The Floor Is High
Marco:
my voice is given out it's like it's like the beginning of winter sickness season and so i've had a slight cold for about a week and a half and i've been managing so far but i'm i'm worried like i'm starting to sound worse slowly i don't think it was i was sitting bowling for soup in the car today i think it's actually the cold catching up with me but we'll see what happens sorry i feel like you are constantly lightly sick
John:
Well, he's got a kid, a young kid, and so do you.
John:
So you should also be constantly lightly sick.
Casey:
No, I'm healthy as a mule or something.
Marco:
I'm not sick all summer.
Marco:
All summer, I'm great.
Marco:
It's one of the reasons why I love summer and why I don't like the rest of the year.
Marco:
It's one of the big ones because the rest of the year, I'm pretty much always either getting sick, sick, or was just sick.
Casey:
Delightful.
John:
We'll see once Adam gets old enough not to be entirely covered with the boogers of the other people in school if this stops.
John:
And then we'll know whether it's you or the kid.
John:
Because I remember getting sick way more when my kids were younger too, but I do less now.
Marco:
Yeah, I think it matters a lot.
Marco:
Right now, not only is he just only in second grade, but even if his age group starts developing basic hygiene skills...
Marco:
they still all still have like a lot of like younger siblings who are still in preschool or kindergarten who so like they're all in the same house together so like i feel like you until probably middle school this is gonna keep happening have you had a lice uh outbreak yet surprisingly not we've dodged that one so far and like they do get lice here and there like in this area it just it just hasn't hit us yet
John:
yeah it amazed me like we used to do lice checks at school all the time in elementary school and i never got it right and i figured like well lice is the thing they check for and they have to check for it and when anybody gets into school they got to check the whole school and you all go down to the nurse and you wait in a big line and you go through like but you know it's not that i like i'd never seen it i'd never knew anybody who had it it was just like a thing that we did and i got kids and i got lice everywhere it's just delightful constant lice
Casey:
Anyway, we should start with some follow-up, and we should remind you that the ATP Holiday Store is open for business ladies and gentlemen.
Casey:
ATP.fm slash store.
Casey:
You can get your six-color shirts in light or dark modes.
Casey:
You can get your old-school ATP logo shirt, your hoodie, your hat, your pins.
Casey:
It's all there for the taking.
Casey:
So please don't be that person that listens to me and says, oh, yeah, I'll remember.
Casey:
I'll do it later.
Casey:
I'll do it later.
Casey:
Don't be that person every single time.
Casey:
at least one, usually a handful of people says, I forgot.
Casey:
Oh no.
Casey:
Can you bring it back?
Casey:
Can you bring it back?
Casey:
I forgot.
Casey:
No, we can't bring it back.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
We can't go now.
Casey:
ATP.fm slash store.
Casey:
You'll be, you'll be glad you did.
Casey:
The sale is available or this, the stuff is available until Sunday, November 17 ATP time.
Casey:
Please go ATP.fm slash store and get yourself some sweet, sweet, sweet ATP merch.
Casey:
moving on marco you have had airpod pros for what like a week now week and a half it's airpods pro casey oh god i'm so sorry i know we talked about it last week but you know now that you're a week and change on are you still enjoying them is this kind of like the apple watch where you flirt with it and then put it away for a year what's going on
Marco:
as of last episode i think i had spent only a couple hours with them so far just like walking around my house basically um since then i've done a number of dog walks with them i have not taken a plane but i have taken two ferry rides with them and uh and you know and the dog walks also have tested the noise cancellation because it is leaf blowing and lawn mowing season uh it is as we record this uh early november
Marco:
And this is one of the few times of year where people in my town are allowed to use leaf blowers.
Marco:
And boy, do they constantly.
Marco:
And so normally, you know, it's the kind of situation that normally I'm walking my dog.
Marco:
I have some kind of small portable headphones on and they never isolate that well.
Marco:
And many times I actually don't want them to.
Marco:
Like I often wear aftershocks for that purpose.
Marco:
And so normally if I'm walking by something very loud like a lawnmower or a leaf blower, I just have to pause the podcast as I walk by because I'm just not going to hear what's being said.
Marco:
with the air pods pro i use the long hold gesture on the stick to uh enable noise cancellation as i walk by something like that and it works and i'm allowed and i'm able to keep the podcast playing now i don't even need to turn it up i can leave it exactly at the regular like normal volume i had it add the noise cancellation and it works very very well like you still hear the leaf blower but it takes it down a significant uh volume
Marco:
The noise cancellation, I think I underrated last episode because I hadn't brought it into a super loud environment.
Marco:
I was only playing with, like, around the house.
Marco:
So I would say last episode, I overstated how good the sound quality was.
Marco:
They still do sound good, but I am missing a lot of that treble detail, and so...
Marco:
I still stand by my statement that they sound better than anything Bose has ever made, better than any earbuds I've ever tried, and better than many regular headphones I've tried.
Marco:
They are great for earbuds.
Marco:
They are good for headphones.
Marco:
But they are not great for headphones.
Marco:
But still, considering their size and their portability and their features and, frankly, their price, good in-ear monitors, which these aren't even in-ear monitors physically, but good in-ear monitors that can sound better than this tend to cost more than $250.
Marco:
And that's even for the basic wired kind.
Marco:
This has all the wireless stuff and everything, and it's Apple, and it has all the features.
Marco:
So for what these are, for the value they provide, for the quality they provide, the balance they provide, the sound quality really is remarkable.
Marco:
I would like a basic EQ, even if it's as simple as a bass and treble slider.
Marco:
Even that, a two-slider screen...
Marco:
would be great.
Marco:
And all their competitors do this now.
Marco:
Sony has it.
Marco:
Bose has it.
Marco:
All the other headphone makers have added EQs in their apps in recent years.
Marco:
I just hope Apple gets around to that.
Marco:
I know it's against their style to offer control over things.
Marco:
But maybe this would be something that would be worth it, I think.
Marco:
Because I want the same thing for the HomePod.
Marco:
The HomePod, I now have, I don't know, 15 of them.
Marco:
Whatever I have in my house, I have a lot of HomePods.
Marco:
They're in lots of rooms now.
Marco:
And I would like to have a treble and bass slider on those.
Marco:
Mostly the bass slider, actually, to turn it down in the bathroom.
Marco:
But just a small amount of control would go a long way here.
Marco:
But otherwise, though, again, the sound is very good for what they are.
Marco:
It's great for what they are.
Marco:
It's very good in absolute terms.
Marco:
And so I would say the noise cancellation is significantly better than I thought it was.
Marco:
I haven't had a chance to take them on a plane yet, but I've already decided that the next time I fly anywhere, I'm going to take only the AirPods Pro and see how it is and actually try it and not take my big Sony's or my Bose's.
Casey:
How do you do with comfort?
Casey:
Because if I recall correctly, and feel free to correct me, you can wear the traditional non-Pro AirPods for, I don't know, like half an hour, an hour, I think you said, before they get deeply uncomfortable.
Casey:
And now with the AirPods Pro, have you done any extended listening with them?
Casey:
Is that better, worse, different, the same, etc.?
Marco:
Long as I can go without discomfort on regular AirPods is about 20 minutes.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
With the Pros, I have gone an hour straight so far, and there's no discomfort at all.
Casey:
Oh, wow.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So that's a pretty big improvement.
Casey:
And what size tips are you wearing just out of curiosity?
Casey:
Not that it really matters.
Marco:
The default ones, the mediums that come on them.
Marco:
And I haven't even tried the other ones because the mediums, they pass the ear fit test.
Marco:
They feel good to me.
Marco:
They sound good to me.
Marco:
So I'm like, all right, I'm not going to mess with it.
Marco:
So far, I have not worn them for long enough to reach a point of discomfort.
Marco:
And I've worn them for about an hour numerous times.
Marco:
so I know it isn't just like a little fluke thing.
Marco:
I've also worn them in numerous different temperatures.
Marco:
I've worn them when I was hot and when I was cold, and they fit differently in each condition.
Marco:
When I'm cold, they fit a little bit looser.
Marco:
They feel like they might slide out, although they haven't yet.
Marco:
They haven't budged, so I don't know.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
So far, so good.
Marco:
I continue to be extremely pleased with them.
Marco:
The controls are fine.
Marco:
I still do miss having a volume control.
Marco:
Any other headphone I've ever tried, there's a volume control on the headphone.
Marco:
I know this is not new to AirPods people, but not having volume on there is really annoying.
Marco:
i understand why it's not there like i think it would be difficult to wedge it in there somewhere but regardless it is not there um and they did make the sticks smaller compared to the original airpods to the point where like i can put on or take off a sweatshirt and not knock them out of my ears so like i do appreciate how small they are that is nice yeah like and so like i recognize that part of why i don't have volume control is that they're so small and it is nice being so small um
Marco:
I will say I don't give a crap what they look like.
Marco:
And to a large degree, I don't know what they look like because I never see them.
Marco:
If I'm using them, I can't see them.
Marco:
If I'm not using them, they're in the case.
Marco:
And they're in my fingers for such a brief time on the transition.
Marco:
Either way, if you asked me to draw them, I wouldn't be able to.
Marco:
I don't know what they look like.
Casey:
Well, it is We Draw Wednesday.
Marco:
Yes, I know.
Casey:
So speaking of TIFF, did she get a pair?
Casey:
And I don't recall what her perspective on regular AirPods were.
Casey:
So did she get a pair of the pros?
Marco:
Not yet.
Marco:
Only merely because we've been busy and she has no problems with the regular ones.
Marco:
But that is on the list of things to consider.
Casey:
And John, none of these have entered your house yet.
Casey:
Is that correct?
John:
No, there's been some interest perhaps for the holidays, but you know, I'm still just taking a wait and see attitude.
John:
I mean, they're, they're really good.
Casey:
Every, everyone I've spoken to says they're the AirPods, but better.
Casey:
And I frigging love my AirPods.
Casey:
So this sounds like it has Casey written all over it, but I just bought AirPods when the Chi ones came out and I just feel guilty because Aaron doesn't really have any interest in taking mine.
Casey:
And,
Casey:
i mean obviously as we discussed yesterday or not yesterday i'm sorry last week uh like reselling them seems a little weird so i just i don't know like i it just seems so wasteful to to get rid of or stop using my perfectly good non-pro airpods my amateur airpods just to get these pros or the pro you know whatever i don't care uh anyway nieces or nephews i forget
Marco:
uh actually uh as of today i have a brand new one but um you go i'm so infants love airpods yeah why not your kids want some of uncle casey's earwax yeah exactly it's gross can you like repurpose them to maybe be used at a dedicated location in your house so for instance like to have one next to your bed for bedtime listening or to leave a pair always next to the next to the tv station like next to the couch for like tv watching day airpods and night airpods god damn it john you beat me to it
John:
Well, that's because I'm always on offense, Casey.
Casey:
Now, that is well done.
Casey:
I have to bow to that one.
Casey:
That was well done.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I mean, this is like the first worldiest first world problem, right?
Casey:
Oh, I really want the new AirPods and my current ones don't suck.
Casey:
What am I going to do?
Casey:
You know, like it's a terrible thing to even talk about.
Casey:
So I should just move on.
Casey:
But I do want them.
Casey:
Maybe they'll end up on a Christmas or Hanukkah list just in case someone's feeling particularly generous.
Casey:
But we'll see what happens.
John:
I still feel like they're not regular AirPods, but better because they're fundamentally different.
John:
These go into your ears and the other ones don't.
John:
Like they don't go super into your ears.
John:
They're not in ear, but that's a pretty big difference.
John:
So if that difference, you know, if the expectation was this is your...
John:
just like my old AirPods, but just they sound better and have notes canceling.
John:
Not true at all.
John:
Like, they go in your ear differently, right?
John:
And so that's my main interpretation.
John:
Now, if you've used AirPods like that before, earbuds, whatever the hell the generic term is, like that before, and they're fine, well, then you're fine.
John:
But if not, like, again, it gets into my whole thing of, like, trying them on or trying somebody else's and wiping them off.
John:
Like, you do have to figure out whether you're okay with anything going in your ear canal.
John:
And then you have to find out are you okay with this specific thing going in your ear canal.
Casey:
No, that's totally fair.
Casey:
When I said they're like AirPods, but better, all I meant was if you take all of the things that I like about AirPods, from everything I've understood, the AirPods Pro, you know, fitment and whatnot aside, everything seems to be better.
Casey:
You know, it has noise cancelling.
Casey:
The battery life is the same or roughly the same, even with the noise cancelling.
Casey:
They're smaller.
Casey:
You know, all of the features seem to be the same, if not better.
John:
Except for the tapping is another one.
John:
I saw a couple of people who said they preferred the tapping to the squeezing.
John:
Obviously, I've heard lots of people on the opposite as well.
John:
It could just be what you're used to.
John:
But, you know, that is another difference.
John:
Like in a smart company last week, you don't have the option to do the tapping anymore.
John:
So you're going to be squeezing.
Yeah.
Casey:
All right, speaking of the AirPods Pro, there's some interesting news with regard to the battery, thanks to iFixit.
Casey:
Apparently, they're using a particularly large, to my eye, but otherwise basically standard button cell battery like you would see in a watch.
Casey:
I guess not the kind of watch that Marco uses because you're too cool for those, but the kind of watch that I would use before the Apple Watch.
Casey:
It's just kind of like a watch battery, which is...
John:
it's fairly surprising isn't it it's it's watch battery shaped uh but it is still a lithium battery and a different voltage and everything like you can't replace it like a watch battery also you can't really get to it it's cylindrical though but like in a flat pizza shape like a watch battery is and more importantly it's not in the stick so one of the reasons the stick is so small is because there's no battery in there so they put it elsewhere they put it in the in the chunky body part
Marco:
What's interesting to me about this is that the interior layout of the AirPods Pro is completely different than the regular AirPods.
Marco:
It isn't just a simple evolution of the same design.
Marco:
It's a total internal rearrangement.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Moving right along.
Casey:
Tell me about the charging light.
Casey:
This is something I've noticed with my Qi-enabled AirPods.
Casey:
I guess it kind of AirPods 2, whatever you want to call them.
Casey:
That when you sit it on the mat, on the Qi charging mat, it'll light up on the exterior as opposed to my original AirPods, which had the light on the interior.
Casey:
it'll light up on the exterior and show you kind of what the situation is and then after a few seconds it goes out and the only way to get it back is to take it off the charger and put it back on and see if it turns from say amber to green or what have you but apparently that's not the same on the airpods pro what's going on here john
John:
Yeah, this is partially spawned from the iFixit teardown when they found this thing inside the case and they weren't sure what it was and it looked like it was like a microphone or something.
John:
But whatever it is, that's probably the hardware mechanism that allows the case to know when you tap it.
John:
It's probably either some kind of mic or vibration sensor basically boils down to the same thing when it's embedded inside the case.
John:
So if you want to see the charge state of your AirPods Pro case, just tap it and the light will go on again and you can see what color it is.
John:
Maybe that will work on the upcoming 16-inch MacBook Pros as well.
John:
If you're wondering how much charge is left in it and it's sitting there, you can tap it.
John:
And then I guess, I don't know, lights will shine through laser etched holes in the aluminum that are invisible otherwise.
John:
I don't know.
John:
One thing that's disappointing though is that this doesn't work when you're charging it through a cable.
Marco:
Yeah, it's only on the mat.
Casey:
Oh, interesting.
Marco:
When you're charging through a cable, you have to like open the lid slightly and then close it to get it to show whether the light's green or orange.
John:
Yeah, which is weird because like the tapping, like the sensor for sensing tapping, like that doesn't care whether it's on a mat or not.
John:
I don't quite know why that feature isn't always available.
John:
Yeah, it's weird.
Casey:
And then John's favorite subject, the case jiggle click.
Casey:
Does it exist in the AirPods Pro, John?
John:
Let's see.
John:
I meant to ask about that on the show when Marco first got his.
John:
I've heard lots of reports from people.
John:
And here's the thing.
John:
With the revised AirPods, whatever we call them, the AirPods Series 2, not the Pros, but the ones that I have and that Casey has,
John:
That's the one where I first noticed the side to side thing.
John:
But some people got those AirPods and their case doesn't do that.
John:
So it's like it's a manufacturing variability thing.
John:
So they don't all do it on the old one.
John:
So I have heard from at least one or two people who say their AirPods Pro case goes side to side.
John:
And it sounds like Marco, yours does as well.
John:
It's very subtle.
Casey:
I can hear it a little bit.
John:
It's very, very little.
John:
I still feel like it is much more prevalent on the second generation AirPods than it was in the first.
John:
I don't know how prevalent it is in the pros, but so far I haven't heard from anybody with pros whose case doesn't do that.
Casey:
Alrighty.
Casey:
And then, uh, Kieran senior says pro tips for the AirPods pro instead of long squeezing, then squeezing once to pause and enable transparency.
Casey:
When someone talks to you, just create a shortcut named be quiet.
Casey:
So then quote, unquote, Hey, dingus, be quiet.
Casey:
Quote, we'll allow you to hear that is very clever, but I can't imagine somebody walking up to me and saying, Hey, dingus, be quiet.
John:
it's like what i was talking about the ear tapping when i you know tap the things on my ear and people think i was pointing to them going uh i'm listening to music and you're being so rude can you imagine trying to say an activation for like they're never going to hear the hey dingus they're going to think they walked up to talk to you and you just turned to them immediately and said be quiet yeah exactly yeah also like who are these people who siri works that quickly for
Marco:
yeah i don't know they have a lot they're very patient people uh asking to talk to them like i i've tried using siri like for volume control and stuff like that it's just too slow like i'd rather just take my phone out because you'll say you know hey thing volume up or whatever and wait wait
Marco:
delay and then it goes up and then your music might resume or might not like it's just it bothers me same thing with the with the fast forward and rewind and stuff it's the same thing it's just so painful you might as well just for me even just to walk over to the other room and do it yeah like i there's no i just i don't like using siri for anything that that requires like quick interactiveness like like media control frankly like if i want to ask it a question or have it send a message or something fine that's i'm glad it's there but it's i don't see any use for it for media controls
John:
Yeah.
John:
And as we pointed out last time this came up, like the most expedient and safest way to deal with this is to reach up and pull the thing out of your ear, which will pause the music or the whatever you're listening to.
John:
And also is the least likely to be interpreted by the person trying to talk to you as something rude.
Marco:
And as I noted on Twitter the other day, a neat little touch is that if you're in noise-canceling mode, but you pull one earbud out, it pauses the music and it turns the other earbud into transparency mode.
Marco:
So you can hear the people around you more easily when you pull it out, and then you put it back in, it puts noise-canceling back on.
Marco:
Super nice.
Marco:
And actually, if you...
Marco:
If you want to have one ear noise cancelling, there's an accessibility option to disable that behavior, basically, and allow it to have split noise cancelling in just one ear.
Marco:
But by default, it transparency-izes the other ear, which is really nice.
Casey:
That's very cool.
Casey:
Last week, we talked on the show about hearing aids and things of that nature.
Casey:
And apparently the FDA has cleared the way for over-the-counter hearing aids, which I think, John, is going to make you very excited, not because you need them, but because this is something you've been thinking about a lot lately.
John:
Yeah.
John:
This is just, uh, seems like some, uh, deregulation of the hearing aid market where previously to get one, you had to consult with a doctor and they were expensive and it's, you know, it's kind of like the thing that came to mind for whatever reason, probably because I have school age kids is like the, the TI 84 calculators or whatever.
John:
Do you remember those when you were in school?
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
They still sell those and they still cost like a hundred and something dollars and they must cost like 50 cents to make like, cause the stuff that's in them has not changed since we were kids and they're still like a hundred and something dollars.
John:
It's,
John:
It's a pretty big disconnection.
John:
The price is held aloft by schools asking the students to buy it and induce demand from saying you have to get this for your kid.
John:
Anyway, it's slightly different in the hearing aid market, but this is a nice timing coincidence for Apple.
John:
to potentially get into the market because Apple would probably not want to deal with all the regulatory stuff, and they're not going to sell a lot of anything that you have to go to talk to your doctor about first.
John:
I mean, I think there have always been over-the-counter things that you could get, but like real proper hearing aids that serious people buy when they actually need it are going to get in the coming year in the U.S.
John:
Much easier to buy without having to consult with medical professionals.
John:
This according to AARP Magazine, and they should know.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
And it's what makes you start feeling really old when you start getting the solicitations by mail from AARP, and you're like, oh, no.
Casey:
Also, Ryan Budish wrote to us, or to you, John, the following, I wear hearing aids, and I think you gave them short shrift on ATP.
Casey:
High-end aids have multiple microphones, do lots of specialized processing, have modes for all kinds of challenging situations, and can cost over 10 times more than the AirPods Pro.
Casey:
Any retort, John?
John:
Yeah, so that cost thing is kind of what we're getting at with the calculator.
John:
They are very expensive, both because the most advanced ones probably contain much more expensive technology than AirPods, but also because their price is artificially inflated by the weird supply-demand medical establishment stuff that goes into them.
John:
I did hear from a lot of other people who...
John:
said that they used hearing aids and thought that apple could definitely do some great things here but from all the feedback i've been getting i feel like and i kind of felt like this uh last week as well that like the place where apple can innovate in this space is kind of where they usually do like we think of them as being like the high-end brand or the fancy brand but
John:
I don't want to use a car analogy.
John:
There's high-end brands, and then there's Pagani.
John:
There's a separate tier for the real high-end, or probably in watches, Marco could give better examples.
John:
So BMW is a high-end thing, but it's not the same as Ferrari, and it's also not the same as...
John:
Like one of those boutique brands.
John:
What's the Conaseg?
John:
Yeah, anyway.
John:
So I feel like there's that kind of that same hierarchy here.
John:
And so where I would expect Apple to make an impact is by fielding a good hearing aid type device over the counter that...
John:
sells into basically the low end of the market because as high as it would be priced it would still be priced way less than the ti-84 of hearing aids right because they would sell it at apple prices which are still better than uh you know totally lopsided market caused by your need to see a doctor and a limited number of devices that are uh
John:
approved yada yada right so i think they even though they'd be selling things for more than the airpods i don't think apple would ever come out with a five thousand dollar hearing aid they would come out with a five hundred dollar one and that would still be disruptive to the market because that five hundred dollar one might have most or all of the features of the five thousand dollar ones that are there today so
John:
Still not sure Apple wants to get into this market, but I feel like they are right on the doorstep, and it's there, and it has a good synergy with their watch and health strategy.
John:
And with the over-the-counter FDA clearances and everything, they don't need to commit too much to it.
John:
They can basically say, look, here's a device that we sell, and it has a bunch of functions that everybody can use, and also it can function as a pretty decent hearing aid, and it's the same hardware, and it's just a little bit of a change in software.
Yeah.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right, moving on from AirPods corner to MacBook Pro corner, is there more space between the keys and the new MacBook Pro?
John:
I was trying to eyeball it last week, and I was like, I can't tell in these pictures.
John:
And I'm looking at the actual 2017 MacBook Pro that's sitting right at my desk, and I'm looking at the picture.
John:
Then I'm looking at my desk, and I'm looking at the picture.
John:
And it's like, I can't.
John:
That's what I was doing last week.
John:
If you hear me on that thing, I'm like, they look about the same.
John:
But someone did what I should have done, which is take two images of the supposed image of the 16-inch and then the image of the 15-inch, put them on top of each other, and then make an animated GIF that switches from 15 to 16 and 15 to 16.
John:
You can see that link in the show notes.
John:
It is from a MacRumors tweet.
John:
And I have to say, I think the space between the keys is slightly bigger on the 16-inch.
Marco:
i agree i didn't think so when i saw the pictures individually but once you see this this like you know this gif looping them back and forth i think it is slightly increased spacing which again i welcome because i think it needs that for accuracy this is like a millimeter though it might be an optical illusion like that's the thing yeah it could be a difference of like shading and
John:
Yeah.
John:
Once Marco buys his, he needs to get some micrometers out and just, you know, find out.
John:
You know I will.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, like the same way we discovered that the bottom row of keys shrunk when the butterfly keyboard came out.
John:
Exactly.
John:
Stay tuned for America's favorite key measuring podcast.
Casey:
And then more suggestions for inverted T arrow keys on the new MacBook Pro.
Casey:
People are starting to wonder maybe we are getting the inverted T back.
Casey:
Why are we thinking that today?
John:
This is the back to that sort of iconic image that we talked about where they have like a picture that shows you your model of computer that they use as sort of a big icon in various parts in the UI.
John:
And we talked about that, you know, a couple episodes ago.
John:
And now there's like a zoomed in sort of Zapruder version of this thing saying, look, if you compare the left lower edge of the keyboard on this icon to the right lower edge, it's clear that they're trying to indicate that that key that's in the right lower corner is not as wide as the left lower corner, which implies an inverted T. So again, I invite you to look at the picture that we will put in the show notes.
John:
This is utterly preposterous.
John:
I find it vaguely convincing.
John:
I mean, like, it doesn't make any sense.
John:
It took me a while to even see it.
John:
Yeah, it's there.
John:
Like, we also saw the picture.
John:
I think Marco poo-pooed this on Twitter.
John:
Someone actually posted, like, a top view picture showing the inverted T clearly, but it wasn't... Well, that was fake, though.
John:
Yeah.
Yeah.
John:
inauthentic but this this i feel like and i have to say i didn't actually confirm this but it's the type of thing you know we have that image from catalina that we could all go to our own catalina machines and extract ourselves to confirm that yeah this really is an image from catalina and i'm assuming if you zoom on it you'll see exactly what they show in this picture
John:
There's a pixel difference.
John:
There's one pixel difference.
John:
I'm willing to believe in the inverted T a little bit, maybe.
Marco:
I hope so.
Marco:
This image is not so convincing that I want to get my hopes up about it.
Marco:
I really, really want there to be inverted T again.
Marco:
Between that and the key switch, going back to scissor, and the slightly smaller key widths,
Marco:
I think that would be amazing, but I just don't want to get my hopes up.
Marco:
Like we've been burned so many times by hoping for these laptops to get better.
Marco:
And then every year they just don't that.
Marco:
I really am.
Marco:
I'm afraid.
Marco:
Like I'm kind of like gunshot to even get my hopes up about them getting better.
Marco:
like i actually this is this is stupid i had a dream last night about these laptops and i know people's dreams are stupid but like were there more ports there were fewer ports oh my god this is a nightmare yeah there was one usbc port and one a and one like kensington lock hole
Marco:
and that was it it was like your laptop but it wasn't your laptop i would take one c and one a thank you very much that is a dream for me yeah this like this is this is how much i am like i have tension about these laptops like coming out and being even worse
Marco:
Or disappointing in some way.
Marco:
I hope they come out soon.
Marco:
I still think they will.
Marco:
Again, these resources are in this build of the OS for a reason.
Marco:
They wouldn't put these resources in Catalina.1 if these machines weren't coming out until next year.
Marco:
So I still think they are imminent.
Marco:
I just want it to come out so we can finally see it and finally end this tension and get back to our usual expertise of complaining about whatever they didn't do.
Casey:
You know, it's funny to me.
Casey:
I think it was David Hanemeyer Hansen had something go around the Internet over the last week or two where he had tried a Windows machine like a Surface something or other for a week and decided he couldn't do it.
Casey:
And on the one side, I think it's really kind of preposterous that people are that upset about the keyboards that they're turning to an entirely different platform because they think that's better.
Casey:
But on the flip side of that, I think the reason people are so upset is because they are having considerably worse experiences than I am.
Casey:
Because I have definitely had to blow out the keyboard on my MacBook over the last two or three years, whatever it's been.
Casey:
But I've never had yet a catastrophic failure like I think so many other people have.
Casey:
In fact, John, I believe you have now gotten to the point of catastrophic failure on yours.
Casey:
And it's just weird to me because my gut reaction is, oh, my God, people, relax.
Casey:
It's not that bad.
Casey:
Oh, no, but it is that bad for them.
Casey:
Never mind.
John:
yeah like as soon as as soon as it happens to you and you can't type on your keyboard anymore it changes your perspective a little bit like again we talked a million times none of us know what the actual percentages are but like the fact that there's really nothing to do except for be without my laptop it's the whole reason i still have this on my laptop why don't you just bring it to work it's not even yours they'll fix it for you but i
John:
don't want to be without my laptop i don't want to have a loaner i gotta i'm in the middle of a bunch of stuff i don't want to have to like backup and restore a bunch of my files like it's a hassle and so i'm i'm just dealing with the hassle and it's stupid but like i mean uh dhh is doing it because like well whatever what else does he have to do with this time so he decided it's a good experiment to do you've got the disposable income in the time why not try windows you know see what else is out there and didn't expect it to stick and he didn't and he ended up returning the thing uh but it wasn't because of the keyboard uh that he returned it so
Marco:
Well, it's funny.
Marco:
In a way, Casey, you started that by saying that he was so fed up that he switched platforms.
Marco:
I've kind of done that too.
Marco:
I hate using my laptop so much, and it's almost entirely because of that keyboard, that I do almost all of my portable work now on my iPad instead.
Marco:
And I save things that I need a Mac for for when I'm home.
Marco:
And when I went on a trip, I brought my iMac Pro instead of bringing a laptop on the phone.
Marco:
I really don't like using it.
Marco:
And again, it's almost entirely because I just hate the keyboard feel.
Marco:
So in a way, I have kind of switched platforms for my portable needs just to avoid using that stupid laptop.
Marco:
That's not a small thing.
Marco:
There's a real collection of issues here that affect people in pretty substantial ways.
Marco:
So I just hope our long national nightmare will be over soon.
Marco:
I feel like we're so close.
Marco:
We're so close.
Casey:
I hope so.
Casey:
I really do.
Casey:
So what's going to happen when we have no more ports, like even if the port situation stays the same, we have no more ports, but the keyboard got better.
Casey:
Is that enough for Marco?
Casey:
Are you going to finally stop complaining and moaning?
Casey:
Or are you going to still whine about the ports?
Marco:
The ports are inconvenient.
Marco:
The ports make me have to carry dongles.
Marco:
But if I have to carry dongles and the rest of it's fine, then I'll be happy with that.
Marco:
Dongles way less than your iMac Pro.
Marco:
Even the hundred that you need.
Marco:
The ports, that problem can be solved with some dongles.
Marco:
the keyboard can't, you can't avoid the keyboard.
Marco:
Like that's an unsolvable problem in that machine.
Marco:
So like it's, it's a much worse problem.
Marco:
If you can get away with having, you know, one or two dongles or buying a few new cables and that's it, then yeah, that sucks.
Marco:
And you're at, you're at, you're at a bit of money, but then the problem solved, right?
Marco:
So I, I'd rather have that problem than have a keyboard that I just hate no matter what.
Casey:
What will happen if we get 16-inch or whatever MacBook Pros?
Casey:
Let's not go completely hog wild.
Casey:
Let's not say they have any USB-A ports, but they have at least as many, if not more, USB-C ports, and they bring back your SD card reader.
Marco:
i'd be on cloud nine like look i'm not expecting usba i i know i would love it because there are so many people in so many occasions where it's like hey you don't just give me one usba port i need it right this second i don't have a dongle right like that would be very helpful i don't see them doing it for lots of reasons whether it's you know physical you know thickness reasons or you know ideological reasons of not going backwards or whatever like that's fine i'm i'm not honestly i don't have any hopes for usba i don't think it's going to happen
Marco:
Agreed.
Marco:
The need for SD cards has not gone away.
Marco:
And fewer people use standalone cameras, but a lot of people who buy pros still do.
Marco:
A lot of the marketing images where Apple shows the ideal customer to buy these computers are people who use SD cards still.
Marco:
So I would say that the need for that is still very much there.
Marco:
Now, if we're carrying dongles anyway, most of the multi-dongle things have SD card readers built into them.
Marco:
So it's less of a need than it was because we all have given up and given into this dongle world anyway.
Marco:
So ultimately, I would love an SD card slot, but I would classify it the same way I classify USB-A as just being pretty unlikely.
Marco:
Now, having more USB-C ports, that I think would be wonderful.
Marco:
Again, I'm not... Honestly, I think the ports are going to be exactly the same.
Marco:
I think we're going to have four USB-C ports on the thing.
Marco:
I don't think we're going to have... And a headphone jack.
Marco:
God, I hope.
Marco:
But I'm not expecting any other changes to that because...
Marco:
Ultimately, I see Apple standing by that for lots of different technical and ideological reasons, which is unfortunate because these computers can still connect to fewer things than their predecessors could because we still end up wasting one port for power.
Marco:
And because, you know, if you use your laptop the way that, again, that people in Apple's marketing for these laptops use them, you can't run on battery for very long.
Marco:
You can run on battery for maybe 90 minutes if you're doing what people are doing in the Apple commercials with these laptops.
Marco:
So you need power most of the time.
Marco:
So then you're down to three ports, right?
Marco:
And like, it's just like, these are basically three port laptops in practice.
Marco:
Or if you get the lower end models, one or zero port laptops.
Marco:
And so I just want more.
Marco:
Just give me more.
Marco:
And all the arguments for how great Thunderbolt 3 ports are seem so wasted when one of them is being used just for power most of the time.
Marco:
Like all that PCI Express bandwidth, all that expansion capability...
Marco:
It's like, yeah, that's great, but I'm just plugging this in with this port.
Marco:
All it's doing is taking power.
Marco:
I don't need all that.
Marco:
So there's a weird engineering trade-off mismatch going on here.
Marco:
And so the more ports there are, the less bothersome that becomes.
Marco:
So even if they went to five, which with odds, they might not.
Marco:
But six, great.
Marco:
Just the more, the better.
Marco:
And the lower-end models, the 13 inches, they should all have at least four.
Marco:
Because you know what?
Marco:
That old 11-inch Air, that had a lot of ports on it.
John:
That's true.
John:
I don't remember what the SD card slot was in the 2015, like what standard it supported or whatever, but there is actually an opportunity if Apple ever decided that they wanted to look back at SD cards to support whatever the...
Marco:
giant alphabet soup standard is for the fastest of the fastest sd card standard do you happen to know what that is marco like u ux yeah um i think we're still on xc yeah well yeah there's the uhs series um so we're on we're on sd xc for like the capacity standards it's like it's like super balls i
Marco:
i know and uh but like yeah like the so there's there's the the like faster generation of sd card slots that have the second row of pins on the back but those are optional for readers like if you like readers can read from both sets of pins at once and like do like a big parallel high bandwidth read but they don't have to so it's it's backwards compatible with everything so like i believe the only computer that has that port so far in apple lineup is the imac pro i don't oh yeah right because the new phoenix just don't have don't have slots but
John:
yeah so the iMac pro does have the super fast sd reader in it and it's wonderful i use it all the time whenever i whenever i don't miss and hit the vent instead yeah if you got those big you know 41 or 62 megapixel or whatever they are images in the big sony cameras and you're filling up these giant sd cards it takes forever you're not going to do them over like wi-fi and i guess supposed to work on usbc but then you're
John:
dealing with cables and that stupid flappy door that you open up to plug the cable into uh sd card take the card out shove it in like it's it's more convenient uh and if it's faster all the better so what happens then if in the next couple of weeks we slash marco get the
Casey:
sd card equipped cellular enabled 16 inch laptop and then right after that and then right after that i just just just shush and then right after that we get the we get the mac pro and suddenly marco just wants to talk about the 16 inch laptop doesn't really care about the mac pro anymore and john just wants to talk about his mac pro and then what do i get to decide what we talk about is that how this works
Marco:
marco is gonna mostly uses his iMac so even though he'll be excited if he got his fantasy laptop then he'll just put it away and wait for his next trip and continue to sit in front of his iMac all day so don't worry about it well i think this problem will solve itself because if they come out anywhere near the same time the answer is i get to talk about the laptop first because john will waffle on take me forever to buy one yeah john will waffle on his purchase he'll be he'll be afraid to pull the trigger on a 15 grand purchase and we'll waffle over for at least a couple of weeks 15 that's adorable
John:
And my computer will take forever to ship anyway because it's not like they're going to be, you know, and then it'll take a while to sort of install because on like a laptop where you just open it up and just plop it on a table, like I have a lot of stuff to move and transfer data from, so don't worry.
Marco:
Yeah, John's going to have to like rebuild his entire office from scratch to fit this computer into it somehow.
Marco:
So yeah, don't worry.
Marco:
It'll be a process.
John:
I mean, it's the same size as my other one, but I do have to like, once you're, you know, I thought about this when I was looking at, what was I looking at?
John:
Something on television or whatever is showing someone set up and looking at their cables is the thing I always do.
John:
I think about it in my house where all my cables are.
John:
If you have a desktop computer that's been there for a long time and has a lot of peripherals, you kind of forget how many cables there are because I'm cleverly hit.
John:
Cleverly hidden them and routed them or whatever.
John:
Once you start pulling things out, then you just end up with this giant wad.
John:
You're like, wow, I couldn't believe how much of this stuff was back there.
John:
Exactly how many wires have to connect for all this stuff to work together.
John:
When it comes time to move it, especially if you're transferring data, I have to have them both connected for some period of time to transfer stuff or I have to yank out hard drives from it or whatever.
John:
Oh, forget it.
John:
Then I have to get everything out.
John:
Then you've got to vacuum behind there because of all the dust and the gross stuff.
John:
Then I've got to install the new UPS and maybe get some new networking cables.
John:
It's like, you know, once...
John:
Once the walls are open, you know.
John:
Right, exactly.
Casey:
You're going to take a sabbatical just so you can do your new computer upgrade.
John:
It's not as bad as my TV.
John:
My TV is worse.
John:
I should take some pictures from behind my TV.
John:
It is not a neatly arranged set of cables.
John:
The stuff you can see is neat, but if you look behind there... I mean, I have like five game consoles connected to my television, plus a receiver, and...
John:
And what else is there?
John:
The TiVo.
John:
And it's just, yeah, there's too much stuff.
John:
And then all the wires going out to all the speakers.
John:
It's terrifying back there.
John:
Plus all the power bricks.
John:
Oh, my God, the power bricks.
John:
It's bad.
Casey:
You know, it's not Stephen Hackett's way to be mean or nasty.
Casey:
But if he ever is mean or nasty, just send him that picture and he'll have nightmares for weeks.
John:
Yeah, I'll send you the picture of the neat part where you can see where I have like the 17 HDMI cables snaking down from my plasma television that used to have all those ports.
John:
I have optical, all the optical cables, like everything that you can plug into my things and my television are plugged in.
John:
I have Ethernet cables and everything.
John:
And there's like an eight port switch behind there as well with its own power brick.
John:
And there's a lot going on behind my TV.
Marco:
I will admit something embarrassing.
Marco:
I actually, when I upgraded my switch in my house, I upgraded to a power of ethernet switch that can send power of ethernet over any of its ports.
Marco:
And I actually upgraded the sub switch that I keep in my TV entertainment center solely for the reason that I upgraded it to one that could be powered by a power of ethernet to save one power brick under my TV.
Casey:
Yeah, nice.
John:
I mean, because I have like the big, you know, I don't have UPS behind my TV.
John:
I probably should.
John:
But I have like a couple of big power strips connected to different outlets from each other.
John:
And I buy like the biggest ones I can, like the 12 outlet ones that are really far spread out because you need room for the stupid, you know, bricks to not butt up against each other.
John:
i'm i'm basically at capacity but when i if and when all this says when i replace my television it's going to be worse because that's moving furniture and big heavy things and i'm going to have to pare down on the consoles like my television supports uh component input which is what my sort of analog era consoles are connected to because it's the best connection like my i think my game cube is connected to component um and all those ports are gone from modern tvs so i just won't have those connected i know i can buy adapters but i'll just probably retire them
John:
And so I'll pare things down substantially and hopefully get some space back.
Marco:
So you have a GameCube connected and ready to go right now?
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
What other analog consoles do you have?
John:
The Wii is not HD yet, so that's my other one.
John:
you oh my god what how often do you use the wii well the wii is actually my substitute gamecube right so because my i have a wii with gamecube compatibility so if i want to play a gamecube game i'm probably going to play out on the wii but occasionally i'll want to play it on the gamecube or it'll already be effectively have two gamecubes connected to your tv right now yeah well the wii is also in 2019 yeah i mean also they're just taking up space in my entertainment center at this point because i so rarely use them right but they but they like here's they take up
John:
They take up space that's important for them to be there because they hide the wires that are behind them.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
They look nice.
John:
If I were to remove them, you'd be able to see through.
John:
Because my entertainment center thing is just like this metal frame with glass shelves.
John:
Like it's not enclosed, which is good for airflow and everything.
John:
But bad if you're trying to hide a terrifying rat's nest of cables.
John:
Does your TV have a RF input?
John:
I can send it to my Sega Genesis.
John:
Wow.
John:
No, it does have composite input, I think, though, which is crazy for an HDTV.
John:
It's got component input for sure because I have things plugged into that.
John:
It might have composite.
John:
I don't know.
Casey:
All right, my final question, John.
Casey:
I'm looking at automobiles.honda.com.
Casey:
A 2020 Accord LX CVT, which I think is the cheapest Accord you can buy, the MSRP is $23,870.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
What is the likelihood in your mind that your computer will be more or less expensive than... Let's say, what is the likelihood it will be more expensive than this?
Casey:
Including the display?
Casey:
It will be less.
Casey:
You think you will be spending less than $24,000 with the display?
Marco:
I think so, too.
Marco:
He can't make himself spend more than that.
Marco:
I'm guessing the display, you're going to spend the $7,000 on the good one.
Marco:
And I'm guessing the Mac Pro itself is going to be between...
John:
seven and ten that's why i'm thinking like you know between 14 and 17 000 and don't forget all my finagling for discounts yeah i know but like oh no okay okay but i'm talking about like the msrp whatever you buy yeah well i mean like cars no one never pays the full price anyway like sure considering the most expensive car i've ever purchased has been less than 25 000 the odds of me getting a computer to cost more than that is not that high
John:
Although you get more years out of your computers than you get out of your car.
John:
I use both for around 10 years.
Casey:
The 2020 Civic Sedan LX CVT, $20,550.
Casey:
I think that's in the running.
Casey:
I really do.
John:
It's close.
John:
I would never spend $20,000 for a car with a CVT.
John:
Come on.
Casey:
You're missing my point.
Casey:
My point is simply that for the price of your Mac Pro, I think you will be able to get...
Casey:
A bad car that I wouldn't like?
Casey:
A very bad car that you wouldn't like.
John:
More than one.
John:
You can still find cars for $15,000 or whatever.
Casey:
My point is looking at Honda, which is your jam, what Honda could you buy new for the amount of money you're going to spend on your Mac Pro?
Casey:
As another example, the 2019 Civic starts at just under $20,000.
Casey:
I don't think you're going to get to $20,000 on your Mac Pro, but I think you're going to get uncomfortably close.
John:
but even if i did that's uh that's two thousand dollars a year so that's like marco buying a new computer every year which he does it's nothing he's got it's it's amortized over 10 years right so yeah i haven't bought one this year you haven't you haven't bought any not you bought zero computer my laptop is from last summer not this you're gonna buy the 16 inch this year though definitely yeah so there you go the moment it becomes available i'm ordering it and it will not it will not cost less than two thousand dollars so there we go that's also true
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
They considered all types of travelers and really put a lot of thought into their design, and they make their carry-on in two sizes with an optional ejectable battery.
Marco:
This is what made them famous, this battery thing, where you can have a battery that's built into your carry-on bag, so as you're rolling it around the airport, waiting at gates, going between flights, you can be charging your phone or any other USB device so you never run out of battery power.
Marco:
And then if you have to, say, gate check your bag, you just pop it out.
Marco:
There's like a one-click release mechanism there.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
They have an interior compression system that lets you pack more.
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to Away for sponsoring our show because this season, everyone wants to get away.
Casey:
James Stratford writes, this was with regard to somebody asking about why a time machine does not use APFS.
Casey:
And James writes, another reason an APFS time machine rewrite may not be a priority is that APFS seems to be focused on SSDs.
Casey:
And few people would use expensive SSD storage for backup at this point, which I think that point in and of itself makes sense.
Casey:
But John, as our resident file system expert, what says you?
John:
I included it because it does make sense.
John:
But on the other hand, SSD prices have been going down a lot.
John:
And it's not like it used to be.
John:
I'll bet a surprising number of people are going to start using SSDs for backups when available.
John:
But yeah, APFS performance on spinning disk is crap.
John:
It was never... I mean, it works, but it was never designed for that.
John:
And so...
John:
I don't think that's the reason why they haven't done it.
John:
Like I said in the last show, they're working towards it in slow, steady increments.
John:
They're not sandbagging because they're like, oh, we got to wait for everyone to not have spinning disks.
John:
People back up to SSDs.
John:
Not everyone has terabytes and terabytes of data.
John:
And the great thing about SSDs is...
John:
They're all bus powered in a nice handy little case.
John:
So, you know, again, power bricks, the enemy of all, you know, good people everywhere.
John:
And it's great to back up to an SSD because it doesn't take forever.
John:
So I highly endorse SSDs as backup drives.
John:
They're small, they're silent, and they're much less expensive than you might think, as long as you don't have tons and tons of data to back up.
Casey:
Finally, we enter Letterboxd corner.
Casey:
Can you tell me about the benefits of Letterboxd Pro?
John:
Last week I said that you can pay for Letterboxd, but I didn't know if you got anything for paying for it.
John:
Well, apparently you do.
John:
I've always been paying for it, so I don't really know what it's like not to pay for it.
John:
But apparently, according to letterboxd.com slash pro, you get personalized annual and all-time stats pages based on your diary entries.
John:
You can filter your favorite streaming services, basically tell which ones you actually subscribe to.
John:
And you can filter activity by type, pin reviews to your profile, duplicate lists, change your username and have cool background images on your profile pages and all sorts of other perk type things.
John:
So, yes, you do get something for your money if that interests you.
John:
And related to that, I said in the last episode that I was using it kind of wrong because I just every time I watch a movie, I would go in and I would give it a rating.
John:
and that would also mark it as watch but what it wouldn't do is add a diary entry to to record that i watch it so at the end of the year when they say hey check out your year annual review of everything that you watched and we'll show you these cool stats and graphs i'd go and say you watch zero films this year which is not true
John:
um they want me every time i watch a movie to make a diary entry which is like a couple more clicks and i i sent a feature request ages ago saying don't make me do more clicks if i go and rate a movie that i have never rated before also add a diary entry that says hey you watch this uh in addition to what they're doing so
John:
They haven't added that feature, but one of the people from Letterboxd's site told me, because we preserve the date when you watched it, like the date when the little unwatched watched Boolean bit flipped, you can export your data.
John:
And then re-import it to make diary entries.
John:
And it pointed me to some export-import page, which I went to, but I figured all this would be a big pain in the butt.
John:
It's going to drop out these giant JSON blobs, and I'll have to, like, transform them and make new blobs and write to an API and, you know...
John:
sign up for a dev account and get an access token and make a little program down i'm not gonna do that but i just want to see what it looks like whatever and it turns out as i wrote in the show notes it's csvz which i think should be their their slogan their export is a csv file you go and you export and it gives you a zip file with a bunch of csv files and the csv files are dead simple there's there's one for each type of thing it's called like diary.csv watchlist.csv and it's you know
John:
I mean, CSV is the format that's not a format as any programmer knows who's ever tried to deal with CSV files.
John:
But in this case, it was very straightforward.
John:
There's a little header to tell you what the fields are.
John:
I didn't even have to read any documentation.
John:
It was totally clear.
John:
And then I saw my diary, which had zero entries, which was a little bit of a problem.
John:
All I needed to do to reassure myself, and so I was sure that I didn't have to read documentation, is I added a diary entry and then re-exported my data so I'd have at least one line so I knew what the lines looked like.
John:
Because there was a bunch of fields like, is that a Boolean?
John:
Do they want a Y and N?
John:
Is it T or F?
John:
Is it 1 or 0?
John:
So I made a diary entry.
John:
downloaded the file saw what a diary should look like and then i just in bb edit just did like select all one you know regex copy and replace thing uh and re and just uploaded the import step was i just uploaded the diary.csv file that i had now filled out um with my hand selected set of all of the movies like the point that of the the person from the site was telling me is like
John:
just because you mark something as watch doesn't mean you watch at that moment which is true when i first signed up for the service i went through like this huge back catalog of movies saying okay i watched that one and i rated this like i rated like like literally a thousand movies just sitting there just in one day you know clicking clicking clicking putting on ratings it doesn't mean i watched them all that day right so i wouldn't want those to show up as die ranges because then the first year i was on the services like you watched a thousand movies this year which is not true um
John:
so that you know they would want to do that automatically which is why i suggest that they have like a feature that says do you want this feature on or off when you rate a movie should mark as viewed anyway since i had the csv there i could see oh look 2013 when i signed up for the site here's like 500 entries ignore all those that all happened on that one day and then starting after like the first legit entry that's like five days later for me watching a movie everything from that point on is a legit watch so i use that as the contents of my diary.csv
John:
uh so long story long now on my letterboxd page every single movie i've watched has a diary entry and i'm going to try to from now on actually add diary entries like the main reason i didn't do it before it's because i didn't realize until the first year i had used the service that i was using it wrong at that point i didn't want to go back and do it
John:
but let's be less than anyone who's making a website or api really dead simple import and export is great for people who i'm not even gonna say for programmers i didn't have to do any programming i literally did all this in bb edit with search and replace it was so easy that is very cool actually i saw the entry in the show notes and i couldn't tell if that was like deep sarcasm or not but i'm actually pleased to hear this that's very cool
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We should talk about Apple TV Plus, and I want to immediately point you to upgrade number 270 from this week called The Toughest Compare, where Jason and Mike go through and talk about some of the Apple TV Plus shows.
Casey:
I would actually like to discuss a little bit about them.
Casey:
If you don't listen to Upgrade, they have a really great segment called, what is it, Downstream?
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Upstream.
Casey:
Upstream, of course.
Casey:
That made me, I really want that one back, but too late.
Casey:
Marco will fix it and edit, I swear.
Casey:
So anyway, they have a really great segment called Upstream, ladies and gentlemen, where they talk about TV-related news and so on and so forth.
Casey:
uh the whole episode is very good you should check it out but i wanted to talk a little bit about my apple tv plus experience over the last 48 hours when i finally started watching a little of apple tv plus i have seen episode one of morning show and i've seen episode one of for all mankind marco have you had the time to watch anything so far
Marco:
As usual, I haven't seen it.
Marco:
To be fair, I do plan to watch these shows, but I don't watch a ton of TV shows.
Marco:
I watch an entire series when possible, and that doesn't leave a lot of time.
Marco:
I was going to say, you don't watch a ton of TV shows, but you're working your way through all of Cheers.
Casey:
Yes.
Marco:
As I've mentioned before, the world of technology is very big.
Marco:
One show can't possibly cover all of technology.
Marco:
I like that Upgrade covers the whole streaming and TV side of all these businesses very well because it kind of means that we don't have to.
Marco:
They have it covered, and that's nice because honestly, as Apple gets into all these different businesses, we don't really cover the credit card business.
Marco:
Apple's now in the credit card business.
Marco:
We talked about it here, like we talked about it briefly, but we're not going to really make it a thing because that's not really what our show's about.
Marco:
And even though our show tries to encompass as much of Apple as we can, Apple's really big now.
Marco:
And they're in all these different areas that we have neither the time nor the expertise nor the will to cover in great detail most of the time.
Marco:
And so I think TV is going to end up being one of these areas.
Marco:
We're going to cover it about the same way we cover credit cards, which is very briefly when it first comes out, and then we're going to forget about it because ultimately more stuff is going to go on.
Marco:
They're going to release these laptops.
Marco:
They're going to release the Mac Pro.
Marco:
They're going to have new AirPods and new other stuff.
Marco:
We're going to talk about that stuff.
Marco:
We're going to measure the keycaps with my calipers way more than we're going to end up talking about the details of like, oh, this series is pretty good, and they got this director, and it's like,
Marco:
Because that's not really us.
John:
Well, it's definitely not Marco, but I've got a whole other podcast where apparently all we do is talk about Apple TV.
Casey:
John, what have you seen so far?
John:
I have watched... They did an interesting thing here with the...
John:
the episodes they didn't do the netflix thing where they dropped whole seasons but they also didn't release a single episode they released the first three episodes i think of all the shows right the first three for morning show i think that's true for the big ones anyway i watched the first three episodes of uh for all mankind and i watched the first three episodes of sea because that's all there are released of those two shows i'm going to check out dickinson i might check out the morning show i'm not sure it's up my alley
John:
Uh, but that's my plan.
John:
Um, but I did want to talk about the, and not in the sort of length that we go into and write solid differences and, and on, uh, you know, upgrade and other shows, the actual application on various platforms through which we watch these shows.
John:
I had, I had a tweet, um, I don't know.
John:
Well, I guess on November 1st when the thing came out, it was my only tweet about Apple TV plus at that point, I think.
John:
Uh, and I basically said that I, uh,
John:
started watching a show, and then put down my iPad, and then later came back and picked up my iPad and wanted to resume watching the show.
John:
And the Apple TV app on the iPad was like, what show?
John:
You weren't watching a show.
John:
I swear I was.
John:
It didn't remember my play acquisition.
John:
And that's not a great first experience for the application.
John:
That was my whole tweet.
John:
It fit in a single tweet with a new longer tweet link.
John:
It's like I started watching a show, put down the iPad, picked it up without doing anything else, and it didn't let me resume.
John:
It got a lot of responses.
John:
Some people thinking I was implying that they don't have this feature.
John:
They do.
John:
Now that I've watched lots of shows in it, it does know how to resume where you left off sometimes.
John:
But really...
John:
I think there's an important perspective in this.
John:
So the application, it has problems.
John:
Sometimes it doesn't keep track of where you left off.
John:
The UI is not great.
John:
The hierarchy of the UI is not great.
John:
I kept alluding to the show where I talk about Apple TV, the upcoming episode of Arkansas with Differences.
John:
We talk about this even more.
John:
Just sort of the standard set by the other streaming services of like when you launch them, the upper left corner is a giant square that shows you the show you were just watching with a little progress bar that shows you where you are.
John:
And if you want to pick up where you were, you know, and when the show ends, there's a button to bring you to the next episode.
John:
And the next episode, they'll often skip the opening credits or at the very least they'll skip the recap because they know you just watched that episode.
John:
There's no reason for you to watch the recap right before the, you know, basic sort of quality of life features of streaming apps that Apple is falling down on.
John:
And, you know, despite the giant barrage of crazy, angry people yelling at me on Twitter because I dared say something bad about Apple's service, it is right to expect Apple to do these things, right?
John:
Like, you know, but what I didn't say, I mean, I didn't really engage with anything that was on Twitter because I wasn't interested in arguing with people about stuff.
John:
I was too busy watching TV shows, which brings me to my larger point, which is...
John:
Pretty much no matter how bad the app is and how many bugs it has, as long as it can actually deliver the video to your eyeballs without like crashing or stopping or whatever, like as long as you can literally see the video.
John:
The thing that dominates all these other concerns about, oh, the app and the UI, and I don't like how it didn't do this, and it wasn't easier for me to resume or whatever, is the shows.
John:
If the shows are good, people will tolerate an app that's buggy, a thing that doesn't pick up where it left off.
John:
Sometimes it doesn't offer to show you the next episode.
John:
Sometimes you have to hunt through the app.
John:
It doesn't matter.
John:
People dealt with...
John:
terrible rabbit ear antennas and tinfoil and trying to get a good signal and terrible cable boxes with really bad remotes.
John:
Like it doesn't people will tolerate almost any bad UI if what you give them is good content.
John:
So my context for our, you know, whatever discussion we're about to have about the actual content of the shows is that despite the fact that I'm disappointed in the quality and features available in Apple's applications for watching the shows,
John:
it matters to me and it matters big picture wise to the world at large so much less than the actual TV shows.
John:
That's what matters in this context.
John:
Like where I know we're so used to talking to Apple, talking about Apple in the context of like, what's their hardware?
John:
What's their UI?
John:
Like, cause that was the whole product to pitch, but this is a fundamentally different business.
John:
This is the entertainment business.
John:
And while, uh,
John:
Those things matter, the various, you know, quality of the UI and the hardware and software, blah, blah, blah.
John:
The thing that dominates is how good are the TV shows?
John:
You know, no one talks about movies in terms of, like, I love that movie, but, like, you know, the seats in the theater that I saw it in were a little bit uncomfortable.
John:
It was a bad UI, right?
John:
But the Oscars aren't docked because the seats were bad.
John:
I know it's a bad analogy.
John:
But anyway...
John:
So that's not what matters in this case, which is frustrating because we want the apps to be good and up to the standards that we expect from a company that's supposedly good at this.
John:
And as I think they talked about in Upgrade, it's fairly surprising to see that the worst aspect of Apple TV's launch is actually the stuff that Apple is supposed to be good at, like hardware and software applications.
John:
But really, all that matters is the shows.
John:
So I think that's what we should talk about.
Casey:
Agreed.
Casey:
I went into this having heard a little bit about Morning Show and even less about For All Mankind.
Casey:
I'm going to do my darndest to try to do this spoiler-free.
Casey:
Additionally, on Upgrade, they were spoiler-free, and I have not yet listened, but on Liftoff number 111, Jason and Steven talk about For All Mankind, Liftoff being their space podcast.
Casey:
That's a pretty good place to talk about it.
Casey:
My understanding is that was also spoiler-free, so I'm going to do my darndest not to have any spoilers.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I went to episode one of Morning Show knowing a bit about the premise, and I didn't think I would really like it.
Casey:
There was nothing about the premise that really spoke to me.
Casey:
But given the cast and given I thought Aaron might like that one, we watched the first episode together.
Casey:
I think we both liked it a fair bit.
Casey:
She might have liked it a bit more than me, but I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.
Casey:
I was very intrigued by it.
Casey:
It was immediately apparent that they were establishing ground rules for what an Apple TV show would be, and that there were swear words within the first 30 seconds or something like that.
Casey:
Which for me, and I tend to use the F word as a comma when left to my own devices, I didn't have any particular problem with that.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
If you recall, months ago, people were saying, oh, it's going to be family friendly and it's going to be almost Disney-like.
Casey:
And it is not almost Disney-like.
Casey:
Not a bit.
Casey:
I have also heard that C is extremely graphic.
Casey:
I have not seen it yet.
Casey:
But I've heard that that is very, very, very graphic to the point of making Mike a little bit uncomfortable.
Casey:
And Mike isn't a clutch the pearls kind of person, generally speaking.
John:
He's just uncomfortable with female sexuality.
John:
That's all.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
I'm not touching that one.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
Mike, you can send your angry emails to John.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
I thought the show was good.
Casey:
I thought the cast was great.
Casey:
It was a relatively interesting premise.
Casey:
The most interesting thing to possibly the most interesting thing to me was when they went on a bit of a diatribe about how broadcast TV is dying because of streaming services as they're doing this television program on a streaming service.
Casey:
Which I thought was quite funny.
Casey:
But all told, it was pretty obvious to see where the plot was going, I thought, in a way that I did not feel that that was the case with For All Mankind.
Casey:
But on Morning Show, I felt like it was pretty obvious to see where the plot was going through episode one anyway.
Casey:
But I really enjoyed it quite a bit.
Casey:
And I was very surprised by how much I enjoyed it.
Casey:
John, what were your kind of quick thoughts on it?
John:
So I watched For All Mankind first because it was the show that I had the most interest in, both based on the premise and also the people behind it.
John:
I talked more about all these shows on Reconcilable Differences in a spoiler-free way.
John:
I'm going to talk in a spoiler-free way here as well, maybe in a more abbreviated form.
John:
Uh, I thought it was fine.
John:
Uh, it's, I, I still like the premise.
John:
I'm still watching the show.
John:
I'm still interested in it.
John:
It didn't blow me away with its writing or acting.
John:
The special effects budget should have been bigger for a show about space.
John:
Uh, you know, they, they should have, I know it's not the same pool of money or maybe it is, but like the money they spent on sea, you can, you see it up there on the screen.
John:
Uh, the money they didn't spend on the show about space stuff.
John:
You also see it up on the screen, which is kind of disappointing, but you know, as a TV show, I don't mind too much.
John:
Um, so like, yeah, it's kind of like Marvel movies, maybe, maybe to a lesser degree.
John:
Like the big thing about Marvel movies is it seemed to me that like, aside from a few, uh, real outliers early on, the Marvel machine that makes these movies has mostly found a way to make sure they don't make a terrible movie.
John:
again you know thor 2 whatever say whatever you want right but but in general they made a lot of movies and it's amazing that they made that many movies that are for the most part okay to good like there's no part of them that's embarrassingly bad there's no like boy i can't even believe they made this one or this scene is a real clunker or they should have got a better star for this movie like in general there is like the floor is high they won't allow the machine will not allow them to put out just an actively bad movie anymore right
John:
and so watching for all mankind i'm like this is not a bad show um it's not you know it's not particularly innovative and daring it the writing isn't super smart the premise is interesting the actors are good but not too good like it's it's it's fine it's okay it's good like i'm enjoying it but it doesn't
John:
It doesn't have that extra special something, which I read a big article by somebody.
John:
I wish I could remember who, but a seasoned TV critic was saying, like, look, when somebody comes out who's never made TV before ever, like Apple's never made television shows before, aside from, you know, Carpool Karaoke and whatever, like like for their first thing you can't expect.
John:
And they put out like maybe four or five big shows.
John:
zero of those are going to be game of thrones zero of those are going to be breaking bad zero of them are going to be the sopranos like they're not going to get half of them or two they're going to get zero you don't come out of the gate with a breaking bad like it's our first try and one out of our four shows is like one of the greatest shows ever it's just not going to happen and i mean it was a chance they could have they had the right pedigree but expecting that is unrealistic right and
John:
instead as far as i can tell based on the two shows that i watch apple has fielded shows that are not bad which is important like a lot of the early reviews like all these shows are awful and i spent some time on rectus talking to merlin about like the the craigs ratings or whatever you know on rotten tomatoes and that was early on because i'm sure i'm sure the numbers have changed a little bit but for all mankind is not a bad show it is a good show you should check it out it's got an interesting premise uh and i would recommend it for most people to watch
Casey:
Yeah, I agree.
Casey:
And I actually would... I agree in general, but I actually enjoyed For All Mankind quite a bit more than I expected.
Casey:
I went into For All Mankind thinking, I'm going to like this.
Casey:
And I really liked it.
Casey:
I was surprised how much I liked it.
Casey:
And even knowing the premise of it up front, I felt like it took some twists and turns that I didn't expect.
Casey:
And they weren't dramatic twists and turns, but it...
Casey:
The ending of the first episode was not exactly what I expected.
Casey:
I can't be any more specific than that because I don't want to spoil it.
Casey:
But I thought it was really good.
Casey:
I thought the way they handled the line between the real past and their invented past, I thought they handled that well.
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
The acting and the writing were good, but not great.
Casey:
But all told, it was a premise that I already found interesting just having heard about it and having watched only one episode so far.
Casey:
It was far more interesting than I expected.
Casey:
And I really, really like it so far.
Casey:
And I like it so much, in fact, that Erin and I were talking about it.
Casey:
And she said, you know, in so many words, well, why didn't you think I would like that?
Casey:
And then I thought about it.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Why didn't I think you would like that?
Casey:
Like,
Casey:
Like, we should watch this together, watch the first episode together for me a second time for her the first, and then watch For All Mankind together.
Casey:
So, so far, of the two shows that I've tried, and admittedly, I've only tried one episode each, I think the two of us are probably going to watch both of these shows.
Casey:
And I expect it to be like, eh, about both of them.
Casey:
So I was quite surprised.
Casey:
Now, with all that said, please feel free to comment on that or just tell me about Sea because I know almost nothing about it.
John:
Yeah, I think if you continue watching For All Mankind, if you like the first episode, you'll continue to like what they have on offer there.
John:
And I think part of what Apple has done that's smart with at least C and For All Mankind is they've chosen shows with interesting premises, like the pitch.
John:
If you see that someone was to give you the pitch, you're like, oh, that sounds like an interesting idea.
John:
You could make a good show out of that, right?
John:
Whereas they're not starting from zero.
John:
Because it's much harder to say, for example, Deadwood.
John:
If you give the pitch for Deadwood, it's like, well, it's the Old West.
John:
Well, that pitch is not showing me anything.
John:
You could implement it in an okay way and have a boring show about the Old West.
John:
If you are, you know, really good and you could get something like Deadwood, but just based on the pitch, you're like, well, you're basically starting from the ground floor here.
John:
Everything you build, you're going to have to build yourself.
John:
I'm sure it's possible to make a Deadwood quality show out of this Old West premise, but it's also possible to make a crap show out of this premise because the premise is not helping you at all.
John:
The premise on For All Mankind and see already you've got a leg up.
John:
You're like, you've already got people's attention.
John:
As long as you're vaguely competent, you can build on that to go somewhere.
John:
And I think that was smart because if they chose to just make...
John:
a show about mobsters or a show in the old west it's very easy to be like oh i've seen a million mobster shows why would i even watch this you have to make the sopranos to get people interested otherwise you might end up with like say boardwalk empire which was a show that i enjoyed but it was not the sopranos but both of those pictures are similar it's like hey organized crime and insert era here right
John:
arguably borough campfire was more interesting because it wasn't set in modern day anyway um so that was smart and i think for all mankind is handily above the average for all netflix original uh material it's not as good as the best netflix has made but it's much better than the average i feel like because i watch a lot of like questionable quality netflix stuff that you know what i
John:
Netflix puts out a lot of things and they they're smart and they're savvy and they try not to spend too much money and they you know I do searches for various keywords and find a bunch of shows and you're like I can't even believe all this stuff exists and I try them out and some of them are stinkers and some of them aren't but for all mankind it's above average and that's why I feel like it deserves a higher visual effects budget
John:
C, similarly, it's got a premise where already it's starting.
John:
You got my interest before even the first frame airs because I'm like, oh, I want to see what they're going to do with this premise.
John:
Like the maturity thing of sort of people thinking, oh, they're not going to curse and they're going to Disney-fy or whatever thing.
John:
Yeah, FC does have a couple of scenes of violence and some sexual content that clearly makes it very clear that that story about, oh, Tim Cook's telling me I can't have adult things in my shows was, as suspected in various ways, probably partially motivated by someone who's disgruntled about creative direction in a particular show or whatever.
John:
But that said...
John:
C does not even rise to the level of HBO sort of adult content in that the sexual content is really tame in the grand scheme of things.
John:
Like it's nothing explicitly shown or anything like that.
John:
The violence...
John:
is you know it's personal violence but it is not particularly gory or grim like to give just one example the boys on amazon which i thought was an interesting show uh is so much more over the top with its gore like it's totally in your face and trying to shock you with the gorsi is not trying to shock you with the gore it's not trying to shock you with sex for the most part again unless you're very uncomfortable with female sexuality uh it's it's fine like it is i'm not gonna say it's disneyified but it is all
John:
that's not what sea is about sea is not even to the degree of like breaking bad breaking bad various had various moments where like they're going to sort of horrify you with this thing that happens and they're really going to show you what it would really be like if that happens not just like a sanitized tv version of it right sea doesn't do that either so uh don't watch it with your kids obviously but don't expect to be shocked by anything
John:
like see uh there's a lot of money on the screen it doesn't really hold together you know premise wise if you think about it for too long there's lots of sort of hand wavy stuff but the premise is interesting i love end of the world stories and so i'm totally willing to go along with it i feel like the the star aquaman what's his name um jason momoa or something yeah yeah yeah
John:
He may be a little bit overmatched by the acting required of him to carry this series.
John:
But mostly he just has to be a sort of brooding lunkhead.
John:
So it's kind of in his wheelhouse.
John:
Again, I don't want to say it's bad.
John:
The ratings that this got from critics, I think it was like 38% on Rotten Tomatoes for the critics rating.
John:
That is wrong.
John:
It is not that bad.
John:
It is absolutely not a 38% show by any stretch of the imagination.
John:
It's not a 90% show either.
John:
It's fine.
John:
I like For All Mankind better, but I'm still very interested in C because you should see the garbage shows on Netflix that I've watched about the end of the world.
John:
This is so much better than them.
John:
I have a high tolerance for garbage shows when it's about the end of the world.
John:
That's just me.
John:
But I would recommend C to people who find the premise interesting.
John:
Because if you hear about what the show's about, and you're like, oh, that sounds kind of cool, you'll probably like it.
John:
Okay, good.
John:
It's not great, but it's also not bad.
John:
So this sounds terrible, like these tepid reviews.
John:
And again, I go back to that TV critic saying, you can't expect when they field like four or five shows for any of them to be on par with the best shows on television in the past few years.
John:
And I think it's good that none of them, as far as I can tell, are awful.
John:
You saw The Morning Show and didn't think it was awful, and that actually got some okay, good reviews.
John:
And I saw C and For All Mankind, and they're not bad shows.
John:
It sounds so terrible to not be able to say, this is the best show ever.
John:
None of them are the best show ever, but it is really important for Apple to come out of the gate, especially when it's kind of in this free, where it's free to everyone who bought an iPhone for a year or whatever.
John:
To get people to watch it and not, like, turn it off in disgust or be like, oh, Apple can't make TV shows or they really blew it.
John:
I don't think anyone watching is going to say that.
John:
I think what they'll say is, well, I got it for free.
John:
Maybe I'll watch it and they'll get interested and, you know, it starts moving along and you watch it.
John:
Maybe by the end of the first season, people are like, you know what?
John:
I really enjoyed that.
John:
I'll pay for it for the next year or whatever.
John:
So...
John:
I think content wise, this is about as good as anyone could have expected.
John:
You could still be out there saying, oh, if only they had that one great show.
John:
But I just think that was an unrealistic hope.
John:
And either any of these shows could turn into a great show.
John:
It sometimes takes shows a little while to get their feet under them.
John:
So I'm mostly impressed for a first time TV maker to come out with a bunch of shows that are OK, good.
Casey:
I agree with you.
Casey:
Granted, I've watched a sum total of like two hours and 15 minutes of Apple TV+, but I have been very, very surprised and very pleased with it so far.
Casey:
Can you tell me about the streaming quality?
Casey:
I watched For All Mankind on my phone in a fit of insomnia this morning.
Casey:
Please don't yell at me.
Casey:
And then I had watched The Morning Show on my very old 1080 TV TV.
Casey:
But I would assume for those of us like you guys that have fancier TVs and fancier Apple TVs and so on and so forth, that it probably looks pretty good.
John:
So this is Flat Panels HD, which is a website.
John:
And this is the editor-in-chief writing in their forums.
John:
He says, Apple TV Plus has the highest streaming quality we've seen for 4K so far.
John:
It's higher than most iTunes movies.
John:
Wow.
John:
Apple DBplus uses variable bitrate with quite a wide span.
John:
The highest bitrate they've seen so far is 29 megabits per second average with a 41 megabit per second peak.
Wow.
John:
I've also seen reports saying, oh, I watched a bunch of Apple TV content in HDR and my TV and there was terrible compression and banding.
John:
So it seems like the answer to the streaming quality is that Apple has the capacity to and will send you many more bits than other services will.
John:
But...
John:
If your connection is slow or inconsistent or has any problems, they will, of course, throttle down and you will see a compression artifact.
John:
So the advantage of getting something from iTunes or watching on a Blu-ray disc is you've got all the bits there and you're going to see all the bits.
John:
Doing anything over streaming, if there's any hiccup in your connection or you actually have a bad connection or you have flaky Wi-Fi in the room you're in or whatever, it's just going to throttle down and the quality is going to go down.
John:
But it's good to know that Apple is leaning on this one potential technical advantage they have is they're willing to send you
John:
more bits because they have fewer subscribers and you know in general they've always cared about video quality but uh you're not gonna see nice pristine video if you can't sustain 29 megabit per second average to your television it doesn't mean like well my internet connection is 150 megabits or 300 megabits i should get that yeah is your connection to your tv
John:
able to handle 29 megabits per second sustained and then of course there's server issues and cdn issues and all sorts of other technical things that are outside your control but uh i i watch most of these shows on my ipad i watch a surprising amount of tv on my ipad it's making me more and more wish for an oled ipad actually um just because like i end up watching like a show before i go to bed uh and you know the lights are all out i've got my airpods in like this is my tv my my right before bed tv watching experience um and i like it i like watching tv like that um
John:
I haven't noticed any... I can say I haven't noticed any terrible compression artifacts, so I guess that's thumbs up.
John:
Again, kind of like the shows.
John:
I didn't see anything bad, right?
John:
I also haven't noticed their quality being particularly great either, but then again, all my internet connections and all my Wi-Fi is...
John:
Very high bandwidth, and a lot of the shows I watch are actually streaming for my TiVo in the other room, and so there's no streaming issues there.
John:
Or I'm watching stuff off my Plex where I know I'm getting all the bits because I do it in original quality because I have good network in my house.
John:
So I think the audio video is fine, but of course for any streaming service, you never know what you're going to get.
Casey:
Anything else on Apple TV Plus?
John:
I mean, I know I said I didn't want to harp on the application issues and the quality of the show is the dominant factor.
John:
That's true.
John:
But I really do hope they get this stuff sorted out.
John:
Like for all the world, it felt like they were having weird server issues.
John:
A couple of people thought that maybe it was also the background process termination stuff.
John:
Like maybe their app was getting killed.
John:
before i could send an api request to mark my uh position in the show but honestly like i i don't want to repeat the rant that i went into on rectus like this is table stakes for the app like you can either innovate and say we have a great idea of how to present an interface to television but if you don't have any great ideas just do what netflix does like when i launched the app you absolutely have to show me in a gigantic box that i just pawed with my monkey paws and just say look
John:
just continue showing me the thing that i was watching if i was watching a show and i finished episode show me the next episode if i'm in the middle of an episode pick up where i left off i should never have to search for that they also would could do with a concept like uh netflix is my list or some other way to say these are the shows that i intend to be watching right now every streaming app has a way some way for you to do that they're all different which kind of sucks but like
John:
You know, obviously, once you start watching a show, you expect the app to understand that you're watching it.
John:
But also you could say, oh, and like I could have I would have liked to have gone and say, OK, I plan to watch For All Mankind, C and Dickinson.
John:
Right.
John:
And I'll think about the morning show.
John:
And then I should have had some page somewhere that shows all three of those shows.
John:
And I should be able to go into them and see all the episodes and see how far along I am in them.
John:
And then when I get to the end of the episode, I should it should go to the next one or prompt me to go to the next one.
John:
Like it should just do all the things.
John:
And it kind of boggles my mind that they drop the ball on that.
John:
Some of it are bugs, and some of it is just that's not how they organize things.
John:
They don't have these features.
John:
They don't conceptualize it the same way as Netflix.
John:
And I'm not saying they have to do what Netflix and Hulu and everybody else does, but if they don't, they've got to do something better.
John:
So right now they're doing neither.
John:
They're doing something worse, or they're trying to do the same thing, but doing it with bugs.
John:
So...
John:
Uh, I mean, I, it's not that big a deal cause I can, I eventually figure out how to get the show to play, but it just seems like it's not, it's not high bar.
John:
We're not asking them for amazing AI features that think about what I'm going to do.
John:
It's just, if I was, if I was just watching a show, like I'm probably going to want to continue watching it.
John:
So that should be like the biggest, perhaps the only thing on the screen when I launched the app.
Casey:
Yeah, I also wanted to comment, and I think they talked about this on Upgrade as well.
Casey:
It was surprising to me that there was no obvious, here's the Apple TV Plus stuff, or at least not on the Apple TV app anyway.
Casey:
There's so many of the same name.
Casey:
So on the device called Apple TV, I was in the TV app, and there was no obvious place for Apple TV Plus content.
Casey:
And I was able to find it pretty quickly, like it wasn't an egregious amount of effort to go find it.
Casey:
But
Casey:
That was the one time when it would have been nice for them to kind of highlight, this is the Apple TV Plus stuff right here.
Casey:
Look here, over here.
Casey:
Hey, hey, hey, over here.
John:
And it's on launch day.
John:
You would think it would be so in your face that you wouldn't be able to avoid it.
John:
And you end up looking for it.
John:
How am I hunting for this?
John:
How is this not like a giant banner in my face that I can't even avoid?
Casey:
But I do – on the flip side of the coin, though, I do respect that they're trying to – or it appears anyway that they're trying to make a level playing field for all of the content in that app.
John:
That's a charitable interpretation, yes, of their bad information architectures.
John:
They're just trying to be fair to the other services that didn't launch today.
Casey:
Well, you never know.
Casey:
I'm trying to get the benefit of the doubt.
Casey:
But no, all in all, again, I'm quite pleased.
John:
One more aesthetic thing.
John:
So Netflix, if you watch Netflix, you know they have kind of a splash screen.
John:
They recently changed it to this terrible thing with a bunch of colored lines.
John:
But like the thing that says like Netflix or the HBO like bong and hilariously compression-defeating static, right?
John:
It's sort of the thing that shows you what service you're watching.
John:
And so I was actually curious of what Apple was going to do here.
John:
If they're going to do anything like that, they do, they do a twofer, right?
John:
So they've got a Netflix style splash screen, uh, that says, uh, Apple TV plus.
John:
And then they also have, uh, before the shows, it says like, uh, I think maybe Netflix does this too, but it says an Apple original or an Apple original film or something like that.
John:
And both of those things also surprising for Apple, like, uh,
John:
The first one, the sort of Apple TV Plus splash thing, is very what I would expect a company that's not Apple to do.
John:
It looks like every other sort of production logo thing.
John:
where it's like shiny and backlit and the plus is glowy and there's a little thx type cord bong like it's a little bit like the startup chime for a mac you know but it's a little bit different it's like it's all the things that you would expect that to be and that i feel like is a missed opportunity to do what only apple could do which is have no writing on the screen just have an apple logo
John:
If Steve Jobs were still alive, you know, we love doing those things.
John:
That would have been just an Apple logo, like probably not even any sound or maybe some sound.
John:
But like they're the only company, one of the few companies in the world that can literally put no text on the screen, put one simple outline logo in a single color and everybody knows what they're in for.
John:
But they didn't.
John:
They went with the whole Apple TV plus glowy plus blah, blah.
John:
And then the an Apple original thing.
John:
the text and the font they used like it makes it looks like it would fit in apple marketing material it does not look like it fits in in the front of a television program so i feel like both of those things
John:
I was surprised by the aesthetic choices.
John:
The aesthetic choices in the case of the logo seem very conventional.
John:
In the case of an Apple original seem kind of meh.
John:
So they have time to change it.
John:
Netflix, like I said, just changed their logo.
John:
I think it used to be just their regular logo.
John:
Now it's this weird animation with a bunch of colored lines and stuff.
John:
that i think is worse hbo is stubbornly sticking to their static despite how horrific it looks on streaming services uh so you know maybe maybe in year three uh someone will have an epiphany and say you know what we should just show the apple stick with the startup bong that's fine it's kind of cute and everything but just show the apple logo you don't need to say apple tv plus it's not a great name it's not a great logo it doesn't need to glow
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Casey:
All right, let's move on to Ask ATP, and we begin with Josh Hattersley, who writes, you often mention that Apple's mobile system on chip are faster than Mac components using Geekbit.
Casey:
I just totally butchered that.
Casey:
How can I rephrase this?
John:
You tried to substitute words on the fly, and you overflowed your own buffer.
Casey:
I did.
Casey:
That is 1,000% an accurate description of what just happened.
Casey:
Now you're going to leave it in the show, though, because that was funny.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I'll just read this verbatim and we can blame other people.
Casey:
You often mention Apple's mobile SoCs being faster than Mac parts and Geekbench.
Casey:
But is there much evidence that it's a good metric when comparing across architectures, for example, ARM versus x86?
Casey:
It's difficult to find concrete info here, but in theory, it isn't apples to apples, is it?
John:
I'm kind of sad that like that today's today's geek children didn't get to experience what was a staple of my sort of early adult geek life, which was arguing other geeks arguing with each other over benchmarks.
John:
back in the times when it was you know 68k versus power pc x86 versus uh 68k versus power pc risk versus cisk altivec versus uh mmx like this is a whole subculture of comparing platforms and arguing about uh which cpus are better than what and of course when it came time to argue about that it was like everyone would pull out the benchmarks and then it just became a meta argument about well that benchmark is not realistic it's not representative that benchmark unfairly favors this particular architecture and
John:
no real application does that.
John:
And it's just, it went on forever.
John:
Like just arguing about the quality of benchmarks and how representative they were.
John:
And if it's artificial and trying real world applications and just trying, you know, it's, it never ended.
John:
Right.
John:
But, but it meant that everyone was well versed in the pluses and minuses of benchmarks.
John:
And in this more modern sort of post iPhone era,
John:
people throw out Geekbench numbers and no one ever argues about how applicable Geekbench or spec or any of these other things are.
John:
No one ever says, oh, that doesn't count because that whole benchmark fits in the cache.
John:
No one ever talks about this stuff anymore.
John:
It's just not an issue.
John:
So I'm going to say, this is why I give all this sort of reflexive hemming and hawing every time we mention Geekbench and no one seems to care about my hemming and hawing and I never get any comments about it.
John:
I'm hemming and hawing because all benchmarks inherently...
John:
are synthetic and non-representative in one way or another.
John:
But all that said, from all the years you're arguing about how fair or unfair a particular benchmark is to a particular PowerPC or a particular Pentium or whatever, the upshot is that in general, these benchmarks, benchmarks that are not made by someone who makes a CPU chip, like, you know, Intel didn't make the benchmark, AMD didn't make the benchmark, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
These benchmarks are trying to be fair, and chips come and go, and the benchmarks more or less stay the same.
John:
So it's not like the benchmark even can be or is tweaked to be particularly favorable to one CPU or another.
John:
It doesn't mean they're not vulnerable to edge cases where, oh, we've been running this benchmark for years, and CPU cache sizes kept getting bigger, and all of a sudden we crossed some threshold, and now this particular entire benchmark fits in the cache, and it goes like 10 times faster, and that's not representative of real-world stuff.
John:
So it's up to the Geekbench people to keep track of that.
John:
But in general, all those caveats aside, I'm going to say the Geekbench, though, it is not representative of any particular real-world application or your particular application.
John:
I'm not aware of any ARM versus x86 biases that would explain the massive performance differences we see between, like, let's say Apple's phone and all of the Macs that they have ever sold in their entire lives.
John:
So, yeah, you can quibble over the details, but I think there, I don't think that the benchmark is so unfairly biased that you should discount it.
John:
In general, you should give yourself some, you know,
John:
5% margin one way or the other.
John:
So if they look like they're close to each other, it's probably about a wash.
John:
But I, for the most part, trust that they're an okay way to look at things.
Casey:
Moving on, Glenn07 writes, can Marco give an update on the state of podcast market share?
Casey:
Is the equilibrium holding or is Spotify taking over the world?
Marco:
So it's hard to have an idea of like, how do you measure podcast market share?
Marco:
Whose data do you use?
Marco:
Whose data is valid?
Marco:
The best data that I know of that is publicly shared is Libsyn's numbers.
Marco:
I've mentioned this before.
Marco:
They do a show called The Feed that's kind of about podcasting and helping people podcasting questions and everything.
Marco:
And every couple episodes of The Feed, they will do a stats breakdown of Libsyn's global stats for all shows hosted by Libsyn for a certain month and month.
Marco:
They'll do geography breakdowns, like which countries had the most downloads.
Marco:
They'll also do type of device breakdowns and app breakdowns.
Marco:
It isn't the most perfect measure in the world because there's a whole lot of really big shows that aren't hosted on Libsyn.
Marco:
So it's not a perfectly representative sample, but it's such a huge podcast host in general that I think it's the best data we have that's publicly shared.
Marco:
So anyway, based on what they have reported, things are kind of in equilibrium for the most part.
Marco:
Spotify is taking significant market share.
Marco:
I think they're up to something like 13% in the latest numbers.
Marco:
But it's mostly additive.
Marco:
It has been mostly people who were not taken away from other apps.
Marco:
Like people aren't leaving Apple Podcasts and Overcast, etc.
Marco:
in droves to go to Spotify to listen to podcasts.
Marco:
Instead, Spotify's existing audience is starting to listen to podcasts for the first time, adding to the market rather than taking away from other apps.
Marco:
They are big, but they're also, because they're not really taking away from the rest of us,
Marco:
It's not as much of an issue.
Marco:
And also, from what I understand, their market share is not like an average slice.
Marco:
It is not like an even slice out of the rest of the market or an additional rest of the market.
Marco:
It's like certain demographics are very strong there and certain ones are totally missing.
Marco:
In the worlds that I tend to play in, in like nerds and tech podcasts,
Marco:
Spotify is basically nothing.
Marco:
Almost no one listens to shows like ours on Spotify.
Marco:
And almost none of the users of my app would be at risk of turning into Spotify users instead.
Marco:
So it doesn't really affect our corner of the internet here, but it still is a good deal of market share.
John:
What about things like Luminary or whatever, those various pay services for podcasts?
John:
Those wouldn't show up on Libsyn stats or whatever.
Marco:
Oh, they do.
Marco:
Luminary shows up as Libsyn stats of having something along the lines of 0.2% market share.
Marco:
So I'm not so worried about it.
Marco:
As a point of comparison, Overcast hovers around 3%.
John:
Wasn't there some other pay service?
Marco:
There's Stitcher Premium and a couple others.
Marco:
Audible has some originals, but I don't know how they do.
Marco:
Stitcher does okay in general.
Marco:
I don't know how Stitcher Premium specifically does, but Stitcher is somewhere in the 2% range most of the time, I think.
Casey:
Well, that's mostly good news, I'd say.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, it seems like things are pretty stable.
Marco:
Spotify is growing.
Marco:
That is significant.
Marco:
But we're fine.
Marco:
We're not really being touched by that in our corner of the internet over here.
Marco:
And so I think things are mostly holding pretty well.
Good.
John:
And the premium service, it sounds like no premium service has even gotten the traction that Spotify has gotten.
Marco:
Not even close, no.
Marco:
I mean, you could argue maybe Spotify is a premium service in some ways, but they own Gimlet now.
Marco:
They do have a paid tier.
Marco:
And they do have exclusive content.
Marco:
So in some ways, they are a premium service, but not in the way that most people would discuss premium podcasting services.
John:
And that wouldn't show up, and you can't pull that out of the 13% because you have no idea what percentage of that is their premium stuff versus which is just people listening to regular podcasts on Spotify.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
All we know from this 13% is that is among Libsyn-hosted podcasts, which are public podcasts, among Libsyn-hosted podcasts, Spotify is about 13% of their downloads.
Casey:
Finally, Paul Donahue writes, I do some very basic database and Excel work for a living, but I've been thinking about learning how to develop apps on site for supplemental income.
Casey:
Since I want to force myself to be at my desk, I've been thinking about getting a Mac mini, but it hasn't been updated since last year.
Casey:
Do you think I should wait until it gets refreshed or would I be fine purchasing it now?
Casey:
You know, this is such a difficult question because up until there's a lot of smoke about something like, oh, I don't know, a 16-inch MacBook Pro, it seems like just about any time is a perfectly fine time to upgrade.
Casey:
But when you wait as long as the Mac Mini has been, because it's been about a year, right, since it's been upgraded, like Paul said.
Marco:
It has been almost exactly a year, a little bit more.
Casey:
Yeah, so then I get to be a little nervous about recommending an upgrade.
Casey:
I would say, especially if you don't have a Mac already, just pull the trigger.
Casey:
It'll be fine.
Casey:
Maybe get it refurbished so you feel less bad if a new one comes out tomorrow.
Casey:
But I would personally say pull the trigger.
Casey:
Marco, what's your two cents on this?
Marco:
Normally, I would say an Apple products that is a year old, you should probably wait.
Marco:
It's going to be updated soon.
Marco:
Not with the Mac mini.
Marco:
I think it would be a miracle if the Mac mini were updated after only one year.
Marco:
it has never even in if it could ever be said to have had a prime which i don't think it ever did but even in its prime if it ever existed it was never updated that frequently uh so for the mac mini only being a year old is actually kind of you know young still it's it's still a uh what is the expression like a spring chicken or something i don't know it's it's very very new still for for the mac mini
Marco:
So I would say if you're going to get a Mac Mini, go ahead and get it now.
Marco:
You have a very low risk of it being updated anytime soon.
Marco:
That being said, there is the question of whether a Mac Mini is really the best choice here.
Casey:
Fair point.
Marco:
That's a more complicated question about what Paul's needs are, what any potential other priorities might be, things like price or having certain equipment around.
Marco:
Paul says, I want to force myself to be at my desk.
Marco:
but i would say like a decently specced mac mini is not that differently priced than an imac and an imac is kind of a better computer in a lot of ways uh so i i would certainly have i would i would urge paul to consider an imac otherwise uh yeah mac mini is fine and it's not at risk of being updated here with marco don't wait around for a mac mini that just buy if you want one buy it but consider an imac
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Hover, Eero, and Away.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Margo and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T Marco Arman S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Marco:
did i tell you guys i blew my first tire yeah we saw the pictures yeah and we saw we saw the tire of shame tell the tire of shame story that's the best part this is pretty good the wheel of shame sorry yeah so uh so i i was i was taking a left turn onto a road with a media and i took it slightly too tight and hit my rear left tire on the median on the inside and uh
Marco:
instantly heard a big loud and then and i was like uh-oh and i was like i was wait for it wait for it and then i see on the dashboard chime and low pressure warning zero psi i'm like oh no
Marco:
And yeah, so I pulled into the parking lot and yeah, sure enough, completely flat tire and a huge gash in the sidewalls.
Marco:
I'm like, yeah, this is not going to be easily fixed.
Marco:
So I didn't really know what to do.
Marco:
I've never had a flat tire before in my...
Marco:
geez, almost 20 years of driving.
Marco:
Actually, no, 21 years of driving.
Marco:
I've never had a flat tire.
Marco:
I've driven hundreds of thousands of miles, never had to replace a tire.
Marco:
So I was like, all right, now what do I do?
Marco:
So Tesla's, like many new cars, don't come with spare tires.
Marco:
There's nowhere to put it in the car.
Marco:
It just isn't there.
Marco:
So
Marco:
So I don't know what the regulations are, like if you have to have some kind of way to fix this.
John:
Clearly you don't because you don't.
John:
What most cars do is when they don't come with a spare, they come with run flats.
John:
But I guess you get neither.
John:
You get no spare and no run flats.
Casey:
That's not always true.
Casey:
My Golf R has neither a spare nor run flats.
Casey:
It has a fix-a-flat kit that it came with that sits in the back.
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
Yeah, the little can.
John:
Yeah, that's the hierarchy.
John:
But in general, unless there's a particular reason, I assume the reason your car is both to save weight and to save space that it doesn't come with... Run flats tend to have worse performance and ride characteristics.
John:
So if it's like a performance car, they don't want to put run flats on it.
John:
Corvette being accepted because America.
John:
But yeah, I would like...
John:
It's obviously not a law because you can do that, but I'm actually surprised that the, well, I don't know.
John:
I'm kind of surprised that the Teslas don't have run flats.
John:
I guess I never thought about it before.
John:
I know that a lot of the Teslas have harder tires for better mileage, right?
John:
But the performance models may be less so.
John:
But you don't even have fix-a-flat anywhere that you're aware of?
John:
Casey, check his manual for him.
John:
No, I don't.
Marco:
Unless it was in the frunk, which was stuck shut, which is a different story.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Now we're going to have to tell that story either now or later, but carry on.
Marco:
We'll get there.
Marco:
But what they do come with is roadside assistance that apparently is free.
Marco:
It was kind of cool, actually.
Marco:
So I opened up the app on my phone.
Marco:
and you tap rotate assistance and you answer like a couple of questions like what is it tires something else and you hit tires like how many tires one okay and then like and like it it's like you know you submit the request and it's like i will get back to you in a couple of minutes and sure enough like a couple minutes after i submitted the request i got this giant long text message series of like all right uh vehicles being dispatched from this company it'll be there within 60 minutes and it'll have a loaner tire and wheel they will swap it on they will bring your broken tire and wheel to
Marco:
to the you know so and so service center that like the nearest tesla service center it was great and so like so sure enough they said within 60 minutes 20 minutes later a guy shows up in a van with a wheel and a tire and he attaches it to my car 25 minutes after i requested it he's gone he's done i'm on the road again it was kind of amazing uh and the deal was the uh the loaner that he gave me it's just it's the same it's it's a tesla wheel but
Marco:
had a regular tesla tire on it not a snow tire okay but you know a regular tesla tire on it and it was the the the rim of it was spray painted it's like graffitied i'll put the picture as the uh chapter right here it was like graffitied with like red
Marco:
Tesla logos, like smeary Tesla drippy spray paint logos.
Marco:
It said Tesla Mount Kisco on the side.
Marco:
That's the dealership.
Marco:
And the guy was saying that they actually just started doing this because people would just never return the loaner wheels.
Marco:
Because the deal is they give you the loaner wheel and then you're supposed to schedule a service appointment at whatever dealership they brought your rim to and go buy a new tire.
Marco:
well there's nothing really forcing you to do that i guess like you sign a thing on the roadside assistance thing but like i don't doesn't seem that they enforce it so like he said people just never return them because like why would you it's going to cost you a couple hundred dollars to buy a new tire so
Marco:
like he would just keep the loner forever so they spray painted it uh now to uh to show like to kind of remind you that it's the loner real of shame like it looks horrendous like i it's like some guy on twitter said it looks like i ran over a trick-or-treater like which is oh
John:
yeah like again look at go look at your podcast player which hopefully supports chapter art if you're envisioning a tire that's like spray painted red and it's like it looks like a regular wheel but it's a red wheel it's not a red wheel it is literally a tesla tesla silver wheel that someone has haphazardly taken like a can of krylon and just just randomly put crap all over it looks so bad
John:
Like it is not they didn't try to make anything like it just the point of it is to look bad, I suppose.
John:
I just it kind of amazes me that this is like a an actual real large company's solution to this problem, which is can we just make them ugly?
John:
yeah sure i can go down to the store and get a can i'll be in there once like are they different colors it was color matched to his car because it is red and he's got a red car like it's just fascinating and yeah and like i can why wouldn't people uh you know who's who's gonna want to go and pay all that money they just gave you a free tire and a wheel right and people aren't thinking like oh well the tread wear is different and you know in your case it's not even a snow tire they'll just keep driving it that said i'm not sure the incredible spray paint will deter people because those same people who don't care that they have a mismatched tire with different tread wear
John:
might not also care that it's all spray painted red and like they're meaning to go to it but they never get around to it especially if like let's say they have wheel damage like say you had like damaged your wheel on that median the wheel is like 600 bucks probably and then the tire is like 300 on top of that uh or you could drive around with an ugly wheel
Marco:
Yeah, like, it totally makes sense why people don't frequently return these otherwise.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And that's like, when you have, like, a spare tire, it's, you know, it's not the same wheel.
John:
It's a smaller thing, and it looks ridiculous.
John:
And still, I see people driving around on their, you know, on their donuts where, like...
John:
especially it's especially hilarious in this day and age when cars like every car like the economy car for like 13 grand comes with like 20 inch wheels or something ridiculous like just wheels have gotten so huge but the spares haven't kept up so if you have one of these little tiny things it's like a roller skate wheel in this giant wheel well that fits 20 inch wheels uh it's it's very strange anyway um yeah don't don't replace single tires if you can help it and don't keep the wheel of shame