Not a Casino I Want to Play In
Marco:
How the hell do we start this episode in any way other than having John Maltz on?
Casey:
That would be amazing.
Casey:
I kind of wish I had planned it such that Maltz was waiting in the wings.
Casey:
Oh, God, that would have been amazing.
Casey:
So yeah, so we should start with follow-up as this is a normal episode as always.
Casey:
And let's talk about the MacBook hierarchy of needs.
Casey:
I did think a bit about what my hierarchy of needs is since it was kind of sprung on us last episode.
Casey:
And my conclusions were not that exciting, even after having thought about it for a while.
Casey:
But we did get a little bit of feedback about this, including from Abby Beckert, who wrote that if you make your own list, there's good chances that one or more PC laptops actually includes every single item on the list.
Casey:
So
Casey:
For Abby, they wrote, you know, a reliable keyboard, touchscreen, carbon fiber, sensible built-in ports, first-party dock for extra ports, cellular, SD card reader, waterproof, a 14-inch screen at two and a half pounds, which is half a pound lighter than 13-inch MacBook Pro, sensible screen resolution, an option for gloss or matte screen.
Casey:
And this was all in – and I don't have the rest of the email in front of me, I'm sorry – but it was all from some flavor of ThinkPad, if I'm not mistaken –
Casey:
That Abby had found.
Casey:
And so their point was just, hey, you know, all of us, including the three of us, are lamenting some of the choices that Apple's made with regard to laptops.
Casey:
But, you know, you could just go swimming in the other pool and that may not be so terrible.
Casey:
You might get the hardware you want, even if you don't get the software you want.
Casey:
And it's an interesting point.
Marco:
Well, it's an interesting point, except that number one on my hierarchy of needs is runs macOS.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
That wasn't the point of most of the emails.
John:
It wasn't like, hey, you should try BC.
John:
It's just that
John:
the idea and it's kind of what i was getting at with the macbook hierarchy of needs uh as i said on the show not so much like let's find out what our one or two in the line of acceptability is but just like what is your full list and can you imagine apple running the whole list uh and it seems unimaginable because we're like well what would we collectively on this program want from laptops it seems like apple doesn't want to build
John:
But you start to get into this mindset that it's like, well, it's not just that Apple doesn't want to build it.
John:
Nobody can make a laptop like that.
John:
That's asking for too much.
John:
And it's just not true.
John:
Like you can make a laptop like if we just read these bullet points, not that Apple has ever been about chasing specs or bullet points or like feature lists like that's the opposite of what Apple is about.
John:
But.
John:
So our lists, each of our lists weren't that out there.
John:
This list, I feel like, is out there.
John:
Carbon fiber and waterproof laptops.
John:
But if you make a list like that, you can find the PC laptop that satisfies it, showing that not only is it possible to do, it's possible to do probably at a price half of what Apple charges.
John:
Of course, probably also...
John:
less than half of the fit and finish or whatever um but all this is just a i put this item in here just you know as a as a level setting that like we shouldn't be too uh sort of resigned to the fact that the only ports that can ever be on a keyboard are you uh on a macbook are uh usbc and thunderbolt we shouldn't be resigned to the fact that there only can be every one keyboard across three different sizes of laptops like
John:
you know we need we need to keep believing that it is possible to make a slightly different set of trade-offs kind of like we did when we talked about the phone and lo and behold the 10r is here and it does make a slightly different set of trade-offs and it goes places that no phone has ever gone before you know it's got a screen that everyone agrees is great even though it's not oled it's got the longest battery life of any iphone apple has ever made and it's a tiny little bit thicker and it comes in cool colors uh you know i'm trying to be optimistic all this is to say is
John:
Apple, we believe in you.
John:
You can do this.
John:
You can make slightly different choices for your laptops and it will make more people happy.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We also got some feedback from a couple of episodes ago when we were talking about, and I think it might've been John, was justifiably lamenting that the search feature in the iOS settings app is kind of spotty.
Casey:
And sometimes you can use like a synonym or something like that in order to get what you want.
Casey:
But oftentimes it's just kind of a disaster.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And we weren't really sure what this was about.
Casey:
And we heard a little bit of feedback, which I'll paraphrase.
Casey:
And that feedback was that the settings app is set up so that each of the different teams writes their own remote view controller.
Casey:
And then that's loaded up to display their little part of the world.
Casey:
And that means that the way it's implemented is that each team gives a list of words or terms or whatever, and then they have to implement something when that term is searched for.
Casey:
So the point of all this is that there's not one master list that there's one or more humans kind of curating.
Casey:
In actuality, each individual team is curating their own list and doing sometimes a good job and sometimes a bad job of that, which explains...
Casey:
why john or whoever it was and maybe it was marco saw such spotty results when using search where sometimes you can use something that doesn't seem like it's at all related but it got you where you wanted to go and then sometimes you'll search for the exact thing you're looking for you know the exact appropriate term for a thing and it won't come up and that's because that team apparently is not good at search terms uh it's kind of amazing to me they don't implement sort of what uh
John:
what you would think from the outside or from a, you know, an outside programmer's perspective that just take every single UI label and add that to the list of strings that you're going to search, right?
John:
Kind of like what I assume the Mac OS, you know, help search thing does.
John:
It just takes the name of every menu item.
John:
And if you type in the help bot, like you don't have to program that.
John:
You don't have to export any special lists from, you know, if you, if you make a menu item called foo and you search for foo and the help thing, it will highlight the menu item called foo and you didn't have to do anything.
John:
Like that's the point of framework.
John:
So,
John:
uh two parts of this the fact that it's a remote view controller is like the settings app just lets another app show its ui but it's showing it inside the setting apps another thing that strikes me strange about the whole this whole split that again made sense when there was no multitasking on what was then iphone os but in the modern world it still feels kind of weird to have things split up in this way uh and then b just you know
John:
Let all the UI labels, let every single string in your view contribute to that corpus automatically.
John:
So you don't have to if you forget to do whatever.
John:
That's why we get frustrated.
John:
Like I know I have a screenshot of this exact item.
John:
And these are the words that are next to the label on this little on off switch.
John:
And if I search for those words, I can't find it.
John:
So they forgot to export those words.
John:
Well, don't make them export it.
John:
Anyway, maybe that will be fixed in iOS 13.
John:
We'll be sure to check for it.
Casey:
And then our next piece of feedback, which is our final bit of follow-up, is a little bit long, but bear with me because I think it's really interesting.
Casey:
Way back on Christmas Eve of 2017, that is not a joke, I really mean it, an anonymous birdie wrote in to tell us a little story about NVIDIA, which I think all three of us had forgotten about until we spoke about NVIDIA a couple of weeks back.
Casey:
And then this anonymous birdie wrote us to say, hey, remember when I emailed you all that way back a year or two ago?
Casey:
And so I went digging through the email, and it turns out it was a good email.
Casey:
So I'm going to read you a bit of it.
Casey:
This is from this anonymous person.
Casey:
Regarding Apple's affinity for AMD GPUs, two anecdotes that may suggest why.
Casey:
Back in 2010, when deployed, Macs had a fairly even distribution of GPU vendors.
Casey:
Over 98% of all kernel panics reported to Apple indicated that it was NVIDIA's kernel driver.
Casey:
So a few years ago, this is back in 2017...
Casey:
Shortly before Apple dropped to NVIDIA, a friend at Apple shared their recent experience working with all three GPU vendors to add a new minor feature to Apple's low-level display software, which required a small change to each GPU driver in order to adopt it.
Casey:
The Intel driver was owned by one Intel engineer who was permanently stationed at the Apple campus.
Casey:
They finished it in half a day.
Casey:
AMD sent an engineer down to Cupertino from Toronto.
Casey:
They finished the work in two days.
Casey:
NVIDIA responded only to say that they had received the request and would evaluate it in the next quarter's planning meetings.
Casey:
Oh, gosh.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
NVIDIA is also and has long been a lumbering, bumbling, bureaucratic mess.
Casey:
Worse, their success in the Windows GPU market, despite themselves, has made them arrogant.
Casey:
And so it's their fault that the GPUs aren't in Macs, not Apple's.
Casey:
It always has been.
Casey:
So now if you smash cut to this year, and this anonymous birdie writes, you know, as to why they haven't made up yet, this is Apple and NVIDIA, history side, perhaps it's because NVIDIA remains arrogant, highly opinionated, intensely stubborn, and not good at all at writing reliable software.
John:
just like apple birdie said that not me so you can see why they might have issues getting along i thought that was fascinating yeah and uh i think we brought this up on uh the last show or maybe on past shows that there was that uh nvidia gpu and laptops that was very unreliable and i think apple's still sorry about that and there's all sorts of bad blood but like i i felt like things were kind of i felt like nvidia was reaching out
John:
uh last year or whenever it was where nvidia was like hey we've made a bunch of drivers for our latest cards for what were then the latest uh mac pros uh so if you buy our cards and buy these drivers it'll work great on your mac and apple was just silence like but i felt like that was nvidia reaching out saying we'd like to be in the mac market and even if apple won't
John:
talk to us still because of everything that we've just listed plus more uh maybe we can show mac users that we're the good guys here and we invest time and energy and engineers in making drivers for mac and even their thing where they were like saying oh apple won't let us make drivers it's like it's like nvidia is still trying and from the outside it looks like apple isn't trying and you know so this is yet another one of those we need to come up with a name for these things these uh
John:
balance of power between two giants, both of whom are being hurt by their inability to cooperate with each other.
John:
Who's being hurt more?
John:
Probably NVIDIA because Apple's got more money than anybody else in the world or whatever, so they're fine.
John:
But if you narrow your vision to not Apple as a whole, which Apple's doing fine, but just Apple's plans for the pro desktop market,
John:
In that narrow view, their ambitions for the pro desktop market are not heard that much by Apple not adopting it.
John:
But Apple's ambitions might be heard because there are whole sections of the market that NVIDIA has handily cornered with CUDA and its particular expertise.
John:
And it still, as I keep bringing up every couple of shows, has the very fastest GPUs for certain sets of applications.
John:
And AMD just doesn't seem to be able to catch them.
John:
So it's probably not going to be the end of the world, but I still continue to wish that these two crazy kids could work things out.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
So this has been a big week, as it turns out.
Casey:
I have been loving this week, despite the fact that I'm 200 and change dollars poorer, which we'll talk about later.
Casey:
But on Monday, Apple decided to release new iPads.
Casey:
On Tuesday, new iMacs.
Casey:
We record this on Wednesday, and there were new AirPods.
Casey:
And we'll go through this one by one.
Casey:
But what an awesome rollout.
Casey:
I mean, I don't know why this happened, other than clearing the decks before next week's Apple video event.
Casey:
But I'm kind of loving this new thing each day.
Casey:
It's like the 12 days of Christmas.
Casey:
It's almost like Hanukkah even in the middle of March, which is unusual to say the least.
Casey:
I guess they got word that it was my birthday this past Sunday, and this is just late birthday presents for me.
Casey:
Keeping the birthday rolling, so thanks, Apple.
Casey:
But they started with Monday new iPads, including miracle of miracles, ladies and gentlemen.
Casey:
a new iPad Mini.
Casey:
I'm very excited about this.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm super happy about that.
Casey:
Yeah, that's super awesome.
Casey:
I've left the iPad Mini behind.
Casey:
If you recall, I had the original iPad, then I had the original Retina iPad, then I had two iPad Minis.
Casey:
Now I have an iPad Pro.
Casey:
You can pry my iPad Pro from my cold dead hands, but I am genuinely, genuinely really, really happy that the Mini has gotten refreshed and is basically on par with most modern iPads.
Casey:
I mean, it's not exactly the same, of course, especially as an iPad Pro, but in terms of the CPU, it's an A12, which is great.
Casey:
That's super awesome.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm very excited about this, not for myself, but for my son's iPad, because he has been using my old, what Casey would call a Retina Pad Mini, what Apple called, I believe at the time, the iPad Mini 2.
Marco:
And so it wasn't that different from the 3 and the 4, but it was like a generation older in certain things like processor and camera and everything.
Marco:
So, you know, it's running an A7 processor and that does run iOS 12 not well.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
like we've we'd been deferring the update for a very long time and at some point somehow we lost that battle and it got updated somebody hit the wrong button at some point it got updated and boy was that a mistake so like it's painful now like you know he'll try to launch a game and it'll be like a white screen white screen white screen and eventually he'll just give up because he thinks it's broken and
Marco:
And he's really started to use his iPad a lot for things that I want to encourage.
Marco:
Things like experimenting with using the camera, shooting video, shooting photos around the house, recording what he calls podcasts, which is super cute, like in voice memos.
Marco:
And I want to encourage him to experiment with some musical things like GarageBand and stuff.
Marco:
And you can do those things on that iPad, but...
Marco:
Boy, is it slow.
Marco:
It's really cumbersome to do those things.
Marco:
And the game thing really frustrates him when we allow him to play games.
Marco:
And so it's painful.
Marco:
And as he's doing all this creative stuff that I really want to encourage, the last thing I want is for his tools that he's using to be creative to fight him in any way.
Marco:
You want to separate a parent from their money, have their kid show an interest in something.
Yeah.
Marco:
the parent will very quickly want to like oh please enable this here throw money at this to i want to encourage this wonderful creative thing you're doing um so anyway uh but you know so all these years we've like i've been kind of waiting for an update for the last couple of you know last year or two uh but i didn't think an update was ever going to come for the mac mini for the ipad mini rather
Marco:
and we like i even like uh when tiff and i upgraded our ipads in the fall i prepped her old one for him which was a 9.7 it was just so big and heavy and unwieldy you know he's still a small kid like he it's that the size of the mini is perfect for him and the size of the 9.7 especially with a case on it was just so big and bulky and it like
Marco:
He could have managed, but it wouldn't have been nearly as nice.
Marco:
He probably wouldn't have carried it around as much.
Marco:
He wouldn't have used it as much.
Marco:
So we really just wanted a Mini, but the jump from the Mini 2 to the Mini 4 wasn't that significant, and the Mini 4 was ancient, so I didn't really want to buy one in 2018.
Marco:
And so now...
Marco:
to have a brand new Mini that keeps everything we love about the old one.
Marco:
It's the exact same form factor, exact same size.
Marco:
It even apparently is the same case dimensions and magnet placements as the iPad Mini 4.
Marco:
And so the iPad Mini 4 accessories should theoretically work with it, although there's some questioning about cases that might cover the microphone now, but we'll see about that.
Marco:
Anyway, so it's the same iPad Mini that we love.
Marco:
but up to date.
Marco:
This is exactly what we want.
Marco:
I didn't want him to have to deal with something bigger.
Marco:
I didn't want him to have to deal with things like Face ID, although he's smart, he could have figured it out.
Marco:
It just keeps everything the same, but makes it faster and current, and it improves the camera, and it improves the speed, and it lets him run the current versions of iOS without painful speeds.
Marco:
It's just exactly what we needed it to be.
Marco:
It has a new battery that's going to help, too.
Marco:
I'm just so happy to see this.
Marco:
I never thought that we would see an iPad mini update, and the fact that it got updated, you know,
Marco:
Sometimes when Apple updates the lower-end products, sometimes they get last-year specs or a generation-ago specs.
Marco:
Sometimes there's reason for that, but it kind of sucks when that happens.
Marco:
This is one of those awesome updates that we get sometimes where the low-end products have the same specs as the current flagship.
Marco:
This has the same processor as the iPhone XS.
Marco:
And a very similar processor to the iPad Pro.
Marco:
It's not quite the same.
Marco:
The iPad Pro has a faster GPU because it has the X version, I assume.
Marco:
But I've kind of lost track at this point.
Marco:
But it has the same processor.
Marco:
Now, all of the iPads, except for the very lowest end one, the 329 one,
Marco:
All of the other ones now have A12 series processors.
Marco:
That's awesome.
Marco:
Every iPad in the lineup now has pencil support.
Marco:
And yeah, it isn't all the same pencil, blah, blah, blah.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
I don't care.
Marco:
They all have pencil support.
Marco:
They're all fine pencils.
Marco:
Yeah, I would have liked to not have the boner charging method, but it's fine.
Marco:
It's better than not having it at all.
Marco:
All the bottom ones, all the ones that aren't labeled Pro, all now support the Logitech Crayon, which is cool because it's cheaper.
Marco:
It's a little more kid-friendly.
Marco:
It's a little easier to manage in a certain context, so that's cool to have more options like that.
Marco:
The Air now supports the keyboard.
Marco:
We'll talk about the Air in a second.
Marco:
Most of them support the keyboard.
Marco:
All of them support a pencil of some kind.
Marco:
All of them have A12 for the very cheapest one, which has, I think, an A10 or an A11.
Marco:
Either way, it's pretty close.
Marco:
This is a fantastic lineup.
Marco:
I am so super happy about these updates because on paper they seem boring.
Marco:
You know, okay, you updated two kind of low-end to mid-range iPads to specs that aren't new.
Marco:
You know, who cares, right?
Marco:
But the fact is this patches a huge hole in the lineup.
Marco:
It resolves a bunch of old business, old neglect, and it unifies things to the most coherent lineup I've seen in years.
Marco:
And you look at what the iPad offers compared to what Macs offer.
Marco:
It kind of makes you feel bad being a Mac person because you can't point to any of these iPads and say, nobody should buy that.
Marco:
You can't point to any one of these and say, that's going to be a bad product to use in practice.
Marco:
None of them.
Marco:
Now, we can point to Max, and we will later when we get to the spinning hard drive iMacs.
Marco:
You can point to Max and you can say, nobody should buy that one.
Marco:
That one's a bad product.
Marco:
That one will punish you for having bought it.
Marco:
There's nothing in the iPad lineup that you can point to and say that.
Marco:
That's awesome.
Marco:
So to cover that much of a price range, that much of a capability range, and have every single one of them be on its own a really good product, that's really impressive.
Marco:
So I'm super happy about this.
John:
It's interesting that we can say that about iPads for a couple of reasons that are actually related to the reasons that we talk about and complain about Macs.
John:
One of them is that the iPad, as a product, from its introduction until now, has always been defined by simplicity.
John:
It's always just been a screen, and it has one button or zero buttons, and cameras on the front and back.
John:
And a thing on the bottom where you plug it in to charge it.
John:
And that's been the iPad.
John:
So never at any point we were like, God, I can't believe these iPads still only have one port on them.
John:
Because that's always been the iPad.
John:
There was never an expectation that it would have.
John:
you know, more capabilities.
John:
But at the same token, as they become, you know, computing-wise more powerful, Apple has added features.
John:
You know, the detachable keyboard, smart connector, the pencil, obviously.
John:
And that's another reason these updates are great.
John:
Because, yeah, so we're not saying don't buy any of these iPads, they just have one port, right?
John:
But on the other hand, with some of the old iPads, we might have said...
John:
That's probably not what you want.
John:
You might not realize this, but you can't use the pencil with the iPad mini.
John:
So even though your kid would really love to use the pencil, you can't like, well, why can't I use the pencil?
John:
It doesn't work with it.
John:
Like it predates the pencil and blah, blah, blah.
John:
Right.
John:
So the few things that Apple has added hardware wise to the iPads.
John:
We were waiting for those to be rolled out to the full line, and here they are, which is why, when we look at this line now, we say, they've all got all the things.
John:
Not all the things you can imagine a computer might have, but all the things that we now currently expect an iPad to have.
John:
The thing that I like the most about this lineup, setting aside the names, which still don't quite make that much sense, is that it's easy to explain to anybody...
John:
what the difference is between the expensive and the cheap models this is the most explicable this line has ever been right what's the difference between the ipad air and the ipad pro and you can list off all the things and if the person says oh well i don't care about those things like great then we have i got the product for you buy the cheaper one but they're real things there are real differences you know usbc the different better pencil uh promotion 120 hertz like face id like those i mean
John:
maybe not all of them but those you can explain those and people understand at the minimum people understand this one has a button on it and the other one doesn't one of them has you know face id which you may or may not be familiar with from your phone and the other one doesn't that's a huge differentiating factor which is not to say that i think they should keep it like this face id should totally go down the line everywhere but you can explain why the hell is this one a thousand dollars and this one starts at four hundred
John:
it's very easy to understand and price wise i do like the fact that the new ones are not you know they haven't the price hasn't crept up starting at 399 for 64 gigabyte that's a reasonable amount of storage for in the context of an ipad a reasonable price for a product that as we've already established has all the modern internals in terms of
John:
will this run things really slowly?
John:
No, like it's, it's not past generation.
John:
It's not two generations back.
John:
It's current generation.
John:
Maybe not the fastest of the past with all the, you know, there's a reason the pro is pro, but it's just such a nice balance of like, take away this super duper pro high end stuff that you think everybody doesn't need, but make sure it's got all the things.
John:
And so that's why, again, why I don't think I'm not upset personally about the old pencil.
John:
The point is I want to be able to draw on the thing with, with a pencil.
John:
The point is not, oh, but this isn't the latest and greatest pencil that snaps onto the side.
John:
It's not.
John:
That's another reason why you might prefer the Pro, because that pencil is better.
John:
It's better in much more subtle ways than Face ID versus Touch ID, but it is better.
John:
But if you just want the capability, it's there.
John:
So I'm really happy with the iPad lineup as it is now.
John:
And then, of course, you got the bottom basement one being the cheapest possible, which has never really been Apple's forte to get that price all the way down.
John:
But it's still like I can explain this line.
John:
I can explain every single one in it and every product in it and why it is where it is and who might want to buy it and how to choose between them.
John:
I can't explain why.
John:
Well, I can, but not in a way that people will find satisfying why one is called Air and one is called Mini.
John:
but yeah i was really happy with these ipads and it was just like i honestly i didn't expect this i expected maybe they would revise one of the ipads but very rarely do we get to see i think we've talked about this past an entire product line from top to bottom sort of in sync like it wasn't exactly in sync obviously the pros came out a while ago but like here we are at a point in time where as marco said
John:
They're all A12s.
John:
They all have all the things.
John:
They all have easily explainable differentiating factors.
John:
They cover a big price range.
John:
If you were thinking of buying an iPad, now is probably a pretty good time to buy one.
Casey:
Did you see a friend of the show, Jesse Chars, tweet describing a revised way of doing the lineup?
Casey:
It's really, really good.
Casey:
And she wasn't the only person to say this, but she was the first person to do like an Apple-style diagram, which is in her tweet.
Casey:
And so the current iPad lineup is, you know, you have two sizes of iPad Pro, the iPad Air, the iPad, and the iPad Mini.
Casey:
And what Jesse proposed was iPad Pro, two sizes, iPad, two sizes, done.
Casey:
And I understand why Apple didn't do this and why the Mini is still called the Mini and the Air is still called the Air.
Casey:
But I couldn't agree more with Jesse's thought and several others who said the same thing that it seems to me to make a lot more sense to just say, hey, there's an iPad Pro.
Casey:
That uses a fancy new pencil, two sizes.
Casey:
There's an iPad that doesn't use a fancy new pencil, but still has a pencil, which I agree, by the way, John, a lot of people had chapped bottoms about this.
Casey:
And I just, I mean, it's, of course, I would love for the new pencil to work with everything, but I don't see this as egregious as a lot of people on Twitter.
Casey:
There were many hot takes given about this.
John:
It'll be greediest if it's like this in two years, for sure.
John:
But at this point in time, it is explicable.
John:
The new Pencil is brand spanking new, introduced only on the Pro models.
John:
It's okay for it to be exclusive to the Pro models until next year.
John:
I think that's fine.
Marco:
Well, because using Pencil 2 on these iPads would have required a case redesign to the flat-sided case, which probably brings with it Face ID, and that becomes a much bigger job.
John:
You're basically just asking, make me a cheaper iPad Pro, which is a thing they could have done, but it couldn't have been this much cheaper, like, bottom line.
Marco:
And by the way, I would argue that the iPad Air and Mini are basically cheaper iPad Pros.
Marco:
Previous generation iPad Pros, yeah.
Marco:
Well, yeah, sort of.
Marco:
Yeah, I guess if you allow for the home button and Touch ID.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Especially the iPad Air supports the keyboard.
Marco:
It's literally the exact same keyboard as the 10.5-inch iPad Pro.
Marco:
If you had that keyboard, you can still use it with the iPad Air.
Marco:
That's, first of all, unexpected and great.
Marco:
For so long, what distinguished the iPad Pro, what made it the iPad Pro, was a larger size available that you didn't have to necessarily take, four speakers, and
Marco:
and compatibility with the pencil and keyboard.
Marco:
And a lot of people who bought the iPad Pro only bought it for one of those things.
Marco:
Maybe it was the pencil, maybe it was the keyboard, maybe it was both.
Marco:
But a lot of people were buying Pros who didn't necessarily want the highest end of everything specs.
Marco:
just wanted like one or two of those things and you don't get the four speakers anymore with the with the new cheap entries like the the new ipad air and the mini you don't get four speakers as you mentioned you don't you don't get um 120 hertz uh promotion um you don't get some of the other fancier stuff but the difference is smaller than ever so like you do get the p3 screen though which is nice which is the thing i didn't expect
Marco:
Yeah, the 329 iPad has a cheaper screen construction.
Marco:
But the new Air and Mini don't.
Marco:
They have nice screens.
Marco:
They have True Tone.
Marco:
They have so much.
Marco:
There's stronger differentiation than ever that if you really want the Pro, there's a few things for it.
Marco:
Here they are, these high-end things or the new design or the Face ID or whatever else.
Marco:
But more people...
Marco:
now will be happier with the middle entry, which is the iPad Air, the 499, than what the middle entry has covered if it even existed for years.
Marco:
The iPad started out at that $500 price point, and then for a little while it crept up a little bit, and then the iPad Pro came out and it went way up, and then the middle iPads kind of disappeared and moved down market, and so there was this big hole in the middle.
Marco:
where if you're willing to pay $500 for an iPad, you could have gotten something great, but Apple wasn't really willing to sell it to you.
Marco:
They wanted to sell you either something really cheap and low-end and old, or something much more expensive and high-end.
Marco:
Now that hole has been filled, and it's just great.
Marco:
I'm so happy about this lineup.
Marco:
i know it's not going to be perfect forever like at some point something's going to get updated and then it's going to make no sense again but for right now this is great and and you know you said earlier that this is probably maybe a good time to buy an ipad i'm going to say this is a great time to buy an ipad because the pro is only a few months old and the other ones are now like two days old and so and the lineup has never been stronger or made more sense or been you know more sensibly priced than it is now and you know
Marco:
In absolute terms, these prices for these things are still expensive, especially when you option them up.
Marco:
You know, you're still going to, for a well-optioned iPad, you're going to be probably in the $600 to $700 range at least.
Marco:
So, you know, it's still Apple pricing and modern Apple pricing, but the options that are available to you and the base prices for them are really nice.
Marco:
And even, you know, the base storage is now $64 on most of these.
Marco:
Like, that's pretty good too.
Marco:
So I got to say, this is a heck of a lineup.
Casey:
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
Casey:
And I also am really hoping that all of our hopes and dreams for iOS 13, especially around the iPad, come true this June.
Casey:
Because how amazing would it be if not only does Apple deliver this really solid hardware lineup –
Casey:
But then in June, they deliver on the software as well.
Casey:
And suddenly the iPad is firing on all cylinders.
Casey:
It is cranked all the way up to 11.
Casey:
It's in great shape.
Casey:
And I would really love to see that.
Casey:
I think that would be incredible.
Marco:
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Casey:
All right, so that was just Monday, and that was a lot.
Casey:
And now we come to Tuesday, and hey, guess what?
Casey:
New iMacs.
Casey:
So I'd like to call everyone's attention to a really great episode of Upgrade with Jason Snell and Mike Hurley.
Casey:
And they had an interview with someone whose name I've forgotten, so one of you can fill in for me.
Marco:
Colleen Navielli.
Marco:
Navielli?
Casey:
There we go.
Casey:
Novielli.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Colleen Novielli.
Casey:
And she is the product manager for what I would say is the iMac, but what Apple people call iMac.
Casey:
And it was a really good interview outside of me always finding it awkward that no Apple people say the iPhone or the iMac.
Casey:
It's just iPhone and iMac.
John:
Some of them do.
John:
The old ones do.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Anyways, it was a really good interview, and it's worth listening to the whole episode.
Casey:
But new iMacs, and that's exciting.
Marco:
It's not as exciting as we had hoped, but it's exciting that it happened at all.
Marco:
This is exactly the kind of update that we keep begging Apple to do if the alternative is just neglect forever.
Marco:
Yeah, that clause is important.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Like if you don't have something exciting ready, just do spec bump updates that are boring.
Marco:
And that's what they've done here.
Marco:
They didn't do a larger update.
Marco:
You know, it still looks the same.
Marco:
It still has the same or at least close enough to the same internal designs.
Marco:
Notably, it does not have the T2.
Marco:
I was kind of disappointed by that.
Marco:
I was expecting all Macs to go T2 in 2019 that weren't yet, which the only ones that are left are the iMac 12-inch MacBook and the Mac Pro.
Marco:
Those are the only ones that are left.
Marco:
I think the reason why they couldn't do it here, most likely, is that I don't think the T2 is built to support spinning hard drives.
Marco:
My big disappointment here with the iMac is that they still are shipping spinning hard drives.
Marco:
And they made other improvements that are great.
Marco:
They now go up to eight cores because Intel is super desperate to keep the 14nm process going a little bit longer.
Marco:
And so they now go up to eight cores on the high-end ones.
Marco:
And that's great.
Marco:
They have six cores standard, and that's also great.
Marco:
So this is all good stuff on the CPU front.
Marco:
Although I do have some concerns about thermals.
Marco:
But, you know, the performance-wise, they sound great.
Marco:
They have new GPUs.
Marco:
That's awesome, too.
Marco:
It does, though, seem like, you know, thermally, they are really pushing the boundaries of that chassis design, of the now fairly old standard, you know,
Marco:
iMac design the iMac pro has a whole different internal layout whole different thermal design because it is a totally different machine inside it doesn't have any support for spinning discs and it has you know totally different cooling system in there and so the iMac pro is able to cool you know it's high wattage high performance parts very well and very quietly and very reliably the old iMac chassis though which is now still in use for these for these new ones is
Marco:
It seems to be struggling recently with the higher wattage Intel heat amounts they keep putting in as Intel can't shrink their process down to 10 nanometers yet.
Marco:
Intel keeps just adding more cores and pushing the heat envelope higher on their 14 nanometer process to make these new, quote, faster chips.
Marco:
And that's pushing the heat envelopes higher and higher.
Marco:
And that's why you have problems like the most recent 15-inch MacBook Pros that have...
Marco:
really hot, high-running max thermals and possible thermal issues that arise from that.
Marco:
You have the same problem in the iMac, where you have severe thermal loads being generated inside this case that has not been updated in a very long time.
Marco:
Combine that with similar problems on the GPU front in that competitive high-end GPUs require more and more heat capacity over time because they're getting more sophisticated, they're getting bigger.
Marco:
So you basically have components that are hotter than ever being put into an enclosure and a thermal design that was designed a long time ago before that was a thing, rather than using the new iMac Pro one that was designed more recently and can handle much higher loads more gracefully.
Marco:
So I expect these machines to have similar issues as the previous generation.
Marco:
You're probably going to hear that fan a lot.
Marco:
and it's probably going to run a little hot.
Marco:
And that's kind of a shame.
Marco:
And that might have problems down the line with longevity or things like that.
Marco:
And that's also kind of a shame.
Marco:
I've also heard this design has issues with dust ingress and dust getting under the screen.
Marco:
And if that's true, that's probably going to be exacerbated if the fan spin faster most of the time for cooling because it's going to be sucking more air through the machine and therefore more dust through the machine.
Marco:
So all those things I have some concerns about.
Marco:
But ultimately, I used...
Marco:
An iMac in this generation, the 5K one that came out in 2014, I used that for three years, and it was awesome.
Marco:
Anybody out there who's wondering, like, do you need to go to the iMac Pro, or are you okay with, like, quote, just the iMac?
Marco:
Just the iMac is great.
Marco:
It's a great machine.
Marco:
It's overall fantastic.
Marco:
I do, though, worry about these newest components with these newest thermals.
Marco:
That is still a concern.
Marco:
And at the low end, boy, do I have problems with these hard drives.
Marco:
I think the whole reason this machine has not been redesigned yet, thermally, like internally, is to keep compatibility with spinning hard drives, to keep those low end options there.
Marco:
And I got to say, I am not happy that Apple updated the iMac and is still selling base models that don't even have fusion drives that are just a hard drive.
Marco:
Nobody should use a computer today that is booting and running solely on a spinning platter hard drive.
Marco:
and you know people have been focusing on oh there's only 5400 rpm so it's even worse and yeah that's that's true a little bit but like ultimately if they put it in a 1700 rpm drive it wouldn't make a big difference like that's it's still going to be a spinning hard drive in 2019 for an operating system and a file system that are not designed to be running on those things and with modern you know loads and everything it's just that's terrible like yes they are hitting a price point here but
Marco:
They haven't sold a hard drive in a laptop, which is the majority of their computers sold, for, what, five years at least?
Marco:
How long has it been since the last hard drive model?
Marco:
I don't even know.
Marco:
It's been a long time, and they've been fine.
Marco:
And most people buy laptops, and they're fine.
Marco:
It is criminal, first of all.
Marco:
They shouldn't be selling...
Marco:
If they're going to put a hard drive in it, they shouldn't be selling anything that isn't a fusion drive.
Marco:
Because to make it a fusion drive, it takes some piddly amount.
Marco:
I think it's like 24 gigs of an SSD stick to put in there to make it a fusion drive.
Marco:
That costs nothing in 2019.
Marco:
First of all, it's too small.
Marco:
Put a bigger one in there, first of all, if you're going to do it at all.
Marco:
Even if it was 64 gigs, make it 128, who cares?
Marco:
That costs nothing with today's flash pricing.
Marco:
Even the super high-grade flash that they want to use everywhere, that costs nothing.
Marco:
But even if you can get past that, this shouldn't have a hard drive at all.
Marco:
all the other macs sold don't have hard drives and it's fine yeah some people have larger storage needs who can't afford giant ssds at apple's crazy prices but there are other options one option is external storage which a lot of people use or cloud storage which a lot of people use also that's what they use with their laptops like all the laptops have these same problems they solve them
Marco:
Another option is, you know, Apple insists on using, like, the highest-grade, highest-performance Flash possible when they use Flash, but what if they don't necessarily need to?
Marco:
Like, are they honestly... Basically, their position seems to be that it's okay to have the slowest storage mechanic in the world today, the spinning platter hard drive.
Marco:
Like, that... They choose that over...
Marco:
like a cheaper consumer grade, slower flash disk to hit a price point.
Marco:
Like that's, that argument might've made sense two, three years ago.
Marco:
In 2019 flash is big and reasonably cheap.
Marco:
I would rather them either not even offer large capacities and just, you know, have like a 128 gig SSDB stock than to offer any hard drives.
Marco:
And for people who need more storage, they can buy externals because they do anyway.
Marco:
They shouldn't be selling a computer today.
Marco:
That is a bad computer.
Marco:
And I can honestly 100% say, first of all, any computer that's non-retina in 2019, because the base model is still for sale, that's still non-retina, and especially any computer that has a spinning hard drive, that is a shitty computer.
Marco:
Apple isn't and shouldn't be known for selling shitty products.
Marco:
They can sell expensive products.
Marco:
They can sell cheap products.
Marco:
They can sell high-end.
Marco:
They can sell low-end.
Marco:
But Apple, like the spirit of Apple, is that nothing they sell should really be shitty.
Marco:
It can be low-end, but it shouldn't be like horrible.
Marco:
And the experience of using that base model computer today is horrible.
Marco:
They should not even be selling that.
Marco:
I'd rather there be a hole in the lineup than to have that computer still be sold.
Marco:
The fact that they're still shipping hard drive configurations in the iMac...
Marco:
is preventing them, it's holding them back from doing the new thermals in there and from making everything all T2 based, which is way more secure and has some performance benefits and everything.
Marco:
It's holding them back.
Marco:
For what?
Marco:
To create these terrible experiences for these terrible products?
Marco:
Apple, you're better than that.
Marco:
They're so much better than that.
Marco:
They shouldn't be selling that model anymore.
Marco:
And I don't care.
Marco:
Whatever the reason they are to sell it, whatever the value proposition is, it's not worth it.
Marco:
I think you have the cause and effect reverse there.
John:
I think, I mean, you mentioned before talking about the cases, how much better the cooling is in the iMac Pro and everything.
John:
And people may be thinking, what is he talking about?
John:
They both look the same except one is dark gray.
John:
That's mostly true.
John:
Like the external shape of the iMac and the iMac Pro are the same.
John:
But inside, inside that exact same shape, they are wildly different.
John:
And you wouldn't think that would make that much difference because they're both super skinny.
John:
And if you had tried to explain this to all of us before the iMac Pro came out, you might have had a good point of like, yeah, it is kind of skinny there.
John:
How much better can the cooling be?
John:
Like how much quieter can it be?
John:
But now that we've seen the iMac Pro, we know the answer is a lot.
John:
yeah it's like if they both look skinny but apparently you can do a much much better job with it uh and we assume we assumed before these came out and we still kind of assume you know that the imacs all will eventually go t2 and if they were to keep the case the same they would look on the inside a lot like the imac pro does from the perspective of what shape is the board where is everything located where do the fans go where does the air come in where does the air go out and
John:
And it would be even easier because presumably the iMac Pro puts out way more power and heat than the iMac will in the topping configuration.
John:
So you don't even need to try as hard as that.
John:
But for that to happen, you'd basically need all new iMacs.
John:
Like it wouldn't just be a matter of, OK, well, we'll just, you know, take out the hard drive and just have them SSDs and then like make the fans bigger.
John:
So you need to reshape and reconfigure all the components.
John:
It would basically be an entirely new iMac.
John:
And getting back to the case thing...
John:
A lot of people have noted that, and it's true.
John:
The external case, figure out the insides.
John:
The external case is the same on the iMac and the iMac Pro and has been the same.
John:
Like that same case shape for the various sizes has been the same for a very long time.
John:
So some people are going, when is the newly shaped iMac going to come out?
John:
If I were Apple, I can kind of understand how you could find yourself in a situation where there will be a newly shaped iMac soon.
John:
And knowing that that will happen, this may not be the best timeline in which to completely reconfigure the guts of the regular iMac, making newly shaped boards and every component new and differently arranged to match the iMac Pro.
John:
And then immediately say, OK, well, that was the last design in that case anyway, because now here's the new iMac case and everything has to be differently shaped yet again.
John:
just in terms of economics of how often do you want to totally redesign the guts.
John:
The iMac Pro clearly was on its own path and started a long time ago and was like the future of the Pro Mac before the Mac Pro.
John:
And you could see why it was worth it for them to make the iMac Pro targeting the same case.
John:
I just feel like they're stuck now where...
John:
they can't go to an all new iMac pro style design with the T2 in the current case without redesigning everything.
John:
But now is not the time to do that because the new, new iMacs are going to come out next year or whatever.
John:
And so timing wise, it didn't work out given that,
John:
given that you don't have a t2 and you don't have totally redesigned internals you are stuck with the spinning discs because well you're not stuck with the old model i could just stop selling it but like there's no there's no way to reconfigure all that stuff to make it you know to get all the advantages of ssd only because even if you just buy an ssd only imac you don't get the imac pros quieter fans like it's not just the hard drive that's making noise inside there it's not that's not a thing to blame it's the entire cooling arrangement that has to account for the hard drive that's messing things up so
John:
Like, it's an unfortunate situation.
John:
I kind of understand, though, how they found themselves there.
John:
And I don't think that they are married to hard drives.
John:
Apple wants to get rid of the hard drives as much as anyone else.
John:
But I feel like they are slightly married to the prices, which is why they're still selling the one with just a spinning disk, which, to be clear, is not a new or updated in any way model.
John:
It's just the same old model they were selling last week.
John:
They're just continuing to sell it at $1099.
John:
And I totally agree with Margo.
John:
nobody should buy this computer not so much because it's a shitty computer but it's not i mean it isn't in in the when you look at alongside the other macs but it's not it's not up to apple's quality standards and more importantly if someone spends a thousand dollars on a computer they should have a better experience than they will with this just flat out right so because i i can imagine people using a non-retina computer or using a computer with a hard drive but i can't imagine it costing a thousand dollars for that
John:
Because for $1,000, you can get a computer with the SSD.
John:
with granted less storage space but the experience will be so much better like this is one of those computers i would never recommend anyone buy i've been recommending people not buy uh fusion drives if possible just because i feel like like just it's worth the sacrifice now and it's not even that much of a sacrifice in terms of storage space or like if you can't afford to buy one just wait like wait longer and save money because you'll be happier it's kind of like telling people to get a lot of ram back in the old days now it's like just
John:
If you're buying a computer in 2019 and you don't have enough money for them with just an SSD, then just keep saving your money because it's such a big upgrade and it increases its longevity so much and it's just such a sea change that I feel like you just got to hang in there and wait for these hard drives to go away.
John:
Yeah, but I'm looking forward to...
John:
the next generation which will surely be all ssd and hopefully we'll actually have a different case for the first time in how many years four years three years this case has been with us for a while i think like 2012 like it's been it's been a long time yeah for for the ones that are going to have face id built into them that have a smaller chin like they don't have to be any thinner maybe they'll have a height adjustable stand haha just kidding apple will never do that um you know like it's a
John:
i agree with marco it's great that they did expect bumps on these we were expecting t2s but if i had thought about it a little bit more and we're like if if they put it this way if they had come out with t2s i would be like guess what we're with this external design for another three years easy now without t2s it's made me strangely more optimistic for a new external case design for the imac to come
John:
sometime next year.
John:
In the meantime, tell your family and friends no spinning disks.
Marco:
First of all, just to quickly disclaim this, I'm not dying for a new case design on the iMac.
Marco:
I've been using an iMac myself as my main computer
Marco:
you know, almost all day, every day since the late 2014 timeframe, like when the, when the retina came out.
Marco:
So, you know, for five years or whatever, five, four and a half years, I never think about what it looks like because if I'm sitting near it, it's on and the screen is glowing at me and I'm looking at the screen.
Marco:
The case could look like pretty much anything and I wouldn't even notice.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
So I actually don't... And you can't see it from the side of the back while you're using it.
Marco:
So I don't actually care at all, really, what the case is.
Marco:
As long as it covers thermal needs and practical needs, I'm fine with it.
Marco:
And the current one does.
Marco:
I'm not dying for a new case design on it.
Marco:
I recognize this one is pretty old, but it's fine.
Marco:
But to give people some idea...
Marco:
You know, most of our listeners probably haven't used a spinning hard drive only computer recently.
Marco:
And to give you some idea, like on this week's episode of Connected, Stephen Hackett was saying how somebody he knows has one and like opening up the settings app makes it beach ball.
Marco:
And if you look at the range of usability between the lowest-end Mac, like this, and the mid-range or the high-end ones...
Marco:
if it can't even open its own setting screen without having performance problems, that's a pretty big problem.
Marco:
Whereas if you look at, like, in the iOS area, if you buy the cheapest iPad or the oldest iPhone that they still sell as new, it's going to be still way better than that.
Marco:
Like, the floor of how low they're willing to sync...
Marco:
experience-wise and performance-wise, is way higher on the iOS devices.
Marco:
But for some reason on the Macs, they're willing to sell these terrible iMacs at the low end.
Marco:
And that's why it just seems embarrassing.
Marco:
It's a terrible idea.
Marco:
But anyway, and before we leave the iMac topic, I do want to say at the higher end...
Marco:
People often will ask us, they have asked us already today, whether an iMac is good enough or whether they should get the iMac Pro.
Marco:
And if you spec up the new iMacs into iMac Pro territory, the new iMac still ends up being around $1,000 cheaper than the iMac Pro.
Marco:
So it's certainly worth asking, what do you get for that $1,000?
Marco:
And I would say, basically to repeat what I said earlier for a minute,
Marco:
The regular iMac is fine for almost anything.
Marco:
If what you're doing doesn't require the levels of performance or the higher ceilings of resources that the iMac Pro will offer, the regular iMac is totally fine.
Marco:
I used one myself, as I said, for three or four years, and it was great.
Marco:
The iMac Pro is also, what, about a year and a half old now?
Marco:
So it's not quite a level playing field.
Marco:
But what you get with the iMac Pro in general is you get higher ceilings.
Marco:
So if you need more than the number of cores or the amount of RAM or whatever that the regular iMac offers, that's kind of your only choice.
Marco:
You get space gray, which is cool.
Marco:
You get more Thunderbolt ports, which is useful to some people.
Marco:
I like just having more USB ports in general, which is nice.
Marco:
And you get that amazing cooling system and ECC RAM and things like that that just make it quieter and more reliable and more likely to last you a long time.
Marco:
But those are all kind of vague benefits for a lot of people or they're unimportant to a lot of people.
Marco:
And that might not be worth $1,000.
Marco:
So if you're really being value conscious but you want something high performance –
Marco:
I honestly can't say you should get the iMac Pro compared to a well-specced regular iMac now.
Marco:
I would still choose the iMac Pro because those things matter a lot to me.
Marco:
And if those things matter a lot to you, you should still get it too.
Marco:
It's a fantastic computer.
Marco:
And I'm still happier with my iMac Pro than I've ever been with any computer I've ever owned.
Marco:
So I just love this thing.
Marco:
But the regular iMacs are a pretty damn good value now if you can tolerate the thermal potential issues and stuff like that.
John:
a faster storage i think on the imac pro as well um yeah i just i i think i looked at the same email i recommended i didn't look at the prices but i said if the prices are comparable it's a no-brainer to get the imac pro for all the reasons you listed the prices aren't comparable then you haven't decided this is another thing that people think about for looking at the uh the uh imac lineup they're like wow if you take the top end one and you start specking it up it's practically into imac pro territory and they
John:
uh point that out as like a a downside or a mistake on apple's part but that's exactly how product lines should work if you go to the step down product and crank up all the options it should just meet the step up product with at the base model right that's you don't want to leave big gaps right and
John:
And it lets you make different trade-offs for similar prices.
John:
I think the gap is probably still bigger than it probably needs to be because ideally every product would be like that, that you would span the entire range of options and at the margins you would have to make a trade-off.
John:
Do I get the top-end product A or the bottom-end product B?
John:
And there should be explicable and explainable trade-offs, which there are in this case.
John:
And so I think it's great.
John:
It's just that these iMacs are still...
John:
lagging behind a little bit for what I hope is reasons that having to do with the next generation.
John:
And as for the case design, like most people don't think about it, but that was an interesting aspect of Jason's interview with the iMac product manager.
John:
The fact that one of the
John:
The reasons the iMac is purchased, the jobs to be done in the market, is part of it is to look really good in scenarios where people do see the backs and sides of it.
John:
Apple doesn't just do this for the heck of it.
John:
People like pretty computers, and people like pretty computers for a reason, very often because they're going to put them into a public place.
Yeah.
John:
As the iMac product manager, she's sort of tuned into all the reasons people might buy a computer, and that is definitely on the list.
John:
So I do appreciate that, which is probably the same reason why we're never going to have a height-adjustable stamp, because that would be ugly if they just want us to use Visa mounting or whatever.
John:
Although I still think that is...
John:
that's an opportunity like to get into pie in the sky territory like what can you do when the whole computer is just a screen and like you don't see any parts of it anyway like what more is there to do it's kind of like the ipad like well what can you do with the ipad it's just a screen you hold in your hands there are things you can do there are like the flat sides with the pencil that goes to it is a perfect example of a refinement it's still just a screen but uh it's improved in a way that is measurable and significant to customers
John:
trying to make an iMac that is basically just a screen better, one of the things that defines that product is it is a screen, and the screen interfaces with the person sitting in front of it, and that interface...
John:
benefits from the ability to get it just right.
John:
The right height, the right distance, all that other stuff.
John:
But that's difficult to do.
John:
Apple's taking many different runs at making the iMac screen adjustable with height and reach and everything.
John:
Some have been more successful than others.
John:
I think that is a worthy challenge of Apple's design team.
John:
I'm not sure they're ready to take it on quite yet.
John:
But eventually, when there is no more chin and face ID is built in and they all have all SSDs and all the other obvious things, there are other challenges to tackle.
John:
Uh, the stand is one how to deal with the ports because people really don't like reaching around behind the computer to get to them, but you also don't want to see them in the front.
John:
There are still very interesting challenges related to what we think of as a very boring computer.
John:
So the future is bright.
John:
If the iMac team needs a bunch of problems to solve, I can give them a nice list and they're all very hard problems.
Yeah.
Marco:
uh and so i don't expect them to all be solved right away but never let anyone tell you that oh there's nothing more they can do with the automatic it's just a screen there's plenty so you mentioned like two minutes ago like whether you want to buy like the top of one product line or the bottom of the of the one above it i'm curious like in general do you have any philosophies on that because i do i'm kind of wondering what yours are both of you
John:
uh i mean it really depends on like because what i said but where they meet like there will be differences it's not like these are actually the same product like it's not like you spec it up and you say huh that actually is the low-end imac it's not the low-end imac pro has other attributes so you'd have to look at those attributes in the case of the imac with my value system like ecc ram alone would make me take the imac pro just because
John:
If you're getting a computer with a lot of something, a lot of storage or a lot of RAM, it just increases the chances that something's going to go wrong.
John:
And if I'm paying a lot of money for something, again, I want this money to turn into something.
John:
If I can pay more money to have fewer problems, that's the work that I want my money to be doing.
John:
I don't want to take – it's like the equivalent of like –
John:
You want to get the very fastest Honda Civic you can or a Honda Accord that is maybe a little bit slower but is bigger and nicer.
John:
I tend to not like a product in a line that is pushed to the very, very limit because that's where I feel like where things go wrong and some aspects of it don't match.
John:
It's super expensive, but the seats...
John:
are uncomfortable because it is a bargain basement car, right?
John:
Right.
John:
It has a huge amount of RAM, but none of it's ECC.
John:
So you get 64 gigabytes of non-ECC RAM.
John:
It's not a casino I want to play in.
John:
So that's usually my philosophy.
John:
You've heard my philosophy a million times about the, you know,
John:
these are expensive things and my solution always when you can't afford it is to wait and save more money like i know that's my solution to everything as we know the person sitting in front of your computer is to wait i know it's not an easy solution but it is always available to you wait and save more money um so yeah that's my philosophy casey
Casey:
I feel like John just spent that entire time describing my car.
Casey:
Let's take something and crank it to 11.
Casey:
And yeah, I don't want that, right, John?
Casey:
So it's tough.
Casey:
I think, like, nothing that John said, I actually disagree with.
Casey:
But in my, if you look at my history, specifically with cars, you know, I got a 335 M Sport, which is as great a 3 Series you can get without being an M3.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
then I get a Golf R, which is as great a Golf you can get, but it's not an Audi.
Casey:
And so for me, I always try to get the best of the thing, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I will go to the next rung on the ladder, if you will.
Casey:
You could make a really good argument, especially in the past when the two cameras were only on the big phones, you could make a really good argument that the big phones were the best phones.
Casey:
I didn't feel that way, so what I ended up doing was typically maxing out or at the least getting a mid-range smaller phone.
Casey:
So my iPhone X, I honestly don't even remember what capacity this is, but I think it's a 256 if memory serves.
Casey:
But I got the best of the thing that was...
Casey:
in my price range and in the best of the thing that i wanted and that's what i did with with my car you know i didn't really want an audi for various and sundry reasons that we've been over a million times uh and so i got the best golf i could get and and that's that's what i tend to do but again it's not that i necessarily disagree with john i totally understand what john said and i think he's kind of right it's just if i look at myself that's not necessarily the the tact i take
Casey:
Marco?
Marco:
My strategy changes depending on what the product is.
Marco:
Like, some products, like, I've always used the 15-inch MacBook Pro as, like, a really great baseline of, like, I think that is one of the best values much of the time in Apple's lineup because, like, the base model, 15-inch MacBook Pro, and
Marco:
Because to achieve base models, the base model is almost always a better value of something than the base model plus upgrades of that same product.
Marco:
Because the upgrades are always overpriced, especially with Apple.
Marco:
But this applies to lots of companies.
Marco:
This isn't just them.
Marco:
And so what's nice is if you can get a base model of a mid-range or high-end product line.
Marco:
Because then, like, the baseline of, like, you know, Apple's not going to make that many variations of the same product to hit low price points.
Marco:
So, like, the 15-inch, like, every 15-inch for a while had 16 gigs of RAM.
Marco:
You couldn't even choose it.
Marco:
Like, that was just, like, the preset.
Marco:
Like, it was 16 gigs of RAM on the 15-inch, no matter what you did.
Marco:
And so even the base model, therefore, had 16 gigs of RAM.
Marco:
And there's stuff like that.
Marco:
A lot of times in the lineup, there's choices that they've made the base model basic in some ways, but maybe you don't care about those.
Marco:
Maybe they gave you the low-end CPU, but it was only 15% slower than the fastest one.
Marco:
And so that doesn't matter to most people.
Marco:
So you get it, and you get this amazing laptop for not too bad a price because you didn't pay for any of the pricey upgrades.
Marco:
Depending on the product, you can achieve things like that.
Marco:
Whereas, as John mentioned, with cars a lot of times, you might pay $30,000 for a souped-up, optioned-up version of a car, but it still has the $16,000 car's seats or dashboard or whatever else.
Marco:
That kind of does irritate me.
Marco:
On the other side, sometimes what is done to achieve the next step-ups base model
Marco:
Cuts out things that are important to you.
Marco:
So, for instance, if you were choosing between a really nice Accord and a low-end BMW, the Accord will probably have better features at the same price than the BMW.
Marco:
Because the BMW has probably cut a lot of things down to hit that price point.
Marco:
But you might not care about some of those and you might want that feel of driving that BMW.
Marco:
And, you know, and that might get you like that might be worth it to you to be like, oh, my God, this feels great.
Marco:
And I can't believe I only paid, you know, whatever a million dollars BMW is charging for the three series these days.
Marco:
Like whatever it is.
Marco:
God, it's so expensive.
Marco:
But like it depends on what you value and what has been cut to achieve the next product ups base model.
Marco:
it's sometimes it makes sense to stick with the lower end money and get like more features for the money because like if you get like the maxed out version you are getting like that company trying their hardest you're getting like the thing that they make that is the best thing they could possibly give you
Marco:
unfortunately it might also be a little bit out of their comfort zone because it's like the highest end of what they're making but you're getting the best thing they can possibly give you and so you can often get really cool stuff there but on the other end it's like when you get the base model you're getting like the absolute cheapest this company can sell you their awesome thing for and sometimes that's a better deal
John:
I just want to point out the car analogies are terrible in this particular situation just because, like, the BMW 3 Series is a great example.
John:
It's like the 5 Series is not a, like, we're talking about the iMac and the iMac Pro.
John:
The iMac Pro is an obvious step up.
John:
You can have any iMac for free.
John:
Which one do you want?
John:
Just pick the Pro.
John:
It's the best in all the ways.
John:
But if they said that about BMWs, the 5 is not necessarily better than the 3 if what you're looking for is like a nimble sports car.
John:
It's a different size class, right?
John:
It's like saying, should I get a maxed out 15-inch laptop or an iMac?
John:
It's like, well, do you want a laptop?
John:
It's like, well, the iMac's better, right?
John:
No, it's a different thing.
John:
The M3 is better than the base 5.
John:
Let me just say that.
John:
It's easy.
John:
It messes up the analogy entirely because it doesn't match up to the way computers work.
John:
um the hot hatches are though casey had that right that part right are an example of taking a car that probably really isn't designed or shaped or envisioned or anything to be any kind of a sporty car and saying what if we just make it really fast it's like all right well you can do that i guess oh my word all right so we're only on tuesday is there anything else we need to discuss about tuesday
John:
uh just briefly they they they bumped the iMac pro options too so you can uh you can get 256 gigabytes of ram uh for five thousand two hundred dollars they and they put in faster gpus and they made 64 gigs of ram cheaper still too expensive but you know whatever pro prices um and they reduced the price of a bunch of options so the iMac pro is mostly unchanged as long like it's a new computer but they adjusted a bunch of prices and gave you some new options for even faster parts which is good
Marco:
yeah i mean especially like the gpu side of it you know we've been saying for years like on on a product like like a pro product like this and they did the same thing on the 15 inch uh what about two months ago uh where like on a pro product like this intel is slow we know intel is slow to make progress and there as far as i know i don't think there's any workstation cpus uh
Marco:
in the Xeon class, that Apple could update the iMac Pro to.
Marco:
I think the current CPUs that have been sold on the iMac Pro for the last year and a half, whatever it's been, are still the best Xeon workstation CPUs that Intel will sell them.
Marco:
So there is no available CPU upgrade.
Marco:
But GPUs change more quickly.
Marco:
And so Apple has...
Marco:
given us a new GPU option.
Marco:
And I don't follow the GPU world enough to know whether it's a particularly good one or not, but I think people seem to seem to like it.
Marco:
So that's great.
Marco:
That's great news that like they didn't just sit here selling the same ancient GPUs as the only options for the entire, you know, probably three to four year lifespan of this product.
Marco:
Instead, they gave us a new GPU update like halfway through.
Marco:
That's awesome.
Marco:
And we want them to do more of that.
Marco:
And so far, they did it on the 15 inch.
Marco:
They did it on this.
Marco:
That's pretty good.
John:
And they reduced the price of the old GPU options.
John:
And they reduced the price of a lot of old options.
John:
Like, how much does it cost to get a 2TB SSD?
John:
They reduced the price, which is practically unheard of.
John:
Like, to do an existing computer to say, yesterday, if you wanted a 2TB SSD, it would have been $800.
John:
But today, it's $600.
John:
They almost never do that.
John:
And it's so weird to see them doing price adjustments on their most expensive, highest margin on iMac.
John:
But I'm all for it.
John:
So...
John:
The iMac Pro continues to be a really good computer.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Man, I love this computer so much.
Casey:
Yeah, I can imagine.
Casey:
I'm getting a little bit of envy, me and my 2015 iMac.
Casey:
It's so old, John.
Casey:
You don't understand.
John:
Save your pennies, Casey.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Like I have some of their t-shirts and I've washed them now probably seven or eight times and they're still like really, really soft.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right, so finally we come to today as we record, which is Wednesday.
Casey:
And I was greeted shortly after I woke up this morning with new AirPods.
Casey:
And I cannot, and I mean this genuinely, I cannot remember a time I have insta-bought something from Apple while knowing nothing about it as quickly as I did these new AirPods.
Casey:
Because as I've lamented on the show before...
Casey:
My AirPods, which I got very shortly after they were released, what was it, late 2016, 17?
Casey:
They're getting old.
Casey:
As many people have reported, their batteries are getting very old.
Casey:
And I am desperate for new ones because I love these things so darn much, but I can't go more than about 15, 20 minutes without them dying or at least one of them dying.
Casey:
So I spent $210 after tax on a new set of AirPods with the Qi charging case, and I am really freaking pumped for them to come in next week.
John:
Here in Texas, I spent $214.
John:
I bought them off the tweet.
John:
The tweet comes in my timeline that says, new AirPods, tap, tap, tap, buy, buy, buy, instant.
John:
Instant buy.
John:
Honestly, I was at the point where if I didn't think new AirPods are coming out, I would have already bought...
John:
the same exact product a second time just to deal with the battery thing.
John:
And we discussed this on the last show.
John:
It's like, Oh, Apple selling disposable stuff, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Like there is no better secret battery technology that they could be using with the AirPods.
John:
This is it.
John:
Lithium ion batteries.
John:
They're tiny.
John:
After a while they start losing capacity.
John:
I use mine every single day for long periods of time.
John:
i love them they're great instantly bought second pair these will just become hand-me-downs the only thing i threw in the mix this time um is that i got mine engraved because now we're about to have three airpods rattling around the house one of which is ostensibly owned by a child so i need some way to keep these things straight i guess i know lots of people like to use stickers and little dental floss stickers and stuff like that but i'm not a sticker person
John:
Starting with the engraving.
John:
I'm assuming, Casey, you got the one with the wireless charging case.
John:
Yeah, you did because that was $200.
John:
To be clear, they still sell it with the non-wireless charging case, like the one you have to just plug in.
John:
And that one is the old price of $160, but they're still the new AirPods.
John:
They're not last year's or whatever, yesterday's model.
John:
They are the new AirPods with the new features that we'll talk about in a second.
John:
just the case doesn't have wireless charging and the second question a lot of people had which is apple apple makes clear in text but i wish they made clear in pictures the wireless charging case still has a lightning port on the bottom it's not just wireless it's wireless in addition to the other stuff yeah i had to like read the paragraphs below it to figure that out i so did i they i was looking where it's show me the bottom of it but they didn't show it but just to be clear apple does include that text if you want to read the words um
John:
Um, so what features this thing has, it's got, Hey Siri, which we all knew was coming, which means that you don't have to tap or touch the air pod in any way.
John:
You can just say the words, Hey Siri, and it will activate.
John:
And then, so now you have a way to change the volume up or down without touching the air pod, which is nice.
John:
As long as you don't mind talking to yourself.
John:
um they're powered they're powered by the all-new apple h1 chip burning another letter in our quest for what the hell the uh the mac arm chips are going to be called although i don't think anyone else picked h uh the things they're touting for it is twice as fast when switching between active devices which what is your interpretation of that line is it saying like i'm using them with my mac but now i'm going to get up from my desk and i would like to use them with my phone and so you tap the little
Marco:
thingamabobber and control center and then tap airpods and watch the little spinner that's two times faster yes that's what they're referring to they said it i think somewhere in the press release something like that they actually said like one switch between like an iphone and a mac or something like that all right i mean that's good because i don't like that thing well uh 1.5 times faster connect time for phone calls what is that supposed to mean i just i love that this is an update to headphones that people are excited about speed upgrades
John:
yeah well there are operations that are slow but I'm just not even sure what they mean with like they mean like when someone's calls how long does it take for you to pick up faster connection time so let me give you a theory and the way I'm going to do this is a little bit of a story so just bear with me for one second
Casey:
A lot of times when I have my AirPods connected to my phone and then I trigger the person in the tube, not the person in the tube because it's the phone, but you know what I mean?
Casey:
I almost said the keyword and so I don't want to say that.
John:
We said it like nine times already and Marco's not going to bleep it so people just have to deal with it.
Casey:
Well, at least I tried.
John:
Phil said it on stage in front of a crowd of people.
John:
Like, I think we're okay.
John:
Yeah, but he dropped out the four kilohertz range when he said that, so it won't activate the devices.
Casey:
Yeah, that's what it was.
Casey:
So in any case, the point I'm trying to say is when I do Hey Dingus, or if I even just mash down on the side button, I believe, and I'm probably wrong, but I think there's some sort of mode switch from just audio playback to like headset mode.
Casey:
And in order to do that, it pauses for a second.
Casey:
And actually, lately, it hasn't been able to hear my AirPods.
Casey:
I don't know if it's an AirPod issue, a software issue, whatever.
Casey:
But it takes a moment for it to switch from audio playback mode to headset mode.
Casey:
And I think that's what this is about.
John:
All right, and the other one is 30% lower gaming latency.
John:
And I put scare quotes around gaming because this is a weird marketing copy.
John:
What they're trying to say is there's less latency for the audio, which means that if you're playing a game in which you have some sort of input and you do some action, like hit a fire button, and the game makes a bloop sound because you fired something, you want to hear that bloop as soon as you see it fired on the screen.
John:
And whatever amount of lag the sort of wireless interface is adding will become apparent to you
John:
Much more apparent in a sort of real-time interactive application like a game than it would be, say, in video.
John:
Because in video, they can and do account for the latency and just say, well, we'll just show you the frame that we know you're supposed to be seeing by the time you hear the sound that you're hearing.
John:
But in interactive games, they can't do that because the next frame you're going to see is dependent on your input, which is real-time, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But what I think this means is the latency is lower, period.
John:
And that's really important in gaming.
John:
It's not as if there's only lower latency in gaming.
John:
And I think I saw just before the show, someone had torn these open and looked at the guts and said, like, all, you know, there's basically the H1 chip.
John:
What was the other one?
John:
It was like W1.
John:
W1.
John:
Anyway.
John:
it has an all new name yada yada but like how do you get all these features like that it's that it's more powerful hardware in there presumably maybe on a new process i don't know if the other one was seven nanomeres i don't know if this one is but the the little tear down speculation i saw was like the power of an iphone 4 in each of your ears like it's just if you look at what's inside i don't know if that's true but if you look at if you look at what's inside the airpods just think of if you look at how many little components are wedged in there and what they're able to do it's it's a
John:
it's an amazing miracle of miniaturization and you know and power computing power in such a tiny space it's very futuristic there's a reason these this is such a great product and on the outside it just looks like one beautiful as we said before one beautiful with a uniform white solid that doesn't fit marco's ear sorry marco but on the inside very complicated it's
John:
one of Apple's best products they've introduced in a long time, which is why it has so many fans, which is why it's so tragic that Marco has weird ears.
Marco:
It kills me.
Marco:
It isn't just me.
Marco:
I've seen a few other people today say, hey, me too.
Marco:
The only thing that I wish they had revised is
Marco:
A lot of people are able to find better comfort with AirPods by having some kind of silicone thing that goes around them.
Marco:
And the challenge with AirPods before, with those things, is that the charging case is so important that you have to use it very frequently.
Marco:
And if you have any kind of silicone thing on the AirPods, they don't fit in the case anymore because they're perfectly snug.
Marco:
There's no room in there.
Marco:
So I was hoping that Apple, with the next generation of AirPods, would either...
Marco:
adjust the sizing somewhat, make maybe multiple sizes, heaven forbid, or at least better accommodate people who need to use things like this to make them fit by changing the shape of the cage or something about the way they charge or something like that, and they didn't do those things.
Marco:
So it seems like it's exactly the same as it was before.
Marco:
So if they didn't fit you before, they're probably not going to fit you now.
Marco:
that's you know that's unfortunate but i have to realize like i'm the minority here it seems like everyone else loves their pods and they fit just fine so i you know i have to sit this one out but everyone else can really enjoy it and i'm i'm proud of you i'm proud of you all for having this thing and you've got a lot of the other headphones i hear anyway so
John:
i do yeah fine like this is just the second generation and i feel like this is kind of delayed like was it uh mark german was saying that actually actually what was supposed to ship now was like a new water resistant model that was very different and this one was supposed to have shipped last year yada yada but the point is these are only the second airpods apple has ever released i fully expect in a few years the airpod line will have been diversified in some way
John:
Maybe just colors, but I think that it's, you know, in several years from now, maybe three years, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that they offer either differently shaped AirPods or AirPods in two sizes because they're trying to do the one size fits all thing.
John:
And I think they did probably a good job of finding the right balance.
John:
But it's never going to fit all.
John:
And so at a certain point in a mature product line, you start to diversify it to fill the needs of the minority.
John:
So I think that will happen eventually.
John:
I don't think AirPods are an unfixable thing that will be this size, shape, and color forever.
John:
So you just keep waiting and we'll get to you eventually.
John:
And as for the H1 chip, like the W1 chip, the W1 was in Beats, I think?
Marco:
Yeah, there was, I think, a Beats solo model.
Marco:
Yeah, there were some Power Beats or something that it was in.
John:
Any non-Apple headphones to get it?
Marco:
No, no, no, no.
Marco:
Just Apple and Beats.
John:
Right, right.
John:
Anyway, Apple refers to the H1 as like a headphone chip, not an AirPods chip.
John:
So I expect Beats to start sporting the H1 as well.
John:
which, you know, plenty of room for this.
John:
It's not a miniaturization miracle in Beats, but...
John:
This is more room in there.
John:
But anyway, I'm really happy that they revised this product just in time as everyone's batteries start to die on their AirPods.
John:
And yeah, I can't wait for battery technology to catch up with this product because it's very, very close to perfect already.
John:
It's just one size tweak and one new set of battery technology away from being very nearly perfect.
Marco:
One cool thing about it, too, that I heard some people point out earlier is that if you had previously mapped one of the double-tap gestures to trigger Siri, now you don't have to do that anymore.
Marco:
So, you know, one of the biggest challenges with the AirPods is that you really only have, like, two buttons of sorts.
Marco:
Like, you can double-tap left ear or right ear, and you can assign them to different things.
Marco:
If one of those was Siri before...
Marco:
you just freed up a button.
Marco:
So now you can just rely on using Hey Siri, and then whatever button you used for Siri before, you can map that to something else.
Marco:
That's pretty cool.
John:
I also heard lots of people hoping that they can turn off the Hey Siri feature because they assume that listening all the time costs battery life, and they never want to use that feature, so they're willing to, can I get that battery life back?
John:
But A, I think it probably doesn't take a lot of battery life because that's part of the reason we had to wait for the second gen for it to come out.
John:
And B, I think the times that it's useful, like when you have gunk all over your hands from cooking in the kitchen and you're not too embarrassed to talk to yourself, far outweigh whatever extra battery life you're going to get from...
John:
uh, that working.
John:
I think it only listens when it, when it knows that you're talking anyway.
John:
So it has some sort of technology to do that.
John:
So we'll see.
John:
Uh, but I can't wait to get these minor coming.
John:
I think like the 27th or something, which I think is the first delivery window, even with the engraving.
John:
Um, but we'll see what happens.
Um,
Marco:
Also, I don't think any of us thought that it could actually be Qi charging.
Marco:
Yeah, good point.
Marco:
Our commentary, the ethos we've been working with so far up till today is they have to wait for air power because a Qi pad can't fit on the back of an AirPods case.
John:
I thought I brought that.
John:
Maybe I didn't.
John:
I meant to interject last time you said that.
John:
A friend of mine at work has...
John:
uh a case with a chi charging coil stuck to the outside of it it's some weird knockoff thing like it plugs into the lighting port or whatever but it totally can fit like i've seen it i've seen it fit and so i i mean to point out every time i brought this up that size wise you can do a chi charging in that space i've actually physically seen it work it was ugly it was like the coils on the outside of the case but if you look at the width and height you're like oh yeah that'll fit and so it does so that's good that's good
Marco:
also uh we should also point out like at the moment we're recording on wednesday night air power does not exist at the moment we don't know it's entirely possible that apple could be releasing more things thursday and or friday of this week that will be after we've recorded but thursday it will be before we've published
John:
so it's entirely possible that you listen to this thinking those idiots didn't even know they were about to release air power or an ipod touch or something yeah if the mac pro comes out between now and release apple will never be forgiven but i think we have to record another episode if that happens in general apple tends to want to release things on tuesday uh and if they have to prefer our first half of the week or second half of the week they want the first half uh so i imagine apple doesn't want to release any good news on a friday
John:
But Thursday's not a Friday, but it's still past Wednesday, so I'm thinking that we are at the tail end of this stuff.
Marco:
I'm losing track of these moving cups here.
John:
What I'm saying is beginning of the week is better than end of the week, and we are just clearing Wednesday, so I feel like we are done with announcements for this week.
John:
But who knows?
John:
Especially announcements that no one cares about, like the iPod Touch.
John:
They did also announce the spring colors for watch bands and phone cases.
John:
I forget what day that was announced.
John:
That was today, yeah.
Marco:
A little disappointed they didn't bring back the nylon straps, but it seems like I guess those aren't coming back yet.
John:
or ever i feel like that's the we're scraping the bottom of the barrel like if air power was going to come out you think you think it would have come out with the the airpods that said there are still persistent rumors that the ios 12.2 beta there are still references to air power but that doesn't mean it's gonna ship and it's like oh air power has been put into manufacturing it's a go like i i guess it's still coming eventually like it's not canceled the rumor is not air power totally canceled the rumor is air power someday it will come so that's the state we are right now at 10 o'clock on a wednesday
Marco:
also uh kyle seth gray in the chat reminds me how about tim cook's game on twitter being so awesome like so first he does the tim apple thing which was great and then the uh the announcement earlier this week of the ipad mini tim cook kind of teased like right before it happened or right as it happened with like a doodle of him like drawing hello with the pencil on the ipad mini and then today it was that same picture but photoshopped in instead of the hello doodle was a doodle of airpods
John:
And he had an AirPod photoshopped in his ear.
John:
I don't think Tim Cook is running his own Twitter account, just to be clear.
John:
But yeah, it was cute.
Marco:
My theory is that the Tim Apple thing, he finally cracked.
Marco:
He's kept up his solid, kind of boring, but reliable...
Marco:
face for so long and i think the tim apple thing like broke him and i think now he's letting it out like he's like now he's we're finally seeing like oh tim actually has personality like you know he's been keeping a bottle up all this time and now he he's like f it i'm done like we're seeing him like actually being like you know more engaging and i kind of like it
John:
I wonder if he even knows his PR team tweeted those things through his account.
John:
It's hard to tell because he does cheer on like his favorite sports teams and that's totally him.
John:
But then these ones I'm like, all right, the marketing people are posting those.
John:
That's pretty awesome though.
Casey:
Yeah, I've enjoyed it.
Casey:
Okay, so this is a weird thing, but do we have predictions for the next two days of this week?
Casey:
I mean, it seems so odd, but I mean, do you think air power is coming this week?
Marco:
I see.
Casey:
I'm going to say yes.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
He believes in the air power.
Marco:
In the last seven days, we've had WWDC announced, all these products announced.
Marco:
It does seem that the event they're having next week that is most likely to be about subscription services, news, games, whatever, etc.
Marco:
We should probably talk about that.
Marco:
It does seem like
Marco:
They are really clear in the decks so that there is no hardware left for that announcement because they're going to be focusing so much on what the announcement is that's not hardware.
Marco:
It would not surprise me.
Marco:
There have been strong rumors of all or most of these products being released in, quote, soon or spring or first half of this year or whatever.
Marco:
There have also been rumors of AirPower and a new iPod Touch shipping in the first half of this year.
Marco:
And so I think it's actually very plausible that in the next two days we're going to get those things.
Marco:
Because it seems like they're really, really clearing out the decks hard so that next week all the attention can be all about that event and the new services and the new TV and whatever else they're doing.
Marco:
And they don't want anything left over for people to be asking about or expecting or complaining about.
Marco:
So I think it's actually very plausible to have both the iPod Touch and AirPower shipped in the next 48 hours.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I would be stunned if the iPod Touch gets an update, but AirPower, I'm really 50-50 about.
Casey:
I don't know what to say.
Casey:
I think if I'm going to wager a guess, I'm going to say no, but I'm right on the fence.
John:
Believe in the iPod Touch more than the AirPower just because iPod Touch can be released on a Thursday.
John:
It's a no big deal.
John:
And if that's still going to be a product line at all, do what you do with the iPads.
John:
Make an updated version of it.
John:
I mean, they updated the Mini for crying out loud.
Marco:
Why not the iPod Touch?
Marco:
And all of these products are also things that don't really require an event.
Marco:
They're kind of like boring or spec bump updates.
Marco:
They're the perfect press release things.
Marco:
AirPower is a brand new product, but because it has been so delayed, I don't think they're going to want to make a big deal out of it when it ships.
John:
I thought I was doing bad news on a Friday.
John:
AirPower really is basically bad news.
Marco:
Like, let's just sneak it out on a Friday.
John:
We're not taking any questions at this time.
John:
It's AirPower.
John:
We told you about it a year and change ago.
John:
Never mind.
John:
Yeah, it'll come out Friday at 5 p.m.
John:
On the side of AirPower is the references to it in iOS 12.2 beta, which is something compelling, although there's been various references to AirPower in various Apple software beta releases forever.
John:
But on the other side, how can you release the AirPods and not release AirPower with them?
John:
I mean, maybe with them is tomorrow.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm going to say I'm willing to believe the iPod Touch
John:
and air power i am below 50 on not that it's ever going to be released but it'll be released like in 48 hours because i feel like if it could have been released in 48 hours they should have done it with the airpods so anyway that's where i'm coming down and like honestly i also wouldn't be surprised if today was the last day so i the least likely scenario for as far as i'm concerned is both the ipod touch and airpods are released over the next two days that's my least likely scenario it's wild it'll also be the coolest obviously but well
Casey:
It's super wild, though.
Casey:
I'm loving this Apple firing on all cylinders.
Casey:
This has been really fun to watch each day.
Marco:
They're cleaning up and unifying and patching holes so much.
Marco:
They're just sweeping away so many old, stale products, neglected things, things that have been rumored forever but seem like they were never coming.
Marco:
They're knocking them all down all in one week.
Marco:
It's pretty awesome.
Marco:
This is a really fun week to be an Apple fan.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Anything else before?
Casey:
Oh, we don't even have time to talk about the next week's event, do we?
Casey:
I guess we can.
Casey:
Well, we can take two seconds.
John:
I mean, we should probably talk about it.
John:
Yeah.
John:
We've already talked about, I mean, what was rumored to talk about as a social subscription services.
John:
And we had an entire show, maybe show and a half where we talked about what can Apple saw you a subscription to and how can it combine subscriptions and what are the pros and cons of that?
John:
So I don't think we need to rehash that.
John:
But prediction wise,
John:
That's what everyone has always been expecting, and with today's releases, it just nails it down farther.
John:
They're not going to announce new hardware.
John:
They're not going to announce the Mac Pro.
John:
They're going to announce subscription services, probably their video service, probably their news service, whatever, in some combination.
John:
Like, it's the most sort of business-focused Apple event that I can think of in a while now, because...
John:
yeah it's about products like you know there'll surely be some software involved that you can get but it's mostly about business models how has apple decided to charge you money for stuff that it delivers to and the stuff is essentially content through you know either existing applications or new applications and that's what we're all waiting for not show me the new piece of hardware not show me the amazing new app it's
John:
show me like a price sheet and show me the content.
John:
Um, there were a couple of good articles floating around about here, all the, the, here's all the video content that Apple has paid for or is in the process of paying for it to have created.
John:
And it's a surprisingly long list.
John:
Supposedly they have five of them already done in the can.
John:
Uh, and you know, it's, the list is like 10 or 20 items with big names and famous people.
John:
And you can go on the list and say, not interested, not interested, not interested, but eventually you probably get the one you do.
John:
I might check that out.
John:
So I'm I'm most excited about the video service.
John:
Maybe that's not going to be.
John:
I assume it's going to be the big one, but maybe that's not the thing that most people are going to be interested in.
John:
But and maybe it won't matter because it'll all be in one bundle.
John:
But I'm thinking that pretty much no matter what happens during this event.
John:
After the event or as soon as I possibly can, I'm going to sign up for Apple's video service.
John:
Maybe that's not a big reach because I sign up for every video service in the entire world.
John:
I'm currently paying for all of them because right now the new season of Star Trek is going on.
John:
So I am subscribed to CBS, but then I always unsubscribe after it ends.
John:
But yeah, I'm looking forward to the event and I am looking forward to seeing how they bundle stuff.
John:
Oh, and the latest rumor about the bundle name is Apple Core, but I'm not sure how much stake I put in that.
John:
That's the worst name.
Marco:
I mean, first of all, Apple's marketing names are often terrible when we first hear them.
Marco:
But boy, that's a bad one because the core of an Apple is the bad part you throw away.
Marco:
It tastes terrible.
Marco:
Nobody wants it.
Yeah.
John:
but they do have you know core animation core image core storage which i know are techier type things or whatever like i i will never at this point there's no name so bad that i will put it past apple uh all i would say is i do not prefer apple core obviously it's not going to be called apple prime but that's how i've been referring to i think we went through the names before anyway that that is part of the challenge is is naming this service assuming it's a bundle if it's not a bundle then casey gets to call it apple video or
John:
uh top of his ear i think was saying call it front row remember front row oh yeah yeah which kind of makes some sense but like you're not really in the front row for tv like there's no audio like anyway also the front row for movies kind of sucks yeah well i mean but they called it they called front row front row when it was about watching television and movies i think it's more of like a theater thing you want to be in the front row so you're close to the stage do you
John:
Yeah, some people do.
John:
You want to see the people on the stage.
John:
You want to see the sweat flying off their brow.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I think the name... People keep saying whether it's going to be Apple TV or Apple Video, but as we keep hearing more and more rumblings about there being more to this, whether it includes the magazine thing, the news thing, whether it includes games as a rumor thing, which I think is very exciting.
Marco:
Assuming it's going to be sold as one big bundle, which I really think and hope it should be, as I've said before...
Marco:
i don't think it's going to be tv or video i think it is going to be something more generic i i hope it's not core because that's a terrible name but i i think whatever it is like it's it's going to sound weird at first uh because it is going to be probably some generic word like that um you know whether it's apple plus apple prime you know who knows what it'll be apple air i don't know core core has the event like when i see apple core i'm like well that's got to be the one that that includes iCloud storage right
John:
Because when I see Core, I think it includes subscription services and other junk.
John:
I don't know why it makes me think that, but I don't actually think they're going to include, like, iCloud Storage.
John:
So that's why I feel like Apple Core is going to be a bad name.
John:
It doesn't make me think, put it this way, it doesn't make me think of, like, music and television shows and movies and news.
John:
It just makes me think of, like, the heart of Apple.
John:
And, yeah, I don't know.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm actually, I'm thinking, like, God, I hope it isn't Core.
Marco:
I could believe,
Marco:
apple tv i could video i don't think sounds good i also still would not rule out the possibility that they just still call it apple music and just add things to apple music that don't make sense and i think my my like reach like remote possibility risky pick kind of thing is what if they call it itunes
John:
Yeah, I think we mentioned that in the Apple Music show and I was just thinking it as well.
Marco:
Yeah, because iTunes has stopped meaning anything on mobile and it's going to soon probably mean nothing on desktop because I'm assuming that the future of Apple Music apps on the Mac is going to be a marzipan version of the Music app.
John:
um so you know it's going to stop meeting something on desktop soon too i actually think calling it itunes is not totally outrageous i i think apple is self-aware enough to know that the brand equity in the name itunes is on the downward slope yeah maybe yeah but it's i don't know even even non-tech nerds don't particularly have good associations with that word these days
Marco:
yeah i mean i'm hoping they call it something really boring and like apple plus i think apple plus is fine like just call it apple plus that's great or you know something like that but playstation has that it's all you can't use it playstation plus yeah but who no one knows about that yeah the lawyers do
John:
Yeah, there's not a lot of great names for it.
John:
The best I can hope for their naming is that it'll be highfalutin, that it will be something aspirational and...
John:
you know i don't know how to sophisticated uh like aiming higher than just like apple music apple music is does not aim particularly high but it also is not the same like itunes is sort of like we're casual and cool we got some tunes man apple music is kind of like straight ahead straight ahead boring whatever but like
Marco:
Yeah, Apple Music is the iOS 7 version of the name.
Marco:
It's like, we've stripped all personality out of this.
Marco:
We are cold and from space.
John:
Yeah, and then the highfalutin version would be like a word that evokes the idea of music, but that isn't so boringly strictly related to music.
John:
So Front Row would actually kind of be a highfalutin name, because it alludes to the idea of... I don't think they're going to use it, but that's what I have in mind, but...
John:
like i said nothing nothing will surprise me anymore with apple names there's no more there's no more system you can use you can't look at a name and say that sounds silly apple will never do that it's like nope that's not that's not the way things work anymore if they ever did yeah i think whatever it is it's going to be a really weird sounding name for about a week and then we're all going to get used to it just like all the other names yep unless they use roman numerals then we'll never get used to it yeah
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So Mask ATP?
Casey:
Let's do it.
Casey:
Jacob Ford writes, Hey, Marco, why are you so into leasing cars but not so into leasing iPhones?
Marco:
um pretty easy really and he's referring to the iphone upgrade program and why i don't do that at least currently uh main reason is leasing cars brings it reduces financial risk basically like if you if you buy a car newer years whatever the case may be you are taking on more uncertainty with the finances of that over time because at some point you are going to probably have to you know you have to service it at some point if you're going to keep it for a long time and have it be used especially
Marco:
casey uh you're gonna have to service it and and that could be you know that's a big unknown and even if you buy new and just you know trade it in after you know three to five years whatever else you're taking a risk on what its long-term value is going to be with iphones you're not really doing that like you you kind of know what they're going to be worth it's a it's a much smaller investment compared to a car um and so there's less need for that and then also the inflexibility of leasing is
Marco:
is that you tend to be inflexible on timing.
Marco:
Using the iPhone upgrade program, you do have some restrictions.
Marco:
It's better than a car lease.
Marco:
You can make things easier and buy things out early and whatever else, but you're losing a lot of flexibility.
Marco:
And with a car, I don't really care.
Marco:
The inflexibility of a lease works fine for me.
Marco:
When a new model of car comes out, I don't really, really, really need to have it on day one.
Marco:
whereas like on an iphone i want complete flexibility i want zero obligations i want to be able to buy a new iphone whenever i want to and walk in on day one and get the new one so i can do whatever i want with it like that's what i want and so that's that's why i don't do it and i also the upgrade program assumes that you want apple care and you're willing to pay for it i don't buy apple care so it's stuff like that like the there's little motivation for me to do it
Casey:
I think that's fair.
Casey:
I mean, on paper, if I was an AppleCare person, there'd be no reason not to do the iPhone upgrade program.
Casey:
But I, like you, am not an AppleCare person, which once has been annoying, but generally speaking, has been fine.
Casey:
Knock on glass.
Casey:
So we'll see how this works out.
Casey:
But for me, I also don't want to do that whole lease thing.
Casey:
Plus, you have to get a credit check, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
And there's some hidden agita there that I just don't want to deal with.
Casey:
Continuing, David McCookie writes, Hey, would Marco still recommend using a 2015 MacBook Pro in 2019?
Casey:
I cringe at recommending it, but I cringe more at recommending Pro machines with defective keyboards.
Marco:
This is a tougher question.
Marco:
I mean, as time goes on, it becomes less and less advisable to use such an old machine.
Marco:
Because over time, like, you know, if you buy a 2015 machine today in 2019...
Marco:
You're still buying four-year-old parts, and a lot of that 2015 machine was not particularly up-to-date.
Marco:
The processors in it, I think, are from 2013, really, or the core of them is from 2013, something like that.
Marco:
You're buying old parts.
Marco:
If you can get a really good deal on it and it's in really good shape, I'd say that's still a great buy.
Marco:
But as time goes on, how good of a deal it has to be increases.
Marco:
So I wouldn't recommend paying the new price for it now because at that point you're paying a lot for pretty old hardware.
Marco:
But if you can get a good deal on it, it's still a fantastic machine.
Marco:
And if it fits your needs, it's still a fantastic machine.
Marco:
And
Marco:
I would say for most people, it probably does fit their needs and probably better than the current ones, unfortunately.
Marco:
The 2015 is still an awesome machine, but it is getting pretty old, so adjust your price expectations accordingly.
Casey:
Yeah, I think that's fair.
Casey:
And then finally, leading or finishing up the all Marco-esque ATP, Chris Adamson, actually, in Marco's defense, I chose all these questions.
Casey:
It's not him.
Casey:
Chris Adamson writes, hey, I'm idly wondering, and this is within the context of Overcast, is for CarPlay versus Apple Watch, which is more interesting, more difficult, and used more.
Casey:
So you can take those however you would like.
Marco:
Used more is the easy one.
Marco:
I have analytics on how much people use CarPlay or how much they have the watch installed and use the watch app.
Marco:
The Apple Watch is used more by a factor of roughly three with my current data.
Casey:
I'm surprised it's that little actually.
Casey:
I would have assumed a lot more.
Casey:
CarPlay is very popular.
Marco:
CarPlay gets more usage than a lot of features do.
Marco:
It gets way more usage than the website, for instance.
Marco:
It gets way more usage than parts of it.
Marco:
The offline playback of the Apple Watch app gets way less usage than CarPlay gets.
Marco:
Orders of magnitude less usage.
Marco:
Certain things like chapter support.
Marco:
get similar usage as CarPlay.
Marco:
The Apple Watch, though, gets really high usage.
Marco:
It's one of the reasons why I find it important to develop an Apple Watch app, even though I personally don't really use the Apple Watch very often, because it's just that big.
Marco:
And CarPlay, similarly.
Marco:
CarPlay is on...
Marco:
almost all new cars now, or at least it's available on almost all new cars as an option.
Marco:
And so it's gotten very popular very quickly.
Marco:
So use more is watch, but CarPlay is no slouch.
Marco:
As for more difficult and more interesting, which are kind of, I'm not sure how I should define more interesting, I certainly have a favorite, and that is I greatly prefer working on the CarPlay app because working on the Apple Watch app is more difficult.
Marco:
The tooling and the software around both are pretty rough.
Marco:
I have a little CarPlay setup on my desk where it's literally a CarPlay head unit strapped to a 12-volt power supply in a plastic box that I dremeled out some holes in to, like, mount the thing in and get some wires out and everything.
Marco:
it's a really like, you know, homebrew kind of setup and I don't have any skills in the area of constructing things.
Marco:
So it's ugly as hell.
Marco:
And yeah, it's, it's a terrible setup, but I had to build this hardware set up because while there is a CarPlay simulator as part of the iOS simulator, it's not very reliable and it's not very representative of real world hardware.
Marco:
So testing and my car doesn't offer CarPlay.
Marco:
Thank you, Tesla for being so stubborn.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So I have to test this, you know, using this crazy test right on my desk.
Marco:
Well, building an Apple Watch app is not that much less cumbersome because the Apple Watch simulator is also pretty buggy and pretty limited and has things about it that do not reflect the way the hardware behaves.
Marco:
And so you have to frequently test on Apple Watch actual hardware and...
Marco:
Building and running an app on an Apple Watch through Xcode is incredibly slow and incredibly unreliable and very frustrating.
Marco:
And honestly, I hate building for watchOS.
Marco:
I really do.
Marco:
WatchKit itself is very frustrating.
Marco:
It's very limited.
Marco:
It's very buggy.
Marco:
which is very, very frustrating for developers.
Marco:
And the watch always kills your app for exceeding resource limits that are very, very, very low, that are very hard to avoid, and that you get no warning for.
Marco:
So just developing for the watch in general is extremely cumbersome.
Marco:
It's a process I do not enjoy.
Marco:
It's very demoralizing, and it's something that I try to do as little as possible.
Marco:
And once I get it working, I try to not touch it, because it is just incredibly time-consuming and just draining of motivation.
Marco:
CarPlay...
Marco:
isn't so bad because there's only so much I can do.
Marco:
I don't control the CarPlay UI very much.
Marco:
the way the carplay api works to the app like on on the watch i'm like rendering that whole ui like i i'm putting whatever components i want and whatever order i want and you know having them behave in certain ways however i want with carplay you just supply like a tree structure of data and there's certain properties you can set on each row you can say like whether something has sub items or not
Marco:
whether something is playable or not, whether it is a streamable item or a locally downloaded item, whether it has progress and what that progress is.
Marco:
And you can set title, description, and an image, like a table row cell.
Marco:
And that's about it.
Marco:
I don't control almost anything about the now playing screen.
Marco:
I control very little about the other screens.
Marco:
So the total problem space of what your CarPlay app can be is pretty small and mostly out of your hands.
Marco:
So your part of it is not that big of a job, and it's fairly reliable to develop for.
Marco:
It isn't too bad.
Marco:
So it's in many ways poorly documented, but it's pretty easy to work with.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
CarPlay is a way more pleasant development environment to work in even though it's way more limited in what it can do because I don't have to do as much and the parts I do have to do are way more reliable and way easier to do.
Marco:
Everything I've ever done with the watch, I've regretted the amount of time I spent on it.
Marco:
I have to do it just for market reasons.
Marco:
I have to have a watch app because a lot of people do have it and they want it.
Marco:
It's in high demand, but I get zero enjoyment out of watch development.
Marco:
It's like doing my taxes.
Marco:
I do it because I have to and I try to procrastinate as long as possible before doing it because I know it's just going to kill my week.
Marco:
Every time I work on the watch app, I have a bad day.
Marco:
it just it makes it makes every day worse the only person who can tolerate working on watch os all the time is underscore because he is just a much better person than me but like i i hate developing for watch os so does that answer the question yeah i think so all right thanks to our sponsors this week squarespace linode and marine layer and we will talk to you next week
Marco:
Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental And you can find the show notes At ATP.FM
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental, they didn't mean to.
Casey:
So I hear through the grapevine, Marco, that you have either become or ceased being an HDMI CEC unicorn.
Marco:
So I have a story.
Marco:
Lay it on me.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I got my wonderful 4K LG C7 TV.
Marco:
I love the LG C7 and the newer C8 and everything.
Marco:
This is a great series of TVs.
Marco:
The motion isn't so great, but everything else about them is awesome.
Marco:
And so lovely 4K OLED sets.
Marco:
I don't keep the TV connected to the internet because I don't trust it.
Marco:
I don't trust smart TVs to have their internet connection.
Marco:
So when I set it up, I wired it up for ethernet, set it up, had it do its initial download of whatever it needed to do, and then I unplugged the ethernet.
Marco:
I never told it about my Wi-Fi credentials or anything like that, so it could never get its own connection nice and easy.
Marco:
It does support HDMI CEC.
Marco:
which is the protocol of hdmi that allows devices like for for like the apple tv allows the apple tv to like turn off or turn on the tv it's connected to when you push the apple tv remote buttons or it allows it to like take the active input so if you hit a button on the apple tv remote the apple tv can make the tv switch to its input
Marco:
So, and there's things like that and, and certain things like with audio control where you can like, you can use the TV that can communicate via the HDMI cable to tell the TV to turn the volume up and down and stuff like that.
Marco:
It's a cool protocol as we famously have discussed in this show before, as John famously says that like it basically like at some point it never works.
Marco:
Like it's, it's unreliable and any HDMI CEC setup that works is only temporary and eventually it will stop working.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
and but for for i've had this tv now for uh i think over a year and it has always worked great i've never had problems the apple tv always was able to like turn the tv on and off take the input and not take the input etc it's been wonderful the tv is also capable of hdr and
Marco:
And when I first got the 4K Apple TV, I first tried setting up an HDR mode.
Marco:
And I had a couple of problems here and there with like the cable would flake out occasionally and everything.
Marco:
And like the picture would flake out.
Marco:
And eventually I'm just like, you know, I don't care about HDR that much.
Marco:
Like I don't see that much HDR content.
Marco:
It's just being a problem for me.
Marco:
I will just set the Apple TV to just 4K output and not use HDR here.
Marco:
If I really want HDR, I have a Blu-ray player that does it just fine.
Marco:
And I can buy high-end Blu-rays and that's fine.
Marco:
So I disabled HDR.
Marco:
And I mentioned this on this show maybe three to six months ago sometime.
Marco:
And somebody wrote in saying, I had the same problem with the same TV.
Marco:
If you run a firmware update on it, plug it back into the network, run a firmware update on it, and it fixes the HDR problems with the Apple TV.
Marco:
And I had that in my head for months.
Marco:
And it was just like a thing on my mental to-do list.
Marco:
Sometime I have to plug the TV into Ethernet and have it do this.
Marco:
But it just never really came up.
Marco:
About a week and a half ago, I decided, you know what?
Marco:
I had some free time in the living room.
Marco:
I was doing stuff around the house, getting stuff done, fixing tech things that needed to be fixed.
Marco:
And I was like, let me finally do this.
Marco:
So I updated, plugged the Ethernet in, let it run its stupid software update, came back, unplugged the Ethernet.
Marco:
All right, we should be good now.
Marco:
And I played with HDR settings for a little while.
Marco:
And the funny thing is, I couldn't get it to look good at all.
Marco:
No matter what settings I changed, I could not get HDR from the Apple TV 4K to look good.
Marco:
And so I turned it back off like I actually preferred it the other way.
Marco:
And so I turned the Apple TV off and went about my day.
Marco:
later on i came back to the living room and the tv was on again that's weird i turned it off yeah maybe like you know maybe the remote fell and maybe like you know maybe hop stepped on the button or something or somebody sat on it or something whatever and then the next day tiff's like hey something's wrong with the tv i tried turning it off earlier and it just kept turning itself back on
Marco:
And I'm like, oh, that's weird.
Marco:
Let me try rebooting everything and unplug, replug everything, reset everything.
Marco:
That should fix it, right?
Marco:
The next day, it happened to me where I tried turning the TV off and a few minutes later, it turned itself back on.
Marco:
And I turn it off again.
Marco:
A few minutes later, it turned itself back on.
Marco:
And it took like three or four tries before it actually would stay off.
Marco:
And I thought, maybe the Apple TV is not behaving correctly with CEC for some reason, even though I didn't change anything about that.
Marco:
I changed what the TV was running.
Marco:
But let's blame the Apple TV for once.
Marco:
So I switched the active input.
Marco:
Before I turned off the TV, I switched the active input to the Nintendo Switch.
Marco:
And then I turned the TV off, thinking maybe the Apple TV is waking it up wrong or whatever.
Marco:
Same problem.
Marco:
I did some searching.
Marco:
I'm like, please don't be a problem.
Marco:
But I did some searching, and I found a Reddit post.
Marco:
Issues with the LG C7.
Marco:
Since upgrading firmware to 5.80.15.
Marco:
describing a bunch of cec problems and then the comments to this post describing more people saying yep same thing happened to me on the same tv with the same firmware update and so this seems to be a problem and this is it's been about a month since this version came out apparently and
Marco:
And I don't know how often LG issues firmware updates for their TVs.
Marco:
I'm guessing it isn't that frequently, especially for a TV that's now like two years old.
Marco:
And the solution is just disabling CEC.
Marco:
And the problem is I've been living a CEC lifestyle and it's really nice when it's working.
Marco:
It's really great.
Marco:
Yeah, it is.
Marco:
My whole family is now very upset that things are now way more cumbersome than they were before to operate the TV because we have to now turn on things on and off separately and adjust volume in a different way and everything's all different and manually change inputs like we're animals.
Marco:
It's terrible.
Marco:
We had this working so well and I was a dummy and decided to update the firmware to fix something that wasn't really even that much of a problem, it turns out.
Marco:
And you can't downgrade it.
Marco:
And so now I just have to sit here waiting for my TV to hopefully get another firmware update sometime that hopefully fixes this problem.
Marco:
Which is totally out of my control.
Marco:
Like, I'm just, I'm so mad.
John:
Like, I don't know what to do.
John:
I'm glad you learned that the solution is always to disable CEC.
John:
It's a solution to all your problems.
Casey:
But it's nice.
Casey:
But it's not.
Casey:
No, it's not because I am with Marco on this.
Casey:
So I have an ancient 1080 TV.
Casey:
It's 40 inches.
Casey:
It's probably close to 10 years old at this point.
Casey:
And I'm starting to get a little bit of an itch to upgrade the TV, but for now I'm fine.
Casey:
And the one thing that it does...
Casey:
relatively reliably, is power itself on when I mash down on the Apple TV remote.
Casey:
And it takes a freaking eternity for the thing to turn on, but eventually it will turn itself on.
Casey:
And it is really darn convenient.
Casey:
I really, really like it.
Casey:
And it's annoying that I have to go flip the switch on my receiver, you know, get the remote to turn the receiver on separately.
Casey:
Because the TV is automatic, why can't the receiver figure it out?
Casey:
And it's also an ancient receiver, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
But all of this to say, I agree with Marco that when it works, it's really darn nice.
Marco:
And also, there's things like, I've seen in some of the comments about this, that certain soundbars and things
Marco:
are only volume controllable via CEC.
Marco:
There are certain components now, like hardware components, that require the use of CEC.
Marco:
This has to work.
Marco:
You can't just say, I'll turn it off everywhere forever, because there are things being made that depend on it.
Marco:
I'm so mad.
Marco:
I'm sorry.
John:
If they never update the firmware again, you can always get...
John:
like a remote to orchestrate all the things i hate universal remotes i hate them i hate them so much i know i know well i mean do you hate them more than the apple tv remote i'm surprised you actually use that thing so much yeah actually i do that's how much i hate them that's serious business