Undefined Wait Period
Casey:
Oh, and what did you say?
Casey:
Nobody looks at a man's shoes.
Casey:
I did not place that reference until somebody linked it in the show notes.
John:
What a surprise.
John:
What a surprise.
John:
Neither one of you got my Monty Python one last week.
John:
Finally, one person on Twitter got it.
Casey:
I don't know that I've seen Monty Python.
Casey:
I think I've seen Holy Grail, and that's the only Monty Python I think I've ever seen.
John:
That's what I did.
John:
It was from Holy Grail.
Casey:
I knew I recognized the reference about the shoes.
Casey:
I just couldn't place it until I saw the link.
Casey:
Does that give me partial credit?
John:
No, because Shawshank is not an obscure movie.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
It's one of my favorites, too.
John:
It's not an obscure line from the movie, either.
John:
It is a very popular movie right in your wheelhouse for your age group, and it is a pivotal, important line from the movie.
Casey:
It is.
Casey:
I have no excuses.
John:
No, you don't.
John:
Sorry, Dad.
John:
I try to tailor my things to you, and they just go by.
John:
The Monty Python I didn't expect you to get, because that's before your time.
John:
But I expected more people on the internet to get it, but only one person.
John:
On Twitter, got it?
Casey:
Please love me anyway.
Casey:
I'll try to do better.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
I'll do it.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
September is, among other things, the most popular month amongst Apple people, but it is also a very, very, very important month.
Casey:
In September, it's National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.
Casey:
And our dear friend Stephen Hackett, his eldest son, Josiah, has been affected by childhood cancer since he was six months old.
Casey:
And
Casey:
Two of Stephen's children, including Josiah, are running or walking or doing some sort of marathon to raise money for St.
Casey:
Jude's Children's Hospital.
Casey:
And if you're not from the United States, St.
Casey:
Jude's is a children's research hospital.
Casey:
They take no money from their patients.
Casey:
They run entirely from donations and grants and things like that.
Casey:
And so this month, as every September, Stephen Hackett is trying to raise money for St.
Casey:
Jude's.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I can't think of a better, more universally agreeable target of your hard-earned money listener than Children's Research Hospital.
Casey:
And I mean that genuinely.
Casey:
And so Stephen originally had asked, or had not asked, but had hoped to raise $9,000.
Casey:
As we record on Wednesday the 20th, he is at $17,000.
Casey:
And I will consider it a personal failing of the ATP listeners.
Casey:
We need a good name like Tim's, like Hello Internet has.
Casey:
But anyway...
John:
Tim's is not a good name.
John:
It's a fantastic name.
John:
It is not because it's gender specific, which is awful.
John:
They tried to brush over it on the re-show and it drives me nuts.
John:
But anyway.
John:
We can call our listeners Upgradians.
John:
That probably isn't taken.
Casey:
So anyway, we need to call the Itpsers.
Casey:
That didn't work at all.
Casey:
Yeah, we'll just edit that out.
Casey:
Don't worry.
Casey:
And whenever I say that, I know that means it's not getting edited out.
Casey:
Anyway, the fundraiser is at $17,048 as I sit here now.
Casey:
If we are not, well, I shouldn't say we, if the Hackett's haven't raised $20,000 by the end of September, I will consider it a personal failing of all of you that listen to ATP.
Casey:
And so I am asking, nay, begging all of you, perhaps the accidentals, if you will.
Casey:
That's terrible also, but it's the best I got.
Casey:
The accidents.
Casey:
The accidents.
Casey:
That's really terrible.
Casey:
So I'm asking.
Casey:
We've got to stop this.
Casey:
We'll workshop it.
Casey:
But anyway, we'll put it in the parking lot.
Casey:
I'm asking all of you to please, even if it's just a dollar, and I mean that, even if it's just a dollar, whatever, a dollar is more than no dollars.
Casey:
Please donate to the Hackett's fundraiser for St.
Casey:
Jude's.
Casey:
It would mean a lot to Stephen, and it would mean a lot to all three of us.
Casey:
So if you have any extra money with which you can scrape a donation together, and I mean that genuinely.
Casey:
I'm not trying to be a jerk.
Casey:
please consider throwing a little bit of your hard-earned money their way because gosh knows they deserve it.
Casey:
So just a quick serious note on that.
Casey:
Anything else you two?
Marco:
I would go even further and say if we don't hit $20,000, John will give you all a thumbs down.
Casey:
Individually.
Casey:
He will tweet every single one of you individually.
Marco:
All of the accidents he will tweet.
John:
We don't want to just use the stick.
John:
We should use the carrot.
John:
If we break 20K, we should come up with a good name for ATP listeners.
John:
oh i like that that's putting a lot of pressure on us the person who who makes it cross over 20k uh send us a screenshot and you might have input on what the name is oh i like that too a screenshot because those can't be fake not at all i love when people screenshot things look take a screenshot you then you'll have proof i don't what young people who grew up in a world with computers
Marco:
We can at least verify whether it has crossed $20,000 yet or not.
Marco:
We can verify that.
Marco:
It would be at least like everyone trying to fake it would have to do it at around the same time at least.
Marco:
And this would be a good problem to have.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So anyway, please, if you have any extra cash, please send it to St.
Casey:
Jude.
Casey:
And I know all of us would appreciate it.
Casey:
So thank you for that.
Marco:
And look at it this way.
Marco:
Like, you know, Apple just released a whole bunch of new crap, none of which costs less than about 40 bucks.
Marco:
Like, of everything they've released, like, is there anything that costs under $40?
Marco:
A single, any accessory or anything?
Marco:
Probably not, right?
Marco:
Even like, if you want to get like, now your phone can fast charge, but you need to spend like $70 between a brick and a cable to make it fast charge.
Marco:
And we're willing to do that kind of crap all the time.
Marco:
Like we geeks, fans, listeners of this show.
Marco:
So to drop like 50 or 100 bucks to St.
Marco:
Jude for literally helping children with cancer, like it's as Casey said, it's pretty hard to find a more agreeable cause and a more beneficial cause than this.
Marco:
And the fact that the families who have to go through that literally do not pay a dime for the health care for like hundreds of thousands of dollars or more worth of health care that their children need.
Marco:
the last thing you want to worry about is how are we going to pay for this?
Marco:
You know, that's a hard enough thing for people to go through.
Marco:
So to have that burden of the finances lifted from the parents who have to go through that is so remarkable that this is worth supporting.
Marco:
It's worth helping to make that possible when we can.
Marco:
So those of us who can, please help.
Casey:
And to go back to the stick rather than the carrot, the chat room is saying ATPons is the leading contender right now.
John:
Oh, that's awful.
Casey:
Yeah, and that's what we're going to use if we don't get to 20K.
John:
No, no, that would be an example of a bad name.
Casey:
I know, that's my point.
John:
If we don't cross 20K, we'll use ATPons.
John:
No, I don't like the stick.
John:
I like the carrot.
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
All right, anyway, moving on.
Casey:
All right, so since we haven't had follow-up for a while, guess what, everyone?
Casey:
We've got a little bit of follow-up.
Casey:
So let's start with Marco.
Casey:
You apparently would like to slightly correct yourself about how you were slightly wrong about the iPhone X screen size.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So last episode, I was talking about the different screen sizes, and I pointed out that the iPhone X screen has the same resolution, the same point width as the iPhone 678, the non-plus version, which I was disappointed that we're not getting at least more width in screen real estate.
Marco:
But it turns out that while that was correct, it is the same number of points in the user interface, it actually is physically larger.
Marco:
I would still like to have the same density and just more space, but this is better than that at least, because maybe this might allow you to set the dynamic text size one notch down significantly.
Marco:
You know, so like you can kind of find ways to fit more on screen.
Marco:
It will also, of course, help with photos and video to look better because this is a true 3x screen.
Marco:
So we actually are getting like, you know, nicer resolution, you know, photos will look better and everything.
Marco:
So it isn't a total loss on the width gain.
Marco:
There is some width gain, just no gain in points as measured by the screen.
John:
So we should hoist up an item from lower and follow up.
John:
The guys who do paint code, because the URL is paintcodeapp.com, have a really cool diagram showing the resolution and points, so the logical resolution, the pixels, the physical resolution, and the physical size for all the different size phones that Apple has made.
John:
It's a great diagram, and if you want to have a visualization of all this info all on one page that you can look at, we'll put that link in the show notes.
Marco:
I love to say PaintCode is an amazing app.
Marco:
I used it to make my blog post of the month and it's wonderful.
Marco:
I absolutely love it.
Marco:
And I have searched for this page pretty much probably once every two weeks for the last two years.
Marco:
Because I always have to refer, like, how wide is the plus again?
Marco:
Or I have some question.
Marco:
And this is right at the top of my search results.
Marco:
And it's always purple because I already clicked on it.
Marco:
And it's just, yeah, this page is very helpful.
Marco:
So thank you, PaintCode.
Marco:
Also, PaintCode is an awesome app.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I don't think it was last episode.
Casey:
I think it was the episode prior, but in the last couple of episodes, we've talked about John's new MacBook Pro that he has at work and how he is now a resident of Dongletown.
Casey:
And I thought you covered, John, why you don't plug your mouse or keyboard into the back of the monitor.
Casey:
But let's talk about that.
Casey:
And could you also cover that everyone and their mother recommended, all the ATPons recommend, I can't even do that with a straight face.
Don't do it.
Don't do it.
Casey:
Everyone recommended that you use some Thunderbolt dock, of which there were like five or ten different options.
Casey:
So can you kind of do a little refresher and build on that for us?
John:
So long ago, no one remembers that show except for me, I guess.
John:
Why not plug the mouse and keyboard into the back of the monitor?
John:
I'll tell you why, because I forgot there were USB ports back there.
John:
I mean, whoever looks at a man's shoes.
John:
uh i don't look at the back of my monitor i totally forgot they were there so many listeners wrote in and said hey you should plug into the back of your monitor and they were right and i did and it is better so one port free oh there you go and now when i do manual kvm i just have to swap the disconnect two things from their two different adapters and plug the two cables into the anyway i'm slowly phasing out my uh a big mac pro at work i just uh wiped a bunch of the discs today so
John:
it's not long for this world um and i'll be down to just the one computer and i won't have to swap it but yeah moving things to the back of the uh the monitor a actually works which you know i i doubted when uh when people suggested that and i said oh yeah i should use that i said oh no what if that would be really convenient but what if they don't work but they do it's fine uh and uh b i think i'm probably just going to keep them there although i'm having some problems with my mouse cord like
John:
My new keyboard tray doesn't support my mouse cord in the same way the old one did, and it kind of adds some extra friction, and now I'm starting to think about, like, I've got to find a Bluetooth mouse that I can deal with because being corded is not, you know, it's not the way of the future, as they say.
John:
Second question, why not use, insert my favorite Thunderbolt dock here?
John:
The main reason is that they're all really expensive, and I already have all these dongles and adapters that I spent a lot of my, you know, discretionary desk budget at work on.
John:
And they gave me, you know, they gave me some smaller dongles, stuff like that.
John:
And, you know, the cheapest Thunderbolt thing starts at around 100 and something and they go up to like 300 bucks.
John:
But all that said, I have actually ordered the cheapest Thunderbolt dock I could find with the main display board.
John:
And I'm going to see how that works out.
John:
If it actually does work better, I'll try to see if I can get that expense too.
John:
But if I don't like it or if it's flaky, I'll just return it.
John:
So that's an update on my dongle town.
Marco:
I would also say, too, the various docks that people recommended, the two that got by far the most recommendations were the OWC one and the Elgato one, both of which are $300 and not very small and externally powered by their own power supply and everything.
Marco:
So it isn't that surprising that maybe those can be more reliable than the little $30 to $60 dongles that we get.
Marco:
But they also aren't particularly portable.
Marco:
And it's also kind of a hard sell to tell people, oh, this new laptop that was more expensive than the one it replaced can be great if you spend $300 more on this semi-desktop brick-looking thing to make it into as useful as it used to be.
Marco:
That's not a great sell.
John:
Yeah, if I get work to pay for it, though.
John:
I got the ODBC one.
John:
They make a big, expensive one and a smaller one.
John:
I got the smaller, cheaper one for $150 in space gray, the one with mini DisplayPort on it.
John:
Put a link in the show notes.
John:
They don't do a good job of linking to items from their email invoices, so I'll just link to the page.
John:
But anyway, you'll see all of them there.
John:
I got some recommendations.
John:
Some people said they had tried a bunch of docs, and the ODBC ones were very reliable, and I've had success with their thing.
John:
So I'm going to try it.
Casey:
We will see.
Casey:
Uh, window management comes back again.
Casey:
Uh, we did get a lot of positive feedback from people who had never heard, uh, episode, what is it?
Casey:
96, uh, the end of 96, whatever episode it was we linked in, in our most recent episode.
Casey:
But, uh, we got a lot of complimentary feedback on that, which I appreciate because as I think Marco agreed, that is my favorite episode of ATP bar none.
Casey:
Um, but anyway, we had lots of people writing in, well, John, why don't you use stay moon tiling window managers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
So why not John?
John:
This has been discussed before, but I guess it's a perennial topic.
John:
I don't use them because they don't work the way I want them to work.
John:
I've tried all of them, and I thank people for sending suggestions because maybe they'll always send one that I haven't heard of, but they just don't work the way I want them to work.
John:
Tiling, forget it.
John:
I don't want to tile at all.
John:
And Stay and Moom, I've tried, and they just don't get into my workflow.
John:
A lot of them...
John:
uh sort of are based on the notion that you have a fixed set of windows or that you want to memorize a set of windows but that's not the way i want it to work i want it to just you know i want to be able to arrange my windows however i want them whenever i want them and have them be in the places where they are i don't want to them to be snapshotted and restored um
John:
Um, I, I don't want them to snap to each other or the edges and be in thirds and halves.
John:
And, you know, I, as I've said, if I ever made a Mac app, it would be, it would be a window management app that would work the way I wanted it to work.
John:
Uh, but those type of system hacks are not really wise investments in terms of, uh, if you're going to make a Mac app, uh, you wouldn't probably wouldn't be able to sell in the app store and the window server changes all the time and yada, yada, yada.
John:
So anyway, I don't use those.
John:
I do it the old fashioned way.
Marco:
So I don't know anything about Mac programming really, but couldn't you do that with like sending Apple event codes and Apple scripts?
John:
Don't say Apple events.
John:
Don't say Apple events.
Marco:
No, because like if you could, then that might make it hard in the future to like distribute this app widely publicly.
Marco:
But you could probably make some little scripts yourself that just kind of monitor for things and keep things where you want them to be.
John:
It's not about keeping them.
John:
My window manager that I want would have to be, like, real-time.
John:
Like, you know, kind of like when you drag things around in any application that has, like, smart guides, like OmniGraffle or Keynote or any of those things where they have all sorts of guides and snaps and, you know, adjustable borders and grid things.
John:
But, like, none of those things, though.
John:
Not like, you know...
John:
The UI would look like that.
John:
In other words, it has to be real time drawing on your screen in response to things that you're doing.
John:
So forget about Apple events, forget about any snapshot, your windows, which all those things are have problems because windows are not identifiable.
John:
Like they're identifiable for humans.
John:
Like that's my whatever window.
John:
Right.
John:
But inside the application.
John:
Right.
John:
There's no sort of identifier of that window that matches up with your identifier.
John:
There's probably a bunch of unique IDs.
John:
And of course, there's process IDs.
John:
And there's the window title.
John:
And there's maybe the document that it's opened up.
John:
It's a document window.
John:
But that combination of things does not map directly to your conception of that window, right?
John:
and it's not so much about keeping the windows where they are because i'm not going to resize my screen or anything like that and that's what these things are trying to solve oh we'll just snapshot your screen so when you unplug and replug everything will go back what if i open 20 new windows and close 10 other ones or close the window and open that same window again my conception of it is that it's the same but the application's conception of it is this an entirely new window but i consider it the same window when i go back to my computer and it restores the previous state it doesn't know about all the new windows that open has no idea where those are supposed to go which is the problem with my screen changing size
John:
and that one window that i think is the same window doesn't go back to where it was because as far as the program's concerned it's a new window so i'm setting all that aside i'm just saying window management in general one screen never changes i want an application that helps me with window arranging helps me be more anal retentive about lining things up so i don't have to do it manually a pixel at a time which someday will be really hard for me to do like i guess it's kind of hard to retina already but if we go like another doubling of screen resolution i'm not going to be able to line things up by the pixel anymore my eyes won't be good enough and
John:
my shaky old hands won't be good enough and then how will i live with one with my windows one pixel higher than the way i want them to be just remember john better to be anal retentive than anal expulsive yeah you gotta do both you can't can't keep it in uh speaking about poopy things let's talk apple tv remote um
Casey:
So I stand by that it's really not that bad.
Casey:
And some people have written in and said I'm right.
Casey:
And other people have said I'm wrong.
Casey:
But Ed Morris writes, to John's point regarding who was able to use the Apple TV remote, my five-year-old daughter.
Casey:
She whips that thing around like it's nothing.
Casey:
Our bone rights hard to use my four year old and 68 year old dad both use the Apple TV remote without issue.
Casey:
Additionally, anonymous rights.
Casey:
I work at an Apple retail store, the complete list of complaints about the Apple TV remote.
Casey:
And that was the end of that section of either their tweet or email.
Casey:
They followed up and said, and I've had several people scream at me about it because of a free U2 album.
Casey:
So a lot of people apparently don't have a problem with the Apple TV remote.
Casey:
We also got infinite feedback, I measured, about why don't you use such and such Amazon link.
Casey:
And I'm assuming it was like a case for the remote or in some cases like a tail.
Marco:
Oh, one of those like rubber condom things.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
And I have never tried these because I don't mind the Apple TV remote.
Casey:
Some days I like it.
Casey:
Some days I have ambivalence toward it.
Casey:
But I presume and thought that...
Casey:
One or both of you guys have tried a remote condom or a tail or whatever, right?
Marco:
I haven't because I just find as much as the Siri remote annoys me, the idea of having some kind of big rubber gummy thing around it, that just seems even worse.
Marco:
Those things are just ugly and just feel weird.
Marco:
The whole reason you buy Apple stuff is because it's nice.
Marco:
I want this remote to be nice to fit in with the other nice things that are in my couch and living room area.
Marco:
I don't want some weird rubber thing around it.
Marco:
The real solution is fix the damn remote.
Marco:
The real solution is make the remote work nice rather than just having it look nice.
Marco:
Apple used to be able to do both.
John:
So the reason I put all these quotes in here is because I think they're a good example of
John:
I was going to say how people can get used to anything, but it's not get used to.
John:
It's more like I'm trying to think of a good analogy.
John:
Maybe if you had in the DOS era, everyone's using DOS and its precursor operating systems on Apple II and all sorts of other Tandy, Commodore PET, whatever, Commodore 64.
John:
They're all command lines, right?
John:
And everybody's using them.
John:
And most people would agree that there is some baseline level of difficulty of using computers.
John:
But even in that environment, plenty of people would say the Commodore 64 is not hard to use.
John:
My eight-year-old daughter has no problem.
John:
You know, my five-year-old is on the Commodore 64 all the time and they love it.
John:
So how hard could it be to use?
John:
And my 68-year-old dad uses the Commodore 64 and he's fine, right?
Yeah.
John:
And if, say, there was a graphical operating system that comes along and some people are still using DOS, you might say, well, okay, so DOS can be learned and used by people old and young, but computers could be easier to use.
John:
Look at this.
John:
And the opinion you could have there is, well...
John:
you may think that's better but only sort of froofy connoisseurs care about these so-called user usability and user friendliness that's better i know word star and dos uh backwards and forwards and i teach a class of seventh graders to use it and they're experts in it uh and so you may think this whole thing with like little pictures of folders and stuff is better but it must be better in some subtle way that uh that only essentially hipsters although they didn't have that word back then or didn't mean the same thing
John:
Only hipsters can appreciate, right?
John:
But in the grand scheme of things, time has shown that a graphical user interface is in general better than having everybody use the command line.
John:
And it took a long time for that to happen.
John:
But at any given point when the command line was still the paradigm and GUIs existed, it wasn't clear.
John:
They would say, I have no problem with the command line.
John:
Well, Apple's remote and indeed all remotes, this was brought up by people, all remotes are pretty terrible with a few exceptions.
John:
And you might say, well, they're bad, but people use them all the time.
John:
Like, whatever.
John:
There's a remote that comes with your cable box.
John:
And, yeah, it's a little bit weird and complicated, but, you know, my five-year-old picks that remote right up and knows right what to do, blah, blah, blah.
John:
How bad could the remote really be?
John:
There exists good remotes, but people would say, oh, maybe that's better, but only better in weird, subtle ways that remote hipsters and real connoisseurs or usability snobs might care about.
John:
I think we're in the same situation where most remotes are terrible.
John:
People get by with them because they can get the job done.
John:
And by the way, one point that a lot of people brought up that we should be fair to the album remote, one thing the album remote does have going for it is that it doesn't have a lot of buttons, which is one of the big complaints about most remotes that you see, right?
Yeah.
John:
All of that said, that we can exist in the world where all of that is true, and also the Apple II remote is awful for all the reasons that we have stated, right?
John:
Just like the other remotes are awful for different reasons.
John:
They have way too many buttons, and maybe the buttons are hard to press, or they die after a certain period of time.
John:
But...
John:
Even though the Apple TV remote has a small number of buttons, it is worse than your average cable box remote in important reasons like how easy is it to find?
John:
How easy is it to pick up without inadvertently doing something?
John:
How easy is it to find which way it's up?
John:
How safe do you feel when picking it up or do you have to pick it up like a game of operation?
John:
Because if you touch anywhere in the touchpad, something is going to happen.
John:
And do people have accidental inputs and have trouble doing the gestures?
John:
Yes, they do.
John:
I see it all the time.
John:
Does it mean that they can't use it?
John:
And it's like one of those as seen on TV commercials where the person gets eggshells in their hair and their house catches on fire when they're trying to make an egg.
John:
Oh, eggs are so messy.
John:
Like, no, it just means that it's not a good remote.
John:
And how do we know it's not a good remote?
John:
Because better remotes exist.
John:
The TiVo remote is absolutely 100% a better remote.
John:
Easy to find, easy to pick up, easy to grip.
John:
You can use it in the dark.
John:
Once you learn how it feels, you can use the select button in the five way in the play pause and a bunch of buttons that are different shapes that are all under your fingers that are prioritized.
John:
The important ones are close to you and the unimportant ones are far away.
John:
it's an amazing remote right it's not like we don't know how to make a good remote and it's also telling that almost no remote is as tiny and skinny as all the apple tea remotes because they get caught in the couch cushions because they're hard to pick up and almost none of them have been always on a completely active capacitive touch swipey thing on them because then it's very difficult to pick up and almost none of them are are symmetrical front and back uh in in ways that you can't tell without either looking at it or putting a rubber band around or something so
John:
Yes, your five-year-old daughter can use it, and yes, your six-year-old dad can use it, but it is a bad remote.
John:
We should want better.
John:
We know better can exist.
John:
The difference may seem subtle to you, but it's not subtle.
John:
In the long term, we will look back on this remote and say, this is the hockey puck mouse of the remotes, and we'll say that when Apple finally makes one that's better.
Casey:
I saw these quotes appear in the show notes.
Casey:
And because I'm the eternal optimist, I thought, oh, well, I think I added the last one, but I thought, oh, maybe they're realizing, the two of them, that things aren't so bad.
Casey:
I should have known, however, that this was just a bait and switch waiting for me.
Casey:
And that, oh, no, this is just more fodder.
John:
It's like that.
John:
DOS is not so bad either, right?
John:
I mean, people have used it for years.
John:
It's fine.
John:
You get the job done, right?
John:
You could even get kind of good with it.
John:
But it is worse than a GUI for most people.
John:
And again, the things that make a good remote are not mysterious.
John:
The reason we are so angry is because there are obvious problems with it.
John:
The fact that it's so small.
John:
I mean, I think it's actually better for five-year-olds because their hands are so tiny.
John:
regular people's hands it's like it's like trying to change a channel on on a stick of wrigley spearmint gum like no like it's not that's not how big my hands are right just make it so that anyway i'm still angry about the remote you can feel free to uh to suffer i had no idea uh all right so that was glorious do you have good news for us john with regard to fans in the apple tv 4k
John:
i asked last week for some very pointed questions about the apple tv and i got some responses that i consider hopefully reliable and authoritative the apple k apple tv 4k does not have a fan so that question answered does have holes in the bottom or the bigger holes than the other one did but it does not have a fan so thumbs up on that
John:
um and about the 24 frames per second cadence still a little bit of mystery the only direct feedback i got was someone telling me that it can do 4k 24 frames per second but not 1080p 24 frames per second but then on parentheses on my tv what does that mean does that mean the box can't do it or your tv can't do it i don't know it will not automatically switch apple doesn't seem to believe tvs will change video modes fast enough or reliably enough to make it worth it so
John:
my parsing of this is that perhaps i don't have this box yet my order has not arrived yet but perhaps you can set the thing to output 24 frames per second to your 4k television in which case i guess the menus and the whole interface would be 24 because it never changes modes which is not ideal because what if you want to watch a television show that's 30 frames per second or 29.9797 or whatever the hell it is
John:
like bottom line is i want it to switch modes i want it to switch modes the same way that the other boxes that connect to television can and do do to match the cadence of whatever content it is showing if you can find a number that's a multiple of 24 and 30 those numbers exist i swear they do math tells me so um then you can get away with it just by having a higher refresh rate and then you know duplicating frames an equal number of times and
John:
Anyway, we'll all find out when we get our televisions.
John:
Marco can find that on his fancy TV.
John:
I'll find that on my old TV.
John:
And we'll see.
John:
But there is a glimmer of hope, I guess.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then Lane Watson writes in to say, I online chatted with an Apple rep about any streaming or cash benefit favoring the 64 gig Apple TV.
Casey:
And they were advised that the capacity difference is for downloading only.
John:
I refuse to believe.
John:
Say it isn't so.
John:
I mean, the only reason I'm holding on a shred of hope like Casey about the follow-up and being optimistic is that it's an Apple rep.
John:
And very often, like, is it like a salesperson?
John:
Is it somebody at an Apple store?
John:
How would they know?
John:
How would they know how big the cash is for downloaded movies, the flexible storage management, the variant of iOS that it's using?
John:
Who knows what it's doing?
John:
Like, we already know there's a whole weight in iOS.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I think where you can tag data as purgeable, but it's so essentially use all the space you want, but the operating system will consider it purgeable.
John:
So if it needs that space, it will chuck it.
John:
They have that technology.
John:
Why would they not use it?
John:
What do you think you saw me that the, uh, the 64 and the, what is the smaller one?
John:
The, the 32.
John:
Yeah.
John:
reserve exactly the same fixed amount of space for downloaded movies it's plausible i suppose it is but i i want to believe that they instead say hey guess what when we cache downloaded movies we're going to use that great api that we introduced two years ago that lets me mark data as purgeable and we'll just use up as much space as we want and knowing full well that if anything else in the system needs that space it will dump it please let that be the case
John:
Anyway, I ordered 64 mostly because I wanted to give them enough money to make a new remote.
John:
Even though they didn't.
Marco:
No, I mean, I also ordered 64 because it's only $20 difference on an almost $200 purchase.
Marco:
So I figured like this might never matter.
Marco:
But usually I keep Apple TVs for a pretty long time.
Marco:
They aren't updated that frequently.
Marco:
So even if you buy every one, you're still keeping it for a few years at least.
Marco:
So I figure just in case it matters for anything I choose to do either now or down the road, I'll take the extra $20 risk.
Marco:
Again, I don't know why they even have this difference and why this premium price thing needs to have two different models separated by $20, but for some reason it does.
Marco:
And I guess it worked on me and John because we gave them the extra $20.
Marco:
I would say if you are too unwilling to do that, give $20 to St.
Marco:
Jude.
Ha!
John:
Yeah, I bought the big one of the previous one, too, and it's totally because I want to give money towards this product, because I want them to make this better, because I bought a lot of movies on iTunes, and I don't want to go through the hassle of having to un-DRM them.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
Wait, I have a couple of questions or thoughts.
Casey:
First of all, they've now updated the Apple TV twice in as many years, haven't they?
Marco:
I believe the first one came out two years ago, the Apple TV 4, so it's on a roughly two to three year cycle historically.
Okay.
Casey:
Either way, when do you keep anything Apple makes for more than like an hour ever, Marco?
Marco:
Oh, I was looking at laptops on eBay this week.
Casey:
I didn't pull the trigger on any of them, but I was looking because I'm like, hey, there we go.
John:
Oh, I forgot to mention some more, Donald.
John:
It's not the fault of the computer, but speaking of my new MacBook Pro, I think it is the fault of some terrible third-party software that work insists on installing on it that I have hopefully disabled.
John:
But I would disconnect it from my monitor, and then I would open the lid.
John:
And it would just sit there with a black screen staring at me.
John:
And it would be working fine.
John:
I could tell because you could command tab and you'd see the touch bar changed.
John:
I recognize, oh, that's the touch bar from Safari.
John:
Oh, that's touch bar.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like I could tell that the computer was working.
Casey:
That's a clamshell thing.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The screen was 100% black.
John:
Yep.
Casey:
Clamshell thing.
John:
And there's like no way to bring it back.
John:
The only way I found to bring it back is if I logged out.
John:
It would show me the login screen, right?
John:
So then the screen would come back on.
John:
I have no idea what's the case.
John:
But anyway, I think it's because of some stupid display link driver for some kind of USB-driven hub.
John:
Nope.
John:
And I disabled that, and I haven't had the problem since, so fingers crossed.
Casey:
Give it time.
Marco:
Probably isn't.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
My experience is that that does happen.
Casey:
probably once a week if you're not diligent about like either opening the lid before you unclam shell or sleeping the computer before no actually i've had it happen when i sleep the computer i'll try i'll try the open the lid thing if it starts happening i need to know all the secret incantations to make a laptop work like a real computer
Marco:
That's so bad.
Marco:
My experiment this summer mostly failed.
Marco:
I was going to bring home the LG monitor and replace this iMac with my clamshell MacBook Pro setup until the Mac Pro comes out next year.
Marco:
And one of the reasons why I'm not doing this is because...
Marco:
It turns out using a laptop as a desktop can work, but a real desktop does a way better job of it on a number of fronts.
Marco:
And so if you can afford to have a desktop and a laptop as separate computers, you generally will not regret that decision if you do a lot of work with it as a desktop.
Marco:
And I do.
Marco:
I work almost only with it as a desktop.
Marco:
And in fact, what I probably should have done is kept Mike's MacBook Escape and either brought this iMac to the beach or literally spent the difference of money on a new iMac just for the summer usage.
Marco:
That would have been a better use of the money than buying myself another 15-inch and then forcing it to be a desktop for most of its life.
Marco:
So next time I buy a laptop, I intend for it to be only a laptop.
Marco:
And if you have the luxury, dear listeners, of using your laptops only as laptops, you have a much better experience than if you try to make a laptop behave and be used as a desktop.
John:
Well, you said that a lot of people ask why I don't have desktop work won't let me I have to get a laptop.
John:
That's why I'm doing this.
John:
I would rather have a desktop
Casey:
I don't know if I agree with you, Marco, about laptops being terrible as desktops.
Casey:
I think the problem is Mac OS and MacBook Pros or really any Macs, they're not well-suited for clamshell.
Casey:
Because if you do the LCD by itself or the LCD sitting next to an external monitor, that generally speaking works pretty darn well.
Casey:
The problem that you have, which I share and I hate just like you do, is that clamshell mode is just good enough to keep us using it, but pretty freaking terrible all told.
Casey:
And that's where everything falls apart.
Casey:
So I wouldn't say that laptops are on the whole completely unusable as desktops.
Casey:
It's just the way you and I prefer and John actually prefer to use them is not that great and is fraught with peril.
Marco:
I wonder if you can bring an iMac on the ferry.
Marco:
I don't see why not.
Marco:
It's heavy, though.
John:
You can bring it to Panera Bread.
John:
Yeah, right?
John:
Is it just Panera now?
John:
Did they drop the bread?
John:
They probably dropped the bread.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Aftershocks Bone Conduction Headphones.
Marco:
Go to atp.aftershocks.com to learn more.
Marco:
With bone conduction headphones, small transducers rest in front of your ears against your cheekbones, not inside or around your ears.
Marco:
And they send little vibrations that you can't feel through your cheekbones directly into your inner ear.
Marco:
So without having anything right on or in your ears, your ears are left completely open to hear the outside world.
Marco:
And this also brings some major benefits.
Marco:
If you feel uncomfortable with earbuds or in-ear monitors because they're sticking in your ear, you don't have to worry about that.
Marco:
Your ears are left open to the air.
Marco:
If other headphones make you really sweaty or you want something to wear while you're working out or during hot weather, this doesn't have that problem either because, again, nothing's covering up your ear and making it all sweaty.
Marco:
And they also stay in place during exercise.
Marco:
They are IP55 certified for water resistance.
Marco:
You don't have to worry about them getting sweaty or getting rained on.
Marco:
The best thing about them, though, is that you are hearing the world around you.
Marco:
You are hearing everything because your ears are not blocked in addition to your music or your podcasts.
Marco:
So this is actually not so good in very loud surroundings like a train station.
Marco:
You can't hear it very well.
Marco:
But it's awesome if you want to listen to a podcast or take a phone call while you're doing something outdoors or around your house.
Marco:
So like if you're walking or running, you really want to hear the world around you for your own safety or convenience.
Marco:
If you want to listen around the house or at work, if you want to listen to a podcast or take a phone call without missing what's going on in the house or office or maybe someone's knocking on your door, you don't want to miss it.
Marco:
It's fantastic.
Marco:
They are incredibly useful tools for listening to podcasts or taking phone calls when you don't want to block out the world around you.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
So it's really up to you which one you pick, but I think you can't go wrong with either one of them.
Marco:
They have a great battery life.
Marco:
They're water-resistant.
Marco:
They are by far my favorite portable headphones, especially during hot weather.
Marco:
So check it out today at atp.aftershocks.com, and you can get a pair of Trex Titanium for just $99.95.
Marco:
Regular price is $130, so that's a nice discount there.
Marco:
Once again, atp.aftershocks.com.
Marco:
Thank you to Aftershocks for sponsoring our show.
Oh.
Casey:
All right, let's talk about Apple Watch with LTE, another thing that in this case I was fired up about and you guys were less so.
Casey:
So Charles Arthur has written a blog post that's relatively long, but there's a really good poll quote that I have here.
Casey:
And he was saying that in the same way I was, that the $10 a month that Americans are being charged is outrageous.
Casey:
And he said, why is it outrageous?
Casey:
Because watch cellular data use is not additive.
Casey:
It's substantive, substitutive, whatever that word is I'm looking for.
Casey:
If you're pulling in data on your cellular watch, you must have left your phone behind.
Casey:
Ergo, you're doing nothing with the phone.
Casey:
It's so it's consuming next to no data.
Casey:
The data consumption is shifted to your watch.
Casey:
And I know that this is probably not 100 percent, you know, completely and utterly true.
Casey:
But I think his point is fair in that.
Casey:
In general, you're going to be using data on your phone or your watch in general and not both.
John:
But data usage doesn't matter.
John:
There's no additional data.
John:
They don't care where you use your data.
John:
If the carrier has an actual argument, it's network capacity because your phone is still on the network.
John:
It's still hogging whatever spectrum and identification space that could be used by another phone that's in use.
John:
It's not off the network when you're away from home.
John:
It is still on the network.
John:
So that would be there.
John:
But, you know, like I said, the real answer has nothing to do with how much does it cost the carrier to have an additional device.
John:
It's what will the market bear?
John:
And that gets us back to the root problem, which is that the market for telecom in the U.S.
John:
is not as competitive as it should be.
John:
There are a very small number of very large companies that probably collude and do terrible things that we don't like.
John:
And there's nothing we can do about it.
John:
And so that's why we're angry.
John:
And this is just like...
John:
This is U.S.
John:
carriers flexing their muscle.
John:
They're taking advantage of the situation they're in, and our complaint is really, we don't like the situation they're in.
John:
And that's why other countries have these obscenely inexpensive rates, because either they have...
John:
Better systems of government or companies that are actually competing with each other or the government mandates that the companies have to be interchangeable in a certain way are all sorts of things that make their environment for telecom better than the environment in the U.S.
John:
And that's really what we're angry about at the root.
John:
Not so much, oh, this isn't worth $10 and let me tell you because it doesn't cost them $10 to do this.
John:
That's not how business works.
John:
It doesn't matter how much it costs them to do something.
John:
It just matters what the market will bear.
John:
And so the market is messed up in the U.S.
Casey:
Well, I think it's both.
Casey:
I also don't think it's worth this kind of money.
John:
Yeah, but you can't have that kind of thinking.
John:
It doesn't cost Marco any more money when someone buys a new copy of Overcast.
John:
Does that mean it's not worth it?
John:
It's what the market will bear, right?
John:
He doesn't have to carve the bits out of a little stone tablet every time someone subscribes to Overcast Premium or whatever.
Casey:
Yeah, I know what you're saying.
Casey:
And I should also add that I saw a ton of feedback about what other countries are being charged.
Casey:
And if there was anyone who said, oh, yeah, it's the same as America, then I genuinely don't remember it because pretty much everyone said like Australians were saying it's about five bucks a month in either Australian or American dollars.
Casey:
I forget which.
Casey:
Canadians said it's about five dollars a month or five loonies or whatever it is they use up there.
Casey:
That sounds right.
Casey:
they're sorry uh they're so very sorry um and also you know confirmation bias alert coming up uh i did not see anyone say to me no you're crazy and it's exactly how much uh you know ten dollars a month is exactly right and you should stop whining now i probably should stop whining but i was stunned because just about everything i say on this show somebody will come out of the woodwork to disagree with and i
Casey:
I did not see not one of those.
Casey:
And I concede unequivocally this is confirmation bias at its finest.
Casey:
But hand on heart, I do not remember seeing anyone say that.
Casey:
So it doesn't mean that those people don't exist.
Casey:
And please, for the love of all that is good and holy, that does not mean, listener, that agrees with Marco that this is your moment to shine.
Casey:
I know that you're out there and I know there are people that disagree with me.
Casey:
I was just surprised how few people wrote in because that number seemed to be zero.
Casey:
Anyway, moving on.
Casey:
Craig Federici went on a press tour to talk about the face ID recognition flub up and upswipe overlap and all sorts of different things.
Casey:
Does one of you want to tell us about this?
John:
I put this in here.
John:
I'm linked to the talk show where Craig went on with John Gruber and they had a conversation, too short conversation because I guess they're busy and had a lot of things to do.
John:
Only 30 minutes, but worth listening to.
John:
uh and andreas gobrudent say uh that uh this interview on the talk show confirmed the idea that i put forward last show about how the iphone 10 could let you swipe up before it has recognized your face just let you do it and if
John:
in the process of you know it's doing the animation to show you the screen where you have to type in your passcode to unlock the phone if during that process at any point it recognizes your face just go straight through it rather than saying hold the phone up to your face wait for it to recognize your face then swipe up um so craig uh confirmed that it does in fact overlap them and it you know that's smart thing to do and apple has smart folks and so that's what they're doing and so we'll put a link in the show notes to
Marco:
the entirety of that episode and also the the time stamp at i think 16 minutes and 45 seconds where you can hear that bit yeah i'm actually kind of happy that i mean i know it probably really sucked for uh apple that the demo failed on stage but i'm actually kind of happy that that the result of that has been we've gotten some really great interviews out of craig over the last few days and so you know yeah i mean it's unfortunate that happened but it's
Marco:
kind of nice for fans of the company following all this stuff to have all this additional exposure and information and good questions being asked and getting more details about how face id works because the iphone 10 is still a while out like it's still you can't even order it for over a month from now and it's probably going to be at least i would say probably january before a
Marco:
So this is still a while out.
Marco:
So to get any more information earlier is kind of nice.
John:
You don't think he would have gone on this, done all this press if the demo hadn't failed for explicable reasons?
Marco:
No, I don't.
Marco:
I agree.
Marco:
Craig is going around doing all these interviews all of a sudden talking about Face ID and how awesome it is because it fell on stage.
Marco:
and this is this is a form of damage control that that seems to make sense i mean part of it is also like reacting to people's concerns about how secure and private it is but i don't think that would have been enough to get an apple executive to go give interviews like this i think it's because it failed and there was some bad press about that because it didn't it didn't just get noticed by nerds like us like everyone noticed and there were news articles about it so
Marco:
like it was the worst kind of mistake because like it is explicable but there's nuance in the explanation and nobody wants nuance all they want is apple demo fails yeah there's no way this would have happened um had the demo not gone the way it did uh but again i think this is this is good for us and ultimately it's fine for apple because long term no one's gonna remember this but it's good for us to get all this all these wonderful interviews
Marco:
Craig's a pretty awesome person, and there's always tons of info in anything that he says publicly.
Marco:
He obviously is very familiar with technical details, with implementation details, with reasons that they do things, and he's able to explain those so well that he gives really good interviews about technical topics, and so it's always really nice to hear more from Craig.
John:
someone had a funny tweet when people were leaking supposed you know inside news from the tense rehearsals after the leak right when all the apple people were rehearsing their thing knowing that all this information leaked out there and they're all angry about it and everyone was yelling at everybody and someone tweeted that uh the worst thing about this uh apple leak is learning that craig federighi yells at people sometimes you don't want to believe it not craig hair daddy would never yell at me
Marco:
I'll tell you one thing, like hearing that he was like yelling and getting mad, that drove home to me like, wow, they must be really mad.
John:
Assuming it's even true.
John:
I mean, that's just random hearsay from like, I'm sure people who are inside the room during the rehearsals are texting secrets out of it.
John:
Who knows?
Marco:
Yeah, that's the one thing when we heard those rumors, the one thing I'm thinking of like, how many people could possibly have been in that room?
John:
Right, they're on their phone in the audience going, this is wild, guys.
Marco:
Yeah, it's not like there's somebody in... Are there like 10 people in the room?
Marco:
And they're not going to be low-ranked people who are going to be leaking stuff.
Marco:
They're not going to have any random person in the room when they're rehearsing their super-secret keynote days before the event.
John:
Anyway, everyone's human, and I'm sure people were mad and it was a difficult time.
John:
And that demo, yeah, it was rough because...
John:
like especially i don't hold regular people to this or even like the regular press but for the tech nerds we'll get into this actually the next very next item let's just transition to it immediately because i will i will make the point in both contexts it wants to save time uh the next item here is that uh apfs support for fusion drives is not in the release version of high sierra it was in the betas and apple talked about it and it would totally be a thing that you can have
John:
but then when they got ready to do the release version said you know here it is from right from apple's page which we will link if you installed the beta version of mac os high sierra the fusion drive from your mac may have been converted to apple file system basically if you check that checkbox you know that you were that they present during the betas
John:
Because this configuration is not supported in the initial release of macOS High Sierra, remember that you follow the steps below to revert back to the previous disk format, and there's this long, arduous series of steps to convert back.
John:
This and also the onstage demo of an unreleased product, for tech nerds specifically, not for the regular press, not for casual people, but for tech nerds specifically, this is what unreleased hardware and beta software means.
John:
It means that it might not work right and things might change before the release.
John:
And if you enter into a beta or watch a demo of something that is unreleased with the expectation that everything absolutely must work perfectly and will not change before release, you are misunderstanding what a beta is.
John:
It just so happens that most of the time Apple is good with its betas and more or less does a steady progression from early betas to late betas that converges on a finished product that we expect.
John:
But this is exactly what happens during betas.
John:
The feature is there.
John:
They do all the betas on it.
John:
They want to release it eventually.
John:
Sometimes things get cut.
John:
APFS will convert your SSD unconditionally, blah, blah, blah.
John:
They make that policy decision.
John:
They say the one that's working on Fusion Drives has a few more problems.
John:
We're going to hold that back.
John:
It will not be in the initial release.
John:
And if you're using a beta and all of a sudden you're really mad, you're like, oh, it converted my drive, but now the release version won't work with it, blah, blah.
John:
It was a beta.
John:
This is what betas are all about.
John:
I think people are spoiled by betas that basically never have any harmful effects and they can smoothly sail right from them to the release version.
John:
That shouldn't be expected to be the norm, nor should it be expected that an unreleased piece of hardware and unfinished software should demo perfectly on stage, never mind the fact that
John:
The hardware and software both worked as expected.
John:
It was a procedural error having to do with the demo.
John:
Basically, the people who were cleaning the fingerprints off the thing accidentally locked them by activating Face ID too many times, which would make sense even if Face ID required a swipe up.
John:
Anyway, I just want to, you know, tech people should remind themselves.
John:
Not done.
John:
Beta.
John:
Unreleased.
John:
Those are all things that we should expect that there will be bugs and there will be changes before release.
John:
So anybody who is super mad about that and is also a tech nerd needs to, like, check themselves a little bit.
Casey:
Before they wreck themselves.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
I mean, also, just like, you know, everyone always asks, every time there's a beta season, we get tons of questions.
Marco:
People saying, is it okay to install the beta on my phone or whatever else?
Marco:
And for an iPhone, you know, my answer is always, like...
Marco:
If you're able to do a restore at any time and tolerate that amount of downtime, because that might happen with pretty much any beta, then sure, you can give it a try if you want.
Marco:
If you don't need your phone to be that reliable, fine.
Marco:
And I usually put the betas on my main phone, usually around beta 2 or 3.
Marco:
I have never installed a macOS beta on my real computer, ever.
Marco:
And I don't intend to.
Marco:
To me, the needs that your computer has should be far more conservative than what you're willing to do on an easily restored iOS device.
Marco:
Your computer, that is like, for me at least, I know this is maybe an antiquated view these days, but the computer for me is my primary store of everything.
Marco:
It is my master device.
Marco:
If everything else fails, my computer still has to work.
Marco:
The computer has the master copy of all the data.
Marco:
It is the thing that I can back up the most, that I can rely on the most, the thing I need to use the most for work purposes and for hobby stuff.
Marco:
I need my computer to be reliable all the time at any cost.
Marco:
And so the idea of installing beta software of my main computer OS in a way that formatting a drive or losing all data would be inconvenient or a problem or slow me down at all, that just sounds like a terrible idea to me.
Marco:
The only time I've ever installed a beta has been on a laptop when I have not needed to use it anytime soon.
Marco:
And even then, I almost never even do that.
Marco:
I think the last time I did it was when they did Safari reading list and I wanted to see what that was like because I was still running Instapaper and I was worried that it would be too good.
Marco:
and nobody could tell me how it was, so I installed the beta.
Marco:
But otherwise, most people have no good reason.
Marco:
Unless you're a Mac developer working on cutting-edge stuff, most people have no good reason to install macOS betas at all.
Marco:
And if you're going to do it, do it on basically a disposable installation.
Marco:
Do it on a disposable partition, on a disposable disk, on a computer that you don't really need right now.
Marco:
Never, ever do it on anything that matters.
Marco:
Because it's hard enough for them to get macOS releases stable when they are released to the public, let alone in the beta.
Marco:
Forget it.
Casey:
Yeah, I've never put a macOS beta on anything I've ever owned.
Casey:
And I can't imagine a reason I would, other than what you've described, Marco.
Casey:
Like, it just seems really a poor choice to me, unless you're, you know, like a macOS developer, like you said.
Casey:
And similarly, I...
Casey:
Generally speaking, I avoid putting betas on my phones.
Casey:
You and I both made the critical rookie mistake of – was it the one with – iOS 5.
Casey:
Yeah, with Notification Center.
Casey:
That, oh, man, you and I, I think, ran right back to our hotel rooms right after the keynote or something like that.
Casey:
I mean, it doesn't matter exactly when it was.
Marco:
We did it over lunch.
Marco:
I think that's what it was.
Casey:
It was something like that, that the both of us were like foaming at the mouth.
Casey:
We were so excited to do this.
Casey:
And I think it took both of us, but hours to deeply, deeply regret our actions.
Casey:
And ever since then, like, I know that you, just like you said, you put on betas relatively quickly, but I don't think for the last two or three versions of iOS, I don't think I've put a beta on my phone.
Casey:
I think I might have, you know, like this with iOS 11, I think I've been running the GM since it was released a few days back, but
Casey:
I don't think I've put an honest-to-goodness beta on my phone in a long time.
Casey:
And I agree, Marco, that once you get through the first two or three, usually it's pretty okay.
Casey:
But in my experience, since I don't absolutely need to for work and I can get my hands on test devices and things like that, and we're rarely on the bleeding edge for these sorts of things anyway, I don't recommend it, generally speaking, because you never know what's going to happen.
Casey:
And my phone and my...
Casey:
I agree with you, Marco, 150% that those I do not want to mess with.
Casey:
Now, my iPad has been on iOS 11 for a while because for me, the iPad is kind of expendable.
Casey:
And if it doesn't work, eh, oh well.
Marco:
Yeah, that's a reasonable way to do it.
Marco:
And for most people, I can't think of a compelling reason.
Marco:
I don't install macOS betas because...
Marco:
Honestly, I just don't care.
Marco:
Mac OS improves so slowly these days that I can't even tell you what's in High Sierra besides the file system.
Marco:
I know there's a couple of things, but most of it's like, here's some improvements to Safari.
Marco:
The Safari team is really pulling the weight of the entire OS when it comes to notable features.
Marco:
That can be bullet points on a slide somewhere.
Marco:
If you exclude Safari changes, it's a pretty thin release as far as user-facing features go.
Marco:
And of course, every release of Mac OS X these days breaks something also.
Marco:
So it's like, I have to wait.
Marco:
Am I willing to tolerate whatever part of networking or USB or graphics or the PDF subsystem or whatever they broke audio?
Marco:
Whatever they broke in this version of Mac OS...
Marco:
Am I willing to tolerate that to get whatever the new stuff is?
Marco:
And usually there's so little new stuff that I can be very conservative and patient with the version of macOS I choose to run.
John:
You should check software update because you can get that new Safari right now and the iMac you're sitting in front of.
John:
I installed it today at work.
Casey:
Oh, yeah?
John:
Same.
John:
No more auto-playing videos.
John:
Go into the settings.
John:
Yeah, in that case, honestly, what do I need to buy Sierra for?
John:
You got the most important feature, the file system.
John:
That's the one that Apple is advertising the most, right?
John:
Or wait, no, is it just this program?
Hmm.
John:
um on betas i've also had ios 11 on my ipad for real time and also because ios 11 was so ipad focused and had all the fancy ipad features that i really wanted to see but but yeah i don't care about my ipad stability that much and so i i suffered through some weird bugs um i didn't upgrade my phone and that meant i was kind of startled when i finally did upgrade to ios 11 on my phone by a few things i already complained about one on twitter about the uh that i missed the dots i didn't think i would miss the dots but guess what i missed the dots uh and for the uh
John:
signal strength thing.
John:
Oh, little circles.
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
Yeah, I kind of miss them.
John:
But really, the one thing that surprised me the most is that even with reduced motion enabled, which you know I love to have enabled, when I unlock my iPhone 7 with Touch ID,
John:
A big curtain raises from the bottom, almost as if I had flicked upward, like on an iPhone X, right?
John:
But I didn't flick upward, I just used Touch ID.
John:
And even when reduced motion is on, that big curtain goes upward.
John:
And it's not a big deal, doesn't bother me that much, but I kind of miss whatever the old animation was, probably a crossfade, it probably takes the same amount of time.
John:
But it's an animation that I'm not accustomed to seeing.
John:
And I guess I'll get used to it.
John:
But that's one of the things that I would have known about months and months ago if I had been installing the betas.
John:
And I could have complained about it earlier.
John:
And you know how important that is to me to get complaints out early.
John:
So that Apple could potentially fix them.
John:
But this is not a big deal.
John:
It's not like my lack of lasers, which could not stand as we know.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, but you got that eventually.
John:
I know.
John:
It took a whole week.
John:
We had to wait until the next show.
Casey:
I'm still bitter that I lost that bet.
Marco:
And at such speed, too.
Casey:
I know, exactly.
Casey:
I really, really rubbed my face in it.
Casey:
To that end, you know, something I've noticed, which I think this is legitimate, and I'm not just bananas, but...
Casey:
So I have a picture of Aaron and Declan as my lock screen backdrop, whatever it's called, wallpaper, I guess.
Casey:
And if I tap the sleep-wake button, the thing that's still there on the iPhone X, I feel like it kind of fades in in a way that's different than iOS X. And I don't know how to describe it.
Casey:
And I tried to take a screenshot of it.
John:
Yeah, it does.
John:
It does fade in.
Casey:
Okay, so I'm not totally bananas.
Casey:
Or at least not for that reason, anyway.
John:
Yeah.
John:
There's a bunch... Like, iOS 11 adds even more... People who don't have reduced motion on are... Even those people are a little bit startled by the more sort of expressive animations about applications flying back into their icons and all sorts of crossfades and things.
John:
I think it looks nicer in general, but...
John:
It has pushed some people over the edge.
John:
They could tolerate the amount of animations in iOS 10 and iOS 11 just pushed a few more people over the edge to go hunting for that reduced motion thing.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
They even include the wall anchor if you want to use one.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Really, Fracture had the first edge-to-edge display in these prints, and they look fantastic.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
They make wonderful gifts for your friends and family.
Marco:
Getting photos printed of, you know, your kid or your pets or funny things between your friends makes such a fantastic gift for pretty much any occasion or just no occasion at all.
Marco:
Just, you know, sending a nice little lovely gift to your friends and family.
Marco:
We have many fractures in our house.
Marco:
I have many in the room sitting in right now, and we've sent many as gifts.
Marco:
They get so many compliments.
Marco:
People love these things.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
That is really the URL.
Marco:
I'm not making a mistake or reading you a placeholder.
Marco:
It's fractureme.com slash podcast.
Marco:
That's where all the podcast landing pages go.
Marco:
And then they will ask you, which podcast did you hear about this from?
Marco:
Pick ATP in that survey to help us out and support the show.
Marco:
Once again, fractureme.com slash podcast to get 10% off your first order and mention ATP in the one-question survey that asks which podcast you came from.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Fracture for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So an anonymous Apple retail employee writes, on the back end of something, there were some significant changes to the way that the Genius Bar appointments work.
Casey:
Two years ago, you more or less had to already have made an appointment online to be seen.
Casey:
Today's Genius Bar holds back the majority of personnel in order to improve the experience for those walking into the store to ultimately be seen within five to 30 minutes.
Casey:
Because of this, there is much less availability for those who are enrolling from home.
Casey:
Please feel free to encourage the world to walk into a store and be helped rather shortly.
Casey:
The ultimate goal here is to do away with the days of, quote, needing an appointment in order to see someone at the Genius Bar.
Casey:
I have such mixed feelings about this because on the one side, you know, when I have an oops because I just dropped my phone, I want to be seen properly.
John:
pretty much immediately but on the other side i'm the kind of person who likes scheduling things and who likes you know signing up in advance and i don't want to be punished just because i had the forethought to actually register myself on the website yeah who wants to wait 30 minutes you need the you need the it needs to be like a real-time operating system with deadlines right uh i can't i can't go to the store for an undefined wait period like i'm gonna go get my thing and it's like how long will you be waiting
John:
i don't know i mean because you could end up having to just abort the entire thing because an hour has passed and you haven't been seen an appointment like as the seinfeld episode so eloquently emphasized like you know you make a reservation and the important part of the reservation is that they hold the reservation for you so that when you get there they say yes we recognize that we had arranged previously to meet here at three and if you arrive at three then i'll be ready to receive you at three that's how reservations work and
John:
And I understand there's a balance.
John:
You don't want to just have reservations because then everybody walks in like, sorry, you have to make a reservation.
John:
And the nearest reservation is it's like going to a restaurant that you can't ever get a table at unless you have a reservation two months out or something.
John:
So it is difficult.
John:
And all this gets back to the discussion last week, which was,
John:
one of the important functions of apple retail is to have a place where people can go to have someone help them with their thingy in person it's one of the most important functions of the apple store otherwise why not just sell everything online it's you can go there and say my thing's not working it's broken i don't understand it please help me with it something right and they will help you and they're great at it they do a good job and so on and so forth and there's high demand for that service because that is a good service
John:
high demand, not enough supply, long waits.
John:
And they try to balance it.
John:
Well, how many reservations should we take?
John:
If we take too few reservations, that means if you try to make a reservation, it'll have to be two weeks out.
John:
But if we take too many reservations, the walk-ins can't get served.
John:
I don't know what the solution to it is.
John:
I'm just expressing our frustration as users of the Apple store with the system as it exists today.
John:
Maybe it's untenable and it's not economical for them to not make us wait.
John:
It is more economical to make us all wait
John:
for a small amount of time because honestly what are we what's the alternative right uh but that's you know it's just us as customers of the apple store expressing our dissatisfaction because i think most of us for the most part buy things online rather than feeling like we have to go to the apple store to get especially if we wanted asap we're there with the whole force quitting the app store app you know all these schemes we're not going to the mall at 5 a.m and sitting in a big line it's preferable for us to order them online and
John:
uh we do go there to check out products like oh i want to see the new iphone 10 mine hasn't arrived yet but i hear they're in the stores that's another important function the stores show off the merchandise let people who and i especially particularly people who don't who aren't like tech nerds and i've already read everything about it but just like regular people wandering through the mall they can say oh there's the apple stores go check out stuff um but yeah i think it's it's even those functions it's not serving that well because the stores are often very crowded but
Marco:
the the the service function is the one that i feel like has had the most challenges over the years so you know it's interesting to hear their strategies for improving it but i don't i don't think there are any easy answers yeah and also like the the the whole thing where like oh just show up and and see how long you have to wait like that really doesn't work for people if for instance the nearest apple store is three hours away and
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Great point.
Marco:
There's a lot of people for whom the nearest Apple store is not just... You can't just pop over there anytime you want and just, oh, it's going to be two hours.
Marco:
Oh, I'll come back.
Marco:
It's not that easy.
Marco:
So there's issues like that.
Marco:
And also just like... I mean, my experience, and maybe this is just my local stores, my experience has been the opposite, that I used to just never make appointments and just walk in because it used to be relatively common that I'd get seen within 20 minutes and it would be fine.
Marco:
And then in the last year or two, that's been pretty much impossible.
Marco:
And I walk in, they will either refuse to even book me as a walk-in, you know, wait around reservation, just say, sorry, we are so full that you can't even do this.
Marco:
Or they do a thing where they're like, oh, we'll, you know, sign up for this thing and then we'll text you when it's about to be your appointment time.
Marco:
but the current estimated time is like, you know, two hours away or something.
Marco:
And it's like, okay, well, so like, what am I going to do?
Marco:
Like drive home and then, you know, it's going to take me 25, 30 minutes to get back here.
Marco:
So it's like, is that, am I going to miss my window?
Marco:
Like that doesn't work for people, for a lot of people.
Marco:
Like it works if you live next to an Apple store and can just pop over there whenever you want and don't have a job and don't have anything else to do.
Marco:
Like that would work.
Marco:
But for most people,
Marco:
Something a little more predictable is what you need there.
Marco:
I will say, though, overall, we got way more feedback than I expected about the retail segment that we talked about last week.
Marco:
We were talking about Angela Aarons' retail update and things like that.
Marco:
And we must have a number of retail nerds in our audience because of everything we said last week about everything about the events and all the new products that were announced,
Marco:
our complaints about the retail segment were by far the most controversial things we said according to the feedback like so many people saying like well this wasn't really for you this was explaining to x whether it was explaining to the world of retail how apple is saving the dying american retail sector or whether it's explaining to the retail employees how to boost their morale and what they're doing means a lot and everything and
Marco:
All sorts of feedback from people who either claim to be or were obviously very close to the retail world saying why that segment not only needed to be there, needed to be that long and detailed, but...
Marco:
Angela Ahrens was really trying to say and why that was so important and everything.
Marco:
So I guess it resonated with somebody, with people who were in the retail business.
Marco:
I can just say as an Apple customer and fan and commentator, it didn't resonate with me at all.
Marco:
But apparently, it worked for a lot of people.
John:
A lot of the explanations were things like, you know, you don't understand how important Apple is.
John:
They're like they're keeping these malls alive.
John:
Right.
John:
That's great.
John:
That's fine.
John:
But why?
John:
Why does anyone need to be told that Apple stores are keeping malls alive?
John:
That's not a message that needs to get out.
John:
And I don't think that was in there.
John:
Like they just wanted to tell you more things about their store.
John:
And I still am not sure who they were trying to convince of what, because I don't think they're trying to convince people that.
John:
You know, they're not trying to tell the rest of the retail industry how they should do things because why would they help their competitors?
John:
And they're not trying to take credit for saving malls because what the hell does Apple care about malls?
John:
I still think it is a lot of sort of deep thinking about what a store can be.
John:
when i wish they would think more about what their store already is and how it can do what it is doing better and that's why i put this feedback in here because this is an uh apple retail employee saying the things that you're asking for them to do they are doing that but they're also thinking big about how a store can be a town hall whatever you know i don't know anyway i i thought it was a little overly long in a presentation uh
John:
that had some very important products to get to, came after two other segments, right?
John:
Maybe if it had been in the front, we would be complaining about whatever the third one was, right?
John:
Because it was a lot of lead-in before they got to the three big announcements.
John:
But in the grand scheme of things, it's not iCards.
John:
It was fine.
John:
iCards, no one remembers that.
John:
No one on this podcast anyway, but listeners remember.
Casey:
Doubtful, but that's okay.
John:
No, they totally do.
John:
Oh, right.
John:
Please do not email and tweet us to say that you remember iCards.
Casey:
Okay, time for some Ask ATP.
Casey:
That actually went quicker than I expected.
Casey:
I'm proud of us.
Marco:
Really?
Marco:
An hour?
Marco:
That was quicker than I expected?
Casey:
Given that we didn't have any follow-up last time, I am pretty pleased.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Jamie Billett writes in to say, oh, man, I should have taken this out of the show notes.
Casey:
I didn't look closely enough.
Okay.
Casey:
Jamie Billet, my new enemy, writes in to say, if the new Mac Pro doesn't have NVIDIA, will it be a failed product?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Moving on.
John:
Martin Deering writes... You got the answer right, though.
John:
I like the fact that you got the answer right.
John:
The answer is no, it won't be a failed product.
Marco:
What does that even mean?
John:
So, this is how I interpret the question.
John:
I talked a lot about how NVIDIA is kind of at the top of the heap in GPUs currently, and the Mac Pro is supposed to be the fastest and bestest thing in the world, so shouldn't it have NVIDIA?
John:
And they're saying if it doesn't have that, if it has a lesser GPU, a GPU that is not as good, that is not as popular, that doesn't have as much software optimized for it, will be a failed product.
John:
The answer is no.
John:
The Mac Pro should be the best, fastest thing Apple can make.
John:
If for some strategic or stupid reason they want to go with AMD instead of NVIDIA, AMD makes some good graphics cards.
John:
If the Mac Pro is expandable, reliable, and frequently updated, it matters not as much that it has the fastest and best video card on the market as long as the next year there's a new version with a better video card and so on and so forth.
John:
It would be a better product probably if it shipped with NVIDIA today, but I don't think it will be a failed product.
John:
The way it will fail is kind of like the trash can failed.
John:
If it is never updated, if it has reliability problems that are never addressed, if it doesn't address the needs of the customers that aren't fulfilled by the iMac Pro and stuff, that's what will make it a failed product, not the lack of NVIDIA.
Casey:
And then Chris Adamson asks, hey, how is John liking the beta of Twitterific for the Mac, a.k.a.
Casey:
Phoenix?
Casey:
And he also asks, do the other two use native Twitter clients or the web?
Casey:
And Chris, I am deeply offended that you would think that I would use either the native Twitter client or the web because they're both dumpster fires.
Casey:
Both Marco and I use TweetBot.
John:
They say use native Twitter clients, not the native Twitter client.
John:
So you misinterpreted that question.
Casey:
My apologies then.
Casey:
Yes, it is.
Casey:
My apologies.
Casey:
Hooked on phonics did not work for me.
Casey:
No, my apologies.
Casey:
But yes, I use TweetBot.
Casey:
And apparently, Marco, you don't entirely use TweetBot.
Marco:
So I still use TweetBot on the Mac.
Marco:
Earlier in the summertime, I deleted TweetBot from my phone.
Marco:
I've tried various schemes and tricks over the years to reduce my Twitter usage because I have frequently been using Twitter too much, which has made me waste a lot of time and be less happy.
Marco:
I tried for a long time deleting it from the desktop and only using it on phones and tablets and laptops and stuff.
Marco:
So it was not on my main computer.
Marco:
And this made things like work difficult because my work sometimes involves posting things to Twitter, like when I'm doing podcast live broadcasts and when I'm just asking questions about, you know, Apple APIs and stuff.
Marco:
And so it was actually fairly difficult for me to not have it available to me on the desktop.
Marco:
It turns out by deleting it from my phone, I do still have it available because I also have the official Twitter app installed.
Marco:
The official Twitter app I bury in a folder.
Marco:
I have to only get to it from search.
Marco:
And I find that it isn't very tempting to just keep going to it over and over again because the official Twitter app is so horrible that it actually discourages you from using it very much or for very long periods.
John:
Put that quote in their App Store description.
John:
This app is so horrible, it will discourage you from using Twitter.
Marco:
It honestly is.
Marco:
Twitter's app is such a confusing, horrible mess of God knows what.
Marco:
And the way it messes up your timeline and puts the important stuff you might have missed up top, it actually is so hard to use for more than about 10 seconds that it totally kills my desire to continue to see it over and over again.
Marco:
And so by not having it be visible on any of my home screens and also by having it be so awful, I still have Twitter if I want to like post a photo I just took while I'm out or something like that.
Marco:
And if I really need to check something or look something up, because honestly, sometimes you need to like look stuff up on Twitter and the website is really awful for that.
Marco:
So like I do occasionally have to check it for things, but that's like having the official Twitter app is enough to,
Marco:
to allow those kind of basic occasional needs.
Marco:
But it's so bad, I don't want to use it constantly.
Marco:
And not having Twitter on my phone means that in the millions of other times throughout the day, when I'm wasting a few seconds by reading my phone, and notably, the significant times, right before I go to sleep, and the first thing I do when I wake up, if I'm not taking care of a kid or a dog immediately, if I'm lying in bed for a few minutes...
Marco:
Or, you know, like I'll read stuff on my phone like many of us do.
Marco:
Not having Twitter be a part of either of those times and not having it be part of most of those little interactions throughout the day where I'm just checking stuff to like idly browse things or idly waste time.
Marco:
has been a dramatic improvement in my happiness level, just generally of how I feel about life and what's going on in the country and crazy people who follow me and are occasionally rude and stuff like that.
Marco:
It has given me an amount of distance from that that I find incredibly satisfying and healthy in a way that my previous experiments of trying to delete it from my Mac and stuff didn't achieve.
Marco:
It's so pervasive on the phone.
Marco:
Every time I paid off the phone, I would be checking Twitter as one of the very first things I did.
Marco:
Now, I check email, which is usually nothing because I have systematically destroyed the reason for most people to ever email me or the mechanism for them to do so over the last 10 years.
Marco:
Email is pretty quiet.
Marco:
RSS is there.
Marco:
I check that all the time in the Unread app, which is wonderful.
Marco:
And I check Instagram, which is happy because it's people posting pictures of fun things and happy things.
Marco:
And to not have Twitter be part of that, like those apps that you just check habitually, has been really nice.
Marco:
And I highly recommend it.
Marco:
And to the people at Twitter who make the official app, just never get better.
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
Yeah, I really should try that at some point.
Marco:
One thing I would love to have, I mean, one of the things that kept drawing me to Twitter was that over the last few weeks, I've been having a number of interactions with people over direct messages.
Marco:
And so I'd have to keep checking it to make sure I was up to date on those conversations or to respond to them.
Marco:
I was unable to find a Twitter client that only does direct messages.
Marco:
It seemed like one of them did exist.
Marco:
It doesn't exist anymore.
Marco:
Like all the links were broken.
Marco:
It's not in the app store anymore.
Marco:
If anybody knows of a good Twitter client that is DM only, I'd love to know about that.
Marco:
That's an interesting idea.
John:
We're going to answer my part of the question here before I move on, by the way.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
Go ahead.
John:
How do I like Phoenix?
John:
It's great.
John:
You should get it.
John:
It's totally what I always dreamed the modernized version of Twitter would be.
John:
And I love seeing the updates that are slowly adding, not slowly, but pretty quickly adding all the new features that were missing.
John:
First, you couldn't do direct messages.
John:
Then you couldn't get info on the people.
John:
Then you couldn't show threads.
John:
And it's just like they're all like one after the other.
John:
I love it.
John:
Everyone should check it out.
John:
It's great.
Marco:
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Casey:
There was some chatter about the Face ID training, which came through in part from the interview with a friend of the show, Matt Panzarino, at TechCrunch.
Casey:
And just quoting Matt, he said, especially given that the data needed to include a high-fidelity depth map of facial data, so says Federighi, Apple went out and got consent from subjects to provide scans that were, quote, quite exhaustive, quote.
Casey:
Those scans were taken from many angles and contained a lot of detail that was then used to train the Face ID system.
Casey:
As mentioned above, Apple went to great lengths to gather its own data on facial shapes and angles.
Casey:
And when it did so, it made sure to gather them across a broad basis of geographic locations, ages, and ethnic backgrounds.
Casey:
Federighi says that Apple has tested extensively, and it should not matter what your cultural background is.
Casey:
Face ID should work with your face.
Casey:
So that was Matt Panzarino summarizing an interview with Craig Federighi.
Casey:
As I was reading this, it occurred to me, this sounds familiar.
Casey:
Where did I read this?
Casey:
And then I remembered.
Casey:
An anonymous listener wrote us on the 2nd of June 2017.
Casey:
That listener wrote, I was lucky enough to participate in a study ran by the scientific consulting firm Exponent in a major U.S.
Casey:
city.
Casey:
The study was run in multiple U.S.
Casey:
cities and also multiple sites abroad.
Casey:
At my site, each day, about 70 or 80 participants six days a week for about two months at least.
Casey:
So 3,000 to 4,000 people or thereabouts were asked or they were recruited, and that was both individuals and family groups.
Casey:
With family groups, they had to sign up two or more people related by blood.
Casey:
And this listener writes, this strongly suggests authentication.
Casey:
Obviously, you want to be able to differentiate between relatives who can look very similar.
Casey:
And they describe in quite a bit of detail what the test was, and it involves filling out a survey, talking about your skin tone and things like that.
Casey:
The consent form talks about how you're going to have an infrared laser shined at you, shined, whatever shined at you.
Casey:
During the session, you're asked to use a device for a series of tasks, which, according to the listener, was an iPhone 7 Plus with a heavy case-like attachment.
Casey:
And then they talk about the different tasks, which I kind of want to read, but I'm trying to summarize this at least slightly.
Casey:
Also, they have you test for looking at the phone, looking away from the phone, using different kinds of lighting, different kinds of headwear with hats and scarves and sunglasses and masks, etc.,
Casey:
And different background objects and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And each participant was given 10 variations, not the same 10.
Casey:
And there were many other tests involved.
Casey:
So I just thought this was fascinating.
Casey:
This is certainly within the realm of time where I think we thought Face ID was possible.
Casey:
But this was, you know, again, three months ago, three and change.
Casey:
And this is clearly to me describing what the Face ID test or not test, but the Face ID like data acquisition process was all about.
Casey:
I just thought that was fascinating.
John:
Each person got $100, too.
John:
Not cheap to run this.
John:
If you think of how many thousands of people and they have to pay the staff and then, you know, the building to have them all in and then give each participant $100, Apple's got a lot of money.
Yeah.
Casey:
So I just thought that was fascinating.
Casey:
There are more details, which John isn't allowing me to tell you about, but they are there.
John:
If you can summarize them, find the interesting ones.
Casey:
Find the interesting tidbits.
Casey:
So the tasks they did, a task was a game where dots appear randomly on the screen.
Casey:
You're asked to identify the emoji animals that pop up in the dots as they flash by, and they thought it was an eye-tracking calibration.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
You turn your eye to look at the phone or keep them straight, then press the record button on the phone and then do an action with your face, shake your head in a different way, cover your face, et cetera.
Casey:
And then the recording is done automatically.
Casey:
Who knows if this was really Apple, but certainly to my eyes, it seemed to be.
Casey:
And that explains how they trained this, you know, because obviously Apple is a very diverse company.
Casey:
Well, maybe I shouldn't have said that.
Casey:
Apple is more diverse than some of the companies that I see.
Casey:
And there are more employees of various backgrounds there than a lot of companies.
Casey:
Let me try to phrase it that way.
Casey:
And so they could certainly, and I'm sure they did train on internal people, but it seems like they also did a lot of work by seeking out other people, which is great.
Casey:
That's what I would hope.
Casey:
And this is the only report I've heard about this, and this was sent directly to ATP.
Casey:
I'm not saying that other reports don't exist, but it's the first I've heard.
Marco:
Yeah, I've been thinking about this email a lot over the last couple of weeks as this Face ID thing was ramping up and then it was finally unveiled.
Marco:
And it's pretty cool.
Marco:
I assumed this was real.
Marco:
I assumed this was a true report that was not just some made-up tip or anything.
Marco:
If so, it makes a lot of sense.
Marco:
It's totally plausible.
Marco:
And it's pretty cool that Apple went to such lanes to try to get a lot of people's data for training and everything else and
Marco:
And all of this, as Craig has very happily pointed out over the last couple of interviews he's done, all of this is not being based on collecting data from the field from iPhone Xs.
Marco:
It's not reporting your face data back to Apple for it to improve its algorithms and train its machine learning.
Marco:
It's doing separate studies that people are explicitly opting into and being paid for to get its data and to train its models.
John:
and so that's it's just all like it's it's pretty cool it's really quite cool and it does learn from your face but that information never leaves the phone which is kind of a bummer if you get a new phone or get your front thing replaced because you crack the screen or something basically like with touch id it's going to mean that you have to retrain it on your face and it's going to start over with learning so hopefully the learning curve isn't too bad but that's that's the whole mo with this stuff is that it's in the secure enclave it never leaves it and so if you break the front of your phone it's
John:
And they have to replace the thing that connects to the secure enclave.
John:
Guess what?
John:
You got to re-register your face and start the learning over.
John:
But that's how it learns with your face as you age, as you slowly grow a beard.
John:
You know, hopefully as you put on scarves in the winter, you know, you'll have the scarf not obscuring your whole face and it'll figure out that sometime the scarf is there.
John:
I don't know how, you know, how good it's going to be in terms of can you just put on a ski mask and
Casey:
one day and have it still recognize you but it does learn and improve as just like touch idea by the way both these things do learn and improve just from you and it's just between you the phone and the secure enclave that's it moving on we should probably dive back into the iphone announcement or the the keynote from last week and uh we have a little bit of information about the apple watch our apple watches are due to arrive potentially as listeners are hearing this um
Casey:
The cellular watch has 16 gigs of storage and the non-cellular watch has 8 gigs.
Casey:
And at first glance, that seems kind of weird, right?
Casey:
Because the cellular watch can stream things, but the non-cellular watch can't.
Casey:
So you would think you would want more storage on the non-cellular watch.
Casey:
But everyone seems to agree.
Casey:
And I guess it makes sense that you're going to want to cache the things that you've streamed.
Casey:
And so maybe having more space does make sense on the cellular watch.
John:
Just waiting for someone on the watch team to write in and tell us, no, the extra space isn't used for caching.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, it'll be from an online chat support agent.
Marco:
No, I mean, that actually... So it makes some sense.
Marco:
First of all, the cellular model is $70 more, so they have a little bit more leeway in the margins.
Marco:
But also, a cellular watch is more likely to be used...
Marco:
as a standalone music playback device than a non-cellular watch.
Marco:
Because somebody who's going to go seek out them by the cellular one probably intends to use it as a workout device wirelessly with music playing.
Marco:
The chances of that being used for that purpose are way higher than other watch models.
Marco:
And if you're going to go take a run with the watch, one way you could do that, technically, with music, is to literally stream the audio off the internet.
Marco:
Another way you could do it is the cellular should only be used very, very sparingly.
Marco:
And the watch can be smart and just cache things from Apple Music that you like or that you've selected to be available on your runs.
Marco:
And Apple Music, based on recommendations and algorithms and everything else, it knows before you go out running what you should probably be listening to.
Marco:
So it probably buffers that stuff like overnight or something.
Marco:
When it's plugged in and when it's charging, it probably tries to fill as much space as it can to
Marco:
you know, with, with downloaded music that it can then play for you without touching the cell network at all.
Marco:
Cause then it saves data.
Marco:
It saves a ton of battery life.
Marco:
Um, and it works with intermittent connectivity areas.
Marco:
Like what if you, what if you're running under, you know, like between buildings in New York city and, you know, the cell connection would keep dropping or whatever else.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
It has cellular, yes, but that doesn't mean Apple is going to use it aggressively because from all the reviews that have come out today, it looks like it has a tremendous cost to battery life.
Marco:
And that even if this alleged Wi-Fi bug that they're saying is causing some of the connectivity problems that some of the reviewers had, even if that is fixed shortly, because it probably will be,
Marco:
it does seem like the LTE connection of the watch is not very aggressive about staying connected.
Marco:
It seems like it only connects if it really needs to.
Marco:
And so if they have enough space on the watch to buffer a whole bunch of music before you go for a run...
Marco:
why would you stream it like why wouldn't you just play your buffer and then if you run out of buffer then maybe stream some stuff but why burn the battery when you don't have to yeah that makes that makes sense to me uh actually real-time follow-up on the watch uh jason sonnell has communicated with me via the magic of slack and told me that what you just said marco is absolutely correct that
Casey:
The watch does use some of those like Fancy Pants Apple Music playlists and caches those overnight in addition to some of the music that it knows you like.
Casey:
And it tries to suck those in, at least on the cellular models, suck those in overnight while it's charging when you're not on.
John:
They said that in the keynote, which is why you had that vague memory of it.
John:
That's where it's from.
Casey:
Yeah, well, now I learned.
Casey:
The iPhone, I thought a couple of interesting things, which I don't think were noted in the keynote.
Casey:
First of all, it includes the little headphone adapter, the Lightning to, what is it, T-L-L-D-R, whatever it is.
Casey:
whatever it's called.
Casey:
TRRS.
Casey:
Yeah, TRRS.
Casey:
The TLDR adapter.
Casey:
Yeah, as soon as I said that, I was like, oh, no, I do remember.
Casey:
Anyway, it does include the adapter, which I would say I lost a bet with myself.
Casey:
I thought it would be included in the 7 and never again.
Casey:
And I understand that not everyone upgrades every year, so it makes sense for it to still be there.
Casey:
But I'd expected Apple to be kind of aggressive about getting rid of it, and they weren't, which is a good thing, I'd say.
Casey:
But it was surprising.
Casey:
And then additionally, there are no USB-C cables of any sort included in the iPhone box.
Casey:
No sort of adapter, no cable, nothing like that, which I can't decide if I think that that's totally bananas or makes perfect sense.
Casey:
And I think I'm ever so slightly leaning toward that makes perfect sense, even though it is weird that none of their brand new computers or laptops, I should say, can plug into an iPhone without some sort of an adapter.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Marco, what do you think about that?
Casey:
Is that weird or does that make sense?
Marco:
I mean, it sucks that we don't have an all USB C world, but the fact is we don't have an all USB C world.
Marco:
So if they would include the USB C power adapter or USB cable in the box as the only one, then you would have the issue of like, you know, you can't plug it into pretty much anything that people use to charge their phones.
Marco:
Yes, people do often charge their phones by plugging them into their computers.
Marco:
But they charge them way more often by plugging them into other things.
Marco:
Power adapters, docks, USB outlets, other USB multi-port things.
Marco:
And none of those things really are USB-C yet, practically speaking.
Marco:
So if there's going to be only one cable in the box, I still think it makes sense for it to be the USB-A cable.
Marco:
Now, you could also argue, as some people have, that they should just put two cables in the box.
Marco:
Put a USB-C and a USB-A cable.
Marco:
and that would be interesting it i think the apple's argument against that there would be a small reason to not do it for for the sake of margins to be able to sell 25 cables to the people who want this this function but i think their bigger argument would be that would be very wasteful that like
Marco:
Almost everybody, by definition, almost everybody who got an iPhone would not use that second cable.
Marco:
They would almost certainly only use one of those.
Marco:
So it would be kind of wasteful to have, like, a cable in the box that almost everyone's throwing away.
Marco:
That doesn't make it great.
Marco:
This is still an annoying problem.
Marco:
But I think the other solutions to it would probably be worse.
Marco:
While we're on the topic of the iPhone and its ports and its cables, I would also just like to suggest the idea here officially that I bet the Lightning port is gone within five years.
Marco:
We're going to have wireless charging.
Marco:
We have it now.
Marco:
It's not as fast as everything else yet.
Marco:
It's going to get faster and it's going to get fast enough that I would bet that the newest iPhone that comes out in five years, whatever model that is, does not have a lightning port and has no replacement for the lightning port.
Marco:
It's just gone because they're going to deem it unnecessary.
Marco:
So I would say for people out there, I would hesitate to invest heavily in lightning-based hardware.
Marco:
um cheap things like cables that's fine but like for instance there are now super fancy lightning headphones um from you know brands like odyssey like high-end audiophile headphone brands i for many reasons i would never suggest anybody waste money on those number one they sound terrible but but numbers numbers like two through seven like you know you can't use them with anything else ever and also lightning ports uh are i would say are not long for this world
Marco:
now that we have bluetooth everything and now that we have wireless charging i would not i would not depend on lightning being around for a long time five years might even be two might even be comically conservative i would i would think if there's a good chance it's gone in three years i think it's gonna take a little bit longer than you think i mean obviously they have to march towards the sort of platonic ideal of just like a screen this little skinny magic thing you know right or or you know that some it becomes a little tiny nodule and everything is all in classes in vr right um so
John:
on an infinite time scale yes lightning port is going away i just don't know what the timing is like uh because getting rid of ports is all well and good until it's the last one and then it's a little bit harder to get rid of i think usage you've got everything covered but i heard just thinking like oh they get rid of the lightning port uh but of course there's a usbc port for diagnostics in the back like in the back like on the mouse where you stab it in there right sometimes
John:
there's no substitute for making electrical contact for for extraordinary situations and i'm wondering what their solution to that would be maybe just like two regions on the back that essentially act as contacts for doing diagnostic things um and really what i'm trying to get at is the light is the lighting port the last port that'll ever be on there or does lighting port get replaced with some other port which eventually goes away but yeah uh in our lifetime there will be no wire that you plug into the phone thing because
John:
We're almost there now where that doesn't have to be.
John:
And it's just a question of, you know, waiting for the whole world to catch up with it.
Marco:
I would say not just in our lifetime.
Marco:
I would say probably within my 4K Apple TV's lifetime.
John:
I mean, five years was my prediction for the notch going away.
John:
Although on that topic about the notch and more like predictions on timelines.
John:
As I said at the end of the thing, five years is when I think they could get rid of it, but if it becomes a powerful branding thing, as we discussed, like, you know, why would they do the notch and why does the icon of it show the notch and, like, how is this one differentiated or whatever, it could last longer.
John:
Not forever, because even the things that distinguish...
John:
Like, you know, the click wheel distinguished the iPod and that silhouette with the click wheel was really important.
John:
But when it was time for that to go away, it did.
John:
Right.
John:
They didn't say, but that's how we brand the iPods.
John:
Like they had no problem making an iPod touch without a click wheel because they realized the future is not this little screen in a wheel.
John:
The future is all screen.
John:
Right.
John:
So they may hold on to the notch longer for branding reasons.
John:
There's no such reason to hold on to the lightning cable.
John:
And technically speaking, they're way closer to being able to get rid of it because all the pieces are pretty much already there.
John:
It's just a question of conservatism.
John:
When do they think they can get rid of it?
John:
I think they pushed a little bit on the headphone, which is why they're still shipping an adapter.
John:
Lightning, I don't know.
John:
Your five-year thing seems reasonable to me.
John:
Your three-year thing seems a little bit aggressive, but who knows?
Marco:
Also, there's an interesting question in the chat room from Yonatron saying, do you think after Lightning has gone from the phone, will slash should they switch to USB-C on the iPad?
Yeah.
Marco:
And that's an interesting question.
Marco:
I feel like it depends a lot on what are these ports actually used for and what could they be used for?
Marco:
On the iPad, it has had the ability to plug in a limited set of USB peripherals since day one.
Marco:
Since the very first iPad, it had that camera connection kit.
Marco:
and there was one that has a little USB port on it, and there still is.
Marco:
They updated it with Lightning, and there was a new one last year that had power passed through finally, which is awesome.
Marco:
And that USB port over the years has worked for not any USB device, but things like standard HD-compliant keyboards.
Marco:
That's probably one of the biggest uses for it.
Marco:
Also, network adapters would work over it, so you could have Ethernet wired on.
Marco:
It has always worked for sound devices, which is very, very nice during sound production.
Marco:
And I don't think there's a wireless equivalent to things like a microphone interface.
Marco:
Like, I don't think that anybody makes Bluetooth audio input devices.
Marco:
At least they shouldn't.
Marco:
And I hope they don't.
Marco:
But they probably do.
Marco:
But nobody should do that.
Marco:
But so, like, there are these kind of edge case things that, like, having a port at all
Marco:
And even if it requires crazy adapters or specialized hardware to use it for these kind of purposes, having a port that can be adapted to these kind of weird edge cases does allow these devices to be used in some pretty creative ways in some pretty interesting fields.
Marco:
And that having no port at all, relying totally on wireless, would make some of those things harder.
Marco:
However, I think those limits are more important to keep open on the iPad than on the phone.
Marco:
That's why I think the phone is probably going to get rid of Lightning first and probably fairly soon, relatively speaking.
Marco:
The iPad, because of those edge case uses, I think it would be more destructive to lose its only port in that way.
Marco:
But it also doesn't really matter what that port is.
Marco:
You know, we've argued for years, like, why don't they add a couple USB ports to it?
Marco:
But so far, the iPad has done seemingly pretty well and totally fine having its own proprietary port that, you know, could be adapted to a couple things here and there, but for the most part was not a standard port.
Marco:
And I don't see that demand curve in that way changing much over time.
Marco:
It got this far with no standard ports, and it's going to keep going with no standard ports.
Marco:
But I do think it would be a shame if it lost the one that it has.
John:
no it needs more ports like for the big for the for the 24 inch ipad pro right you need that's when you start like you don't need the lightning port you can get rid of the lightning port but it should have five usbc ports like for the big pro version for the one you know for the surface book type of is that what am i getting the name right of the imac i can't even keep track of the 27 inch screen like i i still think that's lurking out there in the future of the ipad as it becomes more and more capable and as they expand the line so
John:
if and when that day comes that's the time when the ipad needs ports because it is essentially going to you know it's it's the it's taking the mantle of the pc and the laptop surface studio is apparently the uh the the drafting table thing or whatever it's ridiculous to have a 27 inch tablet size thing
John:
that you use only at your desk because it's huge, that has one port on one edge.
John:
That's ridiculous, right?
John:
So lightning go away, but whatever the equivalent of USB-C, a Thunderbolt, or whatever should be there for all the reasons that we hook things up to our PCs today, right?
John:
They're not all going away quite as rapidly as we feel like we could ditch them on the phone because...
John:
So many things.
John:
Apple itself has come up with so many of the solutions, like with the AirPods, with wireless charging, getting rid of syncing and backing up to your Mac.
John:
They're practically there, but it's too early for them to do it, if only because charging would take too long because the Qi charging is...
John:
Very slow now.
John:
Supposedly going to get a little bit faster, but it's probably not going to catch wire for a while yet.
Marco:
But that's also, like, we don't have Apple's yet.
Marco:
Like, we only have the existing ones that are out there.
Marco:
You know, once Apple ships their version of the Qi charging mat...
Marco:
which I hope is soon.
Marco:
I'm kind of sad that it isn't until next year.
Marco:
But once they ship that, like before the iPad came out, USB charging was very, very slow.
Marco:
And the iPad was one of the first devices, if not the first device, to use like higher amperage USB charging standards.
Marco:
um and i don't even know if it was a standard back then or if apple just kind of hacked it on there um but like you know they needed more power so they made their custom power brick that delivered these you know the more power of a usb to the ipad that needed it um maybe this is a similar kind of thing where like the all the existing things out there now are these low power things but you know apple is doing their magic with extending the standards and pressuring the standards bodies and manufacturers and things so maybe the you know maybe next year's chi charging mats are going to be pretty fast
Casey:
Speaking of, can one of you explain to me what is the equipment I need to do fast charging with the iPhones 8 and iPhone 10?
Casey:
And my understanding from looking at some of Gruber's recent work is that it's actually not that fast.
Casey:
But what are the components I need?
Casey:
And can we get links for these for the show notes?
Casey:
Because I'm not trying to be funny.
Casey:
I genuinely am not clear on what stuff I need in order to make this work.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So the official answer is you should not be asking us unprepared on a podcast.
Marco:
You should just search for some article that Serenity Callbell has probably written at iMore that tells us all the actual information.
Marco:
But off the top of my head, you need basically a USB-C power brick.
Marco:
So not an iPad brick.
Marco:
All of those do charge.
Marco:
If you have any iPhone passed, I believe they started with the 6 or the 6S, anything then or newer will charge faster from an iPad power brick or any other 2.4 amp USB power device.
Marco:
So if you aren't using one of those yet, please use those for everything.
Marco:
Your phones will charge noticeably faster.
Marco:
But if you want to go even faster than that, but not too much faster than that, you can now use, with the new iPhones, you can now use a USB-C power delivery brick.
Marco:
So either the bricks that came with all the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros, including your little MacBook, Casey, that should do it, I believe.
Marco:
And then you need a USB-C to lightning cable.
Marco:
I think there's only one type of USB-C to lightning cable, I hope, from Apple.
Marco:
Because previously, the USB-C to C cables, there were actually multiple different Apple USB-C to C cables with different power delivery abilities.
Marco:
And I assume that's all legacy and has been solved in current inventory that they have in an Apple store.
Marco:
But that was a problem before.
Marco:
But with C to Lightning, I think there's only ever been one.
Marco:
So if you have Apple's, at least, I'm not sure I would trust a third-party cable for this just yet.
Marco:
Not that it would catch fire or anything, but I would just be wary of whether it would work at the maximum rate or not.
Marco:
So I would say go get the Apple Lightning to USB-C cable and plug it into your MacBook's power brick.
Marco:
That's the answer.
Marco:
cool all right thanks because i i was very confused um you could also use the um the the anchor uh you know your little like five port thing that charges things that you told us all to buy in that awesome blog post well i ended up uh this past uh winter i bought the version of that that has a single usbc output port as well that can power up to i think 60 watts over it or something like that that's wonderful by the way
Marco:
So if you're bringing a new MacBook of any kind on a trip and you want to just bring one charger, that Anker thing that has one USB-C port and four USB ports is awesome and can totally power all of the new laptops.
Marco:
It doesn't fully power the 15-inch if you're super draining it because it's 60, I think, versus 85 watts or 87 watts, whatever it is.
Marco:
But it's good enough for almost everything.
Marco:
But again, the gains here in speed, as some of the reviewers are noting, the gains are not that fast.
Marco:
It isn't that much faster than just using an iPad power brick or any other 2.4 amp source.
Marco:
So I would say if you already have this hardware, great, but I'm not sure it's worth the total investment between the bricks and the cables if you're only buying these things to do faster iPhone charging.
Marco:
I think you might be disappointed in how much faster it isn't.
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, thank you.
Casey:
I appreciate you clearing that up.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Air power.
Casey:
We spoke about that a little bit just a minute ago.
Casey:
One thing that bummed me out about air power, which is the pad and technology that allows the one pad to charge multiple Apple devices.
Casey:
What about nightstand mode on the watch?
Casey:
So if you leave the watch on a charger and you leave it such that the buttons are at the top –
Casey:
Then when you jostle the watch even the littlest bit, it will show you the time, just like a clock would on your nightstand.
Casey:
And it'll let you, like, pause and perhaps stop alarms by pressing the physical buttons, just like a clock on your nightstand.
Casey:
And I use this every night, and I love it.
Casey:
And, I mean, this is the first world problem, but I'm going to be kind of bummed if I can't do that on this, like, air power charging mat.
Casey:
And this occurred to me in part because I have the doc that Studio Neat makes.
Casey:
I forget exactly what it's called.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
But that is designed in many ways specifically for this.
Casey:
And they actually talked about this on an episode of their podcast called Thoroughly Considered.
Casey:
And to be honest, I listened to it days ago and forgot exactly what they said.
Casey:
But in some way, they discussed it.
Casey:
And I forget what conclusion they came to.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
This kind of bums me out.
Casey:
I mean, Marco, you don't believe in the Apple Watch.
Casey:
John, you don't really either, so never mind.
Marco:
Actually, by the way, I use it like every day, but I just don't use it the same way you do.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
But do you use it – where do you charge it at night?
Casey:
Do you charge it like at your desk or do you charge it on your nightstand?
Marco:
It's at my desk, so it's not on my nightstand.
Marco:
But when I was wearing it full-time as my main watch, I was charging it on my desk.
Marco:
But that predated nightstand mode.
Marco:
But yeah, that makes sense.
Marco:
I just did the lowest tech solution here possible, which is I have a regular alarm clock thing on my nightstand.
Marco:
They still make those, apparently.
Marco:
I just bought it last year.
Marco:
You were able to buy regular alarm clocks.
Marco:
But what most people do, I think, is either use their watch that way or just use their phone that way.
Marco:
It is a valid question, then, if you're using a charging mat, what about using your phone as a clock?
Marco:
But I think the answer most people will have is they'll just pick it up if they want to check the time.
Marco:
It isn't as nice as doing it your way, but it works.
John:
I've been thinking for years about what I would like in a nightstand clock because I have iOS devices on my nightstand, as I think most of us do.
John:
My phone charges there.
John:
My iPad actually charges there as well.
John:
But I don't want to use them as I have actually a dedicated, like, you know, old style clock radio thing, which I don't like.
John:
It's ancient and huge and ridiculous and, you know.
John:
but it still works and it has properties that marco can relate to when i turn my head in that direction i can see the time because it glows with just the right amount of glowiness not blinding super bright but not super dim the letters are big so with my blind nighttime eyes without my glasses on i can see them and every time i look at it it's there i
John:
I don't need to grope over on my nightstand, knocking over, you know, stuff that's over there.
John:
Like, I don't need to do anything.
John:
I don't need to touch anything.
John:
I don't need to jostle anything.
John:
I just look at it and it tells me the time.
John:
And it also, it's what I use for my alarm.
John:
Why don't I want to use my watch or my phone or my iPad or any of the other emptying things?
John:
Why don't I want to use them?
John:
Because they're not 100% guaranteed to be on my nightstand.
John:
What if I leave my phone downstairs?
John:
What if I leave my iPad downstairs?
John:
These devices are all over my house.
John:
I don't want to have to remember.
John:
I never have to remember.
John:
Did you remember to put the thing that's going to wake you up in the morning on your nightstand?
John:
It's always there.
John:
The alarm is always on.
John:
It goes on every time in the morning.
John:
And when I grow up in the morning to turn off the alarm, I like big, chunky, physical buttons that I can find, again, in my groggy state and either snooze or turn off the alarm.
John:
it's not ideal.
John:
Like the buttons are a little bit weird, but you know, I've had this, this clock radio for like 20 something years now or whatever.
John:
I would like, I was thinking like a nice dedicated clock radio.
John:
And I was like, maybe Apple should make a nice day.
John:
They're never going to do that.
John:
Right.
John:
They want us to use our, our phone or our watch, but I just, I just want, I guess it just, it's kind of like the bike thing.
John:
I just said, just want a good one.
John:
And I've looked at a lot of them and there's all sorts of fancy ones that are interesting.
John:
And sometimes they're really expensive and sometimes they're double as Bluetooth speakers, which is kind of neat, but whatever.
John:
But yeah,
John:
And I also thought about if I got a fancy one, I'd want to be able to play a recording of my choosing, and I would just record my old clock radio's little beep-beep sound.
John:
Because the sound you wake up to can be very personal.
John:
Some sounds people find very jarring and frightening to wake up to, and others comforting, and some sounds just don't wake them up at all.
Yeah.
John:
maybe i should just keep this one forever because it's obviously never going to break but it does take up a lot of space in my nightstand but anyway all this is to say that all of apple's efforts with nightstand mode and with this charging mat and everything seem to me to all be suboptimal solutions for the role that the clock radio plays maybe great solutions for what we're all doing with our devices now which is charging them on your nightstand when you go to bed but i'm still looking for a solution to
John:
waking me up in the morning reliably without me having to remember not to leave my phone downstairs.
Marco:
All right, I have a solution for you.
Marco:
It doesn't have an alarm.
Marco:
How is this a solution then?
Marco:
It doesn't have an alarm.
John:
Wait, is it a butler?
Marco:
It can't play the song of your choosing.
Marco:
However, it will always be charged because it's powered by air temperature changes.
Marco:
It is not designed by Apple, but it is designed by Mark Newson, who works for Apple.
John:
oh right right until you got the mark newson part i said that sounds like my wife because she's powered by air temperature changes it's too hot in here wake up it only costs 26 800 the jlc uh atmos clock that it is powered by atmospheric air temperature changes i would knock that off of my nightstand and it would shatter to the ground wasting 26 000 very quickly
Marco:
They're surprisingly heavy.
Marco:
I do not own one of these, but I have seen them in stores.
Marco:
They are quite remarkable to look at, and some of the lower-end models can be had for only about $10,000.
John:
So it used to be that my kids woke me up, but now they're all older.
John:
Now, realistically speaking, my dog wakes me up at 5.30 in the morning.
John:
The problem with the dog waking me up is if I'm not the one who goes and lets her out, I can fall back asleep, and that's a dangerous situation to be in.
John:
So I still do need my alarm.
John:
Most of the time, I am the one who takes the dog out, and so then I do wake up.
Yeah.
John:
I figure eventually the dog, will this ever happen?
John:
Will the 7-month-old dog stop whining to be let out at 5.30 to 6.30 in the morning?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Hope springs eternal.
John:
But anyway, I still think the role of the thing that wakes you up in the morning is not a solved problem as far as I'm concerned.
John:
And iOS devices, including the watch, don't solve that for me because I don't wear the watch when I sleep.
John:
or at all the only one more thing on air power about apple's naming it's kind of a weird name to me because air power means a thing in a military context and i don't think what other contexts are there for air power there is the i'm just making this phrase that has never been seen before combining the word air with the word power and isn't that great but unfortunately it is a phrase air power is a thing and it's weird to see an even vaguely military term on an apple product
John:
that's interesting i wonder i wonder if they even thought about that they like that might not have occurred to them because they're so non-military thinking usually they thought of it then they just said that's no one knows that term only you know who most people will see it and read it as they intend which is air which is like the macbook air and then power i don't think they they probably said there are military connotations but most people won't get think of it that way so it's fine and they went with it it's just it just struck me as odd when they said it
Marco:
It's kind of funny also that the power does not go through the air, really.
John:
What does it go through?
Marco:
I mean, technically, there's probably a few air molecules between your phone and the mat.
Marco:
More than a few.
Marco:
Yeah, but really, it's not going through a lot of air.
John:
It's not going through a wire now, is it?
John:
Oh, let's not get into that.
Marco:
Here we go again.
John:
You see Google just bought part of HTC's Pixel division or something?
John:
Yeah, I've been hearing those rumors, and as someone tweeted about it, tell me how this is going to end up differently than it did with Motorola.
John:
I guess HTC doesn't have as many patents, and they're not paying $12 billion for it.
Marco:
Yeah, and how well it worked out for Microsoft with Nokia also.
Marco:
I mean, I think this is... I'd be surprised if this mattered at all for anything ever.
Marco:
Google just wants someone to make phones for them.
John:
maybe apple will do it yeah right that'll fix it all right uh apparently we have more to say about animoji didn't we already talk about this you should we should wait until you are you use you can't use it with the no we can't use it with ios 11 unless you have the uh the 10 or does it work on the 8
Casey:
No, I don't think so because it uses the Fancy Pants facial recognition stuff.
Casey:
I think it's only on the 10.
John:
We should save it until one of us has it, I guess.
John:
Yeah, so next March.
Casey:
Did you see, by the way, that apparently they're doubling down on the supply constraints?
Casey:
Like MacRumors posted something earlier about how the supply constraint is really, really bad and they haven't even started full-on manufacturing.
John:
We're waiting a while for our 10s.
Marco:
I expect it to be incredibly difficult for anybody to actually buy these phones, at least at list price, or anywhere near list price, until after December.
Marco:
And I don't know, I haven't heard anything more than what these rumor sites have published, but just knowing how Apple has done these launches of recent products in the past, like
Marco:
They frequently have trouble meeting demand recently, especially when it comes to very highly demanded iPhones.
Marco:
And this is probably going to be a whole other level of the disconnect between supply and demand for this one.
Marco:
And so this is just going to be a mess, I think.
Marco:
I would be shocked if you could walk into a store and just buy one without having reserved it or anything before January and maybe even later than that.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm going to be a sad panda when this phone doesn't come in for a long time.
Casey:
Oh, man.
Casey:
The struggle is real, you guys.
Casey:
All right.
John:
We can always go to the store and play with them, which will be all I'm doing because I'm not ordering one.
Casey:
Of course.
John:
Before we wrap this up, we should be done here because we've gone a little bit long.
John:
real-time follow-up on apple tv uh someone has sent me a screenshot of the screen where you uh can pick the uh like the screen resolutions and so it does show a bunch of 24 hertz options shows uh 25 hertz sdr 24 hertz hdr i mean i suppose it depends on what tv you hook up to and what things it supports but these look like you choosing the output format period for the whole thing so if you do pick 24 hertz uh
John:
you're picking it for the whole UI.
John:
And I understand Apple's desire not to switch modes and that being flaky and stuff like that, but this isn't a great solution either because this, I mean, I guess most people will never go into the screen, but if you want to do the right thing, you will have to know the frame rate of the media you want to see switch your Apple TV, uh,
John:
for a refresh rate to match the frame rate of the media you want to play, then go play the media.
John:
And then remember that you did that.
John:
So the next time you go watch, you know, a 30 FPS TV show or whatever that you keep, you know, that you change to 60 Hertz or I don't know that I find it confusing.
John:
And I really wish the media player,
John:
could just do the thing that other things attached to your television do and tell it, hey, I'm about to start playing 24 frames per second content.
John:
Please switch to a refresh rate that is some multiple of 24 that I have detected using the magic of HDMI.
John:
So I'll try all this out when I get my Apple TV.
John:
I didn't get my order in very quickly, so I think mine's not going to be here for a week or two, but I'll let you know.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks to our three sponsors this week, Betterment, Fracture, and Aftershocks.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-
Casey:
I have a bit of real-time follow-up as well.
Marco:
During the show, not only have I installed the version of Safari that John told me I could install, so now I guess I'm not seeing how to play video anymore, and now I have 60% of the features of High Sierra.
Marco:
without breaking the window manager but also there is indeed a twitter direct message only app called twim t-w-i-m i installed it and it does seem to work in the sense that i can get direct messages there i've tested it during the show with casey thank you casey the only thing is it was not able to notify me of them even though i enabled them so i'm guessing it just like has to rely on background refresh and not just like a push service
Marco:
and if so that's kind of unfortunate in the sense that you might uh you might not get the messages for a while but honestly i don't really care that much most of the time about that if i'm on my phone and not browsing twitter so that seems all right to me so yeah thanks for everybody who recommended twim that's cool i had there was an element here um about ways in our notes did you want me to expand on my use of ways and how much i love it
John:
no save it that's that's all these are all topic worthy topics that's not it's not it really isn't it totally is oh my god we should go up to the after show section and ask casey about how driving accurate tlx was or he was in an accurate yeah so wait what is this one is this like the the nsuv is this a no it's an accord but gussied up a bit
John:
and it's not even on the accord platform anymore like a deluxe tl tlx the tsx used to be on the european accord platform i don't know what platform tlx on is but i think it's not the accord platform whatever it it's it's the sedan that's to john's point it's probably a little bigger than an accord and it's certainly fancier it's not bigger than an accord
Casey:
Oh, my God, John.
Casey:
Okay, how would you describe the TLX?
Marco:
The website describes it as a 2018 restyled performance sedan.
Casey:
I don't know about performance sedan, but whatever.
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
Casey:
So a coworker of mine has been test driving pretty much every car under the sun trying to figure out what he wants to buy.
Casey:
Um, and he's in that stage where he really wants to buy something frivolous and stupid, but he just turned 40 and is trying to convince himself that he shouldn't spend frivolous and stupid money.
Casey:
And also he should, uh, probably be more responsible.
Casey:
So one of the cars that he, that he test drove that I sat in and went for literally like a 300 yard trip in, uh, was an Acura TLX.
Casey:
And so I would describe the Acura TLX as something Accord-ish and fancier.
Casey:
And the thing that's interesting about the Acura TLX is that it has two screens in it.
Casey:
There's a screen that's kind of far away on the dashboard that has navigation on it.
Casey:
And then there's a different screen in the center, not the center console, but like where the radio is.
Casey:
And one of which has CarPlay and one of which doesn't.
Casey:
And if I recall correctly, the CarPlay one is the one... God, I'm going to get this wrong and I'm going to hate myself.
Casey:
But I think it was the one that was up high that does not offer a touchscreen.
Casey:
It has instead an iDrive-like cursor setup or like a left-right, you know, up-down with enter sort of setup.
Casey:
And then the other screen that's down low...
Casey:
is a touchscreen.
Casey:
And it was all really, really, really weird.
Casey:
And I don't think I liked it.
Casey:
But the most startling thing of all for me was even after on a previous podcast, which was called Neutral, which none of you have ever heard of, I discussed that I thought the idea of a touchscreen for car infotainment was terrible.
Casey:
And
Casey:
And I still mostly agree with that, in no small part because as you're driving down the road trying to mash your finger into the touchscreen, you go over the smallest bump and that gets amplified over the distance of your arm and makes it impossible to stab what you want to hit on the screen.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
seeing the like up down left right setup in the acura that was much much much worse and i want to see sometime if the bmw setup for for a car play allows you to use the iDrive spinner and i want to see if that's any good or actually marco have you ever tried that in tiff's car
Marco:
Yeah, I have.
Marco:
And it's, well, I mean, so the way it's integrated into BMWs, and this is, so she has, I believe, what their newest or close enough version is.
Marco:
So it's wireless, works over Bluetooth, which is awesome.
Marco:
But the way BMW integrated it, and I guess in a lot of this I feel like is unavoidable,
Marco:
They have their own whole system, their whole iDrive system, of course.
Marco:
So, like, they have their own navigation, their own media control and everything else.
Marco:
And they try to integrate CarPlay.
Marco:
And the way it works is basically, like, CarPlay is, like, just one of the different layers or, like, app sections in iDrive.
Marco:
that itself has CarPlay's own sub-apps and stuff within it.
Marco:
So you can have View CarPlay mode, and when you have a CarPlay connection to your phone, it kind of is always available, but it's kind of hard to navigate to and find.
Marco:
Honestly, I find it very clunky.
Marco:
And maybe it's just because I don't usually drive Tiff's car, so I haven't really had a lot of time to get used to it.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I honestly really don't like using CarPlay in a car that has its own system that it's also trying to mix in or that it defaults to.
Marco:
I find the whole thing, honestly, very confusing.
Marco:
I will say the idea of navigating it via the wheel and stuff as opposed to a touchscreen, that part I haven't found to be too egregiously confusing or bad.
Marco:
That part seems to be fine.
Marco:
With a car...
Marco:
You have very tricky ergonomics where ideally you want the screens that the driver has to see to be pretty high up and to be set pretty deeply into the windshield area just so you don't have to keep focusing your eyes that close to and from, close and far away, and you don't have to look down too far.
Marco:
So if a screen is ideally positioned for the driver to see it frequently or safely or everything else, it's probably going to be a little hard to reach for it to be a touch screen.
Marco:
So I see why they do this.
Marco:
It makes sense to have a screen that is not a touch screen that is far away for reaching but nice for looking.
Marco:
And then to have some kind of wheel or stick or something that you can control to move on screen.
Marco:
So I'm totally sold on not being a touch screen.
Marco:
I am not, however, totally sold on CarPlay as an additional layer or mode of an already complex entertainment system and navigation system.
Marco:
That, I think, is very confusing and doesn't work for me.
Casey:
Yeah, I have mixed feelings about this.
Casey:
So Aaron's XC90, it has CarPlay.
Casey:
It is not wireless, which is a bummer.
Casey:
And I definitely have mixed feelings about it.
Casey:
And I think the reason that I was so persnickety about her getting a car that had CarPlay is because I want to future-proof it.
Casey:
Because if you look at the interface on my BMW, which was built in 2010 as a 2011 model year...
Casey:
you know, five, what is it, actually six, seven years on now, it looks pretty dated, where by comparison, it stands to reason, maybe, that CarPlay will advance with time.
Casey:
And sure, yes, some auto manufacturers let you upgrade your firmware and your car or whatever.
Casey:
Sometimes you can do it yourself.
Casey:
Other times you can go to service and have it done.
Casey:
But more often than not,
Casey:
It's a whole new set of hardware to get you to the next version of, say, iDrive.
Casey:
Like, I cannot get any of the latest and greatest iDrive because I would need brand new hardware.
Casey:
But with CarPlay, it's just a screen.
Casey:
That's all it is.
Casey:
And as long as the screen hardware doesn't need to change in future versions of CarPlay…
Casey:
it will always be the best CarPlay that will ever be.
Casey:
And this is also particularly important with maps, because although generally speaking, I can use the navigation of my car pretty well, and it typically knows where I'm going when I plug in an address, there are certainly newer neighborhoods or newer sections of town where it has no clue where I'm going because the maps are seven years old, and that's frustrating.
Casey:
And so I stand by car play if nothing else is an insurance policy against future.
Casey:
What's the word I'm looking for?
Casey:
But when things just get old and busted in the future.
Casey:
And that's why I wanted it in Aaron's car so bad.
Casey:
And that's why I insisted on it.
Casey:
I'll also say that I happened to take her car out tonight to do a couple errands, and it's pretty sweet to be able to just plug in my phone and have it kind of take over, in the case of the Volvo, half the screen, because I don't need to have my phone paired with her car, and it doesn't need to fight with her phone when we're both in the car for who is going to be the more important phone.
Casey:
But yet, when I plug it in via the cable, it becomes the only phone that matters, which is cool, too.
Casey:
The thing that sucks about all this, though, and now I'm kind of jumping ahead into next week's show, is from what I can tell, Apple doesn't allow any sort of navigation system on CarPlay except Apple Maps.
Casey:
And I actually don't mind Apple Maps.
Casey:
I feel kind of the same way about Apple Maps as I do about the Apple TV remote.
Casey:
It's fine.
Casey:
But that being said...
Casey:
I would prefer, given the choice, to have, I don't know, maybe Waze on CarPlay.
Casey:
That would be neat, and that's not allowed, and it's because Apple is obnoxious like every other corporation is and won't allow it, and that's super-duper frustrating.
John:
Real-time follow-up.
John:
Now that I look at this thing, the TLX is a replacement for the TSX and the TL.
John:
The TSX was small, originally based on the European Accord platform, and the TL was their bigger thing.
John:
This looks like it's the size of the TL, so I think it actually might be the Accord platform.
John:
Oh, look at that.
John:
that's a honda thing it's been in accords for many generations now it's i don't know how many accurate it's been and i don't know why they decided to do it my car essentially has it except that when i bought it i didn't even have the choice to get the second screen so i've got the one big screen that's not a touch screen buried in the dash and where the second screen would be i have comically oversized physical buttons to cover the giant square where the screen was supposed to be which is very silly um my wife's accord doesn't have it either
John:
um that's where the navigation would go if we had navigation in our car um but this is the new what you're looking at in if you're looking at the 2018 this is the new improved honda infotainment system believe it or not the i have the even crappier one but in some respects it is simpler because it doesn't do all that fancy car play or android stuff it's just a terrible classic honda interface
Casey:
To that end, the screen up top, which shows CarPlay in the picture that we'll put in the show notes, that screen, the navigation system—I shouldn't say it's the screen.
Casey:
I'm implying it's the hardware.
Casey:
It's not the hardware.
Casey:
The navigation system, though, that Honda has caked into this 2018 TLX looks like it's the navigation system for my 2010—well, really, model year 2011 BMW.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
It is approximately a 200 by 200 pixel screen from the looks of it.
Casey:
Now, the reality is it's not.
Casey:
It's better than that because CarPlay requires something better than that.
Casey:
But it is just so it looks so antiquated and terrible.
Casey:
Oh, my goodness.
Casey:
It looks terrible.
Casey:
And so if I had a TLX, there is zero chance I would ever look at that navigation because I would always, always, always be looking at CarPlay.
Casey:
Now, in Tiff's car, where the navigation looks great and is performant and responsive and whatnot, I would probably do the exact same thing it sounds like Marco and Tiff do, which is, generally speaking, I would just use the onboard stuff.
Casey:
And in a pinch, if there was some particular reason to use CarPlay, then sure, I'll use CarPlay.
Marco:
I mean, now we just use Waze, but we can't talk about that apparently until next week.
Casey:
That's right.
Marco:
You know what makes me mad about the TLX?
Marco:
It isn't the dual screens.
Marco:
It isn't the infotainment system.
Marco:
It's that this car is offered with a DCT.
John:
That's awesome.
John:
It's not awesome because this car is not...
John:
It is not a sporty sedan.
John:
It's trying to be... The TSX was supposed to be sporty and the TL was supposed to be luxurious and they combined them to make one bland car.
Marco:
But this is like... It's a fairly accessibly priced car relative to other sports cars.
Marco:
And it has a DCT option and an all-wheel drive option and a V6 almost 300 horsepower option.
Marco:
However...
Marco:
You can only get the DCT on the base model 206 horsepower engine and not with all-wheel drive.
Casey:
Honda is the worst.
Casey:
They always do this with a good transmission.
Casey:
Hey, John, how many cylinders does your car have?
Casey:
Four?
Casey:
Oh, why?
Casey:
Well, because you wanted a stick and you can't get it with a six-cylinder.
John:
I probably wouldn't have gotten the V6, though.
Casey:
Don't ruin my moment.
Casey:
You're ruining my rant, John.
Marco:
Also, I'm very curious.
Marco:
Can you explain to me, John?
Marco:
It says the industry's first 8-speed DCT with torque converter.
Marco:
What does that mean?
Casey:
That can't be.
Marco:
I don't know what that means.
Casey:
How can you have a DCT and a torque converter?
John:
maybe it's like a dual transmission thing where it's got like an automatic transmission in front of it.
John:
It has, I don't, I don't understand.
John:
I don't understand at all.
John:
Here's the, here's the, uh, the one line summary from a recent car and driver review of, of the last year's model, which I think it was just a cosmetic refresh automotive wallpaper from the same company that sells the NSX supercar.
Yeah.
Marco:
so glowing review huh yeah how can that same company that makes that make this thing automotive wallpaper is not what you want to hear so i i also have an issue with the nsx and while we're on this topic the new one or the old one the new one um i i have seen somebody in my town okay somebody occasionally parks one like in town so i see it occasionally now it just is incredibly forgettable looking um
Marco:
The old NSX is incredibly distinctive.
Marco:
And I saw one of those the same day, which is kind of amusing.
Marco:
I almost never see those.
Marco:
But the old NSX, you know it from a mile away, and it looks incredibly distinctive, and it looks cool.
Marco:
Even still today, it still looks cool, which is pretty impressive for a car of that era.
Marco:
The new one just looks like a random expensive car.
Marco:
Like, it doesn't look that distinctive anymore.
Marco:
Like, it doesn't look bad, and it looks like a sports car, but it just looks like every other sports car now.
Marco:
And I feel like that's kind of a shame from the same company that the old one was just so distinctive.
John:
Yeah, it was compromised by the... I mean, it had a difficult life.
John:
If you look at the development history of this NSX, at various times, many different configurations were planned to be the new NSX, and so it didn't have a good development in...
John:
I think it shows in the finished product, which is not bad, but it is kind of a mishmash of various compromises.
John:
And going hybrid, trying to be a hybrid supercar along with the big boys, right?
John:
But having that be a controversial decision and the way they executed it, it's so much better when you have a clear vision from the beginning and you develop based on it rather than changing your mind.
John:
Three times during the development and like scrapping one plan and going with another and then tweaking and modifying it and styling feel like suffers from the same thing.
John:
It's like they had to put a skin over this car they'd made and it just it just seems too high to me and they tried to put family Honda resemblance in the front and rear treatments that don't quite work out.
John:
I haven't seen one in person.
John:
It's all reserved judgment.
John:
Sometimes these cars look better in person.
John:
But every time I've seen one driving around on video reviews and stuff, it looks all right.
John:
And it gets so-so reviews, but no one is wowed by it like they were by the old one.
John:
And the old one definitely... I mean, the complaint about the old one was that it looked like a Japanese Ferrari.
John:
That's kind of what they were going for.
John:
But Japanese Ferrari is a good look.
John:
This just looks like...
John:
I don't know.
John:
It looks like a slightly modified Audi R8.
Marco:
Very similar to the R8.
Marco:
I feel like if you want to buy a really cool sports car, I'd get the old one before I get the new one.
John:
yeah they have some problems too and also you see one of those in real life and realize wow those tires are tiny looks like it looks like a little like it looks like a skateboard it's like 15 inch tires or something on it it's just ridiculous well the the car isn't very big on the old one but it is it's like 25 feet long though like it's it's a very long car you're just you're just fooled by the proportion of the tires like everything about everything about it is small like the the
John:
the beautiful thing about the the nsx is that they did have a clear vision and i think it's a great vision that like it was a competitive advantage that they had over the things that they were sort of imitating like ferrari and everything like their inspiration for the overall shape of the car was the f-16 cockpit where the cockpit is a bubble up above the level of all the rest of the stuff in the plane so that when you're a pilot you look around and you can see things on all sides of you you're not like looking over the big lump you know it's not the
John:
The cockpit is not sort of like the back of the spine of the plane goes long and then slopes downward, and that's the cockpit.
John:
And when you look backward, you would just see, like, nothing, like you're driving a panel truck or something.
John:
They said, no, the plane is going to be down here, and then the cockpit will be coming up off the top of it, so you have a panoramic view.
John:
And that's what they did with the car.
John:
The car is down there in the NSX.
John:
And the canopy, the sort of the roof line, that's where you are.
John:
And you can look around in all directions.
John:
So that's skinny pillars because of Black's crash standards, right?
John:
And amazing visibility compared to any other mid-engine car like a Ferrari where you have like a tiny slit out the back because the giant engine is back there.
John:
And sometimes they even put like...
John:
slits in there like in the older 80s models and stuff to make it so you have terrible visibility huge c pillars huge blind spots and they got to put these giant side mirrors so you can see anything and you feel kind of like you're you're trapped more people should be copying that because that you know if you're if you can't actually make yourself look and perform like a ferrari one of the only advantages you have as a supercar you know an affordable supercar or a supercar wannabe is you can be ergonomically better than the supercars
John:
And that's what the NSX did.
John:
It looked cool, it looked interesting, and had amazing ergonomics.
John:
And the new one, it's also mid-engine, and its ergonomics don't look that great.
John:
It looks like it has pretty darn big C-pillars, and the visibility out the back, while better than a Ferrari, is nowhere near what it was in the original NSX.
Casey:
They can be had for as little as $40,000 for a 100,000-mile option.
John:
They're going up now.
John:
Since we had a neutral episode where we had to pick a car for $25,000 and I picked the NSX, good luck finding a 25K NSX now that's in reasonable condition because they are creeping up.
John:
Did we do that?
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
Remember, if you have $25,000, what car should you get?
John:
You two picked terrible cars and I picked the NSX because I'm a genius.
John:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
What did we pick?
Casey:
I remember us picking comparatively bad cars.
Casey:
You picked something terrible.
John:
I was like, I would like a Toyota Camry.
John:
Something terrible.
John:
I'm like, no, you get an Acura NSX.
Marco:
I probably said like a used 3 Series or something.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I remember both of us picking truly terrible choices, and it took a little convincing for me to decide that, but I agree that it was not good.
Marco:
You can get a DeLorean for about that much.
Marco:
That is a crap car.
Casey:
That is a terrible, terrible choice.
Marco:
I didn't say it was my choice.
Marco:
I'm just saying you can't get one.
Casey:
A DeLorean is furniture.
Casey:
It's not a car.
Casey:
It's like a lawn ornament.
Casey:
It just looks good sitting there, but God, I would never want to drive one.
Casey:
Although they're making the new ones now that I would presume are a little bit better.
Casey:
Do you know about this?
Marco:
Have they actually made them yet, or are they just talking about it?
Casey:
New DeLorean production update.
Casey:
Here we go.
Casey:
In December 2015, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
I'm too easy to read this, but apparently it's happening, I guess.
Marco:
Are they just making the same car again, just with new parts?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Not any design updates or anything, just making the same thing again.
Marco:
Correct.
Casey:
I don't even I don't even think they're doing the like Singer treatment where Singer will take an old port.
Casey:
It is Singer, right?
Casey:
That takes an old Porsche and like guts the interior.
Casey:
Not I shouldn't say the interior, but like completely reworks the mechanicals such that they're like these ridiculous performance cars that are using.
Casey:
And I think this is what you're driving at, Marco, using, you know, like 2017 era parts, but in a 1960s era Porsche.
Casey:
I don't think that's what DeLorean's doing.
Casey:
I think they're doing at most like a modest update or upgrade, but it's mostly the same stuff you saw in the early 80s.
Marco:
So the problem with the DeLorean is that... The problem?
Marco:
Is like we all have nostalgia about Back to the Future and how cool it was back then and how cool it looked back then.
Marco:
And it's such an incredibly rare car that like most of us have never actually even seen one in real life, let alone, you know...
Marco:
have ever ridden in one or driven one or anything else so the if you tell someone like oh we're bringing back the DeLorean like a lot of people who were roughly in our age group like yeah cool that sounds awesome but like
Marco:
You've been able to buy a DeLorean for the last 20 years for a reasonable amount of money.
Marco:
Last time I looked, you could get one that was very lightly used and had a bunch of new parts for $25,000 in totally restored condition.
Marco:
That's really not that much money for a crazy second fun car.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
It's not like you haven't been able to get them all this time.
Marco:
You have, and still practically nobody has actually sought one out and bought one.
Marco:
Because it turns out, first of all, in person, they don't look that impressive.
Marco:
They look really 80s, extremely 80s.
Marco:
And from the car nerd's perspective, it isn't a particularly fun or fast or compelling car to drive.
Marco:
Um, so like if you, if they're going to bring it back in quotes, like in finger quotes, um, without really making any changes to it that are, that would make it like a more interesting car to, to enthusiasts.
Marco:
Who's going to buy it?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I don't know.
John:
Back to the future fans.
John:
I guess so.
Marco:
Yeah, but Back to the Future fans have been able to spend $25,000 to buy one for years.
John:
The new ones will be more reliable and you'll be able to get parts to them a little bit easier and then hopefully drive a little bit better.
John:
And so then it's like it's getting over that hump of I don't want an actual DeLorean because it's just, you know, a terrible car and unreliable and difficult to...
John:
repair and these new ones presumably will improve in all those ways so it finally gets you over the hump to have the will they silly nostalgic thing i'm hoping i mean why are they doing new ones that you know they should just fill it with honda toyota parts so it actually works and then keep the outside the same