Everybody’s in the Alliance
Marco:
Who would have guessed that we would have spent so much time tonight talking about printers and the Airport Express?
John:
Truly.
John:
This is why I love this show.
John:
Truly is the dog days of summer.
Casey:
But this is why I love this show because every time I'm like, oh, this is going to take no time.
Casey:
It takes six hours.
Casey:
And every time I think this is going to take 14 hours, then we'll say three things and that'll be that.
Marco:
The iMac has made it back, and it appears to have made it back.
Marco:
I mean, I've only been using it for about an hour right now, but it appears to have made it back fine.
Marco:
I managed not to get any more dust in the bag because I cleaned off the bottom vents before I put it in the bag this time.
Marco:
And I decided to avoid carrying the bag by just placing it into a wheeled wagon, which made it much more pleasant to carry and partially remove the need for the bag.
Marco:
But oh well.
Marco:
The iMac is back.
Marco:
It seems to have survived the trip.
Marco:
I am once again incredibly happy that that's the choice I took on how to compute this summer.
Marco:
because boy did i do a lot of programming and every time i watched those cpu bars and i stat menus max out all 10 cores i was very very happy i had this computer and during the week that i was home and had only my 13 inch with the stupid lg ultra fine display
Marco:
That was nice.
Marco:
It was fine.
Marco:
But I was very glad that for the rest of the summer, I wasn't using that setup because having the laptop with that external display and all the stupid bugs and crashes that resulted from it, I'm just so glad I didn't have to deal with those rest of the summer.
Marco:
Yay!
Marco:
How's your T2 crashing going?
Marco:
So since 10.13.6, I have not had a single T2 crash.
John:
And for the laptops, they just came out with another update, presumably, to address that, right?
Marco:
Yeah, and the only one I ever had with the laptop was when the LG Ultrafine was connected.
Marco:
When I was not using it, and that only happened, I think, once or twice during that week.
Marco:
When I was not using it with that stupid LG monitor, there were no problems.
John:
Hopefully these will all be sorted out by the time my Mac Pro with the T3 and it comes out.
Marco:
Like I know I've said it before.
Marco:
I'll probably say it again.
Marco:
The iMac Pro is just so awesome.
Marco:
It's so, so great.
Marco:
And I'm incredibly happy with it.
Casey:
Does that mean you don't have to buy a Mac Pro when it comes out?
Casey:
Because that would save me a whole lot of booze.
Marco:
Oh, well, you know I'm going to buy one anyway.
Marco:
I'll find a reason.
Marco:
I can't not buy one.
Marco:
I mean, this entire show is about the Mac Pro.
Marco:
Is it?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Have you seen the artwork ever?
Marco:
Did I have any say in that artwork?
Marco:
Or last year's t-shirt?
John:
It's a tyranny of the majority, Casey.
Marco:
Two against one.
Marco:
Sorry.
Marco:
There is no way that this show is not going to be about the Mac Pro.
Marco:
It's just never going to happen.
Marco:
And now you quit your job, so you're stuck with us.
Casey:
Yeah, I know.
Casey:
There's nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
Casey:
No, it occurred to me it would be funny if I could somehow convince myself to buy a Mac Pro, which every time I open up Final Cut is a pretty good time, a pretty good reason or way to convince myself.
Casey:
Anyways, how funny would it be if I was the first of the three of us with a Mac Pro?
Casey:
Which, to be clear, I don't expect that to happen at all, at all, at all, at all.
Casey:
But just walk down this hypothetical road with me.
Casey:
How funny would it be if somehow I ended up with a Mac Pro before you two, numbnuts?
John:
You become a single car family.
John:
You have all this extra money you all know what to do with.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
No, I mean, honestly, like, if... I know this is sacrilege to one of the hosts of the show, at least, but if the iMac Pro was it, I'd be incredibly happy with that.
Marco:
It's awesome.
Marco:
The iMac Pro is a Mac Pro glued to a monitor.
Marco:
That's what it is.
Marco:
And it happens to be the monitor I would want to use anyway.
Marco:
The only reason why I would really think to get one, and this is probably what's going to drive my choice, is...
Marco:
What I did this summer, I was, you know, on vacation for a couple of months, and I wanted a computer that I could take with me there that could be as powerful as my home desktop, and it made the most sense to have it be my home desktop.
Marco:
And that kind of sucked to bring it there and back.
Marco:
honestly didn't suck that badly but you know it was inconvenient and you know kind of a risk to bring this whole giant glass screen there and back i would love to have the mac pro be a separate thing from the monitor that way i could just keep a monitor there and keep a monitor here and just bring the little tower you know funnily enough the trash can mac pro would have been perfect for this but um
Marco:
And I don't expect whatever the new Mac Pro is to be that small and portable, but it's probably still going to be small-ish and portable-ish compared to an iMac.
Marco:
So that might be a reason to look into one for me.
Marco:
That might be how I rationalize it.
Marco:
But ultimately...
Marco:
I'm incredibly happy with the iMac Pro.
Marco:
Right now, I don't need more performance.
Marco:
The 10 cores are rarely maxed out for more than about 10 seconds.
Marco:
I don't do a lot of video transcoding like you do.
Marco:
Most of what I do is short bursts of extreme power.
Marco:
Things like what Xcode does when it's compiling or archiving or things like that.
Marco:
I've been doing a lot of that.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I don't make video.
Marco:
I don't edit video.
Marco:
10 cores is plenty for the things I do that are very heavy duty.
Marco:
So I'm actually really happy with this.
Marco:
And I actually don't have a strong reason to get the Mac Pro right now.
Marco:
But you will.
John:
is that one area of uh of mac pro speculation that maybe we never actually touched on uh for a long time the big pro tower max had uh handles yeah and you know the imac had handles and stuff like that uh the trash can no handles really but it's so small maybe it doesn't need them i'm wondering if the handles will come back
Marco:
Well, you can just put your hand under that lip on the top and just kind of pick it up like that.
Marco:
I mean, it was so small, I think putting a handle on it would have looked weird.
John:
Yeah, I'm assuming that, like you said, that the new one is going to be bigger, and so maybe there'll be a triumphant return of handles.
Marco:
Honestly, that would be very pragmatic, but I don't think... Handles would be something that does not look nice, but is used for ergonomics.
Marco:
What are the chances of today's Apple doing something that makes it look worse but improves ergonomics?
John:
Zero.
John:
That's not how they work, though.
John:
Handles are skeuomorphic, right?
John:
So they imitate the form of a thing that is no longer actually the thing.
John:
They're not exactly skeuomorphic.
John:
Anyway, the...
John:
The Power Mac G5 and the Mac Pro have things that look like handles on them.
John:
But anyone who has ever carried or lifted those computers by those handles knows they are a cruel imitation of handles.
John:
They look like it, but they don't function like it.
John:
And arguably, they're like this device...
John:
doesn't not that it doesn't need handles but they don't it shouldn't really have them in that way because they cut into your hands they're very sharp edge that if you can if you can like plank your hands underneath them so they don't touch the edges then i guess it's better than no handles but that's not how you would naturally want to grab them whereas on the uh the old yosemite case no not the operating system the other one uh where they were out at an angle um and they were rounded on the bottom
John:
those actually didn't feel that bad they still could dig in a little bit uh because the machines were heavy but especially like on the quicksilver where they were but they were rounded like it was rounded on both sides it wasn't just like sharp edges on the bottom like the uh the g3 and g4 was they were relatively comfortable so at this point handles are kind of like the uh the kidneys on the grill of a bmw right it's just it's a thing you know you have to have i didn't have to but
John:
It's a branding thing for Tower Mac computers.
John:
For many, many years it was, and then they got rid of it when they got rid of the Tower computers.
John:
I'm not sure this new one's going to be anything like a Tower, but if it is, it would be really cool if it had handles.
John:
So, Apple, if you're listening, scratch all your plans and add handles.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Can we move on from the Mac Pro?
Casey:
How does this always happen?
Casey:
And I think half the time it's my fault.
Casey:
I believe you brought it up.
John:
You're like, what if I got a Mac Pro?
Casey:
Somehow I say those two dirty words.
Casey:
It's like Beetlejuice, right?
Casey:
You say it once, though, with you two, and all of a sudden it's like... Beetlejuice is one word.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
I'm saying...
Casey:
never mind i don't even know what i just said juice if you were to take a beetle and juice it in a juicer that's two words god no it's not even worth it i'm not even gonna get into it all right let's start with some follow-up so here's the thing marco genuinely i'm not trying to be stark i really mean this marco is genuinely a tremendous editor and does a tremendous job your introduction is it clarifies something for me because i know where you're going with this and i was confused about it the whole week so please explain to me what happened
Casey:
99% of the time, Marco makes very good edits.
Casey:
I probably sound like I'm being sarcastic.
Casey:
I am not.
Casey:
I really and truly mean it.
Casey:
Almost always, Marco makes all three of us sound so much smarter and so much better than really any of the three of us are.
Casey:
But every great once in a while, something hits the cutting room floor and we all have to pay the price.
Casey:
So Marco, tell us about what happened last week.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, so in last week's Ask ATP, we had a listener ask us about options for extending Wi-Fi throughout their house.
Marco:
And we talked about, like, because they had asked about power line networking.
Marco:
And so we talked about that.
Marco:
We talked about repeaters, talked about mesh systems.
Marco:
And a million people wrote in to tell us about Mochi.
Marco:
which is the technology that allows you to basically it's kind of like what power line networking does but it does it over coax cable um because you know most most houses especially american houses most houses are wired for coax and and so you know that that's also an option you have and coax has a lot of bandwidth compared to power lines and is usually a little bit better grade cable so anyway uh so these things exist to uh to do the same thing over mocha and
Marco:
turns out we knew that at least casey knew that because casey spent about five minutes talking about it during his initial response to that question that episode was running pretty long it was like it was you know kissing that two hour mark and i try to keep it below that uh and we had a bunch of good stuff to talk about other than that so i thought you know what this mocha diversion let let me just cut it because
Marco:
This obscure technology, probably no one has ever heard of it.
Marco:
And probably it's so obscure, no one's ever used it.
Marco:
And no one's going to miss it if we don't mention this option.
Marco:
So I cut it.
Casey:
Which, to be fair, to be fair, knowing what you knew then, I think is a reasonable conclusion to come to.
John:
I don't think it's reasonable.
John:
It's not obscure.
John:
It was used all the time.
John:
Like, who hasn't at least, you know, dabbled in Mocha?
John:
Because it was, at least in the U.S., coax cable.
Marco:
Who are your friends with?
Marco:
Where do you hang out?
John:
In the U.S., coax cable is everywhere in people's houses.
John:
Ethernet is not.
John:
And power line networking, as you noted in the last episode, is slow and old.
John:
So if you need a very high bandwidth sturdy wire that goes from one room in your house to another...
John:
chances are good that you already have coax there and lots of cable companies and tv companies uh and uh you know tivo and all sorts of other things have had options to do mocha to get faster networking around your house this is also like pre-wi-fi so i don't think it's all that obscure
Casey:
I understand your point, but I don't even remember how I found out about it.
Casey:
I think a friend of mine just mentioned, oh, you know, you could get a Mocha Bridge and that will turn coax into Ethernet and Ethernet into coax and you can just treat your coax as though it's Ethernet.
Casey:
And I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Yeah, man, that's how you get, you know, that's how your set-top boxes pull IP addresses, and that's how they get their program guide, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
I had no idea this was a thing until somebody told me about it.
Casey:
And so, like Marco said, I tried to tell all of you about it, and justifiably, Marco thought nobody would care, because honestly, I didn't think anyone would, but oh, were we wrong.
Casey:
So we are aware of Mocha.
Casey:
We'll put a couple links about it.
Casey:
It is multimedia over coax alliance.
Casey:
And just like Marco said, it's basically just treating it.
Casey:
You can treat your coaxial cable that you would use for, say, cable TV, at least in the United States.
Casey:
You can you can run network packets over it.
Casey:
And so you can use that, just like Marco said, as a kind of poor person's way to have your house wired for Ethernet without actually wiring your house for Ethernet.
John:
fun i was gonna ask you too if you could say what uh what mocha stood for because you can kind of you can date it by the fact that the m stands for multimedia and then you can further criticize it by the fact that uh the ca isn't like coaxial or anything the c is for coax and the a is for alliance who's in the alliance
Casey:
I don't even know, to be honest.
Casey:
Everybody.
John:
Everybody's in the Alliance.
John:
Aren't you?
Marco:
Except for the Horde.
Casey:
Aren't you, Marco?
Casey:
Aren't you in the Alliance?
Marco:
If I were in the Alliance, I probably wouldn't have been allowed to cut that segment from the show.
Marco:
John clearly is in the Alliance.
Casey:
The Alliance currently has 45 members, including paid TV operators, OEMs, CE manufacturers, and IC vendors.
Casey:
And John Syracuse.
Casey:
And John Syracuse.
Casey:
The board of directors consists of Eris, Broadcom, Comcast, Cox, DirecTV, Echo Star, Intel, MaxLinear, and Verizon.
John:
As soon as I had my own house, I ran Cat 6 everywhere, right?
John:
But I didn't always have my own house.
Casey:
Wait a second.
Casey:
You've run Cat 6 throughout the house?
John:
I've run it where I need to run and not throughout the house because that would be quite a task given the age of my house.
John:
My television is hooked up to a wire.
John:
My computer is hooked up to a wire.
John:
My Synology is hooked up to a wire.
John:
Wi-Fi is just for the lesser devices.
Yeah.
John:
my iMac 5k is hooked up to ethernet and i have the wi-fi turned off on it so it won't even try to use that yeah fair enough so anyway so yeah so we are aware of mocha and now despite marco's best efforts now you are too you're welcome he's gonna cut that segment don't worry about it
Casey:
That's running kind of long.
Casey:
I probably should.
Casey:
Oh, God, stop.
Casey:
All right, quickly, quickly, quickly.
Casey:
All right, Nick Donnelly said stuff, and let's get into the topics.
Casey:
Nick Donnelly said, hey, you guys need to check out the fairly new Hades Canyon Nux from Intel, which apparently has the model designation, which is so memorable, 8, lowercase i, 7, uppercase H, uppercase V, uppercase K. Wow.
Casey:
Nick writes, I bought one at launch, and it's amazing.
Casey:
And there's a YouTube video that Nick provided.
Casey:
It's half the size of the current Mac Mini, with power midway between an iMac and an iMac Pro.
Casey:
What the what?
Casey:
Tell me more about this, please.
Marco:
Yeah, so last episode, when we were talking about Mac Minis and the topic of NUCs came up, I hadn't really followed the NUC market, but apparently there are some really fast ones recently, and they actually do go pretty high-end in roughly the $1,000 price range.
Marco:
um so yeah they are kind of right there with what the mac mini is trying to be or should be uh so yep turns out because i i was saying something like it was kind of like netbook hardware kind of stuff like you know just super cheap low end low power stuff uh or like the five watt family of chips and nope turns out they make really good high-end ones too and uh so that's pretty cool uh and and also i i did want to point out also
Marco:
You know, so these are these are super small, but while still having, you know, this kind of power and, you know, the topic came up last week during the Mac Mini discussion of like, should they make it smaller?
Marco:
And I was kind of leaning towards no, because I don't think it needs to be that much smaller.
Marco:
You know, it could be a little smaller, but I don't think it needs to be dramatically smaller.
Marco:
And if they made it dramatically smaller, they'd probably do that by cutting off a whole bunch of ports.
Marco:
And that's something I really don't want them to do.
Marco:
Because that would greatly reduce its usefulness as a kind of like patch over edge cases machine.
Marco:
But one thing that I don't think I brought up, but I regretted afterwards, is I think they should finally make it SSD only.
Marco:
And this might be what that weird rumor was referring to with a pro focus configuration only.
Marco:
You know, pro could just mean it has a T2 and SSD only.
John:
I was just assuming it would be SSD only.
John:
I'm assuming every new Mac is going to be SSD only.
John:
I mean, it'll be interesting to see what they do with the 5K iMac, but yeah, for something this small, the hard drives are going away.
Marco:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
And this is an area where in the 50 years since the last Mac Mini update happened, SSDs have gotten even cheaper, and even with Mac Mini punitive upgrade pricing that they have on this product line...
Marco:
The pricing of the SSD upgrades until now has been pretty obscene.
Marco:
I know because I got one on mine when I ordered it.
Marco:
But today, I think they could offer it reasonably, even with their ridiculous margins on this machine, for somewhat reasonable prices to have the base model be a 128 or a 256 SSD.
Marco:
And if they did that, if you look at what they did with the iMac, with the iMac Pro, rather...
Marco:
By changing out what was a hard drive-based enclosure and making it SSD only, it gave them massively more room inside for this huge cooling apparatus with the iMac Pro that can cool a much higher thermal load and be quieter.
Marco:
So obviously taking out that spinning disk out of the enclosure made a pretty big difference.
Marco:
So on a smaller scale, in a few different ways, but on a smaller scale, the Mac Mini could do that.
Marco:
Taking out the hard drive, if you look at a teardown of these things, that actually opens up quite a lot of real estate.
Marco:
And it doesn't really need to be that much quieter.
Marco:
It's already pretty quiet even under load.
Marco:
So I think thermally, they could easily fit the quad-core 28-watt chips from the new MacBook Pro, the new 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Marco:
You could easily fit those in there and have really quiet cooling and probably still have room to make it smaller.
Marco:
Now, what I don't expect is what this Intel NUC did by getting – it made itself smaller by making it not a square.
Marco:
It's a rectangle.
Marco:
So it kind of like lopped off like the front of the square basically.
Marco:
And that's for a lot of practical design reasons, one of which is that it has all the ports that that needs room for.
Marco:
although also keep in mind this snuck cheats because it uses an external power supply uh this is a wonderful cheat kind of like the original xbox or the xbox 360 that's right with that massive brick behind it that was like a third the size of the xbox as this external brick um
Marco:
This NUC has that, where the power supply is this huge rectangle that sits outside of it.
Marco:
Mac Mini does the nice thing and puts the power supply in the computer, such that you only need a nice thin power cable on the outside and not this huge brick to sit somewhere behind your TV and collect dust.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I would expect the Mac Mini, if it's going to have these kind of components and this class of thermals and everything, it's probably not going to be able to get that much smaller.
Marco:
It probably can get a little smaller, and that's fine.
Marco:
But I would not expect a huge savings in size.
Marco:
But certainly some.
Marco:
Or they could, as you said last week, John, thoroughly ruin it and give it no ports and give it the MacBook Air class everything or the MacBook class everything.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
and i was saying have it a macbook pro class everything but still just two usbc thunderbolt ports and that's it like they would have the good and it would be it would be like the uh the macbook pros great internals trapped in a case with no holes in it yeah maybe so for the size thing i think they could make it this small i mean i'm i'm inspired by the apple tv pucks which have always had internal power supplies and have always been very very tiny right it's another great thing about the apple tv was you know we take that on vacation with us and stuff that
John:
internal power supply and that tiny little thing um nick sent a bunch of specs for this thing just so people can get an idea of what it is one clever thing that it does is has an amd rx vega gpu on the same die as i don't know if it's on the same die but in the same package as the maybe it is the same die i don't know as the uh i7 cpu so it's got a decent gpu not made by intel so not intel integrated graphics
John:
shoved into the same package possibly also the same die i don't know as the uh the i7 it can drive six 4k monitors at 60 hertz it has six usb type a ports three thunderbolt three ports two hdmi two mini display port sd card two gigabit ethernet ports audio front and back including toss link no mac has that many ports including the imac pro probably the mac pro also won't have that many ports this thing is half the size of a mac mini if you recall we put a link to uh
John:
jason snell's article where he was showing that here how he replaced a uh his mac mini with a nook you can see how much smaller it actually is oh and it uses vapor chamber cooling uh and has room for a big quiet fan in it and is apparently vr capable so if i was just reading you the specs of the new mac pro and those were the specs about the ports it would be like wow that amazing versatility and power and this is a puck size thing
John:
so it's kind of depressing for the mac mini possibly also depressing for the mac pro apple the gauntlet has been thrown by a stupid thousand dollar nook in terms of port versatility we are sponsored this week by the tech meme ride home podcast please subscribe
Marco:
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Casey:
Something has come back from the dead, like a phoenix rising out of the ashes.
Casey:
It turns out the Airport Express is kind of useful.
John:
More like a zombie, really, if you're going to choose coming back from the dead.
John:
A phoenix is triumphant.
John:
A zombie is like, you know, well, I was dead, and now I'm not dead, but kind of undead.
John:
Well, now I'm still dead, but improved.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But now I'm immune to the laws of thermodynamics.
John:
Something like that.
Casey:
So anyway, so what happened over the last few days is that the Airport Express got a firmware update, much to everyone's surprise, that gives it AirPlay 2 and home app support.
Casey:
Really?
Casey:
I don't even know what to say.
Casey:
So if you recall, the Airport Express is a little tiny Wi-Fi, tiny is probably aggressive, but a small Wi-Fi router that Apple used to sell about 44 years ago.
Casey:
And the, what is it, the second gen one?
Casey:
Some of them can be turned into AirPlay 2 receivers, which is really, really surprising and cool.
John:
what is the home the airplay receiver thing makes sense to me basically if you're if you have any device that can airplay and you go to pick your airplay like you want to play audio from your phone onto your home pod or any other airplay cable now your airport express is also a thing and the airport express of course doesn't have speakers in it so what that means is you're going to airplay to the airport express and on the airport express is ta-da a headphone jack
John:
that you can connect up to a set of speakers and also mini optical yeah so you have a way to get sound out of this little thing it's a way to wirelessly send sound to this little box and this little box is presumably connected to something that plays sound like a set of speakers or a stereo system or you know an ipod hi-fi or whatever uh in the case of jason snell um but the home hub thing what what does that mean i don't understand i don't guess i don't have any the only home apple what the hell is it called home kit the only home kit device i have is the home pod and it it
John:
you know i think i launched the app once and it you know doesn't resonate with me because i don't have any lights to turn off does this mean you can connect a light to the i don't know what it means because like if the airport express already does wi-fi so if you need to connect to one of your devices over wi-fi there's no no firmware update was needed for that so do one of you know what this means
Casey:
apparently you can assign it a room but other than that no i have no idea and i have precisely zero home kit devices in my house so shrug but what snell did with it was kind of ridiculous because the ipod hi-fi is what like 44 years old now i think connecting this to an ipod hi-fi to make an airplay 2 ipod hi-fi is just about the most perfect thing you could possibly do with this new this new ability yeah
Marco:
Made me laugh for sure.
Marco:
This is so nice because as somebody who likes to dabble in a bunch of audio weirdness and stuff, it's nice that we have these wonderful little integrated speakers now.
Marco:
We have things like the Echo and the HomePod and whatever Google's air freshener is called.
Marco:
We have these things that if you want a little integrated experience where you hate speakers, you don't want to see them.
Marco:
You might also hate sound quality and you want this little thing that is as small integrated as possible and has only one wire coming out of its butt and
Marco:
You don't want to deal with anything else.
Marco:
That's great.
Marco:
We need options like that.
Marco:
But a lot of people also have different needs or different priorities or different wants, and they might want a line in or a line out or optical in or optical out to integrate with a system they already have or some larger system or some other capability that they want or need.
Marco:
And so often when you have these proprietary lockdown walled gardens of these media systems that we have these days with the Amazon stuff and HomeKit and AirPlay and stuff like that and Sonos, so often you don't have many or any options for let me connect this to something else because they want you to buy their expensive hardware.
Marco:
And like Sonos is the like one of the biggest offenders in this area.
Marco:
If you want a Sonos line out device to connect to basically, you know, Sonos enable some other kind of speaker or device that can take an input.
Marco:
The only option they have for you, I think, is called the Sonos Connect.
Marco:
It's this $300, I think, little like giant box that is about the size of two Mac mini stacked on top of each other.
Marco:
and uh and that's like you would spend like three hundred dollars to have that ability with sonos and that's just that sucks you know or like i think like one of their big speakers i think the five series might have a line in jack on it but like of course the small ones don't and it's just it's just a pain and so like to have an option like this for airplay 2
Marco:
really opens up the doors even though this is a pretty obscure thing you know even though i think even when this airport express was new when it was sold i don't think they sold very many of them and certainly even if you even if the software update makes you want to buy one too bad you can't i mean maybe you go to ebay but like apple doesn't sell these new anymore um but still to have uh
Marco:
any more options for participating in the AirPlay 2 ecosystem is just really nice.
Marco:
And what we're seeing, we're seeing basically, you know, from the early part of this year when the HomePod launched and AirPlay 2 was delayed and delayed and delayed,
Marco:
It didn't look good for AirPlay 2.
Marco:
It looked like it was just never going to happen or it was going to become even later and come out really slowly and come out in a really buggy, bad state and maybe only ever be on the HomePod and nothing else.
Marco:
And what we're seeing instead is AirPlay 2, yes, it was pretty embarrassingly late, but now that it's here, it does tend to work pretty well and it's spreading really quickly.
Marco:
Like, you know, the aforementioned Sonos, they have AirPlay 2 support on...
Marco:
a lot of their speaker models that I don't own.
Marco:
And it's coming to none of the ones I own, apparently.
Marco:
But that sucks for me, I guess.
Marco:
But, you know, that's AirPlay 2 integration with them.
Marco:
There's AirPlay 2 integration, of course, with the HomePod when it launched.
Marco:
The AirPlay 2 integration into iOS and into Control Center and the music app is really good and really useful to the point where I actually like it way better than listening to either the horrendous Sonos app ecosystem or the...
Marco:
pretty clunky and horrible uh amazon echo uh app and service for music management uh it's airplay 2 i gotta give it credit it looked like it had a really bad start but once it got out the gate it has been spreading like crazy and i'm really happy to see that
John:
speaking of bringing things back from the dead i have pulled an item from the way down in the bottom of the document from four months ago uh into a topic titled the end of airport uh in which i wanted to talk about uh apple deciding that it's not going to sell wi-fi things anymore and looking at the little picture of the the airport express uh jason again jason put a picture of it on six colors.com
John:
looking at that little white box looks like basically a little uh white colored apple tv with two ethernet ports in the back a usba port and then the uh audio uh jack and you know internal power supply with a little cable plugged into it makes me once again sad uh that apple has decided to narrow its business to quite the degree it has because uh
John:
I'm a person who used to buy Apple Wi-Fi things because they were more expensive and they usually weren't the best you could buy.
John:
Like you get better performance out of non Apple things, but they had good integration with Apple's technologies of the day, whether that's like printer sharing or Bonjour or whatever.
John:
Their software for the Mac to deal with them was nicer than going to some ugly web interface or whatever.
John:
They were very reliable for me, and it was just another decision that I didn't have to make, that I could just buy Apple Wi-Fi and use it in my house until the Wi-Fi standards got so old that I had to replace it, and I would go for years and years with it.
John:
That's why I didn't want to – when I got rid of my old one, I didn't want to have to buy a third-party thing.
John:
I got a bunch of used ones on eBay, and then Marco sent me his old one.
John:
I'm still using the one Marco sent me, even though it's ridiculous.
John:
And we talked about it before with USB hubs and stuff.
John:
Apple has never really made those.
John:
it's making me kind of sad that apple is just wants to sell you the things with the highest margin that sell on the highest number and is less interested in providing the sort of overall apple experience like they don't they don't even want your money like i don't care how much money you give us it's not worth our time to upgrade the airports to be like mesh network things like apple could have made euro right
John:
Eero is a very Apple-like product.
John:
Apple didn't make Eero.
John:
Apple instead let its airport line languish until they were completely obsolete and ridiculous and then just canned the whole business.
John:
But this little box, like Mark was saying, a little thing like this.
John:
There's plenty of third-party things you could buy that do this, but are they flaky?
John:
Do they work with all your Mac stuff?
John:
Do they have airport to support?
John:
Like...
John:
it was nice when apple made these type of things there probably weren't big profit centers but it's not like from a customer perspective it's nice to be able to go into an apple store and say here's the situation i want to do x y and z and for them to say we have some products we can sell you we know they'll work with your macs they'll be supported apparently forever even after we stop selling them they'll get new features and they're generally reliable and sturdy and have warranties and look nice with all like the reason you buy apple stuff it's
John:
part of it's a it's a smaller version of why i was so upset about apple not making monitors anymore because obviously a monitor is way more important than usb hubs or dongles or printers for that matter you two don't remember where apple made printers but they did to varying degrees of success um i think we were like four
John:
Yeah, well, see, Apple made great printers in the beginning.
John:
Then they made terrible printers.
John:
Then they didn't make printers.
John:
So most people aren't sad about Apple not making printers anymore because they just remember Apple making the terrible printers.
John:
But they did make great printers at one time.
John:
And I'm not saying Apple needs to get back into the printer business and that Apple sold scanners.
John:
They had CD-ROM drives.
John:
Like, Apple sold external hard drives.
John:
Like, they sold everything, right?
John:
It makes sense to narrow it, but...
John:
you know i guess they're expanding again oh now apple sells a cylinder that you can talk to right but the wi-fi stuff just seems and not that you know i love the euro stuff but like euro doesn't sell anything like this airport express and euro doesn't sell anything like a little uh you know the equivalent of a sonos dongle type thing or like a apple could sell a dedicated home kit hub for less money than an apple tv or for people who didn't want an apple tv or people who didn't want to have i don't know
John:
I just I really miss airport.
John:
I really missed the whole product line and everything about it.
John:
And I'm going to be sad when my awkward skyscraper thing that Marco gave me finally dies and I have to buy some non Apple Wi-Fi thing.
John:
And by the way, I'm using Eero for the Wi-Fi.
John:
I'm just using the Apple thing as a router.
John:
I have the Wi-Fi turned off on it.
John:
why because all my settings are in there for all my configuration and it's nice to use the airport utility app to manage it even though i'm not even using the wi-fi in it that's how dedicated i am to the uh the airport product line so yeah i just wanted to pull this this is from april this year four months ago that they killed that business and no one seemed to care except for maybe me
Casey:
No, I don't remember when it was, but at some point I started using, I think it was one and then for a while, two Airport Expresses.
Casey:
And I'm talking the original Airport Expresses that looked like a slightly elongated power adapter for a laptop, which is the one that's pictured in the TechCrunch article.
Casey:
I used that as my only in-home Wi-Fi for a while.
Casey:
And I believe I was still using the Verizon router, but that one or two Airport Expresses were...
Casey:
Those were my WAPs, my Wi-Fi access points for the longest time.
Casey:
Then eventually I got an Airport Extreme, one of the ones that looks like a Mac Mini.
Casey:
So again, pretty old.
Casey:
And I used that for a really long time.
Casey:
In fact, I think I used that until eventually we got sent some Euro stuff for free since they were sponsoring the show.
Casey:
And I think that's when I finally replaced it because because I just didn't have a need otherwise.
Casey:
And I remember for the longest time I had what was it?
Casey:
Linksys.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Linksys routers and through like college and through the beginnings of being in the house and I.
John:
and they were always flaky i remember you know the cool kid thing to do would be to run like ddwrt or uh what was it like tomato or something like that this is stuff john you never bothered with but i know about all this stuff you're right i didn't bother with it but i certainly knew about this is part of what made me so happy to have an airport i'd never want to invest with the firmware on my wi-fi router and it wanted it to be an appliance and it was i plugged it in i set it up i never thought about it again
Casey:
What was it like the WRT 54G or something like that?
Casey:
That's been drilled into my head because that was the one that would work that you could like flash and do traffic shaping.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I mean, you could do all sorts of real, real cool stuff with this, this Linksys router.
Casey:
You really could, but it was fiddly as crap.
Casey:
It was, you know, it was basically the Linux equivalent of a router, if you will.
Casey:
You know, everything was fiddly.
Casey:
None of it works for more than 10 minutes at a time.
Casey:
It was rough.
Casey:
And so eventually I saw the light and I used airports and I loved it.
Casey:
And now I use Eros and, you know, I love that too.
Marco:
i mean i think ultimately like it is sad that apple exited that market because they were so good for so long but even when they were in it and even when they were current it was still like they were never first of all they were never of course price competitive not even close um and and that's you know that's to be expected really from apple stuff especially from accessories but uh they were also never competitive on power user features um they were
Marco:
originally but then not later competitive on things like range and even throughput um i think what happened was you know when wi-fi was less mature and earlier very similar actually to printers when when it was like a new market that was not very mature uh apple's version could be better than everyone else's and then over time the amount of effort that apple was willing to put into it and the types of products apple was willing to make and sell was
Marco:
were less and less competitive because the market matured, things got more sophisticated, they started moving faster, and other people started making really good ones too.
Marco:
And it wasn't in Apple's DNA to keep up aggressively with that and to make the kind of products that would appeal to power users and keep the price race to the bottom going and get updated very frequently with all these new standards and more and more antennas and things like that.
Marco:
And then now, I think the Wi-Fi market now has taken a direction with mesh systems like Eero that Apple could have competed in if they wanted to.
Marco:
The entire span from a few years after it started until about last year...
Marco:
Apple didn't really have much to do.
Marco:
If they wanted to put a lot of effort into this market and get back into it again, they could do what Eero is doing.
Marco:
But first of all, there's a lot less need for it because even though Eero is a sponsor, here's a disclosure, systems like Eero are really good and really solid and really easy to use and have nice designs.
Marco:
So there's a lot less need for Apple to do it because if you think, how would Apple do this?
Marco:
Basically, look at Eero.
Marco:
That's how they would do it.
Marco:
In an ideal case, it's already being done, though, by somebody else now, so we don't really need Apple to do it.
Marco:
But also, that would require a type of investment into an accessory category that I just can't see today's Apple getting into and caring about and prioritizing that strongly.
John:
i mean like i said they've narrowed the line and a lot of the narrowing makes sense but i think they've gone a little bit too far and the home pod and the monitor evidence of that of the re-expansion home pod is a new thing that they have never made before like now we're going to make a new kind of device why would apple make a thing like that well because we can and we have technologies that make that would work with it and we can integrate it with our stuff and the monitor take it away and eventually why would we make a monitor that's not that's a mature market you know to your point about
Marco:
being commoditized and everything we have no particular innovation we don't make the panels like that's the thing though the monitor is different because as we saw with the lg this market can't be trusted to make something great like in wi-fi we have lots wi-fi now has great options we have we have we have aero
John:
But that's like, if pretend Eero didn't exist, we wouldn't have that many great options.
John:
Like, Eero is the shining light in the mesh network world.
John:
Recommending things on Twitter, everyone's complaining about all the other alternatives that apparently have good performance in test well but are not reliable.
John:
And if Eero goes away or if Eero suddenly makes a bad product, like, that's what we're relying on Apple to do.
John:
It's like the USB hubs.
John:
If there was, or the power adapters, Anker is our savior there.
John:
It's like, you know, we probably name like one good, slightly more expensive brand.
John:
But that's the risk of allowing third parties to do it.
John:
Now, if Apple had to pick one thing that is synergistic with its other stuff that it's doing, it should have been mesh home networks because they've got HomeKit, they've got the HomePod, every one of their devices uses Wi-Fi.
John:
That is the one thing that works with the rest of their products.
John:
It's not CD-ROM drives or printers or scanners or external hard drives or all the other things that they used to make.
John:
uh those you should definitely leave behind but even though a lot of those markets are commoditized you know or or iphone cases for that matter talk about a commoditized market there you if you make products like that if they work well with the rest of your stuff you can still charge a reasonable fee just because they're color coordinated and support airplay 2 before anyone else and are you know like if i had to make an argument for one line that they could they could uh they shouldn't have canceled and they should they should have either bought ero or been ero
John:
Which would have been bad for Eero, because then Eero couldn't be Eero.
John:
But I feel like Apple could have done Eero, you know, in its best days.
John:
Apple could have done Eero the same way that Eero did, only they'd have an Apple logo on them, and they'd probably be $100 more expensive.
John:
But we all would have bought them and loved them.
John:
Instead, they just sat this one out.
John:
So, like, I don't know if they're... I'm not saying they're going to come back into this market, because, you know, they probably don't see a need for it, but...
John:
I think like if Eero went away, if I didn't have Eero to recommend to my sister, as I discussed on yesterday's show, I don't know what I would have done because I don't think I would have recommended a Netgear Orbi or some other mesh system because they're just not quite as nice as the Eero.
John:
I don't think she could have set them up herself.
John:
Right.
John:
So and I wouldn't have felt as good recommending something like that.
John:
so yeah i'm i'm sad about airport and also it was a good product name and he made philish show jump off a thing onto a an air mattress or whatever it's a lot to recommend airport i think also maybe maybe another problem of this market is it's kind of like the teva problem of like every isp now
Marco:
makes it really like you have to really try to not use their wi-fi router like they really push them hard because they learned oh we can charge another additional monthly fee if we rent you this terrible wi-fi router of ours and then we can control everything and everything else so like now like it's really hard to get an isp in the us at least to install something in your house that ends in an ethernet port that you can plug your own router into
John:
Yeah, well, it's like you said, though, this is a time, I think we're still in that time, where there is a burst of innovation during which Apple could charge a premium and have fancy products.
John:
Eventually, all of the cable companies and ISPs are going to have mesh network stuff.
John:
Now, I bet some of them already do.
John:
But most of them don't.
John:
Most of them, you get one Wi-Fi thing, it makes one network, it doesn't reach into your far bedroom, and then you try to find some sort of extender thing, and it never quite works right.
John:
Or you get something like Eero and turn off your thing.
John:
Eventually...
John:
mesh network wi-fi will be everywhere it'll come and you know with all of your isp stuff and that time of potential innovation being able to charge a lot will be over and the only people still buying euro will be the people who appreciate probably the better speeds and certainly the better interface to it right but we're not there yet so this was this was the time for apple to strike and they just 100 missed it and you know if they wanted to shortcut it they could have just bought euro as the uh as the quote that panzer just retweeted earlier today says apple buy small companies from all the time what is i gotta find it
John:
what is that quote from time to time yeah from time to time we usually don't talk about why but by the way here are some beats headphones and some euros rebranded and put into different white cases with apple logos on them i guess yeah aero is way better than beats i'd much rather they've bought them
John:
that's right they bought beats for johnny iovine that's going well right they got the yeah they got all the whatever music thing stuff i'm reminded occasionally that i now subscribe to apple music because i have a home pod uh i listened to some playlists today try to let it recommend stuff to me hmm
Marco:
by the way i i so i use the home pod a lot because i brought i brought the home pods to the beach because i figured i'd be doing airplay 2 this summer spoiler i didn't but um it turns out i had a lot of other stuff to do and i didn't get to that uh but i did end up using the home pod a lot for music and i my opinion of the home pod remains kind of lukewarm to positive like
Marco:
I still really like the way it sounds and I love the integration with my music collection.
Marco:
Occasionally it's a downside because if I ask it to play... For instance, if I say play Foo Fighters, I think by default it kept playing only the Foo Fighters albums I have and there's some I don't have, like some of the newest ones, and it would never play those.
Marco:
Or I think by default it thought I was asking for my collection.
Marco:
But regardless...
Marco:
in general, the integration of it with both my music collection and, I mean, the killer app that I mentioned earlier, it's so nice to have the AirPlay 2, like, music controls on, like, in control center and be able to hand that to the music app.
Marco:
Because then, like, what you do is, like...
Marco:
So if you have an AirPlay 2 session going on something, it'll show up if you go to Control Center on the phone, you scroll down, and it's like a separate little blob for each AirPlay 2 group that you have going.
Marco:
And if you tap on that, it opens it in the music app.
Marco:
And then your phone has full control over it.
Marco:
So you can make it play something else.
Marco:
You can skip the track.
Marco:
You can adjust the volume with your phone's volume buttons in your pocket.
Marco:
It's so nice to have that integration with iOS.
Marco:
Even though Siri is still annoying, I think I'm liking the HomePod more over time because that integration with iOS and iTunes is just so much better.
Casey:
Hmm.
Casey:
That's surprising.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Gray Langer and their Kingdom of the Clouds Tour.
Marco:
This is a new sponsor for us.
Marco:
It's a pretty interesting one.
Marco:
So what this is, the Kingdom of the Clouds Tour is a once-in-a-lifetime, all-inclusive, two-week exploration of one of the world's least accessible yet astonishingly forward-thinking countries.
Marco:
It's Bhutan.
Marco:
Bhutan is the only place where gross national happiness is a more important factor than gross national product, and tourism is actually regulated there with great care to preserve this.
Marco:
So this October 16th, 2018, Grey Liner Tours will return to the fascinating Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan for the third annual Royal Highlander Festival.
Marco:
Last year's tour was a smashing success.
Marco:
Guests even got to meet the king of Bhutan.
Marco:
This is pretty awesome.
Marco:
So Grey Langer was founded by Gabriel Cubbage, former CEO of Adblock, who founded the company out of a sincere love for Bhutan and the desire to share that with others.
Marco:
So availability is very limited.
Marco:
There's only a few slots left.
Marco:
This once-in-a-lifetime adventure will include two weeks of everything Bhutan has to offer, from five-star lodging in Bhutan's capital city to trekking in the northernmost reaches of the kingdom, where they will spend their nights as personal guests of the Laya villagers in their homes.
Marco:
So if you're into really cool travel, this sounds like something worth checking out.
Marco:
So to see for yourself, visit graylanger.com.
Marco:
It's named after the monkey, G-R-A-Y-L-A-N-G-U-R.com.
Marco:
And look for the Kingdom of the Clouds Tour.
Marco:
This happens this October 16th through 29th.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Gray Langer for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Do we want to get into the new iPhone stuff?
Casey:
That's going to take 14 hours.
Casey:
Is it?
Casey:
Well, we don't know anything.
John:
Okay.
John:
I do want to get into it.
John:
I put this in there a while ago, and I want to get into it at the broadest possible level because we haven't talked about it at all.
John:
So the context of this is an MKBHD video where he got like...
John:
physical mock-ups of what the iphones are supposed to look like from like part leaks parts leaks uh i'm assuming the reason i'm interested in this is because parts leaks happen all the time and they end up being really really accurate so these aren't actual iphones i don't think they're actual iphone cases they're like mock-ups but they're probably uh
John:
They're probably sized down to the micromillimeter, micrometer, sorry.
John:
They're probably perfect.
John:
Like, I 100% assume that when the iPhones come out, they will look exactly like these things, plus or minus surface finishes, right?
John:
That's why I'm interested in this video.
John:
I'm not interested in someone's idea of what an iPhone might look like, but I'm just assuming these are all, you know, stolen designs.
John:
And all of the stories I've read about the phone say...
John:
that this is what they're going to come out with three phones a really big one one the size of the 10 and then one in between that's cheaper and not all that and that's all i want to talk about the idea of there being three phones the idea of them being these sizes and these prices and what that what that means for the iphone and whether we think it's a good a good way to go so because this past year was weird where they had the 10 but it was super expensive and it was didn't have the home button and had the face id but then they also hedged their bets with the eight and
John:
which was much more traditional and safe, but they had the same internal.
John:
So that was a weird year.
John:
And so we were wondering, like, what are they going to do next year?
John:
Are they going to still have an 8-type thing around?
John:
Are they going to all look like the iPhone X?
John:
If they do all look like the X, how do they have a cheap phone?
John:
What are they going to replace the plus size with?
John:
What are they going to replace the SE with?
John:
Like, we don't know all the details, but I think I'm pretty confident that this three phones in these sizes thing is going to happen.
John:
And I'm not sure how I feel about it.
John:
I wanted to hear what you guys thought about
John:
the prospect of a three iPhone 10 future, one of them not being OLED.
Casey:
I watched this video two or three times.
Casey:
So the video in question is MKBHD.
Casey:
And like you said, he got mock-ups that, man, to my eyes, they look like they're real.
Casey:
I mean, they're not.
Casey:
I'm not saying they're real.
Casey:
But gosh, do they look real.
Casey:
And it's hard for me to tell on this video, not because the video is bad or anything.
Casey:
It's just hard to tell on a video exactly how big these are.
Casey:
in real life, if that makes sense.
Casey:
Like, I see them in his hands, but he mentions that he has very big hands, and it's just hard for me to visualize, and maybe that's just a Casey problem, but... Oh, God, he uses Pocket Cast?
Casey:
Well, he needs it to be on Android, too, so... Marketing.
John:
You gotta get in on that.
Casey:
Yeah, just do some product placement.
Casey:
Sure.
Casey:
You know, here's the thing.
Casey:
I...
Casey:
over the last couple of weeks, have noticed that I think the iPhone X is too big for me.
Casey:
Now, given the options that Apple currently sells, the iPhone X is still the phone for me.
Casey:
But in a perfect world, from simply a physical standpoint, I still think the iPhone X is a little bigger than I want.
Casey:
I find reaching across the screen is really difficult, frustratingly so.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I am not willing to give up enough real estate to go down to like the SE size.
Casey:
Like that's just I'll take the discomfort over the lack of real estate.
Casey:
But the 10 just feels too big to me.
Casey:
That being said, I will continue to buy 10s because I think it's the best overall compromise for me.
Casey:
Yeah, it's a little bit too big, but I love the OLED screen.
Casey:
I don't know if I say I love Face ID, but I generally quite like Face ID, and I do think it has gotten a bit better in iOS 12.
Casey:
Presumably, it will be better still with new hardware this fall.
Casey:
So I'm not as bothered by Face ID as a lot of people.
Casey:
Well, maybe not a lot, but many people seem to be.
Casey:
I can't fathom wanting to go any bigger than the X. Now, this is in contrast to all of the former Plus Club members like Mike Hurley, like Stephen Hackett, like Federico Faticci, and others that all swear by the big phones.
Casey:
And if that's fine for them, that's fine for them.
Casey:
But I can't imagine wanting a plus-size version of the iPhone X.
Casey:
But in and of itself, that makes sense, right?
Casey:
Because you have a bigger phone and you have a regular phone.
Casey:
And that's what we've had for the last several years since the iPhone 6.
Casey:
What really kind of confuses me is this in-between model that apparently is bigger than the iPhone 10, but has an LCD screen and has a single camera lens.
Casey:
What is going on with that?
John:
And it's smaller than the Plus.
Casey:
Yes, sorry, you're correct.
Casey:
It's in between the iPhone X and the iPhone X Plus.
Casey:
Obviously, we're using incorrect names.
Casey:
None of us know what names will be.
John:
We don't know what they're going to be called.
Casey:
So don't take this as any implication that we think this is what they'll be called.
Casey:
But for the purposes of description, there'll be, according to this video, there'll be the iPhone X. There'll be the cheap iPhone X, but bigger than the iPhone X. And then the biggest still, the iPhone X Plus.
Casey:
And that middle one just seems so peculiar to me.
Casey:
Not necessarily wrong, mind you.
Casey:
It just seems odd.
Casey:
So I don't know what to make of it.
Marco:
So think about this.
Marco:
Think about, you know, the iPhone X is kind of between the former 6 and 6 Plus sizes, which are still sold.
Marco:
It's kind of an in-between size there.
Yeah.
Marco:
the plus size phone has been very successful and it would not surprise me if the plus phone like the current generation so the eight plus it would not surprise me if the eight plus outsells the eight i don't think apple's ever said that although i think they kind of alluded to it in certain certain data things they've they've noted um but it would not surprise me at all if the eight plus outsells the eight
Marco:
I think the fact is people really like that plus size.
Marco:
A lot of the people who were holding on to the previous 8, 7, 6 size moved on to the 10.
Marco:
People for whom that was too big are either tolerating it or using the SE.
Yeah.
Marco:
I don't think it's worth keeping around the 678 size as long as the SE is there, because people who want super small phones to hold, they use that one.
Marco:
The 678 size is big-ish, but pretty small by modern standards, actually.
Marco:
and you know now a lot of people have upgraded to the 10 which is bigger still and a lot of people want the biggest phone size they can get which was the plus before and now it's sort of the 10 in one dimension but not the other and you know when we have like a whatever they end up calling like the 10 plus and this 6.1 inch supposedly cheaper one those are going to be the big phones to have those are going to be the mass market phones so
Marco:
I think we're coming at this from the old perspective of the smallest slash mid-sized phone they sell is the default size that sells the most.
Marco:
But I don't think that's true anymore.
Marco:
And I think if they're only going to have one model that's kind of legacy in certain ways and trying to target a lower cost market, I think it does make sense to have it be closer to the plus size.
Marco:
And if you... I haven't listed all these mock-ups and everything, but...
Marco:
I would imagine the 6.1 is probably very close to the size of the plus-size phone before.
Marco:
It's a larger screen because it has the edge-to-edge design, but it's probably very similar in size to the 6 Plus.
Marco:
And so I don't think that's a bad thing for them to target because that has proven to be incredibly popular.
Marco:
So if you look at it from that, it's like the 10...
Marco:
or whatever the new version of the X is, the base size of the X as we know it now, that is the new 678 size.
Marco:
That's the new mid-size phone for a lot of people who don't want the biggest phone in the world but still want a nice new phone.
Marco:
The SE, I think, is going away.
Marco:
Frankly, I don't see the SE continuing.
Marco:
And I think if they were going to update it, they would have.
Marco:
I don't see that continuing.
Marco:
and uh and also and wasn't i think steve ts or somebody uncovered something about there being like an se with iphone 7 internals that sounds totally wrong to me because the se already has iphone 6s internals so to bring it forward only one phone generation after what three years that doesn't sound right to me um and i just i certainly hope they don't do that
Marco:
And honestly, I know, SE people, this is going to drive you nuts.
Marco:
I apologize.
Marco:
But as a developer trying to make interfaces that work on phones that span this wide range, I can't wait for the SE phone size to be discontinued.
Marco:
Because making interfaces work on that screen is horrible.
Marco:
Because to make the same thing work on a 6 Plus side screen or whatever this new iPhone 10 Plus that's like 10 inches wide is going to be,
Marco:
Making that scale of that and also run on the tiny little iPhone Etsy screen, God, it's a pain in the butt.
Marco:
I can't wait to drop support for that screen size, however long that takes.
Marco:
But anyway, I think this lineup makes sense when you think about, again, just like last week's episode, the smallest model doesn't have to be the cheapest, and the smallest model doesn't have to be the mass market one.
Marco:
And if you look at also the rest of the market, if you're trying to get a decent phone from anybody, look at what your options are if you're not looking at iPhones.
Marco:
Your options are a bunch of Android phones that are all about this size.
Marco:
you're not looking at things at the size of the iphone se as your competition you look at a bunch of android phones that are all pretty cheap and have you know roughly six inch five inch whatever they are screens and then you look at the iphone it's like oh what do you have 400 bucks oh you have this tiny little thing that looks positively ancient and even though it looks good it looks ancient uh and that's not very competitive you know when you're when when somebody's looking at android versus iphone's
Marco:
And so it does make total sense for the, you know, basic model iPhone to look a lot more like the basic model Android phones to be more competitive with them.
Marco:
And you need to be bigger than four inches to do that.
John:
So as someone who's still using a 7 now, I kind of feel where Casey's coming from.
John:
I haven't used a 10, but my wife has a 10, so I have encounters with it.
John:
And I kind of wish they had... Because the 10 is not that much bigger than the 7.
John:
If you put them one on top of each other, you see it's mostly taller, and it's just a tiny bit wider.
John:
But you look at it like, oh, it's basically the same size.
John:
But it just feels...
John:
a little like it crosses some threshold for me with my size hands your mileage may vary right um and the when i look at my seven i think if they just made an edge edge screen seven right that would be a lot more pixels and it would be almost as much as a 10 but anyway that's you're never going to get a phone that's like exactly the right size for you know they don't make a phone in in gradations of one millimeter until you pick the exact size you want the phone maker has to pick uh
John:
a couple of sizes you know small medium large tiny small medium large or whatever you know so i think the 10 is a reasonable compromise um for the big giant phone i do not think that will be the best-selling one out of these three models because it's going to cost 1300 bucks right it's just going to be too expensive i think the reason that the eight plus might have been best-selling is because there's no that was the only big phone option right it was the only big phone option and because it was the step down line
John:
you know because it didn't have the oled and everything uh it was relatively cheaper so it makes sense for the eight plus to be the best seller but i do not think what this behemoth is going to be the best lot it'll just be too damn expensive the one i find most intriguing though because those all make sense to me the x is being the new replacement for the x the 10 being the replacement you made that mistake yeah
John:
Yeah, you read it all the time.
John:
And then, like, the big giant phone replacing the Plus.
John:
Like, those models make perfect sense.
John:
Like, they're not going to make the 10 slightly smaller to satisfy my desire to keep the 7 size, right?
John:
And, of course, they're going to replace the Plus with an edge-to-edge, and that's all good.
John:
It's the middle one that's weird to me, and I don't know how it's going to work out, right?
John:
The middle one is...
John:
a size that really hasn't ever existed before they've just had the small big and the tiny now they're gonna have tiny with the se which may be going away regular size which is like the 10 big which is like the phone that people want big phones and then this in between size and i think to marco's point the in between size of this middle phone here
John:
is most is the size that is the most like generic android phone you see around right because the generic android phones aren't giant but most generic android phones i've seen are also not as small as the 10 they're the size of this middle phone and this will be cheaper it's got a single camera instead of dual it's got lcd instead but if you look at it in someone's hand we're back to the world where all the iphones look like iphones and only if you know and cared you know which one is like the fancy you know
John:
If you had a six or a seven, no one can tell unless you really know what to look for.
John:
And now if you have any of these models, they all have notches.
John:
They all have the little, you know, they all have the edge to edge screen.
John:
They all have face ID.
John:
They all look kind of the same.
John:
So I don't know what this middle phone is going to do.
John:
is this going to be the runaway bestseller just because people don't want to like, why would they pay extra for the one that's slightly too small and the one that's slightly too big?
John:
This is the perfect size.
John:
It's just right.
John:
It's in the middle and it's cheaper.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The camera is not as good, but it's still a good camera.
John:
Um,
John:
Or will people look at that and say, oh, just so you know, the new iPhones are out.
John:
The one in the middle is the bad one.
John:
The other two are the real ones, the real iPhone whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
No, just just by them.
John:
Right.
John:
Because there is that thing, you know, Apple's customer base has changed a lot.
John:
But part of it, like the history of the iPhone 10 is that.
John:
apple's customers usually want the best one if they can figure out which one that is and they'll pay for the more expensive model the iphone 10 has consistently been a good seller like in the beginning it was like oh they're not selling enough of them and now it's like it's been a strong seller through its entire life because it was so clearly the best iphone there were no other options that were in contention for the best iphone even if you liked a bigger phone there's no one who's getting an 8 plus and thinking they got the best iphone because the
John:
10 is sitting right there with its OLED screen and it's edge to edge and it's reading your face and no one is confused but that all those advantages go out the window so now I'm staring at these phones which one is the best iPhone not the one in the middle we know that because it's got the one camera and the LCD screen is the big one the best because it's the most expensive is the small one the best because it's the same speed as the big one but it doesn't you know take up your entire jeans pants pocket I don't I don't know we're back to the the seven and seven plus and six and six plus world where
John:
uh it's hard to tell and then and then the middle one it's just i just feel like it's a wild card so i guess it really depends on pricing if that middle one is just slightly cheaper then i think everything will work out if the middle one is a lot cheaper i think that we're going to have some troubles and in particular it's going to be troubles for the 10 sized one because the people who want the giant phone and the super expensive one will get it the people who want a 10 sized phone but don't want to pay as much
John:
like i mean casey i don't think you could stomach that metal phone because you're like size sensitive like i am where you already think the 10 is a little bit too big but other people if they look at the 10 and that they might think oh this one's cheaper and the screen is slightly bigger yeah i'll get that one so um you know i'm sure apple knows what they're doing i'm sure they'll they'll price these things right or name them right or market them in the right way but i find this lineup of phones to be the most interesting thing they've done
John:
Even more interesting than last year, leaving the 8 and 8 Plus because that was explicable because they had this one new special weird phone, the 10, right?
John:
Now, instead of evening out the whole line and just doing what we'd expect them, you got a big one and a small one, and they both look like 10s.
John:
They got the middle phone, and the middle phone I find fascinating.
John:
Or it's going to be BS and the rumors are wrong.
Marco:
Ultimately, I think it makes a lot of sense.
Marco:
And look, I'm with you guys on my own personal sizing preferences here.
Marco:
The X is... I got used to it pretty quickly, but it is a little bit big for me.
Marco:
i'm fine with it you know if if there were like a like a i don't know 10 se that were like a similar size as the iphone 7 but edge to edge so that like it was like you know a smaller version of this i wouldn't keep the same resolution too right i wouldn't switch down to it because i like like the 10 even though it feels big to me i i like it overall but
Marco:
but I don't want it to be any bigger.
Marco:
When I look at this MKBHD video, first of all, he must have massive hands.
Marco:
When I compare, he's holding these side by side, and I compare how the current 10 looks in his hand to how it looks in my hand.
Marco:
And then when you see the mock-up of the new 10+, whatever it's going to be called,
Marco:
My God, it looks massive compared to the current 10.
Marco:
Like, I mean, look, who knows what other capabilities that phone will have?
Marco:
Like, you know, they mentioned, I believe it was on upgrade this week.
Marco:
You know, like...
Marco:
when when we had like the when before the 10 when we just had like you know phone and phone plus with six seven and eight the plus versions always had something better than the basic version than like you know the regular six seven eight versions um besides just the screen size there there was always some other kind of advantage um so originally like like the pluses had higher resolution screens like it had more pixel density with that weird like
Marco:
1080p kind of screen with the way it rendered like so it was like a slightly sharper screen in addition to it being larger and also they had better cameras in all of them and faster cpus at some point too no higher clock speed no i don't know i don't think so but um although i think the the six plus is actually kind of a bad deal because six plus had um
Marco:
pretty bad ram couldn't handle the big screen yeah yeah i think i think ram they get the same amount of ram as the as the smaller phone but it needed more to to fit all the bigger pixel buffers because it was like kind of rendering a 3x kind of thing so yeah yeah that's the thing about the plus phones they've always been like the non-native res has bothered me on a you know on a uh
John:
the idealistic level but obviously in practice it's fine right uh the performance you mentioned of being slow that's that's a real world thing like i always felt like that line needed to come out of its weird place and this as far as i can tell this is not going to have the the non-native res and presumably they've sorted out all the performance issues so this may be finally the first
John:
I'm not going to say non-compromised plus phone, because to your point, very often they also have something about them that is better, like the cameras.
John:
But I think this will have the same cameras as the 10 size one.
John:
I think it will have a native res screen.
John:
I think it will have enough RAM and CPU to handle it.
John:
And I don't know what you were going for, but you're going to say, like...
Marco:
what will it have to recommend what will what could they put in the plus to make it better yeah because like i mean you know again you could you could reuse one of the previous things they've done which is you know a slightly better camera in some ways so like what you know previously the plus phones um they would either have like a camera that was stabilized where the other one wasn't stabilized or they would have a a better camera entirely or they would have a set a second camera like in like in the seven series it had a second camera we're doing five cameras yeah
Marco:
right so like so you know what might this be if it's going to be is it just going to be like the 10 or you know the 10s whatever it's called is it's going to be like the 10s with a bigger screen and this weird like split view mode which is basically what the plus phones had before which sucked i it was horrible like we're like you'd rotate the phone and then you'd have a mini ipad split view mode and
Marco:
where you'd have a tiny little column of your emails or chat messages or chat recipients in the left side and an also uselessly tiny right side detail view.
Marco:
So like to simulate the split view on iPad.
Marco:
And then as developers, you just have to disable that because it would break everything and it was horrible.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So they're going to bring that back.
Marco:
It sounds like from this rumor that I consider a negative, not, not a feature.
Yeah.
Marco:
as somebody who briefly used a plus phone that bugged the crap out of me but uh anyway but you know i i think they're gonna do something like i i don't know whether it will be better camera stuff in some way whether it will be uh maybe pencil support which we can talk about if you want but like if it's i i bet they're gonna do something they're not gonna just have it be the same phone as the x sorry the 10s but it's catching yeah
Marco:
sorry yeah like it's not going to be the same phone as as the 10s but bigger screen it's gonna there's gonna be something else about it because apple wants to push people who want the best of the best to get the more expensive model even like even if you are totally happy with the 10 size they want people like me and our podcaster friends who want the best model they want us buying the most expensive one in the lineup and they're really good at finding ways to make that happen
John:
If I could go back in time for years or whenever this phone was being designed and tell them, here's how you do that.
John:
Here's how you put stuff in it to make it.
John:
Well, first of all, I would make sure that they're not doing compromised res and everything.
John:
And so it's an even playing field.
John:
And now here's the extra thing you add to make this more right.
John:
I wouldn't actually recommend pencil support just because I don't think the world is ready for that.
John:
but look at the samsung note series i know it's very successful and it has some really good ideas i know i meant the apple world i mean the apple world uh yeah we'll see um i will say like the current apple pencil no that would be ridiculous because the current apple pencil plug it into the lightning port to charge it yeah first of all yeah that that is the whole thing it becomes a thing to fend off muggers
John:
right but and also like the current apple pencil like it isn't it doesn't even fit in a pocket it's so big yeah but no the thing i would recommend that they add uh is a better front-facing camera that's interesting front people use front-facing cameras a lot like selfies are a thing instagram is a thing
John:
the front facing camera has been improving but always the back facing one is better if you want to use the extra space you have in a plus phone to some effect that people will place value on people value the quality of the front facing camera so i would say make that a better camera than in the 10 size and that will be unambiguously superior obviously they could also make the back camera better because again they have more room i'm not sure how they could do that now that everything is all stabilized maybe they would i mean you could add a third camera but it seems like that's not what they're doing
John:
So I guess it just comes down to adding better optics or a larger sensor, you know, whatever.
John:
Um, but the front facing camera is a good place to differentiate for the largest phone.
John:
Uh, and beyond that, if you have room to make the clock speed higher or add more Ram or something like that, you can always do that stuff.
John:
But honestly, I don't think that's, that is more of a selling point for tech nerds and less of a selling point for regular people who will be able to appreciate the, uh,
Casey:
the extra quality of the better front-facing camera that makes their selfies look that much better you really rocked my world in saying that that's the size of your average android phone because i think you're right i'm talking about the middle one i think that is i think that is about right and that suddenly makes this make a lot more sense to me right because think about like like that's the size of both the 678 plus which has been very successful and also the size of a
Marco:
So if you think about what Apple needs from the market, they need to do two things with the iPhone market.
Marco:
They need to try to grow, even though it seems fairly saturated, try to grow their market share.
Marco:
So they're going to attack Android phones.
Marco:
And they need to push the ASP, the average selling price, higher.
Marco:
So for their high-end buyers, which is a lot of their buyers, they're releasing these more expensive phones that go even higher-end, even higher-end, even higher-priced.
Marco:
And for the Android people, they're releasing this other one that's going to attack that market.
Marco:
Like, it makes total sense from a business perspective.
Marco:
Like, this is literally, like, this is the most important part of Apple's business.
Marco:
And it has, you know, it has been hard to grow it in recent years as the market has matured and slowed down and saturated and everything.
Marco:
This is what they have to do.
Marco:
drive the average price up and somehow increase their market share and that's really hard to do so of course they're going to put first of all a lot of time and thought into it and second of all they're going to try their damnedest to actually make big differences there so here's the question um i'm staring at these phones to make me think about
John:
We've been assuming, obviously, that the middle one will be cheaper because this LCD has got one camera.
John:
You can see the cheapness right there.
John:
You just look at it and you can tell we saved money, right?
John:
The question is, does it use the same family of system on a chip as the 10 size and the plus size?
John:
Or does it use an earlier generation?
Marco:
That's a good question, because with the current generation of X, it is the same internals in almost every way between the X, the 8, and the 8+.
Marco:
And even though there is a large price difference between them.
Marco:
So it wouldn't be... It would be not surprising at all, and in fact, I'd say probably the most likely option, that all of them would have the same internals.
Marco:
But the purpose of the 8 and 8+.
Marco:
were not to be cheap the purpose of the eight and eight plus were to continue the traditional iphone line during this period of transition and offer something at the same price it always was actually a little bit more but you know they it was it was like 30 bucks more price anchoring for the 10 yeah that's yeah well yeah right and so so it wouldn't be unheard of you know now that the market has shown that they will accept a you know 1200 phone whatever it is like
Marco:
It wouldn't be unheard of for Apple to say, all right, well, it's no longer necessary for us to maintain that old price point.
Marco:
We can move up with that.
Marco:
And then maybe this other one kind of comes somewhere between the iPhone SE and the iPhone 8 pricing.
Marco:
You know, somewhere between like $400 and $800.
Marco:
But at the same time, like...
Marco:
This is all based on rumors and leaks and stuff like that.
Marco:
Rumors and leaks are usually horrendously horrible at predicting pricing and marketing.
Marco:
They're terrible.
Marco:
Even Mark Gurman and his great sources are terrible at predicting marketing and pricing.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
It wouldn't surprise me at all if this is kind of like the iPhone 5C situation.
Marco:
It might even have more parallels with the colors, but the rumors of the 5C before it launched were that Apple was going to make a really inexpensive phone to compete better in Brazil and India and China.
Marco:
But what ended up happening was they released a phone that was cheaper than their main flagship model by, I think, $100.
Marco:
And it didn't make it as cheap as the rumors and analysts and everything wanted it to be.
Marco:
It just made it the cheapest of the new line.
Marco:
That could be what this is.
Marco:
This could just be, you know, it's not twelve hundred dollars.
Marco:
So it's cheap.
Marco:
And like the rumors are all saying, oh, this is made to be even cheaper, you know, to maybe replace the SE or whatever.
Marco:
But no, I don't think so.
Marco:
I think this is going to be like this is what replaces the eight and eight plus like this.
Marco:
This is it takes that role in the lineup.
Marco:
not the role of something like the SE or something a little bit higher than the SE.
Marco:
So I don't expect this to be cheap.
Marco:
I expect this to be the price iPhones always were until last year, plus $30, because that's their strategy recently.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
So because of that, because they did the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus this past year with the same guts as the X in most ways, I think they're going to do the same thing here.
Marco:
I think this phone's going to have the same guts as whatever the XS ends up being called and just with these other ways to save money, the different screen, the different camera, stuff like that.
John:
So the reason I think I can get away with having the same internals across all three of these phones, same system on a chip, I mean, is because that's not the biggest cost in the phone.
John:
The OLED screen is the most expensive components.
John:
They ditch that for an LCD moment, which is presumably cheaper.
John:
The cameras are expensive and they ditch those, right?
John:
I mean, the system on a chip is probably similar price to one of the cameras or something.
John:
I don't know the exact part listings, but that's not like you don't get actually that much savings.
John:
What you do get is differentiation.
John:
uh but it really like what i'm thinking when i look at this is if they want to if their goal is to sell a lot of them they would put the previous generation system on a chip in there and sell it for a lot less but i don't think to your point i think their goal is to sell a lot of the expensive one not to sell a lot of the cheaper one
John:
so why wouldn't they keep the system on the chip because it makes the lesser phone seem more valuable right that it's that it's just as fast but it has one camera instead of two like that's basically the the pitch in the apple store would be that the apple store is not going to try to tell you about the differences between oled and lcd and they're not going to you know try to tell you about the
John:
uh you know megapixel differences uh or if there's a ram like they're not gonna the only thing they're gonna say is you can see that there's one camera instead of two we can all see that uh but it's just as fast as the other ones and then it can be at the iphone 8 price right which to your point is not cheap but it is less expensive than the other two phones they sell which are the the better ones um
John:
but apple being apple they could have it be expensive as the eight but also put the cheaper system on a chip on it and most people probably wouldn't mind so i i don't know which direction they're going to go with that i wish obviously we all wish we knew the product names because the names would tell you everything about how apple sees the positioning these things but if you just have a bunch of case designs uh you really have you know apple can go a lot of different ways with what they stuff in those cases
Casey:
So I think that I come down with you guys that it would probably be the same system on a chip across all three phones.
Casey:
But let me throw a possible curveball at you.
Casey:
Is it the same amount of RAM across all three phones?
John:
Hmm.
John:
Um, hopefully the big one has more if anything, but if not, then yeah, just because like, I don't, I don't see how you could get away with like, they're not exactly generous with Ram.
John:
So it's not like the, the, the 10 size one is going to have this abundance of Ram that they can skimp on.
John:
the 10 size one is going to have enough ram to be a 10 and the one that's slightly bigger is going to have the same amount because it needs that much ram to be a slightly bigger than a 10 thing like i don't think they i don't and i don't think they'd save enough money to be where like those ram chips again with the with the parts pricing
John:
making if you were cutting in the ram in half yeah maybe you save a couple bucks if you're making it slightly smaller it doesn't make any sense they're not going to cut it in half they're not going to make it slightly smaller i think they will all have the same amount with the possible exception of the big one and it could be that that one has a little bit more but apple being apple probably not
Marco:
Also, first of all, consumers don't know what RAM is.
Marco:
And second of all, Apple doesn't tell them.
Marco:
This is not something Apple uses for marketing.
Marco:
So they wouldn't be able to say, one of the reasons you should get the bigger phone is because it has more RAM.
Marco:
Because Apple would never talk about the RAM.
John:
Yeah, they would only have more RAM if it needed the RAM to do something.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't think that's an area that they would distinguish unless they...
Marco:
yeah it's in the sense of like they wouldn't they wouldn't make the 6.1 have less ram as like the purpose but they might need to make the 10s plus have more ram for practicality sake yeah i mean it could just window buffers or who knows like there could be some reason or some feature that we don't know about that requires extra ram or keeping things in ram more often or to do simultaneous front and back facing camera
John:
you know 360 degree selfies or whatever the hell are coming up with you can imagine scenarios that would be exclusive to the plus size phone that would require more ram but that's that's been apple's mo for all ios devices ram is not a thing that people care about they put in apple puts in what they think is enough ram um they've apples thus far has even on the ipad pro which is which is an ios device with pro right there in the name they have resisted
John:
uh using ram capacity to charge pro users more money they could i think because if anyone's going to know what ram is and what it means to them it's somebody who does like vatici who does a serious work every day on an ios device and who sees the ram limits like has lots of applications in flight at once and is frustrated when one of them gets booted out of memory
John:
vatici would pay 200 extra bucks for another gig of ram are you kidding like that's a way to make money you know again you can make money off pro users by selling them things the only they know and care about at an exorbitant price so far no options for that right you know and you know it makes sense it's fine and they have been adding more ram over time
John:
but they if they are going to move in that direction it's going to happen on like an ipad type device i don't think phones you know as much as the teacher may use his stuff he's not like the ipad is where he probably wants more ram not in his phone so he can do seven phone things you can't even do the the uh the weird drag and drop multitasking stuff on the same extent on phones as you can on ipad so um
John:
I'm looking to the iPad line to add an extra RAM option or to add a model with tremendously more RAM for tremendously more money because they will sell to a small number of people just like the Mac Pro.
Marco:
Well, and also, you know, RAM, it costs some money, but, you know, the amounts we're talking, like, you know, one or two gigs here and there, it's not a lot of money.
Marco:
It mainly costs power in devices this size.
Marco:
And, you know, in phones, you know, because...
Marco:
all the ram you you know you have to keep ram powered for to keep its data and so it's actually a non-trivial amount of power drain um to have a more ram added to something like a phone it's way less of a relative power drain compared to the battery size on an ipad because the battery in ipad is way it's you know it's almost a laptop size battery in an ipad uh but it's you know the same chip really or like a slightly higher powered version of the chip um in the other giant gpu is usually the ipads too
Marco:
Yeah, but most of that power is going to screen, not the CPU.
Marco:
So adding another gig of RAM to the iPad is not a big deal.
Marco:
The trade-offs aren't that big to do that.
Marco:
Whereas adding it to a phone, you have a battery trade-off there that might not be worth it.
Marco:
And also, the way iOS manages RAM and manages apps not staying persistent in RAM very much and
Marco:
like it's it's so good at managing ram that you don't need gobs of ram the same way you do on a mac or a pc because you know the way the os works is totally different so like adding ram for for a phone it's it's honestly not that important it's there's there's not a pressing need to do it very often and oftentimes the trade-off is better to not add it if you don't need to to save the battery life
John:
Again, with the big phone, if you want to add it somewhere for some feature, you can afford to do it with the big phone because it's got the biggest battery.
John:
The applications where it might come in handy in a phone is phone games because people do play games on their phone, and phone games are surprisingly demanding, and phone games will eject everything else from memory.
John:
They will because they'll either leak memory or they'll just use a tremendous amount on their own.
John:
And that's not a great experience for all these teens who are just playing games
John:
what the hell is that clash of clans or whatever on their phone constantly and everything else is out of memory and then they get a message and the notification comes up they gotta launch messages from scratch and they they do that cycle constantly back and forth from game to non-game application and it's uh launching the application fresh every single time they switch and further killing their battery as if playing the game wasn't killing it enough no but they're doing it anyway because they're they're either launching the big social apps which are all tremendous apps that use up all your memory because they're full of garbage and or
Marco:
They are quitting all their apps out of the app switcher constantly.
Marco:
So they're relaunching all their apps from scratch most of the time anyway, no matter what they're launching.
John:
If iOS 13 made, you know, flicking up on your applications, kept the animation there and did the same thing, only didn't have any effect on what applications were in RAM, how long would it take us to notice?
John:
like i suppose steve trout and smith would figure it out eventually but like there's first of all there's no way teams would notice right like it just had no effect whatsoever like eventually there'd be rumors i'm like it seems like when i force quit things sometimes i have to do it twice or like that could be the mechanism like the first time you do it it does nothing except for like remove the picture from your screen and if you go do it a second time it counts that as force quit all right it's like freaking do not disturb
John:
yeah nobody nobody would know for for like years unless some nerd uh dug into it because all they want to do is flick things up like they want to they want to they want to be the janitor in steve jobs parlance they want to make things neat and tidy like that's the compulsion so let them have the compulsion best-selling game on the iphone uh force quit all my apps that's fantastic
John:
has anyone made that name i guess apple wouldn't allow it you can't make a thing it looks like the interface people people would love that a free-to-play game uh with like force quitting apps like on a speed trial like where you have to do some activity like force quit apps and do some activity in the force quit apps kids would love that would like the big boss be facebook or ways
John:
Well, like, you'd have to be doing some other activity, like Cooking Mama or something, where you have some busy work activity that you're trying to do, but periodically you have to stop what you're doing and quickly go force quit a bunch of apps and then go back to what you were doing.
John:
And then, like, during the level loading screens, if you don't force quit all your apps when they're ready to level to load, it doesn't successfully load.
John:
This is what kids have been training for.
John:
It's like the last Starfighter, but for force quitting apps.
Oh, my gosh.
Marco:
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Casey:
Let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
Adam Porter writes, John, on the last ATP, you mentioned having both Plex and Infuse installed on your Apple TV.
Casey:
Why both?
Casey:
What do you see as the pros and cons of each?
John:
So Plex, we don't know what Plex is.
John:
It's a server thing that organizes all your media and it serves them up with like nice cover art and metadata and lets you and groups them into TV and movies and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And it'll transcode on the fly and you can get all your media from outside your house if you set it up correctly, et cetera, et cetera.
John:
right and so in my application i have flex running on either my synology or on my mac but my synology has a wimpy cpu and so we can transcode some stuff but some stuff it just can't transcode and my mac isn't always on or isn't always running flex so it can transcode anything but it's not always on always available like the synology right so i have flex in there because it's a really nice app and that's how i like to view my stuff why do i have infuse infuse
John:
Just wants to be pointed at a file server.
John:
So it's pointing at the SMB share on my Synology.
John:
It's not pointing at my, you know, it can actually read stuff from the Plex thing too, I think.
John:
But anyway, it just says, just give me a file.
John:
And it pulls that file into the Apple TV and decodes it on the Apple TV.
John:
And the modern Apple TV 4K has a surprisingly good system on a chip in there.
John:
So...
John:
that apple tv can decode and transcode stuff that my synology can't so that's why i have the two applications plex is my preferred but if plex looks like it's chugging because my synology can't transcode it i let infuse do it locally and i just like having the option for both and infuse works really well and uh yeah so i basically plex is my first go-to and if it's having problems i go to infuse
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
I have my Plex server running on my iMac.
Casey:
All of the files like you are on the Synology, and my iMac is pretty much always on.
Casey:
So I don't ever really have this particular problem, but it does make sense what you're saying.
Casey:
Will Felt writes, Why are Apple's ARM chips so much faster than their competitors?
Casey:
Aren't they just licensing the same ARM design?
Casey:
Why can't anyone license ARM manufactured with TSMC and wind up with the same performance as Apple?
Casey:
What gives?
John:
Why can't they do that?
John:
That's such a great idea.
John:
So ARM is an instruction set, right?
John:
Just like there's lots of x86-64 compatible CPUs, lots of ARM compatible CPUs.
John:
There's actually lots of different instruction sets within ARM that you don't have to worry about unless you're picking options in Xcode to build your thing.
John:
But anyway...
John:
apple used to license arm chip designs uh but starting with the iphone 6 help me out here what what was the what was the swift cpu i think it was the 5s 5s maybe yeah so starting uh several years ago apple rather than taking an arm cpu design from arm the company
John:
And, you know, maybe tweaking it or modifying it or like, you know, putting it in a system on top of the bunch of stuff.
John:
They started making their own CPUs that, yes, use the ARM instruction set, but otherwise share nothing with anything ARM offers to anybody.
John:
So it is an ARM compatible CPU entirely of Apple's design.
John:
Yeah.
John:
real-time follow-up it was the iphone 5 not the 5s uh and yes it was codenamed swift confusing yes so no one else can buy those it's all apple proprietary apple is the only one that can make them because they've literally made the cpu design themselves and apple's doing something similar with gpu they used to license gpu designs from uh what is it imagination power vr yeah
Marco:
power vr and imagine anyway they're they're trying to go their own way with i forget if the if the current ones have all their own stuff in it i don't know but anyway i don't think we know like we we know that they that they said that somehow or somehow we heard that they are not shipping power vr designs anymore or like like at least pure power vr designs but i don't think we really know what they're shipping instead
John:
anyway uh yeah so they they do it themselves and it's really really hard to do it yourself and it takes many many years and lots and lots of money and that's exactly what they did they spent lots lots of money and took many many years and now they're the best mobile design processor designers in the entire world all right mark
Casey:
And the only reason I put this in is because I just got a printer on Saturday for the first time in probably 15 years.
John:
I saw Declan playing in the printer box.
John:
I'm like, why the hell do you have a printer box?
Casey:
Uh-huh.
Casey:
That is the truth.
Casey:
I replaced a hand-me-down Lexmark Optra S1625.
Casey:
And you should – I will put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
I don't know when this thing was new.
Casey:
But I genuinely think it was probably 15 years ago.
Casey:
It does have an Ethernet jack on it.
Casey:
It was something that dad bought for our house, I'm pretty sure, back when I was in high school.
Casey:
So that is 18 years ago, more than 18 years ago.
Casey:
And, um, and it was, it's a, the particular setup we had, it was dual, a duplex, a black and white laser, and it still ran up until a few days ago when we donated it to, I think, Goodwill or something.
Casey:
Anyway, um, it, the thing was a tank and it weighed as much as a tank.
Casey:
And I really wanted to have a scanner at home for occasional scanning of things.
Casey:
I don't do a lot of scanning, so I don't need a Fujitsu, whatever it is that Marco, I'm sure, will bring up in a moment.
Casey:
But I do occasionally scan things.
Casey:
And I also wanted something that could do color on occasion because now that I don't have an office to go to to do these things, I need to do that at home.
Casey:
So I replaced my ancient Lexmark printer with a, let's see here.
Casey:
Let me get ready.
Casey:
The Hewlett Packard LaserJet Pro M281 FDW, all-in-one wireless color laser printer, Amazon Dash replacement ready, TE6B82A.
Casey:
okay that was a lot uh basically it's a uh scanner printer i think it actually might even fax yeah there was a phone line on the back it it faxes it does all the things and in the last five days that i've been using it works great so that's what i do and it's color laser i don't know if i said it was color or not but it's a color laser
Casey:
John, what are you doing?
John:
So I have a couple of constraints.
John:
I have space constraints, so I don't have a lot of convenient places to put a large thing or a little on multiple things.
John:
So we've always gotten those all-in-one devices that are printers and scanners because we do scan and use it as a scanner and a copier, but also as a printer.
John:
I've had a series of these things.
John:
None of them have been particularly good.
John:
This one, I had to go to System Preferences to look up what it is because I don't even know.
John:
It's old.
John:
Canon MX870.
John:
Printer, scanner, copier probably also does faxes.
John:
I've found it very frustrating since the day I got it because this was before, what is it, AirPrint, whatever, Apple's current printing simplification technology.
John:
It predates that.
John:
So you are at the mercy of the proprietary drivers for Mac and, you know, forget about iOS, proprietary Mac drivers offered by Canon.
John:
This printer, in theory, has the ability to do Wi-Fi printing.
John:
In practice, I got it to work like once briefly with one computer and it has never worked again.
John:
I used to have it plugged into my airport, getting back to the airport thing, because the airport had this USB port on it that you could plug a printer and do printer sharing.
John:
That worked for several years and eventually stopped working completely inexplicably.
John:
Or it would work, but then every time you'd go to print after a two-day gap...
John:
Like your computer couldn't see the printer or just hang forever.
John:
So you'd have to unplug the printer from the USB port and plug it back into the USB.
John:
Like there was something about it that was weird.
John:
The printer decided it didn't like it.
John:
So at this point, this stupid behemoth printer is connected by a USB cable to my wife's iMac, which is the only computer in the house that you can print from or scan from.
John:
which is not ideal.
John:
I really wish it's the office space scene all over again.
John:
I would smash this thing to bits.
Marco:
Finally, a reference I get.
John:
The print quality and the scanning quality are actually pretty good.
John:
I've done a lot of scanning on it, a surprising amount of scanning.
John:
uh and the print quality i mean it's an inkjet so like don't expect miracles but it's fine for you know printing kids documents and it's pretty fast um i would love for i would love to have a thing that uses all the modern printing stuff that could be wi-fi printed from everywhere including ios devices that is smaller than this that is a laser instead of an inkjet and that has a scanning thing so maybe i should look at uh casey's thing i have i have a suspicion that it falls down badly on the size front
Casey:
It's not huge, but I'm coming from, like I said, a tank, so you may have different opinions.
John:
Do you have it in your garage?
Casey:
No, no, it's sitting next to my desk.
Casey:
I'll send you a picture.
Casey:
Remind me, I'll send you a picture.
John:
I'm looking at your printer now, yeah.
John:
Anyway, but the thing about this one is, so far, it's been like...
John:
It hasn't broken, which is a blessing and a curse.
John:
It's a blessing.
John:
It's like, oh, great.
John:
It must be good quality.
John:
It hasn't broken over many, many years.
John:
But now I'm kind of like, I really wish that thing would break.
John:
So I have excuse to get a new printer.
John:
Because it's working fine.
John:
There's nothing wrong with it.
John:
And it is annoying to have to print from one computer, but we don't print that much anyway.
John:
So anyway, that's my situation.
John:
Not ideal.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I should mention with regard to this new printer that I got, it has both wireless and Ethernet.
Casey:
I have it connected via Ethernet.
Casey:
It does have some cool features I set up in its web-based management system.
Casey:
I actually have it connected, in a sense, to the Synology.
Casey:
So what I can do is I can use the little tiny LCD on the printer and
Casey:
and say scan to a network drive, and I have like an incoming folder within the Synology that it will just drop scans, which is kind of cool.
Casey:
So I can go in later and actually, you know, quote-unquote process.
Casey:
And by that, I mean, you know, move that PDF somewhere else.
Casey:
Additionally, it does support AirPrint, which...
Casey:
I didn't think was that important because I don't think I ever really want to print from iOS, but I kind of mentioned that offhandedly to Erin.
Casey:
Erin occasionally prints from her iOS devices or would, I should say, would like to print from her iOS devices, but can't.
Casey:
And when I told her this, she was really, really excited.
Casey:
And I didn't even expect that in a million years, but she got really enthusiastic about it.
Casey:
And she's tried it once or twice and works great.
Casey:
And then finally, some real-time follow-up from Roland00 in the chat room.
Casey:
apparently my previous printer which is shown in almost the configuration that i had it in terms of like extra duplex attachments and extra trays and all that anyway it was advertised in a pc magazine from may 26 1998 so this thing was what does that make it 20 years old is that right um it's 20 years old still working just fine so who knew anyway marco tell me about your beloved fujitsu scan snaps
Marco:
Okay, so we're talking about a few different things here.
Marco:
We're talking about scanners and we're talking about printers.
Marco:
And while these are often the same thing, they don't always have to be.
Marco:
So my suggestion, which is an old, you know, like back when productivity blogs were a thing, one of the things I would write about would be the Fujitsu ScanSnap series of scanners.
Marco:
These are...
Marco:
these are document feed only scanners.
Marco:
They don't have like a big flatbed part.
Marco:
It's only a document feeder and it scans, they scan the top and bottom of any paper you put through them at the same time and they shoot them through really fast.
Marco:
So it's, it's a very fast way to scan a stack of paper into a giant, uh, searchable text PDF.
Marco:
Uh, and it looks, you know, it looks pretty decent for that.
Marco:
Like I, I wouldn't use these things for like scanning your family pictures, um, because they're not great on photos.
Marco:
They're made for doc for, they're made for fast, uh,
Marco:
very reliable very you know just kind of you know work grade scanning of paper documents so i use this as kind of you know a paperless thing to just scan any paper that gets mailed to me that is that might ever be important i scan it it gets indexed to a pdf by the built-in software and it gets saved to a folder and i don't do any other sorting of it
Marco:
It's simply by time.
Marco:
And if I ever need to look back, I either use spotlight searches or I just flip through when I know the time was and just flip and flip, you know, and quick look until I find the file.
Marco:
And it's wonderful.
Marco:
It's a fantastic document scanner if what you need is document scanning.
Marco:
I also maintain a flatbed scanner and I've tried, you know, because as I mentioned that this thing is terrible for photos and sometimes you want to scan something that you don't want to put through a document feeder, like maybe like a, an old family photo print that you don't trust to the rollers, um, or maybe something that's not quite flat that, you know, that you need to scan or something like that.
Marco:
So, um, I've maintained flatbed scanners over the years going through various Epson and Canon ones and they're all garbage.
Marco:
Like they're just terrible.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
But occasionally I need one, and so I'll end up buying a flatbed scanner maybe every four or five years, using it for about a year or two, and then eventually thinking, I don't need this anymore, so I give it away.
Marco:
Or it breaks, or its software stops working on the newest version of my OS or whatever else.
Marco:
And then eventually I need another one, I buy another one.
Marco:
But the latest one I bought, this was actually a surprisingly good deal.
Marco:
It is the Epson Workforce WF-7710.
Marco:
And the reason I bought this one is because Tiff's family had a collection of these large, like, 11 by 17, roughly, really old family photos, like, from, like, I don't know, from, like, the 30s or something, like, really old, like, you know, it looked like they were paintings, like, they were that old.
Marco:
And we wanted to scan them.
Marco:
And because they're roughly 11x17, they wouldn't fit on a regular 8.5x11 or 8.5x14 scanner.
Marco:
And if you look at the market for 11x17 scanners, there's basically nothing under about $1,000 that's any good at all.
Marco:
except this epson all-in-one that is 170 bucks and it's an all-in-one printer scanner fax copy or whatever uh i don't know if it has a fax oh yeah it does have a fax god who uses that anymore but it's still it has it if you're one of the people who uses the fax and it happens to be 11 by 17 and it has a it has an 11 by 17 scanner in this huge printer thing and i should you know disclaim inkjet printers are the worst they are just terrible and
Marco:
Unless you're printing photos with high-quality photo paper using high-quality photo ink.
Marco:
In that case, Inkjet is the best print you can get outside of a pro photo lab, like by mail or something.
Marco:
But if you want photo prints, Inkjet printers, and you're willing to pay for the nice photo paper, and you're willing to use a lot of ink and pay a pretty high cost per page...
Marco:
inkjets are by far the best especially epson inkjets and especially the ones that aren't this one that have like the five different tanks um like because and you can get like some of the advanced epson ones that there they have like six different ink tanks and it's like two different shades like there's like a light cyan and a light magenta in addition to the regular sign and the regular magenta some of them have different have a gray ink so you can print gray scale combining the gray with the black to get even better grays and blacks like they're they get really advanced now and the prints you get out of those
Marco:
When they're working right, when none of the heads are clogged, when all the ink is full, and when you have the right paper and everything's aligned, they are phenomenal and way better than you can get from even the best of the best color lasers.
Marco:
That being said, Inkjet is frustrating for lots of other reasons.
Marco:
For prints, I really don't like Inkjet.
Marco:
I hate the way paper documents look when you print text by Inkjet.
Marco:
I've never seen it look right.
Marco:
Unless it's on glossy photo paper, in which case it looks weird.
Marco:
But otherwise, because of the way ink kind of bleeds into the paper a little bit, as opposed to toner, which is melted plastic on top of the paper, it's...
Marco:
It just never looks very sharp.
Marco:
It always looks a little bit fuzzy with inkjet.
Marco:
You can always tell.
Marco:
And if you get a drop of water on inkjet prints, it smears immediately.
Marco:
Whereas you get a drop of water on a laser print, it's fine.
Marco:
Because, again, it's just melted plastic.
Marco:
That's what toner is.
Marco:
So, I love laser printers.
Marco:
Not to mention the fact laser printers are usually faster and way lower cost per page.
Marco:
Now, the cost per page thing has gotten a little bit narrower as we've gone into both super tank inkjet printers, which I don't ever recommend because they clog up like crazy and they're very expensive.
Marco:
And also, as lasers have gotten cheaper, we've had lower and lower end lasers.
Marco:
The lasers are now playing tricks with how much toner you get per cartridge or sending it with starter cartridges.
Marco:
The cost per page advantage of laser is getting smaller, basically, as time goes on, as laser printers get cheaper and smaller and worse.
Marco:
But if you're willing to buy a decent laser printer, they're amazing.
Marco:
Now, the downside is they're huge.
Marco:
And they can be fairly expensive relative to these other ones.
Marco:
My current setup, which I've gotten to after a bunch of years of using crappy old small earring jets, you can get... Sorry, lasers.
Marco:
You can get a color laser with AirPrint, with networking.
Marco:
By the way, another rule... Sorry, I'm all over the place with this.
Marco:
Another rule is...
Marco:
No printer or scanner I buy can require software on my computer, with the exception of the ScanSnap.
Marco:
That's for legacy reasons.
Marco:
Otherwise, I'm not buying a scanner or a printer that requires software.
Marco:
If the Apple built-in drivers don't support it, and if the built-in Apple scanning app does not support it, I won't buy it.
Marco:
um and you know that's it's you know relying on other people's software is terrible i i've been burned too many times in the past for that even the fujitsu software run on the mac mini under my tv which is funny because by a various combination of apple scripts and weirdnesses every time i scan a document on my scan snap i know it's done because the the speakers in my living room play the ding sound from mac os anyway um so
Marco:
I recommend something that is networked.
Marco:
And whether that's Wi-Fi or Ethernet, it's up to you.
Marco:
Don't really care.
Marco:
That supports AirPrint, which now pretty much all printers you could buy today support AirPrint.
Marco:
So that's no big deal.
Marco:
And I do recommend if you're only going to have one printer, make it a laser.
Marco:
If you're willing to have two and you ever print photos, get an inkjet for your photo prints.
Marco:
But still use the laser for everything else.
Marco:
If you want an all-in-one that has a built-in scanner and everything...
Marco:
you're probably going to be looking at an inkjet for that.
Marco:
All-in-one lasers do exist, but they're pretty large, and there's not that many of them that are any good.
Marco:
And, you know, they're made for, like, offices and stuff, so they're not that great.
Marco:
uh my printer happiness was achieved not when i had my little like you know hundred dollar brother laser printer that was monochrome not when i had my 220 hp uh i don't know 2000 series color laser which is fine but not great
Marco:
It was achieved when I decided, you know what I want?
Marco:
I want the kind of printer that my college computer lab used to have.
Marco:
Because there is this wonderful experience that you have with those printers that you don't get with anything else.
Marco:
Where, first of all, it has a big enough paper tray that you almost never need to refill it.
Marco:
Step one.
Marco:
Step two is I want to hit print on my computer.
Wow.
Marco:
get up, walk over to the printer, which is about 15 feet away, and have it be done when I get there.
Marco:
And you can do that if you get the larger HP lasers.
Marco:
So what I have now, which I've had for a couple of years, which I absolutely love, is the HP Color LaserJet M553.
Marco:
It was something like $400 or $500 when I bought it a few years ago.
Marco:
I've never changed any of the supplies because it's made for big businesses, computer labs, so it's made for heavy use, way heavier than I ever use.
Marco:
And I hit print, and I get up and I walk over to it, and it's there.
Marco:
It's sitting in the paper tray, warm and done.
Marco:
And that is the most satisfying thing you could possibly get from a printer.
Marco:
So I'm very, very happy with my giant $400 or $500 HP Color LaserJet M553 for everything but photos.
Marco:
But I hardly ever print photos, so it's no big deal.
John:
How do you tell whether it requires drivers?
John:
Because that's always the problem is that you're looking at printers and I'm like, I need to know how this will interact with all of my Macs.
John:
And I've never found a good way to tell.
John:
Obviously, the manufacturer is not going to tell you.
Marco:
If you search, I usually just like search the web for this page.
Marco:
Apple maintains a page somewhere in their support site.
Marco:
It basically lists like for each version of Mac OS what scanners and printers are supported.
Marco:
Really?
Marco:
And so I usually just look down.
Marco:
Yeah, I looked on that list and and usually it's usually I can find one of the ones on there.
Marco:
And, you know, ultimately, like they tend to support pretty much every printer or scanner that exists when the OS is released.
Marco:
And this is a little hard to find because printers and scanners and stuff get new models all the time.
Marco:
Like every six months or every year, there's new revisions.
Marco:
But if you look at this list and if you can usually find like, oh, here's one that was maybe like last year's model that's still for sale or something like that, you can usually find one there.
Marco:
And occasionally, if you see one where like the model number is not quite a match, but it's close –
Marco:
a lot of times that works anyway because like it was it was actually the same guts but like this model has a duplexer or something or that you know this model has networking or whatever so something like that um but yeah but yeah no no software and nothing gets nothing gets plugged into my computer via usb either like it's it sits on the network in a closet and it's i don't see it i don't hear it and there's no software that's that's the route to printer happiness right there and giant lasers
John:
The problem I run into with all my all-in-ones is even if the printer is supported, does that mean it's supported only if you plug it in with USB?
John:
Does it mean supported over Wi-Fi?
John:
Does it mean it's supported for printing only and not scanning?
John:
Does it mean you can print?
John:
These are all things that happen with my printer here, that I can print to it wirelessly, but I can't scan wirelessly.
John:
Does it mean that I can print when it's connected to my Wi-Fi router, but I can't scan when it's connected to my Wi-Fi router?
John:
Both of those things are true of this stupid thing.
John:
So it's very difficult for me to determine.
John:
I guess I could buy it and just return it or whatever.
Marco:
I can tell you my Epson WF7710, the 11x17 giant inkjet all-in-one, is totally supported wirelessly.
Marco:
Yeah, it is wireless.
Marco:
I only had one network port back there, so I run that on Wi-Fi.
Marco:
I run my awesome giant laser wired, because I don't think it even has Wi-Fi, but...
Marco:
the epson one i can tell you is supported with no software installation whatsoever scanning included even using even using the um the paper feeder on top which is like a small automatic document feeder on top of there even that i can do with the built-in apple scanner because i just did it that's the cheap 170 thing maybe i should buy that to replace this stupid thing because i think it's actually smaller i think i looked at the picture of it smaller and casey your giant thing
John:
that has a scanner i should say it's not small because keep in mind it's 11 by 17 so it's not small and keep in mind as a printer it's mediocre because it's an inkjet yes yeah well i already have a mediocre printer and like i i meant smaller in terms of height uh length and width it might actually still be smaller than mine because my thing is not the size of you know the scanning bed is not the determining factor there's lots of margins
Casey:
um casey does your thing a scanner too though yeah it it does have a document feeder up top it does not do duplex on the document scanning it will do duplex on printing but in every other way it's almost exactly what marco described it's a color laser it scans it does everything via wi-fi or ethernet it does it all without drivers it it's been again i've had it for five days so consider you know what you're dealing with here but
Casey:
I have been overjoyed with it, and it seems to fluctuate a lot in terms of price on Amazon.
Casey:
I spent something like $330, but go ahead and hit up Camel Camel Camel and see what they say, because it can be up to like $500, or it can be as cheap as, you know, again, about $300.
Casey:
And I'm sure it's not as nice or as fast as Marco's ridiculously awesome Enterprise printer, but it is an all-in-one, and it seems to be doing...
Casey:
all of the things, you know, reasonably well.
Casey:
But again, it's only been about a week.
Casey:
So, you know, take that with a grain of salt.
John:
This is one of the first conversations I think I had with Jason Snell was how I missed the days when Macworld's Mac User Magazine did multi-page printer reviews focused on how those printers work with the Mac.
John:
Because...
John:
nowadays like you're just thrown to the wolves if you're lucky you can find some kind of wire card thing about you know the best printer for most people but it's not going to be focused on max it's not going to have all the details that marco was talking about so you one of the safest bets with printers again being thrown to the world is like well i have a friend who has this one and they say it works for them in these ways so i'm just going to get the exact same one because at least it's a known quantity
Casey:
Oh, and another thing I should point out, which is not the most reliable thing in the world, but has worked well for me, is if you're wondering whether or not you need drivers for something, oftentimes Amazon reviews and Q&A and whatnot, which again, it's not the best.
Casey:
source i'm not going to say it's the best source and you could always get steered wrong but generally speaking if you see the same question asked 44 times as you often do on amazon and if you see the same answer you know 42 of the 44 times then you're probably going to be okay and i think that's what i did with this printer
Casey:
Wow, that went a lot longer than I expected.
Marco:
We knew we had so much to say about printers.
John:
Printing is complicated.
Marco:
And like this is, you know, as we were talking earlier with, you know, tying all that together to like the Wi-Fi stuff earlier, like it turns out no one makes great printers consistently.
Marco:
There is no euro of printers.
Marco:
Thank you to our sponsors this week.
Marco:
Jamf Now, Tech Meme Ride Home, and Gray Langer.
Marco:
And we will talk to 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.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T Marco Arman S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Casey:
John, since the people want to know, can you give us a very brief bee update, please?
John:
Yeah, I'm ready to declare victory.
John:
Oh!
John:
Mission accomplished banner behind you?
John:
Yeah, I haven't seen one in days.
John:
Many people are concerned that they would be entering my home.
John:
They have not, although there was one report at one point of someone seeing a bee in the house where I'm pretty sure it was just a big housefly because I killed a housefly later that day.
John:
No bees in the house, no bees outside.
John:
They are good and gone and dead as far as I can tell.
Marco:
So what about the yellow jackets that you actually had?
John:
Are there any of those around?
John:
People are very angry about me calling them bees.
John:
Oh my God, so angry.
John:
But people will just need to get over it.
Casey:
But John, you're so meticulous about everything else in the entire world.
John:
Everything else in my life, you're right.
John:
You're right.
John:
People who know every aspect of my life and exactly what I'm meticulous about and not.
John:
Ha ha ha.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
I love you, John.
Casey:
So I have a boring story about how my BMW is screwing me even from the grave.
Casey:
Well, you still own it.
Marco:
So it's not in the grave yet.
Marco:
It's kind of like...
Casey:
hovering around i mean there's no good joke to make here yeah no no but it's close uh i went to uh sell the car today or at least get it appraised and i took it to the local carmax and carmax is actually headquartered here in richmond and i've actually done work for carmax in the past but anyways i went to carmax and uh they you know asked me you know a series of five to ten questions is you know is there
Casey:
Is this your car?
Casey:
Do you have the title?
Casey:
Do you have all the keys?
Casey:
Blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
Has there ever been an odometer rollback?
Casey:
I forget what else.
Casey:
Is the title clean?
Casey:
Has it ever been an accident?
Casey:
Blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
And they spend 20, 30 minutes.
Casey:
They look it over.
Casey:
They drive it.
Casey:
They do whatever computations they need to do to figure out how much they think the car is worth.
Casey:
And they brought me the appraisal and they said, okay, here's what we found.
Casey:
It's in good shape, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
But the odometer has been rolled back.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
The odometer has been rolled back.
Casey:
No, it hasn't.
Casey:
No, no, no, look.
Casey:
So in July of 2015, apparently my world-class BMW dealer, Richmond BMW on West Broad Street, don't ever go there.
Casey:
Anyway, in 2015, I think it was July 21st, I brought the car in with something like 58,000 miles on it and got something done to it.
Casey:
I don't recall exactly what.
Casey:
On the 22nd, my car had 296,000 miles on it.
Casey:
And then fast forward three months, and it was back to like 60,000 miles.
Casey:
Apparently, the dumb people at Richmond BMW on West Broad Street decided to enter, I'm assuming, an incorrect service entry or enter a correct service entry, but enter it against my VIN instead of somebody else's VIN.
Casey:
So now the auto check or whatever it is, it wasn't Carfax, but it was an equivalent of Carfax, is saying, well, no, this car has had an odometer fraud.
Casey:
So that dramatically reduced the value of my car.
Casey:
So I drove down to BMW and very politely but very angrily said, you need to fix this.
Casey:
And the best they could do to fix it was write a repair order wherein – I wish I had it in front of me – but it basically says, we are certifying as Richmond BMW of West Broad Street that –
Casey:
the correct and true mileage of this car is 74, whatever, whatever, whatever that it was three hours, you know, seven hours ago.
Casey:
And the purchase or the, the repair order number one, two, three, four, five, six, seven from July of 2015 was incorrect.
Casey:
I then needed to call auto check to tell them to expunge or whatever's, you know, whatever the right word is that record on my report so that this way I could go back to CarMax and get a fair value for the car.
Um,
Casey:
Of course, however, there is no phone number for auto check because turns out it's Experian.
Casey:
Hey, wonderful.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, I'm so excited.
Casey:
So there's no phone number to call.
Casey:
I try their little automated chat.
Casey:
That doesn't go anywhere.
Casey:
I fill out a form wherein they will eventually email me probably in six months to say, oh, we heard you had a problem.
Casey:
Would you like to talk about it?
Casey:
And it turns out what I did was I Googled or really DuckDuckDigode for their phone number and came up with it instantly, called them and pleaded with them to fix it.
Casey:
And then they said, sure thing.
Casey:
I sent them a PDF that I scanned in my fancy new printer that we just talked about.
Casey:
I sent them a PDF of the thing that Richmond BMW did.
Casey:
And they fixed it.
Casey:
Then I went back to CarMax and they offered me an additional $2,500 for my car.
Casey:
So all is seemingly well.
Casey:
And I think I'm going to be bringing the car to CarMax tomorrow to sell it.
Casey:
I didn't do it today for various and sundry, uninteresting reasons.
Casey:
But yeah, that was a whole big adventure that I was not planning to have.
Casey:
And even as I'm trying to get rid of this piece of trash, which really isn't a piece of trash, I'm just so sick of it.
Casey:
It is still causing me problems.
Marco:
Is the current plan to just go to one car for a while then?
Marco:
Is that where you've landed?
Casey:
I negotiated with a dealer in D.C.
Casey:
I got them to a price that I think is reasonable but not stellar.
Marco:
And this is for the Golf R?
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Interesting.
Marco:
Not the GTI, not the Alfa Romeo, not a Jeep Wrangler, not a Model 3, not an M3, not another BMW.
Casey:
Not getting another BMW.
Casey:
Are you sure?
Casey:
Yeah, definitely not.
Casey:
And, you know, the reason that I landed on the Volkswagen is, and I was talking to Aaron about this a little bit, I want something that is basically, basically what I want is a BMW, but I don't want another BMW.
Casey:
You know, I want a sedan.
Casey:
I want something that's preferably four-wheel drive with the six-speed, and that's reasonably quick.
Casey:
And John is going to start chiming in about the Accord, but...
Casey:
I would prefer something quicker and a little bit nicer than that.
Casey:
And I like European cars.
Casey:
I don't have anything against Japanese cars, but I like European cars.
Casey:
And the only way to do that and not end up in financial ruin because of catastrophic engine failures, like when my valve train tried to grenade itself, is to have a car with a six-year warranty.
Casey:
So yes, even though Volkswagen's terrible in the sense of diesel gate, it's great in the sense of I would potentially have a six-year warranty.
Casey:
But the more I thought about it, the more
Casey:
or the morning Aaron and I talked about it sitting here tonight.
Casey:
I don't think I'm going to buy it because we really should just try being one car family for a while.
Casey:
That is not at all the answer I want, which is probably why I sound deeply depressed about it, but it is the correct answer.
Casey:
So by the time this episode gets posted for all, I know I might have a golf R in the garage, but sitting here now, my intention is to just let it go and at least wait a little while and see how bad it really is to be a one car family.
Marco:
I love that you think you might buy a Golf R in the next nine hours.
Casey:
Is that when you're planning on posting it?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Marco:
I didn't realize.
Marco:
No, I think it makes a lot of sense.
Marco:
As much as I advocate for leasing as a keep problems off my plate strategy, one problem leasing puts directly on your plate is timing of when you make purchase decisions.
Marco:
And because you are not leasing...
Marco:
and you have another car you have great flexibility in this like you have you can just not replace it for a while you can you know you can you can get it out of your garage get it off your plate get it off your like you know repair liabilities um you know get get a get a bit of money for it and then just bank it and then just sit around and don't buy a new car yet and just wait and decide if you need one i mean look
Marco:
The cars that you're looking at are not hard to get.
Marco:
They're not limited production.
Marco:
They're probably going to keep making them for a while and make them new ones every year, make them a little bit better every year.
Marco:
So you can pretty much buy one whenever you want to.
Marco:
So it's nice that you have the freedom to be flexible on that.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And that's the theory.
Casey:
I mean, again, we'll see what happens.
Casey:
I'm going so deeply back and forth about this that I'm not even sure tomorrow what's going to happen.
Casey:
And I think what's going to end up kind of forcing my hand probably in the direction of not buying is that the negotiations that I've done with this dealer in the D.C.
Casey:
area –
Casey:
were kind of predicated on doing it before the end of the month because that's how this stuff always works.
Casey:
And Friday is Erin's birthday and I'm not about to give Erin a golf R for her birthday present.
Casey:
So basically I would need to execute tomorrow and I just don't think it's going to happen.
Casey:
To your point, it doesn't mean I can never buy a Golf R ever again.
Casey:
It's just that the deal may not be quite as good as it is today.
Marco:
Don't fall into that.
Marco:
There's always a better deal to be had.
Marco:
That's typical sales pressure.
Marco:
Look, there's...
Marco:
every salesperson worth their salt will try to make you think that every deal they give you is a limited time offer.
Marco:
You better hurry up.
Marco:
You're never going to see it like this again.
Marco:
It's the last one in the country, whatever it is.
Marco:
There's always some BS reason why you have to act now.
Marco:
But that's not the real reason.
Marco:
The real reason is they want you to act fast and create urgency so that you get convinced to do it.
Marco:
But the reality is you can let this deal slip by because
Marco:
the conditions that led them want to offer you whatever deal they offered you are probably going to be the same, if not better at some point in the future.
Marco:
So you can get, and look, it took you like two seconds to negotiate this deal.
Casey:
So like, it wasn't two seconds, but your, your, your point is fair.
Marco:
Like you can go, you can go to them in six months or a year and spend a new two seconds to get them to give you another deal.
Marco:
Like it's fine.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's that there's no urgency here at all.
Casey:
Yeah, so we'll see what happens.
Casey:
I mean, the most adult answer is to not do anything, which I hope is what I'll stick with, but we'll see.
Casey:
The second most adult answer, if I stick within the realm of Volkswagen, so if I'm a shoeing Civic or an Accord or something like that, the second most adult answer is to get a GTI because you can freaking steal a GTI these days.
Casey:
It's absurd how cheap they are.
Marco:
Well, that you shouldn't do.
Marco:
That's not the kind of adult you want to be.
Casey:
Well, yeah.
Casey:
But the most fun thing to do is to get the Golf R and get it immediately.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
The more I think about it, the more I think I shouldn't, even though I desperately, desperately want to.
Casey:
So we'll see what I end up doing.
Marco:
The even more adult option is to just keep getting review cars and try to have one every week.
Marco:
And then you don't really need your own car because you're always driving someone else's.
Casey:
Aaron actually pitched exactly that to me.
Casey:
And yeah, if you're a listener and you have any contact of any sort with the PR department of any kind of magazine, please let me know.
Casey:
And I am not kidding when I say that.
Casey:
I would love to test any of your cars, even a piece of colossal garbage.
Casey:
Let me know.
Casey:
But, yeah, I mean, in principle, that would be magnificent and I would totally live that lifestyle.
Casey:
But the problem is it's deeply unreliable and, you know, it's just not a good permanent solution.
Casey:
The other side of the coin, though, is like how often are Aaron and I really needing to be in two places at the same time?
Casey:
And, you know, could I just lift or something when I need an extra car?
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Like, it's, again, not very much fun, but probably doable.
Casey:
So we'll see what happens.
Casey:
We'll try to live the one car life for a while and see if it makes us totally hate ourselves and each other.
Casey:
And if it does, we'll fix it.
Casey:
And if it doesn't, then sweet.
Casey:
I've saved myself a whole pile of money.
Marco:
The problems you have.
Casey:
Yeah, I was just about to say, this is like the first worldiest first world problem.
Marco:
oh you know i forgot to mention there's there's one thing i'm excited about about these iphone rumors more than anything else i've heard and it's the usb power adapter rumor have you heard this i didn't see this i don't think there was a rumor a couple months back that i think has been rerumored recently that they're going to ship this with a usb c cable to lightning and
Marco:
And that the power adapter in the box is going to be a new design that is basically a really compact 18 watt USB-C quicker charging adapter.
Marco:
And the reason I'm excited about this is that I have tried since getting this new laptop.
Marco:
I'm trying to simplify down my travel cable setup.
Casey:
All right, great.
Marco:
To be only USB... Yes, there's a reason.
Marco:
To be only USB-C.
Marco:
And the one thing... Like, I have so much covered.
Marco:
The one thing that doesn't seem to exist is tiny USB-C power bricks.
Marco:
Like, the USB-C version of the iPad power bricks that we've had forever.
Marco:
These little 10-watt little white bricks.
Marco:
I can't seem to find USB-C versions of that.
Marco:
Or, especially the ones I would love also, like, you know, Anker makes...
Marco:
What looks just like the iPad power brick but has two USB-A ports in it?
Marco:
Why doesn't that exist for USB-C yet?
Marco:
It doesn't have to be massively high wattage.
Marco:
Just two USB-C ports in one adapter.
Marco:
Is that impossible to make?
Marco:
Because no one's making them.
Marco:
And so I would love to just have Apple make a good little white brick that has a USB-C hole on one side and a power prong on the other side and have it be smallish and have it be nicely made and reliable and not going to start fires and not going to flake out, which I can trust Apple to do with their power stuff, and I can trust no one else in my experience.
Marco:
That's like the one thing I want is small, white Apple USB power supply.
Marco:
And so I'm actually more excited about the rumor that that's about to exist than I am about anything about these new phones.
Casey:
That's kind of sad.
Marco:
I know, but that would actually be more beneficial to me in a lot of contexts.
John:
I believe that rumor because the stupid whatever they are, the 5-watt things are just not up to the task.
John:
What do they ship with the 10?
John:
The same stupid 5-watt thing?
John:
Same stupid 5-watt thing.
John:
Yeah, so that's useless.
John:
And the iPad ones are old and big, so it's totally time for a new thing.
Marco:
yeah i believe it i believe the rumor i really i really hope they do because like no one else seems to be making what i want and and even if someone else did start making it i probably wouldn't trust them because i like my experience with third-party power adapter manufacturers even anchor even everyone's favorite anchor has been so mediocre and so spotty like the last thing i want is to pare myself down to a really small set of travel things and to have my you know the one i'm relying on flake out and fail because it was some weirdo brand