ▶️ John to look up my old order to find his address cause apparently whatever I sent her last time worked. So I did that again. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John set yourself a reminder cause you will forget and you know, we’ve obviously we pick the date so we can promote this on three separate
⏹️ ▶️ John shows. But by the time the third show comes around, like maybe you don’t download that show immediately or maybe you don’t listen to it immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John and by the time you hear the third one maybe the sale is over. So yeah, Sunday, April 26th. It ends. Don’t put it
⏹️ ▶️ John off. If you want something, get it now.
XDR VESA price drop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some follow-up. There was something that was very startling,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and perhaps it wasn’t new, but they really kind of chapped my behind about the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Studio Display XDR. And when I was looking at it when it was first announced, I noticed that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the VESA mount version of it was the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey price as the version with the stand, which seems a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit egregious to me. and I popped off about it on Mastodon. I don’t know if I’ll remember to dig up my particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey toot about it, but it was big, like, what are you going to do about it, Energies, I think what I said. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that really made me upset, but I mean, I haven’t ordered Next DR. I don’t think I’m going to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, famous last words. But there’s good news. We’ll see what happens. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good news. The pricing has changed for the Visamount version. The version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the stand is still $3,200, but the Visa Mount version is $2,800. So that’s now $400 cheaper. And friend of the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Robles, got wind of this. In fact, I believe it was him that I heard it from originally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and apparently reached out to Apple via the business chat thing that I always forget exists, you know, in iMessage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever, and said, Hey, am I going to get a refund here? And the Apple person said, yes. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he was kind of like, Oh, okay, sure. And then sure enough, a little while later he got a refund
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for $400 plus tax. So it turns out it’s the real deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that person in the chat said basically everybody who purchased it, quote unquote, recently will get a refund.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s nice. Obviously you had to have purchased the Visa mount version to get a refund. Right, right, right. But this is
⏹️ ▶️ John so weird because Apple doesn’t really drop prices
⏹️ ▶️ John as evidenced by the Pro Display XDR, the earlier XDR, never changing price
⏹️ ▶️ John for the entire life of the product, despite being what five or six years old, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John or the trash can or anything like that. But this is so weird because this product just came out and it was weird that
⏹️ ▶️ John the Vista Mount version was the same price as the one with the stand. But, you know, not that weird, because Casey was like, what are you going to do? Apple’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple. But no, maybe they just forgot. Maybe they somewhat entered it wrong or something like it’s so weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like there was a big public outcry from people buying $3,200 monitors that we demand the Vista
⏹️ ▶️ John Mount version be cheaper. Like, it just seems like someone made a mistake or something so weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it was very unusual, but I’m glad that Apple is doing the right thing and fixing
⏹️ ▶️ John Very out of character. And then the same week that happened, I got an email from Google telling me
⏹️ ▶️ John that they were doing a price drop on my Google One subscription, saving me $50. When
⏹️ ▶️ John does that ever happen? Normally, you get emails from like whatever thing you subscribe to and say, as Marko puts it, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John always like, what, pricing update? Whatever the subject
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco says, it is like- An update
⏹️ ▶️ John on your subscription. Yeah. It’s not, it’s ambiguous, but you always know this just means
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gonna charge more money. But no, they sent an email and said, I forget what the subject was. It was something like an update to your subscription.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, oh, here we go. Ah, it’s $50 cheaper per year. So I don’t know what’s in the water, but
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever it is, keep drinking it.
John’s upgrade cycle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ay-yi-yi. All right, Ryan Himmelreit has a question for John. With the long-anticipated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey death of the Mac Pro finally here, John has made it clear that he intends to become a Mac Studio user. However, I’m curious to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what he expects his typical upgrade cycle to be once he makes the switch. He has an every-other-year cycle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for his iPhone, and I think his iPad criteria tends to be, will this make my bedtime media consumption better?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey While the Mac Studio is far from Apple’s most frequently updated Mac, it’s still updated more than Apple’s recent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey proper tower Macs. As such, John’s previous criteria of whatever decade Apple decides
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to release a new tower Mac will likely need to be revisited. Thoughts? Also, before you answer that, it just occurred to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an ancillary question. Did you ever use, I’m sure we talked about this and it’s slipping my mind, did you ever use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Vision Pro in bed and was that enjoyable or did you not bother?
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re just going for the double entendres this episode. Yes, I did. I talked about it on the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John I watched movies in bed with a couple of times. I prefer the iPad. That’s what it boils down to
⏹️ ▶️ John and Ryan basically got it right like the iPad I am looking like is this gonna make my bedtime watching better because that’s really all I care about
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why I got the OLED one I love it I still love it um for the Mac Studio though my
⏹️ ▶️ John cadence is probably going to be not actually like
⏹️ ▶️ John as as you know more frequent as you would expect it to be because yeah the Mac Studio is updated
⏹️ ▶️ John frequently like I think they basically do it I mean the M3 Ultra run setting aside it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John I could I could get like a new one every year, every year and a half if I wanted. The problem is the one
⏹️ ▶️ John I buy is going to be so expensive, especially with all the RAM and SSD price increases because
⏹️ ▶️ John of the stupid eight terabyte SSD. And once I put all that money in, I’m not gonna wanna buy another one for a long
⏹️ ▶️ John time. Like that just tends to be my inclination anyway. I’ve used all my Macs for a really long time because
⏹️ ▶️ John I tend to buy them stuffed to the gills. And back in the day, I would buy ones that I could upgrade. So I’d use them for a very long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like my Macs was like, My line of Macs is not
⏹️ ▶️ John that well populated. It was the original Macintosh, motherboard upgrade to a plus,
⏹️ ▶️ John then the SE30, then I went from the SE30 to
⏹️ ▶️ John the Power Mac 6115, the 6100 series Power Mac, and then from that to a G3 Tower,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then from the G3 Tower to the original cheese grater, the G5 cheese grater, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then from that to the Intel Mac Pro, and then to the 2019 Mac Pro. That’s all the Macs I’ve ever owned,
⏹️ ▶️ John for the life of the Mac. So there’s huge gaps in there, like going, I mean, I basically went from the SE30 to the blue and white
⏹️ ▶️ John G3, because the 6100 was really my parents’ computer. That’s a long time. But by the time
⏹️ ▶️ John I switched over, like my SE30 was maxed out on RAM, had a bunch of external hard drives, had a 24-bit color card
⏹️ ▶️ John and an external Trinitron color monitor, like I used them for a long time as I stuffed them to the gills. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John with the Mac Studio, assuming I can even afford a stupid eight terabyte Mac Studio with a reasonable amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of RAM, that’s gonna be it for me for a long time as my bank account recovers, cause
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s gonna be so, I’m just dreading how expensive, every day there’s a story that’s like, oh, SSD prices
⏹️ ▶️ John are going up, cause if I had like, I know, I know, and Apple’s prices are always terrible. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not the update frequency of the Mac studio that are the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever that’s stopping me, it’s just how much it costs. And so, you know, it’s kind of like, as I always say
⏹️ ▶️ John to people like, maybe wait another year and save up a little more money. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John my mode for everything. It’s like, just keep putting a little money aside every year
⏹️ ▶️ John so that seven years from now, you can get the new Mac that you want to get. I don’t think that
⏹️ ▶️ John will change much. We’ll revisit this when we find out exactly how expensive the Mac Studio I want will be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you want to place a bet as to how much that’s going to be?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even want to think about it. This is how much college will cost for Maggie situation. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to. The only thing I have going for me is like, well, at least I don’t need another monitor. You hear that? You hear that? Do not bring
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Because I’m reusing the monitor. I’m still using, I’m gonna use this monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John for a long time, especially since Apple doesn’t make one this big anymore. I just need the little box. I don’t need a keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t need a mouse. I don’t just, it’s gonna be rough. Are the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keyboard and mouse USB-A?
⏹️ ▶️ John For what, the studio?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, the ones that you’re currently using. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m using the one that came with my Mac Pro. It connects via lightning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To what degree do you think you would max it out? Like would you get the highest RAM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount offered, which is currently-
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, let’s make predictions. What will be the highest RAM amount when this thing comes out? Because that’s- Well, true. That
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a given. I’m gonna feel bad getting a computer with less RAM than my current one, and my current one has 96.
⏹️ ▶️ John But, you know, I don’t know what configs they’re gonna- Honestly, I don’t need 96. As I said, when I got my 2019 Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John 96 gigs made me just not have to think about RAM. I haven’t thought about RAM since I bought it. 96 is enough that I never,
⏹️ ▶️ John never, never have to think about RAM. I don’t need a full 96. I would be sad though to get
⏹️ ▶️ John a 64 because, you know, it’s a downgrade after six years. So we’ll see. And then eight terabyte, it’s my only choice that’s bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John than four and I need bigger than four. So, bleh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, so if you want above 128, you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the Ultra chip in the current configuration.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want above 128. Like I don’t need any more than nine. I’d be happy to get 96 again if they offered it. Well, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offer 96 with the Ultra. Or if you get just the Max, just the Max chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re looking at the M3 models though. Who knows what the configs will be like for the M5 ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, you can do a 128 with the regular Max chip in the current configuration.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that would get you with eight terabytes, 128, Max chip with all the cores, that gets you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at about six grand. It’s a bargain. Yeah, I’m gonna say you’re probably gonna end up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between six and seven grand for what you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s probably about right. Although again, I’m gonna go for all the discounts I could possibly get through Apple Connections.
⏹️ ▶️ John So hopefully I’ll save a little money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, I think that if this RAM and SSD stuff continues to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go on, there is a distinct possibility you will spend more on this studio than you did on your $95,000 Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John combine the monitor, that’s not going to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s true. I forgot. That’s true.
Mac Studio thermal headroom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about the Mac Pro and the Mac Studio in a different way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We were talking last week about how much like thermal and power headroom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is in the Mac Studio. And John, it looks like you’ve done a little bit of science about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this came up as we were having conversations with our friends and fellow podcasters about the discussion
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Mac Pro and the title of the episode, which I believe was something or the case he said was
⏹️ ▶️ John the ability to get hotter, which is a thing that I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple could use in its desktop line because the Mac Studio is still pretty small. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a plus size Mac mini, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not very big. It doesn’t have a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of air moving through it. It’s mostly entirely filled with heat sink. But as I think someone pointed out, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the ultra model of that, that if you get the studio with the ultra, it comes with a different and better heat sink
⏹️ ▶️ John than the Mac’s version. Like I believe the Ultra comes with like a full copper heat sink inside it, which is another reason
⏹️ ▶️ John it costs more money. And that’s because like within those space constraints, yeah, it can handle an Ultra,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you have to upgrade from what I assume is like an aluminum heat sink to a copper one,
⏹️ ▶️ John because you really at the limit of what that case can dissipate. And I was gonna look up the numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John and like, oh, this is gonna be a pain. I gotta find someone’s review where they hooked it up to like a power meter, but no.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has official support articles where they will tell you according to their specs, what the max power
⏹️ ▶️ John dissipation of their computers are. And it’s pretty comprehensive. So on this page, we’ll link in the show notes, the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Studio from 2025 with an M3 Ultra, 32 core CPU, 80 core GPU, 512 gigs RAM, 16 terabyte SSD.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like this, they give you the exact specs. So this is like the current Mac Studio with everything
⏹️ ▶️ John maxed out, 16 terabyte SSD. How much does that cost? Anyway, that
⏹️ ▶️ John has the max power dissipation or max power draw, whatever they’re calling it here, of 270 watts. To compare to my computer, the 2019 Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, if you got it maxed out, which I did not, with
⏹️ ▶️ John a 2.5 gigahertz 28 core Intel Xeon W2 Radeon Pro Vega II Duo MPX module,
⏹️ ▶️ John so that’s four GPUs inside there, 1.5 terabytes of RAM, of course, and also the afterburner card
⏹️ ▶️ John and a four terabyte SSD, that thing does 902 watts. So 270 versus 902.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how much more headroom Apple has. If Apple had
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of case that could dissipate more than 270 watts, and I feel like that’s probably about
⏹️ ▶️ John the limit of the Studio case considering they went to a full copper heat sink in there and it has fans already,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a lot of room. That’s almost three times the heat they could be dissipating so hey, Apple, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to use your new chip technology to make a chip with more transistors that dissipates more than 270 watts
⏹️ ▶️ John for the CPU and GPU combined and everything else inside the Mac Studio, you’re gonna need a bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John case with better cooling. And I think that’s something they should pursue, but Apple seems to disagree. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John how much hotter? The ability to get hotter? Three times hotter is how much hotter they could get.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And for the record, I looked up, there’s also on these spec sheets, how many BTUs per hour? 1,007 for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Studio, 3,076 for the Mac Pro. Yeah, three times the power.
⏹️ ▶️ John They had a case that could dissipate three times the power, but they did not want it anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, the slots are a whole other issue. But yeah, maybe just like, you know, make the studio a little bit bigger, give it better airflow,
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe crank it up to, let’s say 400 watts. Can you imagine? I mean, gaming PCs, like 400 watts
⏹️ ▶️ John is like a mid-range GPU on its own, not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey even including the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey computer. So yeah.
Passkeys and Apple IDs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Ben Frearson writes, in episode 684, John mentioned that websites
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will let you pick if you have multiple pass keys. I found this true everywhere except Apple’s own websites,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which unsurprisingly don’t seem to recognize the concept of having multiple Apple IDs. I can speak.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It’s called Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accounts now, Ben. Oh, that’s true. I know this. See, that’s why I stumbled. I know this because every time I visit developer.apple.com
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and try to sign in with my Works developer account using the normal 2FA process, I get interrupted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by a prompt to use my primary Apple IDs passkey. This is true, but it’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easy to say, I would like to use a different Apple account, please. I don’t think I am as upset by this as Ben
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, as far as I know, this gets me every time, because as far as I know, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s possible to use passkeys for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than one Apple account on a computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what it is. This was discussed when passkeys first rolled out. And I experienced
⏹️ ▶️ John every single freaking day when I have to re-log in to App Store Connect for the 8,000th time, that
⏹️ ▶️ John I always have to do it with password and it always makes me do the two-factor
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that Apple thinks. So here’s the deal. What I was told back when this first rolled out is that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is aware this is an issue, but this is not an issue that the Passkey team can solve. It is basically
⏹️ ▶️ John whoever controls the developer websites, because Apple’s Apple ID login,
⏹️ ▶️ John as should be obvious to anyone who has ever used it, first of all, it predates pass
⏹️ ▶️ John keys. And second of all, it doesn’t work like normal
⏹️ ▶️ John web things do. Like you can have a two-factor code. You could have had it in Google Authenticator or any of those other
⏹️ ▶️ John apps. Now Apple has first party two-factor codes where you enter the six digits. You know the whole deal with that. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not how Apple IDs work. What happens with Apple IDs is you get a whole separate, different, special
⏹️ ▶️ John custom thing that brings up the map and shows you another thing with six digits on it, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John different. It has been its own thing, its own login process for presumably for
⏹️ ▶️ John added security for ages. And it seems like now that we have a solution that
⏹️ ▶️ John could like modernize, like stop using that old thing that you were using and start
⏹️ ▶️ John using this new thing, they haven’t gotten around to it. And so when you log into your Apple ID on Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John developer websites, you have to use the Apple ID that you are logged
⏹️ ▶️ John into the Mac as if you want to use Passkeys. There is no way, and this has been true from the
⏹️ ▶️ John day Apple rolled out Passkeys, there is no way to log into, let’s say, App Store Connect with a different
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID than when you’re logged into. You can try the Passkey login and it will prompt you, but it will always
⏹️ ▶️ John try to make you use the Passkey for the Apple ID that you’re logged into. And that’s because Apple does its
⏹️ ▶️ John weird own thing with Apple IDs. And every year, I hope, this will be the year they’ll fix their stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s been, I don’t know, two, three years now, and they still haven’t. So yeah, Ben, you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s Apple’s fault. It is not the Passkey team’s fault. It is the team who controls
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID login and or the developer websites that is making all our lives miserable. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John also them that’s making me get logged out of App Store Connect every 10 minutes.
Apple broke Russia sanctions, too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so with regard to Russian sanctions and things of that nature,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is a post from Hartley Charlton at MacRumors. The Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said that Apple Distribution International Limited or ADI, which is the Republic of Ireland based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entity Apple uses to pay app store developers, made two payments totaling 635,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pounds to a Russian video streaming platform in June and July of 2022 at a time when they were subject to UK
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sanctions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. ADI voluntarily disclosed the payments to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OFSI, and the agency confirmed that no breach had been attributed to Apple Inc. itself, only the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey subsidiary. OFSI said Apple had relied on corporate affiliates to handle payment processing, sanction
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screening, and due diligence, but that companies are ultimately responsible for ensuring their own compliance with financial sanctions rules.
⏹️ ▶️ John This came up because we talked about ubiquity and things getting to Russians. We said, like, it doesn’t really matter whether,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it wasn’t us, it was like our subsidiary or a third party or whatever, ultimately you are responsible.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as soon as that episode, the story came out about Apple getting fined for exactly the same thing. And yes, they
⏹️ ▶️ John voluntarily disclosed it because if they didn’t voluntarily disclose, they would be fined even more. But that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John law. The law is, you know, as Marco would say, it may not be your fault, but it is in fact your problem. Pay $500,000.
RetinaDisplays.com
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. I wanted to quickly point out a listener, Naaman Goel, I’m so sorry if I pronounced that wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has created retinadisplays.com, which is a very useful resource to figure out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what your options are if you want a retina style display. And there are a lot of displays
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on here. I haven’t like personally vetted any of these or anything like that, but in principle,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the couple that I looked at sounded right and seemed reasonable to me. So this, as Merlin would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say, gets my official okie dokie. So good stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we still haven’t, all the monitors that were announced at CES still aren’t out yet because it basically takes the entire year for
⏹️ ▶️ John that to happen, or for you to give up on the ones that really aren’t going to ship. But this website in the meantime is great. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can filter based on size, technology if you care about that, whether or not it is shipping, whether
⏹️ ▶️ John or not it is discontinued. It keeps getting better all the time. So kudos to Neiman
⏹️ ▶️ John about this website. It’s very handy.
CIE 1931 and Apple 2026 CMFs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about color spaces and CIE 1931 and Apple’s 2026 CMFs. We talked about this, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, like a month, month and a half ago. And I think I had theorized that 1931 was the time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in which the CIE spec was created. And I think there was some dubiousness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amongst us about that, including from me. But many people wrote in to say, yo, that’s right. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 1931 that the CIE 1931 color space was created. And then Eric
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Portis had a lot of really, really great feedback. Eric writes, the CIE1931 color
⏹️ ▶️ Casey matching functions are not just a monitor calibration standard, they are the foundation of the modern science of human color
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perception. There are three functions, and I wrote about the three-dimensional color space they create.
Bartosz Ciechanowski is amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As an aside, hi, this is Casey. I have never freaking understood color spaces.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe that makes me a terrible developer or an idiot, or maybe both, I don’t know. But I’ve never understood it. And Eric’s post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it is very, very good. And we’re going to talk about another post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here in a second. But I really liked Eric’s post. And if you have any interest in this or want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to learn more, I really suggest it. So that’s Eric’s post, which we’ll link in the show notes. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bartosz Siwanowski, I hope I got that somewhat close to right. Probably Bartosz. Bartosz,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you’re right. Bartosz Ciechanowski, probably. All right, we’ll go with that. Thank you, Marco, for saving me on that one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, this person has done some phenomenal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey websites about, or pages about different things. Like the Mechanical Watch one, I still think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen on the web. Like, these are just incredible. And I didn’t realize this before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I started following him, that he did one on color spaces. And I didn’t have the chance to read the whole thing before recording. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite a bit longer than Eric’s. So you need to like properly have a sit down and read it, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also very, very good. And Eric had pointed to that and said that he also wrote a great
⏹️ ▶️ Casey article with many cool interactive examples about the CIE 1931 XYZ color space
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and how it relates to familiar concepts like sRGB and the spectral locus, aka the XY chromaticity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey diagram that you’ve probably seen a thousand times. Eric then continues, the whole deal with Apple’s 2026
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CMFs, as far as I can tell, is over time, the R, G, and B light sources that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drive color displays have gotten narrower in the range of wavelengths they produce. The red, green, and blue light sources
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used 100 years ago in the experiments that supplied the data for CIE 1931 CMFs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey emitted broader distributions of wavelengths than modern OLEDs and LCDs. Narrower sources
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stress, in quotes, color matching functions more revealing problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, this is a thing that television reviews have really gotten into in the past few years as well, because they
⏹️ ▶️ John would measure the spectral color output of the R, the G and the B and whatever is, you know, producing
⏹️ ▶️ John the RGB light. And if you look at what the diagrams look like, what you want to see is
⏹️ ▶️ John big spikes at R, G and B. But if you look at TV from not too many years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John even just like a W OLED from LG for like five or six years ago, it didn’t look like spikes
⏹️ ▶️ John at all. You get like one pointy spike for the R maybe, and then like the G and the B would just be this big plateau
⏹️ ▶️ John like a mound, like you could barely see any humps in it. You’re like, really? That’s the light that’s putting out? Because what you want
⏹️ ▶️ John is pure red at a specific wavelength that you decided is the reddest red, pure
⏹️ ▶️ John green and pure blue. And then you can combine those in a predictable way. You don’t want your green to
⏹️ ▶️ John have a bunch of red and blue and mixed in with it and everything. You want those spikes. That’s been one of the advancements of
⏹️ ▶️ John Quantum Dot, OLED TVs. they would show, look how much pointier the spikes are. When we went
⏹️ ▶️ John from regular OLED to QD OLED, it’s like, wow, that’s so much better. But apparently, as these spikes
⏹️ ▶️ John have been getting narrower and narrower, it has been messing with the functions
⏹️ ▶️ John in the CIE standard because they were built at a time when the R, the G, and the B
⏹️ ▶️ John were much more smeared and spread out. And I’m not sure what he means by stressing them, but maybe it just reveals
⏹️ ▶️ John more problems with the functions and equations that do the math on color stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, just before we leave the Bartosz Chekhanowski area here, I know we kind of already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did, but I was too slow. I cannot recommend enough, you know, Casey promoted his stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I cannot recommend enough that you go and read any of his blog posts. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the amount of work that he puts into these, every blog post
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like some kind of explainer about usually some kind of science-y thing. And not only is his knowledge incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deep, but you end up learning so much, and they’re all filled with these interactive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco demos and diagrams and like models and it is incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s more like an application than a post. If you’re thinking, oh, it’s a bunch of text and pictures, that’s not it. These
⏹️ ▶️ John are basically applications.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and you end up learning so much. I got like, one of my favorite ones was the bicycle one. It’s all about like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically like the physics of how bikes hold up and work. And I love Bartosz’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. I strongly recommend, like, it’s the kind of thing, This is the kind of thing that used to exist on the internet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just something that somebody put a lot of work into and is just putting out there for free and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delightful and mind-blowing and amazing and there’s not that much of that on the internet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today, at least if there is it’s very hard to find. Bartosz’s posts are that. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s exactly what nerds like us love about the internet. Like I- we can’t believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that he put all this effort into it and it’s amazing and it just makes you smile from end to end as you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you play with it. So definitely check them
⏹️ ▶️ John out. And if you want to compare it, like that’s speaking of mechanical watch one, just try,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a straight Google search or like look on YouTube. You’ll find a thousand YouTube videos explaining
⏹️ ▶️ John how a mechanical watch works. 90% of them will be AI generated garbage. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I guarantee you, none of those videos is as good as his blog post. It’s so good. Like sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John a video is not the right format for a thing. You could make a really good video about how mechanical watches works. but
⏹️ ▶️ John man, it would be hard to beat his, again, I don’t want to call them blog posts, because
⏹️ ▶️ John like you get to do stuff in them, you get to like you read and then it’s like, and this is how it works. And you get to like
⏹️ ▶️ John interact with the page until you understand it until you get it until you see how it works. A bunch of people have done it.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s not the only one. I think I saw one recently about what the heck was it was something having to do with like pixel
⏹️ ▶️ John art or like anti aliasing patterns or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yes, I saw that too. But now I don’t think I can put my finger on it. but yes, yes, yes, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like this, but this particular format of like text images, but also interactive, like
⏹️ ▶️ John application, these things that you can use, it aids understanding in a way that even a video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, for, for God’s sakes, the top of the mechanical watch post, there is an explosion extrusion.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is the word I’m looking for? One of those things where you can see all the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John layers of the diagram,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exploded diagram of a mechanical watch. That’s interactive. This watch has got to be rendered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in JavaScript or whatever, and you can explode out the watch. It just blows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my mind. I cannot believe this is done with web tech. It’s so freaking cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Whenever there’s a new Bartosz post in my RSS reader, I’ll save it for like weeks until I have time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like really sit and like experience it. It’s like saving up when there’s like a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco movie that you want to watch or like saving up for like the finale of your TV shows. You can You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can really watch it. Like, that’s how I treat his blog posts because they’re just so good and so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey delightful. Yeah, and he doesn’t post often, but they’re all incredible. But he has a Patreon,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which if you’re not going to go to atp.fm. Join that’s the next best place to go. You should check that out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been a patron for a while now, so you should definitely check it out.
CIE 1931 and Apple 2026 CMFs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Going back to Eric Portis. Sorry, we got sidetracked there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sorry, Eric. It’s really hard to follow that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It really is. Problems with the 1931 functions have been known for a while, and the CIE itself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey updated its color-matching functions in 2015, and Eric has provided a link, which we’ll put in the show notes. It’s impossible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to convert from three-dimensional values, RGB or XYZ or XYY or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever, derived from one set of CMFs to three-dimensional values derived from another set of CMFs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because reducing actual spectral area, continuous distribution of light across the range of wavelengths
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to three values that represent the quote-unquote same color is a lossy operation approximately all digital
⏹️ ▶️ Casey imaging cameras displays content is based on the CIE 1931 CMFs and approximately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nobody uses CIE 2015 CMFs because there’s just no way to convert the 1931 based values to the 2015 based values
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple had the bright idea to scope their 2026 CMF to be quote white point only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote and there is another link that we will put in the show notes. This means that the Apple 2026 CMF calibrated displays can render
⏹️ ▶️ Casey content encoded with the 1931 functions and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shift every pixel’s color value by the measured error between 1931 white and the Apple 2026
⏹️ ▶️ Casey white, as measured using the actual spectral distributions output by the display. I’m so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey curious, writes Eric, how Apple’s 2026 CMFs differ from the 2015 CIE CMFs, and what experiments or data
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they use to create them. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is such a great explanation and it ties into the fact that CIE 1931 is literally from 1931.
⏹️ ▶️ John If there are problems with the standard and it’s not keeping up with modern technology
⏹️ ▶️ John as our screens get better and everything, why don’t we change it? Well, I think that Eric
⏹️ ▶️ John has explained here, like there’s no way to convert from one to the other. So it’s kind of like, look, everyone has to kind of agree
⏹️ ▶️ John to move to some new color measurement standard. And even though they made a 2015 one, people couldn’t even move
⏹️ ▶️ John to that. So Apple’s kind of like, look, we can’t just make a new standard and everyone’s going to use it. We need to make
⏹️ ▶️ John something that we can convert from the CIE 1931 into this. So they’re saying, we’ll just pin the white point and
⏹️ ▶️ John move everything else. Like we’re in a bind here because we’re using technology
⏹️ ▶️ John and math made in 1931 that is outdated and inadequate for the
⏹️ ▶️ John current problem space of modern monitors. And yet we can’t get everybody to just lift up and say, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody, we’re going to start driving on the other side of the road now, or like whatever analogy you want to make. And so that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco we’re using a
⏹️ ▶️ John standard from 1931 because apparently getting off of it will require a degree of cooperation
⏹️ ▶️ John across many industries that is seemingly not possible. So yeah, 1931, that’s the year.
Long Island vs. “mainland”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we had a bunch of follow-up with regard to Long Island and the mainland.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, Craig Bowers writes, while for all visible purposes, it would appear Long Island is an island, the U.S.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Supreme Court has legally classified it as a peninsula, and thus, an extension of the mainland.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because, of course, the U.S. Supreme Court did.
⏹️ ▶️ John Something I learned about in my Long Island studies class.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love this so much because, yeah, apparently the East River kind of sucks. sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ John When it was when it was filled with poop. It was more like a land bridge. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the East River apparently does not really qualify geologically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a river. It’s more I believe it was a title inlet or something. So therefore Long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Island is not an island according to the US Supreme Court based on some you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco debate about you know how the states control different parts of it. So therefore John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe I am correct.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well as kind of like when the when the like the government declares pizza to be a vegetable for the purposes of school lunches
⏹️ ▶️ John like the government says. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they did like tomato as a vegetable not a fruit kind of stuff it’s like OK but like
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah there’s there there is in fact water surrounding it but not the right kind of water and I do wonder like
⏹️ ▶️ John you know we always look at our current Supreme Court cases that we can transparently see whatever is motivating these
⏹️ ▶️ John decisions but like whatever was in US versus Maine like whoever was lobbying who say no it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not an island it’s a peninsula For the purposes of this thing, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think it’s pretty clear. I think there’s a pretty good history of New
⏹️ ▶️ Marco York kind of getting what it wants from the Supreme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Especially versus Maine. Right, or look at the Statue of Liberty debates with New Jersey.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s been a lot over time of New York kind of just taking what it wants.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Problem solved.
⏹️ ▶️ John We will legally declare this not to be reality. Done and done. Fair enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s the same thing with the pizza as a vegetable that solves a lot of school lunch problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gracious. And then Joel writes on the discussion in episode 685 about Long Island’s location, John and Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are both right and wrong. Section 11-2 of the New York state coastal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey management program describes Long Island as distinct from the mainland and from Manhattan,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is geographically an Island, but geologically part of the continental U S quote Long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Island is a detached segment of the Atlantic coastal plain separated from the mainland on the north by Long Island sound
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and from Manhattan on the West by the narrow East river and the New York Harbor, the Atlantic ocean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey completes the Island saltwater encirclement. Then back to Joel, interestingly, section
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two dash five of the CMP also references the mainland of Long Island in a few places
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to which are here quote, the most extensive beaches in the States coastal area are found on the barrier islands and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mainland of Long Island, particularly along its South shore. And then the second instance, barrier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey islands earn their name in this way by protecting waters of the inland bays and the shoreline of the mainland.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco JSON So it seems like mainland is used in lots of official government documents to refer to Long
⏹️ ▶️ John CASEY Well, again, the government says a lot of things, but I will point out that, Casey, did you copy and paste these things from the email,
⏹️ ▶️ John like their direct quotes, the little passages here? CASEY I sure thought I did, yeah. CASEY Yeah, so the part with the saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that Long Island is a detached segment, blah, blah, blah, separated from the mainland north of Long Island, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John If you notice in that passage, it says, separated from the mainland on the north by Long Island Sound, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then in the other two passages, where it says, found on the barrier islands
⏹️ ▶️ John and the mainland of Long Island, mainland has scare quotes around it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in both instances.
⏹️ ▶️ John Separated from the mainland of Long Island, kind of like when you see like fresh vegetables
⏹️ ▶️ John and the freshest in quotes, you’re like, hmm. So one instance of this requires
⏹️ ▶️ John no scare quotes because it is accurate and direct. And the other one is like, well, you know, kind of like the
⏹️ ▶️ John mainland of Long Island, quote unquote. Anyway, the government doesn’t know anything about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it does seem. So this usage reinforces the overwhelming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opinion that we got from feedback and that most dictionaries and things seem to define,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is that mainland is a relative term.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not what the dictionaries say. That’s what people want the dictionaries to say, but it’s not what they actually say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It depends on which dictionary. It seems as though mainland refers to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically the larger body of land compared to where you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a small body of
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re making up your own definition now, but none of the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey definitions said that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I can’t say that that is an actual definition, but I think it is a pretty universally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John agreed. People want it to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco is right that people want it to be completely relative, but then they get angry when I say, describe Fire
⏹️ ▶️ John Island as the mainland from a smaller piece of land. of land like no that not that not not the thing that I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John to be mainland only the things that I do want to be and then there was like an island is actually called mainland with a capital
⏹️ ▶️ John M as a proper noun yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes there’s a few a few things like that and we did hear from a few people in Hawaii and New Zealand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about how the term is used there um but and yeah spoiler alert Hawaii uses mainland to refer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the continental U.S. um New Zealand is delightful and I forget what they said
⏹️ ▶️ John New Zealand has a thing New Zealand actually gets in under under the definition which a lot of people didn’t know until I sent
⏹️ ▶️ John the definition back to them because New Zealand has, you know, as people said, 700 islands. But anyway, it’s a two big ones, two big
⏹️ ▶️ John things that make up those New Zealand. One is bigger than the other. And that one is referred
⏹️ ▶️ John to as the mainland, because according to I don’t have the text in front of me, but most of the definitions say, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John the larger part of a continent or country. Yeah, New Zealand gets
⏹️ ▶️ John in on technicality, because the larger part of New Zealand is the South Island, and therefore
⏹️ ▶️ John it is the mainland. but unfortunately that is not the case for Long Island because it is not the larger part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the United States of America.
Please don’t email us LLM output
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, in conclusion, John, you are still wrong. However, I will offer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one more additional side note to the listeners. If you are trying to make an argument to us,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sending us the output of an LLM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not make the argument. I wanted to say this as well, but I didn’t want to be a turd about it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, we’ve gotten so many people sending us just a transcript or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perhaps a link to like a long running conversation with the chat bot. Let me tell you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do not want to do, I, there’s very little that I want to do less than reading
⏹️ ▶️ Casey someone else’s conversation with a chat bot. No, thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s kind of like reading their diary. It was like, like, I mean, like, I appreciate the sentiment, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it just feels weird reading. Like, it’s like reading someone else’s Google searches. Like it just, it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I think it’s, for me, it’s like, it’s somewhere between Google searches and somebody telling us about their dream.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, the thing is, you’ll never find somebody on this podcast who likes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chatbot LLM results more than me. I use them all the time. But that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a source. It isn’t an argument winner. It’s a summary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and sometimes fever dream of facts that may or may not be real and may or may not be helpful. That’s something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you keep to yourself and you use for your own personal uses, But the output
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of an LLM is not information to win an argument.
Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this episode by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform
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Knob Feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d like to do a little bit of, I guess, actually follow out, sorry, upgrade. There was a podcast episode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that came out, I want to say sometime last week, and it is entitled, I believe it’s Knobfeel,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the greatest podcast ad campaign of all time. So this is Rob McGinley-Meyers and Britta Green,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they did this podcast episode from their podcast Phonograph, where they basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about the genesis of, and kind of the contents of the ATP Cards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Against Humanity toaster ads. And John talked to these folks. I talked to these folks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our good friend Lex Friedman, the good one, not the bad one, talked to these folks. And this podcast episode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is really, really good. And I highly suggest you listen to it. I suspect, John, you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some more thoughts though.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. When I tweeted about it, I said like, I don’t know if this episode is better if you already know the story
⏹️ ▶️ John of this stuff or if you don’t know, but it is very much like, I don’t know how to
⏹️ ▶️ John describe it, like not this American life, but that type of like a, or 99% invisible or, you know, like, like
⏹️ ▶️ John a well-produced scripted, interestingly put together exploration
⏹️ ▶️ John of a particular weird topic. Um, only, only it’s about us. It’s just so weird
⏹️ ▶️ John to hear a podcast like that about something that you did. Marco’s in it as well. You’ll hear his voice. So like
⏹️ ▶️ John all three of us are in this podcast. Um, so yeah, Even if I feel like if you
⏹️ ▶️ John know everything that they’re going to say, it’s still just fun to hear. Because like, isn’t it weird that they’re talking about this, you know, our, our weird
⏹️ ▶️ John little podcast on this other really like fancy, well-produced podcast. But if you don’t know it, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fun to see where the story is going. I always wish the Casey hadn’t spoiled what the, uh, the ad campaign is about. But,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey uh, and check
⏹️ ▶️ John it out. Like it’s fine, but you know, it’s not, it’s not a super secret for anyone who’s listening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Well, our listeners would know from the title.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Yeah. But like, it’s a little overblown, like the greatest podcast ad campaign of all time, but it was certainly one of
⏹️ ▶️ John the weirdest, that’s for sure. I mean, there have been weirder and some of the weirder ones are pointed out in the show. I won’t spoil what those are as
⏹️ ▶️ John well, but yeah, it is very, very focused on our tiny little circle of the world and it was a
⏹️ ▶️ John delight to hear and it was a delight to do. So check it out. We will put many links in the show notes because like, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even know how to link to a podcast anymore. Obviously we have the Overcast link, but that’s not like the real site. That’s just Marco’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve got the official link and that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John has- You think it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John Libsyn one is the official
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one? No, no, it’s phonographpodcast.com. I’ve already got it in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, well, OK. Well, there’s so many links. And there’s also the pod.link site, which is one of those sites that’s like a landing
⏹️ ▶️ John page that says, it has like every podcast player app in the entire world with little icons. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, listen to Overcast. Listen in Spotify. Listen in YouTube. Listen in Apple Podcasts. Listen, just
⏹️ ▶️ John going down the whole side of the page. And those sites, I just assume, will all disappear someday. But anyway, Casey’s got you
⏹️ ▶️ John covered. You can find this podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, and I also did a little write up on my site about that, which I’ll link, which is not too terribly exciting. But I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most of what I was saying was how freaking weird and flattering is it that somebody’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey history lesson is about us three dorks. That’s really freaking cool and really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey freaking weird, but it’s good stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was delightful. I was, it was incredibly like, you know, heartwarming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to listen to. And I actually, I listened to it in the car on the way upstate with my family. And so my son
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got to hear that. He’s like, that’s you. And they’re talking about you. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was a very nice experience for all of
⏹️ ▶️ John father’s voice coming back from the car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Who knew? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidentally blew them off and didn’t get interviewed because I blew them off. And that was not my intention. Sorry about that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thank you for making this podcast. It was delightful.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think when Casey presented the idea, it was like, this person wants to talk about podcast ads. Like, it
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t clear that this was going to be. Because I was just as surprised as anyone. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, hey, I’ll talk to the person about podcasts. I don’t know what they want to talk to me about. But I know about podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John ads a little bit. And it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey turned out it was
⏹️ ▶️ John good that I did it because I featured in it more than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought I would. Yeah, and it was interesting. I think for anybody who is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interested in the kind of mechanics behind podcast ads, why everything’s moving to DAI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, why ads like the kind we do seem to be significantly on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decline and going extinct, there’s a lot of good info there, both from us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and from the reporters and also from Lex Friedman. and information that you don’t usually hear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasters talk about, just how they’re sold, what dynamics have gone on behind the scenes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you are interested in that whole market, I think there’s a lot of interesting information there as well. But it’s also just a nice story about our toaster
A letter to John Ternus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Marco did the unthinkable, what was it, a week ago? And you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remembered how to post to your blog. I’m shocked that you knew how
⏹️ ▶️ John Did he remember or did he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again? Did AI post to your blog, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give the contents of the post to some AI and say, please figure out how to get this on marco.org?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nope. And I also did not use any AI tools in writing this blog post.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very well done. All right, so all snark aside, why don’t you tell us about this, please?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, so everybody was celebrating Apple’s 50th anniversary last week. And I do think it’s worth pointing out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we didn’t do anything on this podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John to celebrate it. That’s, uh, I mean, Casey is the one who should feel bad about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco exactly appropriate for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. He’s Mr. Anniversary. I’m Mr. No Anniversary. You know nothing. So I’m, I’m on
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s true. And honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know, I think like, you know, the other podcasts in our, in our kind of nearby podcast neighbor sphere,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um, I think they did a good job covering it and And whatever they did was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more of a anniversary celebration than anything we would have done. And so I’m happy to have left that to the other podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They did a very nice job with it. So for me, I was trying to figure out, should I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco post something about Apple’s 50th? I had a little bit of a hard time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deciding on an angle, because my feelings about Apple these days are mixed. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do a lot of good, and they do a lot of bad. there’s a lot about them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I still love, there’s a lot about them that I will always love, and there’s a lot about them that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish they would improve. And we often, on this show, push
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that. Like, you know, we, the reason we push for things to improve when we think they’re there in a bad spot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that we love these products so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if Apple doesn’t serve our needs very well or if they stop serving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our needs, the industry has made it pretty clear that they’re not really going to pick up the mantle and start serving our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs. There’s other things out there that are good, but the way that we love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the basic computer, like the Mac, the personal computer, like the way that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love that, and even to some degree the way we love other general purpose computing devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like iPhones and iPads, other companies are just not going to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we like in those roles for lots of reasons. Many of them won’t, many of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t. The market has moved on, these are mature platforms, mature industries, things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are locked down, locked out. So if we want computers to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be the kind of thing that we love, the way we’ve always known them, a lot of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco responsibility falls on Apple. With the 50th anniversary, there was a lot of looking backwards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the good things that that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and and the older you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the older company and then over time like you know the middle of the companies era
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the great things they did. There wasn’t a lot about the Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco era in these retrospectives except for like the you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know Tim Cook scaled everything up. Yeah that’s true. Okay I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have anything really nice to say about the Tim Cook era beyond that and so I decided
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not going to address that but I also I didn’t want to do a retrospective about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just you know jobs and was because I have I have thoughts about that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll save for another time and I also didn’t want to just complain about everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this blog post we are obviously near the end of the Tim Cook era
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the John Ternus era seems like the most likely thing that’s going to follow it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I kind of wanted to leave like, you know, a letter to John Turnus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in almost a way of like the way that I imagine like CEOs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and presidents leave letters to their successors like, I know that’s actually a thing with presidents.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sit down and write two letters, right Casey? Uh, nope.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, come on. Marco? For your first and last day? I forget the rest of the reference.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, I don’t remember where this came from. from, it’s probably apocryphal, but or maybe it’s a real thing. But anyway, the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is, I can’t even give you the context. So basically, like a new political leader comes
⏹️ ▶️ John into power and finds two envelopes on his desk.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they say, if you get in trouble, open up the first envelope. If you get into trouble again, open
⏹️ ▶️ John up the second one. So he gets it eventually gets into trouble. You open up the first envelope and inside
⏹️ ▶️ John is a piece of paper that says, everything on me basically blame everything on your predecessor. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John he does that and it works and then time passes and he gets in trouble again. He opens a second envelope and
⏹️ ▶️ John it says sit down and write two letters.
⏹️ ▶️ John A letter to John Ternus. Blame everything on Tim. Is it the first letter?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, and so what I what I wanted to do here was basically like and in some ways,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I I’m pretty sure Apple execs see blog posts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They see press, they see this kind of thing. They don’t hear podcasts. Probably not, but at least not all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them. But I was pretty sure that if I wrote this this way, if it was reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco short, if it was reasonably constructive, and if I named it a letter to John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ternes, I was pretty sure there was a good chance he’d probably see it at some point. From his vanity Google searches?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who knows? But like, somehow, this would be sent to him by somebody. that like that I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that the odds of that knowing the way Apple’s execs you know do read a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of stuff that is you know posted by our community I figured there’s a good chance you’d see it and if not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough higher-ups would see it it would still do some some good and what I wanted to do is basically just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reinforce our principles not just what Apple stands for but what like we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are on what we view as the good side of personal computers like what we believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in with computers. And number one is we love computers. Number two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is computers serve us and they enhance our lives.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t need our computers to control us, restrict
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us, take advantage of us, and that we are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the owner of the computer and we are the customer being served. We are not the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resource being harvested by a barrage of upsells and privacy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco invasion and tracking and all that other stuff. I believe Apple best represents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those ideals in the computing industry by a mile. They are way ahead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of everyone else in all of those ideals. But I also firmly see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and believe while they are ahead of everyone else, their own adherence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to those ideals is declining and has declined significantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under the Tim Cook era. As they pushed into services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and upsells, there are promos everywhere, there are ads everywhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the computer does feel like it is taking control away from its customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and owners and treating us more like resources to be harvested and annoyed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Apple is, they’re in a dangerous place here for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their ethics, their morals, their quality, and for the things that we care about. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I was hoping to do with this is keep it very short and try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advocate for this mindset to not be forgotten. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit of historical reference to Jobs and Woz because I do think Jobs and Woz, both in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their very different ways, Both very much believed in these things and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco practiced them. You know, was on wasn’t honestly there for that long, but you know, certainly the jobs era
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jobs. Practiced this jobs pushed for this. He advocated for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He cared about this Tim Cook doesn’t care about this stuff at all doesn’t even know about it doesn’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. I think I get the impression that John Ternus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a nerd like us. at least in hopefully in the good ways. He’s probably,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he seems like a generally better rounded human being than us. But hopefully he does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem like he is the kind of person who would share these ideals. Somebody who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loves computers and wants to make good computers that serve their customers, not just the vendor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or not third parties. He seems like the kind of person who would believe in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. And so I wanted this to kind of get out there and reinforce these beliefs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and bring them into the discussion. And I think it did. I mean, I haven’t gotten a ton
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of traffic or anything, but it achieved what I wanted to achieve. And I think the way I wrote it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is very likely to get to him somehow.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, when I read this, I was thinking that I can,
⏹️ ▶️ John in my mind is like a companion to this that I’ll never write. I feel like,
⏹️ ▶️ John because when I think about stuff like this, and this is actually, what you said about it actually reminds
⏹️ ▶️ John me a lot of my thoughts and some of my words about the
⏹️ ▶️ John case for a true Mac Pro successor blog post I had all those years ago, especially in terms of like bean counters
⏹️ ▶️ John and car guys type of stuff or whatever. And it’s the same type of thing of like, well, mine was more
⏹️ ▶️ John of like a story thing, whatever, just like advocating for, as you said, like our values,
⏹️ ▶️ John what we love about Apple, you know, this is what we want, this is the good stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And anything you’re doing that is not this is not what we want, right? And I read this and I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, having soaked in the last many years of, uh, Tim Cook’s leadership,
⏹️ ▶️ John all I can think about is that I feel like what Ternus needs in addition to
⏹️ ▶️ John this is like help with the situation
⏹️ ▶️ John that he’s going to find himself in, which is basically, there will be things,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’ll be lots of things trying to make it seem like the stuff that Marco is advocating is
⏹️ ▶️ John not the right thing to do. What are those forces? What are the forces that are going to be buffeting
⏹️ ▶️ John whoever leads Apple next, trying to make them not do the stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco is describing? There are a lot of those forces. They are powerful, they
⏹️ ▶️ John are winning, like internal, external, in the world, within yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a million reasons why things have been going the way they are at Apple. It’s not like, you know, someone is like
⏹️ ▶️ John a mustache twirling villain or whatever. forces are aligned to make
⏹️ ▶️ John it so that if you are in this position, you are like, everything
⏹️ ▶️ John is telling you to do the opposite of what Marco is saying to do. And I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like these, what these people need is, I don’t know, a thought technology, something
⏹️ ▶️ John to hang on to something to like, like some kind of thing they can hang their hat on
⏹️ ▶️ John that will give them enough stamina to withstand
⏹️ ▶️ John the forces that are buffeting them. Jobs had it kind of easy in that like, he never needed
⏹️ ▶️ John any additional support in that area. First of all, he founded the company, he just felt like he owned it. So it’s like, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna tell me what to do with my freaking company. So Ternus doesn’t have that, Tim Cook doesn’t have that, Jobs did,
⏹️ ▶️ John he was the founder and he was attitudinal and so he’s got that holding up. And second of all, he was
⏹️ ▶️ John so stubborn and strong-willed that had his own personal beliefs that were sometimes weird or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John in general, like he didn’t have like, he didn’t have a problem advocating for what he wanted.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you just, but that is not a common position that people who are in charge of trillion
⏹️ ▶️ John dollar companies have most of them, with the possible exception of Mark Zuckerberg, who is mustache
⏹️ ▶️ John rolling evil, unfortunately. Like you don’t, like if you’re not the person
⏹️ ▶️ John who feels like this is literally my company, like I found it, it is me, it is mine, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like if you don’t have that, then all the world’s forces come down on you and everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John around you and the board of directors and all the other executives and every shareholder and every, and you can convince yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John that the customers want this too. They’re all making you junk up everything and put in more ads and
⏹️ ▶️ John drive service revenue and cheap out on your products and do all this stuff. And for years,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple held on to, you know, as much as it could, the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that made it successful. Everyone else was, you know, making netbooks or doing,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, doing the financially expedient thing. Apple under the Jobs 2 era
⏹️ ▶️ John was doing the opposite of all of that. we are gonna do things that nobody else does because they seem
⏹️ ▶️ John too hard or too expensive or too stupid or too niche or too esoteric. And it’s just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody cares about this. Don’t waste time on that. Don’t waste money on it. It’s not worth your time. This is why Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ John always doomed. This is why Apple will never succeed because you’re doing stupid stuff that nobody cares about.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you do that hard enough, it pays off in the long run. And that was,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like, has always been the story of Apple’s success. Doing things that everyone else thinks is a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John idea and that is better in ways that nobody values. And if you do it
⏹️ ▶️ John hard enough and well enough, it turns out people do value that. It’s the argument I always make about like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I always try to use analogies of like, if you make an expensive product and it just gains a reputation for
⏹️ ▶️ John durability, that you will have customers forever. You have like generational customers,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though everything else in your industry is telling you don’t do that. Don’t make your stuff high quality. Don’t make your luggage like indestructible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know, making some really high quality indestructible luggage that costs five times as much as everyone else’s luggage?
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re like, you dummy, you should be selling your luggage at Walmart. That’s how you get rich. Why are you doing
⏹️ ▶️ John this? And it’s like, well, if we do this for 50 years, we will have such loyal customers because we will gain a
⏹️ ▶️ John reputation as the company that makes the luggage that doesn’t break. Our zippers don’t break, our things don’t break down. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though it costs more, we make it better or whatever, whatever attribute you want to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that is so hard to do because first of all, you gotta wait 50 years. And second of all, everything in that
⏹️ ▶️ John industry is telling you, don’t do it. make your things cheaper, make them reduce the cost
⏹️ ▶️ John of your materials, manufacture them wherever it’s cheapest, no matter what everyone else says,
⏹️ ▶️ John make sure it’s sold through Walmart, like just do all this stuff. And it’s so hard for, I
⏹️ ▶️ John know it seems like, isn’t that a far cry from what Apple does today? But like with
⏹️ ▶️ John every passing day, every single thing that Apple does, I look at the decisions they’re making and saying
⏹️ ▶️ John you are giving in, you know, inch by inch to
⏹️ ▶️ John the forces that are trying to tell you to do the expedient thing that everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John else is doing and service revenue is just a perfect example of that. So anyway, I look at this, I’m thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John turn us over. The next Apple leader needs a really good understanding
⏹️ ▶️ John of the things that are going to be the forces that are already aligned against them. The day one, they get in there.
⏹️ ▶️ John So many forces are aligned against them inside the company and outside to make them do the wrong thing and
⏹️ ▶️ John make them think it’s the right thing and then give them some kind of something to hold
⏹️ ▶️ John on to, to let them fight that again, you know, they’re not going to have what Steve jobs had is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, well, this is my company and I own it and I do what I want and I also have really good taste, right? They’re not going to have that. Maybe they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even have good taste, but they need something. They need. I know someone, something, something to hang
⏹️ ▶️ John on to. It was some movie I was watching recently, or I don’t remember what it was. It was saying like, how do you get your motivation?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like, I don’t find a reason to do this. I find someone to do it for, like whatever, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever makes it work, whatever will give you the strength to make different decisions
⏹️ ▶️ John when everything in your world says that you should not. That is the only thing that can
⏹️ ▶️ John continue to allow Apple to be what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s got more of that than any other company to Marco’s point, like they’ve got more of it than anybody else. Like I’m not saying though,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s just the same as Dell, they’re not, okay. but it’s the trend line that we don’t like. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John from the outside, everything still seems like it’s mostly okay, but the trend lines are all going in the wrong direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mildly, but they’re all going in the wrong direction. Luckily, Apple started out way far above everybody and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John but yeah, that’s like, this letter is one thing, and then I feel like, and you’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John read this letter and you’re gonna be like, John Turner’s like nodding his head going, yeah, no, I believe all that, that’s great. Thumbs up,
⏹️ ▶️ John I agree with you, Marker. I’m gonna do all that, but then you’re gonna get into the job and you’re not. You’re not gonna do it. you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to continue to do what Tim did. And everyone’s going to tell you you’re doing a great job when you do that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s where things go wrong. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, I don’t know what the solution is, but a Turner says, listen to the podcast. So this is not going to help him.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, maybe he’ll, uh, maybe he’ll get your t-shirt and then be like, you know what? I wonder about this John Syracuse fellow.
⏹️ ▶️ John just want him to feel sad for 1.5 seconds. And that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it was a good post Marco. And you know, I understand for a million different reasons why you don’t really blog
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anymore, but I do miss the Marco that was at maybe not a prolific blogger cause I know that was a lot and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it took a lot and blah, blah, blah. But I miss the at least periodic blogger and I hope you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey consider doing it some
⏹️ ▶️ John more. This is kind of like the, uh, the, uh, speaking of your efficiency, efficiency minded or maybe pragmatic,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like Marco knows he’s not going to shout Apple into doing what he wants, but he’s like, maybe if I just write a sync
⏹️ ▶️ John summary of the values that I think Apple should pursue and present it pleasantly, here it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m always thinking that’s not going to work. They need tools. They’re gonna be buffeted by forces in every
⏹️ ▶️ John direction. They’re gonna agree with you tacitly, but they’re just gonna put more ads in things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, this is the best tool that we have. You know, we know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is a gigantic company with gigantic forces acting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upon them from everywhere in the world. People like us don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of influence on that, but we have a little tiny bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think over the years I have developed a pretty good sense of like How
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and when to exercise this little tiny bit of power that I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes have And it doesn’t I’m not expecting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to move the needle in a noticeable way but maybe in a very very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tiny way maybe this plants or or reinforces some idea in some heads,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe it makes it 1% more likely to do the right thing sometime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s worth it to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s almost like parenting in that regard.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You have a tiny bit of power, and you have to pick and choose when you’re gonna use it, and don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have too great expectations about how much it’s actually gonna do, but if you can make a 1% change, just
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#askatp: How “unified” is our RAM?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some Ask ATP. We’re going to do just a touch tonight. And Johnny Decimal Noble writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey during the recent Mac Pro discussion in episode 685, there was talk of RAM prices and how they’re affecting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the availability of certain configurations of the Mac Studio. I’m confused. Memory is unified. The memory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in these chips is unified. It’s not like Apple’s buying DRAM transistors in the open market, are they? My mental model
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that some giant machine in Taiwan is given a sheet of silicon and out the other end pops an M5 with 128
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigs of RAM. It’s not like the RAM is brought in, bought in, cut up, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fed into the machine and soldered onto that chip, is it? I don’t understand how the global shortage of RAM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey affects the production of the M-series chips, and I don’t understand what effect it has on Apple at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nothing’s changed inside those giant ASML machines in Taiwan. It doesn’t care about global DRAM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pricing. I’d love I’d love to know where my thinking is wrong. Everywhere. John, where did Johnny
⏹️ ▶️ John I already replied on Mastodon to this, but I think this was a good topic because I do wonder how
⏹️ ▶️ John many people also have the same incorrect idea about what unified memory means. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John another one of those terms kind of like the Mac Pro bereave shirt, where you kind of have to know about the
⏹️ ▶️ John shirt and stuff that came before it to make sense of the bereave thing. Unified memory
⏹️ ▶️ John is like that. So the quick answer to the question is, Next to the SOCs
⏹️ ▶️ John that TSMC prints in your Mac, you will see a bunch of little RAM chips that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple buys from the same RAM vendors that everybody else buys their RAM from, SK, Hynix,
⏹️ ▶️ John Micron, Samsung. Yeah, Apple buys RAM chips from the three companies
⏹️ ▶️ John in the world or whatever it is that make 90% of the world’s RAM, and that’s why the prices affect them. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the quick answer to the question is, yes, they do buy RAM chips. the RAM is not, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John printed on the SoC, which is a thing you can do. There is SRAM on there and stuff for the caches, and
⏹️ ▶️ John there was ED RAM on like the GameCube, I believe, and like, but whatever. When you buy a Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are RAM chips next to the SoC. You can see them when you look at the pictures of like a logic board or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now why is it called unified? What’s the confusion here with the unified memory?
⏹️ ▶️ John What is unified about it? And it has nothing to do with where the transistors
⏹️ ▶️ John that make up the RAM are, although they are very close to the SoC. Because again, if you see like an M2,
⏹️ ▶️ John I sent a picture of an M2 chip, it looks like a little square that says M2, but like three quarters of the square
⏹️ ▶️ John is the M2 SoC, and then one quarter of it is two RAM chips. And they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just, they’re like touching it. They’re so close to it. They’re right there. And yes, they are soldered down next to it, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just plain old RAM chips. But that’s not what makes it unified. What makes it unified is that in the olden
⏹️ ▶️ John days, when you made a computer, you had memory or RAM or DRAM, that
⏹️ ▶️ John was in SIMs or DIMMs or whatever, that the CPU would read and that was
⏹️ ▶️ John your computer’s memory. You’ve got a computer with one megabyte of memory or whatever. But then if you had a video
⏹️ ▶️ John card in that computer, 3D, 2D, any kind of video card, sometimes the video
⏹️ ▶️ John card would have its own memory just for the video card. And that was called
⏹️ ▶️ John VRAM for video RAM. And the video RAM would be used like in a 3D card,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would store textures and geometry, and the video RAM, especially on fancier, as the fancier 3D
⏹️ ▶️ John graphics cards, would have huge bandwidth to the GPU that is on the video card.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like just really, really wide buses. They were optimized for moving huge amounts
⏹️ ▶️ John of data into and out of the GPU. And how did that data get into VRAM? Well, the computer
⏹️ ▶️ John would ship it over, probably out of its regular RAM, and it would say, here, video card, you’re gonna need
⏹️ ▶️ John these textures and this geometry to do your work. would send it over the bus, PCI bus or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John AGP bus, whatever bus was the bus of the day, and it would go into VRAM and the GPU would read and write
⏹️ ▶️ John to VRAM and do all of its stuff. So you had these two pools of memory, regular RAM that
⏹️ ▶️ John the CPU used, and then VRAM that the GPU used.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unified memory means not having a separate pool of VRAM
⏹️ ▶️ John and regular RAM. Macs in the Apple Silicon age have one pool
⏹️ ▶️ John of RAM that is used by the GPU as it’s quote unquote VRAM
⏹️ ▶️ John and by the CPU as it’s regular memory. And it’s any part of the RAM can be used by either
⏹️ ▶️ John one. And they both have a really fast, really high bandwidth connection to that RAM. That’s how it works, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John If it was just like, you know, just have a GPU and a CPU and just one pool of RAM, that
⏹️ ▶️ John one pool of RAM would be too slow and too low bandwidth. That’s why they had VRAM, special VRAM with really high
⏹️ ▶️ John bandwidth to the GPU. But what Apple did is they said, We’re gonna take our RAM and we’re gonna make it a huge, wide,
⏹️ ▶️ John fast, low latency bus and solder the chips right next to the SOC. And now that pooled memory can use
⏹️ ▶️ John by both. And this is one of the reasons why the early days of people saying like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it’s okay for a Mac, Apple Silicon Mac to have a smaller amount of RAM because it has
⏹️ ▶️ John unified memory and that makes it use less RAM. The opposite is true. Back in the day, if you had like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, one gigabyte of regular RAM and 512 megabytes of VRAM, you had a total of 1.5 gigabytes of RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John in that machine. 500 gigs for the video card and one,
⏹️ ▶️ John or 500 megs of video card and one gig for the RAM, right? If you
⏹️ ▶️ John unified that, you’d want it to be combined. You say, okay, well, I’m just gonna throw away the VRAM and leaving you with just the one gig. Now
⏹️ ▶️ John you have less RAM. So it seems like you have less memory. It’s like, now I have
⏹️ ▶️ John the GPU fighting with the CPU for who’s gonna get to use what part of the one single pool
⏹️ ▶️ John of RAM. And in Apple’s case, that one single pool of RAM isn’t any bigger. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like you’re using, wasting more memory unless you always have the
⏹️ ▶️ John same amount you have. Even today, if you buy a gaming PC, you can get a gaming PC with 16 gigs of RAM and you can get
⏹️ ▶️ John a video card with like, I don’t know, like eight gigs of VRAM in it. That’s still to this day how gaming PCs work. They
⏹️ ▶️ John have dedicated video memory on your Nvidia card that’s just for the GPU and they have dedicated RAM that’s for the CPU.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s not how Apple things work. And believe me, Apple does not take a 16 gig computer and then take
⏹️ ▶️ John the eight gigs from the video card and combine them. No, you just get the 16 or eight in the case of the Neo.
⏹️ ▶️ John So again, the way they make this work is because the RAM is very fast. We always talk about those
⏹️ ▶️ John memory bandwidth figures that we get very fast, very high bandwidth, very low latency. And it is
⏹️ ▶️ John equally fast when the CPU is using it or the GPU is using it. And the CPU and the
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU are in the same SoC, even if they’re not on the same die as they are in the M5 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John and M5 Max. So anyway, that’s what’s unified about it. It has unified VRAM
⏹️ ▶️ John and regular RAM into a single pool of RAM, but that single pool of RAM is on
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM chips made by the same
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco RAM manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ John to make everybody else’s RAM chips. And that’s why I’m going to pay way too much money for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ha ha ha. Job done. All right, thank you to our sponsors this week,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace and Delete.me. And thanks to our members who support us directly. you can join us at atp.fm.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the many perks of membership is ATP overtime, our weekly bonus topic. Every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco single episode has about 20 minutes maybe of extra content,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one new topic that we couldn’t fit in the main show. That’s overtime. This week on overtime we’re talking about the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Claude Code leak and how Claude actually works. It’ll be really interesting. So join to hear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that atp.fm.com. Thank you so much for listening, everybody. and we’ll talk to you next
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Auntie Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to ♪ So accidental, accidental ♪ ♪ Tech podcasts
Smart/sport watches, part 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A few weeks ago I did an after show where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried a Garmin smartwatch or sport watch whatever they’re called a Garmin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch instead of an Apple watch and my conclusion was basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see why other people might want something like this but I don’t want something like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it seems like it is a very bad smartwatch in order to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty possibly good sport or activity watch. And I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of feedback about that. I wasn’t happy with how I tried it. I wanted to give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it a better shot because one of the things I said in the episode was I figured out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty quickly that I had not really gotten the right one. I gotten one of the like you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller models like a smaller simpler model and Garmin has a thousand models
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their smartwatches and and I really did not I realized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty quickly like this is this is not the one that I would get if I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keeping it but I decided not to keep and I returned it but in response to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know people making very good points I’m like I really should I should have given that another try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a better try so this time I decided you know what I’m actually going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try again but I’m I’m gonna get something that I’m pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure I will have a better experience with. That was not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Garmin watch. It was a Suunto watch. Uh, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I heard lots of good things about this brand Suunto. I think that’s how it’s pronounced? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forgot to look it up. Uh, sorry. Suunto makes, you know, similar looking watches to Garmin’s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, sport watches that are designed for super long battery life. you know, endurance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like, you know, really, you know, strong conditions that maybe you wouldn’t want to bring something like an Apple Watch. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they seem very well regarded. In particular, I know our friend underscore David
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Smith told me that I should probably look at them and it seems like they have a lot of fans.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I looked at their, I was looking at their offerings the first time when I when I ended up with the Garmin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I didn’t, I couldn’t quite decide what to get and I went with Garmin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but this time I tried the Suunto Race S. Part of what I wanted was a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offline maps situation and in Garmin’s models to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offline maps you have to get a pretty large watch and in the Suunto lineup you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so what I went with was the Suunto Race S titanium model.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is in most identical to the regular race S. It costs a hundred bucks more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s a titanium case. And one of the big advantages of that is it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very much lighter weight compared to the regular one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you get graphite or canary?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess they’re both gray. Well, they’re all gray. Dark gray or slightly less dark gray?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe, yeah, I got the dark one. So, but I ended up buying, they have an orange strap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version that I just bought the strap separately on Amazon for, I think, 50 bucks. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s my impressions of the Suunto Race S. Now, as for context, I took another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very long walk and I was wearing both the Suunto and the Apple Watch Ultra. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey protocol. Do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the underscore pose. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the prototypical underscore pose. Very well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was definitely doing my best underscore impression.
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t make his face
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though. No, I mean, who can do that? I can’t totally rip him off. You know, identity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John theft is not a joke, Jim. You should be wearing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? So anyway, I did this long walk. I did 23 miles,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one arm with the Apple Watch Ultra and the other arm with the Suunto Race S.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How long did that take, just ballpark?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco About eight and a half hours, 844. That’s a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were a couple of breaks in the middle, you know, like 10, 15 minute breaks, but yeah. So 844 was the total time. I’ve also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been using the Suunto Race S for my regular three times a week workouts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These are kind of like, you know, mixed full body, you know, some weightlifting, some Pilates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco style stuff, some, you know, training kind of stuff, just kind of mixed workouts with the trainer that we do all sorts of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on mats and with dumbbells and stuff like that. This time, again, my, my goal here was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let me give myself the highest chance of liking this that I can. I decided
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not to have it forward notifications from my phone. So it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a sport and activity watch. It does not try to be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart watch. Because what I have learned is, you know, I learned from the Garmin experiment,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Suunto is no different in this way, the abilities of non-Apple Watch watches with iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are pretty limited in terms of notifications and, you know, there’s no Siri access and stuff like that. And so I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know what? Just to maximize my chance of liking this, let me try using it for what it really is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And not try to make it a smart watch that it really isn’t. So first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco impressions, it is so light. Now, and this is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the Race S is their, I believe their second smallest model. This is a category of very large
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices, generally speaking. So their second smallest model is still substantial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in size. Like I would say it is similar in overall size to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of between the Apple Watch Series 46 line and the Apple Watch Ultra.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s like right between those two, I think in terms of like how big it generally looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your wrist, but compared to both of those it feels So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco light the Apple watch ultra feels like a brick by comparison the Suunto
⏹️ ▶️ Marco straps Way nicer than the Garmin strap that I had now again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Garmin has a very big product lineup Maybe the one I had was was one of the bad ones who knows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Suunto strap very nice silicone, you know, it’s nice and flexible, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco light, I think it looks pretty good, you know, for what it is. Much, much nicer straps on the Suunto.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, keep in mind, as I’m comparing this, I’m comparing it to the Apple Watch Ultra,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the Suunto is only $300 in steel, $400 in titanium. The Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Watch Ultra is $800. So this is half the price, or less,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you get the slightly heavier model. But it still offers similar battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life in terms of like if you’re doing a long workout, like if you need like long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco workout time, if you’re gonna be on like a 12 hour hike or whatever, the battery life between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this smaller Suunto and the biggest Apple Watch is in the ballpark of each other. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty similar. And if you want even more, you can get the bigger models, but I didn’t want to do that. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screen, nice and bright, Totally serves its purpose. I will say the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always on screen kind of sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s mostly, it sucks if you try to use it as a smartwatch, which I was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was trying, like when I tried the Garmin, I was like, let me try to make this a smartwatch. With this, I’m like, you know what? These suck as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smartwatches. Let me try to make it a sports watch. So I’m not wearing it all the time. I’m wearing my Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch most of the time. And when I am doing an activity that requires sports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tracking, I put this on, either instead of or in addition to the Apple Watch. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by using it that way, a lot of the other decisions they have kind of make more sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the always on screen, when you’re in an active workout, it shows the workout data,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always on. And you can turn it off to extend battery life further. But it shows the workout data exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you’d expect. It dims it if it’s not active, but otherwise it’s there. When you’re not in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco workout, This has a customizable watch face, just like every other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart-ish watch. You can customize, they have complications, they have a few different faces you can pick. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a face store you can go into on their app. By the way, the app and the setup process,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way nicer than Garmin’s. Garmin’s apps, plural, and setup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco process are obviously like burdened by lots of legacy and complexity and kind of just scope creep,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, over time. Suunto, I believe, is a significantly younger brand. They have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot less crap in them. They’re much more like simple. There’s a lot, a lot less that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like trying to get you to upsell to other things. It’s just like a nice, simple, and in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opinion, better graphically designed platform. Everything about it was way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nicer than the Garmin experience for me, including the experience of actually navigating the watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe if I had more time with the Garmin, maybe I would have gotten faster navigating it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Suunto seems like it just makes a little bit more intuitive sense. Like there’s a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buttons to learn a couple of like standards, but for the most part, I learned it a lot faster. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the the general graphical style of Suunto is nicer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And frankly, I think their hardware also looks nicer. I mentioned already the straps look and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel and work better than the garments that I had, the garment that I had, but also just like the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case. I think like it’s a little bit more tasteful looking. The Garmin’s have like a certain look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like extreme sport activity, you know, and they kind of use color in weird ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think Suunto just has a better style overall Then it came time to charge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Their models have different chargers and so this one I think is one of the older ones because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the race s is like a couple of years old and The race 2 is the newer model,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s only the big size so far. This charger is USB-A
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not to exist any USB-C options, and because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not all the same, that introduces some interesting complexities. So for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I want more than one cable, I’m going to have to buy more and keep them wherever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I might be. Maybe put one in the backpack. If I want to have it like charge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my bedside table or whatever, you quickly realize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the Apple Watch, by being the dominant platform, it has certain kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built-in advantages. And one of them is that there’s lots of accessories out there made for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watches, because Apple sells tons of Apple Watches and has for a decade,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’ve always used the same charger. So people have had time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make third-party cables, third-party docks, third-party battery packs that all can charge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watches directly on them. And in this ecosystem that just doesn’t exist.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Suunto ecosystem is way smaller and way younger and because they use different chargers for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different models, like if you say, you know, if you brought this on a trip somewhere and if you need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to charge it now, it does have a very good battery life in standby mode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, if you’re just using as a watch, it’ll last many, many days. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you were like in a bind and needed a charger for this, If you were wearing an Apple Watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could go to any drugstore, any like airport kiosk or whatever, and you can get an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Watch cable to charge your watch. If you have something like this, good luck. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably won’t be able to find what you’re looking for without, like, you know, going to, you know, ordering something online and having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it delivered to your hotel, maybe if you’re lucky, you know. So
⏹️ ▶️ John does this charge the same way as the Apple Watch does, like inductive, like a pad or a thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s not inductive? There’s contacts on the back. So but
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not a. All right, so there’s not a port, but it’s just like…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like there is a magnetically attaching disc that attach to a USB cable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s a proprietary charging system that uses two pins on the back.
⏹️ ▶️ John Interesting, I wonder if you could just like buy any charger at a gas station and rip open the wires and just take
⏹️ ▶️ John the positive and negative and hold them to the two contacts on the bottom of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch. Just apply five volts across these terminals and hope for the best.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, like, as I was asking whether it is inductive, like that you needed some kind of coil that exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John matches and aligned to the thing, but if it’s two like pin contacts, that’s real old school.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, that’s, maybe that would work, I don’t know. But anyway, so it is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, it adds to the friction. If you want to make one of these your daily driver, it just adds to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco friction that it’s not a standard charger. And unlike the Apple Watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is also like not a standard charger, so to speak, but like it also is not dominant in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world and hasn’t been there for long. And so odds are you won’t be able to charge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in any other way other than one of its official cables or a clone from Amazon that has all the same problems that the official
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones do, all the same limitations. So the charging situation is bleak, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery life is so good that like you can, if you’re just like keeping it around for doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco occasional workouts while you’re on a trip, you wouldn’t really need to charge it. If you know, unless your trip is longer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than a week or two, maybe. As for other physical characteristics, the speaker on the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just like beeps, Like a cheap digital watch like that. It can be like, you know, it can play different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tones of beeps, but it doesn’t appear to be like a real like PCM speaker,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is interesting. It’s like using like back. John wouldn’t know this, but Casey, you would. I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about PC sound. I used to laugh about it. Yeah, like PC sound. Like if you just had the PC speaker, you didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a sound blaster.
⏹️ ▶️ John you could get the Atari Lynx. Not the Atari Lynx. The the Lynx golf game voice.
⏹️ ▶️ John bet the soon to watch can make that noise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it can, it can make some noises. All right. Um, yeah, so that’s, that’s interesting. But what I learned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using this thing is that generally speaking as a computing device, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very primitive compared to the Apple watch and you see that in a few different ways. So one of them is, yeah, like the PC speaker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of speaker. Um, also the watch seems to have. not really any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco concept of like multitasking so to speak in a practical way so like for instance the app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the watch will only sync to its app if the watch is on its home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen not in an app the soon to app on your phone will yell at you put the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch back on the home screen so we can sync data lovely there was a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point where during my big walk I wanted to change a setting I wanted to turn off the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always on screen during the big walk to try to conserve of power and it turned out I didn’t need to do that. It, it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it had plenty of power. Um, it, it finished a, you know, an eight and a half hour walk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with 66% battery left. So it was fine. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the always on screen on heart rate tracking and GPS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Does this have the fancy GPS that you really, really wanted from the, uh, Apple watch ultra?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, it does. It has dual band GPS L one and L five. So, uh, it has,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so again, like it’s, it’s very ultra in a lot of these features. Like it, it competes directly with the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch ultra and a lot of these features, but again, at half or less the price, uh, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much lighter weight. And in some ways, even better battery life, not always, but, um, in some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways. So the always on screen. When you’re not in a workout only shows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a dumb clock. Like when the Apple watch is in like power save mode, it only shows the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want to actually see your watch face, you have to like hit a button on the watch and that will bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up the watch face. And so the value of things like watch faces and complications,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think is somewhat limited by that. The situation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with watch faces and complications, again, they exist. They’re very limited, very primitive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot of things are missing. So like they have built in weather widgets and stuff that you can put as complications, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s very few metrics you can measure. So like one of the things I was disappointed by is that there’s no UV index. And what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I always have on my Apple Watches is temperature, UV index, and timer as my bottom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three complications. All that stuff is very primitive. And also, so it has this feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you can download offline maps to it, which is great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not super granular. I had to download all of New York to have any of New York.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And all of New York is a gig. And it takes a while to send it. takes like an hour to send it over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch so it’s a you know it’s a slow process but it does actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work once the map is on their map navigation works great you can you can zoom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in and out you can you know it it’s all that stuff is great and I needed offline maps for this because this is upstate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where there’s not that not very good coverage of any kind of any sort and also by the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these watches do not have a cellular option Garmin does on some of their or larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco models. As far as I could tell, none of the Suunto’s do, I don’t think, certainly this one doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s another thing, like if you want this watch to have cellular for things like if you wanted to maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take a run without bringing your phone with you, this isn’t gonna help you. Similarly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of these watches don’t support like local music playback to Bluetooth headphones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of the newest ones do, many of them don’t. So again, like I think the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watch has spoiled us for how good of a computing platform, how good of a smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch it is. But, again, this is half the price,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and way lighter, and with very good battery life, so I think we can forgive a lot of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, um, I’m almost done here. At some point in the last couple of weeks, there was a software update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that just happened automatically, it didn’t ask me, it just did it. And when I woke up the next morning,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my watch face and complications were blown away, reset to defaults and my offline
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maps were deleted. Oh brutal. Um before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the uh the complications on the watch face didn’t quite fit the layout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the watch screen like they were some that were like overflowing their bounds. After that that was fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So okay it feels like I’m using a beta.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um Suunto yes they are a younger company. It shows. Their software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still a little rough in a lot of those ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So after that I reset up my watch face, I downloaded the New York map again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and had it sent over to the watch for over an hour again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I did get it to work. But having a software update silently wipe out my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire watch face configuration and offline maps was a little disconcerting. for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually using it during workouts and during the giant walk. Workouts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first. It’s really nice during workouts actually. So this confirmed first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all I don’t need it to be any bigger. One of the problems that I have with the Apple Watch Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my regular workouts is a lot of times we are like on our hands on the mat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or I’m lifting a big dumbbell with a workout glove like a weightlifting glove and a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times it’s easy for like my wrist or the edge of the glove to accidentally push buttons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on an Apple Watch. And I don’t have that problem, it just seems the buttons are a little harder to push, so that’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also, that’s also why I don’t want one that’s any bigger than this, because if it becomes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger, then it starts getting in the way of my wrist movement, like if I flex my wrist up and stuff like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was very happy to have the size that I have for that, and there’s never been a moment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during this trial so far that I’ve needed a bigger screen or a bigger battery or anything. I have this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller one because again even smaller it’s not small in absolute terms it’s just smaller than other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sports watches of this type. During workouts I like that it’s giving me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every second it’s giving me heart rate updates on the screen always on all the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so if I’m feeling like I’m really pushing myself in a workout I can just quickly glance at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch and I can see it does this nice like ring around the outside of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heart rate zones and And you can customize those zones, which I found very nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I was able to set like, you know, of like the four or five zones that go around the face of the watch, you know, they’re color coded,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, like red, yellow, green. And I was able to set like where the boundaries are to match kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, what I want those to mean. So I can tell, am I pushing myself, you know, as hard as I expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be or want to be? And I can adjust in response to that. That was very nice. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when doing these workouts, that’s when I realized, oh, round
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the right shape for fitness watches. I get it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, but I still maintain that round is not the right shape for smartwatches, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need to be reading text frequently, like from notifications. But now I understand round
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was nice for a lot of these things. It isn’t always ideal, but it was nice for a lot of these things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco including that like kind of radial display of the workout. The way the screen is designed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I felt this way about the Garmin too to an extent, although I didn’t get too much into customization on the Garmin, but the way the screen is designed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it makes it obvious that like, these watches are designed by people for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sports and activities. Whereas the Apple watch, even like Apple’s workout app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s designed by graphic designers to make it look pretty, but a lot of times the functionality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not quite there. Like with Apple’s workout app, I often have trouble like distinguishing what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the different numbers are. Like at a quick glance, you have to kind of, oh wait, that’s the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, okay. Oh, that’s not the heart rate, that’s the pace. Or, you know, whatever it is. Like, it’s a little bit, you have to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of look a little longer than you maybe should to distinguish because it’s all just like a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco left aligned giant numbers. Whereas these watches, the way they design their faces,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they use the shape better, they use the space better, and they have more differentiation between the metrics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re showing you. So it’s easier for you to see at a glance. So that was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I find the Suunto to be very nice during workouts. Also, on the Big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Walk, I found it to be great for kind of just general
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like motivation because it had a few different modes you can switch between about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you could see like how far have you gone or you could switch it to a countdown to like how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far it is back to where you started or if you load the route onto it, you can see like how far it is to the end of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the route. So that was all very nice. I also loved that every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mile, the Suunto would give me a nice little beep, like doot doot doot, like a little like encouraging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beep, hey, I did another mile. And I found that to be like a little delightful thing. I would actually look forward to it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I knew I was approaching a mile marker, like, oh, I can’t wait to get my beep, my celebratory beep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That I found delightful. And I also really enjoyed that the Suunto
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app afterwards, when you’re reviewing the data, It has a lot more detail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the Apple fitness app does for reviewing workout data. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allowed me to like dive in and see like, you know, I can customize and see different charts and graphs and lay one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on top of the other to see different metrics. Like, oh, if I put like elevation over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pace, I can see how I slowed down when I was going up the elevation and stuff like that. Or you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can see where your brakes were within the pacing and everything. And you could break down like by mile.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It didn’t matter that I like pushed the lap button accidentally a few times.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, it also kept an automatic quote lap of each mile I did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I can go back later and review like speed per mile and, you know, pace and heart rate and all that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other stuff. So that was actually really nice. I liked the workout data review in the app. Um, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know if it writes to health kit so far. It isn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if that means it can’t, or if I just haven’t enabled that yet or if there’s some third-party tool I’d have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use to do that. But right now it is not writing to HealthKit. For my purposes I don’t think I care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that could be a big deal to a lot of people. But generally speaking I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enjoyed it on the walk. Again, because it’s so light and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did a perfectly good job of tracking the things I needed to track on that walk, I was really very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco impressed by it. As a smartwatch, it’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All of these devices are terrible as smartwatches for iPhone users. I mean, maybe it’s better on Android,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for iPhone users, I wouldn’t recommend anything except an Apple Watch for a smartwatch. If you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco general purpose smartwatchiness, you want notifications to pop up on your wrist maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you wanna have like a nice watch face that has a lot of complications maybe that tells you useful things throughout the day,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you wanna see your calendar, you wanna do all that stuff, the Apple Watch is the one you should get.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you want kind of the best generalist, You want maybe music features, you want cellular,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for all of those kind of like, if any of those edge case, or if any of those use cases are important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you, you want an Apple Watch. If you only wanna have one watch in your life,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want an Apple Watch. If you want easy charging on trips, there’s so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, the Apple Watch is the best answer to so many of those things. If you want Siri, if you wanna be able to remotely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unlock your Mac or your phone with it, so many advantages to the Apple Watch. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want to watch for workouts and taking on long treks like this or similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of extreme, you know, sporting uses, I think the Suunto is better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s a huge amount of ifs. It is a much more primitive device in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all those other ways that allows it to be a better sports watch in a lot of ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, it’s also half the price and very light.
⏹️ ▶️ John 8.6 grams is that weight difference you’re feeling by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 8.6 grams? Yep. I don’t believe that for a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I’m looking at Apple’s spec page now. What
⏹️ ▶️ John it might be factor in is, because I’m assuming these weights on both Apple’s page and Suunto’s page are
⏹️ ▶️ John just for the watch body. And so maybe the strap, if you’re wearing a really heavy, like using like the link
⏹️ ▶️ John bracelet on the Ultra or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hold on, I will tell you. Give me one moment, I’m getting a scale out of my closet. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Soon to Erase S titanium with its strap is 53 grams. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess they’re including the strap and Apple’s not. Yeah, so the Apple Watch Ultra without strap is 62.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I toss on here, I mean, I have a couple of straps here. I think you mean 61.6. Sure, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what Apple’s webpage says.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if I use the Ocean band, their silicone one for the Apple Watch Ultra, the total
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is 97. If I use the leather loop, which I actually like a lot, the total is 101, 100.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, so the Apple Watch Ultra is with a strap,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about twice the weight. And you feel it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess the Suunto one includes the strap and its weight because it includes the strap. Although
⏹️ ▶️ John no, the Ultra comes with a strap too, doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? Yeah, so just the Suunto titanium without the strap, I just took it off, is only 35 grams. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Ultra is 62. So that’s a huge difference and you really feel it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, I am going to keep the Suunto. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco replacing my Apple Watch, but I am going to continue to use it during
⏹️ ▶️ Marco workouts if I have it. So like if I’m on a trip, I’m not gonna bring it. There’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason for me to do that really. Although it is light and doesn’t need a charger for a long time, so maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for my regular workouts, I’m going to keep using it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For the big walk, I’m definitely going to use it. Although I think I’m going to use it and an Apple Watch Ultra,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just to like have multiple tracking things, you know, as backups and things like that. But I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very glad I tried this again. So thank you everybody who told me that I gave Garmin’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of a short shrift there. I still don’t like Garmin’s, but I do like Suunto.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do they have the Suunto? You took those straps off pretty quick. Do they have like a mechanism like Apple’s that like makes the straps come off easy?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, they have what the rest of the watch world called quick release spring bars. So it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a regular 22 millimeter spring bar mount on the watch. And the straps are just regular, like you could put these in any,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any watch with a 22 millimeter, uh, spring bar setup, but they have these little tabs in the back. You can,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you, you can pull to one side and they pop off, which I think, I think that’s what Garmin did, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I forget off the top of my head.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s very fascinating. I was expecting that you were going to say, oh, I bought the wrong Garmin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and such and such other Garmin is the right answer, but it seems like no, it, at least as far as you’re aware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sitting here tonight, it’s not the Garmin that’s the, it’s not the particular Garmin that’s the problem, it’s that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shouldn’t have gotten a Garmin at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think it, again, it depends on your use case. So Garmin has a number of significant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware advantages and maybe software advantages too, I didn’t get too far into that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But what I really wanted was something that was small enough that it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not interfere with my workouts or shirts, things like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and lightweight was a plus. And I wanted offline map support. Garmin is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty stingy with which of their models get offline maps. And so the one I got was the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Venue 4, which that was the wrong choice for me. I think if I was gonna buy a Garmin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today, I would probably get the Forerunner. There we go. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Phoenix 8 is their like flagship kind of everything watch. I would probably look at that, but it’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chunky for my taste. the forerunner line of Garmin looks like maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a better fit for me, but you have to get the giant one, the 970 to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the offline map support. For reasons I don’t understand. I think it’s just like market segmentation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also keep in mind that model is as much as an Apple Watch Ultra. It’s like 750 and up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So again, Suunto has a pretty big price advantage here for generally similar utility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to what I’m looking at here. But Garmin also, Garmin has some watches that have cellular, They have better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like music capabilities in many of their models. They have, their high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones even have satellite connectivity, which the Apple Watch Ultra 3 does. The Suunto doesn’t have anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. And Garmin has like different screen technologies. They actually offer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a micro LED screen for like $1,600, but you can, if you want, you can buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Garmin Fenix 8 like super edition that has a real micro LED screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s super bright. Remember when Apple was gonna make those for its Apple Watch, like they invested in this, they were
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna build their own micro LED screens for the Apple Watch and they, after a couple of years, they said, nevermind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right, well, Garmin did it. Like you can get a Phoenix 8 today, sorry, Phoenix 8
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro micro LED, $1,700, excuse me, and only available in 51 millimeter size. So it’s huge and very expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they will sell you one if that’s what you want. It’s like super, super bright.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So ultimately this has taught me that I appreciate this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco category of watch if I change what I expect it to solve for me. If I change the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco role that it has in my life, kind of scale back what I want it to be, I appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it is. And it also makes me really appreciate that Apple’s done a really good job with the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Watch. Like when you see what else is out there, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish Apple would have every advantage that every other watch has. They won’t, they can’t, they’ve,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, they, there are certain trade-offs inherent with the decisions they’ve made. And I will, of course, reiterate that I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple, I think watchOS in general, is a really under-invested in platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by Apple. And there is so much potential that they just have chosen not to address yet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or ever. But the Apple Watch really stands up against its competitors in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of ways. Like if what you want is the best all-arounder,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not even close. It’s definitely the Apple Watch. No question. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you should only be looking at the other categories of watches if you know for sure that the Apple Watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not satisfactory to you for some reason. And you’re willing to give up all those other things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get, you know, to use something else. But, these do have a place in the market. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m glad I’ve gone on this experience to like figure that out better. better and to experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these to have, you know, maybe, maybe a new better workout watch for myself. And again, for only 300 bucks or 400
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks for the light one I think it’s a great deal.