Your Face Is Your Face
That is going to make an awesome after show.
It's not really because it's going to be just a white dude and moaning about his expensive car.
It's going to be a terrible after show.
And we're going to keep it in and people are going to like it.
And the one or two people that don't like it have long since stopped listening.
Fair enough.
All right.
So people have suggested that this Phantom version of the Mac, which includes an ARM coprocessor, if you will, maybe that's used for power nap.
I still am skeptical that would be a reasonable use case, but be that as it may.
People have used an example of apparently there's something in the PlayStation 4, which apparently is a console that people apparently play video games with.
I didn't realize that was still a thing.
But anyway, it has a rest mode that I guess works similarly.
Right, John?
Yeah.
So the last show we were talking about the ARM CPU actually being able to function and do useful work when the Intel CPU is off, which would mean that the ARM CPU would need access to all the same stuff.
uh you know all the io and networking and all the other stuff regardless of what software it runs whether it runs just you know a bunch of apple software that apple supplies as part of the os or whether third parties can ship arm compiled binaries to it that it would be a full-fledged cpu able to do useful work and i was saying how that is pretty complicated if the only benefit you're getting out of it is we can do power map on the arm cpu instead of the intel cpu um
And it remains to be seen if the next item in follow-up we have some more suggestions of things this thing could do to justify that complexity.
But the PS4 is actually an example of this actual thing in practice because the PS4 is an x86 CPU.
And when you put it into rest mode, it's basically like the thing is turned off.
the fans are off and everything like it doesn't make any noise it just sits there but it's not completely off off and what it does in this mode is it will like download update giant updates to your games it will charge your controllers it will you know do other sort of background tasks
uh that don't require it to be on but still mean that it's doing useful work it will do obviously with downloading is using stuff over the network and in that rest mode it's according to this uh feedback we've gotten which i'm i'm perfectly willing to believe i haven't looked into it uh extensively it's not using the intel cpu it is using a separate arm chip just to do this stuff uh
And that's an example of an x86 and an ARM CPU in a box.
And when the x86 CPU is turned off, the ARM CPU is able to do all that stuff.
It's able to manipulate stuff on the hard drive.
It's able to use networking.
It's able to do all the things.
And that is an additional complexity that is worth it for the PS4 because it is fixing all the sins of the PS3.
uh every time you wanted to turn the thing on and play a game you had to download 50 updates and it's like why didn't you do that for the 12 hours i wasn't home ps3 it wouldn't even charge your controllers when it was turned off the ps3 you plug them in you know like once i'm playing the game i'll plug them like it's the worst so the ps4 fixes all this and so it's an obvious win on the console
And it's down to the instructions that exactly what they were talking about for this rumored Apple laptop.
Question remains, is that additional complexity, and I'm sure it's additional complexity, worthwhile for a Mac?
And so we had one other suggestion for something that the ARM CPU could do that is useful, that doesn't require third-party developers to make extensions with ARM code compiled to it and ship it off there and do all sorts of stuff like that.
David Barditsky suggested good old photos and face recognition.
You know, like when you first get your Mac or at any point, like wandering over your photos, finding all the faces or doing the image recognition nowadays, like figuring out everything that's a house or whatever, so you can do searches later.
That would be a perfect thing to do when your Mac is in rest mode or asleep or whatever, and it would require...
Maybe networking access, depending on how much cloud stuff they do for the image recognition, but certainly would require disk access.
Is that worth the added complexity of making a Mac that can run either on an x86 CPU or on an ARM CPU, depending on what mode it's in?
Maybe.
First of all, the photo recognition thing, I hope they fix that in this fall of software updates.
Make that sync already.
Everything else about photos syncs.
The fact that every device has to do that is not only a terrible hack with awkward results sometimes, but...
It just destroys the battery life and performance of computers and iOS devices for the first three days that you get them.
And that's just a bad initial user experience for everybody.
But somebody's got to do it.
I know people might have multiple devices, but one of the devices has to do it.
And that device is the victim.
It's great that it'll be shared.
But I would imagine for a lot of people, the phone would be the victim because that's where they take the pictures.
Yeah.
And who knows if people even have photos syncing on their Mac.
I, I, I feel bad that any device has to be, uh, subject to this.
I mean, the only, they could change, change the policy by saying we won't do, uh, image recognition, uh,
Unless nobody's using the computer.
Nobody's using the device and it's plugged in like basically only do it when you're sleeping And it's plugged in well that they already attempt to do that like it does it does stop when you are unplugged on the laptops most of the time however
It takes forever to the point where you never know when you plug it in.
Is it best to spin the fan up?
And then when you unplug it, how long will it take before it pauses?
It uses the discrete GPU which exacerbates any kind of GPU sticking on bugs.
It's just kind of a mess.
On iOS, it's even worse because then your phone gets really hot for the first while that you have it.
You're like, why is my phone so hot?
Is something wrong with it?
Is it going to catch fire?
It's just really inelegant and really sets up very bad user experiences for anybody who's setting up
an ios or mac device that isn't their first one ever uh and that's they really really need to address that in this year's updates like that cannot wait yeah so i'm not sure it would be better if uh instead it did it while it while it was asleep because obviously it will take way longer to do it while it's asleep i really only apple knows for sure but like what are the usage patterns for uh
devices that are plugged in not ios devices because they're they're never asleep awake like when the screen's off basically that's a you know asleep like when they're plugged in overnight and charging that's when they should be doing their photo stuff if that's the only device but for macs i don't know what the defaults are but i imagine if you walk away from your mac it'll be on for some period of time and then i think the default is to go to sleep after like
not that long of a time and if you can't do any photo recognition stuff in the background in sleep mode normally like a power nap doesn't do any of it now um that's all a waste of time so all the only time your mac has to do photos is when it's unintended is like the one hour between when you stop using it and when it goes to sleep according to
the default energy saver settings or whatever whereas it could have had 12 hours just plinking away with this little arm cpu so maybe that would help a little bit but again i have to you know the complexity of having a second full-fledged cpu with access to all the same things as the intel cpu is significant uh and i'm still so far i'm still on the page that uh it's much smarter to use that cpu for auxiliary functions that have to do with the hardware like i said last time a proximity sensor camera microphone
you know sort of like a a glorified uh m was m1 or m7 what was that the original uh motion detecting step counting thing in the iphone was it the m8 still we're getting we got bmw on the brain m7 m7 there you go it's the one m because the m1 was a totally different car anyway yeah um yeah just having dedicated hardware her functions related to the hardware
uh and that's perfect for a little cpu and again and the only reason we're talking about this at all is it's already there to run the touch bar it's like it's already there and so you're just saying how can i get more bang for my buck from this thing that i already have to put in it's not like we're looking to throw a bunch of new uh chips into the thing it's already in these these laptops so um i believe uh that a next version or a version after that of this they'll find new things to do with chip they should because they're paying for the chip and it's there and when it's not doing anything fancy on the screen give it something else to do
They have good ARM chips, and they have a good OS to run on them, so why waste it?
Speaking of face recognition, Windows Hello, whatever that may be, does some really weird and fancy stuff with their face recognition.
Yeah, I made a joke about face recognition not being good for security because someone just prints out a picture of your face and holds it up, and then they unlock your laptop.
Didn't specifically say that that was a vulnerability of Windows Hello because they didn't know much about it, but many people wrote in to say that Windows Hello actually uses depth maps so that you can't just hold up a picture because it wants something that not only looks like your face but is contoured and shaped like your face.
So people would have to make basically a mannequin of your face instead of just a picture, which is harder.
Yeah.
And then the faces versus fingerprints thing, because a lot of people bring up, like, well, it's just like fingerprints.
Like, people can lift your fingerprints pretty easily.
I feel like it's still the apt comparison is local versus remote exploit.
Local exploits, like, there's a million of them.
Basically, if someone has physical access to your computer, in most cases, game over as far as security for a variety of reasons.
Yeah.
For fingerprints, they need to have physical access to either you or something you've touched to lift your fingerprints.
And there's been many demonstrations on the web like, oh, you can lift someone's fingerprint and you can unlock their iPhone because fingerprints are just a series of ridges and we can get them out and make a little plastic mold of it and you're gone.
Right now...
usually you can't get fingerprints from a normal photo of people.
Like if you're walking down the street and someone snaps a picture of you, they can't lift your fingerprints from that picture.
Or if they Google you, they probably won't find close-up pictures of your fingerprints or anything you've touched at a resolution where they can lift your fingerprints.
But for most people, you can find plenty of pictures of their face.
And you could fairly, not easily, but much more easily, remotely, without ever being anywhere near that person or anything they've touched,
reproduce their face in a 3d manner from a series of photos that are taken a whole bunch of different angles and make it use a 3d printer to make a little mold and then print out a picture of their face and slap it onto the mannequin and it fools the depth sensors and it fools the the camera and you've unlocked their thing with their face
Again, this is kind of like Mission Impossible, whatever stuff.
If someone is this determined to attack you, it's probably much better just to call you and tell you they're from Microsoft and they want to reset your password because that's a much easier way to get into your stuff.
But thinking about this and how easy it is to pull your fingerprints versus make a 3D model of your face versus whatever...
It has reminded me once again of the trouble with all biometric security, which we all see in the future sci-fi movies.
They're always putting their hands on things or doing retina scans.
We're living in the future now with fingerprints.
I use my fingerprint to unlock my phone all the time.
I love it.
It's awesome.
But the trouble with all biometrics is...
if they are compromised in any way, if people have your fingerprints or have a nice 3D mold of your face, you can't change those things.
You can't say, well, I'm going to use a new set of fingerprints.
Always rotate your fingerprints.
Don't use the same fingerprints in multiple sites, guys.
Your fingerprints are your fingerprints.
And for the most part, your face is your face.
So once compromised, they are compromised forever.
You can't use your fingerprint.
If the whole world has high res images of your fingerprints,
Your fingerprints are useless.
Never mind that in this country, anyway, law enforcement can make you put your stupid finger on the thing anyway.
But just in general, biometrics...
they're unlike passwords that you can change and rotate or whatever you can't change them even your retinas if you do a retina scan and someone has like a detailed map of your retina and makes a little fake eyeball with your retina scan you can't use retina scans anymore it's bad um and if it became commonplace it's the definition of repeating your password you only have 10 fingers right then you have a different finger on each secure thing yeah so in general biometrics are great convenience but if we in in sci-fi movies of our youth anyway
they were always presented as a much more secure way like ha ha you can't get in because you don't have my eyeball or my finger and then didn't take long for the movies to to shift into gouging people's eyeballs out and cutting off their hands to get their fingerprints which is another downside of biometrics but in general i think biometrics are settling in to be the casual convenience feature like it's the reason i unlock my phone with it because who wants to type in some big long password every time you unlock your phone
But not for increased security.
For increased security, we're still stuck with, for now, big giant passwords and multiple factors.
I love that ripping out somebody's eyes and cutting off their fingers is described by you, John, as a downside.
I mean, it is.
It's a pretty significant downside in my book, though.
no one's gonna do that unless you're in a you're in a you know a sci-fi movie like because no one cares that much about your crap and again it's like there are much easier ways to get at your crap like just forcing you to put your finger on it because you're not a big tough guy but in the movies to get into the evil villains lair the you know you cut off the guy's hand cut off the henchman's hand and you just shove it on the panel didn't uh tom cruise's character do that minority report you got new eyes it's been done so many times so many times
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So there's been a little bit of sort of kind of back and forth between our show and one host across two other shows, which is a friend of the show, Mike Hurley.
He has talked on his two podcasts, Upgrade and Connected.
about some arguments or counter arguments about whether or not the iPad is worth Apple's attention.
And you really should listen to both Upgrade and Connected, well, in general, but particularly the latest episodes, and we'll put links in the show notes.
I'm going to try to unfairly summarize Mike's points, and then... I can't wait to hear this.
Yeah, yeah.
And then Marco can add his two cents about all this.
What I got from what Mike said was, hey, if you look at modern iPads and modern Macs, where you define modern slightly arbitrarily, but basically can run the most recent versions of iOS and macOS.
I don't remember the exact numbers, but modern Macs, by that definition, go back between five and ten years, and modern iPads go back, I think, around five years, something like that.
The particular numbers don't really matter that much.
The conclusion, though, that Mike came to was, hey, if you look at the sales and thus assumed install base of modern Macs and modern iOS devices, or excuse me, iPads, there are like twice as many iPads as there are Macs.
So if there's that many iPads in the wild, shouldn't that be where Apple puts most of its attention?
Because presumably...
All of these iPads are still in use and presumably at least a subset of these owners, you know, iPad owners are using them for, and I'm doing scare quotes here, work stuff.
So shouldn't that be where Apple puts all of its attention, or maybe not all, but a lot of its attention?
And that's a super, super, super summarized version.
Again, listen to Connected and Upgrade, actually in the reverse order, listen to Upgrade first.
But anyway, listen to them to get the longer versions.
But that's kind of what I got from it.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah.
Yeah, I think so.
And this was in response to what a lot of people were talking about after the earnings came out, what, two weeks ago now, about how iPad sales continued to drop.
And many people commented on this with theories, myself included, both on my blog, and then we talked about it on the show last week.
And, you know, many, many people... Every time there's quarterly earnings that come out and it shows that the iPad sales are going down, which has happened a lot in the last few years, everyone has these theories about, well, here's why the iPad has failed or is failing or you can't get real work done on it or whatever else.
And so if you are an iPad pro-heavy user like Mike and Federico and some of our other friends are, then this makes sense to be defensive about because...
it's very hard to separate out these arguments into individual things to talk about.
A lot of times people are arguing past each other because they're not quite hearing what the other argument was or they're responding more to a general feeling or to a general kind of trend of where the commentary is or has been rather than what somebody actually said or what people are actually trying to figure out.
And there's nuance to all this stuff.
So
part of what mike and jason on upgrade were responding to was not just what we said but i think a lot of it was based on us and what we said and what i wrote in my blog post about uh what if the ipad isn't the future of computing and and so i did want to address this uh hopefully briefly uh here and i'm actually i'm working with mike we actually might do a little special with just me and mike arguing about it uh maybe next week sometime but we'll do i get not to get to participate in that
Ooh.
Because I'm right about everything, and you guys just have to argue about which one is you're going to do more wrong?
Ooh.
Yikes.
I didn't listen to these episodes, but it seems like it was like Mike versus Marco, but I said stuff, too.
Didn't anyone disagree with the stuff I said?
You got hit, too.
Don't worry.
You and I were kind of lumped in together.
Anyway.
Oh, that's unfair.
Now, that's ridiculous.
I knew that would get you.
Anyway, so here's my actual position here.
Obviously, people are getting real work done on iPads.
Not every iPad owner, of course, but as Mike accurately pointed out, not every Mac is sold and used to do, quote, real work, whatever that means.
Mike's main point was also that the iPad, obviously, even with the downward slope of its sales curve, is still selling like two to two and a half times unit sales of what Macs are selling.
And there are still way more iPads out there than Macs.
And so therefore, this really is a serious platform.
And I'm not arguing against any of that, actually.
My main argument with my post, and hopefully if I express it properly last week...
is that the iPad is presented in so many views, both from Apple and from analysts and fans, as, quote, the future of computing.
And what I interpret that to mean is a replacement, ultimately, or largely a replacement for the PC and the Mac.
What we're mostly seeing is that PCs have been a little bit contracting for a while, but Mac sales have been pretty solid.
The rise of the iPad over... It's been seven years now.
And it's been popular the whole time.
So it's selling a lot.
The iPad's selling a lot.
But during that entire rise, sales of Macs haven't gone down.
So if the iPad were really like the future of computing in quotes... I'm doing finger quotes here, sorry.
In the way that that means replacing PCs and Macs for a lot of people...
I think the numbers are showing otherwise.
And I made the case last week that for a lot of people, if you're going to choose between only being able to afford or only wanting to own either an iPad or a computer, they're still picking that computer.
I think the sales show that.
And there's lots of reasons, as we got into last week, about why that might be.
Things like the limitations of doing things on the iPad and how many limitations you have there versus what limitations tend to be on PCs and differences in usability and everything.
We argued about that, so I'm not going to repeat the whole thing.
All this is not to say that you can't get worked on an iPad or that iPads are only for consumption.
I never said that.
This is also all not to say that nobody is replacing their PC or Mac with an iPad.
I didn't say that either.
But I think very clearly, my argument here that I'm clarifying now again, my argument is that on a large scale, it doesn't appear that tablets are replacing PCs.
uh and the windows world is a little bit messier because they kind of have these combo things but on the apple side i think it's very very clear that the ipad is not replacing the mac it seems that most people who buy the ipad are buying it as the third device however they order it in their minds they still have a phone and a computer and the ipad is added to that mix again not everybody not all ipads but this is added to the mix for so many people and
And so while everyone can name someone who got an iPad and doesn't use their computer anymore, a lot of people also use computers and don't buy iPads.
So I think the sales reflect the reality here.
The iPad, like so many things in technology, has not destroyed what came before it.
It has added to it.
And so in a world where it is one of many devices that people use to get computing on, as opposed to the device that is replacing the computer, I worry about the direction that Apple is taking between the Mac and the iPad because it sure looks like, from Apple's point of view, and we'll get to this crazy slasher rumor in a little bit, but it sure looks like, for the most part, what we see from Apple is that the Mac is kind of like, as I said last week, it's kind of like in maintenance mode.
It seems like they're not really putting a lot of, like...
huge effort into like moving the mac paradigm forward it seems like they've they consider the mac basically done and they're doing fairly minor things to it touch bar hardware engineering aside yes okay but the software model seems like it's been fairly minor uh and not seeing a lot of meaningful changes or engineering effort put into it could be wrong but this is what we're seeing from the outside um whereas the ipad if that if that were to be the future of computing then that which that needs more investment
What we're seeing instead is that that's not the future of computing, and Apple's kind of neglecting both of these platforms.
But that's a story for another day, I guess.
But I just wanted to clarify my argument on this is not that the iPad is useless or dead or not possible to get worked on.
It's simply that it is showing itself through sales to be, in reality, a third device for a lot of people and to not be replacing the Mac.
While you were talking about that, I was thinking about...
offhand comment i think it was the last show that apple doesn't make best best anymore um and thinking about uh mac sales not that they're declining but as as the mac has become over many years proportionally less of what apple sells mostly because the iphone honestly you know because they sell a bazillion iphones right but even you know the ipad has pointed out that sells as much or more than the mac these days um at to go back to our favorite well the good old car analogy
In the car world, if you sell a small number of cars and you are a going concern in the car business, chances are good that the small number of cars you sell are extreme in some way.
No one sells a small number of Toyota Camrys.
You can't run a car business by selling cars.
5 000 toyota cameras a year that's not a thing right but you can sell 5 000 ferraris a year and be okay you can sell 5 000 humvees maybe and be okay or that's a bad example to this gm but anyway um if you sell in small volume you specialize and very often you charge tons of money like way out of proportion to the quality of the car that you're selling you know jaguar or whatever sorry you know that's maybe that's not true these days i know they're better anyway
If the Mac, again, not low volume, but proportionally lower volume, if the Mac becomes the minor player in the world of the iPhone, which is the Toyota Camry, right?
And maybe even the iPad is selling more than it, you know, on an ongoing basis.
That would be the perfect time for them to look at that line and say, well, who is still buying Macs?
Why would someone want a Mac over an iPad?
Oh, they have more demanding needs and more sophisticated tasks.
Go back to the old world, Apple, which was perfectly willing to have a machine that could be configured with an obscene amount of RAM.
with a ridiculous number of the most expensive cpus with a very large hard drive and a very big hot expensive gpu and overcharge for all of it that's the old apple way char make a machine that i can configure to be as much as an apple watch edition right should be able to configure you used to even with the old 2013 mac pro a 15 20 000 mac
It's not worth that much money.
It's like it's overpriced in the same way that a Ferrari is not worth that much more than a Corvette that has almost the same performance.
But for people in certain markets, whether it's because you need the absolute biggest best and you're willing to pay for it, like it's a blip in your radar, or just because you want a Ferrari because you think it's cool.
As your volumes get lower in proportion to the rest of your business, that becomes a way to extract more money from this product line.
And so it seems that they are losing interest in the mag.
I wish they would have enough interest to say, can't we fleece those people?
Because at this point, I'm begging to be fleeced.
Can't we...
have you priced out a touch bar macbook pro by any chance john i know i know like i mean that's that's the thing too but like it's still it's still within the realm of reason like you can't even get it with 32 gigs ram right like and and if there are people who have those demands like there's nowhere to go in the mac world for them and
like regardless of how where we want to draw the line between where is the line between people who really need a personal computer style thing and people who need an ipad and people who just need a phone like there's a continuum there but at a certain point like we all agree that the mac is at the one end of that spectrum right it's not no one's arguing that like the mac is in between the ipad or the phone or something it is one end of that spectrum
You just need to extend that line out and make sure that if someone is forced into a Mac or has to use a Mac because of their work, that they can go all the way up.
And because it's a low volume relative to the phone market, charge tons of money, get super high margins.
maybe maybe be less into the 500 increases on your on your uh laptop model which is more of a mainstream thing and just put all that money into i don't know like a like a mac that's for professionals like you could shorten the name but whatever i know i'm going in circles here but i was just the sad part is they have been doing that to the mac pro every mac pro generation is more expensive than the last one i know but then but they didn't give you one with two cpus in it
right and they still raise the price i know i know but but like it just seems like it's frustrating when at any price you can't throw your money at apple and say just give me as much ram as will physically fit in the machine because i'm doing some weird application and i don't care how much it costs and like nope not i'm not interested in selling you that and you should be because it's a good way to make money off suckers like us
And also, to bring it back a little bit just to the iPad discussion, I did want to also mention a great post that our friend David Sparks made over at MacSparky about his interpretation.
He is also a very iPad Pro user.
And his interpretation basically of trying to explain away the iPad sales dip is, in short, I hope I'm summarizing this accurately, in short that basically...
Most people aren't pushing their iPad hard.
That's why so many people are able... Even people who have decided to make the iPad a part of their life or a part of their workflow or both, they're still perfectly okay using a four-year-old iPad.
And the main reason why that he's saying, which I think is right on, is that they're just not pushing it hard enough.
Because what people do on iPads...
What the software does, what is possible to do well on it, is usually pretty light workload kind of stuff.
It isn't that the hardware is not getting better.
The hardware is getting way better.
But just what most people are doing on the iPad doesn't need better hardware.
And the blame for that and the duty to fix that or to try to push that forward mostly lands on Apple.
Because a lot of that has to do with the OS and the way it's structured and various limitations.
A lot of that has to do with the app ecosystem, which much of that is on Apple to try to fix or to enable fixes to happen.
We've seen this theme from a lot of iPad users' responses over the last two weeks to this.
People love the iPad.
People want to use it for more.
They want to be able to do more of their work on it if they can't currently do all of it on it.
But iOS needs to move forward in a way that lets people get more worked on more efficiently.
I mean, there are so many really basic things that we consider basic from the PC era of just things like managing multiple emails and attachments.
Like moving photos around, moving documents around.
Things that are very hostile to do on iOS, that are very clunky or sometimes even just impossible without crazy hacks or sometimes just outright impossible.
Simple stuff like moving media around and dealing with people's files.
iOS really fights people a lot.
Basic multitasking stuff.
The multitasking implementation now is...
very limited and could really use some enhancements and whether that's coming down the road this year or not we'll see i hope it does but the point is there's still tons of room to improve ios on the ipad and i i hope apple tries to do that in some way because
Tons of people want that.
And it just seems like regardless of which side of the future of computing you fall on, whether you think it's the iPad or the Mac, it seems like there's plenty to complain about Apple neglecting your platform either way.
I hope Apple cares enough about the actual future of computing to invest very heavily in at least one of these platforms because it seems right now that the Mac is in maintenance mode indefinitely and the iPad gets occasional updates from iOS when it's convenient for them.
I'll see you next time.
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Investing made better.
On the idea that the iPads, people keep using them because it still does what they want it to do, even though they could buy a much better one, I think it's another situation where Apple probably has data about this.
But trying to think about it anecdotally, there's two things that come to mind immediately that make you buy a new whatever.
uh one is the usual tractor of software basically if you have a vibrant software ecosystem eventually your old phone doesn't run the cool new app that all your friends are talking about so the more the more vibrant the ecosystem is the more apps take advantage of new hardware or being dragged along by the platform by like not supporting 32 bit apps anymore or whatever you know um the more that is a thing it'll make you say oh i don't like my phone anymore because all my friends are using apex
And I can't use that because it says it doesn't run on my phone or something.
Right.
So software ecosystem, which, again, is lacking on the iPad, like there is more of that on the phone than there is on the iPad in terms of social pressure and software, you know, action in the software market to put along.
And the second one, and this is where Apple would have the data, is how many people replace their phones because they break them?
I see a lot of broken phones, and I see fewer broken iPads.
I do see cracked iPads.
You see them in airports and stuff, but I also see kids in airports with iPads dropping them like they're a juice box and just bounce in the giant rubbery case they're in, right?
So I'm going to say probably...
percentage-wise, phones and their lives because they break more often than iPads, just based on my personal experience and anecdotally.
But again, Apple would know because they probably, in all these surveys, say, why are you buying a new phone?
It seems to me that those two tractors are making the phone replacement cycle
Notice I didn't list as one of the things that's making people replace their phones is that their phone feels slow.
In general, I think iPhones aren't like Windows computers where you use them for two years and they're so crapped up that you just need to get a new one.
Again, this is based on my experience in talking to other people.
That doesn't happen with phones as much.
And I'll say it doesn't happen at all.
Sometimes your phone does get slow and, you know, I upgraded the OS and then my phone feels slow.
And that is another factor in it.
But I feel like it is far behind...
software ecosystem pressuring you into upgrading your phone and just plain dropping it and if none of those things are true for the ipad then it is protected and it kind of makes me fear for the day when apple makes an iphone that you can drop all day long and it never breaks will the phone suddenly become like the ipad if again if this theory is correct that you know the people aren't buying new ipads because the one they have is working just fine i think people's phones would be working just fine if there wasn't some new app they wanted to play if they didn't keep dropping them
maybe i'm overestimating the dropping and maybe i i notice cracks too much because i'm always amazed at the vast percentage of people i see like on the train or whatever just swiping their thumbs along totally shattered phones you know ios or not uh because people drop them and they're made of glass and it's a problem so uh i don't know we really need to get uh
product marketing from apple on the show now that we're mad with power and say what are your percentages of why do people replace their phones is it because they have an android phone and it's getting old and slow is it because they dropped their old one or is it because they want to play a new game
i i first of all that that's okay that'll be question number one for when we get phil well question number two question number one will be about the mac pro i have many other questions earlier in the queue we may never get to that one sorry folks that's fair uh but i i do think you are underestimating how many people replace their phone because it's old and slow um because do you think it's just os upgrades like yes i brought that up and i have heard that from a lot of people and it is a real thing but
i was gonna say no one's forcing you to upgrade your your phone but apple is pretty pushy these days aren't they yeah they apple really really pushes the upgrade pretty hard and a lot sometimes like an app a critical app that for people will require it so that kind of forces them to i mean they push you on the ipad too like i have had ipads that i regret upgrading the os for because they're just so old and you upgrade to the very last i'm like oh i should have stayed one version back so why wouldn't that make people replace their ipads in the same way
Well, that's a good question.
Worth thinking about.
I think one of the reasons for that, maybe one of the biggest reasons for that, is the types of apps that you use on the iPad versus the types of apps that you use on the phone.
Is there an app that's pushing you to upgrade or not?
On the iPad, I think the data shows that despite the community of people who get a lot of work done on the iPad,
A lot of iPad users are using it mainly for video watching, web browsing, and email, Facebook.
The basic email, web, video kind of workflow.
And for that, probably nothing is really going to push you to really upgrade your OS.
You can still use Apple's mail app in whatever OS you have.
You can still use the web browser.
I would imagine Facebook and Netflix and stuff probably keep their minimum version pretty low.
Well, they'll upgrade the OS, but it doesn't matter if you upgrade the OS.
If you're just using it to play video, it really doesn't matter exactly how clunky the animation is on Springboard when you launch the Netflix app.
All you care about is once the video starts playing, it's fine.
That's fair.
But anyway, regardless, I think the way most iPads are used...
it probably has a slower upgrade cycle from this offer side simply because they're not often using a lot of apps that require the newest version of the OS.
Whereas on the phone, you have a lot more new games that come out, new cutting-edge apps that come out that usually come out on the phone first or only, and you have more early adopters.
It seems like there's more driving that.
But also, there's this consistent narrative with the iPad that
That explains a lot of this.
That is probably correct.
And there is some data to back it up.
That basically, while you can get work done on it, a lot of people do use it for mostly consumption.
That's not a judgment.
That's just what people do.
That's also true of computers.
That's also true of phones.
However, that is true of iPads.
And that people's needs on iPads are fairly simple most of the time.
Whoever's fault that is doesn't really matter.
The point is, people do pretty simple things on iPads most of the time.
You know, it's only one data point, but I feel like it's relevant.
The aforementioned iPad 3 that we had after we stopped using it because we found it to be too old, it was collecting dust for months.
And then just a couple months back, I had, you know, reset it all, and I had my dad bring it to my grandparents.
Right.
They live in Pennsylvania.
I'm in Virginia.
And although they come down from time to time, we haven't been up there in a long time.
And they're not that young at this point because I'm turning 35 pretty soon and these are my grandparents.
But we gave them this iPad 3 mostly so they could FaceTime with us and Declan and I guess my parents from time to time as well.
From what I understand, they were beyond overjoyed to have received it, not only because of FaceTime, but because it's a much easier device for them to use than their PC.
And I think it's a reasonably modern PC.
But they were overjoyed to receive an iPad 3 late in 2016.
When was the iPad 3 new?
Like 2012 or something like that?
Probably before that, actually.
2012.
It wasn't 2012?
Okay.
So, yeah, so they were beyond excited to receive this old device, which for them is more than enough.
Now, obviously, they have nothing to compare to.
Obviously, in a perfect world, I'm sure they would prefer a brand new one.
But for someone who hadn't had one before, it was way more than enough.
And not every iPad user is going to be like that.
And I'm sure that there's tons of iPad users that upgrade regularly that are not using it for work.
They just really love the iPad.
But to speak of the longevity of the iPad, this is a device that's nearly five years old now that brought genuine joy to their household when they received it.
Well, because that's the thing, like this is why old iPads are so useful and so many of them are still in use because most people's needs are pretty low end.
Most people just want a thing that they can browse the web and send emails and see Facebook on.
Like that's pretty much what most people do with any of their computing devices, phone, laptop or tablet.
And so this device is delightful for that.
Yeah.
Again, but I think that that doesn't preclude people doing really work on it, and also my theory that I'm putting forth with these sales graphs that this is mostly just additive to the world of technology.
There aren't any real answers here.
The data that we have is shallow, and...
we have to extrapolate a lot from it and and so because of that it's there's so much judgment involved and there's no clear right or wrong and i think that's why we're going to talk about it in in bits uh across 17 different podcasts for a little while but um but yeah so let's talk about something that's indisputably awesome
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So there was this crazy rumor or sort of rumor that was posted on Slashdot as a comment.
And this was a in Slashdot parlance, an anonymous coward, which is to say somebody that didn't want to leave their name.
But they went on and on about how there are several ARM-powered laptops that are drifting around internally at Apple, and this individual claims to have seen several with their own eyes.
And they had a lot to say about it.
I don't know the best way to summarize it, partially because I read this days ago and I haven't looked back since, which was in part because it seemed kind of bananas to me.
Right.
But...
It seemed like the short, short version was, yeah, there's some apps that run on ARM and the OS is really iOS-ish, even though it isn't iOS.
A lot of things that we like to control as not even necessarily power users, but just users on macOS, not a lot of that is available on these supposed phantom ARM Macs.
And I didn't think this something about this didn't feel right to me.
Like, I'm not sure I can point to a specific passage and say, yes, this is why it's bananas.
But a lot of it just didn't feel right to me.
And from what I gathered from people that I've spoken to, it didn't feel right to a lot of them.
But we wanted to acknowledge its existence and we will put a link to the show notes.
And I'm sure that the two of you have some thoughts on it as well.
I wouldn't do more than just acknowledge it.
Yeah.
I don't want to entertain it as a as a possibility because it's that, you know, this is not a credible source.
But let's just pretend like hypothetically, let's talk about this thing if it existed.
Right.
Because, again, I don't think the sourcing is enough to say that this does exist.
But I would say, in fact, the incredible shadiness of this post and so many of the weird things that don't really sound very appley or don't reflect how they actually work, I would say this is very unlikely to be true.
But the reason I want to talk about this, too, I was very happy to see it in the notes, is that this was an interesting idea for where the Mac could plausibly go.
Because while the details of this are very suspicious that make you discount the validity of this report...
i do think the overall idea of such a product is plausible and the idea that apple would take it in this direction is very plausible it's not just plausible this is like this is the as soon as ios appeared this is basically the exact not exemplar but like like this is the prototype of this rumor the very second the first person said ios mac merged like the very second someone said that many many years ago this is exactly what they were talking about this is
a mac running on arm cpus can only get apps from the app store everything locked down all binary sign can restore from the internet like a phone like there is nothing in this that is even outside the realm of the things that the only reason it is you know it's interesting again it's because it's being presented as truth it's kind of the same way when you tell a joke you pretend it's a real story that happened to you to make the joke funnier that's exactly how this is working here
But because we haven't had, like, the reason it's worth talking about again is because we haven't revisited this idea of the iOS and Mac merge, totally locked down Mac thing again.
And in light of the actual appearance of ARM CPUs inside Macs with the Touch Bar Mac Pros, and in light of all the Intel stuff and so on and so forth, and our own revisiting of...
When is it going to be time to flip the Mac over to ARM?
I think it's worth revisiting this old rumor of the merged iOS Mac.
Not so much the merging of the U.S.
's interface-wise, but of literally buttoning down the Mac in all the same ways that iOS is buttoned down.
As an example of what we talked about last show, like, you know, either expanding the capabilities of iOS or making the Mac easier.
This would be an example of taking all of those sharp edges in the Mac and following them down as much as possible to make something that is hopefully almost as easy to use as an iPad, but still much more capable.
Yeah, and so I think it's worth going over some of the details because our chief summarizer-in-chief failed to.
Sorry.
It's okay.
You've had a long day.
We'll get to that in the after show.
It's true.
Yeah, sorry.
But yeah, so basically the idea put forth by this comment basically is that it is like the next generation of laptop presumably or possibly of all Macs.
It is an ARM processor, all custom Apple ARM hardware, just like the iPads and phones.
It only boots the signed OS images that come over the internet.
I assume not every time, not like a net boot, but it only boots similar to iPhones and iPads.
There is no physical install media.
There's no downgrading.
Here's the software update for you.
Here's what you get.
You can't downgrade.
You can't choose what version you run.
Just here's what you get, period.
They said a lot of the OS X legacy utilities and stuff are missing.
There's no more X11.
There's no audio MIDI setup.
A lot of that stuff.
No disk utility, no terminal, which is interesting.
System preferences and a lot of functionality has been moved into a new app called Settings to match iOS.
The App Store is mandatory, including even things that require hardware drivers.
It sounds kind of similar to when you connect a Bluetooth or Lightning device to a phone, and it can associate itself with an app on the App Store that lets it work.
Similar to that, but for drivers on the Mac.
So you get a new scanner or something, you plug it in, and it downloads the...
launches you to the mac app store to download the driver for that uh similarly all drivers would be like you know kind of like ios sandboxified where something could install one of these drivers like at the deep level of system but then you could just go into a system prep pane and like delete it and it's gone it doesn't like leave files behind you know it's very iosey in that way of like
With iOS, you can delete an app and you know everything about that app is gone.
There's no remnants of it left in your phone or anything.
Of course, the Mac doesn't work that way now.
Macs get gummed up over time with all this crap.
You have all this junk in your library folder and everything else.
A couple of things, but yeah, basically... Oh, and the file system is kind of like... How do you pronounce chroot in Linux world?
Is it chroot?
I don't know.
But basically, the file system is like chrooted.
So basically, like...
you like what appears to be at root is your home directory and you don't even see the system files they're just they're not even there like they're they're they exist in the file system but you don't see them from your point of view from your user space you see at root your files and nobody else's and they said there's like no concept seemingly of multi-user stuff but i don't want to get too much into the specifics of this post because again i think the credibility of it is is pretty low uh but
as a future direction of mac os and and of the mac hardware platform i do think this is worth talking about not only because it's so plausible based on what apple seems to want to do but also i think i will have the seemingly in this community very unpopular opinion that i think this could be really good with a few minor exceptions i think this could be really good
The only things about this that give me a lot of pause are that it said that everything has to come through the Mac App Store.
That's number one.
And I think, you know, the Mac has this wonderful gatekeeper system and has this kind of like code signing without app review system called developer ID.
If the developer ID and gatekeeper come forward into whatever this is, again, assume this is real even though it probably isn't.
Thought experiment time.
Okay.
Okay.
if this were to have some kind of developer mode where you could build open source stuff, however it's containered, if it's in your own little true root of jail, fine.
But if you can build open source stuff, if you can develop code, if you can compile code with your C compiler or whatever else and just run it on this thing without the OS's code signing stuff interfering badly with that, if that's possible to do here, and if you can distribute software through developer ID...
which would bypass the mac app store then i think this is not only plausible and could be good but it might be great because a lot of this solves real problems with the mac and with pc style os's one of the biggest problems is like
how apps spread themselves out all over the place, all over the system.
It isn't, as I said, with iOS.
iOS, you delete the app, it's gone.
On the Mac, you delete the app, and there's garbage everywhere.
And you have to use Mac cleanup utilities to clean all the garbage out sometimes.
You have to go find these files that are spread all over your system, and you can't be sure what an app is doing when you install it and all this stuff.
The PC and Mac style of...
of app security is outdated.
We've talked about this before, the Unix idea of anything you run just has access to your entire user account and everything you've ever made on a user account and all your files and it can delete files at will, it can read everything of yours.
That is an outdated model.
That is not great for the future of computing.
And one of the things that makes iOS so appealing to a lot of people for a lot of reasons is the additional simplicity and security that the sandboxing model that it has enforces.
I think it is possible to do this well.
A lot of Mac diehards are really against this idea when they saw this comment and assuming it might be real.
And I can see why you would be so against this.
But I think, again, with that very slight tweak of a developer mode and being able to distribute software with developer ID, that's...
pretty much all i would need for this you know like it sounds like it would be really good in a lot of other ways either the mac is in maintenance mode as i keep saying it seems that way and nothing ever changes and that's fine or if it is going to change if apple really is working on like the next
The next generation of OS, not just 10.something else, the entire next generation, like when they went from classic to OS X. If they are indeed working on such a thing for the Mac, which I would argue they should be because it would be ridiculous to continue a computing platform forward with no plans to ever do that, then I think this is exactly the kind of thing they would do.
And we should be prepared for it.
And we can see a preview of what it's like by looking at iOS.
Because iOS is even more restrictive than this.
And so if this is plausible, and if this happens, and if it's done well with those couple of little holes punched through the wall for developers and for distribution through developer ID, as I said, I think this could be a great move forward.
This could be the simplicity and security of iOS, but with windowing and file management and access to your files in a traditional paradigm and stuff like that.
And yes, it would require a lot of apps to be rewritten.
Some things that worked in the old system wouldn't work anymore.
But a lot of this stuff is ancient.
I don't need X11 anymore.
A lot of this stuff is so ancient.
macOS is very old.
It has accumulated cruft over time because everything does.
This new way of doing things sounds like it could really be the actual future of computing that blends together the greatness of iOS with a PC style paradigm to allow more types of work to get done for more people.
This sounds really good to me.
The actual future computer.
I spend all this time explaining myself, and you just ignore me.
It's funny.
It's funny.
Last week, we talked about how the iPad was making progress in terms of expanding its capabilities with multitasking and the pen and the bigger size and stuff, but kind of slowly.
The Mac...
has been doing that same thing, but in the other direction, but even more slowly.
Because if you think about the Mac trying to simplify itself, trying to be friendlier, this has been a process.
The process took a pretty big leap with...
Classic to OS X, actually, because many things that were way more complicated than classic were massively simplified.
The dock is the best example of that.
All the ways that you could manage the same stuff that the dock is supposed to do on classic Mac OS at the time we transitioned.
the doc is just like the most dumbed down version of all the other options that we had, not even including third party things of which there were many.
This was this one first party thing.
No, you can't use the private APIs to, uh, to make your own doc type thing.
We'll, we will fight you on that.
And it is way simpler and don't worry about it because that's all everybody needs.
Right.
Um,
And sandboxing, another example, a long, slow, painful slog trying to get some of the benefits that you get in iOS.
All your crap in one place, applications protected from each other, blah, blah, blah.
It's been slow going.
We haven't been able to get there because sandboxing is incompatible with lots of cool things that Mac apps have done and still want to do.
And it's very difficult for Apple to ever...
get slowly incrementally get it to the point where mac applications are sandboxed in the same way as ios applications instead they've been saying you can be a mac app and your stuff can still be in seven different places because it kind of has to be but we'll put some constraints on you and it's a this weird mismatch between having to do that but also having to be protected from yourself and isolated from other applications and
Even so far as, like, how many Mac apps have struggled with the sandbox, because the integration point on PC-style operating systems is very often the file system.
And that's how applications share things with each other, is I write a thing here, and you open that same thing over there, and the user's allowed to make little folders and put stuff in them, and you're trying to sandbox things, so each application only sees its own files, but, like...
It's been difficult.
And so this description of the iOS-ified Mac, which, again, has been in people's minds and talked about for many, many years now, the question is always, how do you get from where we are to there?
Because it's a big leap.
And trying to do it incrementally has been very difficult.
It's been taking a long time.
It hasn't been particularly successful.
A lot of efforts have stalled out despite a lot of effort put into it.
It gets back to the question from the last week's show.
Is it easier to make the iPad more capable or make the Mac friendlier and simpler?
And unquestionably, I think it's still easier to make iOS more capable because if you try to make the Mac simpler...
everything about the system and the users and the developers fights you at every step because there's so much entrenched tradition and software and conventions and capabilities and attitudes and just like and cruft like marco said just plain old cruft uh that it's it's difficult to get there so this this the host here is almost kind of like wishful thinking like
Wouldn't it be great if we could snap our fingers and be there?
And like Marco said, one way you can do that is say, okay, well, it's not macOS anymore.
It's a new OS called something else.
You know, like people would have said macOS 11 back in the days before the 10 got dropped, right?
But this really, it would be a leap of that size if it appeared wholesale.
you can still get there piecemeal.
It's going to take a long time.
You might have to wait for some people to die.
And there are many places where this can go terribly wrong.
For example, it's obvious to us on this program as rabid Mac users that...
Of course, you'd have to have some mode that most people wouldn't use, but that would give you access to the terminal.
They will let you build software because we're software developers and we know any software developer who uses a Mac, no matter what kind of development you're doing, even if you're doing everything in Xcode, I would imagine.
But it's definitely if you're doing development, you know, for any kind of server side software, you're used to being able to install and run software like Xcode.
that is not signed with Apple's developer ID thing.
All that Unix open source stuff, that's not signed with developer ID.
And if you literally can't run binaries that are not signed, if you don't have that final option in Gatekeeper to launch applications with, you know, the right click in the open and all that, you know, or just launching it from the command line, like, if that option, like, literally does not exist, as it doesn't on iOS, unless you jailbreak, and I really don't want to be jailbreaking my Mac, that eliminates just so many users.
This is not even an edge case anymore.
This is like...
A large percentage of people who, you know, whole professions who use Macs at their desks need the ability to do that type of stuff and are going to need it for the foreseeable future.
So if you cut them off, then you're just marginalizing the Mac too much, I think, because they would be eaten up by iOS on one side and you abandon everybody else who's using those features on the Mac.
And so that's a danger zone as well.
But the general idea of, like, let me just close my eyes and open them again, and the Mac, at the very least, solves one or two or three of the biggest problems.
It still wouldn't be solving the file system problem, even with the chroot stuff and everything.
But at least you'd solve app install, management, drivers, regular users wouldn't have to see disk images anymore, etc.
settings and preferences would be more coherent and familiar because they're used to ios like just those wins would be huge and if you can get those wins while also allowing uh people to do their work in the old way if they want to like that's talking about progressive disclosure
like no one if it's a developer mode or whatever like no one believe me people aren't going to be like i wish i want to have developer mode turned on no nobody wants that they want it to be simple and nice it's like casey's grandparents they're overjoyed when it's like oh this is simple i just do this do this and it all makes sense to me there's no place i can get into trouble they're not going to go looking for the thing to turn on developer mode that's for power users quote unquote and yes there is a class of person who will go looking for it and turn it on and
you know because they're interested in that they're you know they're geeks they're nerds that's fine but regular people trust me do not want the complexity like all of us when we go into a preferences screen and we see an advanced button we click it immediately other people don't even want to go to the preference screen like they don't even want another preference screen exists they probably don't know the preference screen exists like it doesn't need to exist
They just want it to work and work fine.
So I'm pretty much with Marco that I would love a Mac that worked like this as long as I had the option to, you know, the developer mode or the way to do all this stuff.
I just, I'm not sure how long it will take to get there.
Whether Apple has the will and wants to dedicate the resources to get there, because it just seems like still a much more straightforward path to continue to enhance iOS.
I feel like iOS is getting this rate.
iOS is still getting more sophisticated at a faster rate than the Mac is getting simpler.
which is fine with me as an old Mac user.
But if I start drawing lines on graphs and seeing how this ends up, it just seems to me that unless Apple has a massively renewed interest in the Mac, that iOS will eventually overtake it because for whatever their interest is in the Mac, their interest in iOS seems much stronger on the phone and still even a little bit stronger on the iPad.
And who knows what other weird devices they're planning.
I mean, you've got the watchster on the mix there too.
Like,
iOS as a legacy-free basis for innovation seems like a much easier path than continuing to bang their head against the Mac.
You know, by and large, I agree with you guys, but I can't help but think a couple things.
One, it almost sounds like you're saying, I want the good parts of iOS and none of the parts that bother me.
And that's okay.
Like, I mean, yeah, that does sound good in and of itself.
But, I mean, for two people that really don't seem to be too terribly interested in the iPad...
it's interesting hearing you say, oh, I'd love all that stuff from the iPad.
Whose people are those?
I use the iPad every day.
So do I. I use the iPad more than I use my Mac.
Well, I can't say that, but I do use the iPad.
At home, I use, definitely, obviously I work all day on a Mac, so that's the majority of my time.
But in my house, I use my iPad literally every day and many days go by when I don't wake my Mac from sleep.
Well, but I think to clarify this, it's not that all of iOS is bad.
There's tons of great stuff in iOS.
There's tons of advantages of iOS.
Between the way iPads work and the way macOS works...
there's a huge difference in interaction paradigm the file you know the whole difference between being you know mac os is very uh file centric like most pc os is where uh whereas you know ios is app centric like these are massive differences in just the way these systems work of course you can take some of what's good about one and apply it to the other uh the only question is you know where's your starting point and and where are you going and you know like
As John said, it's a lot easier to make iOS more capable than to make macOS simpler.
However, no matter what you do to iOS, it's still going to feel like a big phone that's app-centric and not file-centric and everything else because that's just like the entire design of the system.
Whereas on the Mac...
If what you want is the PC style of computing, it is totally possible with something like this crazy scheme, this crazy comment that is probably BS, it is totally possible to take the best of PC style computing, make it still work the way that people who want that are accustomed to, but bring in the modern advantages of iOS.
Yeah, that summary makes a lot more sense to me.
imagine if you gave your grandparents this mac described in here i think with the possible exception of the keyboard being intimidating they could be just as delighted because from their perspective if it's simple and they can figure out how to use it like like if it was basically as simple as the only way you could launch applications is with launchpad launchpad was always visible in the thing it would probably have to be touch um which is another issue entirely in terms of uh
Bridging that divide, but like if they were never faced with the complexity of an open save dialog box or never had to look at a bunch of files or little documents on the desktop or never even looked at the desktop and it was just basically had the simplicity of an iPad but happened to be a Mac, they would be just as delighted because they just want to accomplish a task.
The task is video, you know, a video conference with with my family and be able to send emails or whatever.
And you and I could say, oh, if you had a MacBook adorable, you could do it just fine.
But the difference between a MacBook adorable iPad to them is huge.
So all you need to do to delight them with a Mac is make it so that when they use it, it is just as simple as an iPad.
It can still have lurking under the covers all all the other complexity.
um the file system stuff is a place where we we continue to punt and apple continues to punt i i hold out hope that there is still a better way to collaborate on things than the completely app-centric island model of ios and the completely file-centric uh world of the pc but considering no one has figured it out yet you know we'll just leave that off to the future but again we are talking about the future of computing not the present but anyway like that that's why i think this this mac is uh this type of mac is appealing because it
It will start to blur the lines that we're all thinking in terms of because once something like this appears on the scene, we can't have the same conversation anymore.
It's a different conversation entirely.
Yeah.
The thing that I'm curious to see if this becomes real one day and if the three of us are still blathering on the show is –
What are the restrictions and how egregious are they?
And I mean, Marco talked about this some, but if there's a developer mode, what does that really give you?
And do you have file system access just to your change-rooted root area?
Can you get all the way to the root root?
Can I install a kernel extension?
Would I want to?
I just I can't help but feel like let's say this dropped on our laps tomorrow and, you know, Marco or you or me or all three of us buy one.
I think inevitably what would happen is it would put roadblocks in our way in ways we find frustrating.
And what I'm not sure about is.
Would your average developer, when looking to his or her left and seeing the Touch Bar MacBook Pro, and then looking to his or her right and seeing this phantom ARM-based Mac, I mean, certainly I would choose the Touch Bar MacBook Pro because it doesn't limit me at all.
And this hypothetical new Mac, while it does fix a lot of problems for people in general, I don't think it solves any problem that I'm seeing today.
And so I can just see I have visions of this being like a less extreme version of me saying, well, I don't like working on the iPad because I feel like it constrains me.
And I feel like the Mac is freeing because that is how I feel.
And I think that this hypothetical new ARM Mac would be a lot of the same in that regard, if perhaps a little bit less of it.
A lot of what we would want as developers could be accomplished through VMs.
True.
If it was still possible to have virtual machines running on this in some form, a lot of this could be solved by containering and by virtual machines.
I lost a day this week on Monday.
I spent a whole day...
Finally fixing my local Apache and PHP MySQL installations between my iMac and my laptop, both of which my laptop never had a working one because I did a clean install when I got it.
And I just never finished setting it up and fixing homebrew and fixing PHP and fixing the built in Apache to use the right version of PHP and all this crap.
And I tried MAMP, and then I didn't like it, so I stopped trying MAMP.
And fiddling with all this stuff that's all over the file system, all the stuff that Homebrew puts, and different other package managers do it, and then Homebrew complains that other package managers exist.
Dealing with all this crap all over the file system that gets upgraded when the system gets upgraded, that I'm trying to put my own stuff into and edit the config files and everything else...
So during a lot of that, I'm like, you know, why don't I just install VirtualBox and just make a Linux VM and just run all the stuff in there and be fine?
Try Docker.
You've got a modern enough Mac that you can run Docker.
I know I should know about Docker.
I know nothing about Docker.
I know the general high-level concept of what it is.
I've never seen it, never used it, no idea how it works.
You should try it before you go the full VM route.
And in the meantime, you should compile everything from source and install and user local like I do.
Well, and I did actually, you know, I eventually moved to the full Homebrew setup.
It took me a while to realize that Homebrew installs its own version of Apache.
No, no.
But it did finally do that.
But it was so much messing around and so much crap, and I know that future OS updates will probably break it.
Never touch the system files.
You can only mess in user local.
Do not touch anything else.
Pretend it doesn't exist.
Yeah, and I did eventually move to that system.
But my point is, that is not that different from what if on this hypothetical next-generation Mac OS lockdown mode, which would be the only mode, what if in this OS...
developer mode existed which i think again i do think that developer mode needs to exist where you can just compile stuff or you can run open source software that is compiled from source or through package managers or whatever else somehow you can run open source stuff you can build it yourself and just run it and somehow there needs to be a way to you know to to distribute software out of the app store with developer id gatekeeper whatever that's so given those two exceptions
suppose developer mode is rooted in such a way that you know you you basically get your own version of user local in this little virtualized environment within your home directory that's not that different from what we have now and that's totally fine we could totally work with that it would be fine as long as there's still a way to have a terminal and a way to compile software you get from other places all of these workflows don't break just the file paths might change slightly that's it
It could be done well, like, so that you don't feel constrained, Casey, like, so you don't feel like you're suddenly trapped, because it would just be a matter of coming onto the machine and flipping a few switches and be like, ah, back to normal.
But really, the ultimate cure for this is the same thing that solved the exact same situation in the change from classic macOS to OS X, which was
a big, you know, increase in simplicity and downgrade and customizability with the elimination of whole categories of interfaces and ways of working and lots of third party things being replaced by first party things that could not be enhanced or replaced in a supported manner.
Um,
The solution is, guess what?
There is no more classic macOS.
So, nah.
Like, that was the solution.
It's like, well, you know, go use Windows or Linux, or this is the future of the Mac.
Like, I don't envision the Mac described in this comment here existing alongside the other Macs for any appreciable amount of time.
there would be a transition and you're either you're on board or you're not and you know like take it like that's exactly how it would have to work and especially if they go there by increments but again if you could blink and and you know open your eyes and this thing was here they wouldn't keep them both around the old thing would go away so that would basically solve the problem for you and hopefully like i said you wouldn't feel constrained well maybe tim cook would keep selling the old thing for 10 more years after yeah well you know the software they're a little bit better about that they do upgrade it but like yeah
That you wouldn't... In the same way... Initially, a lot of classic Mac users felt constrained on OS X because it was very young and slow and it was missing a lot of things and it was simpler.
And in some respects, I still feel constrained by some of the interface things in OS X. But...
you get used to it and eventually it becomes the new normal and you accept that it comes with many other benefits so i would imagine that this type of mac would be palatable to you if not immediately then in short order as again as long as they didn't screw it up because i feel like one of the ways that apple especially today's apple could massively screw this up is by going too far and cutting off all these other avenues because
if the mac can't support that type of user like why bother having the mac now i'm saying that's the only reason for the mac's existence but it's like then what are you even doing you're just you're squeezing the mac from both sides until it's basically like a really weird ios because presumably ios would still be advancing so it's like this really weird ios version that can't do the things that a mac used to do but isn't as simple as ios and they put all these resources into morphing the mac into this thing and it's like
what's the point at that point you you have to concede that microsoft had the right approach and that you've just been wasting your time with this dual s strategy as you shave one of your os's from both sides until all that's left is this little skinny spindle that just topples over well and and if they did this again like you know i said earlier like you know this we haven't had a major os transition in a while from apple not since you know 99 or whenever it was john i'm sure has some idea of when that was but um 2001 was 10.1 there you go no
Yeah.
That's my guess.
Yeah.
So, you know, we haven't had a transition since then.
In the Windows world, they have them a little more often, but it still doesn't come that often.
And when you have a major OS transition like that, one of the luxuries of this, I mean, it's painful.
No question.
It's painful.
It's time consuming.
For a while, there's a transition period that just sucks for everybody.
However...
It is an opportunity to modernize app frameworks, to add new capabilities, to basically take the opportunity that you have that you're kind of forcing app makers to do something new, to do like a major update or to even do a rewrite process.
to take the opportunity to, to make it better for everybody.
So for instance, some of the things they could do with the Mac, if they did this, and if they presumably broke a lot of old apps, the fight, they could finally make like a more unified UI framework for one, like make UI kit for the Mac.
And I don't mean make everything look like navigation controllers and make it all function the same way in the UI.
But you know, there's like some of the simple low hanging fruit, like, like unify the way like table views, you know, load their data and,
And make it so we don't have NS color and UI color anymore and stuff like that.
There's a lot of stuff they could do to unify those two frameworks.
They could do things like, as I mentioned previously, cellular Macs.
Because they could implement better control over networking and do all this stuff.
It would give them the opportunity to...
It would force us to live for a while with incompatible software, with, oh, well, we can't do this on the new OS yet because this app hasn't been updated or whatever.
We have to drag along Microsoft and Adobe or whatever else.
But then when we got there, it could be so much better because app makers have been forced to update.
Right now, the Mac software ecosystem is...
There are some bright spots, but a lot of it's just a graveyard because most people who make Mac apps, it's a low priority for them because they can keep making the same old app over and over again, and it's fine, and they can focus their efforts on iOS and stuff.
If the Mac changes, yes, some of them will get lost.
But the ones that want to stay on the Mac will have to put effort into it, and that will make their apps better, and that will make it better for all of us.
So there would be a substantial silver lining, not to mention all the benefits of the OS itself, as I said, of things like the better security, the better sandboxing of the apps, like not having their crap go all over the system.
This could be really good on a number of ways if something like this were to happen.
It would definitely be painful.
And some stuff that you could do now on macOS, you'd never be able to do on this.
But look at how many people do everything they need to do on phones and iPads.
This can do more than that.
Everyone who says they can't do stuff on iOS, sometimes it's because of a capability that iOS just will never be able to do because of its security model.
But sometimes it's just because it doesn't have a very good multitasking model or a very good file system model or things that this would actually have.
So I think it would be a painful transition to go to something like this.
But it wouldn't be impossible.
We would all grumble.
We'd all complain.
But then we'd get on board.
A few things wouldn't be possible anymore forever.
And we'd deal with it.
We'd find new solutions.
Like, if I couldn't use Audio Hijack anymore to record this phone call from Skype...
then we'd probably either stop using Skype, or we could switch to one of those web-based podcast recorder things.
There's already five of those, and there's only going to be more by the time this thing ever exists.
So there's always workarounds.
Time would solve any pain that would be there.
So I think...
even though this was probably all wrong and based on this one weird post on slash dot that's probably bs this kind of sounds cool and if it happened assuming it had those the those two exceptions of developer mode and developer id distribution uh i think it'd be really nice you have to throw cold water on this we have to bring back to our old refrain anytime we discuss anything radical happening to the mac is like
yeah but that would cost a lot of money and take a lot of time and resources and does apple want to put that much money into its legacy platform or however you want to describe the mac because sales volume wise you can justify almost any investment in ios uh can you justify that same and the ipad is along for the ride because even though the ipad's volume is similar to the mac guess what it's it's got the same os as the phone so congratulations you get a lot of development stuff quote unquote for free
But this would be a hell of an investment in the Mac.
It would be on the scale of the classic to OS X transition, or at least close, maybe not that big, but it would be close.
And it would be the biggest investment in the Mac software-wise in many, many, many years.
And so I think it could, you know, I'm not saying it couldn't be.
The right people pitch it.
It could be sold within the company, but it would be a departure.
from uh the historic investment in the mac which has been good and it's you know it hasn't been as high since the transition from os is as you know as is appropriate or even the transition for cpu architecture but this would be an architecture transition and an os transition that is the second biggest one that apple has ever done um
And, you know, we're all on board for it and would be ready for it.
But I'm not entirely sure that Apple is ready to put that money into the Mac, which now that that is the now that that is the most dubious thing about this random slash dot com.
But again, like I wouldn't characterize it as novel or interesting.
I would characterize it as a reiteration of the.
The prototypical idea of a Mac merged with iOS resurfacing now in a new context, and that new context is the new Apple and the new state of Intel versus ARM and the new sales figures for iPad and all of us new people being older and wiser and having seen more of the tech world reconsidering the same thing.
Well, in that case, I will put it in terms they will understand.
You can sell iPad hardware for $1,500.
They already do.
That's not including all the cases.
Wow.
And that's our end.
Thanks to our three sponsors this week, Betterment, Squarespace, and Setapp, and we will see you next week.
Sell iPad hardware for MacBook Pro prices, $2,600.
There you go.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
It's accidental.
They didn't mean to.
So Casey, I hear you're having some car trouble.
Yes, indeed.
So I brought my car in to get the oil changed.
I don't care that you think that's preposterous.
Don't care.
I don't have the time to change my own oil.
Why is that preposterous?
Are you talking to us or the audience who's scolding you?
No, the audience.
I'm hopefully preventing all the people.
No one in the audience is scolding you about not changing your own oil.
Okay, you can send a tweet to at Syracuse about how angry you are that I'm not changing my own oil.
Even people who change their own oil, I feel like now realize that they are outliers.
Probably.
So I had a coupon.
I was very excited.
I had a coupon.
So my BMW oil change was supposed to be $90, which I understand is expensive.
Wait, you were getting into the dealership?
Now it's time for me to scold you.
Yeah.
I was going to the dealership.
Now you're going to hear from them.
Yep.
So, okay.
I understand I am not innocent and I have made mistakes.
Mistakes have been made.
Hey, I do the same thing.
Well, you don't get your oil changed anymore.
But anyway.
Well, I did.
If you're going to the dealership anyway, okay.
But if you're going to the dealership to get your oil changed, no.
Don't do that.
Well, I don't trust like a Jiffy Lube or anything like that.
Oh, geez.
You don't have a Ferrari.
We have to go to this special little Italian person.
It requires synthetic.
It doesn't matter.
The point is.
By the way, for the record, I think it might be covered when you have a lease.
I'm not sure.
But just for the record there.
If it's free, then yes, yes.
By all means.
I believe they are, and it was free for me when I first owned the car because I still had some of the maintenance program.
Yeah, it was like five years, right?
I forget.
It was four, I think.
It doesn't really matter.
But anyway, so I had my $90 coupon.
I'm all excited with myself.
The wherewithal to ask for a loaner, which I was very glad for, and we'll see why in a moment.
But here's my $90 coupon.
I should expect to see you later today.
I probably didn't even need to bother getting a loaner.
I'm going to drive it the handful of miles to work, and then probably immediately later, you know, a handful of miles back, and that'll be that.
I get a call as I'm out to lunch, and they say in so many words, oh, things relating to the drivetrain in the front.
I have an all-wheel drive BMW before you get all angry.
Things related to the drivetrain in the front, like tie rods and bushings and things of that nature.
And the adjustment screw that you use in order to do an alignment has seized.
Things are breaking.
That'll be $1,000, please.
Oh, and you'll get your car back tomorrow because we don't have all the parts.
Okay.
Fine.
So in and of itself, okay, fine.
The car has almost 70,000 miles on it, if I remember correctly.
It is not unreasonable that things would be going wrong.
But in the last year and change...
I had a $5,000 or $6,000 repair of the Vano system.
I had a $1,000 water pump issue that was almost last month.
It was just barely in December.
And now I have this $1,000 issue.
And I think this is the universe giving me a sign that this car is not long for this world.
So I'm getting some pressure from Aaron, and I think it's completely justified to unload the thing because it's just I can't keep the damn thing on the road.
And at first I was resisting, but now I'm to the point that I'm like, screw it.
This thing is not worth my time anymore.
I want to get rid of it.
Now, on paper, the right answer is get a brand new 3 Series, maybe an M3 if I want to spend too much money.
Maintenance will be covered, at least in the beginning.
It'll have a nice big fat warranty.
Problem solved.
Except I feel like I've been burned by BMW.
I think new ones are, as I think we talked about recently, new ones are just unaffordable.
And then that becomes, okay, well, fine, get a pre-owned one.
Well, I just did that.
And yes, this hypothetical new pre-owned one would be
With the CPO warranty, which goes to like 100,000 miles.
And yes, that's possible.
But even if I'm not paying out of pocket constantly for my car to be in the shop, my car is still in the damn shop all the time.
And I feel like the moment a BMW gets past lease time, things start falling apart.
And I have friends that have had similar experiences.
I just don't want to be bothered by it.
So I have many options in front of me.
If you recall, my requirements, which are somewhat loose, are I don't want front-wheel drive.
I want it to get to 60 in under six seconds.
I don't care that that's not necessary on regular roads.
That's what I want.
I want three pedals, and that's mostly it.
So what are my options?
Okay.
I'm only thinking about new right now, and then I'm going to start trying to rack my brain for used because I'm not opposed to going used.
But looking at it, I think every single one of my options has problems.
um a friend of mine actually just written in uh cadillac ats great call but the infotainment is from everything i've ever understood unusable just utterly unusable and i don't know if it has car play i'd have to check that out so that is a potential um if i'm also hideous yeah it's too ugly to be totally to be seen in sorry great car too ugly
fairly hideous i'm not arguing fairly hideous okay so let's just it sounds like the the brain trust has eliminated that so if i'm willing to have wrong wheel drive focus st the problem with that other than it being a ford which in of itself is fine um but it's front wheel drive which i don't particularly care for um and then the rs is also uh is it the rs whatever the super hot roddy one is
Um, that one is just too 18 year old for me.
I'm turning 35 next month.
Just no way.
The ST is a reasonable compromise, but wrong wheel drive.
If I'm willing to go back to Deutschland, I have the Volkswagen GTI, the Gulf R, which is the thing that I think I'm most interested in the a four and the S three, which is basically a Gulf R, but in sedan form, if I'm not mistaken.
Um, come on.
What, what's what, what do you want a series of little Euro hatchbacks?
And then you'd lump the a four on the S three and then I'm like, Oh, it's the same thing.
No, the A4 is wildly different.
The S3, I thought, was basically the drivetrain of the Gulf R. Under the cover, sure, but it's a whole, like, from the outside, it's the difference between driving around in a rabbit and driving around in a regular car.
You're dating yourself even calling it a rabbit.
Here's the thing.
I mean, I could rule out all four of these right now for you.
because a four is a good car it's a little boring but i think he should try it before he decides it's too boring because it's nice looking if it has the features he wants it's reasonably nice inside and out the main slam against it is that it's more boring than the bmw's but i think he should test drive it is the a4 even available on stick
yes oh it is okay i didn't i thought it was anyway uh oh no it is all right so the a4 is basically a three series that's slightly worse like it depends on what you want if you want if you want less if you want it smoother kind of nicer even keel experience if you want a crappier interior and higher prices they look nice they don't feel nice
I'm not sure I agree with you there.
Also, iDrive is way better than their weirdo system.
iDrive is light years better than MMI, at least as of about a year ago.
I forget if the A4 has the updated one or if it's still on the old one.
Yeah, see, I don't know either.
I thought it had the new hotness one, which I have yet to try.
But the A4 supports CarPlay.
I don't think it's wireless CarPlay, but it's CarPlay.
The S3 is basically a Golf R, although a buddy of mine is saying it might be DSG only, which might eliminate it from contention.
Then the Golf R, obviously.
All of these are appealing because they are not front-wheel drive, but that's going back to Germany, and I can't tell if this is a German car problem or if it's a BMW problem.
it's so it's it's a expensive car problem because every car around 60 000 miles especially if you live in the northeast which you don't really but if you did like around 60 or 70 000 crap starts falling apart and breaking or whatever the problem is though when crap falls apart and breaks on a bmw costs a bazillion dollars to fix that's that's where your problem is like any car you keep for that number of miles you're gonna have like if you have a car for 100 000 miles you have to replace the water pump it's not a surprise like it's a thing that happens
right that's but if the water pump costs you 1500 bucks then you're you know you're driving a bmw right that's the thing is that in and of itself any one of these repairs fine whatever well maybe not the vanos exploding but generally speaking like the engine stuff i feel like if you had a honda it would still be fine you would not need to to put that much money into the engine the entire body would rust off the car before the engine would need any work on a honda
So yeah, so I could go back to Germany, Golf R, A4, S3 apparently is definitely DSG only from what I'm being told.
So that's eliminated from contention.
It's also really overpriced for what you're buying.
That's probably true.
I forgot to mention the GTI.
Well, I think I mentioned the GTI.
I've heard the performance pack is phenomenal, the GTI performance pack.
However, that is also wrong wheel drive.
So, so far, still in contention.
Focus ST, wrong wheel drive.
GTI, performance pack, wrong wheel drive.
R, German.
A4, German, a little bit boring.
And then now I get into like the real slim pickings.
If I'm willing to go extremely slowly, I could get an Accord, which I cannot option the way I want, or a Mazda 6, which I cannot option the way I want.
And then if I'm willing to live inside of my car because I will be divorced and never get to see my wife or child again, I could get a Tesla.
Okay.
So here's one of the big questions here is, do you want this to be a car that can comfortably hold your kid?
sitting here now yes that's probably ruining everything but yeah we're gonna go with yes on this one because then your only options on this list that can go fast are the model s that's it like no that's not true the a4 goes plenty fast it's it's about the same speed as my car it's a little slower but not too much slower don't do the a4 if you're gonna get the a4 i think you need to go to a dealer and casey needs to go to a dealer and a
for now you're not buying just go in there to look at it maybe take a test drive poke around you're not even thinking of buying just check it out because i feel like you're marco's anti audi biases is uh audi is great unwarranted audi is great but bmw is better it's simple as that like audi makes great cars current ones not the current three series with a weirdo electric steering and the ugly outsides and the bazillion dollars worth of options
Well, but I mean, talk about a bazillion dollars worth of options.
Audi is also the same way about the option pricing and the repair costs and everything else.
Basically, in most of the downsides, they're the same or roughly the same.
And I think BMW's upsides are better, basically.
I think Audis are, again, they're nice cars.
Some of them are really nice cars.
But the interior, I've always thought felt noticeably cheaper than BMW's.
The media system is a major step backwards.
I deeply agree.
Yeah.
And I'm actually kind of surprised that they still offer a stick because I think most of their cars, they don't even offer that as an option anymore.
Although, to be fair, BMW is not that different in that regard.
So, yeah, you can get an A4 Premium Plus with all-wheel drive and actually the only available transmission is the six-speed.
It does have CarPlay, by the way.
I was just flipping through their website.
They got a big screenshot of it.
There you go.
It's not wireless, but it is CarPlay, nevertheless.
Wait, wait, wait.
Hold on.
The A4, which one?
The Premium Plus?
Just the plain old A4.
I'm just swapping through the things.
With front-wheel drive or all-wheel drive?
No, all-wheel drive.
Oh, okay.
They have that and a stick?
Yeah.
Oh, look at that.
Six-speed manual.
It's basically my car.
I mean, well, it's a four-cylinder turbo, but otherwise, it's basically my car.
It's six-speed, all-wheel drive, et cetera.
I wasn't aware that they were still making all-wheel drive with stick.
That's pretty good.
Well, and I think this is new.
I think they just added the manual transmission option like this model year, even though I think the refresh happened months and months ago, maybe even last model year.
That's the thing about the time to get ready for your car.
It's not so much whether your car is falling apart.
It's that the longer you wait, the less chance you have to get any car with a stick.
Period.
That's true.
But I mean, I mean, you know, you would have some warning when that was going to happen.
But anyway, that is in broad strokes.
That is true.
So I would say for you, I'm telling you as a friend, Casey.
I'm not buying a damn Tesla.
No, no.
I'm telling you as a friend.
This is my intervention here.
Mm hmm.
I would rather you buy an overpriced German hatchback than... Oh, not a hatchback.
Listen, I would rather you buy an overpriced German hatchback than to have you compromise on what's really important to you and to have you get an Accord or a Mazda.
Well, that's the thing.
The Accord is a nice car.
But what about versus the A4?
why'd you just eliminate that one i can understand what you're saying like i'd rather have you get a sporty hatchback than a boring stand fine right well i'd rather have you get a sporty hatchback than a sporty sedan like the a4 no i the a4 is is fine you know you you know you've driven one before casey you know you know what they are yes but i haven't driven one of the new ones so the last one i drove was the pre-refresh version and my understanding is
A lot changed with this refresh for the better.
Then it's definitely worth seeing because as we know, BMW has had some shortcomings with the new 3 Series.
I completely agree with you guys.
The A4, absolutely, absolutely worth a look.
I think the Golf R would probably be a more exciting car.
And certainly, I'm pretty sure it'd be considerably quicker.
But the A4, I think, would be sufficient in every metric that I can think to throw at it.
also expensive to repair and maintain by the way well you're still shopping in german luxury sedans and so but you but if you especially if you got it so here's here's the question would you consider either new financing or leasing which would then take care of the maintenance issue for the most part if not entirely yeah see i mean financing whatever that's it you know whatever but lease it do it just lease it i don't want to lease a car like i don't because when it leases up you can get a model three if you're lucky
Well, that's true.
So the thing with leasing is, is that in a perfect world, what I want is the situation we have with Aaron's car.
Aaron's car has been in the shop for repairs fewer times in the 10 years we've owned it.
Well, nine and a half at this point.
than my car has in the last 10 months.
What is it?
A boring, reliable Japanese car.
It's a boring, reliable Japanese car.
It's boring, slow, and reliable.
You don't want that.
That would crush your soul.
But I want something.
It will crush my soul, but I want something that will last more than 10 freaking minutes.
You have it.
It's called Aaron's car.
It's called All My Honda Accords.
Yes.
No, look, if you want to have a boring, reliable car, there's lots of great options.
Pretty much everything from Honda, Toyota, there's lots of good options.
Hondas aren't boring.
Toyota's boring.
Honda is as exciting as it can to be given the horsepower.
I'm not saying this has a powerful engine in it, but it is... Okay.
But...
It's a thinking man's BMW, Rave's car and driver.
Okay, but anyway.
Test drive one of those anyway.
You won't be able to find a stick to test drive, but you should, well, I don't know.
Maybe next time you visit, you can test drive mine and see what it's like.
I mean, the thought has crossed my mind that maybe it is worth testing it because, oh my God, it's just, it's bananas that all, I mean, okay, I understand that what I'm about to say is a bit preposterous, but all I want
is a six-speed, not front-wheel drive car with four doors that gets to 60 in less than six seconds that will last for more than 60,000 miles.
Is that so much to ask?
How fast is this A4?
I think five and a half-ish, something like that.
It's actually much quicker than one would think.
I mean, you can go to the S4 if you want more out of it.
It's a lot more money, though, right?
I certainly wouldn't be doing that new, for sure.
So here's the thing.
Look, I mean, this is one of those, like, you know, project management triangle situations.
It is, it is.
For what you want, basically you have to either pick, like, fast but crappy...
Or like, you know, slow but nice or used and expensive to maintain.
It's like you have to pick one of these things or you raise the budget and you get divorced.
I mean, one of those like one of these things has to budge or you have to be willing to tolerate something that you don't want to tolerate right now.
uh so whether that is the shame of driving an audi uh or whether it's shameful whether it's spending more than you wanted to spend or whether it's having more high price maintenance down the road or giving up your entire soul and and driving an accord um and i say this as somebody who bought an accord at one time and enjoyed it for a couple years
Opportunity costs.
Think about what you could buy with the money you saved buying the Accord and how much happier that would make you.
Is there anything that would make Casey happier than a fast car, John?
Yeah, that's the thing.
I understand what you're driving at.
This is Casey we're talking about.
How about college education for your children?
Just saying.
This is not going to make or break Declan's college education.
Right.
So therefore, I think basically you have a tough decision to make.
John will push you towards the Accord.
I'm pushing him towards the Audi.
I'm just saying the Accord isn't as bad as you make it out to be, but he wants something faster, so the Accord is in it.
So try the Audi.
Basically, since none of the three of us have driven the current generation, apparently the newest A4, I guess I've come around.
I think you should try that because I do find the F generation of BMWs, the F30 generation of BMWs to be pretty underwhelming in a lot of ways.
And as you mentioned, quite expensive for what you get.
That being said, so is the Audi.
However, I think it's certainly worth trying.
Well, but let's go build one.
We can keep talking, but let's build an Audi.
I started down that path, and I got sidetracked.
It looks like there is currently no S4.
Is it between update generations, because I just did the A4?
I think that's correct.
What color would I get?
Let me turn off flux and blind myself.
Hmm.
I don't know what color you would get.
Shut up.
God, you're such a jerk.
I don't know how to even consider picking a color for you.
You've got to get with the program.
It's the year of the red car.
So that's what you've got to do, right?
Oh, is it?
Okay, we can go red.
Marco got a red car?
I got a red car?
Come on.
I'm not sure how this looks in red.
It looks okay, but I wonder if I see what else.
Audi historically makes a very good premium black.
That is a nice black, actually.
I can't do a black car.
Stop, stop.
I can't do a black car.
I mean, look, they have like four different shades of white.
Literally, they have, let's see, there's glacier white metallic.
There's Floret Silver, which is so light it's basically white.
There's Cuvie Silver, which is kind of champagne but almost white.
There's Ibis White, which is another white.
And there's Monsoon Gray, which is a pretty light gray, almost white.
So maybe this actually is your brand.
Maybe all these years talking about BMWs that we've been wrong all this time and you actually wanted a brand that has five different shades of white on every new car to choose from.
The 19-inch wheels, because I'm an idiot.
No, no, no.
You got to pick the Sport Plus package.
Go with 18, because the 19s don't look that much better than 18s, and the ride will be better in 18s.
You're such an old man.
No, I'm just serious.
He's right.
It's one-inch difference.
You're not going to be able to eyeball it.
It's not like... You'll just have to deal with the fact that your wheels are smaller than mine, but it'll be fine.
Oh, listen to this guy.
And here's the thing, though.
Performance-wise, you're roughly in the 328 category of performance here, but you're spending like $45,000 at least.
$47,875.
That's the thing.
Price-wise, I think it's pretty much the same as BMW.
Once you option it up the way you want it,
you're like they're both very expensive for what you're getting that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it as you know i i often argue on the other side of this but i'm just pointing out that like this is not a great value compared to bmw it's it's going to be about the same like in the same ballpark doesn't of course it doesn't mention the 0 to 60 time why would it i could swear 5.7 seconds it's in the 10 i was gonna say okay i thought it was around five and a half i mean like that's good but like is that is that like fifty thousand dollars in 2017 good
Yeah, see, now I'm coming back to the Golf R. Let's see, where is that?
You're too old for this car.
No, I'm not.
The Golf R?
Yeah, you're too old for this.
No, I'm not.
Our friend Brad has one, and he's not too old for it.
We're all the same age.
He pulls it off.
We wouldn't pull it off.
You make a good point, actually.
He's also a lot cooler than us.
He lives in California.
He can pull that off.
We can't.
You know, if you want to go two doors, speaking of jamming your kid in the back, the Accord Coupe does 060 in 5.6 seconds.
I do not want to go two doors.
Is the Volkswagen site not working for you or are my bananas?
Volkswagen doesn't work for me.
Oh, stop you.
What about the last item on this list?
Which one is that?
The divorce option?
Yep.
It's $100,000, Marco.
I could buy two A4s.
What about a used Model S?
You can get a used Model S or a 50K?
That's where things get interesting.
Buy it from MKBHD.
I don't think he wants this anymore.
When you talk about maintenance costs, I would definitely not want to keep a Model S past the big battery powertrain warranty, but I think that's 100,000 miles.
So if you get one that's right off lease, it's like 30-ish K miles, then...
it would probably need almost no work for like the next five years until you really wanted to, you know, until the mileage started getting really high.
And then you would probably, you know, trade it in for something else at that point.
But because like, you know, there are used Model Ss.
There aren't a lot of them because three years ago, they weren't selling that many.
So, you know, there aren't many of them to choose from, but they do come in.
They are usually like, you know, you have to like call the dealer sometimes.
Like they're not usually going to be like... Oh, no, they have a list.
Okay, there you go.
I put it in the chat.
But the problem is there's no 90Ds, which is what you and underscore have, and I think would be a perfectly reasonable... Well, the 90 has only existed for like a year and a half.
Okay, well, there you go.
So what you'd be looking at maybe would be the 85D, but all of the Ds, all the dual model, the dual motor ones have only existed for, I think, about two years or so.
So the problem is I would want the dual motor for the acceleration, not because I necessarily need all-wheel drive.
It is better.
I mean, just in general, the dual motor was a substantial improvement to the car.
So you do want that.
So P85D...
The cheapest one they have is 80 grand.
So I could buy... That's the P model.
That's the one that's new for like $130,000.
That's the cheapest... The first entry they have that has dual motor is the P85D for 80 grand with 15,000 miles.
That's kind of awesome.
What do you mean that's kind of awesome?
It's $80,000.
Do you know how fast that is?
That's...
That's the one that I test drove, and I felt like it was getting smacked in the face, and I said, no, this is too fast.
I understand that.
It was a P85D.
You're talking about I could almost buy an A4 and a Golf R for one of these.
I can't justify it.
Or five Accords.
Or five Accords.
I can't justify it.
I can't.
I'm not saying you're wrong.
There's a 70D on here for $67,000.
You could drive a different Accord on every day of the week.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
That 70D is a hideous color, though.
Yes, it is.
It's like you spilled some champagne into some snow slush.
I've seen more of the little mustache Model S's, and they've really grown on me, and now I like it better than the fish mouth.
What?
Get out of here.
They look less hideous to me now, but they still look weird.
I'm sure by the time it's time for me to renew my lease, I will be okay with it, but it's still weird right now.
Yeah, I mean, it's worse in white, obviously, right, or in lighter colors, but it's turned me around having seen them.
Now when I see one of the old ones, I go, ugh.
I mean, I never really liked the big ball gag, but the pinch nose looks better in real life than it does in photos.
oh man i disagree i've seen it a couple times it is not good the point is this is a lot to choose from already and because the dual model versions have only existed for like a year and a half or two years there's probably about to be lots of them coming in like in inventory over the next year
It is certainly worth considering heavily.
I'm not going to necessarily say that you should definitely do this, but it solves a lot of problems.
It solves a lot of problems.
It is faster than everything else you're looking at, first of all.
It is way lower maintenance in all likelihood, especially the newer you go.
Once you're into the D generation, they ironed out a lot of the early problems, and when you're still covered under the warranty, that solves everything right there.
You pay something like...
500 bucks a year for like this giant big inspection they do every year but that's it that's that's your entire total maintenance cost until i need to spend twenty thousand dollars to replace all the batteries because whatever one i'm hypothetically buying has between 15 and 30 thousand miles on it i think it's like 10 years it's it's really far into it it's basically you don't really keep the car that long that's the answer to that question you remember that i'm telling you that aaron's car is nine and a half years old almost everything you're looking at you're
all these picks you're not going to keep those picks for 10 years like not none of them you're gonna you're you will you will own none of those when they are 10 years old except for the accord obviously you will own none of those when they're eight years old how old how old is your car now like six or something it's not even that old right it was delivered to the original owner in december of 2010 if i remember right yeah so it's six and it's already so expensive to maintain that you're trying to get rid of it
Yeah, but that's because I didn't buy a boring Japanese car.
That's the problem.
Right, and so my point is, you're going to have high maintenance costs on all of the cars in this list.
Any car that you're going to be happy driving that's not going to crush your soul and ruin you as a person, you are going to have high maintenance costs if you want to keep it past year like, you know, six or seven, basically.
It's probably about as far as you can go without things getting a little too crazy.
you're going to have to pay a lot for every car.
None of them are particularly good investments or values.
No matter how you own a car, you're going to pay a lot.
Because you want a fast car, you're going to pay more.
Simple as that.
No matter how you slice it, no matter how you arrange it, no matter whether you buy new or used or lease, whether you get bitten by bad maintenance luck like you did with this one or whether you don't,
No matter what, there is no way to continuously drive fast cars without spending a ton of money on them.
This is a place you have chosen to spend your money.
You are an adult.
You are a good person.
You make a decent living.
You can do that.
It's totally fine.
You don't indulge yourself in very many other things.
This is what you do.
It's okay.
This is the sound of the devil that's on Marco's shoulder all the time.
I know, right?
You are the best worst influence.
It's on both of his shoulder.
He doesn't have an angel on one.
It's just too little devil saying this to Marco constantly.
You are the best worst influence in the world.
This matters a lot to you.
You get a lot of joy out of this.
You take a lot of your life happiness from driving a nice, fast car.
Which actually maybe makes me wonder if my priorities are screwed up, but I understand what you're saying.
Look, everyone has something like this, you know?
Be happy that yours is something relatively harmless like this and not like drugs.
A lot of people's vices are way worse than this.
Drugs are Mac Pros.
Yeah, God forbid.
I mean...
On the plus side, I don't like expensive watches yet.
Yeah, exactly.
That's way worse.
Seriously, it could be so much worse.
Just look at Marco.
Exactly.
It could be way worse.
So what I'm saying basically is like pens for crying out loud.
So basically, like what I'm saying is.
Don't don't feel guilty that you like nice fast cars and don't try to talk yourself down from what you really want.
Because a car, it's a long-term choice.
You have to make this decision, and you have to be driving whatever you pick.
That's going to be your car for the next at least few years.
And so it matters a lot.
You shouldn't talk yourself down out of, like, you know, Casey's self-doubt.
Like, let your friends encourage you, at least this one.
Don't listen to that one talking about something foreign in Japanese.
Listen to this friend encourage you.
Tell him to go test drive an A4.
That's what I tell him to do.
I think that's fair.
I think test diving A4 is reasonable.
I think if I were a betting man, I'd probably get the Gulf R because it's the least amount of compromise all in all.
Basically, the only thing I'm compromising on is I don't really want a hatchback, although there is some convenience that comes from it.
That's a big thing.
Interior quality is going to be worse than the A4 by a lot.
I don't think it'll be a lot.
Now, I have not sat in a gulf in a long time, but people that are friends of mine that are also car nuts swear by Volkswagen interiors and by proxy Audi as well.
I happen to like BMW interiors.
I happen to like the way BMWs think because I think the same way.
And I'm trying to figure out what a specific thing I can cite.
I don't have any off the top of my head, but...
iDrive has always made sense to me, you know, stuff like that.
But everything I've understood is that Volkswagen gets interiors right.
You can debate the exteriors.
You can debate a lot of things.
You can debate whether or not they make diesels that get more than four miles a gallon.
But they do interiors right, from what I'm told.
And I mean, I think the plan is, if I'm really serious about this, which I think I am, the plan is first to get Erin a car because she needs one worse and she's next in line.
But after that, test drive a Golf R, test drive an A4, and that's probably the entire.
I'd probably test drive a Focus ST just to see, but it's probably one of these.
So may I suggest an alternative?
Mm-hmm.
So you are prepared to spend probably $50,000 on a nice A4.
Potentially, yes.
Potentially.
Okay.
The A4 is pretty much what you have now.
It's moving you to the newest version of what you're already driving with a different shape logo on the front.
It is not an upgrade.
It is not probably a downgrade in any meaningful way.
It is slightly.
It's going to be a little bit slower if that's where I end up.
Okay, so you're actually getting slower.
Okay, right.
Okay.
You're losing a couple cylinders, etc.
Okay.
That's about $50,000 to do that.
For 55, you could have a brand new fully loaded M2.
Stop.
Stop with that noise.
The problem is the waiting list for an M2 is... The waiting list for an M2 is like two years.
My car will be exploded by then.
Then get the M235i.
Close enough.
Look, BMWs are really nice cars when you don't have to pay to maintain them.
Well, that's true.
All I'm doing is punting my problem down the road.
I'm kicking the camera.
Yeah, so look, I mean, I know you.
As much as I want you to drive a Tesla, I know that your left foot would fall off and you'd be upset.
As much as I want you to have something nice and fast that is a little... Nice and fast in other ways, like your little GTI and R and Focus options...
I can't let you do that.
I just can't let you drive a hatchback.
You're too old for that.
You're done with that.
You realize all of Europe, any age group drives a hatchback.
It's different.
Europe is different.
California is different.
We live here on the East Coast, and we are boring geeks in our 30s.
You can't drive a hatchback.
I can drive a hatchback.
You have a kid, for Christ's sake.
You can't.
No.
All right.
So that's out.
The A4 is a great car, I'm sure.
Does it not have a six-cylinder option anymore?
Is that not a thing?
No, it does not.
Okay, maybe when the S4 comes back, presumably.
Probably.
But that would then be more money than this, I bet.
What you really want, deep down in your heart, what you really want is a six-speed rear-wheel drive BMW.
Well, I want it until the moment that the warranty runs out, and then I need to get something different again.
If only there is a way to have a car where you are always under warranty.
God, the white M2 is hideous.
you get the blue one right i think you have absolutely when i when i priced yours out here just now i i picked the blue one for you because i i also surprisingly i also think the white is hideous and i think black is a little bit boring for that car um so yeah i think i think blue is the only option for that car you could also do the m240i uh which is very good in itself i've driven the m235 a friend at work has one and it was phenomenal
Rearble drive M240i is only $46.
It's like $10,000 less.
That is interesting.
That's actually a pretty good compromise if I don't mind never being able to put Declan in the car.
I mean, you could.
It's a two-door.
It would suck.
You could.
But you wouldn't want this if you were going to do that a lot.
But really, what you would be happiest with...
is probably something like this.
It's probably not settling for a Volkswagen Group made hatchback.
And the A4 would be fine, except it's pretty much a sideways step.
You're getting what you already had and actually slightly slower because you're losing a couple cylinders.
BMW makes good cars that you like a lot.
They just suck to maintain.
You know, the thing that pisses me off, so I just priced my M2 and I came up with 55, 202.
But the thing that really pisses me off about it in the summary page says your M2 coupe and there's, you know, a panoramic view that you can, well, a quasi panoramic view of the car.
And man, does it look good.
But right under that, estimated lease $829.
MSRP is billed 55202.
The next item on the list, 060, 4.1 seconds.
You get me, BMW.
You really get me.
I can't do another BMW.
I'm so angry about it right now.
I just can't.
I'm over it.
wait cool off run some numbers and consider all your options really like don't don't rule anything out unless it wouldn't make you happy to drive then rule it out so goodbye accord goodbye Mazda sorry truth I'm not sure the a4 would make me terribly happy but it's worth a shot right exactly you're actually getting slower than your current car like this is what I'm saying like
During the good days, when you've been owning your wonderful white BMW, during these good days, were you ever thinking that your next car would be slower?
No, certainly not.
Right.
Exactly.
You were thinking, man, this is a great car, and my next one's going to be even faster.
You were thinking about getting an M3 next.
And I totally agree with you that the current M3 is ridiculously expensive and is probably not the right move.
But, and also, it sounds just disgusting.
It's...
there's now finally enough of them in the world that I'm starting to like see and hear more of them in real life my goodness is that a hideous sounding car but the M2 isn't the M2 sounds nice and is kind of like what the M3 should be but isn't the M2 is a good car
i really think that you should consider it and if not the m2 then the m240 which is very it's also very good i'm not gonna do that i'm not gonna get a coupe it's not gonna happen i mean it's kind of like a sedan just with the doors removed but like it's like you're riding at sedan height you're not like on the floor like you are like in like an s2000 like you know like you're you're riding a sedan height you're roughly sedan shaped you have similar like sedan weight distributions and
Or say screw it and get an M3 and just be done with it and just never drive it near my house so I don't have to hear it.
Wow.
There's no way I'd get an M3.
No freaking way.
Not a chance.
I'm pretty much telling myself I will not buy another BMW, if ever, at least next.
I'm just not going to do it.
Then you can get a worse car for you.
That's fine.
What is worse about a Golf R?
What is worse?
The size, the refinement, the interior.
The only thing that's worse about the Golf is for people who hate hatchbacks, but in case he doesn't.
No, hate them, but I don't like them, too.
He doesn't hate hatchbacks, and so that eliminates my main objection to the Golf is that it's a hatchback.
Every other aspect of it sounds like Casey would have fun with it, and he's somehow not bothered by driving around in a rabbit, so that's fine.
You're such a jerk.
No, Casey, look, you need to forgive yourself.
Let yourself get something nice.
We need to forgive him for getting a hatchback.
That's what we need to do.
He needs to forgive himself for getting a hatchback.
$40,472 for a brand new Golf R. You could also, although if you do get that, we'll have to have like a seminar on how to pronounce the name of the car.
What are you, are you a golf person?
What do you mean?
No, he keeps saying like the of Mexico, blank of Mexico.
That's what he keeps saying, but that's not the name of the car.
It's an O. I...