We Get the Most Boring Tips
The snow is destroying my house.
We'll see if it remains standing.
I keep thinking this house has been here since 1932.
It's not going to fall down this year, but it's got to fall down some year, and I'll probably be in it when it does.
So if you want to know how to polarize our audience, and we've talked about some controversial things in the past.
We've talked about all sorts of things, not really ever politics or religion, but we've come as close as one can get.
And it's not the abuse of women in the technology industry.
That is actually not very controversial to our audience, which is good.
But, man, if we talk about cars, holy hell do people get upset.
And then some people love it, and then people get upset.
And then other people love it, and then people get really upset.
Who's getting upset?
Are people yelling at you about stuff?
Most people are in a joking way about, oh, talking about cars, haha.
But, like, they seem pretty okay with it.
I don't know about you, Marco, but I've seen some pretty angry either tweets or emails about the car talk.
I didn't really feel a lot of anger.
There were a couple of tweets that were like, oh, I guess I'll skip this one, but they were pretty mellow.
I mean, compared to what we got when we did Neutral, you know, Neutral had like 200 really upset people and 100 people who liked it, and that was it.
And this seemed to... I was surprised, actually.
I was very surprised how many people enjoyed my Tesla review, because I thought...
I was very nervous about even including that, because I was afraid people would think that I'm some elitist asshole.
Should have just made a blog post, see?
It would have been fine.
No, that would have been worse.
No, no, no.
I would never put that on my blog, because I would have had so many... People who listen to this tend to like us more, I think, than the average blog reader.
If I post something on my blog, I get a whole bunch of hate from drive-bys.
Whereas with podcasts, you don't really have drive-by readers or listeners to a podcast, you know?
Like, people who are here tend to like you.
I mean, with the exception of, like, MTW, everybody else tends to like us, you know?
So, I'm not... Like, you can say, like, more possibly controversial things on a podcast, and you can expect that the audience will give you the benefit of the doubt, or will know you a little bit better, or will understand you a little bit better, you know?
So, it's...
I feel way more comfortable saying things on podcasts than I do, and especially on our podcast, than I do writing it on my blog.
You need to go on Analog with Casey and talk through these issues that you have about feeling bad about buying nice things with your money.
Actually, that is a very interesting point.
An alternate solution, if you find that too onerous, is to give all your money to me.
I have no such problems.
The funny thing about you, John, is that even if I gave you all the money in the world to go, like, buy Ferraris and stuff, you still wouldn't do it.
I have different priorities than you, so the ranking of what's the first thing you buy, the second thing you buy, so it may be different, but I would have no problem, like, blogging about the expensive thing that I bought, being afraid, you know, whatever.
Like, that's me, that's you.
We're different people.
That's why I said you need to get rid of all that nasty money that's bothering you, or go on to Casey's Feeling Show and...
talk about cheese food yeah it's different for you people believe you oh my god that's funny though because i of the three of us i would peg you as the least willing to talk about all the fancy crap that you bought oh no way am i i've talked about my tv for hours it's like the fanciest thing i own it's all i talk about
I'm totally willing to talk about the fancy things that I have.
I also forget that you talking about things that you like really amounts to you preaching and moaning about those things rather than being like, look at me and how awesome my Tesla is.
I would have complaints about a Ferrari.
I mean, it's like an exotic car.
There's probably like all sorts of ergonomic issues and everything like, but I would talk about the good things too.
i mean i was just looking at the the screen the screenshots looking at the uh the pictures in that verge article someone had the the 488 a bunch of pictures like the first non-press you know non like glamour shots that ferrari takes of the car and so you get to see it from different angles and see the awkward parts or whatever and they had a shot of the interior showing like the the seat controls on the side of the seat and i was like boy when that door closes it's tough to get your fingers down there to feel those seat controls and it's like ferrari doesn't care about the ergonomics of how easy it is to reuse the seat controls that's not what this car is about
You know what we've got to do?
There are companies like... I forget the names.
There are some companies in New York and LA and stuff that will rent supercars to you for a few thousand dollars a day.
My wife tried to do that once and I turned it down.
Can you imagine something worse?
Marco, you can relate to this when you're owning cars.
Someone else's expensive car that you are renting...
And especially the one she was looking at was like, in a city?
Having a Ferrari in the city of Boston was pointless.
Why not just take it and rub it upside down on top of some gravel?
You're not driving it.
It's abuse.
We have to get a sponsor to make this happen.
To pay for...
A one-day rental of whatever your chosen Ferrari is that's currently available through these rental places.
A one-day rental for you just to have you evaluate it the way you evaluate things.
I don't know.
Maybe if it was a sponsor thing.
Who knows?
I would feel very nervous driving someone else's car.
And it would have to be during the summer for crying out loud.
It'd be even better now.
Yeah, right?
No, Ferraris are not allowed on the street.
I see occasionally, I have seen in my life in the Boston metro area, a completely blasted road salt covered slush destroyed red Ferrari out in the winter.
So somebody's doing it.
That person I have immense respect for, whoever that is.
Yeah, seriously.
This 488 is pretty.
I'm looking at this Verge article.
It's nice.
All right.
We should get the follow-up before we turn this into neutral again.
Too late.
Now it's like now when we're doing the show, I'm thinking, where is Marco going to put the car opening?
To get back to what you were pointing about the people with the feedback about the car stuff.
I mean, most people, I think, are just bemused by it and joking about it.
And I think they're joking because it's like, look,
if there's a rumor that apple's gonna make a car we're gonna talk about it on a tech podcast that's focused a lot on apple like blame apple we didn't tell them to make a car you know blame nine to five mac and the wall street journal yeah if we were making if they have rumors of them making a boat we'd be talking about boats all right so now that we've uh wasted 10 minutes would you like to do some follow-up
Yeah, guess what it's about.
Sorry, guys.
Oh, God, this is the best.
All right, so let's talk about cars.
Yeah, first one is from William Faraday or Faraday.
It's better for Faraday because I think he works for Tesla.
And he says that Tesla reports margins.
We were saying like, what do we think the margins are on Tesla's cars versus what they imagine that might be on Apple's cars?
And he says the margins are about 25%.
The goal is 30%.
And then he says, thanks for believing in us.
Model S is bonkers awesome.
So by saying believing in us, I assume he works for Tesla.
No, I wouldn't actually assume that.
Let me remember for a second there.
Tesla fans are crazy.
We've had, and I will probably count myself among those in a year or two, whatever, but
Tesla fan, I've never encountered fans that were as devoted and incredibly loud and overprotective as they are.
You know, it kind of, you know, Elon Musk himself has, you can tell he's extremely oversensitive, much to a fault, actually.
Whenever anybody says anything he perceives to be unfair or incorrect about Tesla's in news or in reviews, there's that whole scandal with Top Gear, then the scandal with the New York Times, and like all this stuff.
And I think I would say Elon reacts poorly.
I would say it's necessary to react to these things.
It's necessary to issue statements and stuff if you disagree, but the way he does it, I think, is not beneficial overall.
But...
The fans have seemingly taken that on themselves.
The owners have taken that kind of like the scrappy upstart underdog attitude on themselves.
And boy, there is no woodwork that can hold them back.
I mean, it is...
If you say anything, they jump all over you, good or bad.
And so it was very helpful to me when I was honestly looking into this and giving this a fair shot.
I got tons of amazing information from Tesla owners, tons of how you take road trips.
What are the good things?
What are the bad things about these cars?
Everybody is willing to share this information.
Everybody has tons of things to say.
And everyone's like, please, I will never buy an internal combustion engine, which they all abbreviate ICE.
I will never buy an ICE car again.
You have to come over.
It's amazing.
You'll never go back, etc.
It is the most devoted, nearly rabid fan base I've ever seen of anything.
It's really something.
It's funny because I don't mean this to be funny at all.
It reminds me of the way I perceived Apple fans before I became one of them, you know, like just ravenously excited about their company.
And I also thought it was quite funny that more than a couple of people tweeted at Elon Musk saying, oh, my God, you have to listen to this M5 owner talk about how wonderful the P85D is.
Check out this podcast, which I thought was quite funny.
I'm sure he'll work that into his schedule.
in between launching rockets into space one of the reasons why i'm interested in the tesla now is that you know elon musk has some maybe many of the qualities steve jobs had in the sense that and and to some degree jeff bezos has but i think steve and elon do a better job of it um this kind of like crazy billionaire with really high standards and pretty high product ambitions and
I kind of miss that from Apple.
And we still get great stuff from Apple.
And I'm sure we'll talk about next week's event now and then when it happens.
And I'm sure we'll say, oh, this stuff is great.
But that spirit of the charismatic, kind of crazy leader who pushes everyone to do pretty crazy stuff, that's rare.
And Elon, I think, is one of those.
And I'm kind of interested in joining one of those product fan bases again.
I think the reason Tesla fans are as rabid as you say they are and why Casey perceived Apple fans to be like that before a coming one is I think you need to have a company that you recognize or that the fans recognize as having a superior product but that the world does not recognize yet so you have to be an under you have to be an underdog so like
The Mac was just so much better than Windows 3.1.
It was ridiculous.
It was even worse than Tesla versus other cars.
And yet the entire world considered the Mac a silly toy and not a real computer.
And that breeds rabid fans.
Same thing with the Amiga.
You think, guys, don't you see?
This is so awesome.
Why is it only me and my seven nerdy friends who see that this is awesome?
The world has to know.
And they'll defend it and so on and so forth.
Once you stop being the underdog and become the overdog and just like...
the entire world knows that apple is really good and everything then you tend to chill out more so casey your perception could have been right back when apple was beleaguered and on the ropes and so on and so forth or maybe it was just like you know it's it takes a while for that that perception of the fans to turn around but tesla is definitely the underdog at this point because
well because they make super expensive cars and and not many people can buy them and the people who own them think they're great uh but other people think either a they're too expensive and i can't afford one or b uh you know they'll run out of batteries or whatever other fud is out there about uh electric cars and that's what they're combating
But anyway, so you think this tweet, William Faraday, he should tweet us back and say, thanks for believing in us.
You think he's saying us as in we Tesla owners?
I mean, I totally read that as him saying that he works for Tesla.
Well, and I did.
hear from a couple of people who who work for tesla and and you know i don't and nobody whose names anybody would recognize as far as i know but you know just people who like they listed their employer in their twitter bio as tesla and one of them was wearing a tesla jacket in his picture so it's like pretty obvious uh so yeah they're they're out there yeah i think i clicked on this twitter thing and looked at the bio to see if you work for tesla and didn't come up with anything but anyway uh there's one tesla fan slash employee's opinion
All right.
And what else do we have with relation to cars, perhaps self-driving cars?
Yeah, we talked about that.
I said we could have something like that at Disneyland or, you know, some confined area where the routes are well-known, sort of basically like self-driving buses or whatever.
And Michael Lewis or Louise Brown were going to say that Heathrow Airport has self-driving car-like pod things that take you to and from the parking lot.
We'll put a link in the show notes.
You can see what they look like.
It shows them going in a little road that's barely big enough to fit the thing.
So anyway, it's a self-drive.
It's a driverless thing that people go in that goes on something that resembles roads.
It's not on rails.
It's not on tracks.
There's actually wheeled vehicles in a confined place.
So that's, you know, that's already a thing.
And I think someone also said that in Disney World they have something like that as well.
as part of some ride or something.
And like I said, they have stuff like this in factories.
So yeah, the tech to do it in limited circumstances has been with us for a while, and now it is slowly spreading.
Well, now, are these actually self-controlled?
I did not read this article, but because this looks a lot like...
and actually it's labeled the caption on this picture is PRT which is personal rapid transit I have a friend that went to Virginia Tech for his undergraduate degree like I did and that's where we met and then he went to West Virginia University for his law degree and in West Virginia they have or in WVU they have these things they call the PERT personal rapid transit and it's straight out of like 65 or something like that but they're these little orbs that don't look too dissimilar from what I'm looking at here and as you walk in
You push a button on this console that's clearly straight from like 73 or whenever this thing started.
And that tells the computer system where you'd like to go.
And then you wait and the computer system dispatches a driverless orb thing.
And then you wait until it shows up.
It says that, you know, I'm going to the engineering building or whatever.
And then you step in and it magically takes you to the engineering building.
And it's on like a kind of elevated track that doesn't look too dissimilar from this road in this picture from Heathrow.
It is ancient and kind of busted and beaten down.
And it was awesome.
And I kind of wish I had one nearby.
I bring all this up to say that this is not new technology, and this has been around for a long time.
Now, perhaps the difference, though, is that these Heathrow ones may genuinely be self-driving, whereas the ones at WVU are clearly operated by a computer based out of like 92 or something like that.
Yeah, well, it doesn't really matter whether they're centrally controlled by a computer or controlled by a computer that's on board the thing for the purposes of, you know, shuttling to and from two places.
Like, a computer is controlling it.
It's deciding when to accelerate, when to brake, when to turn.
You know, like, I'm sure the road itself has sensors in it to keep it on track or whatever.
It's limited controlled circumstances.
You know, it's not out on the open road.
But this is where all these things start.
And then, you know, you get all those DARPA challenges and things that Google's doing to work out the problems in the real world.
All right.
Now, this same individual, Michael, also had some other feedback for us.
About the 16 biggest transport ships in the world pollute as much as all the cars.
Internet meme story thing or whatever.
Our intrepid listeners track that down to its source, which looks like a presentation in 2009 from something called the DK Group.
uh it's all about pollution uh it is a slide uh show thing we'll put a link in the show so you can go through the 55 slides they have on this presentation and see that it is it is kind of game of telephone morphed into x number of ships pollute more than all the cars in the world if you look at the presentation it gets into specifics
they're not like they have stats about co2 they have it about what sulfur sulfur oxide compounds as well and the sulfur ones is what they're focusing on for the the 15 16 ships things but they also talk about the co2 levels and there's no bite size like this has been distilled down into an impressive sounding stat there are actually equally impressive stats in here that just don't boil down as nicely uh
And you can find echoes of it in, like, there's a story in The Guardian from a similar amount of time.
There's a TED Talk that cites it.
And every time it gets cited, it becomes more kind of, like, vague.
Like, even in 2009, when The Guardian's citing it, it says, confidential data from the maritime industry insiders based on engine size and the quality of fuel typically used by ships and cars shows that 15 of the world's biggest ships may now emit as much pollution as all the world's... Like, as much pollution?
Well, is that exactly what they said?
Yeah.
Yeah, see, this is why it was so confusing, because when you mentioned this last week, I, in my head, assumed that you were talking about just like fossil fuel consumption, not emissions of certain chemicals.
And so that makes complete sense, which is like, it's, who knows if this is true, but it's at least plausible, because there's so much regulation on how much of certain chemical pollutants that cars are allowed to emit all over the world.
And ships are presumably pretty much unregulated, because they're in the ocean in the middle of nowhere most of the time.
And so it does make sense that, like, you know, they could throw enough crap in the air that cars would have to use, you know, filters and converters to not emit.
Well, yeah, and I had originally had it in my head as CO2, which is like all the greenhouse gases, like if you want to combat, you know, global warming and everything that you want to get rid of the cars.
And, you know, I've talked about the farting cows, which are a big thing because methane is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2.
But...
it's not like it's like you said it's not so much about the co2 of these ships which is significant but the the other things that are in the fuel because they use the cheapest crappiest fuel possible and they don't care anything about what's being spewed out of their their pipes and so uh it's not like they use more fuel than all the 15 ships use more fuel than all the cars in the world right the
that when they burn that fuel the you know and this calls it the pollution well a co2 pollution i think they're mostly talking about the other crap that's in the fuel not the co2 but the other stuff that you know cars have been regulated down to not you know or have catalytic converters and other things to stop the stuff from going out anyway that's why we'll link to the actual presentation in the show notes so you can look at it but every time it gets repeated it sort of morphs and like this pollution
uh summary it's not inaccurate it just depends like once someone says pollution then the next person to decide it's going to say co2 or co2 and other gases or you know like you can phrase it in a way that is still correct but it's slowly drifting away from the meaning so if you care check out the presentation it's interesting anyway uh yeah we should uh ships should yes that elon musk will do that next next make uh container ships that work entirely on battery of course it'll have him on battery big enough to move a container ship
would probably produce more pollution in the creation of that battery than the ship ever would.
Or charging it.
I don't know.
Shipping's pretty easy.
You know, like energy consumption-wise, it's pretty efficient to float things across the ocean.
Well, you say that, but in a prior life, so to speak, I... Oh, yeah, you know this stuff.
Yeah, I actually worked on navigation systems for big, big, big ships.
And at one point, I actually took a business trip to Helsinki, Finland to talk to a company that would take hyper, hyper accurate models of ocean currents.
And they would say, OK, if you're, I don't know, maybe carrying an M5 or many M5s, as the case may be, and you're leaving Germany and you're going to New York.
And the most direct route will be, and I'm completely making this up, 2,000 nautical miles.
Well, if you are willing to go one or 200 nautical miles out of your way, you can catch this awesome current that will save you 50% on fuel.
And granted, I'm making these numbers up, but the difference was tremendous.
And when you're talking about a vehicle that big, it was a trip, just an
indescribably large amounts of fuel, like measured in hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars worth of fuel.
And so this was all based on hugely accurate predictions of ocean currents.
It was the most fascinating technology in the world.
And I kind of wish that I was still privy to what's going on with that company because I thought it was amazing.
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And so I have this row of three of them up above my windows here, and they look great.
Well, ever since I've been talking about this, a few other people have started doing it.
and uh fracture is now they're actually trying to collect pictures of all these things out there in the world so uh they are hoping to build a gallery of these on their site uh so here's what you do post if you have one of these things if first of all if you don't have one order one for any apps you make or have worked on it's great um also good size for podcast artwork because it's also square any kind of square artwork or rectangles they can do rectangles no big deal
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Excellent.
All right.
So we are chipping away at the follow-up.
What else do we have?
Ah, we have an answer to my question about who supplies Tesla.
That's right.
So Sam – oh, God.
Abwelsamid – I'm so sorry, Sam – wrote in to say, Tesla designs and builds their own electric motors and power electronics, the part that does the DC to AC conversion –
Just as most automakers design and build their own engines.
Transmissions tend to be a mixed bag of in-house and supplier produced for automakers today.
The Model S brakes are supplied by Brembo, one of the few suppliers that are typically highlighted by automakers.
I think that's an excellent point.
Other suppliers are highlighted on a chart, which we'll put on the show notes.
Tesla designs and builds their own battery packs, but the 6,000 to 8,000 lithium-ion cells in each pack are supplied by Panasonic.
The Gigafactory, which we were talking about last episode, is actually a joint venture between Tesla, Panasonic, and a few other suppliers.
So a little bit of information about that.
I guess Tesla makes the battery packs.
Well, but Panasonic makes the batteries.
So I guess they make the pack part.
I mean, I know it's, you know, the electronics and the complicated things over that, but that just goes to show even it's like, oh, well, Tesla makes their own batteries.
They're really good at they're still outsourcing the actual like bazillion little lithium ion cells that they wired together.
um did you look at the big picture that i linked there i did not i did my homework all right i mean just look at it i mean it's and every car is like this so it just shows that tesla is more or less typical you can go down the suppliers and see i mean this is not every single part in the car it's just kind of like a sample of things you could see also uh the front grille surround by our friends at magna uh you know electric power steering zf uh you know brembo brakes is a good point that like when
When something comes with Brembo brakes, you tend to see.
Well, I don't know.
I see it in car magazines, but car magazines also tell you, you know, who makes the transmission and the tires as well.
But yeah, I guess they'll sometimes just advertise carbon ceramic brakes or whatever.
I don't even think they offer carbon ceramic.
Anyway, yes, it takes it takes a village to make a car, including the Tesla.
Yep.
All right.
So further car feedback, this time from Yuba.
I'd made mention of a bus that specifically was in Volkswagens in the context of the conversation we were having an episode or two ago.
But Yuba had said in the US, CAN, which is the CAN bus, has been the standard protocol for all car computer communications since 2008, not just German cars.
Some messages on the bus are standard and well-documented, such as speed, air intake, temperature, etc., but most are OEM-specific and undocumented, although they are unencrypted.
Lots of people have reverse-engineered those messages to do things like lock or unlock their car doors, kind of the way Universal TV remote makers have to reverse-engineer infrared comms for each TV manufacturer.
This kind of work is finicky and potentially harmful to your car, so you want to be careful.
And this is interesting.
And Yuba continues, what's cool, though, is that car manufacturers aren't interested in locking down the CAN bus, or at least they can't because of a long legal tradition of people's right to repair their own cars.
I thought that was really interesting and a very good point.
And Yuba continues and says that this is what opens the door for companies like Automatic, which is a previous sponsor.
And as it turns out, this individual is one of the co-founders to build awesome stuff using events read from the CAN bus.
So I just thought that was really, really interesting and a little more information than I was aware of about all of that.
yeah they have the idea of it just you know having the bus be documented but then they not under any obligation to document the things they send over the bus so it's just a bunch of data going back and forth that you can kind of figure out and it's like that's like the worst of all possible words like well we have an open bus uh but we're gonna send messages over there i'm not talking about what they are so you can try to figure out what they are and i hope you get it right and we might change it in the next version i mean i know it's not really like safety related things where they're gonna
turn off the power steering or power brakes accidentally or something, but it doesn't seem like an ideal situation, you know?
And again, the whole reason automatic exists is because car manufacturers are so terrible.
This market need should not exist if car manufacturers had any idea what they were doing, because...
By the time a third party gets around to doing it, you could have done it as the car maker like a decade ago and didn't because you're terrible.
Yeah, and it's funny because I'm assuming it's the CAN bus that allowed me to do something that BMW owners called code the car, which is to say you get this dongle that is similar to automatic but serves a different purpose, but it's either a Bluetooth or Wi-Fi dongle that you plug into your OBD2 port.
Nice.
Thank you.
And...
and so mine's ethernet yeah here's that's right it's called an enet cable and it's it's it's like it's literally like ethernet on once on one end and obd2 on the other which is really weird i've never used it i like i try because like in order to use it you have to like pirate all this software and all these like roms for the car and all this crazy stuff and i just once i once i realized all the stuff i'd have to do in order to make little customizations to my car i'm like you know what forget it like it's not
It's not worth it.
And then my uncle, who also has a BMW, has this $50 iPhone app, and you thought $10 was expensive, has this $50 iPhone app that connects to this thing and will let you make, like Marco said, some customizations to your car.
So as a silly example, I'm able to open my windows from the little key fob, but I was not previously able to close them.
I had to, oh, travesty of travesties.
I had to stand outside the car and put my finger on the door handle in order to close all the windows.
You're an even bigger jerk than me.
It was so terrible, Marco.
You have no idea.
This is great.
All I wanted to do was get... Because every time you start up the car, like most modern cars with navigation systems, you have to hit the confirm or I agree button on a EULA on the nav screen before it will do anything.
And there's a little checkbox flag and these hack programs that you can turn that off.
That was mainly what I wanted to do, was just disable that.
Right.
So what I did was I coded my car such that I can hold the lock button on my key fob and all the windows will go up.
And the only other thing I was interested in, but apparently it was a lot more fiddly, is on BMWs and a lot of car makes, the mirrors, the external mirrors can fold in if you push a little button.
I think on most Mercedes, they're actually automatic.
Well, I wanted it to be automatic so that every time I parked the car, the mirrors would fold in.
But that was like many, many, many switches and I got scared and I didn't do it.
But I can roll up my windows from a distance and that's awesome.
The only analogous story I have for my cars is that...
like many people who have had stick shift cars, uh, before the time you guys are probably driving, I was forced to master the art of paying a toll with physical cash and then pulling away from the toll booth while rolling up the window as in rolling up the window in a stick shift car, which basically leaves maybe thighs to steer with, but normally it's straight.
So you gotta give cash, roll up first gear, pull away, roll, roll, roll.
And then hopefully the, yeah, that's, that's my equivalent.
I would just complete the roll-up before going, like just sitting there with the gate open.
No, that's because I'm from New York.
You don't sit there and say, okay, now let me close up my purse and let me put it back down over here and let me roll up the window and now let me shift into gear.
No, that's not how it works.
As soon as they get the money, as soon as that arm goes up, you've got to go.
Yep.
I know that feeling.
Oh, there's a related link, by the way, on this CAN bus thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, now we're, hang on, people are going to drift back into Apple and something else that is not car related.
So this is our transition.
The story that was going around at this Telegraph interview with Tim Cook, where he says that the Apple Watch is designed to replace your car keys.
which is an interesting statement and it could be related to canvas because it's like all right well so that doesn't mean apple's making a car designed to replace your car keys just means it has some way to signal to whatever fancy cars that apple watch you know like is it is does it work with the canvas is it some kind of wireless thing or reverse engineered thing where you can run an application that they can uh figure out that you know like car keys this statement confused me because my understanding is that the
the silly proximity key stuff that every carmaker has is all proprietary and crazy and how could the apple watch replace your like well i'm sure i'm sure all there all it is is just using an app it's like the watch is using a watch kit app on the phone to you know because some of these carmakers will have apps that can remotely unlock their cars i'm pretty sure bmw does i know tesla does um i know i'm sure many of the carmakers do do this sort of thing now
So is it Bluetooth or Wi-Fi or what is it?
No, it's neither.
It's the watch telling the phone and the phone using the data network to go tell some tell some data center to tell the car to unlock.
Oh, that's a hell of a long way to go.
It's like the Rube Goldberg machine for, you know, I think I bounce a signal off a satellite, go to a fiber optic cable under the sea to a server and then come back to the car that's two feet in front of me.
I bet that's what it is, though.
I would almost guarantee that's what it is.
Yeah, I didn't think of that, but you mentioned it.
That sounds very plausible.
No, that is absolutely how the BMW app works.
There's a BMW remote, which used to be okay and now is a piece of crap.
But anyways...
What that used to do is it would phone home to BMW, presumably in Munich, and say, I would like to unlock my car, please.
Then Munich would phone the car because the car has a cellular connection for the quote unquote OnStar, although in BMW's case, it's something proprietary.
And then it would tell the car via the car's onboard cell connection, OK, unlock the door, please.
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All right.
So that's it for follow-up, right?
Anything else, John?
I was going to complain about, well, Tim Cook's statement with the car keys, but now that I read the actual article in Telegraph, it says, the watch is designed to be able to replace car keys and the clumsy large fobs that are now used by many vehicles, comma, Cook told the Telegraph.
So it's not a quote.
There's no quotation marks there.
I'm just relying on their summary.
But what the hell does it mean to be designed to replace car keys?
and and so like what he maybe i can't imagine tim cook ever saying that or like it's just terrible like it's the type of thing that you would expect the ceo of a company ceo that doesn't actually know what their products are or do to say not something that tim cook would say but again this is not a quote this is just a summary but anyway uh your clarification about the uh the pervasiveness of
basically internet connections for uh for dealing with car stuff leads me to believe that's probably what it is yeah it has to be that's kind of boring but anyway you know the read on it like it's almost like tim cook is winking at us why mention that at all you know what i mean why why mention anything having to do with design to replace your car same kind of thing of like you know he said i use it to control my apple tv well my you know that's a product they have at least but why mention any oh by the way it could replace car keys
have you heard anything about cars lately anyway moving on like i mean it also you know because you know it wasn't a direct quote we aren't seeing the context it could he could have just thrown that out there like in a list of things that could be done with it in software it could have been a leading question yeah like could it be used to replace car keys and tim says yeah sure yeah well exactly i mean there's it doesn't it means nothing it just means nothing i know but it could be him winking at us we don't know probably not he's not a winker
So maybe he'll be winking or not winking at us during the Apple event that's coming up on the 9th, which is Monday.
Is that correct?
Yeah, it's Daylight Savings Day.
Yeah, someone in marketing was excited to pick that date.
It's all about time because we're going to talk about a watch.
It's about time.
Do you get it?
The slogan on the invitation is spring forward.
I know.
Do you get it?
Because watches used to have springs and it's Daylight Savings Time joke and it's a watch.
Oh, my God.
And it's springtime sort of somewhere, maybe.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, they announced this date.
When did they announce it?
Like last month, but we didn't get a chance to talk about it because we were swamped with car stuff.
But yeah, so what do we think about this event?
I mean, the consensus is that there will be more information about watches.
And what do you think?
That's it?
Yeah, you know, we actually got a really interesting anonymous email about this that kind of hinted to us that maybe this will involve some sort of MacBook Air, a Retina MacBook Air, perhaps.
Yeah, the Mark Gurman Retina MacBook Air, basically.
The 9 to 5 Mac, like, perfect, you know, nearly perfect outing of this thing.
Yeah, that's allegedly, if this tip is to be believed...
You know, I never really know what we're supposed to do when people email us tips.
I know, it's so true.
That's why I think talking about the tip is not as interesting as talking about the, like, why are we being sent tips and what's the point?
And by the way, just on the substance of this, did it actually say that this stuff would be announced in the event on the 9th?
Yes, it did.
Where does it say that?
In the email.
I did my homework, John.
I know, I read it when it came in.
Where in the email, though?
here's a brief preview of what's happening on watch day oh on watch day all right oh yeah i mean i suppose like there's enough room in the event to talk about new macbook air and because like it's not that like they're announcing the watch even when they announced the watch that other stuff for now so here they're just going to fill us in with details we assume like any changes they might have hopefully pricing info they already gave us availability right we know the the launch date don't we
well we just know the launch month of april yeah i guess they could pin it down to a day but like you don't have a whole event they're gonna you know fill out the the rest of the missing pieces and maybe announce when pre-orders are available and maybe show off the new redesigned apple stores where you're gonna be able to try these things on and buy them and do all that business and i think there's enough room in a presentation that contains that
to also talk about whatever new Mac thing they have to launch.
And this supposed tip is telling us that the other thing they had to launch is a MacBook air that we have discussed at length based on the nine to five Mac rumors.
Uh, and it has a few extra tidbits there.
And before we talk, talk about the actual substance, the idea that people, you know, send us an anonymous tip, uh,
Why would somebody do that?
Assume it's real.
Assume this person actually knows.
They're in a position to know or think they know because they are secondhand or thirdhand and they totally believe all their sources.
So as far as they're concerned, they are in possession of super secret information about what is shipping.
Why send it to anybody?
Why send it to Gruber?
Why send it to us?
Why send it to, you know, why do the people, why do Mark Gurman's sources at 9to5Mac send him information?
That is mysterious to me.
It's not like they're disgruntled employees trying to leak information to hurt their employer.
Well, sometimes.
I mean, you should.
There's a good discussion about this on Upgrade this week with Jason Snell and Mike Hurley, where they talked exactly about this.
And Jason had a lot to say about, you know, why these sources say the things they say, you know, where the information might come from, why they're motivated to share it with somebody, you know, why you're motivated to publish it or to tell it.
It's very interesting.
So just go listen to that because Jason knows a lot more about this than we do.
But I didn't listen to that one yet, so I don't know what he said, so you should tell me.
The gist of his point is that when you know this kind of secret information, a lot of people are very motivated.
It's like burning a hole in your pocket.
You just got to tell somebody because you're excited to know.
See, that's the worst kind of source, though, because if you're super excited to know this information, then it's not a matter of course.
For the people who work at Apple on these projects...
they're that's just part of their life is you're going to know stuff that other people would like to know that you're never going to tell anybody so the leaks would never come from there because you're not like oh my goodness i know i know about this thing i gotta tell no that's your whole job like you get used to it like or you get fired like it doesn't you have to it has to be somebody who is not usually in the position to know what the super secret actual product is
And then also be like, oh, I got to tell somebody.
And there's a separation inside Apple.
It's like, well, every Apple employee doesn't know.
There's something in the company that every Apple employee doesn't know about, because the only people who know about like the supposed car project are the people who are working on there.
To everyone else, it could be like, oh, I'm not usually.
But, you know, but you always know about your project.
Right.
And so I guess that might kind of get old.
So but anyway, second or third tier people who like heard from someone who heard from someone are super excited to know this.
It's depressing to think that like they're just excited to tell somebody because obviously if they're excited, they're probably an Apple fan.
And in general, you know, Apple doesn't want people knowing these things.
So and it kind of spoils the surprise to like for the rest of the fans.
Like it's kind of it's kind of kind of ruins the fun if you know everything that's going to happen before it's before it's out.
and apple wouldn't like it it's like they're such apple fans you know back when steve jobs was alive if you had to put a person's name on i was like what would steve think about you telling these the sites this information you know would he like have you ever met him oh i'm a big fan in fact i leaked this information like no he would shoot you with his lasers out of his eyes and you would melt like if you admire the company and admire the people who work there that seems like it's the reason the people who don't leak the people who work there don't leak because they it's out of respect for the company and for what they do and you know like i don't know it it's weird
i've i've had these i've had like people send me tips like ever since i started writing my site forever ago i've had tips come in here and there by email and i i get the most boring tips like it is hilarious it's like yeah well you know next year they might update the cinema display wow that would be a good tip if you get that one tell me i haven't for a long time actually
Right.
Every year it's like, I should send you the same tip.
No new monitor this year.
Go back to sleep.
Yeah.
But like, you know, but I don't like in the tips I've gotten, I have, I have not mentioned almost any of them because it's like, what am I supposed to do with this information?
Like if I just publish it on my site, like there's lots of rumor sites that just publish any tips they get.
They're usually the worst rumor sites because most of like, if I look back at the tips I've gotten,
I would say at least half of them have not panned out or have turned out to be just flat-out wrong.
If I had published anything or based anything, anything I'd said on that information, I would have looked stupid.
I would have looked bad.
And I'm happy to say that of all the crazy tips, of all the crazy predictions I've made on my site over the years that have turned out to be wrong, like blatantly, embarrassingly wrong...
almost none of them were based on any tips I've gotten.
I just am that bad at predicting things.
But at least that's me screwing up with my own guesses and not like, oh, I got this crazy tip.
I better rush and report on it on my site because no one's coming to my site for that anyway.
I stand to gain nothing from that.
And the chances that any tip I get are actually going to be true are so low that it's just not really worth discussing.
It's not worth even taking the risk.
I think when Mark Gurman was on the talk show, I think what he mentioned is that his I may be misremembering this, but his best sources were people that he actually knew, like anonymous sources.
This is not even what we get.
Someone went to our web form and typed a bunch of stuff.
Anybody could just go to that web form and type stuff.
You know, all you got to do is just sound confident and say, look, this is what they're going to do.
There's this.
There's that.
You know, you say whatever you want.
Anybody can go to that form like, you know, anybody who listens to the show now could come up with a plausible rumor and type it in confidently into our web form.
that's the type of source that like it's basically useless because you don't know who that person is and anybody could we're about to discuss what this person emailed us but anybody could have i could have written this email like it's only impressive after the fact if what apple announces is exactly what was in this email then we'll retroactively know oh that one anonymous email that guy was exactly right but that doesn't help us when the next anonymous email comes in because we don't know if it's from the same guy like it's you know i think you really have to have
Yeah.
Yeah.
yeah it's like it's confusing to me when someone sends something like this because the only kind of inside information i'm ever comfortable receiving now that i really receive any to speak of is the type of information told to me with the understanding that i will never tell anyone and then i do never tell anyone and that's it that's where it ends and this is like for the purposes of the outside world it is useless it's exciting to me because now i know something that very few people know but then i never tell anyone else and then you know like oh well you know i mean it helps i guess it helps me sometimes i get told things
in confidence sort of for the purposes of background information for my os 10 reviews and stuff like that and that informs my reviews and occasionally helps me to be right about things that i had no right to be exactly right about that just happened to actually know but i never phrase it as i'm 100 sure about this even when i am 100 sure about it because that's not the point i'm not trying to like reveal secrets or show how much inside knowledge i have
Even if I know for sure something, I'm going to phrase it as this is something that is plausible.
And I say the same thing about other things that I have no inside information about, equally phrased with the same amount of confidence.
This is plausible, like technically feasible, plausible, could be blah, blah, blah.
Half of the could be's are just like Marco, or I'm just making stuff up and thinking, well, this could happen.
We'll see.
And the other half are like, I know for sure this is exactly what it is, but I'm never going to tell you that or how I know that.
So just, you know, and anyone reading it,
It's not a secret code.
You can't decode it.
It's just a bunch of things that could be plausible.
Some of them turn out to be true.
Some turn out to be false.
But that's the only thing I can understand because those people would talk to you because they want an accurate picture of like their product or their technology or whatever to be out there in the world in a way that doesn't impinge secrecy.
I can't imagine someone telling me something and saying, now you're free to go write that about this on your blog.
Like that dynamic is weird to me, especially in an ongoing basis, that there will be someone inside information that routinely gives information to someone who they know and consent to publish that information on their blog as confidently asserting this is information we have from inside Apple.
Yeah, I mean, I would say, you know, like we said, like when we are told things in confidence that we are expected to really not share because it would, you know, put somebody in a bad spot that we might know that I actually feel like that's kind of more fun to me, like to have to have a secret that I'm not expected to do to do anything with that I'm actually really expected not to write about or share.
because that's that's why they told you the understanding that you're never going to tell anybody and maybe they tell you like for example for you someone might tell you something that influences which api you choose to use or something because it helps you with it helps you with your job right but it's not something you're going to go on your blog go hey guys guess what you should use this api not this one because reasons xyz like you're the only reason the person told you is because they're telling you not so like they understand that you are not going to post it on your site because your site is not a clearinghouse for inside information that you get from apple
Right.
And, you know, when people tell me things that may or may not be true, usually I have no way to know, but when people tell me things that may or may not be true, you know, you're right.
The best thing I can do, really, is to inform my future thoughts and actions and discussions on the show or on my blog.
Like...
It's really better in that way because then you avoid all the risks of what if you're wrong or what if you get somebody in trouble or burn some trust.
But you can benefit from – if you heard from somebody in Apple that this thing that you were saying before actually is wrong, you can stop saying it.
Or next time you comment on an issue, you can be better informed about it.
Or when you're trying to make a decision between the product and the lineup, like, oh, should I buy a Mac Mini right now?
No, no, wait.
Stuff like that.
Or should I use Core Data for this?
Should I use iCloud, Cloud Sync or whatever?
And you can make those kind of decisions.
That is better than just spewing out a secret for...
whatever brief value it might have to you that might backfire and and we're more likely to get information from people who are sort of the leaf nodes in the organizational graph at apple and those people only know what they know but none of those people know
what products Apple is going to ship, what those products are going to be called, when they're going to be released, how much they're going to cost, like nothing.
You know, all they know is like what they see at their from their perspective on their project.
And nobody, not even inside the Apple knows the future.
Products are canned, projects are canceled, projects are delayed, things change.
Like, so even that information, even though it could be 100% reliable,
that's what the entire company thought at the time you got that information but it turns out they changed priorities and did this and did that and this thing got moved to there and this project was canceled and this person left the company and then it turns out that nothing they told you comes true not because they were wrong or you know just because like that was the plan at the time but plans change and so like that's why when i look at these rumor sites and like even if this is 100 true it still doesn't predict the future in a way that is useful because things change so much on whatever detail that they've just uh put out here
I don't know.
I feel like I can understand a perspective where what if this person or a person is an Apple employee but happens to like our show and maybe they admire anyone or all three of us and maybe they want to kind of participate in the show a little bit.
without necessarily doing so by name.
So they have a little bit of pertinent and perhaps interesting information, and they could give it to the three of us and probably steer the show in the direction of that information, such as what this person has done in getting us to talk about secrets in general.
And then you can sit back and you can know
i did that i was the one who got the three of them to talk about that and look at me i am an informant now i'm special to people i think are special i think it's more likely to be excited by the fact that i just made up a bunch of bs and they talked about it on the show as if it was real because that is what i think when i see an honesty about it's like oh if we talk about this on the show the guy's gonna be like i can't believe they talked about that me and my friends just made this up and typed it in a web form because again it's all plausible and
it's all 100 plausible anybody can make up a plausible room you just got to assert it confidently and then you just wait and so this is why i wanted to talk about it because this will be allowing bringing the audience in on what this is like on a micro scale where we're going to talk about what they say in this prediction and then we can all find out was this just totally bogus stuff that somebody made up and haha we're suckers for talking about it or was it by god we didn't know at the time but it's 100 accurate and we'll all find out together so
The really funny thing about this is that the extra info that we allegedly have that no one else allegedly has is so boring.
But it's all stuff that we talked about.
Like, when we talked about this stuff, we talked about pretty much all of these possibilities, but we just talked about them as a sea of possibilities.
They can do this, or they can do that.
Let's talk about the pros and cons of this, or what if they did that?
Like, we've covered all these bases before.
Yeah.
What this supposed tip is doing is saying, all those possibilities you listed, this is the one that's real, and this is the one that's happening, and here's why.
And I guess there's a little bit of a here's why angle here.
So we'll find out together.
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uh and if you use promo code atp you get five bucks off your first purchase go to harrys.com promo code atp thanks a lot to harrys okay so before we talk about the contents of this maybe it's real maybe it's not rumor slash tip get excited everyone we should probably talk about what the original rumor was that mark german and crew posted at nine to five mac
Yeah, we didn't talk about this enough when it came out.
Well, just a very quick recap.
So they had said that there's going to be a radically new 12-inch MacBook Air.
And more importantly than almost anything, that it was going to do away.
Well, let me read.
A radically new design that jettison standards such as full-sized USB ports, MagSafe connectors, and SD card slots in favor of a markedly, markedly, markedly, anyway, a thinner and lighter body with a higher resolution display.
So that was the basis of all of these rumors.
So with that in mind, John, would you like to take us through what this individual has said to us?
Yeah, there's a couple of pieces here.
The first part is about the trackpad that I think it's in that article that we discussed that like, you know, the thing's going to be so thin that the trackpad has no place to sort of click down into.
So the idea was that the trackpad will not actually move when you click it.
And we discussed like, how are they going to handle that?
How is it going to feel to press something that doesn't actually move?
this anonymous tip person and again i would say we're not going to make a habit of reading anonymous tips but i think it's fun just to do it in this one place so we could all find out together was this totally bogus made up stuff or was it all 100 accurate and i imagine that it's going to be one or the other extreme and not anywhere in the middle anyway it always is yeah this tip says that what they're actually using is the same thing they use for the force touch no not the star wars thing but on the apple watch that's a reference casey
Oh, I got it.
Where you press really hard on the Apple Watch and it can tell the difference between that and like a regular tap.
You know what this person says force touch technology.
I guess it's probably a branding thing or whatever to tell the difference between a tap and a deep press.
And the idea sounds kind of creepy.
The idea is that it will be better than... I know a lot of people who are devotees to tap to click on the trackpads, but the people who don't like it usually don't like it because it's easy to accidentally tap sometimes because just sort of any finger brushing against the trackpad counts as a click and you don't want that to happen.
Well, this supposedly would...
make it much less ambiguous when you are clicking and when you're not.
Still without a trackpad that actually moves, but so that the trackpad can tell a difference between you just sort of tap your finger lightly on the pad and you are actually pressing, even though the thing doesn't move.
See this, I'm a little skeptical if they, I mean, it makes sense, you know, like it's plausible that this is what they might be doing.
um but because none of us have actually done force touch on a watch yet um like i don't like if you have to push hard at all it's going to be really tedious and ergonomically questionable i don't think you have to press hard i think i think the thing is a misnomer my guess is that it's figuring out how much your finger squishes so like the contact patch changes size and i would assume that that's what the trackpad is using to determine the force not like actual
pressure or maybe it's a combination of both but i don't think it's going to be like you'll be able to tell i guess if you take something that does not make a larger contact patch when you press and see if you can force touch with that i don't know what that would be maybe some kind of like cylindrical hot dog and a sleeve or something that is like
water you know you need something that's that's filled with water like the human finger and press with it in a way that the contact patch does not change size and maybe it's a combination but you're right we none of us have tried the force touch on the watch so telling us that the the trackpad is going to be just like the watch almost tells us nothing at this point
By the way, for whatever it's worth, I actually, when the Apple Watch was announced six months ago, and they talked about force touch, I had speculated on the show, they were probably just measuring the radius of the touch, you know, like capacitively, not actually measuring force.
And I think we got a couple of people who said, I'm not remembering exactly, but I think we got a couple of people telling us there actually were pressure sensors as well.
So I think there's something there.
But either way, we'll see how this pans out in practice.
I was very skeptical of the current kind of tripads we have, the quote button list where kind of the whole thing is a button and just hinges on the top.
I was very skeptical of that when it came out, and it turned out to be just fine and normal.
So this sounds really weird, but it might be awesome.
I guess we'll find out.
yeah and there is a thing on the apple watch page the apple watch technology page at apple.com where you can see an explanation of force touch and that's what we're being pointed to to see that explanation also applies to the thing again with branding apple can apply the force touch you know once they have a sort of a branded name with a capital f and a capital t then they can just apply that same name to anything remotely like that in their product line regardless of whether it actually uses the same technology retina
retina's not what's what's a good example they've done that i mean file vault and file vault 2 which are totally unrelated technologies other than other than the fact that they both attempt to encrypt your data implementation wise they share nothing but they do share the same branding um so the next bit is about like what are they going to do if they have just a single port how how do they deal with that and this is the big one guys this is it the answer are you ready the answer is super exciting a usb hub i know you're super excited about a usb hub
Now, the interesting part about this is not so much.
This is our tip, a USB hub.
Yeah, not so much the fact that they have a hub, but this tipster provides motivation behind this.
And the motivation and a little story behind it is with the original Retina MacBook Pro that didn't have an Ethernet port, apparently doing market research let Apple determine that people really want high-speed networking if they're going to buy a big expensive laptop.
And so they made the, you know, the Thunderbolt, the Ethernet adapter or whatever.
And according to this tipster that that was made, the sole reason that product existed was because of a customer demand that they discovered through market research and that they were selling it either at cost or below cost when it was initially made.
Because at that point, I assume Thunderbolt chips were expensive or whatever.
Because it was important for them to have that product.
So the $29 adapter, unlike so many other Apple products did not have a big margin, in fact, may have been sold at a slight loss when it was brand new.
Now I'm sure the margins are better on it or whatever.
So that same idea is with this adapter, like that, you know, why does this hub exist?
Well, because...
based on market research or whatever uh determined that one one port is not enough for people they need some way to have other ports and as marco has talked about in past shows third party usb hubs are flaky and apple probably doesn't want them to be attached to have to deal with like sleep wake problems and things you know tickling the bus and stuff like that so and as i suggested like it would be nice if apple made a really nice sturdy port that they
sturdy usb hub that they knew worked with their stuff that like maybe this is like a taller order if you currently have some apple branded hardware that's driving you insane it didn't help that it's made by apple it's still driving me nuts like a time capsule that's flaky or something but anyway in theory apple can make one of these qualify it for use in all its os's and make sure it's sturdy and good and all that good stuff
So according to this tipster, that is exactly what they're doing.
They're making a hub.
There's two USB type A ports, two type C ports.
It's supposedly small and fairly heavy so that it doesn't get pulled off the table by the thing that you plug it in because I assume it will be a powered hub.
See, that part sounded weird to me.
A number of things about this sound weird to me.
The fact that it's a small USB hub that's going to be heavy.
that i don't buy that and also how funny is it and it is very apple like really but how funny is it to make a usb hub that only has like four ports and two only two of them are actually normal well like when i'm thinking of heavy i'm thinking kind of like uh i guess kind of like the apple tv like where it's dense for its size like not that you think it's going to be a big but it's small but but it feels dense when you pick it up and it's probably like a grippy rubber thing on the bottom i'm picturing something that looks like a little miniature white apple tv
When I see this, what do they say about this?
Something about it having a short, stubby, stiff cable.
Where is that bit?
The hub is small.
The cable connecting it to the Mac is stiff and very short.
It has a significant weight to it, so it doesn't get ripped off your desk or out of the port by the power brick.
Power brick makes me feel bad.
I don't like power bricks.
That's one of the annoying things about hubs is...
the stupid power brick you know the ac dc converter and little dc thing plugs in the back that's one of the awesome things about the the amazing things about the apple tv this is the one that has this right no internal power supply right yeah yeah that's that's a little puck and it does not have a power brick at all it just has a plug that goes into you know the outlet no it all the power supply is internal
which is an amazing feat for such a tiny little thing and i like that and that's sort of like a sort of a premium experience i don't know if the other pucks are like that like you've got the amazon fire tv now right marco yeah it has a brick yeah and it's isn't it bigger than the apple tv too close it's i think it has a bigger footprint but it's it's pretty uh short it's i think it's shorter but wider right and so if you took what's in that brick and added it to the volume of the amazon thing suddenly it would be huge just goes to show what apple has done with their puck it's
despite the fact that everything else about their puck is completely outdated and outclassed by every other product in the category they do have a really nice internal power supply you got to give them that right and no fan yes no fan love it but the amazon doesn't have a fan either right as far as i know it doesn't that's not that's not a no oh god i don't think it has any ventilation holes for yeah i don't i don't just got a fan but no ventilation holes it just spins in there turns around the warm air
oh jeff bezos is a little bit crazy yeah and so the summary of this is that basically the german report is completely accurate and the only things that he didn't have was he didn't have the hub and uh he didn't know whether it would be retina and the answer is yes it will be retina right and by the way mark german in a podcast uh like like a few days after this did say of course it'll be retina i don't know why he left that out of the article maybe he wasn't positive well he said high resolution but he specifically said like a few days later like yeah of course it'll be retina um
you know he does run that website or like can't he just go change it he could have like once once everybody said you didn't even say it'll be retina you can just go right up to the thing and do update yes it will be retina close anyway maybe he didn't know it for sure at the time that he published it and wanted everything in it to be correct so that people would look back and say wow you got everything correct
yeah so how could you have come up with this fake rumor if you if you had no information other than reading that german article it's pretty easy because you could say that article is 100 correct but there's two bits of information you don't know one i'm going to take that force touch thing that they already talked about for the watch and tell you that's how they're doing the trackpad and two everyone has been saying that if it only has one port it'll be a problem maybe they'll have some kind of hub or something well actually apple is making a hub and here's how many ports will be on it and here are a few attributes of it
By the way, real-time follow-up on that Apple Watch technology page.
Apple says right there that Force Touch uses tiny electrodes around the flexible retina display to distinguish between a light tap and a deep press.
So, yeah, apparently there are actually hardware sensors that will attempt to detect a pressured press there rather than just measuring the size of your fingertip growing bigger.
or if it does that at all maybe it doesn't do the fingertip radius at all we don't know right exactly yeah all right well we will find out i suppose i mean how how will we know whether this person was right well first apple's got to have a usb hub right yeah i mean the usb hub that this email described but you know that was a pretty uh thorough description so like it's going to be pretty obvious whether this was credible or not because you know
it's not like you know this event is five days from now uh it is this it's too late for something like this to be canceled you know like if this this person wrote to us i think this morning right so like you know chances are like this is either going to be 100 right or 100 wrong there's not going to be some last minute change that oh well i was right but they delayed the ipad pro so you know no it's not going to be like that like they're this is going to either be all right or all wrong
And I think it's hilarious that if it's all right, that we got this amazing tip about a USB hub.
And so the force touch thing, we have no way to tell whether that's right, because even if they don't use the phrase force touch, this doesn't tell us that they're going to use the phrase, the marketing term force touch.
Like, basically, it's relying entirely on the German article being right because the German article said trackpad that doesn't move.
If it has a trackpad that doesn't move, was this one right?
No, all it was doing is repeating.
Like, the only additional information it's providing is it's using the same thing as force touch.
And we can't tell that when they announce it because, you know, unless Apple specifically...
brands it with force touch it's like oh well trackpad doesn't move that's what mark german already said wait guys i have breaking news i've just gotten a tip from an anonymous source that apple's about to announce during this event an update to the double a battery charger yeah
Oh, you're the worst.
No, I mean, like, you know, like if they're making it up, they deserve to be ridiculed.
And if they're not making it up, they will be vindicated by history.
Like, that's why I'm trying to figure out how we'll tell whether they're right.
The most interesting thing, if this is true, the thing that I'm most interested about is the idea that Apple makes products and then does market research to figure out if the products are palatable and then scrambles to make adapters when they're not.
Yeah.
that is like if that is actually true that sort of you know and we don't have a good way to tell that but like if if that if inside apple that's how things are working that is not a healthy situation because that's what it gets back to my thing with the whole one port like what advantage does one port provide that two port does not and i haven't got a satisfactory answer and if the answer is someone designs says this is the product we're making no it's going to be thin no ethernet no single part blah blah and then some other department gets in and says our customers are saying basically it's a no-go so we got to give them some solution
oh i guess we'll make some adapters slap it on sell it at a loss like that's terrible it shows you're not making like it shows your product design is not fitting the market and it would explain a lot of the things where they make something and then the next version like has more of a different kind of port or rearranges things or adjusts you know like
So it's better to find this out ahead of time.
You know, if you're going to do something like either stick to it or don't stick to it, don't make a product and then slap a bunch of ugly adapters on it because that is not an elegant, simple, clean, blah, blah, blah, whatever, Johnny, I have white world solution, right?
It's so true because every time I go to give a presentation at work or plug my computer into the projector for any reason whatsoever, anytime I do that and have to get out the little Thunderbolt to VGA adapter, every PC user around the table just kind of shakes their head and snickers.
Because every single one of them has this antiquated VGA port, which is very useful, built into their computers and has since the beginning of time.
yeah well they're they're wrong on that thing because no one no one should have a vga port on their computer like if they have hdmi directly into their computer or like you know like vga is ridiculous give me a break i didn't that should not be but but yeah but like sometimes you have to have an adapter right but for things like this it's not like when you have to interact with some cruddy old third party thing use this adapter this is like
When you want to use your computer for something that requires more than one port, use this hub that we're selling you.
Or I know that you buy a Retina MacBook Pro and you're going to be using it on Ethernet every second you can because you need high-speed networking.
Use this dongle, you know, because we couldn't fit an Ethernet port.
And sometimes, you know, they're limited by the size of the port, so the Ethernet just doesn't fit.
We want to make it thinner.
Like, there are reasons for it, but...
especially with the single usb type c like the whole point of type c is it's super small now you can fit more of them don't give me fewer unless unless giving me fewer provides some advantage as we talked about at length in the previous shows like you can use fewer pci express lanes or you get more battery life because you can use a chipset that doesn't include this thing and but like
I would like a reason, and based on random spy shots, we don't have any kind of reasoning.
And of course, Apple's not going to give you any reasoning, probably, unless they're feeling super defensive.
Like, if they're feeling defensive, they'll say, and hey, look at this feature, like Steve Jobs would say, it's just got one port.
Now, people would say, why one port?
Well, it turns out, and then he would say something that may or may not be true, but at least it would be a reason, you know?
Turns out that if we just do one port, we can make an even lower power, and then, you know, other people using the same Intel chipset have already released lap stops.
They get insane battery life, and I bet they don't have one port on them, so I'm going to be skeptical of any sort of power-related explanations of why this thing has one port, if it indeed does have one port.
I mean, yeah, I think the most clear explanation, or the most plausible explanation, knowing modern Apple and seeing the renderings of this thing from Mark Gurman, I think it's just thinness.
That's it.
Like, there was room for one.
But I need to see the iFixit tear down to prove to me that there was really only room for one, right?
Right.
And nobody asked him to make it that thin.
It's a self-imposed problem.
It's not because it's too thin.
It's not like, well, there's only one part of the case that's thick enough.
At minimum, there's two places on the case where it's thick enough, one on one side and one on the other.
You know what I mean?
Right.
Well, but they use the other one for the headphone jack.
i know but the headphone jack is you could move like the headphone jack doesn't have a lot of width so you could have the us anyway i feel like there's room it's not because you know within the case that they have now when they open this thing up i feel like you're going to be able to find that yes there was room again get back to the the puck thing where they put an internal power supply there's got to be
room in there for more than one port gotta be and so there's got to be some other reason and it could be philosophical and stupid or whatever but anyway if the idea that they would subsequently do market research and determine this product is not not as viable as they want it to be without an adapter therefore we have to make a hub like when that happens it had to happen early on right because you have to make this whole hub product like
shouldn't they go back and say should we make a hub or can you just put another damn port on this thing guys i mean come on i mean and for whatever it's worth like you know now like i'm i'm considering buying one of these things because i uh as i i keep realizing that uh whenever i travel i hardly ever actually get like coding work done that actually needs a big screen real estate and i actually would like smaller travel weight
Anyway, so I'm considering getting one of these things.
And because I've had such terrible experiences with hubs and third-party adapters and everything, knowing that Apple is going to make an adapter, if this proves to be true, this would make me more comfortable buying a laptop.
If the rationale that this person stated about making people more comfortable buying it being the reason these things exist, that is plausible to me because I am one of those people who that is the case for.
Is there anything that's new that you cannot justify buying?
No.
No, there's a lot.
I mean, you know, like I'm sure I can think of something eventually.
I've got one.
It's an easy one.
He has a TV that really needs to be replaced, but he doesn't replace it.
That's a great example, yeah, because it still works, and I don't care that strongly.
All the advantages of modern TVs that have come out since my relatively ancient one, mine is still good.
It's fine.
And after seeing yours at your house, John, I came home and mine looked really small and really low contrast and really crude by comparison, but it's still fine.
You know, there's lots of stuff.
I mean, look, this is going to replace, if I get this, it's going to replace a three-year-old laptop.
So it's not that ridiculous.
Oh, I didn't realize it was that old.
All right, I feel better.
Yeah, it's a first-gen 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro with bad screen retention issues.
So I've heard.
Okay, so before we end the show, let's talk quickly about the post you made with regard to Apple Watch pricing.
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Do you not read the damn Skype IMs?
Two of the three parties in this podcast agreed to talk about this and then end the show.
We're still going to talk about it.
He just wanted to be in the after show.
Yeah, I'm just... I'm so bored of Apple Watch price discussion, which is why I wrote this big article for some reason.
Can we complain about how... I already complained about this to you privately.
Complain about how... All right, so this is... Instead of complaining, let's turn into a positive.
Listeners to this show, if you are a regular listener to this show, I feel like that you are...
sometimes several weeks ahead of the press cycle on the apple news sites because when like for example when the apple watch was announced and talked about we spent like three freaking shows talking about the price of the watch whether it would be upgradable how apple's going to sell it in the stores and then in the past two weeks all of those topics came back with a vengeance on every single site where everyone is talking about
Will the watch be upgradable?
How much will it cost?
How are they going to sell it in the stores?
Which I think is fine.
But it meant that like we weren't going to talk about it because we sent so long.
You think we spent a long time talking about the car.
Go back and see how long we talk about watch pricing and upgradability.
It seemed like there was forever.
And we just covered it from every possible angle and talked to ourselves to death.
And there's no new information about it.
Like we haven't learned anything new about it.
but uh yeah so to see all those things go back around a cycle and feel like we're not participating in that i guess it's like the podcast cycle is different than the blog cycle or whatever um but yeah marco's pricing posts like there's there's no like unless correct me if I'm wrong there's no new information right you're just rehashing pricing stuff like and and sort of people are getting different feelings as the date approaches like i know we talked about this before and i know before i said x but now i'm feeling like y and not based on any information right
Like, you don't have any new information about price.
Oh, me?
No.
No, definitely not.
All I have... The few people I've talked to inside of Apple have only provided their own speculation.
Like, they don't know either.
Yeah.
So, I mean, it's... You know, as the date approaches, maybe you get a different feeling and maybe you want to hedge or maybe you want to stick to it.
But we'll...
endeavor to find the links to the shows many moons ago when we talked about these things just forever uh so people can go back to listen to them and to see how right or wrong we were after the apple event but we were right or wrong a long time ago uh but for the rediscussion of it i think the the new angle that you had on the market was the idea of previously we were talking mostly about boy can you believe how much these things are going to cost do we really think they're going to sell something for 10 20 30 grand at the top end or whatever and the new angle is
how maybe they're going to cost way less than we thought.
And as I was messaging to Marco earlier today, I think this is getting muddled up in the idea of like, are you talking about how much will the most expensive Apple Watch Edition cost?
Or are you talking about what is the cheapest price that you can get an Apple Watch Edition for?
And
depending on what you're talking about like you could agree that the apple's going to sell one for 10 grand or 20 grand and you can also agree that the cheapest one will be like two thousand three thousand like those are not incompatible ideas because there can be a wide range in the apple watch edition thing and so the new thing is like oh maybe we're just all being crazy and maybe you'll maybe the apple watch edition will only be like twelve fifteen hundred two thousand three thousand dollars
i will i'm willing to believe that and but that won't mean that you still can't get the most expensive apple watch edition with a gold solid gold band and a solid gold watch and all this other stuff for 10 15 grand even if you can also get one for five grand four grand six grand or something like that
Yeah, I mean, that's a fair point, because we still don't know the variability within each line, depending on the band choice and everything else.
Well, there's not everything else, depending on the band choice and the size.
Especially because if the band is solid gold itself, the band could contain way more gold than the watch.
actually yeah i mean i i don't i don't know i don't know anything about watches but that that makes logical sense to me like volume wise i mean i guess i don't know how strong they're like whatever super strong gold alloy whatever we don't know obviously we know nothing about watches but just looking volume wise it's conceivable to me that having a gold band could more than double the price of the watch versus just that same watch with leather one
And as we talked about in the past shows, again, I want to rehash everything we did.
The price of the materials has very little bearing when you're up in this type of class of product, very little bearing on the price of the product.
The markup can be astronomical.
It's not like a 30 percent margin.
It's like hundreds of a percent margin, you know.
How high can you possibly go?
And the only thing stopping you is like it is basically like a social and economic signal, not a reflection of the cost to manufacture or acquire the, you know, the materials to make.
And keep in mind also, the manufacturing of these things is a big deal.
They talked about on the description on the Apple Watch site, and I don't know if it's on the site or if it's in the video, but somewhere in official Apple material, they talk about how each link is hand-polished and it takes six hours to make one of these things.
If that has six hours of labor in it,
that's going to cost significantly more than the cost of the raw metal.
Not to mention the machining and any parts that might have to be discarded and recycled.
There's going to be a lot behind that.
So the fixed cost of the gold watch is going to be substantially high.
Apple's cost is going to be substantially higher than whatever X ounces of gold costs in the free market today.
Yeah, but I still don't think that the pricing has almost, for the high-end models only, has really anything to do with the cost of manufacturing your goods.
It has everything to do with two parts.
One, how many of these do they think they can make, which probably actually does hinge on material, like how much gold they can get at a reasonable price.
And two...
who are they trying to sell it to because like we said the markups could be hundreds of a percent like that markup has nothing to do with costs of manufacturing and how many little machines have to polish the little things like you're already like doing multiples of three four five six whatever like and when you're picking those prices you're picking them basically to say this is now a status symbol and the fact that it costs a lot of money is what makes it more valuable like it's that what is it the veblen goods thing which we link again again we we discussed all these things on past shows that we're just rehashing now but uh
That's what we're looking for.
What signal is Apple selling?
Is Apple trying to send with this product?
And really, it's only about branding and signaling and fashion.
And it's because...
No matter what the price, most people don't own gold watches, right?
Millions of people own iPhones.
Like that is within the range of things that people can buy.
And we already know the entry level price is going to be around iPhone price or actually less.
That's where the volume is, right?
And creep up and then it'll get more and more expensive.
And then there'll be like this bend, like a hockey stick somewhere that says, and here's the rich people version, right?
And our question on all these past shows is how much does Apple want to bend that?
Do they want to bend it a little bit so you can get into an Apple Watch edition for $2,000?
Do they want to bend it a lot so the entry-level model is $5,000?
And what do they want the endpoint to be?
Is the endpoint $10,000, $20,000, $30,000?
Because at that point, it can be anything you want.
And I think the reason people are getting cold feet about the $20,000, $30,000 top end now even is that they're saying...
Well, if Apple really wants to disrupt the market, the way they do it is by pricing it so that it makes the other ones look like a ripoff, right?
So they price it five grand and all of a sudden the 10 grand watches look like a ripoff.
Like, oh, the most expensive Apple edition watch you can get is $599.99.
And now why would I ever buy a 10 grand Rolex?
But at the same time, if you do that, then maybe people start to think of the Apple watch as being cheap.
And that's what we don't know because none of us buy watches that cost as much as cars.
Right.
And I mean, ultimately, yeah, I mean, I barely even wanted to write the article because I think the price is going to be really boring because none of us are going to actually buy it.
But...
It would be interesting if Apple priced it low enough that it becomes more plausible for more people to buy it.
Suppose it's $3,000 for the gold.
I think that is just as plausible as it being $15,000.
Because there's advantages to both sides.
If it's $15,000, it's much more exclusive.
It's much more profitable for Apple.
If it's $3,000, they'll sell a lot more of them.
And it's still way more profitable than the steel one, I'm sure.
it's like app store pricing like like what do you want what do you want to do and that's why i think like you know it in addition to the signaling thing it's like well if they have any kind of supply constraints on the gold or some other precious metal or thing or whatever you can control that by just raising the price a lot and then you sell fewer of them you make the same amount of revenue by just selling fewer right exactly
Yeah, it's been funny to me listening to various podcasts talk about what they expect the pricing to be.
And I think a lot of the more traditional nerds nerds have been very upset at the thought that there would be humongous markups like in the hundreds of percents or several hundred percent markup.
And it's
And it seems like a lot of people think that Apple would never want to be seen as like, oh, a super expensive luxury good.
And John, I couldn't agree more with what you said earlier.
I think that there will be just silly, ridiculous markups.
And I don't know.
I mean, I would say, since I guess it's reasonable for me to hazard a guess, that I think at least one of them will be north of $10,000.
I think you'll find something that's more expensive than that.
Yeah.
But it strikes me as funny that all the nerds nerds seem to think that anything more than a few thousand dollars is just inconceivable.
And I wish I could say the voice so you would know I was talking about the Princess Bride.
But anyway.
That's a reference, John.
Yep, it is.
So I don't see how it makes any sense for it not to be tremendous, tremendous money.
Just like you said, John, because it's not about a piece of electronics.
It's about a status symbol.
And I think that's spot on.
Well, what if it's not?
Because my point in my article was, what if Apple's primary goal here is to sell a watch that anybody is willing to wear?
And so some people are only willing to wear a gold watch.
And so if Apple wants to get those people wearing an Apple Watch, they have to make one that's really fancy.
The people who are only willing to wear gold watches are also accustomed to paying ridiculous prices for them.
Because I don't think there's anybody who makes gold watches but sells them at like a 50% markup over cost.
Again, I don't know enough about watches.
Maybe there's such a thing that exists.
But it seems to me that as soon as you get into gold watches, you get into the land of...
pricing is now just you know like based on the prestige of the brand not the not the amount of gold in the thing like we were just looking at the amount of gold to just basically say like no matter what we know it's going to cost at least x because that's just how much the materials and labor are going to cost and that already pushes it up into four digits and now we're just saying like
Do the edition start at four digits?
Do they end in five digits?
I don't think anyone has said they're going to start at five digits.
I don't think anyone has said you're not going to be able to get an Apple Watch edition of any kind for less than $9,999.
I think almost everyone thinks that the edition ones are going to start in four digits.
And the question is, do they go into five digits and how far do they go into five digits?
And this will tell us a lot about how Apple wants to be seen as a brand.
It won't tell us anything about how much money Apple wants to make or anything.
i don't know we'll see anything else on the apple watch any other predictions we want to make uh well we have the real-time follow-up from the uh the tipster who uh sent us the tip about uh the usb hub and everything just to clarify that the brick they were talking about the brick they were talking about they're really doubling down the brick they were talking about is not the power brick on the usb hub but the computer's power brick
Our second most boring tip.
Well, no, I like real-time follow-up.
Hey, it's good.
What that means is that I guess it means that the hub won't have a power brick, but it may have power pass-through that, like, the power from the brick will go into the hub and then from the hub's short stubby cable into the computer because, of course, it's the power going through there.
Should have just sent us like a picture of the thing.
This is amazing.
In the grand tradition of rumors, you know, like the blurry picture, maybe put it on the floor of an elevator.
There's a deep cut for the Mac rumors listeners.
You two don't even get that.
Never mind.
Someone in the audience will know about blurry pictures of things on elevator floors.
That's for them.
uh what else oh i i think the best thing the best sad trombone about this would be if the march night event comes and goes and they don't mention anything about laptops that'll be awesome no i mean keep in mind like the at the at the last at the first apple watch event they also released two iphones yeah no there's plenty of time that's what you're saying in the beginning like this is this is a press event
there's going to be watch details there's room for something else this seems like because what else is what else is ready to be you know what else is ready to be announced i mean according to the rumor mill nothing else is ready to be announced i mean you know unless like it's unless they talk about the other mac like the the existing non-retina macbook airs are allegedly about to get broadwell but that's that's boring and i mean they might mention that in passing while talking about this one um but you know that's
that's not that's not newsworthy you say nothing's ready to be announced but that just shows how much we've all given up on the apple tv the thing that's using a single core a5 or whatever the hell it's using now it's like geez like or the ipod touch similarly make a version of the apple tv for the same price it's like twice as fast and they could in theory make the software way better given that hardware but they're not for whatever reason yeah