Senior-Citizen Advantage
John:
Okay, fine.
John:
i don't know wasn't actually the mac mini thing that is in the topic section uh is a natural uh follow-on from last thing not to be confused with follow-up from last topic yes who invented follow-on uh i don't know is it even a thing i think i was just using the actual term the actual phrase
John:
as in something that naturally comes after another thing i mean you probably thought the same thing when you were first using follow-up and then it turns out you invented that no because there was a format associated with that there was a format what's the format for follow-on it just when you in the next show you do a topic that that is a natural uh
John:
you know that naturally follows the topic on the previous show i don't know i think it's whatever you say it is well we'll see if i do it if i do it for like two years regularly with a strict format and every single episode then we'll see what we got so let me just state for the record that we immediately ended up on a tangent on this thing that will be very quick it's fine
John:
uh carry on why there wasn't a lot of follow-up um so the only item i have is more chair follow-up of course i can't forget i love this last last week i think i was sitting on the gesture right i think you had just started sitting on the gesture like that day or sometime recently yeah
John:
Yeah, so I used it for a few days or whatever, but I've swapped it back now for the Embody.
John:
I took the old chairs out of the room, so now we're in the actual trial period where I'm going to try one chair, and my wife will try the other, and then we'll switch back and forth and see how we go.
John:
I kind of know what I think of both of the chairs so far, and I wish there was one that was just such a clear winner, but the big lumpy thing underneath the Embody annoys me.
John:
Um, but I think I like the embody, uh, like I think it fits my body better than the gesture.
John:
Um, so anyway, uh, the only bit of followup I have is last week I was sitting on the gesture, but I was wondering how I was going to figure out how to take off the arms.
John:
Um, and I'm happy to report that I did successfully remove the arms without too much fuss.
John:
It was just a tiny little bit tricky.
John:
It's not, it wasn't actually tricky.
John:
Like it's, it's straightforward and less.
John:
If you don't have a lot of experience disassembling things, and this is how you get experience disassembling things, you do it the wrong way when you're a kid a lot.
John:
Maybe adults don't do this, but frequently as a child, if I wanted to take something apart and I took a lot of things apart...
John:
you would look at it and be like i want that thing to come off and you'd look around for a couple seconds and see if there's any obvious screw heads poking out somewhere or something like you know what do i need to unscrew or untwist or whatever to make this come out and if you don't see anything you're then you're like well i've got a lot of tools and i'm pretty clever and i have opposable thumbs and i'm a clever tool using monkey um
John:
i can get that off like it's coming off right you just you you realize that you can do it you're like i have i have leverage and and friction and all all sorts of things that will get this thing off but you end up destroying the thing when you're taking it off and so
John:
The Steelcase Gesture Chair is one of those devices where any tool-using monkey can look at the thing and say, I can get those arms off, probably.
John:
Like, I kind of have an idea.
John:
Like, I see some squishy plastic bits that seem like they have seams.
John:
And even though I don't see any screws that I can unscrew to get it undone, I see a lot of things that are soft enough that I can pry them off.
John:
And surely underneath those things, if I pry them off, will be the screws that I seek.
John:
And I'll be able to remove these arms.
John:
But...
John:
Me, having some experience disassembling things, knows how this goes.
John:
Yeah, you probably will eventually do it that way, but there's also a very good chance that you will pry off all these soft parts and damage them, and underneath them will just be scary, unyielding metal that doesn't help you at all.
John:
So, take two seconds to think about it, and I did take two seconds to think about it.
John:
I didn't pry the thing off, but I didn't destroy it, because, you know, it's an expensive chair, and I want to, you know, be nice to it.
John:
Anyway, like I said, this is what comes with the experience of taking things apart.
John:
So I found that you could feel the underside of some very large screws that were probably holding the arms on, but there's no way you could get at the top of them because there was no, like there was, you couldn't see the top of them.
John:
And I'm like, look, well, this chair went together.
John:
Someone assembled this chair, and it's not like so many Apple things, one-way assembly with tabs that don't untab or things that iFixit has to remove with heat because they're glued.
John:
First put this beanbag in the microwave.
John:
Right, exactly.
John:
Or even just things, a lot of things snap together like a plastic snap together model where there's like a slot in a tab and like they really only go in one direction and you have no way to push that tab back out like without breaking it.
John:
But I figured a chair is not like that.
John:
So the trick of it, in case you're wondering, is the seat of the steel case chair slides forward and back on like a little like it's like rack and pinion steering.
John:
There's like a little, you know, rack thing and then a little gear that turns.
John:
Right.
Right.
John:
And I could see that to get to the top of the screw heads that I wanted to get at, they would probably be underneath the back of the seat.
John:
So I moved the seat forward, but I couldn't remove the sort of plastic shroud.
John:
It's a lot like a car.
John:
Plastic shroud that was probably covering what I imagined to be the tops of those screws.
John:
And I'm like, oh, if the seat goes forward, I looked underneath the seat.
John:
There's no screws underneath there, but there's one tiny little tab that was like...
John:
stopping the seat from going completely forward so you can move it forward and back and what what prevented it why did it stop going forward this is one tiny little tab and it was made of flexible springy metal all right so push that little springy tab down into the slot and now all of a sudden the chair you can just keep turning that dial and the chair slides right off the front like the seat slides right off the front in one piece perfectly fine and then you have access to
John:
the body of the seat and then there's a plastic thing with some little you know you peel off the plastic shroud with some little plastic clippy things in there you'll see the uh apparently expensive chair industry standard which is a t30 torque screws and there were like six of them and they were really hard to undo and they're humongous apple once i had all six of them out the arms came right off no damage done at all reassembled perfectly so happy to report that i now have two armless chairs and
John:
and did not damage them and now i have what i imagine is several hundred dollars worth of useless arms up in my attic in case anyone wants to buy them of course you have arms for sale oh that's that's by the way that's a i don't even know if i would sell them because i'm such a hoarder but um a point something i wish i had known earlier is you can buy the embody without arms for like a hundred dollars less
John:
If you can find someone who will sell it to you, you can configure it without arms and you will save like a hundred bucks on it.
John:
So it's no small amount.
John:
As far as I could tell, there was no place where you could buy the gesture without arms because gesture, the arms and the gesture are kind of like half the point of the chair.
John:
They're very, very configurable.
John:
They're actually really cool arms.
John:
I just don't want them on my chair.
John:
So that's it for my update.
John:
I'm sitting on the embody.
John:
There are no arms and we're off to the races.
John:
Life is good.
Casey:
Wait, what about your wife though?
Casey:
What if she wants arms on her chair?
Casey:
Tough noogies?
Casey:
She doesn't.
Casey:
She doesn't want them.
Casey:
Oh, that was part of the prenup?
Yeah.
John:
No, it was not part of the prenup, but she told me I don't want arms.
John:
They get in the way.
John:
She's used to having a chair with no arms as well, and they just get in the way.
John:
So no arms for anybody.
Casey:
I think that's bananas.
Casey:
I can't imagine not having arms on my chair.
Casey:
I'm serious, too.
John:
I explained this in Slack today because you missed it, but I don't know if people deal with arms on a chair.
John:
If you're...
John:
If your arms are positioned ergonomically on the keyboard, like it should be like if you look at yourself sitting at the seat in profile, it should be a 90-degree L from like your shoulder straight down to your elbow and then 90 degrees out to the keyboard, right?
John:
That's where you want to be.
John:
In that position, especially if you have long arms like mine, your elbows are already low enough that they're probably bumping into the armrests.
John:
And even if the armrests are below where your arms are,
John:
If you relax or move or whatever, your arms might bump into the armrest.
John:
And I just feel like I feel constrained by the armrest that my elbows are constantly bumping them.
John:
So then I find myself pulling in my elbows to instinctively avoid bumping into the armrest.
John:
And that is uncomfortable and tense.
John:
So that's the first thing.
John:
And the second thing is I apparently get in and out of the chair sideways all the time.
John:
And when there are arms there, you can't do that.
John:
Like, you know, you have to climb over them.
John:
You have to rotate their pull out the chair.
John:
And by the way, these chairs are really heavy.
John:
I wish they were lighter and they don't roll that well on the carpet.
John:
But bottom line is I get into the chairs from the side.
John:
And once there are arms, you can't get in from the side.
John:
And third, the arms hit against my keyboard tray because of the height they would have to be.
John:
Like if I put the arms below the level of my keyboard tray, they'd be so low that they'd be like hitting my hips and not my elbows.
John:
But like, what the hell is the point then?
John:
so they're just they just arms just don't fit into my chair life at all and i imagine a lot of people who have arms in their chair who don't mess with them their keyboard is too high like if your keyboard is on your desk chances are good your keyboard is too high like if you sit properly and type and your arms do not make perfect 90 degree l's or or a larger angle so like you know 95 degrees or whatever so that the the angle at your elbows is bigger than 90 then you're probably your keyboard is too high which may not bother you but it super bothers me a lot
Casey:
Now all I can think of is I'm envisioning you mounting a chair by hopping one leg over it like Jonathan Frakes.
John:
You know what I'm talking about?
John:
I was going to do a Riker reference.
John:
I'm like, nobody's going to get that.
John:
But I guess it's meme-y enough that Casey got it.
Casey:
Oh, come on.
Casey:
I love The Next Generation.
Casey:
Why you got to do this to me, Daddy?
John:
Yeah, but when you watch Next Generation, did you know about that?
John:
Or did you only know about it after the meme came?
Casey:
Yeah, only after.
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
I think I'm more disappointed when I hear a John Syracuse than when my own father does the equivalent.
Casey:
This is an abusive relationship.
John:
Your own father has a podcast?
Casey:
Oh my goodness.
Casey:
Let's just move on to Ask ATP.
Casey:
And Jonathan Rogers would like to know, how do you all feel about Bitcoin slash cryptocurrencies?
Casey:
Do you think that there's a real long-term value in them or are they just short-term speculation plays?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Do you buy into the underlying structure for sustaining billions of transactions in the future?
Casey:
And do you hold any coins of any type?
Casey:
I know almost nothing about any of this and have no cryptocurrencies of any sort.
Casey:
And I would love to be enlightened.
Casey:
And I did hear Glenn Fleischman, I think on the talk show, he did describe Bitcoin and it still flew right over my head.
Casey:
And so I just don't get it.
Marco:
I treat Bitcoin the same way I treat all other kind of high-risk, mostly luck-based or speculation-based investments, which is this is a game that other people play that I should not play, and so I don't play.
Marco:
I don't even own individual stocks anymore.
Marco:
I used to have some of my savings be in an E-Trade account that I could buy and sell individual stocks from, and I did for a couple of years, and
Marco:
I came out a little ahead, but I was always worried about it, and the ups and downs really annoyed me and stressed me out.
Marco:
All the index funds over the same time beat my performance.
Marco:
It wasn't like I was being particularly special or clever.
Marco:
Pretty much any kind of manually managed...
Marco:
investments like this um are i i think not a good use of of my time or my money um you're if you are more if you're a person who's more into doing that and and you and you get a lot of interest and value out of that that can be your game and and more power to you but i decided that the best way for me to make more money was to just do things that made me that made me money like do more of them yeah
Marco:
And that was better than trying to extract an extra 5% or 10% a year out of some potentially lucky investments that oftentimes weren't so lucky.
Marco:
Bitcoin, to me, is no different than playing stocks.
Marco:
It really isn't.
Marco:
It's a volatile foreign currency, basically.
Marco:
Foreign exchange markets, commodity markets, these are all types of commodity tradings.
Marco:
Bitcoin is not the first thing to do this.
Marco:
This world has been for a very long time.
Marco:
It is very clear what can happen in this world, what can go well, what can go poorly.
Marco:
Bitcoin is in some ways even less secure than a lot of those things because of the way it works.
Marco:
But as a way to make money,
Marco:
I wouldn't advise people put a lot of faith in systems like this as a fun thing to play around with.
Marco:
Or if you're doing it for more political reasons, like you want to make a statement about not being part of the official banking systems and everything, you might have other reasons.
Marco:
But for making money, I think it's just... You might as well go to Vegas.
Marco:
It's just gambling.
Marco:
It's a different form of gambling.
John:
So I view this kind of in the same category as many other things in my life where I feel like I was...
John:
well positioned to know about this type of because it's a tech thing well positioned to know about this thing more than regular people to know about it sooner to understand it better to sort of get into the ground floor like another example or a lot of like the internet ipos and stuff from you know back in the days when no one understood the internet but i certainly did because i was on it very early right as a techie person there are some you have some advantages in some realms and bitcoin falls into that category and
John:
like all those other things i kind of think of it as uh yet another case where i failed to make a lot of money and i could have because like for example you know if we all knew we know now and put us back into 1990 like we would all be bazillionaires because you just know you would know to like first of all buy all the domain names you can get for like common names because some company will buy them from you later
John:
Like, second of all, sink all your money into the stocks that we know are going to go crazy, right?
John:
Like, you know, it's easy to go back in time and understand.
John:
But we were there early, and it's like, I knew domain names would have value, but they were like, you know, $200 to get one with VeriSign or whatever, and I couldn't afford that because I was a college student, you know, working a part-time job to pay for my books living in a crappy dorm.
John:
Like, I didn't, you know, it was...
John:
It was timing was kind of good, but not really.
John:
Same thing with investment.
John:
I could have invested.
John:
I could have got a large amount of VA Linux stock because I contributed to CPAN.
John:
Right.
John:
But I didn't have that kind of money to invest.
John:
And I could have got like a 500 percent return on my investment if I'd had the money to invest.
John:
Right.
John:
So.
John:
Bitcoin, similarly, when Bitcoin was first going around, it was like, oh, I, you know, I read up on it, I learned about it, I understood what the deal with it was.
John:
I even got to the point where I downloaded the software and was mining for coins on my incredibly slow computer, whatever the hell it was at that time, right?
John:
i didn't you know didn't take it super seriously and didn't invest a lot of time in it and you know it was kind of boring to mine for coins and i was like yeah like i think i i don't remember what i got out of it some fractional bitcoin probably exists on some backup of my hard drive somewhere or you know i don't know if i got one bitcoin out of it it's like oh you should dig that up it's worth 700 bucks now like i don't even know what the hell that crap is which is another problem with the system that's so based on like
John:
Do you ever lose track of your files?
John:
How would you feel if those files were worth thousands of dollars?
John:
But unlike the investing gambling things, it was the type of situation where there was the possibility, because you were a nerd, that you could have, with no risk and no money up front, it sounds like an ad, you just spend a little time on your computer because you're there early and because it was easier to mine coins in the beginning than it is now, computationally speaking.
John:
um you could have done what many people did is if you're just a little bit more interested in it and you had mined coins a little bit more thoroughly for like a month or something that didn't cost you anything it's not like you're putting your life savings into it you spent a little bit of time and you're having some fun and it's a hobby and it's an interesting thing and why are you doing this because you're a nerd and you know about this stuff and that would be worth a huge amount of money now but i didn't do that so the way i view bitcoin is
John:
If you were in really early and mined when they were easy and held them instead of buying them to order pizza like so many people did in those sad stories where they sold their Bitcoins and ordered a pizza for $20 and now the Bitcoins that they ordered that pizza with are worth like $50,000 and they feel bad about it.
John:
I guess I suppose that would be worse.
John:
But that time is over.
John:
We all miss that.
John:
And now it is like Marco said.
John:
It's just like, okay, well...
John:
now you look at it and you're like this is just a giant soap bubble floating through the air that's either about to burst or something terrible will happen or like it is it is so incredibly risky and scary and you're you know you're supposed to buy low and sell high not buy high and hope it's going to go way higher and obviously that's terrible advice if you're thinking of investing in apple and it's 10 years ago but
John:
So there's risk like and it's not you have to put you have to put in money to make money at this point, whereas in the beginning you put in like nothing to make potentially huge or nothing to make nothing like penny stocks.
John:
You know, it's like very little investment probably is going to come to nothing, but it's but it's such a small amount.
John:
And it's a fun thing to do.
John:
If you're into this nerdy stuff, it's kind of fun.
John:
It's like SETI at home, but for money.
John:
so uh yep so i so i regret obviously not getting more into it earlier but what can you do you can't tell the future and uh so anyway i have no interest in getting into it now i don't quite understand how they could ever sustain any large transaction volume i see lots of potential pitfalls this but i think it is very technically interesting using math to make a bunch of
John:
uh parties who don't trust each other have a verifiable trust relationship for transactions i think that's an important advancement both the the math behind it which is probably not that new but the implementations of it which it is new idea to say can we actually implement this in a safe way without bugs and problems and without letting more than 51 of the swarm get a quorum and and you know tip the whole market or whatever the hell anyway i think it's cool but it's not for me
Marco:
As much as I'm staying far away from it and always had no desire to get into it for financial reasons, it is technically beautiful.
Marco:
It is an amazing technical accomplishment and idea, and I really respect that.
Marco:
But despite all of its other problems, it is pretty awesome of an idea and a concept, and I just have no interest in gambling with it as a financial instrument.
John:
Well, what's not beautiful about it, unfortunately, is that due to the constraints of the current implementations, as in, like, what does it have?
John:
Parties that don't trust each other can have verifiable relationships at low transaction volumes.
John:
It has found its ecological niche, which is...
John:
You know, selling drugs and all sorts of illegal things.
John:
There's a small number of parties who really, really don't trust each other and really don't want to use the banking system, and they don't have a large transaction volume, right?
John:
And so that's kind of sad, right?
John:
But the transaction volume actually is a problem.
John:
You can't move the entire banking system to a cryptocurrency until they...
John:
sort those things out and who knows if they will but i do really like the idea of whatever disintermediation or whatever the phrase was from the 90s which i think is still an important thing because nobody likes middlemen uh when the middleman is math uh then there there are lots of interesting things that can happen
Marco:
The other problem then is the environmental cost of Bitcoin is really non-trivial.
Marco:
The amount of energy being wasted because all of a sudden wasting massive amounts of energy now has a financial upside for the people who are doing it much more so than I think it ever has before for doing apparently no other work.
Marco:
That is not good.
Marco:
It is a beautiful technical system that
Marco:
Yeah, I think you're right that if it never scaled to be incredibly big, it would have stayed a beautiful technical system.
Marco:
But because of how big it is and because of how much money could be made in it, basically it's being exploited like crazy for financial gain.
Marco:
And the result is a pretty nasty burning of energy for no reason.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
Moving on, NeoIntendoNada, which apparently somebody has translated to, I do not understand anything, would like to ask, do you think the next iPhone SE will be called iPhone SE X?
Casey:
Which was a funny thought to say the least.
Marco:
It'll be the Model 3.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
My thoughts on this is that the iPhone SE will just continue to be the iPhone SE X.
Casey:
It will be more like a trim level, if you will, than an individual model like iPhone 7.
Casey:
And so there will be if there is another iPhone SE, which I think there probably will be.
Casey:
And if it eventually gets all the nifty bits from the iPhone 10, then I think it will still just be the iPhone SE.
Casey:
It'll just be the, you know, 2018 edition, if you will.
Casey:
I don't mean that in a literal sense, but it'll just be the next version of it.
Casey:
What do you think, Marco?
Marco:
Yeah, honestly, I don't really care.
Marco:
It's a very nice, important product, but I don't really care what the name is.
Marco:
I could also say they might do SE2.
Marco:
I share your opinion that it will probably get an update.
Marco:
I would expect it to get an update probably next spring.
Marco:
Maybe it's called the SE2.
Marco:
Maybe it's called the new iPhone SE.
Marco:
Maybe it's called the iPhone SE 2018 or whatever.
Marco:
It's fine.
John:
I put this question in here because I thought it would be a quickie because I didn't think anyone would seriously try to answer it like you two just did.
John:
But good job for taking this.
John:
I just put it in here as yet another opportunity for me to tell an old Mac person story.
John:
For the people who don't know, I'm glad some people in the chat room do know this.
John:
It shows that the right kind of old people are in our chat room.
John:
But back in like 1988, 89...
John:
uh the the mac 2 had just come out and the successor to the mac 2 was called the mac 2x it was a faster version of the mac 2 and the mac se was the contemporary of the mac 2 the all-in-one contemporary so they made the mac 2 uh gave way to the mac 2x so they had the mac se naturally it should give way to the mac
John:
But of course, they didn't want to do that because it spells out sex and they didn't want to have a product for that name.
John:
So instead of calling it the Mac SEX, they call it the Mac SE slash 30.
John:
And the SE30 is my favorite Mac ever.
John:
And its entire name is derived from Apple's desire not to have a computer named sex.
John:
And so it's funny all these years later that they have painted themselves into the same corner by having a successor product with a capital letter X in its name and having a product with SE whose natural successor were there to follow that naming convention and make one with a notch or something would have an X. And so I think they should call it the iPhone SE 30.
Marco:
Well, and also, I mean, realistically speaking, you know, sex thing aside, the X or 10 branding is the high-end phone.
Marco:
And it's going to remain the high-end phone for probably quite some time.
Marco:
I would honestly be surprised if by the time...
Marco:
does indeed end up filtering down the line, which is not a given.
Marco:
It might not.
Marco:
If it filters down the line over time, I bet by the time it gets to the point where it would be suitable to use on a low-end model, the iPhone SE will not be the name that's used anymore for that model.
Marco:
They will have moved on to some other naming convention where SE is no longer used.
Marco:
It's a funny question, but I don't think it would even be under consideration because they're not bringing the letter X down that low in the line.
John:
yeah and anyway it's capital and it's a 10 like back in the mac days it was it was a lowercase x and it was pronounced x so it really would have been capital s capital e lowercase x and the two x was roman numeral two with you know two big bars and then the lowercase x um so that was it i just wanted to tell the story of the sc30 for the people who don't know it
Casey:
I feel better for having known that story.
Casey:
And in a very sad and terrible turn of events, I did not get to do the Ask ATP notes before John did.
Casey:
And normally that'd be kind of nice because I've had a busy week.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
John has added the following question to ask ATP.
Casey:
So if you have any upset or angry emails that you would like to send or tweets, please send them to John Syracuse.
Casey:
Anyway, James or James D who asks, what's the best place to start when trying to listen to fish?
Marco:
John, do you have any opinions on this?
John:
My opinion is that everybody should get a question that's aimed at them every once in a while.
John:
So this one's for you, Marco.
John:
Casey, do you want to go first?
Casey:
I would say that you're going to say some sort of live show, probably the New Year's Eve show from the most recent year.
Marco:
Okay, so basically, what you need to know when getting into Phish is that the albums are a great place to start to get to know what their music roughly sounds like, but what most Phish fans listen to most of the time is the live shows, because they are substantially better if Phish is the kind of thing you're into.
Marco:
You can listen to the albums first, and they're on every streaming service now, and everybody has a streaming subscription for something these days, so...
Marco:
You can listen to Phish music on pretty much anywhere, any service you have.
Marco:
I would suggest start, if you can, if your service has it, and most of them do, start with one of the live albums.
Marco:
Now, it's a little different than most bands in that...
Marco:
While they have live album releases that span the last 20 years, they've put out maybe 10 official albums that are live.
Marco:
And one of the first ones was called A Live One.
Marco:
That's on all the services.
Marco:
You can definitely listen to A Live One if you wanted to.
Marco:
And it's good.
Marco:
But unlike most bands, every single Phish show, every concert they do...
Marco:
is recorded from the soundboard, professionally mastered, and released a few hours after the show ends as a legal, purchasable download from a site that they're affiliated with called Livefish.com, I think.
Marco:
Livefish also has iOS apps where I think you can stream for free.
Marco:
You just can't pick what they're playing, but it's like a constant live stream that I think you can do for free.
Marco:
So if you listen on your streaming service of choice and you decide that this is something you want to hear more of...
Marco:
the way to get more into it is not to go listen to all their studio albums if you don't really... The way to get into it is to listen to more live shows.
Marco:
And once you exhaust the official releases that they've done over time, the way to get more into it after that is to go to Live Fish, either their app or their website, and either preview for free or buy the stuff there.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
And enjoy.
Casey:
That took a lot less time than I expected.
John:
I hope you'll insert some fish clip after you say the word enjoy at that point.
John:
Just like a guitar riff or like three of the words from the middle of the nine words that are in the middle of a half an hour song.
Casey:
You have to put in meat stick because that is the most preposterous fish song.
Marco:
Well, which one?
Marco:
I have, hold on, 37 recordings of meat stick in my collection.
Marco:
So for reference, I have 7,700 fish songs over 112 gigs that span 42 days of total time.
Marco:
And that's only what they've done since about 2009.
Casey:
And you buy every single show, is that right?
Marco:
Yeah, I buy the... They have season passes on Live Fish whenever a new tour is announced, and you can pre-order the entire tour as legal downloads.
Marco:
So I just do that.
Marco:
So usually it's a couple hundred bucks for a whole summer tour or something like that, and I just do that.
Marco:
I should point out, too, if you're more into going to concerts...
Marco:
They put on a great show, and they put on lots of them.
Marco:
And so even though they sell out, they put on just so many shows that they aren't that hard to get into if you try.
Marco:
And you don't have to pay a ridiculous price to do it or anything.
Marco:
So if you are a concert goer, I highly suggest you go to their concerts.
Marco:
I personally just don't enjoy going to concerts very much.
Marco:
I have been to exactly one Phish show, and it was fine, but...
Marco:
I didn't feel like I needed to go to more.
Marco:
I really love listening to the live shows, but I'm not a concert person.
Marco:
But if you're a concert person, especially if you're into the drug scene at all, which again, I am not, they are apparently a great place to be if you're into that.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Aftershocks, bone conduction headphones.
Marco:
Go to atp.aftershocks.com to learn more.
Marco:
Aftershock headphones work by bone conduction.
Marco:
So small transducers resting in front of your ears send small vibrations through your cheekbones directly to your inner ear.
Marco:
So they're not really putting anything in or on your ears themselves.
Marco:
It's all going through your cheekbone from in front of your ear.
Marco:
So this leaves your actual ears totally open with nothing blocking them, nothing making them sweaty, nothing making them hurt.
Marco:
So, of course, this is great for comfort, for exercise, for hot weather.
Marco:
They're even IP55 certified for water resistance, so you don't have to worry about that.
Marco:
The biggest thing for me, the big advantage of these is because they leave your ears open, you hear the world around you in addition to, say, the podcast you're listening to or the phone call you're taking.
Marco:
So this actually isn't so great if you're in a very loud place like a subway station in a big city.
Marco:
But it's awesome if you want to do things like listen to a podcast or take a phone call while walking or while running or cycling where you really need to hear the world around you for practical or safety reasons.
Marco:
And that could be as simple as you're at home and you need to take a phone call or you want to listen to podcasts and you want to know maybe when your kid upstairs wakes up from their nap or if somebody knocks on the door, you want to be able to hear it.
Marco:
So this is great, not for loud environments, not for like pristine music listening, but for practical speech content, phone calls, podcasts, audio books.
Marco:
It's great for that when you're in an environment where you want or need to hear the world around you.
Marco:
I highly suggest using these things if you have a need like that.
Marco:
I have been using them myself.
Marco:
I'm a big fan.
Marco:
I had great headphones that I loved before this for walking around, and these have totally replaced them.
Marco:
They are wonderful.
Marco:
So check out the Aftershocks line of headphones.
Marco:
They have the titanium model, which I had at first.
Marco:
They now also have the air model, which is even lighter.
Marco:
and has a few additional little features.
Marco:
You can't go wrong with either of them, honestly.
Marco:
Check out the lineup today at atp.afterstocks.com.
Marco:
That's atp.afterstocks.com.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Afterstocks for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
So this week, as we record, in fact, it will be in just a couple of days, is iPhone 10 pre-order time.
Casey:
Because the world revolves around California and California stuck in the past, which is to say outside of Hawaii and I guess Alaska, it is the last American time zone.
Casey:
Please don't email me.
Casey:
The pre-orders will go up at midnight California time.
Casey:
And as they do every year, California gives a big middle finger to the rest of the world, especially country.
Casey:
And at three o'clock in the morning, I will be waking up on Friday morning to pre-order two iPhone Xs, one for me, one for Aaron.
Casey:
And I genuinely, genuinely will be stunned if I receive either of these in 2017.
Casey:
I will be getting one of the I don't remember the official name white and one of the I don't remember the official name black.
Casey:
Both 256 gigs because children and movies and things of that nature.
Casey:
And I will be sufficiently broke thereafter.
Casey:
John, what is your intention for this coming Friday?
John:
So half the reason I put this topic in was just to have someone who knows and cares more than I do tell me exactly what time this is happening so I can decide whether I'm going to be doing anything.
John:
Obviously, I'm not ordering one for myself, but potentially I could be trying to do this at 3 a.m.
John:
for my wife, for her phone.
John:
I need her to tell me what color she wants and what size, I guess.
John:
Those are the only options, right?
John:
Color and size?
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Yep.
John:
And there's only two sizes, 64, 256, right?
John:
So, yeah.
John:
Because even, like, I think she wants to know whether she really wants this first.
Yeah.
John:
but you can always cancel an order so it kind of makes sense to just like try to get in and if you happen to get an order and you're lucky fine and probably before your order ships you'll be able to like see it in a store or something i'm assuming um and you can always just return it after what is the 14 day return window or whatever yeah yeah so i assume that she's gonna want
John:
a free order for this and so this may be the first time I actually do this I've never done it before because I always just wait for my phones and normally she doesn't care one or the other but I think she's getting impatient with her phone which by the way this is her phone she's got an iPhone 6s plus and it's got the latest version of iOS 11 on it and she says it's like slowing down and getting all sort of
John:
stuttery and stuff and i did notice her animations were stuttery so i turned on reduced motion it's like hey it's fixed no more stuttery animations but she still complains that it it's slow and crap but maybe her maybe her uh storage is filling up i gotta look at it but if anyone has any bright ideas on how to uh if there's some sort of problem related to ios 11 that makes uh iphone 6s pluses slow down because 6s plus isn't that old i think it should be fine but anyway she's getting frustrated with her current phone
John:
and wants a phone sooner rather than later.
John:
So if she can't get in a pre-order for this, she might just buy an 8+, which would be perfectly fine, and she'd be happy with it, but it's certainly more boring than trying the 10.
Casey:
Let me just put it on record, John, before we hear Marco's intentions, that if you order Tina a phone and if she does not want it, I would like dibs on buying it off of you.
John:
You don't even know what color it's going to be.
Casey:
I don't care.
Casey:
Or what size.
Casey:
What if she wants a 64?
Casey:
I don't care.
Casey:
So this is the first worldiest of first world problems, right?
Casey:
That I'm this worked up as I get every year about getting the new Apple hotness quickly.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
This is even worse than every other year because Apple has all but come out and said, or maybe they did say at some point, but they've all but come out and said, good frigging luck getting this anytime soon.
Casey:
So I am trying to work whatever angle I can in order to get myself an iPhone 10 as quickly as possible.
Casey:
That being said, Marco, what's your intention?
Marco:
So I'm going to get, well, I'm going to try to get the white one.
Marco:
I love Kim Allberg user in the chat said, the official color names are kind of black and somewhat white.
Marco:
And so I'm going for the somewhat white variety.
Marco:
Oh, is that right?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So I've had every single iPhone that I've had so far has been in whatever version of black was the blackest black they had that year.
Marco:
And so, like, I have jet black iPhone 7 currently.
Marco:
And, you know, before that, just space gray, space gray, space gray.
Marco:
It's funny.
Marco:
Apple has no idea what color space is, clearly, all the different space grays I've had.
Marco:
But it's just in various points in the past, I have had interest in getting one of the lighter-backed ones, like the silver-backed ones, just for variety's sake or certain models.
Marco:
I thought it looked better.
Marco:
But I never wanted the white front plate on it, like above the screen and everything.
Marco:
Just like John, you know, I just don't think those look very good.
Marco:
Now I have the option to get either color with the same black notch and black bezel around it.
Marco:
So honestly, in the pictures I've seen so far, which admittedly is not many of them because nobody has these yet, but in the picture I saw from the launch event from the backstage area, I thought the kind of white one looked better than the somewhat black one.
Marco:
But again, it could just be because I just want variety because I've had so many black phones in a row.
Marco:
Anyway, so I'm going to go for that one.
Marco:
I'm going to go for the large capacity and the Verizon or SIM free one if I can at all get it anytime soon because I am an AT&T customer and I'm not interested in changing networks because Verizon doesn't actually cover my house or most of my neighborhood very well.
Marco:
The reason I want the Verizon version, despite not being a Verizon customer, is that they're doing the same thing again this year that they started last year with the 7, which is that for the GSM-only ones, the ones that are being sold as AT&T phones in the U.S., and I don't know what the situation is elsewhere, those have an Intel cellular modem.
Marco:
And the ones that are sold either SIM-free or that are sold on CDMA-based networks like Verizon and Sprint are using a Qualcomm modem.
Marco:
allegedly when this started last year with the 7 oh the modems are the same it doesn't matter whatever phone you get it's fine you know and there have been other iPhones in the past that had like minor component variations like whether you got like a Samsung or TSMC system on a chip and I think the 6s generation had like a minor battery variation and stuff anyway
Marco:
I have found, with my experience with the Intel modem iPhone 7s on AT&T, I've had a lot of call-dropping problems where my microphone on my phone will stop working and the person on their end will not be able to hear me.
Marco:
And I have done a lot of research.
Marco:
I've heard from a lot of people, customers.
Marco:
I've even heard from a few geniuses at Apple bars or groves or whatever.
Marco:
Are they called arborists now because they're in the grove?
Marco:
I don't know what they are.
Marco:
Anyway, I've heard from a couple of arborists that this is actually a pretty big thing.
Marco:
it's a pretty widespread issue that the intel modem at&t iphone 7s frequently have this issue where the microphone drops out during a phone call like this is just a thing and so i'm trying my best with this generation and by the way this has been really annoying like you think you don't get you know you know as a nerd you think oh i never make phone calls it isn't that big of a deal and then i'm like on the phone with somebody at apple and it drops so
Marco:
And it's like, you don't want those calls to be unreliable when they happen for an app developer.
Marco:
Like, you want to stay on that call.
Marco:
It's really annoying when that happens, and it makes it very hard to use this as a phone.
Marco:
And I've actually had two different iPhone 7s, because one was replaced for a bad lightning port halfway through the year, and they both do it to some degree.
Marco:
So I know it's not just some fluke thing with my very first one.
Marco:
TIFFS did it too.
Marco:
Like, they all do it, right?
Marco:
And it's just an issue of whatever network conditions...
Marco:
cause this you know whether that affects where you are or not is whether it's going to happen to you or not it seems but anyway so i'm trying my hardest to get the qualcomm modem in the iphone 10 and the only way to do that is to get the verizon or sim free version in the u.s and they're not going to probably offer the sim free version for a while they usually they don't with the high profile release they don't usually offer it immediately usually it's a few weeks out or a
Marco:
But I don't have a Verizon account.
Marco:
So it's going to be pretty much impossible for me to actually place an order for that.
Marco:
So what I'm probably going to end up having to do is order the AT&T one in the app or whatever I do that night.
Marco:
And then just go to the stores constantly over the next few weeks.
Marco:
Because there's no way it's coming on day one.
Marco:
So go to the stores for the next few weeks.
Marco:
And I hope I can get myself a Verizon one or a SIM-free one somehow.
Marco:
And that's about it.
Marco:
I, too, am going to wake up at 3 in the morning.
Marco:
And I'm going to try to place my order.
Marco:
I know I'm not going to be able to.
Marco:
And when I am finally able to, probably 10 minutes into the ordering window, the delivery dates, if I'm lucky, will be December.
Marco:
If I'm more honest with myself, probably January or even later into 2018.
Marco:
So I'm just not that optimistic about my chances of getting it in the app.
Marco:
The only reason I'm waking up at 3 a.m.
Marco:
at all is that on the off chance that Apple has made more of them than they thought they would this week or whatever, and if you can actually place an order at 3 a.m.
Marco:
and get it within a couple of weeks of launch day, I will feel really stupid if I didn't do that.
Marco:
If I decide to just get up at 8 a.m.
Marco:
and try to place your event and then go to the stores and just hope for the best, I'm going to feel really stupid.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I am not optimistic.
Marco:
I think it's going to be a really bad scene.
Marco:
I think even people who get there in the first minute or two of the orders being open are going to be seeing dates in December.
Marco:
And it's going to be rough.
Marco:
And that's if you're lucky.
Marco:
If you're lucky to get it this year.
Marco:
And I really am a little worried for what this is going to do for Apple's financials and their sales numbers and everything for the next few quarters.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
I really don't think they're going to sell nearly as many of these as there's demand for.
Marco:
But the people who have been waiting for this, some portion of them will say, all right, forget it.
Marco:
If I can't get this anytime soon or if the initial reviews come out and there's some annoyance with them that certain people don't want to deal with or that won't solve their needs well enough –
Marco:
There is going to be some percentage of those people who say, all right, forget it.
Marco:
I'll get an eight plus or I'll get an eight and that'll be it.
Marco:
And so, you know, Apple will cell phone to those people for sure.
Marco:
Like if I had to guess, I'm guessing that Friday, like after everyone has tried to place an order for the iPhone 10 and has been told it's going to be January.
Marco:
I'm guessing Friday afternoon is going to be probably the second biggest sales day for the iPhone 8 Plus for its entire run.
Marco:
The biggest was probably its opening day.
Marco:
I bet the 8 Plus has its second biggest day on Friday.
Marco:
because of all those people who are going to be discouraged from the X, sorry, X. I honestly didn't mean to do that.
Marco:
They're going to be discouraged from the X, and they're going to say, all right, forget it, I'll get the 8 Plus, and that'll be that.
Marco:
But that's going to be some percentage of people.
Marco:
I don't think it's going to be a high percentage of people.
Marco:
I think most of the people who are really holding out for the iPhone X are not going to settle for the 8 Plus or the 8.
Marco:
they're going to just wait for the 10, even if that means springtime.
Marco:
And by then, they might say, you know what?
Marco:
Now, I'm a third of the way until the next iPhone comes out.
Marco:
I'll just wait until the X2 or whatever might come out next fall.
Marco:
If the shipping delays are long enough, they run that risk.
Marco:
So, this actually might be a problem.
Marco:
Like, Apple is taking a pretty big risk here with the way they have launched this phone.
Marco:
I... I'll tell you one thing.
Marco:
I would not want to be Tim Cook for the next year.
Marco:
That... Well, I mean, I guess he probably has a pretty good life.
Marco:
But... But, like...
Marco:
this i have a feeling he's going to be under a lot of scrutiny if if these financials don't work out because they can't sell enough of the iphones people actually are waiting for that's going to be a problem for tim cook i think it'll even out over time though because i feel like that all the reports we're seeing about inventory problems are all none of them say it's anything systemic like a year from now
John:
this should be settled.
John:
Right.
John:
And so that's bad because you got a whole year of, of under shipment.
John:
Right.
John:
But that it evens out eventually.
John:
And I think he always takes the long view.
John:
Yes.
John:
People are going to complain to him about all the numbers are crappy or whatever, but, uh, that over a two year, three year time period, this, you know, the sales of this phone will just be a different shape, but the total numbers should be good.
John:
Because as you said, if they sales, they lose for people who want to buy a 10, but can't get it, they're probably going to go to the eight.
John:
Um,
John:
they have good retention and they're not going to say well if i can't get a 10 i'm going to try an android phone i mean there's some of that always but i think the bigger potential problem is not inventory which is you know it's bad it's better if you have enough phones to sell to people that's much better right but it does even out over the long haul if your things are good the real danger is what if the 10 is not that good what if the 10 is not does not satisfy the customers who all think they want it now
John:
uh because you can't that doesn't even out over time that gets worse over time and that increases the chance that someone's going to go to you know try an android phone or something like that so i mean i i bet he's more worried apple should be more worried about 10 not being a good phone than they are about not having enough of them they should be worried about not having enough of them but not as much as not having
John:
a good phone um and from my perspective like i'm i always cancel patients on this like i'm not even getting one it just so happens that there's this confluence of events where you know my wife's phone is old and it's her year and it's getting slow because of ios 11 or it could just because of upgrade a lot of voodoo people suggest to try to uh
John:
you know make it become faster including resetting a bunch of stuff but i hate doing that because like if you reset stuff and it doesn't make it faster then you have to change all your settings back for and you just you just cost yourself even more time and get yourself even more annoyed anyway she's impatient i'm not
John:
Casey is always impatient, obviously, as you already described, that he needs to have a new phone now, now, now.
John:
And Marco kind of needs to have the new phone now, now, now as well.
John:
As far as I'm concerned, I just want... Yeah.
Casey:
I think Marco and I are probably tied for least amount of patience.
John:
But he's got at least a legit reason that he can rationalize, like he's got to develop an app for it and everything, right?
Casey:
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.
Casey:
I do this for a living.
John:
Yeah, but you're going to have one available at work.
John:
Like, it doesn't have to be your personal phone.
John:
Am I?
Yeah.
John:
yeah sure right i mean if it's important for you for your application to be available yeah but but everyone like everyone at everyone's job is under the same problem that we're like i know everyone's facing the same problem right but you have a lot more of them you don't have to get a phone just somebody does so what i'm getting at is that i think just someone on atp needs to have the phone for the purposes of of doing this show right but we don't all need to have the phone so i think it'll be fine if we just get one of them and of course it would be nice if apple just sent us one to review hint in to apple people but so far podcasts still don't exist as far as they're concerned
John:
So we wait patiently and we will try to order with the rest of the people.
Casey:
For a loose definition of patiently, but yes, I agree.
John:
But yeah, for regular people who are not in a hurry, just wait.
John:
Like, wait until the spring.
John:
Nothing will happen to you.
John:
If your phone currently works fine and doesn't have some weird problem that's making you want to get it, don't feel that thing that Casey feels where he just needs to have the newest, greatest phone.
John:
Like...
John:
especially in the case of the 10, which might be annoying or problematic in ways that nobody knows yet because nobody has them.
John:
And it is very different than the other phone.
John:
It's not a known quantity.
John:
There's so many things that could go wrong with it.
John:
And you don't want the first batch of them.
John:
There are so many reasons to just relax.
John:
just it's so much more relaxing to be pretend you're not listening to a tech podcast and pretend you just wander into an apple store in march and go oh these new iphones they go buy one of these and they'll say would you like one and you'll say yes i would like one and they'll bring it from the back for you and you'll buy it like a normal person who doesn't listen to accidental tech podcast it's a cool way to live i will also say like in in the craziness of trying to get one if you buy one from somebody else
Marco:
Don't have them ship it in the box that Apple shipped to them in.
Marco:
As I learned last year in this horrible incident, I still feel so bad.
Marco:
In this horrible incident, basically, I think Apple tracks them pretty well when they ship them to the original customer, such that I don't think people at UPS are trying to steal them or anything like that out of the boxes that Apple ships them in.
Marco:
but if you retape up that box and ship it to somebody else as resale those happen to get stolen quite a lot as i learned last year uh and so don't do that put it in a different box maybe and maybe maybe don't try to resell it uh if you do try to resell yeah for the love of god put it in a different box and don't label it iphone or anything oh it's such a mess what did you get in your box you didn't get like a rock or something did you
Marco:
No, it was just the plastic wrap from the outside of the iPhone box.
Marco:
Packing peanuts and plastic wrap.
John:
It's a little bit classier when they replace it with a rock or something.
John:
I feel like that shows the personal touch for the thieves.
Marco:
Yeah, and I got a very lightweight box that was literally stolen from the UPS supply chain because it had its weight stamped on its label before it was replaced by nothing.
Marco:
So that was fun.
Marco:
The other thing I would say is if...
Marco:
you think you might want one, don't follow John's advice and be patient.
Marco:
If you think there's any chance you might want one, put an order in.
Marco:
You can cancel it with like three clicks if you decide before it ships that you don't want it.
Marco:
Just put the order in if you are at all on the fence because then you'll at least have an option to get one in two months when it finally ships.
Marco:
You'll have a date that you can get one
John:
But now you're tempting people to stay awake at 3 a.m.
John:
or midnight at least.
John:
You're saying, well, if you're going to order it, you might as well order it at the beginning because why are you ordering anyway?
John:
So now you're setting your alarm for midnight or 3 a.m.?
John:
I'm saying, no, don't do that.
Marco:
That is what I'm saying.
Marco:
I am actually saying, if you think there's any chance you're going to want one,
Marco:
Stay up till 3 a.m.
Marco:
or wake up at 3 a.m.
Marco:
and do it.
John:
Plus, you're encouraging more competition for us.
John:
Tell those people to tell you.
Marco:
That's the bigger problem.
Marco:
Stay up till 3.15 a.m.
Marco:
and order it.
Marco:
There we go.
Marco:
Set your alarm for 3.15.
John:
Yeah.
John:
That's the other thing I'm hoping, considering I might actually be doing this this year, is I'm hoping that...
John:
like the the casuals all bought iphone 8s right like normally there's like this big pent-up demand for the new phone and everyone who wants the new phone goes at once but now we have it tiered where it's like you want the new phone but do you want like the super expensive one or do you just want the new iphone because the eight's pretty good and it's new and it's different enough that i think it satisfies what people want you know it's like it's a different outside with the glass things and the better cameras and you know all that other good stuff different colors right i hope those people
John:
are people that you would have normally been competing with.
John:
Like those people were there trying to get the sevens or whatever, right?
John:
But a lot of those people go out and they got the eights now, leaving, I hope, a smaller group of people for the 10.
John:
Now, unfortunately, that smaller group of people for the 10 is probably competing for a way, way, way, way smaller number of 10s that are going to ship in 2017.
John:
So it's probably not good, but I do like the fact that at least we got a little bit of help from the people buying eights.
Marco:
Yeah, but I wouldn't count on that too much actually helping.
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:
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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:
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Marco:
And those are not, you know, stores and podcasts are not hard or they're not easy things to host.
Marco:
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Marco:
They have all this functionality built in.
Marco:
It's really quite incredible what you can do with Squarespace in really just a few clicks, no matter what your skill level is making websites.
Marco:
Squarespace is also a great option if somebody has asked you to make a website for them.
Marco:
Not only can you do it yourself, but even better, you can show them Squarespace.
Marco:
Maybe you can get them started.
Marco:
Spend like 20 minutes setting it up for them just to make it easier and easier sell for them.
Marco:
And then you can show them, look, you can do this yourself.
Marco:
You don't need me.
Marco:
And then you're off the hook for making it.
Marco:
You're off the hook for supporting it.
Marco:
You just hand it over to them, and if they need any help at all, and honestly, they probably won't because Squarespace is so easy, but if they need any help at all, Squarespace supports it so you don't have to.
Marco:
It's a wonderful setup.
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
So I was wondering, this is probably our last time to talk about the 10 or speculate about it before this actual press review is out, I would guess.
Marco:
Is there anything about, like, so John, you mentioned earlier that, like, you know, the biggest risk for Apple with the 10 is that it has some kind of problem or it isn't very good or isn't very compelling after all.
Marco:
What do you think the biggest risks are for it?
Marco:
Like, what are the biggest ways that this might not pan out?
John:
So, I mean, the big ones that a lot of the press is talking about is Face ID.
John:
And I think that is, again, not not having ever tried it and not, you know, not getting much information from the people who did.
John:
If Face ID doesn't work well enough.
John:
like it you know i don't know if it has to be as good as as touch id out of the gate but it has to be close like if if let's put it this way to use a bad analogy that will make everyone sad if face id works like siri it will be a bad scene right you know because because siri does work and you can demo it and it does cool things but for the unlocking your phone if face id like falls below some minimum threshold of convenience people unlock their phones a lot
John:
And I think a lot of people lock their phones now.
John:
Like we're not in the old days where you just slide to unlock.
John:
People have codes on their phones.
John:
They're used to Touch ID.
John:
Touch ID is amazing and works great.
John:
Face ID has some minimum bar that has to reach.
John:
So if it doesn't reach that, that is a big problem because no one wants to get a phone and just really be annoyed every time you have to unlock it.
John:
And the second thing is app updates.
John:
You have to update your app to deal with the stupid rounded corners and the home line thing.
John:
and the notch and obviously and i listed them probably in the order that they're annoying like you would think the notch is the problem but having seen overcast and simulator screen shots and everything like it seems clear the rounded corners are a much bigger problem than you think if you're not if you haven't considered how you're going to fit your app into that because it really does cut off a lot of things and so updating apps how fast a developer is going to do it if you buy a new phone and face id works great but every app you put on it looks all weird and janky and goes crazy in landscape
John:
Even though it's not, quote unquote, the phone's problem, like, oh, the phone is fine.
John:
Nothing wrong with the phone.
John:
People will have a bad impression.
John:
I waited all this time.
John:
I stay up till 3 a.m.
John:
I spent twelve hundred dollars.
John:
And as a reward, all my apps look and work weird on this phone.
John:
Those are the two that occurred to me right off the bat, setting aside like all the batteries exploded.
John:
There's some kind of hardware reliability problem or, you know, all that stuff that can happen with any phone.
John:
But the things that are unique to the 10 face ID and app updates.
Casey:
I agree with John.
Casey:
I am super curious to see real-world reviews of Face ID because I suspect it's going to be as good as Apple promises, but...
Casey:
I'm scared.
Casey:
And I've talked to friends at Apple that have used them, and they all say, no, really, it's amazing.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I want to have a third party tell me what they think.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I'm cautiously optimistic that it will be very good, and I think it's going to be pretty darn amazing.
Casey:
I think the Face ID is the most obvious stumbling block that could happen, but I think the most obvious stumbling block that will happen is what John said about third-party apps, that they're just...
Casey:
Not updated in timely fashion or not updated well or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
And I think that's the thing that is going to be most telling.
Casey:
And we'll see whenever these reviews come out, we'll see if the reviewers have run into a lot of that.
Marco:
Yeah, I think you guys pretty much covered what I was going to say, too.
Marco:
Apps, I think, are the biggest thing I worry about.
Marco:
And not just how many apps will be there on day one, because I think the answer to that is probably going to be not enough.
Marco:
There's going to be some, but probably not enough.
Marco:
I'm probably not going to make day one with Overcast update, because...
Marco:
I just keep running into really annoying UI issues that are, you know, some of which are my fault.
Marco:
Many of which are my fault from like, you know, technical debt that I'm still repaying and trying to get rid of over my previous UI hacks.
Marco:
But some of which are just the iPhone being harder to work with than I predicted and the UI being harder to manage than I predicted.
Marco:
But ultimately, the biggest problem with apps is first it's going to be when the apps get letterboxed.
Marco:
I've seen a few people running simulator tricks to kind of show what apps look like when they're not updated for the iPhone X when they're running on the iPhone X size screen.
Marco:
and they just look ridiculous like it's almost as if they look almost like when the ipad first came out and you could run iphone apps in that little tiny window like in the middle of the ipad yep it almost looks that ridiculous like they just run in this tiny little area in the middle with these giant black bars that are boxing the top and bottom of the phone it looks really bad
Marco:
And this is not just a simple recompile with a bigger storyboard.
Marco:
This is a large undertaking for a lot of apps.
Marco:
Best case scenario, even for very simply designed apps, even apps that use very standard stuff that make it very easy to convert...
Marco:
Even they typically have to spend at least a couple days on this update.
Marco:
It's a significant change that a lot of things have to do to adapt to this screen because it's so different.
Marco:
It isn't just the same properties but bigger.
Marco:
It's, you know, there's no more corners and now the bottom is not solid and you can't really put anything there and you should probably take gestures away from being near it.
Marco:
And the top is giant, but you can't put anything there and you should take gestures away from it.
Marco:
Like there's all sorts of it.
Marco:
And when you rotate the phone, if you happen to support landscape in your app, you have to change something on almost every screen of your app.
Marco:
And that may be difficult or not, depending.
Marco:
If you use table views and you use background things in table views, chances are you have work to do.
Marco:
There's so many little and big design changes and technical changes your app now has to do.
Marco:
And to give Apple credit, the API for...
Marco:
All the safe area inset stuff is remarkably complete and remarkably useful for accommodating the notch and the various insets that the notch creates, especially in landscape mode.
Marco:
Like the API is good, but we still have to use it.
Marco:
We still have to do it and work on it and redesign things and move things and test things.
Marco:
And it's just proving to be a ton of work for almost every developer I've talked to about it.
Marco:
So I would not expect many apps to be updated soon.
Marco:
And no matter how... Like, even if the apps you use, for the most part, are by really on-the-ball developers who are really going to be there on day one and be ready...
Marco:
you're still probably going to use a number of apps throughout your day-to-day life that aren't going to be updated for a while.
Marco:
So you're going to have those giant ugly black bars on top and bottom for a long time, depending on what apps you use.
Marco:
But you're going to see this a lot for a while, and it's going to be annoying for owners of the 10 for a while.
Marco:
The other thing is that...
Marco:
I worry with the X quite how much of iOS has been rooted in the idea for a long time that you can always reach things in the top bar of an app.
Marco:
And to some extent, the bottom bars of an app, like button bars, toolbars, tab bars.
Marco:
And with the iPhone X, it is a very different aspect ratio than any other iPhones or iOS devices have ever been.
Marco:
And it is very, very tall and skinny.
Marco:
If you have trouble reaching the top and bottom of a screen on an iPhone Plus, you're definitely going to have problems reaching the top and bottom of the screen on the iPhone X. And so much of iOS has been built on the assumption that you can put pretty frequently used buttons and things in bars on the top and bottom of the interface.
Marco:
that even when you account for the insets from the notch and from the home indicator area on the bottom, things are still going to be really hard to reach for a lot of people.
Marco:
And apps will eventually change from this.
Marco:
The Plus phones encourage apps to change to some degree from this, but it wasn't quite as bad, and you could still say, well, if you have really big hands, you're buying the Plus, or if you don't mind using two hands, you're buying the Plus, but oh well, that's just because you're buying the Plus, you can deal with it.
Marco:
But now, like, this is going to be like the mainstream power user phone.
Marco:
And also the Plus kind of already has been becoming that, honestly, for about the last year, year and a half or so.
Marco:
So apps have to totally rethink their interaction models.
Marco:
to try to minimize requiring use of the top and bottom of the screen because those are going to be way harder to reach for way more people now than they were before the os in general is going to have to do that also like ios is going to have to change a lot of its own standards and a lot of its own uh app designs to to better accommodate this and that's all going to take time it's going to take years
Marco:
So I think, you know, the overall bullet point here of risks to the iPhone X's reception and to the quality of using one for the next little while, the overall heading there is apps.
Marco:
But that's way bigger and potentially way longer to get right.
Marco:
You might find it really annoying to use apps on it until things are better designed for it.
Marco:
So that's a pretty big sticking point.
Marco:
The only other thing I would think of is battery life.
Marco:
The battery life is a giant question mark because we've never had an OLED iPhone.
John:
You're the second person I've seen worry about battery life, but I didn't list that on things because this is the phone that they said has two hours more battery life.
John:
So even if they're off, it still has better battery life than the 7, right?
John:
What are you worried about?
John:
You think it's going to be worse than the 7?
Marco:
well the way they measure battery life is useless for real world use it's it always has been whatever measure they use for battery life does not reflect the way anyone i know uses their phones but proportionally this they said the seven was better than the six and it was right it was yes but it also the battery also got bigger and so it was basically like roughly the same type of components that we've always known but bigger right and so it kind of made sense that that happened like it wasn't a
Marco:
But it depends on how they're measuring it.
Marco:
Like if they're measuring by talk time tests, a web browsing loop, things like that, they optimize for that.
Marco:
And they can design the phone to be really responsible in what they consider those typical uses.
Marco:
But then if you do something on your phone that is not typical use, so for instance, that crazy new processor with the six cores that can now all be on at the same time if they want to,
Marco:
If you're doing something that's processor intensive, that's probably a pretty high power usage ceiling that the processor can have.
Marco:
And while they're doing whatever they're doing with their battery tests, they might be not setting it that way or not using the processor in that way.
Marco:
But if you do something that uses it that way, you're going to have very different results.
Marco:
Similarly, their tests probably don't use GPS.
Marco:
They probably don't use heavy cellular data or roaming or anything else.
Marco:
There's all sorts of things that can be different there.
Marco:
And also just the nature of power usage from an OLED screen, where now the screen can... Not only does the screen use probably less power overall when it's on, the screen uses a varying amount of power based on how brightly the pixels are lit up.
Marco:
So if you have black pixels that are effectively off with an OLED, that's going to use less power than if you have white pixels that are lit up all the way.
Marco:
That's different from the way LCDs have always worked.
Marco:
So like...
Marco:
The way the iPhone X will use its battery and the variation that you will have, we don't really know the answer to that yet.
Marco:
We're not going to know that until we have a few months of using this to really get a feel for how that battery behaves.
Marco:
And the way Apple quotes the battery time, I think, is almost meaningless for how that will work in practice because these are all new components with all new profiles of how they use power that I don't think we can really say for sure how it's going to work.
Yeah.
John:
I don't think it's meaningless.
John:
And I think the OLED screen, even if it was 100% white all the time, would tie or beat an LCD.
John:
Like, that's the point of OLED.
John:
That's why it's on the watch.
John:
It's lower power, even if the stuff's turned on.
John:
That's my impression anyway.
John:
So, like I said, I'm not worried about battery life.
John:
I mean, if the batteries explode, that's a problem.
John:
But battery life-wise, even if it doesn't meet the extra two hours, I feel like it will be better than the 7.
John:
And as long as it's better than the 7...
John:
people will like it because you know it's like the fact that you're replacing your phone with a battery that's gone through several charge cycles so it's already kind of crappy with a new battery and the new battery gets more battery life i think i think it'll be fine i'm optimistic about battery life
Casey:
To go back a step to what Marco was saying, part of the thing that worries me about app support is that if nobody can get their hands on one of these in the first place, like if no developers can get their hands on one of these, it's only going to exacerbate this problem.
Casey:
So it's a two-pronged issue.
Casey:
One of them is that almost every iOS app, like Marco was saying, is designed for top-based navigation.
Casey:
Your back buttons are at the top.
Casey:
Your create a new thing, like a new message in Messages or whatever, is typically at the top.
Casey:
All of that might need to shimmy down, which is, in many cases, a really, really deep and wide update.
Casey:
Like, that's rethinking your entire app's architecture.
Casey:
And on top of that, if you don't have a real test device for months – I mean, we were just saying we're planning on waking up at 3 in the morning –
Casey:
And we don't think that we'll necessarily get our phones until 2018.
Casey:
Like, that's going to be a big darn problem.
Casey:
I'm optimistic.
Casey:
I hope that it'll work out just fine.
Casey:
I hope that I'll get my iPhone a week from Friday.
Casey:
But I feel like we're raining on everyone's parade.
Casey:
And I don't think that's anyone's intention.
Casey:
We're hopeful that it will work out for the best.
Casey:
It's just...
Casey:
There's a lot of signs.
Casey:
The Magic 8-Ball is saying this is going to be an interesting rollout and it's going to be an interesting first few months with it.
Casey:
But let me tell you, I'm still super amped in March of 2018 when I finally get my phone.
Casey:
I'm super amped to unlock it with just my face.
Casey:
I'm excited.
Marco:
And the other thing about about your developer thing, too, is like, keep in mind, like exacerbating the apps problem is that developers won't have these phones for a while, as you said, which means there is immense pressure on us from users and from Apple to update our apps for the iPhone 10 like yesterday to have this needs to be done now, now, now.
Marco:
This is immense pressure on us to update our apps for a phone that will probably handle pretty differently than anything that we have used before that deserves significant redesign consideration that we have to design for without ever holding it.
Marco:
And sure, we can change it later.
Marco:
But like the initial batch of updates for the iPhone X might not be good.
Marco:
I would say it's going to be really hit or miss because almost all of them will have been designed and developed without any without the designer and developer having access to one.
Marco:
So it's all going to be just it's going to be like the very first wave of iPad and Apple Watch designs when those came out, which is like really hit or miss because they were mostly developed in the simulator.
John:
So somebody put out numbers.
John:
The Nikkei reporters for that, what is it, a newspaper website?
John:
I don't even know.
John:
But anyway, this is their speculation, obviously not from Apple, but they're saying 20 million iPhones between now and the end of the year.
John:
And you're like, oh, that sounds like it's a lot, right?
Yeah.
John:
last year between october and december apple shipped almost 80 million so that's a factor of four if these if this guess estimate from you know these third party people with knowledge of the supply chain blah blah is right but not like we're saying there's going to be 20 fewer phones last year whatever four times fewer and again maybe the eight buyers are going to help with that but i'm not sure they're going to help forex so i really hope i really hope these numbers aren't right because that is really grim um yeah i hear you know the graph of like
John:
how bad is it going to be in terms of pre-order times i also hope that the number of people who are awake at 3 a.m exactly hammering on their phones to try to order another phone is itself smaller still like that that you what you're really getting to are the the people like this is the type of thing where i like where the people who are willing to do the ridiculous thing to lose sleep to set their alarm for 255 to
John:
do all this stuff that there are there's a small number of them and the numbers get bigger for the people who want to order uh the next morning and then bigger still for the people the next day and so on and so forth so it can be you know if you if you want the best chance to get it as soon as possible then just do what we do and as many people pointed out and who have gone through this before very often the barrier is not your cdn updating in marco's case where he doesn't even get to see the phone on his app until it's too late or
John:
apple store crapping out which happens but at various points during the purchase process depending on what you buy it may need to contact your carrier servers and the carriers suck in the u.s so that that's where your entire order process goes off the rails because their servers are unresponsive and while you're trying to get through that phase where it has to contact verizon or whatever all the phones have been ordered and by the time you get through that now you're you know your ship date is february 21st and
Marco:
what can you do so it's not one of the strategies people suggested is buy the one without a sim so you never have to contact the carrier but i don't know like what chipset to marco's point that thing is going to use that does get around it the problem is it's exactly what people want to do when they're scalping them so apple does not usually make the sim free version available for a high demand phone on day one they usually wait a few weeks or months and then they make it available
John:
But then the people go to the T-Mobile one.
John:
They go to T-Mobile because it doesn't contact their site, but then you get a different chipset that loses different radio bands, and it's all very fraught and confusing.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I've never done this before, so I can't say, but I'm not optimistic.
Marco:
Yeah, I have a feeling that because what I'm trying to do is exactly what scalpers try to do, I'm probably going to have to just go to the stores a lot and just try to get lucky that way.
John:
Yeah, you're using the senior citizen advantage, which is like, I'm home during the day, suckers.
John:
I'm going to wander into the Apple store while you're all at work.
John:
And I can just come there every day and go, hey, how you doing?
John:
It's me again.
John:
Any handy phones?
Marco:
Well, the good thing is I'm now getting allergy shots twice a week at a building next door to an Apple store.
John:
Twice a week?
John:
What are you curing yourself of allergies from?
Marco:
Allergies.
John:
Yeah.
John:
To what?
John:
Everything.
John:
Pollen?
John:
Everything?
Marco:
Pollen, ragweed.
Marco:
Not dogs, fortunately, but cats, you know, bugs, rabbits, mostly the pollen and the ragweed, which makes pretty bad seasonal allergies.
Marco:
But no, fortunately, I have a hypoallergenic dog, and he's wonderful, and I could put my face on him and have no problems.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
uh if he was a rabbit i would have problems because rabbits are kind of like cats but they're constantly moving so they have a cloud of allergies around them constantly it's awful yeah i so if i just show up early to an allergy shot like twice a week i can get to an apple store at like eight in the morning maybe nine in the morning and you know i'll see like i'm sure it's not going to work during the first week or two but maybe during week three you know that's probably going to work before my 3 a.m order will be delivered
John:
yeah isn't that how i got my uh my iphone 7 i seem to recall i was a it was an in-person wander by thing i wasn't in a super either but it was the same deal the jet blacks were hard to get i didn't even bother trying to get it early on and i think i did a lot of uh you know oh we're in the mall let's stop by the apple store and see what they've got
John:
I don't remember if that's where I bought it or not, but that is a very good, because Apple stores do get shipments in, I don't know, weekly, daily, whenever they get them.
John:
Daily, usually.
John:
They get a small number, but if you happen to be the person who wanders into the store when that small number appears, you are like in a mini line that only consists of the people who happen to be in the Apple store at the moment the shipment comes in, and that line is way shorter than the line we're all going to be in at 3 a.m.
John:
trying to get in a big, giant queue with the entire world to get a phone shipped to us in February.
Marco:
so it'll be it's not gonna be fun i was it'll be fun but no it's not gonna be fun it's gonna be a slog but we will eventually get this phone and you know what all of my concerns aside ultimately i am very excited to get this phone that's why we're all waiting for it because like if it's good
Marco:
Which Apple, you know, for all their problems with Macs recently, their record with iPhones is pretty solid.
Marco:
Like they usually don't have major issues.
Marco:
Sometimes they have minor issues.
Marco:
They don't usually have major issues.
Marco:
The likelihood that this is going to be as described and going to be good is pretty high.
Marco:
And if that's true, this is going to be great, because it'll finally be, like, the nice middle ground between the iPhone 7 and the iPhone Plus that we've been waiting for for so long.
Marco:
And to have, like, you know, the best cameras in the, quote, medium-sized phone, you know, even though it's not quite, but to have that would be great, to have a bigger screen and a smaller body would be great, like...
Marco:
There are a lot of asterisks on this.
Marco:
There's a lot of things we're having to give up to get this.
Marco:
But if it works out, it's going to be awesome.
Marco:
So I'm tentatively optimistic.
Marco:
I think it's probably going to end up being great.
Marco:
We're probably going to look back on all these worries and laugh at how ridiculous they were.
Marco:
And I hope it turns out that way.
Casey:
I hope so, but I think what's going to end up happening is I'll get my phone in December or January, and you will get yours in about a week by going to the store every single day.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
That's my wager.
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Casey:
So speaking of things that are positive, maybe, apparently the Mac Mini's still a thing.
Casey:
Kind of.
Casey:
Maybe.
Marco:
Here's the thing.
Marco:
Do you have the Tim Cook statement handy?
Marco:
uh yeah does it matter we all know what he said can you read the statement just for the record i'm glad you love mac mini why is it never the mac mini that's a steve carryover i think i know it just drives me back and for context listeners this was a neat so some somebody emailed tim cook asking about the future of the mac mini and got this response that allegedly and then it was posted to mac rumors so
Marco:
What was that?
Marco:
Go on.
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
I'm glad you love Mac mini.
Casey:
We love it too.
Casey:
Our customers have found so many creative and interesting uses for Mac mini.
Casey:
While it is not the time to share any details, we do plan for Mac mini to be an important part of our product line going forward.
Casey:
Best, Tim.
Marco:
Yeah, so all the websites took this to mean Tim Cook confirms the Mac Mini's not dead, that they're working on a new one.
Marco:
When I read this, I was less optimistic.
Marco:
Or at least I found this to be relatively content-free.
Marco:
Almost all of the words that Tim wrote back allegedly don't mean anything.
Marco:
Our noncommittal, you know, PR CEO speak BS.
Marco:
And the few words that mean something...
Marco:
were so vague and so noncommittal that what he could mean is we're just going to keep selling it like it is now like that's all he really said it's still a thing in the line like when they gave that wonderful statement during the mac pro roundtable last spring where it was something on the lines of that mac mini remains a product in our lineup it was like one of the best things i've ever said yeah
Marco:
It was so ridiculous.
Marco:
This is about the same.
Marco:
I don't think this is saying anything about future updates.
John:
I think you're bending yourself into pretzels to try to make it seem like the same.
John:
It's not the same.
John:
They said not time to share any details.
John:
If it was going to be the same, there's no details to share.
John:
Not that there's much information in it, but the one piece of information is an official confirmation from the CEO of Apple that they plan to...
John:
share some details related to the mac mini in the future which means as far as i'm concerned like if this was the mac pro what we'd be saying is this is confirmation the mac pro is not dead right then he might as well have said
John:
we're going to come out with a new thing that people who like the Mac mini will like.
John:
He didn't even say it was going to be a new Mac mini.
John:
Who knows what it could be.
John:
And I think we want to discuss that.
John:
Right.
John:
But, but the whole point is that like the, they like, there's, there's not like there's not going to fade away.
John:
Like we're not making the Mac mini anymore.
John:
So we're going to sell this one until it becomes really embarrassing.
John:
And then we'll stop like they were planning on doing with the Mac pro sell it until it becomes embarrassing.
John:
And then just let it fade away and replace it with the iMac pro or whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
That was the plan for the Mac pro until they turned around this email is,
John:
Does not have much content, but the one bit of information it has is, does the Mac Mini have a future?
John:
Yes, no?
John:
Answer, yes-ish.
John:
Like, again, they don't say it's going to be a Mac Mini, but the person was asking about the Mac Mini, and his answer is...
John:
just wait we'll have something and so i think at least tim believes that the person who likes the mac mini will be interested in this future thing so it's got to be something mac mini ish and that's not a lot of information like what do you expect like it's not going to tell you a date and yes we're going to have the mac mini or yes we're going to replace it like whatever but
John:
It's more than we had before.
John:
It's from the horse's mouth.
John:
And so I take that if I was a big fan of the Mac mini, I would be excited now to know that that computer line is not 100% dead.
Marco:
There's two parts of Tim's wording here that actually mean anything at all.
Marco:
WoW is not time to share any details.
Marco:
This implies there will be a time in the future where something is shared.
John:
Not a time in the past.
John:
Space doesn't have a time machine.
John:
It will have to be a time in the future, and he will share details.
John:
Details about what?
John:
Details that this person who sent this email apparently would be interested in.
John:
This person wants a Mac Mini.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Well, so...
Marco:
What that clause means is there may come a time in the future where there's something to share.
Marco:
The only other part of this that says anything is important.
Marco:
We do plan for the Mac Mini to be an important part of our product line going forward.
Marco:
But the problem with that, when a CEO says important, it's like your call is important to us.
Marco:
That is complete BS.
Marco:
They do not mean it.
Marco:
They're saying that to please you.
John:
that doesn't mean anything when you remove the bs speak from this all it really says is we plan for the mac mini to be part of our product line going in the future going forward like that's it that's all it says yeah but but like i said don't have anything to share right now we will have something to share later and if the product doesn't change there's nothing to share if there's something to share that means there's news that means there's news that mac mini owners want and the obvious news is there's going to be a new mac mini
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
So basically, I think part one of my skepticism on this is I don't think this email says anything real.
Marco:
I think this is 100% fluff and there's no meat to it.
Casey:
I completely agree.
John:
But it's not 100%.
John:
It's 1% a promise that the Mac Mini is not dead as a line of computers.
Casey:
Yeah, but if you're Tim Cook, you're not going to make that declaration in an email to some rando.
Casey:
You're going to make it... Yeah, sure you will.
John:
I think that is the minimum amount that you can... There's nothing else he can say.
John:
He can't just say what Phil said, which remains a product in our lineup.
John:
Because that will be taken... If you're answering it all, if you answer that, that's taken as a confirmation that it's dead.
John:
Because if he can't bring himself to say...
John:
his you know patented tim cook just stay tuned we're really excited about blah blah blah future blah blah nothing to share today like he does that all the time that's his little shtick if he can't bring himself to say that and he actually replies and says remains a product in our lineup that means it's dead so he has to either not reply which would be the smart thing to do or reply and say no we're gonna it's not dead we're gonna do a thing and he gives his little answer about you know
John:
nothing to share today that means there'll be something to share like that and that is you know you could say 90 bs and 90 content free but that one little nugget like i said if i was a big mac mini fan that would make me very excited because i feel like it is unambiguous unambiguous that tim cook thinks in the same way by the way that they would have said we have you know mac pro users we have something you'll be excited about and they meant the imac pro and so you can still be disappointed but like oh i was hoping they would you know keep the mac pro but it turns out
John:
The thing they thought we would be excited about is the iMac Pro, and we would kind of be excited about it, but it would still be not as good as a real Mac Pro, right?
John:
So there's still room for Mac Mini owners to be disappointed, but that's their lot in life, right?
John:
Isn't that what they're there for?
Marco:
Yeah, it's always been a disappointing product on some level.
John:
So anyway, I think it's not that bad.
Marco:
Part one of my disappointment with this was, you know, Tim's fluffy language.
Marco:
When Tim says things or does interviews, I don't even watch them or care because there's so little content.
Marco:
Really, he's so guarded.
Marco:
He's so careful that you see no personality.
Marco:
You get no real ideas of anything.
Marco:
So I don't anyway.
Marco:
So I wouldn't put anything into his words.
Marco:
The other thing to worry about is, do we want today's Apple redesigning the Mac Mini?
Marco:
When they last did it in 2014, they basically took the 2012 model and made it worse.
Marco:
what would they do if today's apple redesigned the mac mini because what everyone wants is one thing what everyone wants is yeah maybe bring back the quad core option that used to have maybe bring back the user replaceable upgradable hard drive and socketed ram like things like that would be great because this is a machine that appeals to low-end and budget conscious buyers more than their other machines and
Marco:
So that matters.
Marco:
The upgradability and repairability over time, that matters more on this machine than on probably any of their other machines.
Marco:
And they made it worse substantially in the 2012 update.
Marco:
So when people say we want an updated Mac Mini, I think number one, what they want is upgraded components.
Marco:
That would be nice to have modern processors and everything.
Marco:
But I think they're also thinking of some kind of redesign.
Marco:
And everyone has their idea of what they want it to be.
Marco:
Mac Mini users, who use them as their primary computers, generally want upgradability.
Marco:
Apple commentators, there was a great segment on Upgrade this week where Jason Snell argues that it should be more like the Intel NUC, the N-U-C, however that's pronounced, where it's the size of an Apple TV.
Marco:
So it's like, take the Mac Mini and make it even smaller.
Marco:
Make it have even less components and upgradability inside.
Marco:
Even fewer ports.
Marco:
Things like that.
Marco:
I honestly don't think Mac Mini owners are looking for that.
Marco:
But I think if Apple did redesign the Mac Mini today, it would be more like that.
Marco:
It would be like, let's make it even smaller.
Marco:
Let's give it all USB-C ports.
Marco:
Take away all the usefulness of it.
Marco:
Keep the same high price.
Marco:
Maybe even increase the price with today's Apple.
Marco:
And now you have less upgradability than even before in the 2014 revision.
Marco:
Do you think today's Apple would actually issue an update to the Mac Mini that Mac Mini buyers would be happy with?
Marco:
I think it's very unlikely.
John:
I think you're kind of dancing around this article that you haven't read in the show notes, which is by Ricardo Mari, who offers three... He categorized three possibilities for the future of the Mac Mini or things that the Mac Mini people might like.
John:
And you already covered two of them, but just to cover...
John:
with the link in the show notes to read this article which is longer uh the first option is it's the same mac mini you see today but it has upgraded internals which is like the minimum they could do right better cpus gpus faster ssd like all the things you expect you know usb c ports on the back but like but otherwise it's the same and probably a price bump because why not right um second option is the apple tv size mac mini right it's
John:
It's smaller, it's, you know, like, has lower power stuff in there in both senses, but it's like the size of a hockey puck, so a whole new realm of things becomes possible.
John:
Like the Intel NUC, like the Apple TV, you know, that's the second option.
John:
And the third option, which you didn't mention because, you know, I think this is probably the least likely, uh, is that it's basically the X Mac or the poor man's Mac pro.
John:
It is a small modular computer, but that it goes like up market in terms of power.
John:
Like, uh,
John:
what if you don't want an imac because you don't want the screen but you also don't want a bazillion dollar mac pro you want a desktop mac that is nevertheless configurable and you can put some powerful stuff in it and then you don't have to say it's upgradable maybe it's not upgradable at all maybe this is totally you know but but it is like faster like it's actually got some fast processors in it and a fast ssd it's like a little mini speed demo again this is the least option all of these are small computers they're small computers that do not have a screen that's not a laptop and
John:
but they're like it's like three sizes you know you got the the current size which i think is actually kind of gross it's like you know flat and wide i kind of not that i like the taller skinnier one but i don't like things to get wider like i think that limits usefulness but anyway you got that form factor you got the hockey puck and then presumably the the x mac or the poor man's mac pro would be bigger still than the current one and
John:
these three options are not equally likely in my you know like you said about the puck like who really wants that and it's extremely limiting um the the xmac performance mac pro is just not going to happen like give up you know that's why the xmac will never you know that's something that enthusiasts want they don't want and so that leaves the first one where it is a new mac mini with updated internals and maybe it changes size in some small way because they can make it smaller now but it's not hockey puck size
John:
um you know like and i guess there's you know fourth option or whatever that that's just something entirely crazy like that's by the way the mac minis and the mac pro both seem to induce this in people where they start to get the idea like what if it was like a bunch of mac minis you could combine them and they would combine forces like voltron and and
John:
you know use some sort of magic technology to distribute computing across them and if you just added more mac minis it would get faster and all sorts of fantasy scenarios that are like this is not this is not the 90s this is not uh the apple that made the duo doc like that's not gonna happen this is not their important product you could technically do some of these things but
John:
you know not the mac mini it gets is the least investment of any mac so you should just hope that they update it that the price is not too obscene and that it is good to go for another three years and i think that's the best you can hope for and i think that's what's going to happen
Marco:
Yeah, I think it's kind of sad, though, that the option that we think is the most likely is also probably what the fewest Mac Mini customers are asking for or want.
John:
Do you think so?
Marco:
I do.
Marco:
The most likely one, obviously, is the one where they make it even smaller and remove even more from it.
John:
Oh, no, no.
John:
I think the most likely one is they just update the internals.
John:
They can still make it smaller, but it's not going to be Puck.
John:
I don't think the Puck is the most likely one at all.
John:
I think it's still a silver box.
John:
It just has different ports and different internals.
John:
I think that's the most likely.
Marco:
So based on what modern Apple would do and what modern Apple should do, I think making it better, making it more powerful, more expandable, more upgradable, that's not going to happen.
Marco:
I think the best we can hope for is that they keep it the same and just update the guts.
Marco:
And it's really telling to consider...
Marco:
that is like that's what we're hoping for here is like please apple don't touch it too much like please like touch it a little bit like give us upgrade upgrade components but like i feel like you know going back to going back to my argument i think last show or the one before about about apple lacking confidence in its design it seems like apple refuses to update a product that
Marco:
where it's just a spec bump a lot of the time you know the mac pro famously was never updated after it was released uh the lap pops before that had had wide long spans or like they could have upgraded cpus but they didn't um the mac mini is is the clearest example yet of that now in the current lineup um because i i consider the mac pro not in the current lineup even though it's typically for sale
Marco:
Anyway, I think Apple needs to get over this insecurity or this roadblock they have in their head that every update has to be some kind of new external design or mind-blowing thing because that is important for some of their products.
Marco:
I'd say the iPhone is the big example where the market really values that.
Marco:
But there are a lot of products they sell where the market doesn't really care about that so much and
Marco:
if the alternative to having a fancy new external design on a regular basis is never getting an update of any kind, then, you know, Apple needs to really, really consider what that says about them and what kind of computer company they want to be.
Marco:
If they still want to be a computer company, please, for the love of God, please.
Marco:
I mean, geez, that's a valid question these days.
Marco:
But, like, it is totally fine for the Mac Mini to get updates,
Marco:
where the external design does not change like the market like an apple should be confident enough to be able to update it without without saying well we can't do anything big so we should just wait until we can because that's not that's not how computers work like that's not how people buy computers that's not how that's not what anybody wants
John:
Yeah.
John:
like not going to become super duper small because to do that you would have to you'd have to really cut the power on it like it would have to get way slower than it is you can't or maybe it wouldn't maybe you could say the same speed as the three-year-old's computer but the whole point is people want a bump because they want a mac mini that is more capable than the current one
John:
and if you just say okay well how about if it's the same speed or it's the size of a hockey puck i think they can make it smaller maybe not make it so darn wide and have a smaller case but it should be faster than the current if they introduce a new mac mini that is not faster than the old one
John:
That is definitely not what anybody wants.
John:
They already did it once.
John:
Yeah, I know.
John:
I know.
John:
That was the core count thing, and then nobody liked that update and stuff.
John:
But the one after that actually did get faster.
John:
No, no, no.
John:
I have that one.
Marco:
I have the one that got slower.
John:
The 2012 one?
John:
Wasn't the one where they cut the four core option?
John:
2012 was was the good one they they killed the four core option in the current lineup which is 2014 yeah all right well anyway i i that's what people want because why are you not satisfied with the current mac mini it's super expensive and what you get for that money doesn't run mac os that well because it's old and slow so give me a new mac mini
John:
and if we say new mac mini same speed as your old one but size of a hockey puck you're like that's not what i wanted right it's not that doesn't help me i would just like i would just keep using this one so i agree that it will not be an x mac uh but i think it's also not going to be a puck i think it will be a mac mini either the same size as the current case or smaller but not puck size and it has to be it has to be faster how could it not be faster just three-year-old guts never probably older it has to be faster
John:
So Tim Cook didn't say that in his email, but maybe I'll email him later and say, hey, Tim, the Mac Mini, it's going to be faster, right?
John:
And he'll send me one reply that says yes.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
No, are you kidding?
Marco:
He can't say one word.
Marco:
He'll give you three sentences that say nothing.
Marco:
It is also worth looking back at what the role the Mac Mini was supposed to be in the first place when it was first launched, what, about 12 years ago, something like that.
Marco:
What was the role back then?
Marco:
At the time, it was basically the Mac for new switchers to the Mac platform.
Marco:
And it was a way that, you know, if the rest of the Macs were too expensive for your budget or for your needs, then here's a way you could get a Mac for less money.
Marco:
You supply your own, you know, whatever display and keyboard and mouse you already have or you can get cheaply from other people.
Marco:
You bring that.
Marco:
We'll give you the box.
Marco:
And that can be your Mac for a lot less money than our big towers or our laptops.
Marco:
I think if modern Apple still viewed the Mac as a business that had potential growth in it, which is a big question mark, I think which is unfortunate because I think there's tons of growth to be had because for all the press narrative that phones and everything are killing computers, we all keep using computers and we all keep buying them.
Marco:
And, you know, while the PC market on the whole is not growing very well anymore, and in some cases it's not growing at all anymore, Apple doesn't have a very big share of it, and their share can grow.
Marco:
So there's tons of growth to be had if they wanted it.
Marco:
But I think it's worth revisiting that original purpose of the Mac Mini, which is to attract new people to the Mac platform who otherwise won't or can't buy the other options.
Marco:
And if Apple really wanted to do that, you know, I think they've always had this tension with the Mac mini that they probably don't want to cannibalize sales of the higher end Macs.
Marco:
Because one thing, you know, one thing a lot of people don't talk about in the Apple commentosphere is
Marco:
is that when you look at what Apple actually sells, the volumes they actually sell, the computers they sell ridiculously high volumes in are the lowest and cheapest configurations of each type of product.
Marco:
They sell a ton of the cheapest iMac and the cheapest MacBook, which for a while has been a MacBook Air.
Marco:
Before that, it was the MD-101, like the famous non-written 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Marco:
Apple sells massive quantities of those to businesses, schools, things like that.
Marco:
And so they have to make sure that whatever is the cheapest thing in a category, that it is both okay for Apple that they sell a lot of those instead of anything else, and that it is a reasonable computer.
Marco:
I think they clearly want people to buy the low-end iMacs and not the low-end Mac minis as the cheap desktop.
Marco:
The reality, though, is that laptops outsell desktops so much these days.
Marco:
That was not as true back when they first launched the Mac Mini.
Marco:
Laptops are now the computers that almost everybody wants.
Marco:
So if you're going to still have a desktop whose sole purpose is to sweep up the rest of the edges of the market, as Jason Snell said this week on Upgrade, it's kind of like the catch-all.
Marco:
It's like...
Marco:
It catches a lot of edge case needs that other Macs might be impractical or unusable for.
Marco:
People run server farms on Mac minis.
Marco:
There's so many cool uses that you have.
Marco:
Home server, stuff like that.
Marco:
Headless things, cheap things, portable things.
Marco:
There's so many things you can do with a Mac mini where an iMac would be impractical or just not really work for that purpose.
Marco:
Or a laptop wouldn't really work.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
The Mac Mini is an important part of the lineup where it's actually true.
Marco:
The question I think is, is it worth expanding what that means now?
Marco:
Because in today's environment, which is very different from when the Mac Mini was first conceived and introduced...
Marco:
If they actually had a compelling, inexpensive little desktop thing that you could put a standard two and a half inch hard drive in if you wanted to for expansion or things like that, like things that would make it appeal more to low end and and customized buyers.
Marco:
they could, I think, really increase the appeal of macOS for a certain category of people without, I don't think, really cannibalizing meaningful portions of Mac sales.
Marco:
Because if they introduce a desktop that cannibalizes sales of the lowest and cheapest iMac,
Marco:
I don't think that's a big problem for them, especially because the Mac Mini, it's still not going to be that cheap.
Marco:
It's still not going to be a great value because it never has been.
Marco:
So from that angle, I think it's okay.
Marco:
And the reality is most low-end buyers these days buy laptops anyway.
Marco:
So I don't think they have to worry so much about low-end cannibalization anymore as they used to.
Marco:
And so what this product could instead do is be a market expander, basically.
Marco:
Expand the market share of Mac OS, of people using real Macs instead of Hackintoshes.
Marco:
who want their own desktop who who don't want to pay iMac prices who want to put like two terabytes in it with a standard drive in some way like things like that like this could be a market expander for them in a way that would detract from their core profitable markets almost not at all if they wanted it to be but i don't it doesn't seem like apple views the mac as a growth market anymore but i think that's totally wrong
John:
I feel like you're getting into X-Max territory when you keep talking about the idea that it's going to have a 2.5-inch bay somewhere in this computer.
John:
It did until 2012.
Marco:
Or no, it did until 2014.
John:
No, that seems very unlikely to me.
John:
They love the PCI-based little stick SSDs.
Marco:
There is still space in the case design for one, and I think you can still order them with Fusion Drives.
Marco:
You could have a stick and a bay in there, but if you didn't order it with a Fusion drive, then the hardware to mount the drive isn't there.
Marco:
So mine is SSD only, and I wanted to expand it because it's only 256, and I can't.
Marco:
I just can't.
Marco:
There's no hardware in there to support anything.
Marco:
So I have to just do external stuff if I want to expand it.
John:
So we don't, Apple hasn't broken out iPad mini sales in forever if they ever did.
John:
So we don't really know what the numbers are, but I bet they're super small.
John:
And what you're describing would be a cool thing, but I think it falls under the same category as the Mac Pro as in they would have had to have a special announcement about that.
John:
Like it's getting into XMac territory.
John:
We're saying we're going to reimagine the Mac mini.
John:
um and it is going to fulfill a different role and that role is exactly what you just described marco and but it would have to be a very different product it would have to basically be a miniature mac pro designed to be modular and configurable to be able to spec it up and down to get a really cheap low-end one but also a really fast high-end one in a similar form factor and be upgradable and fulfill all those roles that you just described and
John:
For a different kind of person, like, because the iMac would be the, I don't want to worry about it, I don't want to have any boxes or cables, it's all in one, so I'll get the low-end iMac, right?
John:
And I'll just, it's all in one box, and I get a nice screen and a nice computer, and it's all there.
John:
And then the other end is, I want a computer that is configurable and upgradable, and...
John:
potentially can be cheaper than the iMac if I already have a monitor, but also can be more expensive if I want to crank it up and try to get something faster.
John:
And that's into the X-Max territory.
John:
But so far, we don't know anything about this, but it still seems just much more likely that it will continue to be what it is, which is like...
John:
the cheapest way to get into a mac as long as you don't need to look at a screen right it's like you already have a screen and a keyboard and a mouse you can probably spec a mac mini so that it's cheaper than apple's cheapest laptop which may not be true for much longer given how the mac mini prices keep going up and that apple continues to keep around low-end cheap laptops like what is the you know the 13 inch air with a terrible screen is that below 900 yet it's around there yeah so
John:
Yeah, it would be nice if that trend reversed and you could actually get a cheaper Mac mini.
John:
But I'm not really into the Mac mini, but I feel for people who use them in various roles.
John:
And it's one of those products where it probably doesn't make them money.
John:
Like they probably don't sell enough of them to recoup the cost of development of the new case that they're going to design if they do design a new case or whatever.
John:
but it keeps enough of the of the right people happy the people who are enthusiasts who will spread the word of apple and be satisfied to be in an all apple ecosystem because they can make their music server be a mac mini or they can use it in some little situation that tickles their nerd hearts right like just
John:
there is value in that beyond the value of how much money do we make on selling them because i really think they sell very very very very very few mac minis and like the mac pro it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy if you don't update for three years and increase the price and make it slower yada yada yada but i'm personally less angry about it so i'm i'm just willing to be patient here but like i said i'm excited that there's going to be details that will be shared in the future
Marco:
Supposedly.
Marco:
I still am very skeptical that's anything.
Casey:
I think the problem with the Mac mini is that it tries to be three different computers at once, right?
Casey:
Or at least two.
Casey:
I know a lot of people that love to have them as an entertainment computer.
Casey:
And I know that with the Apple TV and other boxes like it, that's less important now.
Casey:
But I know people that have a Mac Mini connected to a TV, and that's how they prefer to manage their media.
Casey:
So that's one kind of Mac Mini.
Casey:
Another kind of Mac Mini is the sort that Marco, I think, uses, wherein it's just a very, very cheap in-home Mac-based server.
Casey:
And that's also oftentimes used at development shops like mine.
Casey:
We, for a long time, used a Mac mini as a continuous integration platform, which is something that Marco does not understand.
Casey:
We'll put it in the parking lot.
Casey:
Yeah, we'll put it in the parking lot.
Casey:
We'll have a scrummer fall about it tomorrow morning.
Casey:
Yeah, that sounds perfect.
Casey:
And then finally, there's the one that it sounds like Marco's most interested in, unsurprisingly, which is the cheap but expandable and flexible Mac.
Casey:
Something that's kind of sort of like the MacBook Air that John had just brought up.
Casey:
But desktop-y, you know, where you can expand it potentially and you can bring your own keyboard and mouse and monitor and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And I think the problem is, is that no matter what Apple does, shy of making three different machines...
Casey:
There will be one or more groups that will be displeased by the results, and I don't envy them in that regard.
Casey:
And yes, to a large degree, this is a self-created problem, just like John said and Marco said about how, you know, you didn't update it for three years, and the updates you did before that were crap.
Casey:
So this is the bed they've chosen to sleep in, but it's a crummy situation, and I don't know how to dig yourself out of it outside of making a few different machines.
Casey:
It's not going to matter, though, because our iPhone Xs will be quicker anyway.
Casey:
Yeah, it probably will.
John:
100% guaranteed.
John:
Unless they did the X-Mac, which they're not.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, 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.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long
John:
The sound of Italian power.
Casey:
Is that what that is?
John:
Mm-hmm.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't know what your BMW sounds like.
John:
Plus, your BMW's in the shop.
John:
I don't think you want to rev it like that.
John:
Probably blow up the valve train again.
John:
That is true.
Marco:
Sounds like some kind of dinosaurs exploding in sequence and possibly eight sequences.
Casey:
It is not eight sequences.
Casey:
It is six sequences.
John:
It has to be six in the Julia.
Casey:
It is a V6 in the Julia.
Casey:
And that is what you just heard.
Casey:
I recorded that last night.
John:
Sounds good.
Casey:
So my alpha has arrived.
Casey:
I am back to being a car journalist, ladies and gentlemen, and I am excited.
Marco:
Wait, did you like glue a camera to the back of your car?
Marco:
How'd you get this?
Casey:
It's a GoPro.
Casey:
Oh, OK.
Casey:
With a suction cup.
Casey:
You're a vlogger now.
Casey:
I know, right?
Casey:
Work has a GoPro.
Casey:
What is this thing?
Casey:
It is a Hero 3 Plus.
Casey:
And anyway, and I bought literally an $8 suction cup mount.
Casey:
You know, quick aside, this is not why I'm bringing all this up.
Casey:
I had never really used a GoPro before.
Casey:
This thing is amazing.
Casey:
Like, everyone, including, I think, the three of us, and I very much include myself on this one, we had said, oh, you know, the GoPro's going out of business.
Casey:
Maybe we never talked about this, but I feel like we did.
Casey:
GoPro's going out of business because that's why you have an iPhone, and they're, like, waterproof now, and you're good to go.
Casey:
And, yeah.
John:
I don't recall saying that.
John:
Okay, maybe it wasn't.
John:
You always love saying, oh, we all said this.
John:
Did we all say that if you can't even remember?
John:
Chances are we didn't all say that.
Casey:
Yeah, well, yeah, but I don't trust my own lack of memory.
Casey:
Anyway, the point is, is that I've heard somebody say that GoPro is going out of business, and I have no idea what their financials look like.
Casey:
But this thing is so damn flexible, not in a physical sense, but it is so damn flexible and so good.
Casey:
that I, if you do any sort of, of videography that involves any sort of motion and putting things in odd places, that sounds bad, but go with it here.
Casey:
Um, this is a tremendous device and, and I am so glad I was able to borrow it from work.
Casey:
So yeah, so I suction cupped, uh, a GoPro to the back of the Alfa Romeo as I was going through a parking garage, uh, uh, sorta near my house.
Casey:
Don't be creepy.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
And and so I got delivered to me and Alfa Romeo, Julia.
Casey:
Let me try this.
Casey:
I'm sorry, Federico, who probably doesn't even listen to the show.
Casey:
He actually recorded for me a clip.
Casey:
I should send it to Marco so he can just dub it in.
Casey:
He recorded for me a clip of him pronouncing it at my request.
Casey:
And I'm going to butcher it.
Casey:
But anyway, it's a Quadrifoglio.
Casey:
Giulia Quadrifoglio.
Casey:
It's the high-speed twin-turbo V6 version of the Alfa Romeo Giulia, and it is unbelievable.
Casey:
Holy shit, is this a nice car?
Casey:
It's take your Tesla, but make it
Casey:
much more tossable and make it sound like sex.
Casey:
And that is basically what this is.
Casey:
Or perhaps take your M5 and make it lose 15,000 pounds.
Casey:
And I loved your M5, don't get me wrong.
Casey:
But this thing feels like it's one-tenth the car that the M5 was.
Casey:
And oh my word, it's amazing.
Marco:
I'm a little concerned about your opinion of the sound of certain things, but otherwise... This does sound really good.
Marco:
I think it looks good.
Marco:
John doesn't agree that it looks good, but I think it looks good.
Marco:
Oh, it does not look good.
John:
If you don't want to stick, of course.
John:
That's the sticking point.
Marco:
I guess that's our first question.
Marco:
It's like, how is the automatic transmission in this wonderful sex car?
Casey:
So...
Casey:
The automatic is an odd thing.
Casey:
This has the ZF 8-speed that BMW uses, that the Challenger Hellcat uses.
Casey:
It's the same ZF 8-speed that's used in anything that wants to go fast but only have two pedals and doesn't want to be a DCT.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I still want to stick, but damn if this isn't a decent substitute.
Casey:
And the biggest problem I had with this car is that, and to be clear, in case you haven't been following along, this is my Alfa only for a week.
Casey:
And then it goes back to Alfa Romeo.
Casey:
It's a press car that was arranged by friends of the show at the Wheel Bearings podcast, which we've linked to before and I'll link to again.
Casey:
Imagine our show neutral, but by people who actually know what they're talking about, and that's wheel bearing.
Casey:
So anyway, so I've spent $0 on this car.
Casey:
I've already gone through like a half a tank of gas in the span of three days, but that's a different issue.
Casey:
But this car will be going back to Alfa Romeo on Monday.
Casey:
So anyway, the ZF 8-speed, it feels unlike any other automatic I've driven.
Casey:
And I don't know if it's just that it has a lock-up torque converter that spends almost all of its time locked.
Casey:
But it feels much more like a DCT than it does a traditional automatic.
Casey:
The problem I have with the Alfa Romeo, though, was that, or is that, first gear is pretty much useless.
Casey:
And I don't know what it is, because it just doesn't really move in first gear.
Casey:
And then you bang into second gear and suddenly, you know, the Kraken has been released and all bets are off.
Casey:
Well, at least that's what I thought.
Casey:
And it turns out that I'm just too programmed by BMW.
Casey:
And I'm too used to seeing the dashboard light up like a Christmas tree if the traction control comes on.
Casey:
So earlier today, I was out, and the Alfa Romeo has four modes.
Casey:
It has D, N, and A for dynamic, natural, and advanced efficiency, which basically amounts to sport, normal, and eco-crap.
Casey:
But it also has race mode.
Casey:
Race mode is scary because race mode turns off all the electronic nannies, and that's the way it works.
Casey:
It also makes the exhaust sound even better, but it turns off all the electronic nannies.
Casey:
And so I had it in race mode.
Casey:
I had it firmly planted with the wheel at zero degrees because this is a rear-wheel drive car with 500 horsepower, and I don't trust my driving skills, as Marco saw at BMW in South Carolina.
Casey:
So anyway, I had it firmly planted at zero degrees and I mashed on the gas and I realized, oh my, first gear isn't the problem.
Casey:
The problem is it doesn't have wide enough tires to get the traction to the ground or to get to get the torque to the ground.
Casey:
And so the problem is that it's neutered in first because it just can't, it just can't get the power down.
Casey:
And honestly,
Casey:
oh my word is this thing quick when it hooks up it is unbelievable fast the numbers say it's zero to 60 in a little under four seconds which is probably about the same speed as marcos tesla but oh my word it feels like a rocket and sounds so good it is unbelievable i don't know what to make of the reliability um
Casey:
Obviously, everyone has a dad or an uncle or a grandfather or a cousin or something like that that had an Alfa Romeo 20, 30 years ago and said that they never worked for more than 10 minutes at a time.
Casey:
I believe that to be true.
Casey:
I don't doubt it.
Casey:
I don't know if this is reliable or not.
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
But if it is reliable...
Casey:
And if one can have one under the $80,000 or so that the sticker's for, wow, what a great sedan.
Casey:
And so much of the inside feels like it's a BMW, but slightly different.
Casey:
The gear shift is straight out of a BMW.
Casey:
I'm assuming not literally, but it's the exact same style as like TIFF's car has.
Casey:
The paddles are humongous, but otherwise very BMW-ish, although the
Casey:
the bmw loaner i have today because my car went into the shop for another two thousand dollar repair um the loaner i have today is a 340 grand uh grand touring grand turismo whatever the hell the thing is that tiff has the three i'm sorry not 340 a 330 gt uh and this and the paddles are on the steering wheel and i think i prefer that but my my understanding is that i'm wrong so john do you know why i'm wrong to prefer the paddles on the wheel rather than the steering column
John:
I thought about that a lot because every time I read your review, people have strong opinions.
John:
Usually they're raving about them in the Ferrari and how they're on the column and not on the wheel.
John:
But the only thing I have to compare it to is my audio controls, which I use a surprising amount because I do random play on my iPod in the car and I do a lot of skipping, much to the consternation of everyone in the car with me.
John:
And so very often I will want to skip to the next track while I'm turning.
John:
And I think about, would it be better if I could get to that control and it was always in the same place?
John:
Or would it be better that it stays, you know, because the audio controls are actually on the steering wheel?
John:
And I, having, you know, I can't say, having the only paddle ship car I've ever used is Marco's M5.
John:
uh and i don't think i did a lot of sharp turns now but my recollection is that those paddles were on the column is that correct marco uh no they were on the wheel yeah my recollection is not helping me but anyway i've never had i've never even driven one that had it on the column yeah so using my audio controls i think i would find it more convenient for them to turn with the wheel because where are my hands they're usually like i'm not you know it's good that the ones that are on the column never move
John:
But it's bad that my hands might be far away from it if I'm in the middle of a turn and holding on for dear life.
John:
But I confess that I have no actual experience in this situation.
John:
Closest I have is taking a suburban street turn a little bit too fast while I'm trying to skip a track.
John:
And in that case, I like the fact that it's by my hand.
John:
But changing audio is not the same as shifting gears.
John:
So what is your experience with...
John:
Have you used both kinds, Casey?
Casey:
Well, yeah.
Casey:
So to back up a half step, today my car, my 335 went in for service.
Casey:
I asked for a state inspection, which is required by law in the state of Virginia to be $16.
Casey:
The bill is about $1,600.
Casey:
The reason being, apparently my rear tires were on the wear indicators to the point that they would not do a safety inspection.
Casey:
They would not pass the safety inspection.
Casey:
And then they said, oh, the fronts are bad enough that you should probably do the same thing.
Casey:
So $1,600 later, I now have new tires or will have new tires.
Casey:
But the problem I have is every time I bring my car into the shop, as you guys know better than anyone, it's usually there for at least an overnight.
Casey:
As it turns out, it has been, if not a week or more.
Casey:
So I asked for a loaner when I booked this appointment like two or three weeks ago.
Casey:
And then the Giulia showed up and I thought, oh, maybe I should just tell them, you know, don't give me a loaner because I have this car.
Casey:
But then I thought, no, if I do that, then it will need a full like coolant system replacement or water pump or something like that.
Casey:
So I better just have both of them.
Casey:
So right now in my driveway, there is one car that we own and two cars that are borrowed.
Casey:
And the borrowed car, like I said, is a 330 GT, which is the neutered version of Tiff's car.
Casey:
The rear visibility out of that, by the way, is comically bad.
Casey:
But anyway, the 340, I keep saying 340, the 330 has steering wheel mounted paddles.
Casey:
And I think I vastly prefer that because I've been driving the Alpha predominantly in manual mode and it will aggressively try to avoid shifting by like presumably shutting down cylinders or killing the fuel into the engine rather than shifting.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So, there have been a couple times where I've been turning the Alpha and wanted to grab the upshift paddle, and it's not where I expect it to be because it's hanging out at the steering column, and my hands are at like 12 and 6 o'clock.
Casey:
And even though these paddles are freaking enormous, which I do like, they're not where I expect them to be and I don't prefer it.
Casey:
So in my brief experience with paddle shifted cars, I think I prefer it on the wheel, which is weird because almost every YouTube video I ever see seems to think that on the column is the better way to do it.
John:
I think the people who like it on the column is based on racing, and I bet you steer differently in racing.
John:
First of all, it's not the same as going on a suburban street where you might cross your hands over each other.
John:
I imagine maybe the racing technique is not to do as much, like to do more of passing the wheel through your hands instead of going into these crazy positions where your arms are practically crossing over each other.
John:
But that's just a guess because that's the scenario where you would want it on the column.
John:
I mean, I'm just thinking like F1 cockpits where you have to take the steering wheel off to even get in the stupid thing.
John:
You don't you don't have a lot of room to be like turning your hands over each other.
John:
And even if you're making sharp turns and the steering ratios are not the same as in regular cars.
John:
So maybe in that situation.
John:
Although they don't have paddle shifters in F1 cars anyways.
John:
I don't know what I'm talking about, but I can see the argument both ways based on how you drive.
John:
What is your driving technique like?
John:
With a giant steering wheel on residential roads in a regular person's sedan,
John:
on the wheel probably seems like it's better but for the people who are raving it could be just a situation of like if they're on a racetrack that's why ferraris have them uh you know that there are advantages in that scenario so maybe if you had well let's say when you did the bmw driving school did all the bmws or were you stick shifts or were you paddle no
Casey:
They had 1 Series M's not too long before we were there, but they said they were constantly blowing clutches because nobody knew how to drive them, and so they abandoned those and everything was DCT when we were there.
John:
And so those were all steering wheel mounted?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I don't think BMW's ever made a car that wasn't.
Marco:
If it has paddles, I think they're on the wheel.
Casey:
The only thing that's a bummer about these humongous paddles, though, is that they're exactly where I'm used to having a turn signal.
Casey:
And so every time I go to use my turn signal, I hit the damn downshift paddle or almost hit the downshift paddle.
Casey:
But yeah, this ZF eight speed, man.
Casey:
It is a great transmission.
Casey:
And my buddy Brian, who had the R32, he had an E36 M3.
Casey:
He had the 335.
Casey:
He was only recommended to me that I buy my 335.
Casey:
He now has a six-speed X5, which turns out is a thing.
Casey:
And I believe I've spoken to you two about it, and I've driven it.
Casey:
And it is completely wrong in every measure, but it is phenomenally cool.
Casey:
Well, anyway...
Casey:
He had been telling me for years that the ZF eight speed is actually really good.
Casey:
And I kept telling him he was out of his damn mind and it's DCT or six speed or get out.
Casey:
I still think I'd prefer DCT, but I think if I had put, if, if Marco or myself had ended up in this car and not known if it was a DCT or a slush box, I'm not sure either of us could tell the difference.
Casey:
It is really that good.
Casey:
It is phenomenally good.
Casey:
And the car is just tremendous.
Casey:
So much of the switch gear feels like BMW.
Casey:
It does get silly things wrong.
Casey:
As an example, BMW turn signals are very peculiar, but I love them.
Casey:
And the way it works is they always end up in the center.
Casey:
So even if you have the turn signal constantly going for an hour, the stock will be in the center.
Casey:
So what you can do is if you want to cancel the turn signal, you can either hit it in the same direction it was going before, or you can even go in the opposite direction just a smidge.
Casey:
And either way, it will cancel like a pending turn signal.
Casey:
In the alpha, what I'm used to doing is I'll turn on a turn signal, and if for some reason I want it to turn back off, I will just hit it in the same direction again.
Casey:
So if I hit the left signal, then I'll hit it again to cancel it.
Casey:
And in the Alpha, the only way to cancel it is to go the opposite direction, which is this little quirky thing, but it drives me bananas.
Casey:
The other quirky thing is, it is really good Bluetooth support.
Casey:
Everything seems fine with that, except every time you get in the car...
Casey:
And if you go to your phone as the media input, you need to tell it to reconnect to the phone for media.
Casey:
It's already connected for telephone, but it's not connected for media.
Casey:
And it's instant when it does it because it's already connected via the phone.
Casey:
But you have to tell it, yes, I would like to listen to my phone.
Casey:
Please enter media mode on my phone.
Casey:
It's so annoying.
Casey:
That's pretty bad.
Casey:
Yeah, but it works great.
Casey:
And the display is pretty high res.
Casey:
The backup camera is comically not, but the display is pretty high res.
Casey:
It blends into the dashboard much better than any BMW does with like those like TIFF's car where it's just like a screen hanging out of the dashboard out of nowhere.
Casey:
Audi does the same thing.
Casey:
That's not unique to BMW.
Casey:
But most of the switchgear just feels like BMW, and I mean that in a good way.
Casey:
It feels very familiar.
Casey:
One of the advantages of having a two-pedal car is it has a remote start, which is kind of neat.
Casey:
What else did I write down?
Casey:
The biggest thing for me is just that it feels much like the M5 did, and it feels much like the Tesla does, in that it feels like infinite power from almost any part of the RPM range.
Casey:
The other thing that's interesting is 3000 RPM in any standard transmission car I've ever driven is about where I would normally shift.
Casey:
So like 1500 to 2000 RPM in any car I've ever driven is like the comfort zone, right?
Casey:
And 3000 RPMs when you're starting to get out of, you're definitely out of the comfort zone, but you're starting to get into like, no, you're clearly trying to go somewhere with a quickness.
Casey:
That's like what 3000 plus is in this car.
Casey:
which has about a 6,500 RPM redline in this car, 3000 RPM feels like 2000 RPM in any other car, which is to say 3000 RPM feels like, okay, this is about the top of the comfort zone, but still comfortably in the comfort zone.
Casey:
So it just wants to rev like, like no other car I've ever driven.
Casey:
And it is phenomenally, phenomenally fun.
Casey:
Now, all in the chat room is giving me all sorts of grief because I didn't make a perfect quality video for him or her and is wondering why I'm doing a video at all.
Casey:
My intention is to do a proper car review of this and put it on YouTube probably sometime six months from now.
Casey:
But I'm trying to get a whole bunch of film that I can splice together using either iMovie or if I decide to spend the money on Final Cut Pro and hopefully get like a five to ten minute video out of this.
Casey:
Also, interesting.
Casey:
Oh, and I'm definitely going to write something on my blog about it.
Casey:
Also, interestingly, if you and I don't think I have the link handy, but if you look up the Ars Technica review of this car, as it turns out, that that review was written by someone based out of D.C.,
Casey:
Well, this car is based out of Baltimore, and if you look at the plate on the car that's in my garage as we speak, and if you look at the plate of the Ars Technica review, it is the same plate, and thus one would assume it is the same car.
Casey:
Also, interestingly...
Casey:
There was another review I saw by someone based out of New York.
Casey:
And the plate on this car is either 6 or GLP K17.
Casey:
And the other review I saw was, I guess, 6 LP K16.
Casey:
So it's not really surprising, but it just struck me funny that apparently, you know, Alfa Romeo or really Fiat Chrysler of America...
Casey:
you know imported you know maybe six of these or something like that and just went to the michigan you know dmv and said okay i would like to register six julias if you please um additionally when the car was delivered on monday uh it was delivered in the cars uh the the competizione red um which is beautiful uh when it was delivered the chase car was another julia it was not the quadrifogia quadrifoglio i think that's right i'm sorry federico
Casey:
Anyway, it was just the more pedestrian version.
Casey:
The chase car was white.
Casey:
The loaner that I got today, and I did not ask for it, is white.
Casey:
This white thing follows me, even though I don't want it to.
Marco:
Sure, you don't want it to.
Casey:
I don't.
Casey:
I really don't.
Casey:
But God, this red is so good.
Marco:
So I will just say, in my history of getting service loaner vehicles from car makers while my car is in the shop, I've never gotten a white one.
Yeah.
Casey:
You had a bunch of white ones when we were in South Carolina at driving school, though.
Marco:
Thank you very much.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Anyway, the car is tremendous.
Casey:
I don't want to give it back.
Casey:
I really, really love it.
Casey:
And if I was...
Casey:
If I was to buy a car tomorrow and I was willing to give up on the six speed and I had $80,000 to spend, I really think I would buy one.
Casey:
I really, really do.
Casey:
I mean, I'm used to a car that never runs anyway, so why not get another one that's unreliable?
Casey:
This thing is tremendous.
Marco:
That's really nice to hear.
Marco:
I knew John would not like the way it looks and would therefore rule everything else out about it.
Marco:
Plus, John would never buy a car this expensive, no matter how much money he had.
Marco:
That's not true.
John:
No matter how much money I had, you just made an infinite timescale argument.
Casey:
Okay, on an infinite money scale.
Casey:
Okay, on an infinite money scale.
Casey:
Okay.
Marco:
Yes, but anyway, I am most pleased to hear your opinion of the automatic transmission because your description of it like really avoiding shifting when you're in manual mode, like really avoiding shifting itself.
Marco:
The main problems I had with all manually shifted automatics that I've ever driven have come down to too many gears and...
Marco:
And also that it would second-guess me and that it would shift itself when it felt like being convenient for me.
Marco:
No matter what kind of sporty or manual mode I put it in, that was always a problem for me.
Marco:
And so I'm glad to hear that this one appears to be a much better implementation of that.
Marco:
And the only automatic shifting that the M5 DCT ever did for me was if you came to a complete stop, it would put you in first gear.
Casey:
Yeah, and this will do the same.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
But I totally get your point.
Casey:
And yes, it is really, really good.
Casey:
Stunningly, stunningly good.
Casey:
In a way that really kind of makes me uncomfortable.
Casey:
Because...
Casey:
And I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I also kind of mean it.
Casey:
Part of my identity as a car guy and as someone who has enjoyed cars is driving a stick.
Casey:
I feel like I would be losing part of myself if I bought an automatic car that I drove every day.
Casey:
And I recognize how bananas and kooky that sounds.
Casey:
I fully own it.
Casey:
But it's the way it is.
Casey:
If I'm really honest, it's the way it is.
Casey:
I guess it's turned into analog all of a sudden.
Casey:
But anyway...
Casey:
This car is good enough that it would make me second guess having a stick.
Casey:
I would absolutely take the stick if it was an option, but since it isn't, I would absolutely still consider this car if I had $80,000 to spend, if I felt like it would ever run for more than 10 minutes at a time, etc., etc., etc., etc.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
It is so good.
Casey:
And I think part of the reason it's so good is because it's 500 horsepower, right?
Casey:
Like if this was in a 200 horsepower car, I don't think I would be near as amused.
Casey:
Thoughts, John?
Casey:
Are you going to come visit tomorrow?
John:
No.
John:
Maybe if you got a Ferrari, I would.
John:
Oh, I see how it is.
John:
Luigi, if I only the Ferrari.
John:
You wouldn't fly down there.
John:
No, you're right.
John:
I wouldn't.
John:
Well, I don't know.
John:
Maybe for a Ferrari, I might.
John:
I don't know.
John:
But no, it sounds good.
John:
It looks bad.
Casey:
What can I tell you?
Casey:
I don't think it looks that bad.
Casey:
I really don't.
John:
Gerber baby.
John:
Spice Navigator.
Marco:
If I was in the market for this kind of vehicle, I would give this strong consideration.
Marco:
I think it looks good.
Marco:
I like the idea... Having the ever-driven one, I like the idea of it...
Marco:
having like spirit and a soul that most modern cars lack, like giving you feelings of like, this is so awesome.
Marco:
I just love this.
Marco:
I love the way it sounds.
Marco:
I love the way it drives.
Marco:
Like that's something that is really hard to find in the rest of the car world.
Marco:
Most of the time, especially at the high end where like so many high end cars also have to appeal to like, you know, old people with stiff bones that like, you know, they finally have the money to buy.
Marco:
So it's like they have to also appeal to like Lexus buyers.
Marco:
And so it's hard to find really nice sports cars that are also really fun and make you make you feel feelings, you know.
Marco:
And so if this does that, that's really special.
Marco:
And that's that's pretty rare.
Marco:
So I would definitely give it strong consideration if it's the kind of car that I was looking for.
Marco:
I think I'm ruined now for electric forever, but if I was not, I would certainly look at this.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, it's going to be hard.
Casey:
So John and Marco did not know that I had received the Alpha.
Casey:
They knew it was a possibility, but they didn't know I had.
Casey:
And earlier today, John and I were talking about the new six-speed... What is it?
Casey:
The Accord Sport?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I already went to sleep even thinking about it.
John:
But the point is... The car you can afford that will work.
Casey:
To its credit, it will probably work forever.
Casey:
But yeah, like...
Casey:
Okay, the idea of a six-speed sounds great.
Casey:
The idea of an Accord, eh, mostly sounds great.
Casey:
But the idea of 250 horsepower, that is half as many horsepowers as this thing has.
Casey:
And I know it's also the third the cost, or probably even less than that, probably a quarter the cost.
Casey:
But, oh my God, it's intoxicating.
Casey:
It's just so intoxicating.
John:
Well, what about all that trunk space and the cavernous backseat that your children, who will not be small forever, will thank you for someday?
Casey:
I mean, this thing is reasonably large.
Casey:
I mean, Declan's been in the back of it.
Casey:
I will also say that Aaron, who is, if you recall, six-ish months pregnant at this point, she and Declan and I went to dinner Monday night, and she did not like it.
Casey:
And it's not because it's fast.
Casey:
It's not because it's fast.
Casey:
That doesn't bother her.
John:
It's noisy and a rough ride.
Casey:
The noisy mostly didn't bother her, but you got it with the rough ride because I had it in dynamic mode, I believe, for most of the trip.
Casey:
And I don't recall if I was manually shifting or not, but she did not care for the shift because the speed and the ferocity of the shifts in dynamic mode.
Casey:
Now, once I turned it to advanced efficiency, which again is basically eco mode, then it was fine.
Casey:
And it's actually very docile at that point.
Casey:
But when I had it, even I think in normal or natural or whatever the N is in DNA, when I had it in that mode, even that she did not care for.
Casey:
So, yes, she did not like it until I kind of neutered it.
Casey:
And some of that may be pregnancy.
Casey:
And I asked her that.
Casey:
And she said, no, I don't think so.
Casey:
She said, it's pregnancy that's causing me to hate getting in and out of it.
Casey:
But it's not pregnancy that's causing me to hate the jerkiness of it.
Casey:
It's a fun car, though, and I'm going to be really, really sad to give it back on Monday.
Casey:
Super-duper sad.
Marco:
You've got to buy one.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, that's the right answer.
Casey:
$80,000.
Marco:
Yeah, we'll start a Patreon or something.
Casey:
Okay, that sounds great, yes.
Casey:
Send the reasonably affluent white man a bunch of extra money so he can buy an Italian sports sedan.
Casey:
That sounds like a great idea.
Casey:
I'm sure that'll be trending on, on Patreon momentarily.
Marco:
Isn't that basically what YouTube stars try to do?
Marco:
They're all on Patreon.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Touche.
Casey:
Touche.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I'd like, oh man, I would love this car.
Casey:
It would probably work, work for 10 minutes at a time, but man, would I love it?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Just like your BMW.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
True story.