Unapologetically Digital
Casey:
I am back on my iMac.
Casey:
Back and better than, I don't know.
Casey:
Well, better than the MacBook One.
Casey:
That is true.
Casey:
My poor little adorable sits to my left.
Casey:
Sad that it is not the star of the show anymore.
Marco:
Is it fast enough to feel sadness?
Casey:
That's a fair question.
Casey:
It's actually funny.
Casey:
I'm reading a book by the author Blake Crouch, who, if you know at all, he did this trilogy, Wayward Pines, which was really, really bananas.
Casey:
And I've read several of his novels at this point.
Casey:
I've come to really, really like all of them.
Casey:
And I'm about halfway through... What was it?
Casey:
Recursion, I believe, is the name of the novel, coincidentally, which is a very on-brand.
Casey:
But anyway, yes, it's called Recursion.
Casey:
And it's... All of these novels are about, like...
Casey:
what is or is not real and how do you know what's real and can you screw up your perception of reality and it's that sounds very like negative and dark it isn't they're they're fascinating novels and in fact this was all stemmed by marco asking is the adorable capable of feeling sadness is it fast enough to feel sadness and unbeknownst to marco that was very on point given i was reading just before the uh just before the broadcast tonight about whether or not reality is really real is this real is this now are you real
Marco:
I mean, you know that I have such a broad and deep knowledge of literature, especially.
Marco:
And it's even deeper than my knowledge on film.
Marco:
I just have such a passion for the fine world of literature and film.
Casey:
Naturally.
Casey:
John, you don't read novels that often, do you?
Casey:
I don't recall.
John:
I used to do it more.
John:
I keep buying them and I keep starting them.
John:
I'm in the middle of like four, right?
Casey:
Wait, slow down.
Casey:
You start one and then you pick up another?
Casey:
How are you okay with this but not okay with Merlin starting and then stopping and then starting a film?
John:
books are different you can't you i can't anyway i can't read them in one sitting i don't read that fast do you actually like go back and pick one up like once you've once you've started a different one do you ever go back to one that you that you hadn't finished and like actually return to it absolutely yeah wow i'm a book multitasker i'm i didn't used to be but i am now
John:
Who are you?
John:
But it's only because I used to like plow through to the end more than I do.
John:
And now I read so much less that I'm running in parallel on these things and each one of them I'm dipping in and doing a page here or a page there.
John:
And it's not great.
John:
I read less than I used to.
Casey:
That's no way to live, John.
John:
I don't recommend it.
John:
If I had more time, I would probably read more.
Casey:
If you stopped murdering your brain cells playing that stupid video game with words that do not belong in the English language.
John:
I like that video game.
John:
This is a conscious choice.
John:
I could read more and play Destiny less.
John:
I do not make that choice.
Casey:
It's murdering your brain, John.
Casey:
It's murdering your brain.
John:
It's just fine.
John:
Destiny's keeping me sharp in my old age.
Casey:
This is your last chance to donate to St.
Casey:
Jude, except not really.
Casey:
As this is being released, it will be the 27th or 28th of September, and September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.
Casey:
We've done this pitch for several weeks in a row.
Casey:
I will spare the long version of it this time.
Casey:
I will just say that September is running out, and this is your last chance to get in under that big heave that Relay is doing for September.
Casey:
And I would like to genuinely, genuinely thank everyone that has listened to us or even donated to St.
Casey:
Jude on account of all of our browbeating and whatnot.
Casey:
The original goal was $75,000.
Casey:
That was plowed through relatively quickly.
Casey:
And as I record tonight on the evening of the 26th, $266,000, which is absolutely incredible.
Casey:
And genuinely, thank you to anyone who has linked, who has talked about it, who has encouraged people to donate, who especially have donated.
Casey:
It is not too late to get in on September, but really anytime you feel like it.
Casey:
definitely please donate.
Casey:
And at least through the month of September, I'm not sure if it lingers on after that, stjude.org slash ATP, stjude.org, S-T-J-U-D-E dot org slash ATP if you wanted to donate any more.
Casey:
And we really, really appreciate it.
Marco:
Yeah, I got to say, it's the amount of money raised.
Marco:
We don't really do anything for this.
Marco:
We don't set it up.
Marco:
We aren't the ones chiefly evangelizing it.
Marco:
This is really its game here, and they really deserve all the credit here.
Marco:
We just do the minimum that we can, which is we publicize it.
Marco:
And what what they have done here is so incredible.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
And we're just we're we're lucky that we are like, you know, kind of nearby as they do great things.
Marco:
But like all the credit here goes to Relay and to all of you who are donating.
Marco:
This is it's really been incredible.
Casey:
Yeah, so I've recorded earlier today, in fact.
Casey:
I recorded this analog, which is episode 166.
Casey:
I'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
That link will be broken until Sunday.
Casey:
But nevertheless, Mike and I talked a lot about this whole heave that Relay has done and what it was like for them to do their podcast-a-thon, which John was a big part of and I quite enjoyed watching.
John:
A big part of?
John:
I was there for like five minutes.
John:
Five minutes out of the six hours.
Casey:
Fine, fine.
Casey:
I'm trying to give you credit, John, but fine, fine.
John:
Accuracy.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, anyway, so you can check out Analog, and we'll also link the podcast-a-thon video, which is quite amusing as well if you wanted to check that out too.
Casey:
But again, stju.org slash ATP.
Casey:
Back to our regularly scheduled follow up.
Casey:
A lot of people wrote in a couple of weeks ago.
Casey:
This has been like a lingering topic about me using a one time use credit card number for Sirius XM.
Casey:
And I don't think we had the time to talk about this last episode or perhaps it hadn't come up since last episode or until after last episode.
Casey:
But one way or another.
Casey:
privacy.com is a website that I think for free will give you one-time use of virtual credit cards.
Casey:
Uh, I did not look into this very heavily to be completely honest with you, but I got a lot of recommendations for it.
Casey:
The only thing I will say is that it's tied to a checking account.
Casey:
So you're not like what I was doing where you're just getting a different number for your existing visa or what have you this, it actually extracts the money from your checking account.
Casey:
So if you want to get like points or what have you, um,
Casey:
then it's not going to work in that sense.
Casey:
But from what I understand, it is a very good service that is either free or low cost in order to get these one-time use virtual cards.
Casey:
This is not a sponsorship, mind you.
Casey:
It's just a lot of people have said it's good stuff.
Casey:
That's privacy.com.
Casey:
Moving on, an anonymous former Apple employee wanted to clear up some things with regard to AppleCare+.
Casey:
We had a few people write in, but this person, if they're right anyway, as being a former AppleCare or Apple employee, has the most clout.
Casey:
And they said that AppleCare Plus and virtually all service and support contracts for electronics, cars, and appliances have a U.S.
Casey:
state-mandated refund policy.
Casey:
So in AppleCare Plus, you can see it in Section 9.
Casey:
And the short, short version is...
Casey:
If you want, at any time, you can cancel your AppleCare Plus, and they'll prorate the refund that they give you.
Casey:
So if you buy AppleCare Plus for $200 and use it for 10 months, you can call AppleCare and cancel it and get the majority, well, maybe not the majority, but more than half of your purchase price back, minus, you know, processing fee and any of the repairs that you may have used.
Casey:
And so it's worth noting that.
Casey:
Additionally, when you trade in devices to Apple that have AppleCare service on them, typically they'll get a slightly higher value than those that do not have AppleCare Plus.
Casey:
Also, finally, we were wondering what would happen if you bought without AppleCare Plus and what's the window and how do you buy AppleCare Plus after receiving the device?
Casey:
And someone in one of the slacks we're in noted that there's actually a prompt in iOS 13, maybe 13.1 in settings that says, hey, you have so many days left to get AppleCare Plus, which is, I don't know.
Casey:
On the one side, I find that super sleazy.
Casey:
On the other side, I kind of understand it.
Casey:
But anyways, one way or another, you have 60 days left.
Casey:
after purchasing your device to get AppleCare Plus.
Casey:
And interestingly, if you do it on the device itself, I'm told that it will run like a full diagnostic suite on the device to make sure that you didn't like just destroy your screen.
Casey:
I'm not sure how I can tell this, but one way or another, it will run a diagnostic suite on your device to see that it is okay at the point in which you enroll and you're not trying to like game the system.
John:
One minor correction.
John:
I think this person was saying that the resale value of hardware that has AppleCare is better.
John:
I don't think you get anything more on the trade-in, but if you're just selling it on the open market, obviously it's more valuable for someone if you still have like a year left on AppleCare.
John:
I'm assuming that means that it transfers.
John:
I don't know what the transfer things are, but this person is saying that.
Marco:
AppleCare, I mean, I don't know if you're paying monthly if that would easily transfer, but any kind of prepaid upfront AppleCare that used to be the only kind is just tied to the machine serial number.
Marco:
It's not tied to any particular owner.
Marco:
That's why you can go buy or sell laptops that have a year left on them, for instance.
John:
Well, there you go.
John:
But the refund thing is good to know.
John:
Yeah, I had no idea.
John:
Paying month to month would be good if you're not planning on keeping it free.
John:
But apparently you can buy the upfront one and just get your money back.
John:
Although it's probably a little bit more of a hassle than it is just canceling your month to month thing.
Casey:
That's probably true.
Casey:
Additionally, we were wondering, you know, how does this work if you pay up front but want to continue forever more?
Casey:
And Willie writes that AppleCare Plus can continue monthly for iPad, iPhone, or watch even if you pay up front.
Casey:
So, you know, you let your two years elapse, but then after that you can renew it on a monthly basis, you know, and so that might make sense if you're holding on to like a phone for, I don't know, what is it, three plus years or whatever the case may be, and you really wanted to keep that service for that time.
Casey:
And then finally, Phil Sutton writes, if you stop AppleCare monthly payments or miss a monthly payment, then it stops and you cannot start it again.
Casey:
So once you let your coverage lapse, that's a one-way street and that is it.
Casey:
And so if you are going month to month, you're going to want to make sure that you don't have an oops with regard to payment or else it will cease forevermore.
Marco:
I love having servers at Linode.
Marco:
Whether you're doing something that's like one server, which is how I started, just running my little play around Linux and blog server, all the way up to hosting all of Overcast there.
Marco:
All of my Overcast servers are there.
Marco:
I think I have about 24 of them now.
Marco:
They're all at Linode.
Marco:
And from small stuff to big stuff, whatever you want to build, you can build it at Linode.
Marco:
The servers are fast.
Marco:
They have enterprise-grade SSDs on all the servers.
Marco:
They have Xeon processors, so you get tons of great resources.
Marco:
And they're really affordable.
Marco:
Their entry-level price starts at just $5 a month.
Marco:
They get to a server with one gig of RAM, and then they have lots of plans above that that are all very competitively priced.
Marco:
I have servers big and small there, and I got to say, over the entire eight or nine years I've been with them,
Marco:
They've always been either the best value in the business or tied for the best value in the business.
Marco:
No one has ever been able to beat them.
Marco:
I don't know how they do it.
Marco:
Over time, as hardware gets better and cheaper, they even lower their prices or they increase capacity for the same price or whatever.
Marco:
So they really keep up.
Marco:
Their support is also fantastic if you ever need it.
Marco:
I've used it here and there as you need to with web hosts sometimes.
Marco:
And it's been fantastic every single time.
Marco:
You can pick whatever data center you want your servers to be in.
Marco:
You can have a blend of different data centers.
Marco:
They have them all over the world and are constantly opening more.
Marco:
Check it out today.
Marco:
Linode.com slash ATP.
Marco:
I really recommend them.
Marco:
If you need to run a server somewhere, do it at Linode.
Marco:
Linode.com slash ATP.
Marco:
And get a $20 credit when you use promo code ATP2019.
Marco:
That could be four months free on that $5 a month plan.
Marco:
So check it out.
Marco:
Once again, linode.com slash ATP for all your server needs.
Marco:
Get a $20 credit when you use promo code ATP2019.
Marco:
Thank you to Linode for hosting all my servers and sponsoring our show.
Casey:
I don't know if now is as good a time as any to bring up my AppleCare experiences because I received my iPhone 11 Pro, which we'll be talking about more later.
Casey:
I received it at roughly 8.30 in the morning on Friday.
Casey:
And by 8.30 in the evening, I had dropped it on my driveway and have a humongous crack in the back of it.
Marco:
caseless casey list i was gonna say you didn't last the whole day but you didn't how many hours did you last it was approximately 12 hours 12 hours for caseless casey list what have we learned about caseless yeah well i i would love to make fun of you for this but it's just too painful like the the idea of dropping my half day old phone and cracking it like even even though you had apple care which that's good it's good thing at apple care um even despite that even knowing it's not going to cost you that much to get it fixed it's still really painful
Marco:
It's like you drove your car off the lot directly into a telephone pole, like across the street from the dealership.
Casey:
Basically, yes.
Casey:
I really shouldn't be laughing about this, but yeah, that's basically true.
Casey:
I will put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
I am really, really disappointed in myself.
Casey:
So I can tell you my tale of woe, and it is a long and sordid tale, but I don't think anyone actually cares.
Casey:
Suffice it to say, I was washing Aaron's car and...
Casey:
which is a big American SUV.
Casey:
Well, American in the sense that we live in America.
Casey:
It's actually a Swedish SUV or Chinese, depending on how you look at it.
Casey:
But anyways, I was watching your car.
Casey:
I was doing it in a rush for, again, uninteresting reasons.
Casey:
And I was trying to listen to the relay, the podcast-a-thon.
Casey:
And I tried to get my AirPods to work with my phone, and for whatever reason, they wouldn't work.
Casey:
And I tried to get them to work with my iPad, and for whatever reason, they wouldn't work.
Casey:
And I was like, ah, screw it.
Casey:
I'm running out of daylight.
Casey:
I'm running out of time.
Casey:
I know what I'll do.
Casey:
I'll just put the phone in my back pocket, speaker up, and I'll crank it, and I'll be able to hear it even without my AirPods because I just don't have time to continue to mess with this.
Casey:
And that plan was flawless up until the moment that I jumped up high in order to get some of Aaron's roof.
Casey:
And then the next thing I heard was a smash.
Casey:
Oh, not a smash, like a clack or a clatter on the ground.
Casey:
And I was like, huh, that's weird.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
Oh, no.
John:
You sprang from your bed to see what was the matter.
Casey:
Yeah, something like that.
Casey:
It was the worst Christmas ever.
Casey:
But anyways, so yeah, I looked down and realized that the back of my phone is not in good shape.
Casey:
Now, with that said, it is aesthetically horrible, truly and utterly horrible.
Casey:
But the funny thing about it is it doesn't feel bad to the hand.
John:
Stop rubbing your fingers on broken glass.
Casey:
No, no, no, listen to me.
Casey:
No, I can't feel it at all.
Casey:
It's like it's under the matte finish.
Marco:
Trust me, it feels bad.
Marco:
You feel bad.
Marco:
Just get it fast.
Casey:
Well, and I will get it fixed.
Casey:
I absolutely will get it fixed, without question.
Casey:
But we're going on a vacation next month.
Casey:
And so I'm continuing to roll Caseless Caseless for now.
Casey:
And I figure subsequent to that vacation, if it will take damage, it is very likely that it will take more damage during that vacation.
Casey:
So I will hold on until after then.
Casey:
And then I will pay the $100 to fix it.
Casey:
Because I had thought at first, oh, it's only $30.
Casey:
That's not so bad.
Casey:
But oh, no, no, no, no.
Casey:
The back glass is a full $100, I think because they just give you a refurb or, you know, like replace the whole darn thing.
Casey:
I don't know that for sure, so I might be wrong.
Casey:
But the front glass is $30 and the back glass is $100.
Casey:
And so I was kind of pissed off that it was $100 and not $30 until I saw that the no AppleCare cost.
Casey:
Do you guys know what the no AppleCare cost for this is if I didn't have AppleCare?
Marco:
$299.
Marco:
$300, $400, something like that?
Casey:
$600.
Casey:
For the back glass?
John:
That makes it sound like they're just replacing the whole phone.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
I may have misread it, and I apologize if so, but as far as I understand, $600, gentlemen, to replace the back glass.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
How bananas is that?
John:
that's something or you could put some electrical tape over it yeah exactly okay so now after you get your new one so i understand you're going to be one of the the cracked phone masses we all see them out there just wandering wandering the world using completely shattered phones rubbing their fingers against tiny glass slivers for just years at a time right but eventually you're gonna bite the bullet and pay the money yes fixed after that are you gonna use a case
Casey:
uh i don't think so because i'll have one more oops and then if i do have a second you're gonna you're gonna burn all your timeouts yeah exactly right and then if at that point i i don't know i i don't i'm actually not as opposed to a case as i sound i've used cases i don't know for the past four or five iphones at least but i don't know i really like i love the screen and i don't like i don't know if i really like the clear case and so i was thinking oh it'll be all right the clear case got bad reviews
Casey:
Yeah, so there you go.
Casey:
And I'm, I don't know.
Casey:
So one way or another, I just thought to myself, you know what, I will just spring for the AppleCare Plus and hope that I will do okay.
Casey:
And this is the first phone I've broken since, it was my seven, I think I broke, you know, several years ago now.
Casey:
And I generally have a pretty good record with this sort of thing.
Casey:
But, well, a pretty good record in terms of the amount of phones broken versus how many I've owned.
Casey:
A terrible record in terms of the amount of time it took me to break this particular phone.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
But yeah, if you go to support.apple.com slash iPhone slash repair slash service, we'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
iPhone model.
Casey:
iPhone XS Max 11 Pro Max.
Casey:
iPhone XS 11 Pro.
Casey:
Oh, I'm sorry.
Casey:
It's not $600.
Casey:
It's $550 for the 11 Pro.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
My apologies.
Casey:
It's a bargain.
Casey:
A bargain, I tell you.
John:
The only person who might have you beat is that remember this was like a couple of phones ago.
John:
Someone was like some video going around YouTube where it was like he got like the first phone from the store and he opens it up.
John:
He comes out of the store and he opens the box right there like on the sidewalk in front of the thing.
John:
And as he opens it, he opens it in a rush and it pops out and falls on the pavement.
John:
But I think it didn't crack.
Casey:
I don't recall.
Casey:
I know what you're thinking of.
Casey:
And actually, somebody tweeted at me that exact video.
Casey:
I'll have to see if I can dig it up.
Casey:
But yeah, I don't remember how it ended up, but I know exactly what you're talking about.
John:
And it probably had a lot of nicks on it.
John:
So some general phone advice.
John:
Like, I understand that you said you couldn't get the AirPods to work with it or whatever, but I would have...
Casey:
And I shouldn't have tried to do any of the things I did.
Casey:
Like, this isn't 100% my fault.
Casey:
But my thought was this is a one-time thing that's streaming live, and I didn't want to, like, miss – I wanted to miss as little as possible.
John:
Yeah, no, but, like, what was the deal with the AirPods?
Casey:
Like, they just didn't – I honestly don't know.
Casey:
It kept saying – both my devices actually kept saying both the iPad Pro and the iPhone 11 Pro –
Casey:
Both said that they were connected, but they wouldn't actually pump any audio to them.
Casey:
It was the weirdest thing.
Casey:
It could have been user error, but I've had AirPods for a while now.
Casey:
I feel like I know how to use them.
Casey:
For whatever reason, both these devices, they just would not work.
Casey:
And I could have surely stuck with it a little while longer and figured out how to fix it.
Casey:
But I was running out of light.
Casey:
I didn't want to continue to mess around with them.
Casey:
I just wanted to get Aaron's darn car cleans.
John:
So for the AirPods, I usually putting them back in the case and closing the case and letting them chill for a while and then bringing them back in a better environment helps.
John:
But anyway, one of the underrated advantages of AirPods is the removal of cords.
John:
I listen to podcasts while I make dinner, while I do dishes.
John:
And before the advent of AirPods, I would have to have my phone on my body somewhere.
John:
and then have a cord snaking to headphones in my ears.
John:
With AirPods, I don't even have my phone in the room.
John:
It's in a different room on a piece of furniture, laying down, no fear of anything happening to it in the kitchen, even if I jump up in the air, Casey.
John:
Sure.
John:
Phone is staying where it is.
John:
And second of all,
John:
If you are playing the speakers on your phone, that's even more reason to not have it on your body.
John:
Just put it on a shelf on the side of your garage and point the speaker.
John:
They're very loud.
Casey:
It wasn't that loud.
John:
Do you ever see how people use their phones?
John:
Some people use their phones as a sound system for their entire house.
John:
They just put their phone in the dining room, crank the volume all the way up, and then just wander around the house cleaning, and you can hear the phone everywhere.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
Again, it is entirely my fault and poor choices were made, but they were made for somewhat good reasons.
Casey:
Like I was washing Aaron's car.
Casey:
I wasn't even washing my own car and I was trying to listen to the St.
Casey:
Jude thing.
John:
You didn't want to get the step stool that you use for the roof, right?
Casey:
That's the thing.
Casey:
And I was rushing, so I didn't get the darn step stool that I always, always, always use.
Casey:
Again, mistakes are made, John.
John:
You bought a car that's too tall for you.
John:
Like, why is this all the way down to why you even have this?
Casey:
Just call me Toyota, right?
Casey:
Anyway, but yeah.
Casey:
So instead of $550, it is $100 if you don't consider the fact that I paid $200 for AppleCare.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I am both...
Casey:
deeply relieved and thankful for past Casey, not trusting future Casey, and also deeply annoyed that I'm that dummy that within 12, it might've been 11 hours, might've been 11 and a half hours, but effectively within 12 hours, I broke my brand new phone and, oh God, I'm so mad at myself.
Casey:
That's all right, though.
Casey:
All right, moving on, a little bit more follow-up.
Casey:
Speaking of iPhone 11 Pro, the RAM and battery numbers, we talked about this last episode and what we had heard rumors of.
Casey:
John, can you take me through, if you don't mind, what we said and what the reality is, please?
John:
Yeah, despite the fact that we're a couple weeks out now and iFix has actually done a full teardown on the Pro Max and like a live teardown on the regular Pro,
John:
This information is from the Chinese equivalent of the FCC, which is apparently called T-E-N-A-A.
John:
I don't know how you're supposed to pronounce that.
John:
But I don't even know if this is official, but it's the best information I was able to find at the time of this recording.
John:
So the things that we got wrong, according to both this and the iFixit thing from last show, is that the 11 Pro battery is actually a 15% increase over its predecessor, not 20%.
John:
and that the 11 pro max battery is actually a 25 increase not 10 so the 11 pro max battery is apparently way bigger than we thought it was and the 11 pro is a little bit smaller than we thought uh and the 11 we got the numbers right and the other thing is ram or even the ifixit teardown you should go through the teardown of the pro max they're trying to figure out how much ram there is apparently there's some rumor about ram dedicated to the camera but they couldn't find it like they're just looking at the chips i don't think they had had uh you know sliced the tops of the chip or anything so
John:
They have limited ability to figure this out.
John:
And of course, the reporting that you get from inside the OS is it was the thing that was giving us six gig numbers and people were confused by.
John:
But anyway, the consensus right now is everything has four gigs.
John:
So there's no six gig model.
John:
It's four gigs across the board, which is that's one gig more for the.
John:
10r replacement the 11 has one gig more than the 10r did but then the 10s and the 10s max had the same amount as the 11 i'm gonna be so glad this is gone 11 and 11 pro i'll be able to say 11 and 12 next year it'll be so nice i can't for some reason i had no problem with 10s and 10 and 10r but i cannot mentally jump from roman numeral letter to number it's really really hurting my brain
Casey:
Yeah, you and me both.
Casey:
The A13 performance, this is somehow part of follow-up, even though we're about to talk even more about the iPhone 11.
Casey:
Maybe we've moved out of follow-up.
John:
Yeah, it's follow-up because it's about the phone stuff.
John:
And I recall a show a while ago where both of you took such glee in telling me that your phones were faster than my Mac.
John:
Well, guess what?
Yeah.
John:
Guess what?
John:
Your time has come, Mr. iMac Pro, Mr. awesome computer that I love, Mr. 2017 computer that I tried to make Casey buy last show.
John:
That computer, and in fact, every single shipping Mac, has slower single-core performance than Casey's broken phone.
Ha ha ha ha!
Casey:
That is, all kidding aside, that is absolutely bananas.
Casey:
How is this thing in my pocket, shattered as it may be, faster than Marco's beloved iMac Pro?
John:
Yeah, now this is Geekbench and benchmarks aren't real-world performance and yada, yada, yada.
John:
And here's the actual numbers.
John:
You can look it up on Geekbench's site if you don't believe us.
John:
The fastest single-core performance for an iMac is not even the iMac Pro because it's like the regular iMac with the really fast, low-core count thing where you can make one core go turbo up to high speed or whatever.
John:
Anyway, it's...
John:
1,262.
John:
That's the fastest Mac score, period.
John:
Any Mac that you can buy right now.
John:
And the A13 gets 1,332.
John:
It's incredible.
Casey:
That is absolutely nuts.
John:
Who knows?
John:
Maybe the Mac Pro, the dangerous, still won't beat it.
John:
Because, again, the Mac Pro's forte is not going to be, I want the best single-core performance.
John:
It's all about huge numbers of cores and everything, which is why Marco's iMac is still way better for...
John:
building overcast obviously than your phone but boy our max any day now right because this is any day now this is really embarrassing for intel and just absurd and ridiculous and the thing that no one is thinking about and it just doesn't make any sense and i don't i don't understand the world anymore all right and john if you wouldn't mind can you continue with the iFixit teardown and tell me about whether or not bilateral charging is in the hardware
John:
Yeah, that's the thing where you can stick another device on top of your phone and it will charge from your phone through the coil that's hidden in the back of it.
John:
It's rumored to be a feature.
John:
It was not an announced feature when they did the teardown.
John:
Like many other things in the teardown, it was inconclusive.
John:
There's some hardware in there that wasn't in the XS and the XS Max that extra wire is going from the coil to the battery and stuff.
John:
that could be used for that but on the other hand is also a bunch of features to better manage the battery and report on its authenticity and stuff like that and just by physically looking at it they couldn't tell so there is a physical difference it could mean that bilateral charging is there but disabled
John:
But maybe not.
John:
But anyway, the one that we can say is they didn't crack it open and say there is nothing in here that would even remotely lead me to believe that it has bilateral charging because it does look different than the predecessor phones in ways that could make sense with bilateral charging.
John:
So inconclusive, but we are still not able to rule out the possibility that all of our phones can eventually charge our AirPod cases or whatever.
Casey:
That would be kind of neat.
Casey:
Like I said, I think last episode, I'm more interested, especially with my new watch, I'm more interested in charging the watch than I am AirPods.
Casey:
And we'll talk about that more a little bit later.
Casey:
But that would be super cool if it was possible to do this via software and just magically turn that on.
Casey:
Which, actually, as much as I love pooping on Tesla these days, one of the very cool things about Tesla is how you do get over-the-air updates.
Casey:
And, actually, to that end, you actually have podcast art that friggin' works now, don't you?
Marco:
My car hasn't gotten an update yet, but that is officially – that is apparently in the new, like, I guess it's a beta or it's doing a slow rollout.
Marco:
Whatever it is, the new software –
Marco:
finally supports artwork transfer over Bluetooth.
Marco:
So finally, it'll stop doing that terrible fuzzy matching against its music album database where it would just find whatever music album artist and title were semantically closest in edit distance or something from whatever your podcast title was that was playing, which was oftentimes comically not close at all
Marco:
oftentimes ridiculously inappropriate or or you know weird to be showing on your car display there were a number of times when like it would match whatever my podcast title was to some piece of artwork that from some obscure album that had like you know people in bikinis in the front and i'm like trying to pick up my kid like a preschool and i'm the screen in my car is this giant picture of like you know this bikini clad woman i'm like i swear i didn't i didn't put this just happened to you it happened to you marco
Marco:
So finally, Tesla is adding Bluetooth artwork support.
Marco:
I'm looking forward to my car getting that finally.
Casey:
Our long national nightmare is over.
John:
I've been watching.
John:
It was my new brief Tesla sideline here, my new YouTube obsession.
John:
I don't know how I even got into this.
John:
Probably just the algorithm led me there is to a YouTube video series where people rebuild.
John:
totaled cars i think i posted a whole big thread about the first one that i got into in one of our slacks but i'm watching a whole bunch of them including ones where people buy total model s's and rebuild them and i know a lot more about how the car was put together than i really wanted to know at this point don't tell me don't ruin it
Casey:
Well, I was going to say, does that make you more or less likely to ever?
John:
I mean, I know you would never buy one, but hypothetically, I mean, just about neutral because it's just like it's not worse than I thought, but it's not better either.
John:
It's pretty much exactly what you would think.
John:
But I mean, there are some impressive stuff in there, but then there are other things about assembly and build quality that aren't great.
John:
And the main attraction of these rebuild things is watching what awful things these people who are rebuilding the cars do where you're like, that doesn't seem like I would want to drive a car that you fixed in that way.
John:
I mean, these are all totaled cars, but serious damage.
John:
They're like, well, we could probably patch it up.
John:
Maybe just maybe don't drive that, especially with like Teslas and other things.
John:
But these people don't understand the cars and are doing all sorts of hacks to get around the fact that lots of things in the Tesla, like any electronic device or like your printer.
John:
are like out to not let you do an unauthorized repair on them right so the tesla does not want to be repaired it won't even like charge unless you do a bunch of stuff to to fool it it's a little bit scary but anyway uh i'm i guess i can probably can't put the links in the show notes to those because there's just too many videos but if you're interested in that type of thing or you think you might be check out you know car rebuilding videos um on youtube some of them are surprisingly fun and they're really long and i found myself like i've watched like
John:
four hours of car rebuilding videos that's apparently what i'm doing with my life when i'm not playing destiny and not reading but i know a lot about car repair now no that's good do you or have you just seen it no yeah i know how to like hit things with hammers and oh good and uh like seriously it's like car repair the only tool you have is a rock
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
That sounds very safe.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
In a kind of transition from follow-up to our actual main topics, I would like to give everyone an update on my iMac, if that's okay.
Casey:
First and foremost, I would like to genuinely thank the handful of listeners who are in a position to and did offer me
Casey:
The Apple friends and family discount.
Casey:
That is genuinely extremely kind of you.
Casey:
I had a handful of people reach out and say, hey, you can use my friends and family discount if you would like.
Casey:
I really, really, really, really appreciate it.
Casey:
That is exceptionally kind.
Casey:
I didn't end up doing so because the iMac is back.
Casey:
And better than ever, maybe.
Casey:
It went into Apple the day that we recorded last, coincidentally on iPhone release day, when my iPhone still was not shattered.
Marco:
You went into a store with an iMac on iPhone day?
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
I left the store with an iMac I had previously bought.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
I left it on iPhone day.
Casey:
But anyway, so I went back, I don't know, like four hours after I had left in order to pick up the iMac, and that went fine.
Casey:
Interestingly, I wasn't charged for it.
Casey:
I honest to God have no idea why.
Casey:
I did not try to call in any favors.
Casey:
I never asked anyone about it.
Casey:
But supposedly it got a logic board replacement, which should run me like $700-ish.
Casey:
And that does seem to have fixed everything as far as I can tell.
Casey:
But when I went to pick it up, you know, the gentleman that was helping me out was using his fancy Apple iPad.
Casey:
And he was, you know, saying, OK, well, this is the bill of materials.
Casey:
You know, it was like six or so hundred dollars for the logic board and like 80 bucks in labor.
Casey:
You know, here's sign here, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
And then he goes to the payment screen and whatever, you know, internal iPad app he's using.
Casey:
And it says I owe nothing.
Casey:
i was like what i said uh you don't owe anything huh i'm pretty sure i owe you guys something and he's like no i don't think you do no no that's when you say thank you sir and you walk out well see but i'm too i'm too nice and so i was like no no are you sure because i really don't want to be like stealing stuff from you guys you you're they tell you you owe nothing you say okay thank you and you you owe nothing yeah so i pushed back a couple of times and he was like he wasn't upset about it
Casey:
Well, because I feel like that's bad karma, man.
Casey:
No, listen.
Marco:
There's only two ways this went.
Marco:
Either they decided that you shouldn't have been charged for this because it should be covered for whatever reason, or someone called in a favor, and in which case you shut up and you say thank you, and that's it, and that's the coolest thing ever.
Marco:
Like, that's awesome.
Casey:
Yeah, fair enough.
Casey:
And Jelly is sending me a text saying, please, largest company and richest company in the world, please take my money, which is basically what I was saying.
Casey:
But anyway, but yeah, so he progressed the payment screen and said, you know, I don't know anything.
Casey:
And I said, are you sure?
Casey:
Blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
And he said, no, no, no.
Casey:
You know, worst case, we'll call you, but get out of here, basically.
Casey:
And so that's what I did.
Casey:
I restored from Time Machine from my Synology, which is my Time Machine backup.
Casey:
That took from Friday late afternoon until the time I went to bed Sunday, which was not delightful.
Casey:
As it turns out, I love my Synology.
Casey:
I still love my Synology, but maybe not the best time machine backup destination in the entire world.
Casey:
Before I get a zillion emails, I do use SuperDuper.
Casey:
I had thought at the time that the hard drive was out of town.
Casey:
It actually wasn't because I send them off with my parents and move them off site for real safekeeping.
Casey:
As it turns out, it was not out of town.
Casey:
I didn't realize that it was local.
Casey:
But either way, it was several weeks old.
Casey:
I only do that once a month.
Casey:
And the time machine backup was several hours before everything took a dump.
Casey:
And so I did restore.
Casey:
It has been working just about flawlessly, as far as I can tell.
Casey:
So I think all is well.
Casey:
That being said, this machine is now tainted twice over.
Casey:
And so I am still...
Casey:
casually in the market for a new computer, but thankfully I do not need to do a desperation purchase now, now, now, which is what I thought I was going to have to do.
Casey:
So ultimately it has worked out well and I am pleased to have my beloved iMac back, even though I don't feel like I can trust it at all anymore.
Casey:
So anything that was like hanging out on my desktop, usually I'm a very devout, clean desktop kind of person.
Casey:
I usually don't have stuff strewn all across my desktop, but
Casey:
Over the course of the last three years, there was plenty of cruft that had accumulated.
Casey:
And so the first time I really had a chance, when the kids were either in bed or out or what have you, I went through the iMac and made sure I filed away all these things that were in the two-file category on my desktop.
Casey:
And so hopefully if this thing takes another dump, it won't be quite as ruinous, but we'll see what happens.
John:
We got some good feedback from people trying to diagnose your problem.
John:
In particular, one person reported that they had a problem not with their RAM itself, but with the compatibility between third-party RAM and first-party RAM.
John:
And the RAM vendor was like, oh, yeah, sometimes we hear that, that for whatever reason, our RAM doesn't like to play nice with the Apple RAM.
John:
And the only solution is to just either use all Apple RAM or all third party RAM.
John:
I don't, again, I don't know if that was your problem.
John:
Maybe it really was your logic board, but it's just one more thing to look out for because we were trying to deal with third party RAM.
John:
You had the bad RAM and they replaced it.
John:
But if you still had some wonkiness, that's one more thing to look into.
Casey:
Additionally, what sounded like it was mostly around fusion drives, but we did get a handful of people writing in saying there were very weird lockups and so on and so forth that ultimately they convinced themselves and or they were traced back to a completely borked APFS volume.
Casey:
And I don't want to mess with your beloved APFS, John, but people seem to believe, whether or not it's true, that occasionally APFS will just get confused.
Casey:
And when that happens, there is no turning back and no recovery.
Yeah.
John:
I haven't had that happen yet, but it's possible.
John:
It's a new file system.
John:
File systems do take a while to sort of mature and settle down.
John:
But so far, so good for me with APFS.
Casey:
We are sponsored this week by Channels.
Casey:
Do you want to cut your cord?
Casey:
You should get channels.
Casey:
Do you want to get rid of your cable box?
Casey:
You should get channels.
Casey:
Do you want to watch TV outside of your house?
Casey:
You should get channels.
Casey:
Do you want to have a full-fledged DVR on your Mac PC or even a Raspberry Pi?
Casey:
You should get channels.
Casey:
Channels is an iOS app and, if you want, server software that is made by people who really care from top to bottom.
Casey:
It's an app made by nerds but made for everyone.
Casey:
Their iOS app has an API.
Casey:
That's how serious this is.
Casey:
So let's start with the iOS app.
Casey:
If you have a network tuner like an HD Home Run in your house and it's attached to an antenna, you can actually pull TV from the freaking air and watch it on channels.
Casey:
Channels Plus, however, makes things really interesting.
Casey:
Channels Plus is server software, much like Plex Media Server, that enables full DVR functionality, including recording all the episodes of a series, every game for a team, and more.
Casey:
You can even watch while recording, and automatic commercial skipping is included if you're into that sort of thing.
Casey:
But you're listening to this, so I guess not.
Casey:
You can stream live TV away from your house.
Casey:
All of this does require the server software, but it runs on everything, including the Raspberry Pi 4.
Casey:
Channels, the app is easy to use even for non-nerds, and your family will love you for it.
Casey:
It's so serious how much they care that when you set up the server software on your computer or your Raspberry Pi, it will automatically go and get a Let's Encrypt certificate to install on itself so all of your communication is secured.
Casey:
that's how much the channels folks care you know what kids i didn't think that there was any point in this because i still have a cable subscription but as it turns out once you plug in your subscription information to the channel server it actually works better than espn's own app i was streaming espn from channels quicker and better more reliably than i could from the espn app
Casey:
So let me tell you, you should definitely give it a shot.
Casey:
ATP users can get their first month of Channels Plus for free by visiting getchannels.com slash ATP, getchannels, C-H-A-N-N-E-L-S dot com slash ATP, and you can cancel any time.
Casey:
Kids, give it a shot.
Casey:
You know you want to.
Casey:
Channels, thank you very much for sponsoring this episode.
Casey:
All right, let's move on.
Casey:
I would like to briefly talk about the Apple Watch Series 5 because I don't think that'll take too long.
Casey:
And then we can talk about the iPhone's Pro.
Casey:
I did get to recap.
Casey:
I moved from a Series 3 cellular 42 millimeter Apple Watch to a Series 5 40 millimeter.
Casey:
So I went to the small size cellular Apple Watch.
Marco:
Hmm.
Marco:
Which of your friends who has good taste in watches told you to do the small size?
Casey:
You did.
Marco:
Oh, that's right.
Casey:
Yes, indeed.
Casey:
And I regret it.
Casey:
And let me tell you why.
Casey:
I think this is a temporary regret.
Casey:
But I cannot overstate how f***ing terrible the battery is on this watch.
Casey:
It is atrocious.
Marco:
It's funny you mention that, Casey.
Marco:
Because I, too, bought that same watch.
Marco:
Did you?
Marco:
With Cellular 2?
Marco:
Yes, but it isn't activated.
Marco:
Okay, fair enough.
Marco:
And humorously enough, as we record, it is 9.38 p.m.
Marco:
And at 9.37 p.m., my watch turned off with 0% battery.
Casey:
Has it been on all day?
Casey:
Like on your wrist all day, I mean?
Marco:
Not only have I been wearing it all day, I've been wearing it all week.
Marco:
And we can talk about that.
Marco:
Oh, oh, oh.
Marco:
But I wore it today as my all-day watch.
Marco:
And I put it on at about 8 in the morning.
Marco:
And I've been wearing it all day.
Marco:
And at 9.37 p.m., died.
John:
Well, before you two pile on your watch quite so much, I have one other interesting related story, which is my wife has got a watch and a phone, right?
John:
And the day she set up her phone...
John:
She was complaining that her watch battery, the life wasn't as good, and she expected to have much more.
John:
It didn't turn off, but she expected to have much more battery by the end of the day.
John:
This is the new watch.
John:
Getting close.
John:
Well, this is the thing.
John:
No, because her watch hadn't come yet.
John:
This is the old watch, the same watch that she'd been wearing that has not changed the Series 4.
John:
And she complained about it for multiple days because it took a while for her watch to get here because she got the phone basically on day one, but the watch just came yesterday.
John:
And she's like, I don't understand why my watch battery life is so terrible.
John:
I kept telling her, well, just wait, soon you get a new watch, maybe your watch.
John:
But it was a dramatic change, and the change coincides with her getting a phone with iOS 13 on it.
John:
So my pet theory now is there's something going on between phones with iOS 13, especially phones with iOS 13 that have just been set up.
John:
and watches period now going to a smaller watch yes casey in your case you should expect to get less battery because there's less battery in there and the always on screen is probably not right but the battery inside inside these watches is a little bit larger so i would say that there is a possibility that you're both getting screwed by ios 13 more than you're getting screwed by your watch battery but we'll just have to wait until like 13.3 or whatever to see if this resolves itself
Casey:
So that's the thing is that as a regular consumer, this is a really, really bad experience.
Casey:
Now, again, let me reiterate what you just said.
Casey:
I understand and totally agree that I am absolutely going to have worse battery life on account of it being a smaller watch.
Casey:
I understand and totally agree I will absolutely have worse battery life on account of it being always on.
Casey:
But I have gone from my Series 3, two-year-old battery on the Series 3, which again was the big one,
Casey:
That would last all day, every day, without even thinking twice about it, including on occasions when I would do like a half hour run on cellular with my AirPods paired to the watch, listening to either overcast or music.
Casey:
It would go to the end of the day, no sweat, every day.
Casey:
There were maybe 10 times in the two years I owned that watch that I didn't make it to the end of the day.
Casey:
Now, in this brand new watch with a brand new battery, where I feel like I've actually been pushing it less hard than I did my Series 3, I can barely make it to dinner.
Casey:
And that just seems wrong to me.
Casey:
Now, the frustrating thing about Apple is they never say anything about anything until it's like a big kerfuffle.
Casey:
And this apparently is not a big enough kerfuffle for them to say anything.
Casey:
But I have been whining to every little birdie I can talk to about this.
Casey:
And the rumblings I've heard is that things will get better.
Casey:
I don't know when.
Casey:
I genuinely don't know when.
Casey:
I wish I could tell you.
Casey:
I've heard that WatchOS 6.1 will fix everything.
Casey:
I genuinely don't know.
Casey:
But I have heard that there are things that are coming that will make this better.
Casey:
I don't know when and I don't know why.
John:
Yeah, the Series 6.
John:
Some suggestions on how to deal with this.
John:
One of them, obviously, is, and you can try this experiment, the always-on watch face is an option.
John:
And it's on by default, but you can turn it off.
John:
So you can try that experiment and see if it works.
John:
But the other things are things related not to your new watch, again, but just to iOS 13.
John:
Check to make sure your phone is not more aggressively shying to shove stuff onto your watch.
John:
Check to make sure that your settings... But how?
John:
How do I do that?
John:
that your settings on your watch haven't changed and now it's trying to transfer massive playlists all the time in a much more aggressive manner than you so because again i remind you both of the example my wife's series 4 suddenly got way worse battery life when she set up her new iphone there is no series 5 watch in this equation and she is not changing sizes the same watch she had same unmodified series 4.
John:
So I feel like there's something going on with iOS 13 that is doing it.
John:
And her solution to this was to try to see, is there a bunch of stuff on my watch that I shouldn't have there?
John:
I mean, it doesn't make any sense.
John:
So I am very suspicious of iOS 13 on the phone, not the watch.
John:
Now, from your little birdies, I can also totally believe that
John:
the series 5 and you know whatever watch os 6 or whatever is on it are uh there's some wonky problems in the point zero release and they need to get straightened out or whatever but i'm very suspicious of 13 on the phone as well i mean trust me the wonky problems extend to the point one release as well uh in fact it introduced some new ones that affect apps with navigation bars good thing that isn't too many apps trying to make ui in your app marco
Marco:
But anyway... What is UI?
Marco:
So, I mean, this very much could be software.
Marco:
Like, even in the best versions, the most mature, stable versions of these OSs, even in those scenarios, watchOS in particular is way buggier than iOS in my experience.
Marco:
And also...
Marco:
The process between phone and watch communication, anything with watch connectivity framework, anything where the phone and the watch are transferring information in either direction is the buggiest part of the Apple Watch software stack by far.
Marco:
And I don't care which side it's on, whether it's the watch OS's fault or iOS's fault.
Marco:
It doesn't matter.
Marco:
The transfer process between the two is always horrendous.
Marco:
It became even more horrendous this summer during the betas.
Marco:
So I know, like, stuff, major stuff changed there, basically.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
Something about watch connectivity changed so much that it was literally broken, I think, until Beta 3.
Marco:
And so there is very likely to be a software problem here that can be fixed, hopefully, with software fixes, if they ever fix the software.
Marco:
But I also think, like, you know, if we think back to, if you remember the Series Zero Apple Watch, the very first one.
John:
Oh, do I?
Marco:
Yeah, we all had it.
Marco:
John still has it, right?
John:
Yep.
Marco:
If you got the 38mm, the small one, the battery life was not very good to last for the day if you ever used workouts.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Because workouts put it in a higher power state and it has a little light on the bottom and it runs all the sensors at full blast and everything.
Marco:
If you didn't do workouts or if you got the bigger one, you were okay.
Marco:
But if you did workouts much during the day, the smaller one would not have a great battery life.
Marco:
And I think what this has done by adding the always-on screen, which we'll get to in a few minutes because I actually very much like the always-on screen, and it's a huge feature.
Marco:
It's like a category-defining feature that other watches were adding, and the Apple Watch didn't have, and it's a big deal.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
I'm really glad they added it.
Marco:
But I think what it largely has done is reset the battery gains.
Marco:
Like all the gains that we've gotten over the last few years have now been spent on the always on screen.
Marco:
And we're kind of back to where we were in series zero now, where if you like, cause I've been wearing this watch for, as I said about the entire last week and I hadn't run workouts until today on it.
Marco:
And today I did about two hours worth of time running in workout mode.
Marco:
As a result, I got to 9 p.m., battery died.
Marco:
And before today, it was fun.
Marco:
I would end other days with way less than my Series 4, which was the same size.
Marco:
Like the Series 4, I would put on the charger if I wore it for a day, which granted I didn't do that often.
Marco:
But if I wore it all day, I put it on the charger at the end of the day, and it would often still have like more than half of its battery.
Marco:
life left after all day of wearing it whereas the series 5 again same size is ending most days with no workouts at like 25 or 20% so no question the always on screen is a significant change to how much it uses the battery like we had kind of too much battery life before which was great it was a great problem to have they have spent the surplus big time and and
Marco:
Honestly, I think it was the right move to spend the surplus this way because it's awesome.
Marco:
And we'll get to that in a minute.
Marco:
But the battery issues are very real.
Marco:
And I will give the exact same advice to people now that I gave with the Series Zero.
Marco:
And we heard those reports, which is basically if you plan to use either workouts or cellular.
Marco:
get the big one.
Marco:
I wouldn't normally say, like, you know, get one that doesn't fit you very well, but honestly, if you use workouts or cellular and you don't want to take it off in the middle of the day to charge it, you're going to want the big one.
Marco:
I even might switch to the big one.
Marco:
I'm thinking I'm going to go try one on tomorrow to see, like, if I can really pull it off or not because the battery life is really bad on the small one if you do aggressive things.
Marco:
Now, the reality is, in my usage of the watch, I'm not frequently running two hours of workouts in one day.
Marco:
Today was unusual for that.
Marco:
Um, so it might not ever matter for me, but for those of you out there who do want to do those things or who do want to use cellular while you're out and about a lot, uh, that, that, that should be a strong consideration at the big one.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I have been trying to diagnose this.
Casey:
You know, I have been posting about this on Twitter and everyone has had their own theories as to what it is.
Casey:
And I appreciate people, you know, trying to give me ideas as to what to test.
Casey:
I assure you that whatever it is, listener, that you're thinking of, it is all but guaranteed that I have tried it.
Casey:
So you do not need to send emails or tweets.
Casey:
I appreciate it.
Casey:
But I've tried most things and I haven't found anything that works.
Casey:
Additionally, if you look at my mentions over the last few days, there are, I would say, exactly half the people that say, oh, you are crazy.
Casey:
This is great.
Casey:
It works flawlessly.
Casey:
No problems here.
Casey:
And exactly half the people have said, oh, it's a disaster.
Casey:
It's a disaster on the old stuff.
Casey:
It's a disaster on the new stuff.
Casey:
Everything's a disaster.
Casey:
And there was a brief window of time earlier today when it sounded like only the cellular models really got hit bad with this.
Casey:
But I've heard other people say, no, no, no.
Casey:
I have a non-cellular model, a GPS model, and it's still garbage.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
I really don't know.
Casey:
But I am really, really hopeful that it gets better.
Casey:
And ultimately, one way or another.
Casey:
I am of the opinion, and this is like, I think, was it you or Mike?
Casey:
I think it was Mike was getting very upset about everyone telling him to restore his phone or what have you, reset his phone.
Casey:
I think that's true.
Casey:
Like, if you look at this on a broader level, I spent $500 to get a watch that Apple promised to me would last all day and could have the screen on all day.
Casey:
I shouldn't have to micromanage my power.
Casey:
I shouldn't have to treat this like a Tesla going across the country worried if I can make it or not.
Casey:
I should be able to put it on in the morning and take it off at night and that's it.
Casey:
And it's just a really, really crummy experience for a brand new user to have to worry about this sort of thing.
Casey:
And furthermore, like on Aaron's watch, this I would love debug help with.
Casey:
Her old watch, she would use her watch face was the photo's face, and it would be pictures of the kids that were coming off of a shared album on iCloud.
Casey:
And I cannot, for the life of me, get her brand new watch, her Series 5, to get photos onto the watch.
Casey:
Because when you go to that watch face, it says, that's lovely, I would love to show you pictures, but there aren't on the watch.
Casey:
I've done everything I can think of outside of a start from fresh, which I was planning on trying tonight but didn't have time.
Casey:
I cannot figure out how this works.
Casey:
And so Erin has been like really and justifiably fired up that this thing that she spent $400 on because it's not cellular, it isn't working.
Casey:
It's just not working.
Casey:
And it's so frustrating.
Casey:
And the thing that frustrates me even more is I freaking love this thing.
Casey:
Like when it's working, it is amazing.
Casey:
And one of my favorite features about it, well, first of all, I do like the rounded display or the new kind of display in the Series 4 and the Series 5 because remember I was coming from the rectangular display.
Casey:
And like, I don't know what face is this that I'm using.
Casey:
I don't even know.
Casey:
The California face is extremely customizable, which everyone else under the sun knew, but I did not because I didn't have it before.
Casey:
I am loving the California face.
Casey:
What is it?
Casey:
The Meridian.
Casey:
That's also really good.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
I really like that one too.
Marco:
I have a lot to say about these too.
Casey:
And I genuinely do want to hear it.
Casey:
So this short segment, as ATP history tells you, is going to run very long.
Casey:
But the always on face, it really is delightful.
Casey:
And I mean that word.
Casey:
I choose that word deliberately.
Casey:
And what I found myself doing in the first couple of days of having it on is I would like say I was eating lunch or something and my hand is just or my arm is just resting on the table.
Casey:
And I would look over at my watch.
Casey:
And it would be on and it would show me the time.
Casey:
And my internal monologue would just say to myself, oh, I got lucky.
Casey:
It happened to be on.
Casey:
I guess I just moved my arm in such a way that it just happened.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Like I just happened to catch it before it turned itself back on.
Casey:
And it was like this really delightful feeling.
Casey:
And then when I realized, no, no, no.
Casey:
It's always on.
Casey:
It sounds so dumb, but I've had, what, four years, five years, something like that, of having an Apple Watch that the only way it turns on is if I've just moved my arm.
Casey:
And here it is.
Casey:
It's always available to me.
Casey:
And it makes a huge difference.
Casey:
Who knew having a timepiece that always displays the time is useful?
Marco:
It turns out a few other people knew this.
Marco:
This is one of the reasons why I've been wearing it for the last week.
Marco:
I wanted to really give it an honest shot in a way that I haven't given the Apple Watch an honest shot in years.
Marco:
Really, for me, what I loved about the Apple Watch at first was, oh,
Marco:
I'm wearing a watch, which I haven't done since middle school, and I like wearing a watch.
Marco:
And then I very quickly discovered, after about a year and a half, I'm like, wait, well, actually, I really love just the time on my wrist.
Marco:
That's like most of what I want.
Marco:
It's like 90% of the value that I get out of a watch is the time.
Marco:
which doesn't seem like that crazy of an idea and so i i quickly became attracted to regular watches and i got i got gotten super into like the you know the jewelry aspect of them like these are beautiful things that make me happy and make me feel like i look good and i smile when i look at them like the things that jewelry and fashion do for people like that's what watches have done for me over the last few years
Marco:
The Apple Watch really couldn't compete on those standards.
Marco:
It still is not much of a fashion piece.
Marco:
A little bit, but not as much as most good watches.
Marco:
There are certain aspects of it that can never fit the jewelry side of it.
Marco:
Just...
Marco:
The way that a mechanical watch can be beautiful in just some of the ways that the light reflects off the various facets of the hands and the hour markers and things like that.
Marco:
There's just a lot of things that – just like the way that you play with light and look at a watch that the Apple Watch can't do because it's just a screen.
Marco:
there's also a lot of value to the Apple watch and, and I feel like I should be more familiar with it being in this ecosystem.
Marco:
Uh, I, you know, both as a podcaster and as an app developer, I, you know, I need some familiarity with it.
Marco:
And, uh, and so I, I've, I've wanted, and also, you know, I like some of like some of the workout tracking stuff sometimes.
Marco:
So like,
Marco:
I've wanted to get back into it for years.
Marco:
And every time I would, I would buy the newest watch and I would enjoy it from like a development perspective because the new watch has always been like, you know, significantly faster than the one before it.
Marco:
And so I, you know, development cycles were always a lot easier and a lot faster because watch development is still pretty painful.
Marco:
So any gains there are significant.
Marco:
So like I'd be fine with it from development side, but then from the like wearing it as a watch side, I would get, I would fall out of love with it pretty fast because what would always annoy me about an Apple watch,
Marco:
is that that stupid wrist turn that i would turn my wrist and and about 20 of the time maybe it wouldn't work and i wouldn't see the time or there would be like a you know half second delay before it would light up and then i would start looking at the time and that annoyance just adds up for me so quickly especially once i got accustomed to regular watches where they are just always showing the time as you said
Marco:
So the reason why I was so interested in the Series 5 is because they're always on screen.
Marco:
It seems like Apple really just barely made it here with the battery, and maybe they haven't even just barely made it with the battery.
Marco:
But this is why I think that's an important thing, because it really radically improves the watch in a very critical way for a lot of people.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
To me, the always-on display is bigger than cellular.
Marco:
I know not everybody will agree with that, but to me, cellular is a nice-to-have feature that I think most people think they will use more than they actually end up using it.
Marco:
And most watches aren't even equipped with it because most people just buy aluminum and half of them don't have it.
Marco:
And also, you know, of all the ones that have it, how many are activated?
Marco:
You know, it's not, it's probably not a great percentage there either.
Marco:
And then of the, of the few that have cellular and the few that are activated, what percentage of those people are actually using the cellular connection?
Marco:
You know, like this is cellular effects.
Marco:
In reality, I think probably a pretty small percentage of Apple watch usage, whereas the always on screen makes the Apple watch between a little and a lot nicer with
Marco:
for all of them all the time yeah agreed so that's that that to me is a way better use of the power budget and it's the way more impressive uh feat to me and i you know i i know technically cellular was hard and everything but like to me like the always on screen is a much bigger deal because it makes the watch just overall significantly nicer in use for every single person using it all the time
John:
You may change your opinion on that once you start strapping your hand-me-down watches onto your children, because when they have cellular, you can track them when they're just wearing the watch.
John:
And you think, well, won't they always have their phone with them?
John:
Maybe.
John:
My kids don't want to take their phone anywhere.
John:
My daughter leaves the house and says, take your phone with you, because that's the most reliable way to...
John:
track her and get in touch with her it's got a big battery it's got more powerful radios all the other stuff she doesn't want to take her phone but the wrist once you the watch once you get it strapped onto the wrist uh as long as they like it there and put it on every day they just forget it's there so that's interesting i would not trade always on for cellular for my kids watches but for my own maybe if i wore a watch
Marco:
The good thing is we don't have to make this trade.
Marco:
But anyway, it's a really big deal.
Marco:
And there are a lot of implementation details and things to work out.
Marco:
Some things about it are a little bit weird.
Marco:
But overall...
Marco:
it works as advertised it really is like battery issues aside yeah well but again like you know like battery issues i think it's again it's very similar to the series zero where like if you push it hard it's not going to make it through the day and i think we've we've been spoiled with some of the recent uh generations that have had just way more battery life than than you think you that than anybody really seemed to need
Marco:
so much so that sleep tracking with the watch became a thing which apple has never really advertised it has never made easy because the whole thing was you're supposed to take your watch off and charge it overnight you know according to apple and like there was so much surplus battery life that this whole sleep tracking thing has come up on the side because people can wear their watch almost 24 hours a day and if you just charge it for like a couple of brief periods you can get enough charge to last you know the whole day so like
Marco:
We clearly had a big surplus, and I think this was a great way to spend it.
Marco:
Anyway, so as I've now come back to it for the week, and I don't know how long I'm going to stick with it as a daily wearer, but I do want to keep doing it for a little while longer so I can really get myself into this world and be able to talk about it more intelligently and everything else and know what it's like and be able to make my app better for it.
Marco:
A lot of my Apple Watch complaints...
Marco:
have been partially resolved or mostly resolved with with this change but a lot of those complaints are still there i love now telling time on it that was the i know shocker telling time on a watch telling time on the apple watch before sucked because again you'd turn your wrist and it might not be there or it would take a minute it was terrible now i enjoy telling time on it but there is one giant asterisk on that
Marco:
Apple cannot design an analog watch face to save their lives.
Marco:
I know everyone loves the new California and the new Meridian faces.
Marco:
You're grading on a curve.
Marco:
Apple's analog watch faces are incredibly mediocre.
Marco:
They have lots of problems.
Marco:
They have lots of design flaws, many of which are really easily avoidable, but they didn't.
Marco:
Apple watch faces seem like they're designed by people who have never worn analog watches and really don't understand them at all.
Marco:
it's like the same way it's to me like the the analog watch faces on apple watch are like game center to video games it's like this was designed by people who don't understand it right like it like when game center had like that green felt like they're just not good analog faces at all there it's not good analog watch design and at heart the apple watch is a digital watch through and through and
Marco:
So for me, I have found – for multiple reasons, I have come to peace with this fact that this is never going to be a good analog watch unless Apple lets us do third-party faces, which honestly I think now that the faces are even more complex in the way they have to deal with the sleep versus wake state of the dim screen –
Marco:
I think the chances are lower than ever that we're ever going to get third-party watch faces because I think Apple looks at this as now like a critical power management thing.
Marco:
They're never going to allow third-party watch faces, in my opinion.
Marco:
I wish they would, but I just don't see it happening.
John:
I'll take that bet, as I stated in the last program.
John:
Fine.
John:
Because we have to wait for the infinite timeline to complete for you to ever win.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
Or the Apple Watch to be discontinued, I suppose.
Marco:
Anyway, so the reality is, like, the Apple Watch is a really mediocre analog watch, but it can be a pretty decent digital watch.
Marco:
And so I've come around to this fact, and I've come around to the fact that I'm never going to get the analog face I want.
Marco:
I'm never going to get good analog face design from them.
Marco:
So, I've just been using Solar, my favorite face.
Marco:
Solar is the old face that has, like, the sun going through the sky with the digital clock on the corner, complication on top and bottom.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
i i love just part for me like a huge part of watches is the aesthetic appeal i like the way they look and i buy them based on how they look and how they make me feel and i love the solar face the solar face is not only incredibly attractive but it is to use a johnny term it is uh unashamedly plastic is that what he said
Marco:
unapologetically that's it it is unapologetically digital like there is nothing about solar that pretends to be an analog face at all and it's not perfect like it still does that weird time travel thing where if you turn the crown it enters like this like the time travel like mode that has been kicked out of watch os for like two years now but it's still on the solar face that you can scroll through and see like the like what sunset time is and stuff and that's annoying because if you like accidentally brush the crown it's in this mode and everything but
Marco:
It is unapologetically digital, and the Apple Watch is a way better digital watch than it is trying to fake an analog watch.
Marco:
It's so much better at that.
Marco:
And again, not perfect.
Marco:
There are things I would edit, but so many fewer things, and they're such smaller things.
Marco:
Another just practical advantage of going digital now with Series 5, two things.
Marco:
Number one...
Marco:
When you are in bright sun and the screen is in the dim mode, you can read the digital time a lot more easily and with a lot less of the screen very visible to you and a lot more quickly than you can read analog hands.
Marco:
Because one of the reasons why Apple's analog faces are so mediocre is that they really have been pretty poor on time legibility.
Marco:
especially if you use any complications.
Marco:
And some of the faces are a little bit better or worse than others, but the analog faces are not very good at letting you quickly see the time and figure out what time it is.
Marco:
The digital faces that just put the time in the upper right corner or something...
Marco:
a lot less of the screen has to be visible and for a lot less time.
Marco:
And it's a lot easier to see if you, if you're in like a bright light and there's a dim screen, it's a lot easier to see that time.
Marco:
Like I, I just, I spent a few days at the beach again, walking around outside and the bright sun and everything.
Marco:
And it was totally fine reading the digital time in all conditions.
Marco:
There were some times where it was, it was a little close.
Marco:
Like I could almost not read it, but I could read it.
Marco:
And yeah,
Marco:
Or if I'm hanging my arm on the window while I'm driving, you have very bright sun hitting your wrist there, but you can still glance at it and see that digital time in no time at all.
Marco:
So that's one major advantage.
Marco:
I think in the dim screen mode, having a digital time makes it much more readable more of the time.
Marco:
And then secondly...
Marco:
There's this weird thing where people who have Series 5s know this, where if you have an app open and it goes into dim mode, the app doesn't dim unless it's the workout app.
Marco:
And if it's any other app, it blurs out the app with a big blur effect and just puts a digital time in the upper right.
Marco:
yeah yeah yeah and so if you are normally using an analog face but you happen to have put the watch to sleep while an app is running congratulations you now have a digital watch and that's jarring that the transition is like that's not what you want at all and maybe this is just because the the you know the dim face software is super super young probably right because it's a brand new hardware like i'm sure the software is going to improve and there's going to be you know better transitions and smoother things like that but like right now
Marco:
it's like the Apple is going to force you to see this digital face pretty frequently anyway.
Marco:
So, if you're already accustomed to one of the faces that puts the digital time in the upper right corner, like so many of them do, then this, it looks a lot less different when it does this than other times.
Marco:
So,
Marco:
I have dramatically improved my enjoyment of the watch by just making it a digital watch only.
Marco:
I'm not using any analog faces right now.
Marco:
I've just been using digital, and that just makes it a lot nicer for me.
Casey:
Now, I know you would never give up your beloved mechanical watches, and I don't say that to poke fun, believe it or not.
Casey:
But in the past, it sounded like you would use an Apple Watch only for the things it was uniquely well suited for.
Casey:
So something like exercise as an example.
Casey:
But now it sounds like you're less, I don't know, bitter isn't the word I'm looking for, but less, and disgusted is too strong a word, but less grossed out by it.
Casey:
So the question I'm meandering toward is, do you see yourself electing to wear this at times when it isn't necessarily the best suited for the job at hand?
Marco:
I mean, that's a hard thing to judge.
Marco:
Choosing what you wear, for the most part, is mood and fashion and situation-based.
Marco:
I'm not going to be that analytical about it.
Marco:
To me, it used to be this annoying thing that I had to wear sometimes for my job, basically.
Marco:
And now, I'm embracing it as, this is just a nice digital watch.
Marco:
okay and i i really like the way it looks when i configure it my way like i love the solar face i once again got stainless steel i love the 40 millimeter size although we'll have to see about the battery thing but like you know i i love the size i love the stainless steel and and i love my white sport band
Marco:
Like it's, I love the look of this thing.
Marco:
I think it looks very nice, especially now when by having always on faces, you can make much more of a fashion decision about what your watch looks like because before you would have, well, you could choose the strap and the metal and then we're going to have a big black square most of the time and that's going to be your look.
Yeah.
Marco:
All right, well, now I have more control over that.
Marco:
And I just, God, I wish so much for third-party watch faces or for Apple to put a lot more effort into the number and customizability of their watch faces.
Marco:
But neither of those seem likely.
Marco:
It seems like Apple is treating watch faces just as these afterthoughts, which is crazy to me because it's like the interface to one of their most important products, and they seem to be afterthoughts, honestly.
Casey:
Do you feel like if the software enabled you to do it tomorrow, do you feel like you, Marco, could design a pretty good or maybe even perfect analog watch face?
Casey:
Or is it more like you know the things you don't like, but you don't know if you personally are capable of generating something that you do like?
Marco:
definitely the latter like you know it's like you know like film critics don't have to know how to make movies right like yeah totally like you know which is a common argument actually but like you know like i feel like you can be a critic of something without necessarily being able to make a really good version of the thing yourself and so and i i can critique any watch style design uh and and i i know what i like i know what i don't
Marco:
And unfortunately, the Apple Watch does not come close to the analog faces.
Marco:
But the digital faces are a lot better and there's less about digital faces to be offended by because the time is just condensed to this little group of numbers and then you have the whole rest of the screen to kind of just play with.
Marco:
So, you know, as opposed to like, you know, regular analog face design where you typically have the entire surface of the watch is responsible for the time.
Marco:
You have these big, broad hands going across it and you got to indicate the hour somehow in some kind of legible way.
Marco:
Like there's all these there's a lot more that goes into the design of analog faces than digital faces.
Marco:
Um, and so, yeah, I, I, I know what I like.
Marco:
I can, I can say, I can look at something and tell you why I do or don't like it.
Marco:
Uh, but I don't think I would, I would like to try making some, making them myself, but I don't think I'd be very good at it.
John:
On that topic, it's obvious that you're not in love with any of the analog faces that Apple makes, but I'm not sure what the overall public opinion is.
John:
You mentioned that Apple is bad at making analog watch faces.
John:
They're bad at making analog watch faces that you like, but you're a watch nerd.
John:
The general public, are they satisfied by the watch faces?
John:
Do they think the amount of configurability is adequate?
John:
Is it legible to most people?
John:
How many people care about the hands blocking the date window?
John:
I
John:
i don't i don't i'm not in touch with enough regular people who have apple watches to know mostly i don't hear about uh complaints about the apple watch except for from watch nerds and i did remember hearing uh some complaints when they moved to the whatever the thing is with the i don't know the names of these stupid watch faces the one with like the three dials remember that was the first rounded infograph yeah
John:
infograph was the first time i heard complaints from people mostly because that was so heavily pushed because you can't read the time and it was and it was confusing but other than that i feel like they've had enough watch faces that i think most people who really who basically don't care about watch faces can find something that not only that they tolerate but that they're actually happy with so i'm not entirely ready to say apple is bad making analog watch faces
John:
Apple seems like they're bad at making watch faces that watch nerds like, and they're definitely bad at making watch faces that you like.
John:
But I don't know, like, overall, are they dropping the ball on watch faces or not?
Marco:
I mean, lots of people use Windows PCs every day and see nothing wrong with them.
John:
Yeah, I know.
John:
I'm not sure if they're like bad at it, right?
John:
Like they are making keyboards ho.
John:
Because it is so much of a taste thing.
John:
Like there is legibility, right?
John:
But even on that front, I don't feel like it's a common complaint that...
John:
I can't read the time I watch, unlike, you know, my space bar is acting wonky or I get two E's when I press the key, right?
John:
And very quickly, because it is so subjective, it goes into, well, what do you like?
John:
What appeals to you?
John:
And then everyone, you know, has their own taste.
John:
But like legibility.
John:
The number of watches I see where it's got a picture of someone's kid's face, like they use the picture face.
John:
That's Aaron.
John:
It boggles my mind.
John:
It's like you're complaining about details, legibility of your thing, and they're just like, nope, giant picture of my kid.
John:
Those are digital faces.
John:
They're fine.
John:
I know, but legibility-wise, it's just a big, giant picture with no thought for legibility whatsoever.
John:
I mean, it might even be the same color as the letters and the numbers for the time in the background.
John:
People have strange tastes.
John:
Yeah, but that doesn't mean that we can't make better things.
John:
I know, I know.
John:
I mean, obviously, like, again, third-party watch faces is a solution here.
John:
And, you know, maybe, like, one or two watch faces with extreme customizability for the watch nerds is definitely an area where they need to branch out.
John:
And maybe they'll never make a watch face that you personally like.
John:
But, like I said, I'm not quite...
John:
sure that they are actually actually bad at making watch faces because if most people can find a watch face that they're actually happy with i think they're probably doing okay making watch faces still should still definitely should do third-party watch faces for a whole bunch of other reasons but i don't know
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Everything is visual, intuitive, easy to use.
Marco:
So when you have to make a website, you can go the nerdy way and try to do some other kind of thing.
Marco:
But really, it's not worth it.
Marco:
It's much more worth it to go Squarespace because there's lots of other things you can do with servers and be more interesting these days on the back end.
Marco:
But if you just need a website, which is what most people need,
Marco:
just go with Squarespace because it saves you tons of time.
Marco:
You get amazing output for very little effort and they have a great, you know, they even have great support if you ever need it.
Marco:
So check it out today, squarespace.com slash ATP.
Marco:
You can build an entire trial site there without even giving them a credit card.
Marco:
And then when you want to sign up at the end of the trial, make sure to head back there, squarespace.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Use offer code ATP to get 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
Once again, squarespace.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Code ATP for 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
Make your next move with a beautiful website from Squarespace.
Casey:
We should finally talk about iPhones and our iPhones 11 Pro.
Casey:
So, John, you personally did not get a phone this year.
Casey:
Is that correct?
John:
Right.
John:
But my wife did.
John:
She got 11 Pro in space gray on day one and slapped into another funky colored silicone case and has been messing with it since then.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
And Marco, you and Tiff, what was your agenda for this?
Casey:
That you both got 11 Pros?
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
I got the, what I said, you know, the white one with regular size 11 Pro and a red Apple leather case.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
And then what did Tiff, did she get a Max or did she get just an 11 Pro?
Marco:
She got the Max green with the clear case.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I obviously, like we discussed, I got the 256 Pro in green and I am running caseless, which I somewhat regret and
Casey:
I wanted to quickly cover a couple of things.
Casey:
And if you guys have stuff to add, please feel free to jump in.
Casey:
Otherwise, I'll just blaze forward.
Casey:
My pickup experience I wanted to briefly talk about.
Casey:
For the last several years when I've gotten new phones, I did not get the XS series.
Casey:
So last time I got a phone was the X. But the phones leading up to that, with the exception of whatever one it was that they did not do pre-orders, I've always had them shipped to the house.
Casey:
And I've never done a store pickup.
Casey:
And I've never done a schedule of pickup time in advance store pickup.
Casey:
But I did do that this time.
Casey:
Again, I ordered a phone for Aaron and me, one phone apiece.
Casey:
I ordered a watch apiece for Aaron and me.
Casey:
Interestingly, the watch did not let me set a time earlier than 10, which is when the store usually opens.
Casey:
But the phone, because it knew it was launch day and the store was opening early, the phone let me set a time for 8 a.m.
Casey:
8 to 8.30 was the time I chose.
Casey:
And I was a little, I don't know if worried's the word, but I was curious whether they would let me do my 10 o'clock watch appointment at the same time I did my 8 o'clock phone appointment.
Casey:
And they did, and it was no problem.
Casey:
Now, granted, the Short Pump store here in Richmond is not...
Casey:
overwhelmingly busy it is the only store in a surprisingly large geographic radius but it is not a terribly busy store and i got there about 8 15 and i was out of there by like 8 30 8 45 something like that it was pretty easy pretty painless
Casey:
No big issues.
Casey:
I was picking up Erin's phone, which I believe I ordered just as like, you know, AT&T, otherwise untethered, so to speak, phone.
Casey:
I also picked up her watch, which she ordered under her own, you know, Apple account and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And she sent me as a pickup person for it.
Casey:
That was no problem.
Casey:
I just had to show my ID.
Casey:
Uh, the pickup experience for me was really, really good.
Casey:
And I think, especially because my UPS driver loves to come at like six o'clock at night on iPhone day, I'll probably continue to do pickup where possible for the future.
Casey:
Uh, John, your Tina's was shipped to the home.
Casey:
Is that correct?
John:
Yeah, some people have to go to jobs during the day, so it's kind of hard to go to an Apple store.
John:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Oh, monsters.
Casey:
And Marco, as a fellow unemployed person, what did you do?
Marco:
I did the order for delivery.
Marco:
At the 8 a.m., I ordered them for delivery.
Marco:
But I happened to be next to an Apple store doing shopping errands that day, and I thought, well, you know what?
Marco:
I didn't order a case anymore.
Marco:
And I think I want a case.
Marco:
I think I'm a little scared to go caseless on this one.
Marco:
Jeez, why?
Marco:
Yeah, right?
Marco:
So I was next to the Apple store, and so I went over, and of course they have all the big lines set up outside, and there's like three different lines for whether you have an appointment or not and everything.
Marco:
And they were probably, this was pretty early in the day still, so there were probably about 100 people out there in line.
Marco:
And I went up to the agent who was assigning people which line to be in, and I'm like, I just want to buy a case.
Marco:
And she's like, oh, okay, hold on.
Marco:
And I had to wait for like, you know, five minutes or something and then she let me in.
Marco:
So it was great.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So I go over to the cases and I'm looking at the wall and I'm like, all right, I wanted the red leather 11 Pro case.
Marco:
There was not a spot on the wall for that.
Casey:
Interesting.
Marco:
Like, the red leather case exists for the 11 Pro, but there just wasn't a spot for it.
Marco:
And it looks like behind little things, like all the little boxes to see, like, you know, maybe they just got mis-shelved or something.
Marco:
Nope.
Marco:
There is nowhere to be found the red leather case for the 11 Pro.
Marco:
So I'm standing around.
Marco:
I'm like, you know, on iPhone day inside the Apple Store...
Marco:
Almost every employee is talking to somebody, setting up their phone.
Marco:
You can't really get a lot of people's time, but I happened to luck out.
Marco:
One of the employees was walking by between things, and he's like, do you need any help?
Marco:
I'm like, well, I'm having trouble finding this case.
Marco:
Do you not have it?
Marco:
He was super nice, and he's like, let me see what I can do.
Marco:
He goes in the back and looks.
Marco:
Eventually, he comes back out, and he actually found one in the back somehow.
Marco:
I'm like, out of curiosity, could I pick up a watch while I'm here?
Marco:
And, uh, and sure enough.
Marco:
And yes, the answer was, yeah, sure.
Marco:
No problem.
Marco:
Cause like once you're in, once you're assigned to a person, they don't care how many things you haven't bring out from the back.
Marco:
Like it's, that's a different person that's doing that.
Marco:
Like they're, they're just ringing you up.
Marco:
So they happened to have what I wanted in stock, which, of course, online I couldn't reserve it.
Marco:
But they have a certain percentage for walk-ins, I guess.
Marco:
And so I got an Apple Watch, exactly what I wanted, by waiting in line for five minutes.
Marco:
Now, the funny thing is, so I went home, waiting for my phone to arrive.
Marco:
It's about, I don't know, four or five at night, and the UPS truck comes.
Marco:
And we ordered two phones, but it was two different orders because I wanted to go fast through the process.
Marco:
So we ordered two phones.
Marco:
You could track it on a live map.
Casey:
Yeah, those are awesome.
Marco:
And it showed them both on the same truck.
Marco:
Well, only one box arrived with only one phone in it.
Marco:
It was Tiff's phone.
Marco:
I'm like, oh, no.
Marco:
And I was going on a trip the next day.
Marco:
So I'm like, I want my new phone for my trip.
Marco:
And the tracking still said it was on that truck.
Marco:
What?
Marco:
So I chased down the truck that was a block away once I figured this out.
Marco:
And I waved down the driver who was, of course, delivering other people's iPhones to their houses down the street from us.
Marco:
And he checked.
Marco:
He's like, look, I'm sorry.
Marco:
It's not on this truck.
Marco:
Whatever it is, it's not here.
Marco:
And he was like, sometimes this happens.
Marco:
You can call them.
Marco:
I called them.
Marco:
He's like, maybe I got mis-dispatched or whatever to a different truck.
Marco:
I'm like, God.
Marco:
I call the UPS.
Marco:
This is the worst phone call ever.
Marco:
Right?
Marco:
trying to call UPS's national call center on iPhone day saying, you know, where is it?
Marco:
It was going nowhere.
Marco:
I'm like, oh, crap.
Marco:
I'm like, you know what?
Marco:
I had kind of an easy evening.
Marco:
I'm like, let me just go back to the store.
Casey:
There it is.
Casey:
We all knew where this was going.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Sorry.
Marco:
so i went i went back to the store and i go i go to the line person and by this point the lines were much shorter but i knew i'd have to like actually wait on the real line this time i couldn't i couldn't take you know press my luck twice so i go wait on the real line but i told the uh the dispatcher i'm like just so you know like i i know exactly what i want and i'm not going to do any setup and i'm paying in full and she put me in a different line for that oh really a much shorter one
Marco:
oh that's funny yeah so i i went again with no reservation got myself in a much shorter line this one was only like 15 minutes instead of like you know probably 45 to an hour for the other one i get in there and uh and you know i i got a person they start looking stuff up and oh they yeah they have one in the back okay and they go and and after like 15 minutes i got a message from tiff saying your phone just arrived on a
Marco:
oh my word and about two minutes after that the employee comes back i am so sorry but the manager just told me we actually don't have this phone anymore like we're actually out like even though i had they had created a reservation for me like but that didn't i guess it didn't work somehow somehow so i'm like all right i guess you know no no problem so thanks for trying so i left and came back and got my phone
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
That is a very Marco story.
John:
That is a lovely story demonstrating Marco's incredible patience.
John:
Chasing the truck down the street.
John:
Where's my phone?
Marco:
I'm going to the store.
Marco:
I got a phone?
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
I'll see you later.
Marco:
I mean, I took a lot of good pictures on that trip.
Casey:
Yeah, you did.
Casey:
So to that end, that's actually a perfect segue.
Casey:
So again, I came from the iPhone X, and so I didn't have any of the XS Super HDR goodness.
Casey:
Obviously, none of us have had night mode, and none of us have had the supposedly better battery, which we saw how well that worked on the watch.
Casey:
Let me start with the camera.
Casey:
I went to this really interesting festival that's here in Richmond called Field Day of the Past, which is potentially worth discussing another time, but supposed to say it's sort of kind of like a state fair.
Casey:
And I was taking a few pictures here and there and I didn't bring my big camera, even though I usually do, because I thought, well, let me put this through its paces like Panzerino style.
Casey:
And I took a picture of I think it was just the landscape, but I was pointed directly at the sun.
Casey:
And this was a picture that should have failed miserably in pretty much every way.
Casey:
And it came out beautifully.
Casey:
And that was one of the first pictures I took with my then unbroken phone.
Casey:
And at that point, I realized, oh, oh, this is the real deal.
Casey:
I also have noticed that I am trying to go wide on all the things, which is exactly what Mike has talked about, I think.
Casey:
On upgrade, it might have been connected.
Casey:
But he said, you know, I think everyone's going to be doing wide shots of everything just because we can.
Casey:
And yep, that's me.
Casey:
I'm that guy.
Casey:
But I'm loving the flexibility of the ultra wide.
Casey:
I've calmed down already a fair bit on actually using it, but I'm loving the option.
Casey:
I am very much loving the much improved and wide selfie camera because something I've noticed myself doing more and more often is taking pictures of all four of us
Casey:
And trying to do that with the front-facing camera, which is genuinely hard.
Casey:
Maybe I'm just a bad selfie taker, but it's hard to do on the X because there's just not a lot of width to these shots.
Casey:
And using the wide camera on the selfie camera is just freaking delightful.
Casey:
I haven't played with night mode very much, but I did take a really pretty picture of my car in the driveway at like late, late, late dusk, almost night.
Casey:
And it is very good.
Casey:
Having not really experienced the Pixel night sight or whatever they call it...
Casey:
I've seen examples of it from time to time, but I never really played with it.
Casey:
I had this, in retrospect, completely bananas thought that you could take pictures with almost no light whatsoever, and they'll be perfect and noise-free, and that is not at all my experience with night mode.
Casey:
Night mode definitely requires some amount of light.
Casey:
It just requires quite a bit less light than you would expect.
Casey:
And I got to say, it is extremely impressive.
Casey:
And I am loving the cameras on this phone as someone who came from a 10.
Casey:
Marco is not only a photographer, but someone who has come from the 10s.
Casey:
Any thoughts on the camera specifically?
Casey:
And then we have some other things we can talk about.
Casey:
But what about the camera?
Marco:
I love these cameras.
Marco:
I got to say, I mean, it's funny.
Marco:
Like, I believe I said on this show a week ago that, you know, well, I wish they would have done like a, you know, a more telephoto, you know, the wide, you know, I'm not going to have much use for the wide.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm using all the time.
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
Now, I think some of that is just because it's new and fancy, but yes, I completely agree.
Marco:
And what I do wish, and I think you've done a little bit of this, so when you have actual optics, like an actual optical zoom that is moving elements in a lens forward and back to achieve different zoom levels, you get differences in the perspective.
Marco:
If you take the super wide shot, if you just crop the middle section out,
Marco:
That's not how it looks when you use a lens that is that focal distance.
Marco:
There's a certain amount of perspective compression and distortion in different ways that... So what I kind of wish is that...
Marco:
I very rarely need the entire ultra-wide 13mm out zoom, but I often wish for something that's between the 13mm and the 28mm.
Marco:
Yeah, I think that's fair.
Marco:
And they simulate it, but it's not quite the same.
Marco:
It doesn't have the right optical characteristics as if you had a 17mm or 18mm zoom lens.
Marco:
So I kind of wish for that, but I know that's probably out of scope for what they're doing here.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
And the other thing I will caution people about wide – wide-angle shots can look very strange and can be extremely unflattering of people.
Marco:
I would suggest – I mean it's a fun effect to play with.
Marco:
But I would suggest if you're going to shoot something ultra wide, you don't want it to be very close to the camera.
Marco:
It's great for landscapes, obviously, and stuff like that.
Marco:
But if you're shooting ultra wide of people or things, those people better love you very much.
Marco:
And also, again, not being super close to the lens will be good for you.
Marco:
But yeah, I love these cameras.
Marco:
Just like, you know, shooting video especially and like some of the photos I've gotten have just been incredible and I've put like no effort whatsoever into them.
Marco:
Just like casual like snaps of like
Marco:
you know snapping like the sign of like where i parked in the parking lot so i can remember where it is and like it looks incredible like my my my typical like you know like boring the like i know like merlin was talking a lot about this um i believe on rectifs this past week right john uh about how like you know whoever like who does apple think we are with these cameras there's like we're all like
Marco:
shooting pictures of like models and on vacations and these incredible scenes like no like the way i use my phone camera is i shoot mostly very boring things like everyone else it's very rare that i'm shooting like beautiful you know scenes and yet even for all the stupid stuff these cameras look fantastic
Marco:
And they take no effort.
Marco:
The iPhone has been heading in this direction for years.
Marco:
This is not a brand new thing that it can do this at all.
Marco:
But this is a significant leap forward.
Marco:
And the XS was also a fantastic leap forward on the camera in most ways.
Marco:
And this is just that much better that it even outdoes the jump that the XS made.
Marco:
So I am very happy with these cameras so far.
Marco:
And I'm looking forward to using them more.
Casey:
You know, I don't think I talked about this on the show, but I was talking to somebody about this.
Casey:
It's interesting to me that I'm finding myself less and less enthusiastic in taking my big camera.
Casey:
And I love bouquet more than anything.
Casey:
And the portrait mode in this is still eh.
Casey:
I took a portrait mode photo just earlier today of Michaela on a seesaw, and it was one of those instances where her leg was out and there was an empty space in between her leg and the seesaw itself, and that was crystal clear.
Casey:
It should have been blurred out.
Casey:
And so portrait mode still leaves a lot to be desired.
Casey:
But outside of when I really want that beautiful background blur...
Casey:
for pretty much any other kind of picture, I genuinely think my iPhone is considerably better than my Micro Four Thirds camera I bought just, I think, a year ago.
Casey:
And that's both wonderful and kind of weird.
Casey:
But, you know, I take that example I used a minute ago, shooting into the sun.
Casey:
If I understood and knew how to edit a photo like you or Tiff does, I might be able to take a
Casey:
take one shot and underexpose it, you know, and take another shot and overexpose, you know, and do this basically the magic that the phone does on my behalf.
Casey:
Maybe I could do that by hand.
Casey:
But why the hell would I want to?
Casey:
And the phone just does this for me.
Casey:
And it does it perfectly, or at least to my eye anyway, it does it perfectly.
Casey:
And it does it in a fraction of a second.
Casey:
And in night mode, good grief, there is no way I would get anything night mode like out of my out of my micro four thirds camera.
Casey:
Now, maybe if I had one of those bananas full-frame cameras like you and Stephen have, maybe I wouldn't need night mode at all.
Casey:
But for me, with my equipment that's in my house, about the only time I'm going to turn to my Micro Four Thirds is when I know it's really important to me to have that beautiful background blur.
Casey:
And it is important to me a lot, I'm not going to lie.
Casey:
But it is unreal how good these cameras are.
Casey:
And I think some of that is just new shiny, but so much of it is just they are so flexible.
Casey:
And the computational photography that Apple does is so good that it makes me reluctant to bring my big camera at times when I absolutely would have just a year ago.
Marco:
Well, and there's aspects of this that big cameras can't match.
Marco:
Like the night sight mode or whatever it's called.
Marco:
What do you call it?
Marco:
Night mode?
Marco:
I think it's night mode, yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, night trap, whatever.
Marco:
So the night mode here is so good in...
Marco:
ways that big cameras don't do because big cameras you know you can have a giant sensor and you can have amazing optics and you can have an incredibly high sensitivity on that sensor so you can crank the iso way way way up and or you can put it on a tripod and and go you know go to crazy lanes so maybe have like a timer release so you don't have like the shake of pushing the button to really keep it steady and have it shoot for like a 30 second or minute exposure some long time
Marco:
But what big cameras can't do is give you a pretty good shot in pretty minimal light while you're hand-holding them.
Casey:
Yeah, good point.
Marco:
Because night mode is not just a long exposure.
Marco:
It is a combination of a bunch of stuff.
Marco:
And it especially handles handheld motion way better than any regular camera can because they're not doing that kind of smart.
Marco:
They're applying sheer hardware and optics to the problem.
Marco:
Whereas Apple doesn't and will never have hardware and optics to best the big cameras.
Marco:
So they're using software and tricks instead.
Marco:
And they're really effective tricks and really smart software and really incredible computation there that...
Marco:
you know the big cameras can do a lot of things better but they can't do like the night mode stuff like in real world real life like when you're not having a tripod you're not setting up some big you know pro photo shoot with tripods and gimbals like in an apple commercial like if you're just a person holding your phone trying to take a picture like the rest of us you you will actually get way better pictures out of the iphone under a lot of circumstances than you'll get out of even the best big cameras
Casey:
And that's so bananas to me that this thing in my pocket that we all laughed about in 2007, 2008, whenever it was that the first iPhone came out, you know, the Internet connection was slower than dirt and it didn't have copy paste.
Casey:
And, you know, so much of it was such trash back then, but it was still so much better than what we had now.
Casey:
And now, you know, the LTE connection on a good day is not as fast as what I have at home but more than ample enough.
Casey:
This camera is arguably better than the one I spent, you know, almost equal money on.
Casey:
between the camera body and the lens.
Casey:
Actually, I spent about the same money between the camera body and the lens.
Casey:
It might be better than that camera.
Casey:
So much of this is just phenomenal.
Casey:
And while we're gushing over these new phones, I need to basically take all the whining and complaining I just did about the Apple Watch, which really is chapping my hindquarters, and everything is reversed for these phones.
Casey:
For me, anyway.
Casey:
I can't tell you.
Casey:
I don't know what your experience has been like, Marco, or what Tina's experience has been like.
Casey:
But I have been using my phone on and off all day long, and it is 1035 in the evening, and I am at 53%, which is nuts.
Casey:
It is insane how good this battery is.
Casey:
It is as good as the Apple Watch battery appears to be bad right now.
Casey:
I cannot get over... I mean this genuinely.
Casey:
I cannot believe... Well, I guess it was two years for me, but really, from my understanding, the XS wasn't too much different than the X. But the difference between a two-year-old X battery and this battery is...
Casey:
bananas I cannot believe they've gotten this much juice out of this and I know we've learned that there's a bigger battery as we talked about earlier and we've learned that there or we knew that there was much better power management but this is absurd how much battery power this thing has and I am loving it it is incredible yeah so far I haven't been using it so much like without being near a charger that I would that I have a good idea of it but so far it feels pretty good
Casey:
Yeah, I cannot gush enough about how good this battery life is.
Casey:
It's to the point that, I mean, we'll see what happens next time I do like a trip or a conference or what have you.
Casey:
But, you know, when I'm at a conference like WWDC, basically any occasion I have to charge my phone, because I'm not one to use a charging case.
Casey:
I have no problems with it.
Casey:
I just am too cheap to buy them.
Casey:
Uh, anytime I have an opportunity to charge my phone at dub dub, I will absolutely take that opportunity because you never know the next time you're going to be able to charge unless it's bedtime.
Casey:
And that to me is like number one pro tip of WWDC.
Casey:
I sitting here today, I feel like I would probably make it a day or, or, or it would be close to making it a day without charging.
Casey:
Whereas with every other iPhone I've ever had, there is not even a prayer of me making it through a day at WWDC with any of them.
Marco:
Now, how have you found the removal of 3D Touch?
Casey:
Both better and worse than I expected.
Casey:
There are places that it drives me insane, like on the lock screen.
Casey:
It drives me insane on the lock screen.
Casey:
I don't know...
Casey:
I guess they don't want to do momentary touch on the camera and the flashlight buttons because maybe you'll hit them by accident.
Casey:
But I feel like the delay is long enough that it's frustrating.
Casey:
It's really frustrating.
Casey:
Yes, I know you can slide for the camera, but I don't think you can slide for the flashlight, my friend.
John:
Try every direction.
Casey:
Yeah, well, you never know.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I find I'm annoyed with it being missing there.
Casey:
I don't like the text selection.
Casey:
You have to be more deliberate and do it on the space bar.
Casey:
I do like that there's still an option because I would be eight times more furious if there was no option for the touchpad text placement thing.
Casey:
But I am glad there's something I don't like that I can't just mash anywhere on the keyboard and do it.
Casey:
Aaron pointed out something interesting to me, which maybe has been in iOS 13 the whole time and I just never noticed.
Casey:
But it used to be like, say you've composed a text message and you tap and hold on a word.
Casey:
It would bring up the little, what do you call it, loop or whatever.
Casey:
And you would be able to shimmy the cursor around by starting that with a tap and hold.
Casey:
now a tap and hold selects the word and sitting here today only a week or so into having that you know change because i believe that's a change anyway i don't particularly care for it i bet you over time i'll get used to it but aaron was like what the hell is this why can't i you know tap and hold and get the loop and do it the way i used to do and i was like i don't know hit the space bar maybe that'll work
Casey:
Um, and, and that after she showed me the arrow in the FedEx logo, I realized that it is kind of annoying me too, but I, that one, I think I'll get over the space bar thing.
Casey:
And man, that's, that that's frustrating.
Casey:
I might go to get over it, but God, those lock screen buttons are driving me nuts.
Casey:
How do you feel about it?
Marco:
i feel pretty similarly like i never did the word selection thing uh but i the and the keyboard cursor movement thing doesn't actually bother me very much in practice because with force touch excuse me 3d touch uh i i had a pretty high error rate with trying to mash it to get the cursor to show up you know and drag it around like i
Marco:
I actually had a pretty high error rate and my error rate with doing the space bar is almost zero.
Marco:
So that I, you know, it is a little bit slower, but it's more consistent.
Marco:
And so I actually prefer that.
Marco:
The flashlight and camera buttons in the lock screen though, I definitely don't like that.
Marco:
And as John mentioned, you can swipe.
Marco:
I actually forgot about that.
Marco:
Like ever since moving to the 10 series of phones that added those buttons, I actually totally forgot that you can swipe to get to the camera.
Marco:
um so i'm trying i'm trying to like retrain myself now but that's that's just it's taking you know undoing two years of muscle memory here uh but but uh i assume that'll be fine eventually but that that's where i felt it the most is that that camera button because it's making me miss shots because it takes a little bit longer now and and that's yeah i want to i hope i can fix that
Casey:
I think for the camera, you and I will retrain ourselves over time.
Casey:
But yeah, I agree with you.
Casey:
The other thing I actually meant to bring up and I forgot was the lack of peak and pop, or the change, I should say, in peak and pop.
Casey:
So it used to be, so let's say I'm reading Twitter on TweetBot or what have you, and there's a URL there.
Casey:
Well, I used to be able to mash down kind of medium strength, and it would pop up, you know, like a preview of what I was about to load, or what I was
Casey:
the url shows and then if you push down even harder it will just it will be as though you had tapped it and and it will you know open up this this you know safari view controller and and show you what you were what you were what that url is now if you long press on a url you get like a snapshot of what that web page looks like but you also get a
Casey:
But I am really liking having quick access to all those actions in that like kind of pop up menu.
Casey:
And so I think I'm on board with this overall, even though I would have told you I use peak and pop a lot, which I did, and I would miss it, which I do.
Casey:
But having all those actions there is really, really nice.
Casey:
And I'm really digging that.
Casey:
Oh, and one other thing really quickly, the NFC reading I am really enjoying.
Casey:
So when I was at WW this past year, I genuinely don't remember who it was, but somebody gave me a Shortcuts sticker, actually with the Shortcuts logo on it, that is an NFC sticker.
Casey:
And so now with 13.1...
Casey:
You can go ahead and set up a shortcut automation that is triggered by an NFC sticker.
Casey:
And so now if my phone is unlocked and I wave my phone over the sunglass holder on the roofline of my car, it will automatically, without any intervention from me, send a text to Aaron saying, I'm on my way home.
Casey:
I'll be home at 4.15, which is in 12 minutes, which I think is super cool.
Casey:
Truth be told, I can also just say to the robot, hey, robot, I'm on my way home, and it will also accomplish the same thing.
Casey:
But that doesn't use the future technology, man.
Casey:
I keep trying to say the name.
Casey:
That's the old assistant stuff from like six years ago.
Casey:
I want to use the future in my NFC card reader, and I think that's super amusing.
Casey:
And I was talking to actually one of the
Casey:
the people that works on channels, which is a sponsor for this week's episode.
Casey:
And he was telling me that he's put a tag near his receiver at, at his house, you know, his stereo receiver or surround sound receiver.
Casey:
And so I haven't tried this myself, but apparently what you can do is you can set up a shortcut triggered by NFC that will basically, uh,
Casey:
tell the phone to pipe audio to a specific AirPlay speaker.
Casey:
So the thought is, if you're near this receiver and you want to hear whatever you're listening to on the living room stereo, you just wave your phone in front of the sticker, and the next thing you know, it's playing on the living room stereo, which I want to try that real bad because that sounds super awesome.
John:
Apple should do that for their AirPods, because I spend so much of my day going to the various menus to, you know, on the lock screen or on the control center to switch the AirPods, because I have one set of AirPods and one set of ears, but I go back and forth from, you know, Mac, phone, and iPad.
John:
Want to listen to it?
John:
I would love to be able to, and the problem is I don't have the case, like...
John:
I'd love to be able to just rub the AirPod against the device I want it to pair with, right?
John:
But I understand due to the nature of NFC, that's probably not feasible.
John:
But maybe the case, like if I had the case in my pocket, if I could just rub them together, I don't know.
John:
That's probably not a great solution.
John:
But I'm open to the idea of like sewing NFC things into my clothing and having all sorts of weird gestures.
John:
If I take my phone and put it on my chest, it does this.
John:
But if I put it on the side of my arm, it does this.
John:
And then if I put it in my pocket, it does this.
John:
Or, you know, putting them around the house.
John:
If I put my phone down here, it plays through my stereo speakers.
John:
If I put my phone over here, it's time for the TV.
John:
You know, yelling out to your digital assistant is actually probably faster, but I like the idea of having a silent, physical way to do it rather than just yelling into the air.
Casey:
Marco, John, any other thoughts on the 11 Pro?
Yeah.
John:
I'm going to have to give you an update on the Pokemon Go situation because I don't think my wife is going to work out yet.
John:
But that's obviously the ultimate stress test.
John:
She's still going to need to have her giant arsenal of batteries.
John:
She's just going to say, how much better is it?
John:
Is it better in a noticeable way?
John:
Can you bring a smaller battery?
John:
Can you actually go out and do a thing and not...
John:
killed the battery entirely but i don't have any reports yet um we did bring the camera uh to one of my son's cross-country meets i brought my big camera obviously this highlights another place where phone cameras are just not up to the job like you know it's it's uh they're people running and they're far away and they move fast and you just you know you don't have the reach with a phone like you'd get you get a wide shot every shot is a wide shot there's a little blurry speck yeah that's my son you need
John:
You need a longer lens, bottom line.
John:
But the landscape pictures that came out of it looked good.
John:
So I think it is a better camera, but I'm not ready to give up my big heavy thing quite yet.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Channels.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Casey:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T.
Casey:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean it.
Casey:
So a little while before the iMac had its near-death experience, I actually decided to use a brand new mouse.
Casey:
And I have for years, basically since the Magic Mouse came out, I've used the Magic Mouse.
Casey:
It is an ergonomic disaster, but I do love the ability to swipe two fingers side to side to do things and so on.
Casey:
And the scroll with the inertial scrolling I really like.
Casey:
So leaving aside the fact that it is a terrible ergonomic mouse, functionally I've always really liked it.
Casey:
But a couple of weeks ago, maybe even a month ago now, I don't know why, but I just spontaneously decided, I'm going to start using my Magic Trackpad and just see what I think.
Casey:
And I've always hated trackpads.
Casey:
Well, that's a little strong.
Casey:
I've never really liked trackpads that much.
Casey:
If you recall from years and years and years ago, I grew up on Thinkpads and it had a little track point, which I was the only human in the world that loved, but I loved it.
Marco:
Hey, I loved it too.
Marco:
The little Ready Racer?
Casey:
Yep, yep, yep, yep.
Marco:
Yeah, those ones are great.
Casey:
You and I were the only ones that loved it.
Casey:
Now, to be fair, in today's world with gestures and so on and so forth, I don't think I would love it the way I did then.
Casey:
But back in my day, when things were simple and we walked uphill both ways to school, when you only had two mouse buttons and maybe a scroll, it actually worked really, really well and I really liked it.
Casey:
But I've been using Magic Mouse for years and I started using the Magic Trackpad just to see what I thought.
Casey:
I think I might stick with it.
Casey:
And I don't know what to think now.
Casey:
It's like me telling you I bought an automatic because I wanted to.
Casey:
Like, what is happening right now?
Casey:
And so I guess I bring this up only to share because maybe somebody would find it interesting, but also to ask you guys, like, what is your mousing situation?
Casey:
I'm assuming, John, you're still using the mouse from back in Vietnam.
John:
Yeah, and interestingly, when I found myself once again in Staples during the first week of school with a thousand other parents, I took some of the time to look at the collection of mice they have there, or mouses if you prefer.
John:
And first of all, I noticed the selection was way down.
John:
They used to have like a giant long table with like a million mice and trackpads all set up.
John:
uh now the selection was much smaller but i did get to because this is the only way you can really tell with that you have to actually like i said about the game controllers you have to actually put it in your hand you can look at the pictures online all you want but you have to actually feel how it feels in your hand and just accept that you're getting all people's germs so i did that and i looked at a bunch of other ones and i think uh when i get my new mac pro eventually i think i'm gonna get a new mouse
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
Really?
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
I'm in the market for a mouse.
John:
Like, these old mice are getting really gross.
John:
Like, and I don't, you know, and they're not great.
John:
And, you know, it's mostly because my wife has, like, a modern mouse.
John:
And although I don't like her mouse and wouldn't buy it for myself, using her modern mouse a lot has said, you know, I can tolerate this.
John:
Like, there are advantages.
John:
Glowing review.
John:
And nicer or whatever.
John:
So, if I just get a...
John:
you know like because the the options for i don't want something with a million buttons and i don't want you know but i want maybe i don't know if i'm gonna bite the bullet and get something with horizontal scrolling i definitely don't want the gesture thing because i'm not into that uh but maybe i'll get one of those momentum wheels you know the wheels that spin freely i love those things but as soon as i had a need for horizontal scrolling uh yeah i immediately went to the magic line from apple because it's just way better
John:
Yeah, I was recently using an app that makes shift scroll wheel be horizontal scrolling, which is actually kind of neat because this is Affinity Designer.
John:
And if you're using that kind of app, your hands are always on modifier keys anyway.
John:
So it's really actually pretty easy to flick a scroll wheel and then hold down shift and flick the scroll wheel to go sideways.
John:
um yeah maybe i would be into a gesture mouse if there was ones out there that worked as well as apples but weren't really low because i don't like a low mouse anyway all that is to say is i still have my old mouse i still have my own mouse at work i still like it but they're getting kind of gross and so i'm in the market for a new one i mean like here's the thing with my new mac pro this is i don't know if this has been clear from my discussions of it but like
John:
everything is on the table for a newness now i'm not getting a new house for the new mac pro but that's pretty much where i'm drawing the line they're gonna like new you know new ups uh you know new i've already got the new chair new mouse new keyboard and yet you're saying you're gonna have a old monitor with it your old non-retina monitor we don't know what i'm gonna do for monitors we don't know yet there's no configurator we know oh no we know oh man
Casey:
Well, so all kidding aside, John, are you soliciting recommendations for mice?
John:
No.
John:
In case you haven't noticed, most of the time when I want to buy a new thing, I don't solicit recommendations.
John:
Totally.
John:
You give the recommendations.
John:
No.
John:
I don't have trouble figuring out what I like.
John:
Now, I may have trouble finding something that I like, but I don't have difficulty deciding if presented with six options, which one should I buy or should I buy zero of them.
John:
This is not a weakness that I have.