Never Mind, I’m Out
Marco:
How much do I have to derail this show so we don't get to talking about Elon Musk?
Marco:
A lot.
Marco:
Challenge accepted.
Marco:
I know, I know.
Casey:
You could probably do it by yourself.
Casey:
You and me together, our powers combined, could absolutely do it.
John:
What do you have against talking about Elon Musk?
John:
We're going to say really mean things about him, probably.
Casey:
Oh, that's the last thing I want to do, though, because then everyone gets angry at us.
Marco:
I'd rather just say nothing about him.
Marco:
I just don't like him so much.
Casey:
Here we go.
Casey:
Let's derail.
Marco:
Wait, we're talking about him.
Marco:
Let's derail immediately.
Marco:
I had to restore both of my HomePods today.
Marco:
Oh, gosh.
Marco:
How does that even happen?
Marco:
So remember how I said a few weeks ago, you know, they've been working really well.
Marco:
They seem to have stopped breaking, and they've been working really well.
Marco:
Well, that came to a screeching halt over the last week or so, where they've been working very poorly, like...
Marco:
you know it's a stereo pair and you know sometimes one would just drop out until i would like unplug it and plug it back in um which one it was would change over time um sometimes it would it was doing that thing where it was crashing in the middle of a response and restarting itself like it would say part of the response and it would say let me try that again and then like say the same thing what yes that's a thing yes it is and it's doing it more it sounds like apple made their own automatic kicking machine
Casey:
They did.
Casey:
They totally did.
Casey:
That's a throwback.
Marco:
That's a throwback.
Marco:
That's a thing.
Marco:
And then eventually, and of course, you know, and so we actually, so first of all, for the music project, thank God we hit the end.
Marco:
So there's a clear, so remember, you know, I was saying how 2000 to 2006 was a pretty rough time.
Marco:
Like the music got much angrier and dirtier and much more explicit.
Marco:
And it was, it was pretty rough.
Marco:
Well, then it seemed to get better from about 2007 or so, 2008, maybe.
Marco:
I don't know if you recall, maybe, who was president between 2000 and 2008?
Marco:
So that was a really angry period.
Marco:
And then we had a change, and from 2008 until about 2016...
Marco:
it was much happier and much, much less angry and explicit.
Marco:
And then, I swear, 2017 to 2020 took another massive dark turn.
Marco:
Like, I swear, listen to, go to Apple Music and say, pop hits,
Marco:
x for whatever year you want it's clear as day it's a very clear difference like you can tell like what what was the culture feeling was the culture angry was the culture frustrated you know was the culture partying you can feel all those things in the music it's trust me it's worth seeing but anyway um so we've gone back now and uh it's we decided to go back and do the rock chart instead of the pop chart
Marco:
um the rock chart didn't actually exist until at least in apple music until 1956 or 1965 rather and but they have pop charts going back to 1955 so we actually started 1955 pop and we're going to do that until we get to 65 and we're going to switch over to rock um and we're hearing so much stuff so many songs that i'm like oh my god this like the version of this that i knew was actually a cover of this and
Casey:
Oh, what was the Spin Doctors?
Casey:
No, was it not Spin Doctors?
Casey:
It was some song that—oh, now I'm going to have to look it up.
Casey:
There was some song that I had no idea was a cover, and I just recently discovered this, and it blew my freaking mind.
Casey:
And the funniest part is the original was also incredible.
Casey:
Crud, what was that?
Casey:
All right, I'm going to just interrupt you in a second when I figure it out, but I have it on a playlist, the original, and it's off to find it in a second.
Yeah.
Marco:
And there were so many songs, too, where, like, they're not officially credited, I think, as covers, but they clearly, like, drew, like, they clearly, like, just lifted the whole melody of a certain song.
Marco:
Usually it was, like, a jazz artist in the 50s who then, like, some, you know, white guy in the 60s lifted it or in the 80s or in the 90s.
Marco:
Like, we heard this one song yesterday and I'm like...
Marco:
this is just i want candy like i want candy just completely ripped off but it was and it was some jazz song i never heard of like this is it was so incredibly similar today i heard a song that i'm pretty sure surfing usa ripped off yeah i think marco you need to spend some time on youtube but there's a whole subgenre on youtube of is song x a ripoff of song y why or why not oh yeah you'll find that highly educational
Casey:
A follow-up, real-time follow-up.
Casey:
It is Hard to Handle by Otis Redding as covered not by the Spin Doctors, but instead by the Black Crows.
Casey:
My mistake.
Marco:
Oh, okay.
Marco:
That's a pretty different band, but okay.
Casey:
It is, and you will absolutely recognize at least the Black Crows version when you hear that.
Casey:
And then if you were to hear the Otis Redding version, it is not that particularly different, but it is also stunningly great.
Casey:
I will say, I have possibly the best playlist in all of music history,
Casey:
uh, which is all like funk and soul music from about the sixties.
Casey:
And it is something like 50 or 60 songs that are just perfection from top to, from top to bottom.
Casey:
So, uh, I just wanted to share that with everyone and this is on it.
Casey:
That's how I could find it.
Marco:
So there's, and there's a lot of like, you know, we did last time we did this, we started in 1960 and we were at first until, until all the ATP listeners wrote in to say pop hits X. And when I was just doing play the top songs from year X and it would play at the top, it would say playing the top 25 and then it'll play the top seven and then wander off.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
so we're hearing a lot more now than we did before and there are so many good songs in the i mean you know it still sounds like the 50s but there's a lot of good music from back then like we just hit um tequila the song from peewee's big adventure like i didn't realize that was from the 50s i would have guessed you know 60s but but like oh man there's so much like good stuff in here and it's so refreshing to be able to just hit play and not have to worry like every song transition wait do we have to skip this because adam's here or because we don't want to hear all this dirtyness
John:
Well, didn't you, like everyone gave you the solution to that.
John:
It was like the turn off explicit content on the HomePod.
John:
Did you just never hit that switch?
John:
Yeah, I didn't.
John:
I forgot about that.
John:
I was too busy trying to get the HomePods to work.
John:
You should just do it.
John:
It'll save you some trouble later because I'm pretty sure the Rockets are going to have some bad words in there too.
Marco:
yeah but not for a while like you know we have we have a few decades to go before those are really in there um at least in any significant quantity um there's certainly innuendo but i mean heck there's innuendo in the 50s songs it's just different you're gonna get the uh the radio edit of creep which i think is better than the one with cursing
Marco:
I agree, actually.
Marco:
When I first heard the version of Creep that had the F word in it, I was like, oh, that's actually less of a good song.
Marco:
It didn't fit.
Casey:
I freaking love Radiohead, and Creep has never done much for me, which probably makes me completely without taste.
Casey:
But hi, welcome to the last eight years.
Marco:
No comment.
Marco:
So anyway, so my HomePods were exploding, and I was trying to figure out, all right, what do I do here?
Marco:
A few people had commented over the times that I was complaining about this that doing a full restore fixed them for a while.
Casey:
Why don't you just restore your HomePods?
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
Well, I mean, look, it works for the Apple Watch.
Marco:
I'm like, all right, so let me give this a shot.
Marco:
So I did the full restore of both.
Marco:
You plug it in while holding it down.
Marco:
It spins red, and then it tells you it's going to reset.
Marco:
It's a pretty easy process.
Marco:
I actually got them both done and repaired in a matter of maybe 20 minutes or less even.
Marco:
It was quick.
Marco:
It's been working better.
Marco:
But I did, I started looking, I'm like, you know, what if these do die?
Marco:
And if it seems like it's both a physical flaw that all HomePods have, the whole thing about like, you know, slowly frying one of their components with some weird power.
Marco:
So there's a physical flaw they seem to all have over time.
Marco:
And the big HomePod actually runs different software than the HomePod mini.
Marco:
So my theory is, well, they're probably going to
Marco:
you know slowly let more and more bugs creep into the big one that just kind of never get fixed whereas the little one seems to work better we do we have both in the house we have little ones like in you know little rooms and they work they work much better much more reliably and faster so if my home pods die i might be able to briefly get along with you know finding new ones on ebay but eventually i'm not gonna be able to do that anymore and so let me take a look at what other airplay 2 compatible speakers exist
Marco:
Now, helpfully, Apple maintains such a list on their website.
Marco:
So I went through and opened up every single page on that list.
Marco:
This was disheartening.
Marco:
I would say at least half, maybe even two thirds of them were 404s.
Okay.
Marco:
Cool.
Marco:
Just all these old products that, or they were valid page responses, but it was for discontinued products.
Marco:
Many others were, like, sound bars, which I'm not looking for, you know, because this isn't going under a TV.
Marco:
This is, you know, trying to be a speaker on my kitchen counter.
Marco:
And many others were...
Marco:
possibly useful for that purpose but ugly or very limited or they had like you know a single two inch driver in them it's like well that's gonna sound like crap i like i i could just have the homepod mini if i want that kind of sound profile like if i want a single small driver doing all the work then i'll just get a homepod mini and put it up there that's you know
Marco:
But looking through this list, I was trying to figure out, like, is there anything that could directly replace them?
Marco:
And the answer is pretty much no.
Marco:
The biggest hurdles I've found are, first of all, just like the speaker configuration.
Marco:
Like most of them have, as I said, like, you know, maybe one small driver somewhere in there.
Marco:
At best, maybe a passive radiator as the woofer, similar, again, to the HomePod Mini.
Marco:
But these are in like multi-hundred-dollar products.
Marco:
or they're these massive, really high-end things that are really huge that would be ridiculous to put on a kitchen counter or wouldn't fit at all and are very expensive.
Marco:
The other issue is the voice assistant situation.
Marco:
We've had the Alexa products in our house before.
Marco:
We know what we get with that.
Marco:
A decent voice assistant that's fast and reliable, but that is just relentlessly trying to get us to give it more to do.
Marco:
Hey, did you know you could also ask me to do all your shopping for you?
Casey:
Yeah, it never used to be like that, but it's gotten bad.
Marco:
Did you know you can make voice calls?
Marco:
Just give me access to all of your information and contacts and let me beep at you and blink my light at you in different colors that you have to learn how to disable.
Marco:
It's getting really bad.
Marco:
And and so I don't really want the Amazon assistant in my house if I can help it.
Marco:
Also, I have had poor luck with things like Sonos products that have the Amazon Assistant built in, where products that have the Amazon Assistant built in but are not Amazon products tend to have a lesser version of it.
Marco:
They tend to be very limited or have weird little bugs or shortcomings that Amazon's own first-party products don't have.
Marco:
But Amazon's first-party products sound like crap.
Marco:
And I also had a lot of reliability issues with my last set of Echoes, and so...
Marco:
I don't really want to go that route.
Marco:
I've heard that Google has a good assistant.
Marco:
You know, I've heard that from John.
Marco:
I've heard that from lots of other people.
Marco:
And so I have thought, like, maybe I should try a speaker with the Google Assistant built in.
Marco:
But I just kind of feel dirty about that.
Marco:
I don't like Google.
Marco:
They're a really creepy and morally bankrupt company.
Marco:
I think they get away with a lot simply because Facebook is worse.
Marco:
But Google is certainly, you know, no shining star of morality and, you know, trust.
Marco:
And so that's an option, but I don't love that option.
Marco:
And then Siri, well, we know what Siri is.
Marco:
Siri is a really well-meaning, privacy-conscious, frequently failing, and very frustrating assistant that works about two-thirds of the time and poorly at that.
Marco:
And Siri is only available in HomePods.
Marco:
As far as I know, there's no other speakers on the market that have Siri built in.
Marco:
And so if I want AirPlay 2 and Siri, HomePods or HomePod Minis are my only options.
Marco:
If I want AirPlay 2 and I'm willing to take Google Assistant, I have a few more options.
John:
I think there's got to be something with Siri because my thermostat, I believe, is an AirPlay speaker and has Siri built in.
Marco:
they yeah remember when they when they did that demo or the keynote where they had like the big virtual house and they were like cgi like flying through it um they talked about how they were they were adding some kind of program to put siri into things like thermostats but i think it's only in thermostats i don't think it's gotten any further than that yet um you know apple does a lot of these programs where they'll announce some kind of hardware integration partnership program and then you know there's
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Until something comes out, I wouldn't hold my breath on that.
Marco:
But anyway, so it really showed me doing this exercise.
Marco:
What I landed on was things I would be most interested in trying would be a couple of decent multi-driver speakers that had AirPlay 2 support and Google Assistant built in.
Marco:
And there's only a pretty small handful of those, and they're really expensive.
Marco:
Over $1,000 expensive.
Marco:
It really showed me like, wow, the HomePod was actually not that bad of a deal for what it was.
Marco:
If you try to find that kind of speaker arrangement or that kind of speaker capability, multiple mid-range slash tweeter drivers, a big subwoofer that's big for its size, some kind of DSP to adjust things, that's
Marco:
That's actually pretty uncommon, and it's especially uncommon for under $500.
Marco:
I appreciate the HomePod even more now that I tried to shop for its replacement, and I'm even more hoping that Apple is the one to replace it sometime in the not-too-distant future because nothing else really will replace it unless I'm willing to compromise heavily on some other aspect.
John:
Good luck.
John:
Couldn't you just separate the voice assistant from the speaker part, like get some other small turdy thing to be the voice assistant, but have that little voice assistant use the speakers that you buy as their sound output source?
Marco:
I can.
Marco:
And I thought about that.
Marco:
Downtimes of that would be like, you know, on a kitchen counter, I don't want a whole bunch of boxes and wires.
Marco:
I want something that's integrated for there.
Marco:
You know, if I'm going to make a whole separate system, well, then I'll make a real speaker system like, you know, over by the TV or in my office.
Marco:
I have a pair of passive speakers driven by an amp that I'm fine with in that kind of context.
Marco:
But on the kitchen counter, you want something integrated.
Marco:
And again, even, you know, looking at the HomePod and what it offers,
Marco:
Other products that offer similar multi-speaker driver arrangements are not only more expensive than the HomePod, but much bigger than it.
Marco:
Apple did a really good job designing this product that nobody except me wanted because they made it too expensive for what the market wanted.
Marco:
But they made a really nice high-end product, and I really hope they do it again sometime because the HomePod Mini is great in my bathroom and not many other places.
Marco:
And so I really want...
Casey:
i i want that big home pod back so i'm just hoping i'm hoping mine lasts as long as they can then i who knows what i'll do after that but the looking around at the options uh was not promising so it's that time of year once again it is time for atp merch we talked about it last week we're talking about it this week and i believe we have one more episode where i will remind you is that right john one more episode
Casey:
where you will get your reminder to pull the car over, to step aside, to do what you need to do to remember that it is time to go to atp.fm slash store.
Marco:
Alexa, remind me in one hour, buy ATP merch.
Marco:
You're a mean, mean person.
Marco:
Okay, Google, remind me in one hour, buy ATP merch.
Marco:
Hey Siri, remind me in one hour, buy ATP merch.
Casey:
Oh, Marco.
Marco:
How did that not activate any of our stuff?
John:
I don't know.
John:
You leave that on?
John:
I mean, I don't know.
John:
One of us has to have something.
John:
Last time your watch interrupted the show.
John:
Yeah, I'm wearing a regular watch tonight, just so that wouldn't happen.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Well, anyways.
Casey:
So we have several options available to you.
Casey:
And remember that if you cannot buy anything right now, that's fine.
Casey:
Pull the car over, step to the side of the sidewalk, tell your children, hold on just one moment.
Casey:
Well, maybe you shouldn't do that, but just do what you need to do.
Casey:
Remember that Casey said, remember this moment.
Casey:
Think about where you'll be when you can order some ATP merch.
Casey:
Envision that in your mind's eye and think about ordering that merch when you get there.
Casey:
Do what you got to do.
Casey:
So what do we got?
Casey:
We've got the M1 Ultra shirt and the M1 Ultra Interposer shirt.
Casey:
I won't belabor this too much, but the M1 Ultra shirt is exactly what you would expect.
Casey:
The M1 Ultra Interposer shirt is where it says max adjacent to an upside down max, which is a very, very, very good in joke.
Casey:
Marco, how good of an in joke is this?
John:
it's actually selling quite well it's like 5x what the the ultra shirt is selling guys five to six x but the regular one is and and i think that's that's odd because i think not that i'm saying people should buy two shirts but like the joke works better in the context of knowing that the regular shirt exists and if you just buy the joke one i'm probably gonna get both of them so who am i to talk never mind continue
Casey:
In any case, we've got both of those shirts.
Casey:
They are black fabric with yellow Ultra or Max Max symbols on them.
Casey:
And of course, the multicolor M1.
Casey:
Then if you prefer more color in your life, we have the M1 Ultra shirt, as you would expect, but only Ultra, not Max Max.
Casey:
And that is available in a rainbow of colors.
Casey:
And then we have the traditional ATP logo shirt.
Casey:
We have brought back the ATP hoodie as well as the pint glass and ATP mug with a slight change that the ATP mug is gray on the inside, not red, because hashtag supply chain.
Casey:
All of this stuff is available until the evening of Saturday, April 30.
Casey:
So please, if you don't mind, go to atp.fm slash store.
Casey:
But hey, John, if people really just want to support us, and they don't necessarily need yet another podcast t-shirt, even though the Interposer shirt is so freaking good, what could they do, John, to support the show?
John:
You forgot to mention that if anyone is already an ATP member or wants to become an ATP member, you get 15% off.
John:
If you go to your member page on ATP.fm, you'll get there.
John:
You'll find a promo code.
John:
You can put that into the little promo code field during checkout, and it will reduce the price for you.
John:
So definitely all ATP members should remember to do that.
John:
And if you just want to get 15% off, just sign up for membership for one month, use the code, and then cancel your membership.
John:
Nope, nope, nope.
John:
And a lot of people have been doing that.
John:
I've seen the merch sale bump.
John:
The member numbers are going to go up, and then when the merch sale's over, the membership will go back down.
Marco:
No, they don't have to, though.
John:
You sign up to get the merch discount, and then, oh, look over there.
Marco:
Is that sparkly something?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Anyway.
John:
Is that Elon Musk?
John:
What Casey was alluding to is that these are expensive things.
John:
The shirts are expensive because they're limited run.
John:
We make
John:
them expensive because we do 17 printing passes on them um and of course the you know the cost of everything goes up because of supply chain stuff yada yada it might seem like you're really supporting the show a super duper amount by buying the super expensive t-shirt and you are and we appreciate it but only do that if you actually want a shirt if you don't want a shirt just sign up for atp membership you will get stuff for that as well and it will cost you far less money and we will get more of it so atp.fm slash join
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
This is all great stuff.
Casey:
And I am just sitting here so smug.
Casey:
It's funny, I'm stealing your valor, I guess, Marco, because it was your idea to do the Max Max shirt.
Casey:
But because you were kind of, you know, pumping the brakes on it a little bit.
John:
Because you're poo-pooing your own idea, yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
Since you're pumping the brakes, this is very like opposite day because I feel like I would be the one to pump the brakes on my own idea.
Casey:
And you would be the one to, you know, just run with it.
Casey:
But no, now I'm running with your idea and I'm telling you that I'm claiming it as mine.
Casey:
And so, yes, the ATP M1 Ultra Interposer shirt is the clear winner so far.
Casey:
And let's keep it that way.
Marco:
I can't believe we actually made it.
John:
One more thing on the merch this time.
Marco:
I posted a Photoshop joke and then you guys made it into a shirt.
John:
well that's how it works that's how it works the uh the the mugs and pint glasses like i said last week those are the ones where we have to guess how many people are going to buy them and order a bunch ahead of time and we were afraid that we're going to end up with a bunch of you know leftover ones like the pins where we just sold them for years and years and couldn't get rid of the last of the pins so we actually uh reduced our order because we were afraid we weren't going to sell through the things that we have and also like as much as we like the gray interior ones we didn't want to be stuck with five years worth of gray interiors when the people who want the red interior be like when
John:
are you going to bring the red one back and we're like sorry we got to sell through another three years worth of gray ones um so we reduced those orders what that means potentially is that we could sell out of the mugs or pint glasses i don't think we will i think we've got plenty i think we're going to have left over but just fyi if you really want a mug you broke yours last time or you just want a different mug or you want one that's you know less uh loud than the red interior one maybe consider buying your mug or pint glass sooner rather than later because the
John:
it is plausible that we could sell out of one or both of them again i don't think we will but just want to give people heads up i can say it makes a very nice desk mug for like holding pens and scissors and stuff that's how i use mine yeah that's what my wife uses it for i'm kind of insulted by it's like we got this nice bug why don't you use it as a mug it's like no i like it to hold my pens it's not a pen holder it's a mug but yes it does look good on your desk so if you want to use it to hold pens apparently that is a very common usage
Casey:
In any case, atp.fm slash store or atp.fm slash join.
Casey:
And despite what John says, you can feel free to just let that membership cruise.
Casey:
It's not going to hurt you.
Casey:
There'll be more merch sales in the future.
Casey:
You can do it.
Casey:
I have faith in you.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
correct uh they the original gravity people have put up an instagram post saying hey guess what uh guess who's back again no it's not eminem good guess though you know him you love him the bavarian sausage starting today and this was what uh the 16th of march the people's wiener returns so come reunite with your old friend at original gravity it is only but one of the many sausages they used to offer but it is at least one option back at original gravity so there you go
John:
hey it's a start but hey maybe by the time we get there they'll have a full sausage menu again well i feel like i do want to have a word with whoever their person is who's doing copy for their social media stuff because they use they were w-h-o-s-e who's instead of w-h-o apostrophe s for who is we're ignoring that they probably they probably had some beer first it's fine no apostrophe in the people's wiener it's just i mean well i'm just glad that we have sausage follow-up again which is kind of amazing and there's a little picture of a sausage and some fries so there you have it
John:
I was going to say that we did it because we recorded that episode.
John:
But again, this was on March 16th.
John:
So we did it retroactively, kind of.
John:
Something like that.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
With regard to Ethernet controllers, we were talking last week about how was it Realtek has a really crummy implementation or perhaps just crummy drivers for their Ethernet controllers.
Casey:
And we were trying to figure out what is the deal with my beloved CalDigit TS4.
Casey:
And apparently somebody reached out to CalDigit or found the answer from CalDigit.
Casey:
Oh, you reached out.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
You said you had asked them last week.
Marco:
I actually behaved like the journalist that I pretend to be sometimes and said, hey, we're, you know, we want to talk about this in ATP.
Marco:
Can you confirm like which Ethernet chip you use, whether it's this, you know, the RTL, whatever, whatever, whatever, three, that's the bad one or the six.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And today they responded and said the TS4 is using the Intel i225 PCIe to 2.5 gigabit Ethernet controller.
Marco:
so it is neither of the real tech chips it's an intel chip and i i haven't followed the development of you know different like nick chips for a very long time however back when i cared about such things intel always made the best ones so i don't know what the exact deal is with mac os and the driver support of this thing and whether it will work at full speed and everything however
Marco:
hearing that they're using an intel chip to me that's very good news because they used to again they used to make the best nicks in the world and they they probably are still very good whereas real tech is kind of hit or miss with their products usually so this i'm happy to hear this yeah and then uh i had made offhanded mention of the fact that you need to flip some
Casey:
magic switch in the hardware area of system preferences in order to get ethernet to work more reliably and a couple people reached out asking what the crap i was talking about and it completely slipped my mind to put that in the show notes but i have put it in this week's show notes so i put that link in there additionally a couple people pointed out maybe i just stumbled upon this i don't remember how i got here but one way or another i found that there they have a
Casey:
a FAQ post with regard to sleep issues.
Casey:
And apparently it's better under the most recent version of macOS, but it's still got a little bit of wonkiness.
Casey:
So what they say on this page is, there are some short-term ongoing intermittent issues in macOS 12 and up, affecting some Thunderbolt docs in general after macOS going into sleep mode.
Casey:
So they have two recommendations for you.
Casey:
You either turn off sleep mode, which is what I've done of my own volition, unrelated to any of this,
Casey:
Or, and this is interesting, reconnect the dock each time you reboot prior to sleeping it.
Casey:
And apparently you only have to do it once, but once you boot your machine, disconnect the dock, reconnect the dock, and then magic happens.
Casey:
And then you don't have the problem anymore, according to this page on their FAQ.
Casey:
So I just wanted to pass that along.
Casey:
Again, there will be links to both of these in the show notes.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite place to run servers.
Marco:
Visit linode.com slash ATP to learn more and see why so many nerds like me love this wonderful host.
Marco:
I mean, look, I've been running servers for a long time, since I believe the year 2000.
Marco:
And it is, I've used a lot of web hosts in my day and Linode is by far my favorite one.
Marco:
That's why I've been sticking with them for the longest.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Same level of support, and I've used it, and it is fantastic.
Marco:
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Marco:
I have seen, again, a lot of hosts.
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:
Once again, linode.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Create a free account there to get $100 in credit.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for being an awesome web host, for hosting all my stuff, and for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Let's talk about Ecobee's.
Casey:
Eric Powell had some interesting feedback.
Casey:
And Marco, can you summarize one more time what your issue or confusion was with the interaction of Ecobee and HomeKit?
Marco:
Yeah, basically that every time HomeKit... Every time I would control the EchoB thermostats through HomeKit, or they would control themselves through a schedule I had set in their app, a lot of times things would mess up when whoever has control would switch.
Marco:
Whether HomeKit did the last command, or whether EchoB's internal stuff did the last command, it was oftentimes very weird.
Marco:
I would often do things like ask HomeKit to turn off the heat in this room...
Marco:
And instead of turning off the heat, it would go to like auto mode where it like will use heat or AC to maintain one of these temperature ranges, you know, which is very different from off.
Marco:
So stuff like that, like this weird stuff would happen.
Marco:
It would or I would I would tell HomeKit to do something and it would say, OK, and then I would look at the thermostat and wasn't doing it.
Marco:
Or it was just it was a very strange situation.
Casey:
Alright, so Eric Powell writes,
Casey:
Comments on Reddit complained about this for ages, with tips on how to MacGyver your way around it with shortcuts, for example.
Casey:
However, finally last year, they relented and changed the way this works via an update.
Casey:
Now the system will do a temporary hold when you use one of your HomeKit options and will revert back to the scheduled temperature when the next schedule starts.
Marco:
Got it.
Marco:
So now it apparently is better at maintaining both a schedule in the Echo B app and a schedule on a thermostat.
Marco:
That being said, I don't plan to try this because it was a pain in the butt and having everything controlled only via the home app and its own automation and scheduling and voice control is working fine for me.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
Again, I think so often we run into problems with smart home stuff if multiple ecosystems or apps are trying to control the same thing.
Marco:
So I think having only one of those things controlling it, whether you go all in on Echo Bee's app or all in on HomeKit, I think go all in on one or the other.
Marco:
Don't try to mix them because it's just asking for trouble.
Yeah.
John:
Although speaking of mixing them, something somebody pointed out with the little sensor things that come with some of the Ecobee things.
John:
I mentioned that they're a temperature sensor and they're wireless and they're powered by a little coin battery type thing and supposedly last a long time.
John:
They're really neat.
John:
And then when I added it to HomeKit, I saw the multiple things that were like the
John:
the various sensors in addition to just temperature there's like the present sensor or whatever um someone pointed out that you can use these things even if you don't care about the temperature in the room first of all you can tell the ecobee which ones should contribute to temperature calculations and when they should so you can just say like during nighttime hours ignore all the temperature sensors except for the ones that are upstairs or something like that and the other thing you can do is because they're present sensors you can do stuff like when someone walks into the room or if nobody has been in this room for x amount of time
John:
fire off this automation all sorts of that as I feel like we're mixing and matching I know you just recommended using just one but like if you use the ecobee to control the temperature but then if you just added home kit automation sort of just using this the smart sensors as devices I think they would probably stay out of each other's way because I don't think there's any way to sort of do the equivalent of like
John:
execute this shortcut you know what i mean from the ecobee whereas in the home thing if you just use the present sensor device and say when no one has been in the living room for two hours uh if any of the lights are on turn them off that's a thing you could probably do with you know home kit and shortcuts and automation uh that you probably couldn't do with ecobee
John:
all right and then john tell me about how you found instructions for your weirdo setup after all it's not really quite the same as my setup but it's like it's it's the equivalent so the reason i didn't find it is because if you honestly answer the questions that these various like wizards guide you through on their website do you have x do you have y do you have z right you'll never find this because one of the things is asking you like uh it leads you down the path of like do you have like the ac adapter that plugs into the wall and i mentioned you know i didn't have that i don't want that because then you'd run a wire up your wall or whatever
John:
So I would never go down that branch.
John:
But practically speaking, what that little wall wart adapter thing is doing is the same thing that those two other wires I found buried in my wall are doing.
John:
It's just they're providing 24 volts AC.
John:
You know, it's only instead of being plugged into the wall, it was shoved into my breaker box to a little transformer that was mounted to the wall next to it and then up through my walls through a cable.
John:
But it's the same thing electrically speaking.
John:
So if you do follow these steps, and I'll put a link in the show notes, which is not a direct link, but it's as direct as I could go.
John:
If you follow the link in the show notes,
John:
then you click on the section that says step three, then you click on the section that says scenario A, then you click on the section that says alternate solution, you will in fact reveal a wiring diagram that shows, hey, what if I have basically a W1 wire, an RH wire, and then I have two other random wires that are essentially 24 volts AC coming off a transformer, which in the diagram they show to be a little wall wart, but in my house it's not.
John:
And the solution they have doesn't require putting two wires into a single hole.
John:
Instead, they put...
John:
The 24-volt AC, they put one into C, the common wire, and they put the other one into RC.
John:
And then for the thermostat wires, they go into W1 and RH.
John:
And I'm sure that would work on mine as well.
John:
In fact, if I ever need to disassemble mine and reassemble it, I will do this just because it's simpler than my weird solution of melding the two wires together.
John:
And in my house, I don't have like RC is in theory for like cooling and RH is for heating, but I don't have any cooling.
John:
So just having, you know, W1 and either RH or RC, you just tell the thermostat which one, you know, you want to be the one that means turn the heat on and it should work fine.
John:
So I'll try that if I ever have to open it up.
John:
But for now, everything works and I'm not opening it back up.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Cameron Wood writes, lots of issues and discussion on this week's ATP on smart thermostats.
Casey:
Worth noting that it's a different ballgame in Europe for your listeners.
Casey:
They use different wiring setups and different products.
Casey:
Nest, Tato, and Hive are pretty good follow-up mentions for your Europe listeners where Ecobee isn't available.
John:
I mean, we don't mention this.
John:
It's implicit.
John:
But yeah, we all live in the U.S.
John:
And anytime we're talking about anything that might vary between the U.S.
John:
and elsewhere, just assume everything we're saying only applies to the U.S.
John:
We have U.S.
John:
plugs.
John:
We have U.S.
John:
electrical systems.
John:
We have U.S.
John:
roads.
John:
Just...
John:
Any of that type of stuff that varies from country to country, you know, we can't tell you what to do in other places in the world because we honestly don't know.
John:
And, you know, in this case, like the manufacturers might even be different.
John:
Some of these manufacturers we're talking about may not even serve those regions.
John:
They might be U.S.
John:
only or they might only be, you know, the U.S.
John:
and the U.K.
John:
or something.
John:
So we're sorry that we can't offer a bar of respect, but do keep that in mind before you rush off to do something based on home automation that you heard us talk about because homes are very different across the world.
John:
cmf in the chat room is asking how i get by in the summer in boston yeah window units it's not it's not great they're heavy why don't you either do the hvac or do mini splits yeah mini splits are awesome you know the answer to that question yeah i know you don't you don't want to make holes in your house i know but yes mini splits are are a worthy hole i don't understand why anybody does mini splits they're so hideous they work really well that's why hideous inside the house they're hideous outside the house so
John:
My house does not have much going for it, but the one thing it does have going for it is that it looks nice on the outside in terms of being a nice house without a bunch of ugly crap all over it.
Casey:
I mean, I cannot fathom living in a place where it gets over 70 degrees without air conditioning.
John:
Well, the window units do the job.
John:
They're a pain to install and a pain to uninstall.
Casey:
Yes, because those look great in your windows, John.
Casey:
They look stupendous.
John:
They look better than mini splits, let me tell you.
John:
uh maybe inside the house i strong disagree on the outside definitely outside because they go through the windows the windows are already an area where there's stuff going on they don't like pierce the wall and end up looking like these warty things and then and then like when you have a nice day and you want to open the windows you have one that you can't use but i have plenty of windows don't worry about it this is plenty of windows to open
Casey:
Far be it for me to convince you that you've made the wrong choice with regards to your employment, but maybe you should have hung on for another six months just so you could amass the money such that you can do proper HVAC.
John:
It's not a money issue.
John:
It's a house disruption issue.
John:
We've talked about this before.
John:
I do not have any air ducts and those little skinny ones they try to fish through.
John:
Fishing anything through my ancient walls is a big project and the house would crumble to dust.
John:
It's the type of thing that
John:
what if you open the wall and you end you ended up discovering oh my god there's a whole second air duct in here i don't think there's any secret air ducts if anything there's probably just bodies buried in there and old radiators and rats and a bunch of old razor blades from the little razor blade hole that is in the uh you know the medicine cabinets that we talked about before did we talk about this before
John:
yes we have on this show i'm pretty sure we talked about it i don't think so i don't think we did john i know the thing you mean like the kind of thing you mean but i don't think we've talked about it for people who don't know again this may be u.s only we don't offer this disclaimer but it's fresh in my mind because i just mentioned it uh in the u.s at least back in the day uh when they made a house they'd put in like a medicine cabinet which is like a little thing that's recessed between the studs in your bathroom wall and it has a mirror door on it usually and if you pull on the mirror door it opens up in there you put all your medicines and
John:
other stuff right it's a medicine cabinet in the bathroom right and what they would have in the back of the medicine cabinet it would just be like a metal thing that's like in the wall to make with little shelves or whatever there'd be a slit in there and what that was for was when you used to shave with like straight razors back before disposable razors and stuff when you're done with your razor blade you'd remove it from your little handle and then you would shove it through the slot
John:
And it would just fall down the stud cavity in your wall to the bottom of the stud cavity somewhere.
Casey:
Are you serious?
Casey:
This is a thing?
John:
Right.
John:
And the reason they do that is like, oh, it's a razor blade.
John:
I don't want to put it in the garbage because what if like a toddler goes over and finds it in the garbage and plays with it and they'll cut themselves or whatever.
John:
So razor blades are very, very small and very, very light.
John:
And they figured, look,
John:
for the life of this house not like they're going to fill the stud cavity with razor blades just let it fall and it will just plunk why didn't they like put like a like a like a metal bucket or something like it yeah it just goes into the wall and so in many houses if you tear open a bathroom what you will find is a little pile of rust a little pile of rusty metal or potentially a big pile depending on how long that was done the people who lived there and how long they did it um right underneath where the medicine cabinet was
Casey:
I had no idea this was the thing.
Casey:
Genuinely, no idea.
John:
I bet you can find good pictures on the internet of like, you know, what does it look like when you find a pile of those in the wall?
John:
But it's a good example of like the childlike thing of like, look, they're not going to fill this.
John:
How long will this last?
John:
500 years?
John:
A thousand years?
John:
The house is going to disintegrate before this ever becomes a problem.
John:
We've essentially found a permanent, it's like a radioactive waste storage.
John:
Like, I know what we can do with it.
John:
We'll just put it in between the studs in our bathroom and it will never fill up.
John:
Only this is a system that actually works.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Sanity and the new structured content 2022 conference.
Marco:
Sanity is a content platform that powers exceptional digital experiences for companies like National Geographic, Figma, Nike, and more developers, designers, content professionals, and digital leaders rely on Sanity to collaborate in real time, ship new experiences quickly and delight their customers with rich media content.
Marco:
We'll be right back.
Marco:
Now, let's talk about their inaugural conference happening this May called Structured Content 2022.
Marco:
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Marco:
Some of the confirmed speakers include Guillermo Rauch, the CEO of Vercel and the creator of Next.js.
Marco:
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Marco:
And Kerry Hain, head of content strategy relations at Sanity, the author of Designing Connected Content book also.
Marco:
So there's more than one way to attend as well.
Marco:
You can join in person in San Francisco on May 24th and 25th, or you can attend virtually for absolutely free.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Once again, San Francisco, May 24th and 25th for in-person or attend virtually for free.
Marco:
To learn more about Sanity and the Structured Content 2022 conference, go to sanity.io slash ATP.
Marco:
That's once again, sanity.io slash ATP.
Marco:
Thanks to Sanity for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, so we had some interesting feedback with regard to USB-C KVMs.
Casey:
And we were talking about how Intel has like a dev kit that does this sort of thing.
Casey:
And then Victor Leung wrote us to point out that there is the MCCI Model 3141 USB 4 switch.
Casey:
which apparently is a computer-controlled, programmable 2-to-1 switch connecting two USB Type-C receptacles to a single USB Type-C plug.
Casey:
It is compatible with USB 4 hosts and devices, as well as older protocols such as Thunderbolt 3, USB 3.2, 2.0, USB Type-C alternate modes, and of course, power delivery.
Casey:
And this looks like exactly, it looks like basically a packaged version of that Intel dev board, which is really interesting and really exciting and sounds kind of great until I point out that the list price is just shy of $1,000.
Marco:
Yeah, that's quite a switch.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
So from the same anonymous friend of the show that wrote us with regard to the Intel dev kit, this individual wrote, they did a nice job on this, but they just finished reading the docs.
Casey:
It doesn't have quite as much fanciness as the Intel board, but it covers the basics.
Casey:
But oof, the price is almost $1,000.
Casey:
Bananas.
Casey:
There are literally three USB connectors and an MCU and analog MUX and diodes MUX in there.
Casey:
That's like $25 of parts.
Casey:
They must have done this on spec to Microsoft and then realized they could charge Microsoft essentially an arbitrary price for finished units and no one would care.
Casey:
So when you can charge a trillion dollars for something, guess what?
Casey:
You do.
Casey:
Subtitle, the Apple story.
John:
That's more like the government contractor story.
Casey:
They're very true.
Casey:
Very true.
Casey:
Very, very true.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I'm assuming this is John that put this in here.
Casey:
Tell me about this video from my best friend, Linus Tech Tips.
John:
Yeah, Joshua Prisman sent this in apparently in the latest Linus Tech Tip video.
John:
I forget what the actual video is about.
John:
They were taking apart some Mac Studios.
John:
They had enough Mac Studios that they just happened to have, you know, taking them apart.
John:
And they found two of them that are the same model.
John:
It's not like one is the Ultra and one is the Mac.
John:
They were literally the same model, the same SKU that had entirely different power supplies in them.
John:
And you can...
John:
look at the video.
John:
We'll put a timestamp link.
John:
You can see them holding up next year.
John:
They're both, you know, circular.
John:
They're both the same size and shape more or less because they both have to fit in the same case, but they are not like each other at all.
John:
Two different manufacturers.
John:
One is light on and one is Delta.
John:
Um,
John:
There's some speculation that one of the problems people are having with Mac Studios is not actually related to the cooling system, but just related to electrical noise from the power supply.
John:
They didn't say this in the video, and it's too hard to tell with just two of them, but it would be interesting to know the people who are getting electrical buzzing noise, which one of the two possible power supplies do they have.
John:
Maybe there's three possible ones.
John:
They say this in the video.
John:
It's not uncommon for Apple to source parts from multiple manufacturers.
John:
Very often, they have multiple suppliers for
John:
you know, commodity parts like the RAM or, you know, if no one's looking at the individual capacitors saying, wow, my Mac, it's the same as your Mac, but my capacitor is made by this company and your capacitor is made by that company.
John:
In this case, the entire component, the power supply is made by a different company.
John:
They've done that in the past on other Macs as well.
John:
But I, you know, and you'd need quite a sample to be able to nail it down and say, is the electrical noise just manufacturing tolerances and variation across all the manufacturers or is there one manufacturer that's more susceptible to this than the other?
John:
Unfortunately, as far as I know, there's no way to tell which power supply you have without opening the thing up.
John:
And the Mac Studio does not want you to open it up.
John:
And if you did open it up, Apple would probably be able to tell.
John:
So I wouldn't suggest it.
John:
But just FYI, you know, whether this is because of supply chain stuff and they were worried one manufacturer wouldn't be enough to supply them.
John:
So they had to have two of them or they just farmed it out and two manufacturers came back with designs that both qualified according to Apple specs.
John:
Who knows?
John:
But either way, there's some variation going on inside the Mac Studio.
Casey:
So now's the time that, Marco, you and I really have to combine our powers to avoid talking about Elon Musk.
Casey:
Have you looked into any of the newer offerings for electric cars, like the Ioniq 5 or anything like that?
Casey:
Because we're going to do a mid-show neutral, apparently.
Casey:
But there's a lot of new stuff coming out that looks, at a glance, at a glance, looks really, really good.
John:
The Ioniq 5 is not new, and it does not look really good.
John:
I mean, I guess it's a nice car, but it doesn't look good.
Casey:
Well, okay, for the broader definition of look.
John:
I don't find it appealing at all.
John:
The Kia one that's based on the same platform looks a little bit better.
Marco:
I haven't been paying much attention except for what we hear from friends like Alan and Eric over at Fun Fact.
Marco:
I haven't been looking too much just because
Marco:
it's almost like my heart's been broken so many times by promises of cool electric vehicles that then just never come out or that eventually come out and it's nothing like the concept and it sucks and so i when things do come out that's that's good but i don't pay attention to the press anymore in that whole subject area because it is so it's so heartbreaking so often casey was just describing cars that are out have been out for a while there's also the bmw ones that are out although i don't think they're particularly
John:
particularly appealing the lucid air by the way is also out and it is more or less exactly what they said it would be combined with what you would expect which is this is literally the first car from a new manufacturer so it's very much like the first model s but you did have one of the early model s so it's not like you're unfamiliar with that that experience not really not that early i mean it was early enough that there was weird problems right now
John:
not really no i don't really have any weird problems i mean i had like you know i had to like replace the door handles once but like that was yeah that that and the electrical not the electrical the uh the sort of software gremlins in the first versions of that and with it crashing or whatever i didn't really i mean that didn't that wasn't any it wasn't like the drivetrain crashing it was like the screen crashing and that yeah just so the lucid air is like that too the the drivetrain and the car part of itself seems to be fantastic every review is going gaga over it of course it's super expensive as well but it's like amazing amazing range amazing amazing performance uh
John:
you know amazing sort of I don't know what the equivalent is but like miles per watt hour very efficient huge on the inside you know everything's great about it but the software is like it's a little immature maybe a little wonky it's not poorly performing like the Rivian where the Rivian is like oh this feels kind of janky and slow it's fine but it's definitely like oh this is the first car from a manufacturer that hasn't done this before and some of the integrations they promised with third party stuff is not quite up to snuff yet so
John:
But if you're willing to deal with those early adopter stuff, and probably the door handles will break because everyone knows something weird with door handles.
John:
That's just a rite of passage.
John:
That's how we know it's a futuristic car.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
But anyway, the Lucid Air actually did launch and is pretty amazing.
John:
And the tech in it is, from everything I've seen, the tech, the drivetrain tech in Lucid Air is the leader in the entire industry.
John:
Possibly also the battery tech, although I think the jury's still out on that one, but the drivetrain tech is for sure the leader.
John:
It is the smallest, most powerful car.
John:
like the best uh you know in terms of size and weight for what you get out of it it's still slower than the the what do you call it um plaid yeah it's still slower than the plaid because the plaid has three motors this one has two but i think lucid is going to make a three motor one and when they do probably you know the
John:
Well, maybe by then the Tesla Roadster will be out.
John:
But honestly, that whole arms race is not important.
John:
It's like the Lucid Air is 0-60 in 2.5 seconds.
John:
Like, who cares that it's not 2.1?
John:
It's fine.
John:
You'll be fine.
John:
So I would suggest if you ever do look at another car, since you seem to like the Model S type stuff, the Lucid Air is 100% a Model S attempt at a Model S competitor.
Marco:
uh give a peek at it because the reviews have been pretty amazing and it is actually out actual customers have actual cars and that's good but i mean like but right now like i i'm actually so i'm you know i'm not looking for a replay that's why i bought my car out at the end of its lease because i i don't like the new model s's and also don't want anything else that's in the market right now and so i'm hoping to get a lot of years out of it because you know frankly
Marco:
the model you know the first model s i had was i think a 2015 model year my current one's a 2018 model year and even in 2015 i think it was already like three or four like like the car had been out for like three or four years before that so they actually had worked out most of the early problems by the time even my first one came out and my and you know by the time my 2018 model came out like it was it was a pretty mature platform and by the way speaking of that have you have you ever looked at a video that shows you the revisions of the door handle between the first one and the one you have
John:
No.
John:
It's pretty fun engineering, and it mostly makes you think the people who made the first door handle were just, like, someone needed to talk to them.
John:
Because they eventually, like, you look at it, and you're like, there's no way that's going to be reliable.
John:
And guess what?
John:
It wasn't.
John:
And the new one has, like, 1 18th the number of parts, and it's so much more reliable.
John:
It's like, oh, jeez, guys.
Marco:
anyway yeah they figured out eventually yeah and like but the thing is like if i'm going to jump into one of these newer alternatives that's out there first of all i would lose the supercharger network and that's still not a great thing to lose like right now the supercharger network is still very much a competitive advantage and
Marco:
I get that over time, eventually that will become less the case.
Marco:
But right now, it's a huge competitive advantage.
Marco:
And once you're accustomed to it, it's one thing, if you're buying your first electric car, maybe you don't know what you're missing.
Marco:
But if you already had access to the Tesla Supercharger network, to lose that, to buy another electric car that can't use it, you'd feel that hit.
Marco:
You wouldn't enjoy that when you take a long trip.
John:
I think you might be able to make it upstate without going to a charger because the elusive one has 520 miles of range.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Marco:
I can make it upstate just fine if I'm fully charged.
Marco:
But my car right now has been sitting in the beach parking lot for a few weeks.
Marco:
I probably parked it at 75%.
Marco:
It's probably now more like at 65% after, you know, maybe after 10 days or after two weeks, maybe it lost 10%, something like that.
Marco:
Maybe not that much, but it actually loses pretty slowly.
Marco:
But anyway, so I'm going to get in the car tomorrow when I arrive there.
Marco:
And I'm going to want to go directly somewhere far away.
Marco:
And it's really nice when you have excess battery capacity and good range.
Marco:
It's really nice to be able to do that.
Marco:
But it's also really nice if you don't have the range to make at home to be able to stop somewhere because you couldn't plan very well or you couldn't leave on a full charge.
Marco:
Having a big battery and having the supercharger network together add flexibility for you.
John:
yeah but you're but you get about half the range of the air so yes it's good to have the charging network but it's also good to have double the battery capacity fair enough but i mean that's also probably a ridiculous amount of money i i haven't even looked at the pricing but i i'm i'm sure it's absurd it's not that bad i mean they're trying to sell like the fancy one to the early adopters but i think actually the long range one is cheaper than the top of the line because the top of the line trades range for performance which is probably not a choice you would make
Marco:
Well, maybe, but still, yeah, I wouldn't.
Marco:
But still, being in the Tesla ecosystem now, I have the massive supercharger network.
Marco:
I have my problems with their software, for sure.
Marco:
It's still designed by, as far as I can tell, a moron who has never driven a car before.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
added a circular steering wheel back either yeah but like seriously who whoever is designing this should not not only shouldn't be designing car uis shouldn't be allowed to design car uis it's literally less safe than it was before like if there were some kind of licensing professional licensing to design car uis they should have the license revoked like that's how bad it is like anyway
John:
I actually really related to weird bad decisions made in Tesla cars with the yoke steering wheel that we were alluding to before.
John:
I saw my first story about a non Tesla manufacturer offering a yoke style steering wheel as an option of all the things to copy.
John:
Don't at least it's an option.
John:
It was Lexus by which car was Lexus.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
Well, they're not known for their fantastic design either.
Marco:
Well, there's that.
Marco:
Anyway, so, you know, besides my recent software UI issues with Tesla, their platform is mature.
Marco:
It's very reliable.
Marco:
I know that I'm going to go back there tomorrow and it's not going to be dead.
Marco:
And I'll be able to get in the car and drive and drive where I need to go.
Marco:
And I know it'll be fine.
Marco:
I can trust it.
Marco:
It's proven.
Marco:
I know that I can stop at superchargers and they'll all be perfectly fine.
Marco:
They'll all have space for me.
Marco:
They will all have working chargers.
Marco:
The first one I pull up to will almost certainly work.
Marco:
And I can tell from the car before I even get there how many spots are free and everything.
Marco:
And the car can navigate me to get there very easily and tell me when I will need them and when I won't.
Marco:
And I also know that if the car breaks or if I need parts or if I blow a tire again, I know how to get that.
Marco:
Like they have really good service infrastructure in place already.
Marco:
They have dealers.
Marco:
They have service vans that drive around.
Marco:
That's not, you know, when you go, when you have like a brand new brand.
Marco:
You have to give up all that.
John:
And it's it's much more all that all the manufacturers do all the things you said.
John:
It's just a question of whether they have as many charging stations.
John:
They all will tell you how the distance is the nearest charger and how many spots are open if they're part of the network and they'll have a service van come out to your thing.
John:
It's like that's the other thing with Lucid.
John:
They're in the remember the things that Tesla used to offer.
John:
uh like well $7,500 rebate from the government which is the thing that we have if you're a new electric car manufacturer and uh you know unlimited charging at their stations and free like will come to your house and fix stuff or whatever lucid is still kind of in that phase where they can offer all that stuff to the early adopters whereas tesla is in the phase where they're kind of doing belt tightening and you don't get a free supercharger anymore but the service experience is not ideal let's say if they can't get parts or are annoying about it or whatever but yeah
Marco:
Now that I've lived through like Tesla as a younger company with the first Model S that I had, and now that I've had the second one, Tesla as a more mature company that has like, you know, just more mature software, more mature service infrastructure, more, you know, all that stuff.
Marco:
The idea of going backwards to somebody who has less of that stuff figured out and basically being someone's beta tester again for my car, I don't have a high tolerance for that.
Marco:
So I would rather, you know, either, you know, first of all, I'd rather keep this car as long as I can before getting anything new.
Marco:
And then when it comes time that I have to replace this car,
Marco:
I'd rather either stick with Tesla, hopefully they have something I like better by then, or go with a manufacturer that's been around for a while and that happened to have started making electric cars sometime in the intervening time.
Marco:
So I'd be more likely to go to check out the Audi e-tron or something from BMW or something like that, as opposed to one of these brand new companies that's starting from scratch.
John:
you should definitely test drive it though because by then it'll be the same age as your original model s like i've had a few years work out the kinks blah blah fix their door handles do all that stuff um definitely worth uh looking at doing if i all accounts it is you know sort of better built even than the current tesla that's another place where it's not taking other manufacturers as many years as apparently taking tesla to figure out how to build cars like correctly without squeaks and rattles with all the pieces aligned um so we'll see how that goes
John:
So we narrowly avoided talking about... We avoided talking about Elon Musk by talking about Tesla for 15 minutes.
John:
Good job.
Marco:
I do want to say just a quick note of memorial for the author of Barefeet, the website that always had amazing benchmarks of all the Mac Pro configurations and CPU options and GPU options and always did tons of great comparison work, all these wonderful graphs and everything.
Marco:
The guy whose name was Rob Art Morgan or Robert Arthur, but he wrote it as Rob Art Morgan.
Marco:
And he just passed away.
Marco:
And I just learned about that tonight.
Marco:
And that was really sad to hear.
Marco:
I've been following his site barefeets for a long time for years and years and years since long before this show and everything you know basically since I started started paying attention to Mac stuff like forever ago so yeah just a you know quick note of condolences to his family and really I really did enjoy barefeets a lot so I really that's it was really sad to hear
John:
Yeah, I don't know what it says about me or him that I just assumed it was like a bunch of teenagers doing that site because they were always so like enthusiastic about like, let's see how fast this is against that.
John:
And let's try this and let's soup this up and let's overclock that and let's stick this video card into a Mac Pro.
John:
And it just seemed like a bunch of, you know, like really excited, nerdy teenagers just trying to like trying out all sorts of cool tech stuff.
John:
And he passed away at the age of 77.
John:
So he was not a teenager.
John:
I mean, he was just not recently.
John:
At some point, but he was not a teenager when he was sticking cool video cards into Mac Pros.
Marco:
Yeah, I was also surprised that he was that old.
Marco:
But yeah, it was a great site, and I'm going to miss it.
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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Oh.
Casey:
All right, let's talk to Elon Musk.
Marco:
No, no, no, no, let's not.
Marco:
How about Ask ATP?
Marco:
Is it too early?
Marco:
It's too early.
Marco:
Oh, man.
John:
I don't know why you're so against this topic.
Marco:
I have a day watch and a night watch now.
Marco:
Can we talk about that instead?
Marco:
Other than you don't like Elon Musk.
Marco:
No, no, no.
Marco:
So here's the story.
Marco:
So as I was working out, you know, with like... People are going to be mad at you, just FYI.
Marco:
Who cares?
Marco:
They're mad if I talk about it or they're mad if I don't, you know?
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
No, they're more mad if you don't.
Marco:
So, back to Apple Watches because it's anything but him.
John:
And by the way, this will stay in the notes and we'll just get to the next episode.
John:
There's no escape.
Marco:
There's always an escape.
John:
It's like the supercharger network.
John:
It's everywhere.
Marco:
You know how much stuff is buried in our show notes because something comes on top of it and then, you know, eventually it just falls off the bottom.
Marco:
That could happen, but this one will probably stay because this one is growing.
Marco:
So anyway...
Marco:
I realized that, you know, so most people, I don't think most people know this about the Apple Watch, that if you don't like the crown on the right side, you can flip it.
Marco:
You can flip the whole watch physically and then go into settings.
Marco:
And if you go into settings into the general, I think orientation is where it is, you can set which wrist you have the watch on.
Marco:
And you can also change whether the crown is on the right or you flip the watch over and put it on the left.
Marco:
And then the software will then flip the screen as necessary.
Marco:
So I, you know, whenever you're like, you know, doing a workout or something, you do like a push up or you're, you know, or moving your hand in a certain way where like your wrist goes up.
Marco:
It's very easy to accidentally push the Siri crown button and invoke Siri when you don't want to.
Casey:
I have never had that problem.
Casey:
I was doing push-ups a few hours ago, and I've never run into it.
Casey:
I'm not saying your lived experience is wrong.
John:
It depends on the shape of your wrist, maybe, like how low down the watch can slide.
John:
Because if your watch, if you don't have a big bone on your wrist like I do that's stopping the watch from sliding real down close to your wrist, then when you bend your hand like when you're doing a push-up, if your watch can be down that low, the back of your hand would hit the crown.
Marco:
that's true i do have a john syracuse nubbin on my wrist it really helps that does help it also um it it happens more like if i'm wearing gloves like weightlifting gloves like because then the edge of the glove like can push the button pretty easily um so yeah i i decided you know let me try flipping my watch around and wearing it that way for a while it was great during the workout and i hated it at all other times
Casey:
Isn't this the Chalk and Berry approach?
Casey:
Yeah, I think Chalk's been doing it for years.
John:
He's not the only one who does this.
John:
As people are pointing out, the watch asks you during setup which way you want it.
John:
So I bet a lot of people choose to do that.
Marco:
I think it asks you left or right wrist, but does it ask you about orientation, about the crown orientation?
Marco:
Yeah, I think so.
John:
At the very least, it's prominent in the settings on the iPhone app.
Marco:
Anyway, I can strongly recommend if you do any kind of thing where you're wearing weightlifting gloves or other things in your hand that push that button a lot, flip it over.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
However, I hated it during the rest of the day because it turns out I scroll with the crown a lot.
Marco:
And I was just not getting used to it.
Marco:
And also, I don't think it looks right.
Marco:
Because obviously, the watch is designed very clearly to have the crown on the upper right.
Marco:
If they sold one where the crown was on the upper left instead of the lower left,
Marco:
I would probably buy that.
Marco:
There's actually, in the watch world, that's an occasional option that you have.
Marco:
Certain watch models, it's called something like Destro, there's some term for it, but certain watch models will have the crown on the left side instead of the right.
Marco:
I actually have one of those.
Marco:
My crazy oil-filled sin, it's a ridiculous thing.
Marco:
But anyway, I have one of those.
Marco:
It's great because it never gets in your way.
Marco:
But when you do have to like set it, it is if you're wearing on your left hand and your right hand, that is kind of annoying.
Marco:
It's more made for left handed people to wear on their right hand.
Marco:
But anyway, so I would totally buy that if they if they sold the Apple Watch that way, because it is much nicer and I get used to it for scrolling.
Marco:
However, I couldn't I can't get over the look as my permanent solution.
Marco:
So I took out an old Apple Watch from my drawer of old hardware.
Marco:
And I set it up as a second one, and it was totally fine.
Marco:
That's basically the end of this topic.
Marco:
I wish I had more to keep delaying the inevitable, but it was a very easy experience.
Marco:
I did have to kind of reset the watch, install clean, because it was freaking out if I didn't do that.
Marco:
Otherwise, it was a very easy experience.
Marco:
And yeah, that's it.
Marco:
What else can we talk about?
Marco:
Let's start Ask ATP, because we have a lot of it together.
Marco:
We're not starting Ask ATP yet.
Casey:
I abstain.
Casey:
I abstain because there's no winning this fight.
John:
I mean, I think at this point, I think it might actually be more interesting to ask you why you don't want to talk about this than to actually talk about the topic.
John:
Because of all the things for you not to want to, it's not like Casey not wanting to talk about the Mac Pro because he's not into big, powerful tower computers.
John:
Why don't you want to talk about the Elon Musk investing in Twitter thing?
John:
What is it about this topic that is so upsetting?
John:
Because I hate Elon Musk and I hate investment talk and I hate Twitter.
Marco:
Well, I don't think I don't think you hate Twitter and investment talk.
Marco:
What is investment talk?
Marco:
Because I don't care.
Marco:
Like we don't cover Apple's quarterly results like when they when they we never talk about them unless there's something really interesting that comes out, which it usually isn't right.
Marco:
We don't talk about like, hey, you know, you see Facebook's new investment and, you know, Uber like we we don't talk about that kind of stuff because.
Marco:
We're not a financial podcast.
John:
Right, but this is not a financial story.
John:
This is not a finance... I mean, it touches on finance, but it's mostly about Twitter and the power of billionaires and quote-unquote free speech.
John:
And we talk about stuff like that all the time.
John:
We talk about app store rules and the ability for people to get things into stores and how much power big tech companies have.
John:
It's totally in that exact same wheelhouse.
John:
The only difference is it involves Elon Musk now, which, granted, I know you don't like him, but this is an opportunity to, like I said, say mean things about him.
John:
It's not like we're going to...
John:
You know, it's not... I don't know.
John:
I find it fascinating that you are so repelled by a stop.
John:
Are you afraid people are going to yell at you because the Tesla people will come?
John:
You already said all these nice things about Tesla.
John:
So they're going to like you now because they're going to say, yeah, Marco loves Tesla.
John:
Supercharger network forever.
Marco:
They should still fire their software designer.
Marco:
But no, that's... Look, he is a clown.
Marco:
I love the cars that came out of the car company that he made.
Marco:
But he personally is...
Marco:
character that I do not enjoy.
Marco:
And he is very much like some of our more negative political figures over the last couple of years.
Marco:
He thrives on attention and is so often provocative in such a way to get negative attention or to get attention in bad ways.
Marco:
And I just don't want to support that.
Marco:
I don't want to give him the attention that he wants.
Marco:
I don't pay attention to the things he does as much as possible because
Marco:
I don't want to feed the troll.
Marco:
That's what he's doing.
Marco:
He trolls the world, and the last thing you want to do is feed the trolls.
Marco:
I don't want to support that.
Marco:
I don't want to have him dictate what we talk about.
Marco:
I don't want to engage in the public discourse.
Marco:
Oh my god, can you believe the thing he did today?
Marco:
Look at the stupid thing he said.
Marco:
Look at the crazy thing he did.
Marco:
I don't want to feed all that.
Marco:
There is so much more in the world that's better to talk about.
Marco:
I'm drawing a blank right now for more...
Marco:
But I just, I don't want to feed him.
John:
Well, related to that, though, and related to Tesla cars, actually, this is actually, I think that is not really relevant to this topic, but it is relevant to one of the reasons why I soured on Tesla cars and why I, you know, it's not because I don't want to support Tesla
John:
Elon Musk, he doesn't care if I buy a car.
John:
He's fine, right?
John:
That's not what I'm talking about.
John:
Mostly what I'm talking about is that, and this is kind of true of Apple too, when you have a big personality who's very much in control of a company, whether it's Zuckerberg or Jobs or Bill Gates or whatever,
John:
even though the company is made up of tons and tons of people, the founder's personality, the person running the company, their personality can't help but come through to some degree because despite what all the hundreds or thousands of other people in the company think or feel,
John:
especially if the company is tightly controlled by sort of you know a a very uh very hands-on let's say ceo at the top they're the instincts of the employees and the judgment of the employees can be overridden just because you know steve jobs said everything's got to be leather and this version of mac os and no one else likes it and no one else wants it and everyone else thinks it's a bad idea but in the end he's the the buck stops with him and so he just makes it happen and so you're like boy apple has bad taste and it's like is it because apple has
John:
bad taste or is it because one person very high up happened to have taste that disagrees with yours and they have the ability to make it happen across the organization that's a tiny little detail it's not a big deal but in Tesla the thing that really soured me on the company is in fact very well tied to Elon Musk as a person
John:
Because eventually, especially with all the – it's not that the Tesla fans do this or whatever, but the sort of – the general discourse and attitude around Tesla very much reflects Elon Musk's attitude.
John:
And Elon Musk's attitude – and I'm going to compare this to Jobs because he has someone I think was slightly different.
John:
But Elon Musk's attitude towards – about Tesla and the cars is pretty much –
John:
If there's something wrong with a Tesla car, you got one and it has a defect, or you don't like the fact that the defroster isn't up here, whatever your complaint is, legitimate or not, you have some complaint about the car, or your thing came and it has got weird panel gaps, or you've been waiting too long to get your thing, or they changed the price on you when you pre-order, whatever your complaint is about the car.
John:
Elon Musk, specifically the person, not Tesla, the company, but Elon, specifically the person, as evidenced by his own words, which he has plenty of online, mostly on Twitter for you to see.
John:
His attitude is basically like, as soon as you say something bad about Tesla, it's time to discredit you, say you're just trying to short the stock.
John:
You're a hater.
John:
You know, and let me just dig up dirt on your background and dox you and just like all the worst kind of things you can imagine.
John:
It's like the second you are not 100% loyal to Tesla and say anything bad about it, even if it's legitimate, doesn't matter what your complaint is.
John:
Elon Musk wants you to die.
John:
And, you know, obviously not literally, right?
John:
And it's like, so what?
John:
He's a big baby.
John:
Like you said, he's just loud.
John:
He wants attention.
John:
Like, that's just one person.
John:
That's not the company.
John:
The company is filled with really good engineers and employees who want to make the best cars and believe in the mission and are doing real good work.
John:
And, you know, and look at how revolutionary Tesla's been and so on and so forth.
John:
I agree with all that.
John:
But at a certain point, I got the feeling that
John:
You know, like the reaction of the company to any problem anytime they do anything wrong is to discredit the people who are complaining about it and deny that anything is ever wrong.
John:
And I never want to buy something as important as a car from a company.
John:
That I feel that attitude coming from, as opposed to like, you know, a company that's like, if there's ever anything wrong with our car, you know, we're going to swoop down and say, what do we have to do to fix this?
John:
We're going to fix it right away.
John:
And now, you know, you can name a million car companies like, well, they're all like this, like Volkswagen is lying about their emissions things.
John:
they got caught in it and they were forcing their engineers to you know make their things fake fake stuff out on tests to spew chemicals in the air what a terrible company or whatever you're like the unsafe at any speed but i don't remember the company that was was that ford oh no the chevy corvair maybe
Casey:
I know exactly what you're thinking of.
Casey:
I can't remember now.
John:
Car is going to blow up, but we're not going to tell you about it.
John:
Like all car companies are bad or whatever.
John:
I mean, I get where you're coming from that.
John:
But just like my feeling of is that Tesla is a company because of the way Musk runs it is not the type of company that I trust to make a car.
John:
And that's my personal decision.
John:
I don't think that, you know, again, the cars are what they are.
John:
if you like them and the best fit for you want you know by all means go for it but that's what i feel for him and that's why i became disillusioned with tesla that's why i sold my two shares of tesla stock like you know five years ago whatever it was because i'm like no as long as he's running this company it is never going to be run the way i think a car company should i don't agree with any of his opinions or tastes and his entire attitude about about basically everything he does not just tesla but everything he does he acts like
John:
I'm trying to find the correct analogy for it, but I think we've all met people like this.
John:
If you are not 100% for them and are just sort of a sycophant and telling them everything they do is great, as soon as you have one single complaint about anything, it's all at war, you are persona non grata, and you are just a terrible person, and you don't understand, and you deserve...
John:
the full force of a multi-bazillionaire trying to, you know, rain down hell on you from high.
John:
And he's not above doing shady things and telling people in his company to do bad things.
John:
And to the extent that he's able to force them to do so or they're on the same page as him, stuff like that happens.
John:
This is before we get into, like, all the, you know, labor relations stuff and the racist things happening in his factories or whatever.
John:
You can't blame the person on top for every single thing like that.
John:
But when you see his actual attitude and you see those things happen in his company, you're like...
John:
Yeah, that fits.
John:
I can see how he could know about that and not care because it's not, you know, it doesn't concern him and it's not a big deal and too bad for those suckers or whatever.
John:
So anyway, I'm on the same page with you with not liking Elon Musk and so much so that it has turned me off to his entire line of cars and pretty much anything that he does.
John:
I feel like he is
John:
you know ill-equipped do that i mentioned i would bring this back to steve jobs his attitude was kind of similar and like but not quite the same because steve jobs desperately wants everyone to like his products but if you don't like them if you don't like them for a stupid reason he's going to be bad about it but in the end he does want you to like them so he's going to fix the product think about antenna gate he thought there was a stupid controversy but the next iphone had a different antenna
John:
right and you know he was pissy when he said you want a bumper fine here's a stupid bumper case right he thought it was unfair and stupid or whatever but the bottom line is he wanted the iphone to be a better phone so it's not like he said in fact all future iphones are going to have this intended design just to show how terrible you are like sort of the the musk attitude towards the yoke steering wheel you don't like the yoke steering wheel guess what the round one's not even an option i know we you saw pictures of it forget it everyone's getting the yoke right
John:
It's a subtle difference because Jobs was also a jerk, but he was a jerk in a much different way, in a way that I think produced better products and was more aligned with attempting to do right by the customer.
John:
Steve Jobs would berate underlings and yell at employees because they weren't serving the customers well.
John:
If you wrote to Steve Jobs with a sob story, he would forward it to one of his people to say, fix this, right?
John:
And he'd be mean to the people who work for him, which is not great.
John:
But the point is he wanted it fixed for the employee, whereas Musk would say, find this person and get them fired.
John:
I know they don't work for us, but you can probably dig some dirt up on them.
John:
But they're really annoying us, and they're probably just trying to short the stock.
Casey:
For me, I avoid talking about Musk because the contingent of people who treat Tesla as their team—and we're guilty of that, all of us, for various things, arguably the three of us for Apple—but I like to think that we can criticize Apple and find problems with Apple.
Casey:
But as you guys said, especially John, when you criticize Tesla and or criticize Elon—
Casey:
There are people for whom Tesla and Elon are their team and they will do anything, like you said, John, to make it very clear how disappointed in you they are.
Casey:
And that's what bothers me.
John:
But on that point, Casey, though, about the fans.
John:
that happens and that's a thing and it's annoying, but those fans have no control over how Tesla makes cars more or less, right?
John:
Like they're not, you know, and that's why it's so much worse for me that it's the, like, even if there was a rabid fan base like that, like arguably Apple has had, and if you ask some people, it continues to have a rabid fan base like that.
John:
And it's annoying and it sucks and it's, you know, it's not fun to be in the other end of that.
John:
But,
John:
that's sort of a sideshow if the ceo of the company is like that the ceo of the company has an attitude that's as bad as or worse than the best the worst rabid fan type thing that's bad because the ceo is supposed to be trying to like you know make customers happy and make better products not say the second you have any kind of complaint i hate you forever i'm not going to listen to you
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, completely agree.
Casey:
But let's try to soldier through this real quick.
Casey:
So Elon Musk has invested in Twitter, and we're going to go through a quick timeline, which... All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
We're going to go through a quick timeline.
John:
Darren Kilkoff asks... No, we'll get through it.
John:
I can do it fast if you don't want it, Casey, but one of us will do it.
Casey:
All right, so The Verge wrote at some point, I guess like a week ago now, that Elon Musk bought 9.2% of Twitter amid complaints about free speech.
Casey:
So he bought just a little less than 10%.
Casey:
According to the filing, Musk purchased the stake on March 14th.
Casey:
He has long been one of Twitter's highest profile users and recently polled his over 80 million followers about the platform's adherence to free speech.
Casey:
Twitter's share price was up over 25% in the pre-market trading on the news.
Casey:
Musk has been publicly calling into question whether Twitter's approach to free speech via a poll conducted on his Twitter account on March 25th.
Casey:
Like I said, free speech is essential to a functioning democracy.
Casey:
He said, do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?
Casey:
The CEO asked before noting in a follow-up tweet that, quote, the consequences of this poll will be important.
Casey:
So the Washington Post wrote that he delayed filing a form that announced his either intention to or completion of purchasing the
Casey:
stock that he did.
Casey:
And because he delayed that, nobody knew he was going to buy the stock.
Casey:
So then he bought the stock.
Casey:
Then the stock went up 25% or whatever I just said.
Casey:
So he basically made himself $150 million.
Casey:
Must be frigging nice.
Casey:
Elon Musk was 11 days late in publicly declaring that he had amassed a huge stake in Twitter.
Casey:
That omission may have earned him $156 million, according to a half dozen legal and securities experts.
Casey:
That's because of a 50-year-old law that requires that investors notify the Security and Exchange Commission when they surpass a 5% stake in a company.
Casey:
Musk reached that benchmark on March 14th, according to the filings, but he made his public disclosure only like a week or two ago.
Casey:
In between, he continued to buy stock at the price of around $39 a share, bringing total stake to 9.2%.
Casey:
After his disclosure, Twitter share price rose to roughly 30% and is now above $50 a share.
John:
So the idea is that if people knew he was planning on buying this much, the share price would have gone up before he could buy it all.
John:
Because you can't just buy it all at once.
John:
It's just too much stock, right?
John:
So he's buying it slowly over time.
John:
And when you cross the 5% threshold, you have to tell people so that all the other people who have Tesla stock know, oh, Elon Musk is about to buy things.
John:
The stock's probably going to go up.
John:
And that would drive the price up.
John:
But by not telling anybody, he got to keep buying at the low price because nobody knew that he was planning to buy 9.2%.
John:
And when they say he made $156 million, it's because he was able to buy the rest of his shares at the low price that was, quote-unquote, artificially low because he didn't disclose, as the law dictates, that he's supposed to, that he was planning on buying more.
John:
But what the hell does Elon Musk care about laws involving finance?
John:
He breaks them all the time.
John:
In fact, he's forbidden from being on the Tesla board because of past lawbreaking, most of which the SEC didn't punish and just slapped him on the wrist, but eventually he was...
John:
banned from being on the tesla board and got some sort of other wrist slapping fines or whatever but basically he just he breaks the law when he feels like having to do with finance which is one of the things that you can do when you're a billionaire
Casey:
One of the many, many things.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So after that happened, Parag Agrawal, who is the Twitter CEO, wrote on April 5th at about 830 in the morning, I'm excited to share that we're appointing Elon Musk to our board.
Casey:
Through conversations with Elon in recent weeks, it's become clear to us that he would bring great value to our board.
Casey:
And then, just a little while later, Twitter says Elon Musk won't get special treatment from its rules, even as a board member.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Sure.
Casey:
Totally.
Casey:
Nile Patel wrote, Twitter's in a tough place with Elon on the board.
Casey:
He's promising changes, but the company's telling us, and by extension its employees, that Elon is not going to make content policy decisions.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So then five days after the announcement that he's going to be on the board, the Twitter CEO writes, Elon has decided not to join our board.
Casey:
The board and I had many discussions about Elon joining the board and with Elon directly.
Casey:
We were excited to collaborate and clear about the risks.
Casey:
We also believe that having Elon as a fiduciary of the company, where he, like all board members, has to act in the best interests of the company and all our shareholders, was the best path forward.
Casey:
The board offered him a seat.
Casey:
We announced on Tuesday that Elon would be appointed to the board contingent on a background check and formal acceptance.
Casey:
Elon's appointment to the board was to become officially effective on the 9th of April, but Elon shared that same morning that he would no longer be joining the board.
Casey:
I believe this is for the best.
Casey:
We have and will always value input from our shareholders, whether they are on our board or not.
Casey:
Elon is our biggest shareholder and we will remain open to his input.
Casey:
There will be distractions ahead.
Casey:
Tell me about it.
Casey:
But our goals and priorities remain unchanged.
Casey:
The decisions we make and how we execute is in our hands and no one else's.
Casey:
Let's tune out the noise and stay focused on the work and what we're building.
Casey:
Tune out the noise like Elon Musk, you say.
Casey:
Like, cheesy peasy.
Casey:
Do we have any comments on this?
Casey:
You want me to just hold your own?
John:
Get to the final stage so far, and then I'll comment on the whole deal.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So Elon Musk is then sued for delayed disclosure of his Twitter stake.
Casey:
A Twitter Inc.
Casey:
shareholder sued Elon Musk, alleging the billionaire committed securities fraud by delaying his disclosure of his stake in the social media company.
Casey:
In the lawsuit filed in the U.S.
Casey:
District Court for the Southern District of New York on Tuesday, Mark Bain Rosella alleges that Mr. Musk didn't properly disclose his Twitter stake within the required time frame.
Casey:
The suit alleges that the move personally benefited Mr. Musk and could have hurt other shareholders who had sold the stock.
John:
And that's where we are today.
John:
By the time you hear this episode, who knows what else would have happened.
John:
But this is totally in keeping with Marco's description of the typical Elon Musk type of thing.
John:
The first thing you have to understand is the sort of very basic, you know, 12 year old boy misunderstanding of free speech that why aren't I allowed to do whatever I want on Twitter?
John:
That's that's, you know, my First Amendment rights are being infringed or whatever, which is
John:
I would hope that everyone listening to this understands the difference between Twitter deciding what you're allowed to post on Twitter and the U.S.
John:
government putting you in jail for saying something.
John:
Very different things here, but people get it into their head, the idea that...
John:
You know, that I should be able to say whatever I want on Twitter and that if Twitter does anything to impair my personal ability to say what I want to say, that's infringed on my rights and a great injustice as opposed to, you know, what it actually is, which is a private company deciding what you're allowed to do on their platform that you don't even pay to be on.
John:
Um, and even if you did pay to be on it, it wouldn't matter.
John:
It's like, it's, it's a ridiculous nonsensical thing that basically amounts to a temper tantrum.
John:
I mean, Elon Musk has been on Twitter for a long time.
John:
He says all sorts of things.
John:
Mostly he commits securities fraud on Twitter by, uh, pump pumping up stocks.
John:
Uh, and then, you know, or, or, uh,
John:
maybe not securities for us, but he does things like, you know, hyping up Dogecoin.
John:
He's got so many followers.
John:
All he's got to do is say something to hype it up and people get all excited about it.
John:
And so he can drive the price of, you know, cryptocurrencies up and down, depending on what he says.
John:
And he can drive the prices of stock up and down, depending on what he says.
John:
Sometimes it's legal.
John:
Sometimes it's not.
John:
But it is a power that he has as a person with a very big sort of cult following of people who are willing to put their money where his mouth is.
John:
Right.
John:
That's just I mean, there's
John:
there's nothing inherently wrong with having that power, except that what he does with it is jerk people around and enrich himself to no good sort of end that benefits the world or anyone other than him.
John:
For the most part, uh, despite his reputation, it's like, Oh, he's saving the world with electric cars.
John:
Like his at his attitude and ideas about how to quote unquote, save the world are so terrible and so stupid that the good he does is very often eclipsed by the bad.
John:
He is also doing at the same time.
Um,
John:
so that's like why is he doing stuff here and why why does he buy a bunch of stuff well when you're you know argue i don't know if it's the what stats are but someone said he's the richest person in the world or close to the richest person in the world when you're annoyed that twitter uh is not letting you say what you want which by the way i don't know why he's annoyed he's not like he's getting banned from twitter or twitter stopping him from saying stuff but like whatever he's cranky about something maybe he's cranky that people respond to him and say mean things and he's not allowed to like ban them from twitter uh
John:
But what you can do is you can just, you know, become the biggest shareholder in Twitter.
John:
And of course, you can make a bunch of money at the same time if you don't tell people you're buying stock and you just say a bunch of stuff about Twitter.
John:
And then the stock price goes up after you.
John:
Oh, and by the way, I'm a big shareholder now.
John:
So you made me a lot of money.
John:
Whatever.
John:
He's just who cares?
John:
He has so much money.
John:
Doesn't even matter.
John:
He's doing stupid stuff.
John:
Right.
John:
And then him going on the board was so clearly a move by the Twitter CEO to try to put some controls on him, which honestly, it's a pretty optimistic that they're thinking this is going to have any effect because he doesn't care about laws or anything like that.
John:
But if you're on the board of a company, usually there are some rules that, you know, it mentioned in this little thing when he didn't join the board that you that you're you're obliged to act in the best interest of the company.
John:
And Elon Musk would never do that.
John:
Like he doesn't, he would never want to be constrained to act in the best interest of Twitter.
John:
He doesn't give a damn about Twitter.
John:
He gives a damn about himself.
John:
So he would never join the board under the constraint that he has to do what's best for the company.
John:
He wants to do whatever the heck he wants.
John:
So I didn't understand why he was ever going to be on the board.
John:
And now apparently he isn't because either he never had an intention to be on the board or he found out and someone told him, you know, if you're on the board, in theory, you're supposed to do things that are in the best interest of the company.
John:
He's like, oh, well, screw that.
John:
I don't want to do that.
John:
I have complete control of Twitter now anyway, because the stock price went up a bunch when he bought all those shares.
John:
Everybody who's a shareholder and the whole board on Twitter is like, great, we're all richer now.
John:
But all he's got to do is tweet.
John:
Twitter sucks.
John:
Never mind.
John:
I'm out.
John:
And the price will go down.
John:
Right.
John:
And so now everyone is addicted to the price, the artificial price hike that he has gained by just, you know, saying, hey, Twitter is great.
John:
They're sort of beholden to him.
John:
If he gets angry, he just has to tweet something that makes their stock price go down.
John:
And you could say, like, well, they're all millionaires anyway.
John:
Do they really care their stock price goes down?
John:
I feel like there is actually a set of people who are already very, very rich.
John:
But nonetheless, care a lot about whether the stock price of the company that they are in the process of running goes up or down.
John:
And some people that's, you know, kind of part of their job, like as the CEO, you're not going to be the CEO for long if everything you do causes stock price to go down, depending on how the governance structure is set up, because there are a lot of shareholders.
John:
They're going to say, hey, I have a bunch of stock in your company and I'm losing a bunch of money or whatever.
John:
i get it but the the power that he has which is based on nothing more than his i'm gonna say nothing more than his popularity which is you know nothing to sneeze at or whatever he's got that power whether he's on the board or not so he declined to be on the board and now he's being sued and it's like anytime i see something like this happening like i i lose so much faith in the legal system i'm glad that some shareholder presumably some rich shareholder has taken it upon themselves to contribute some of their millions of dollars to to you know track this down but
John:
If you know anything about the United States, it is very rare that a rich person faces consequences for anything, ever, right?
John:
Almost no matter what they do, no matter what crimes they commit, it is so rare to see someone actually face consequences for...
John:
You know, breaking some law having to do with security or finance or, you know, it's just it used to be that at the very least, like the big rich people would designate some smaller rich person as a fall guy.
John:
Right.
John:
Sort of.
John:
I don't want to give spoilers for a TV show that Marco hasn't seen, but sort of like a popular TV show where it's assumed they're going to find someone who's going to take the fall so that the, you know.
John:
More important, quote-unquote, white-collar criminals can get away with it.
John:
But nowadays, it's like, we don't even need to do that.
John:
It'll be fine.
John:
Our banks are too big to fail, and we can pay for the best lawyers, and we'll just wait this out, and eventually some criminal will be president of the United States, and they'll dismiss all charges, and we'll all be fine.
John:
And so I don't have any faith that this lawsuit will go anywhere, and I don't have any faith that anything can constrain what he does, because in the end, he's got a lot of money, and he's got a bad attitude, and he's got bad ideas about everything, and he is just like...
John:
like a I don't know like a like a sort of spiky billiard ball just bouncing around in the United States just destroying everything in his path making a mess generally being a jerk with no rhyme or reason of other than to do things that he thinks are cool make himself more money amass more power and I kind of feel bad for Twitter because they're stuck with this guy who is like taking an interest in them and decided to use their platform and
John:
Now, by merely tweeting and spending a few million billion or whatever it is of his own money, he's the biggest shareholder in the company.
John:
And they're all beholden to him because he made the stock price go up and he can also make it go back down.
John:
And boy, this is just not good for Twitter.
John:
And why do I care about this?
John:
Because I like Twitter.
John:
I use Twitter every day.
John:
I get a lot of value from Twitter.
John:
It's certainly got problems.
John:
But I feel like the changes over the past several years of Twitter have been starting to go in a better direction in terms of content moderation.
John:
They still have a long way to go.
John:
But from what I've heard from everyone on the inside, there are people inside Twitter who want to make things better.
John:
And they have made some moves in that direction.
John:
Elon Musk doesn't care about any of that.
John:
To the extent that he has any influence and control over Twitter, all of his influence is going to be to counteract all the things that I want to happen on Twitter.
John:
And disclosure, I'm not a Twitter shareholder.
John:
I have no stock.
John:
I don't know anybody at Twitter.
John:
This is just me as a user of their product that I enjoy.
John:
I don't want him to be involved in any way.
John:
And related to that, I'll put this link in the show notes to this New Yorker story.
John:
It's called Paul Singer Doomsday Investor.
Casey:
Oh, this is a good one.
John:
I have some personal experience with what they call activist investors.
John:
That's when someone invests a lot of money in your company with the goal of changing what your company is doing.
John:
Basically, the attitude is like, I see your company.
John:
Whoever's running it now is doing a crap job.
John:
I feel like if I could tell everybody what to do, your company would become a lot more valuable.
John:
So I'm going to invest a whole bunch of money.
John:
And so I will own some large percentage of your stock, which will give me some amount of power because once I own a large percentage of your stock, if I suddenly sell it all, your stock price will go down.
John:
And everyone who owns stock is going to lose a lot of money if I do that.
John:
So once I do that, you better start listening to me.
John:
And so I'm an activist investor.
John:
I'm going to come in and I say, look, here's how you can make money.
John:
Those people tend not to have a good reputation.
John:
This particular story is about one guy who's got a really bad reputation, the Paul Singer guy, because he comes into your company and he says, you could be making more money and here's how you do it.
John:
Lay off all these people, cut everything to the bone, remove all R&D, squeeze every Lance Penny out of this thing, stock price goes up, I sell, I get out, and your company is left as a dead husk.
John:
That's a business thing to do.
John:
Private equity, that whole angle is like, you could be making more money if you ran your company with less regard for human life, essentially.
John:
And that's usually true.
John:
You usually can find a way to make profits go up, increase the stock price.
John:
And the people who come in and do that as activist investors, and then they sell all their stuff and they make a big profit.
John:
And then the company's dead after that.
John:
There's so many stories about that.
John:
So many companies that were perfectly fine.
John:
The one that hit me close to home for silly nostalgic reasons is Toys R Us, which is a toy store that I grew up with.
John:
Uh, private equity came into that one and said, you could be making a lot more money, Toys R Us.
John:
And they just wrung every cent out of that company and then left it and then just crumbled to dust after they made their money.
John:
It's, it's not quite the same thing as active investors, a similar type of attitude of like, I've got a lot of money.
John:
That money gives me power.
John:
I can use that power to make even more money from your company, which I don't give a damn about.
John:
And once I have made money, I'm going to leave and I don't care what happens to you.
John:
And so I hope that doesn't happen to Twitter.
John:
But when I see Elon Musk coming in and doing that, I have bad flashbacks to activist investors of the type of like Paul Singer and the Toys R Us folks that just gives me bad vibes.
John:
I hope it never happens to Twitter.
John:
In the end, the best thing that could happen to Twitter is Elon Musk says, Twitter's filled with a bunch of botos.
John:
I'm out.
John:
Sells all his stock.
John:
Twitter stock price goes down.
John:
Everyone is sad.
John:
But then it rebounds in three years and we can just forget about him.
Casey:
What a troll, though.
Casey:
What an absolute troll he is.
Casey:
Let's cheer each other up.
Casey:
Let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
Marco, the M1 was based on the A14 core, both from late 2020.
Casey:
For the past year, it seems like everyone has been assuming the M2 would be based on the A15.
Casey:
Instead, how likely do you think it is that the M2 will come out this fall close to the A16 and be based on its core?
Marco:
I think at this point, that's becoming fairly likely.
Marco:
The only reason that we all thought the M2 would be based on the A15 is that the original M2 rumors were supposed to be for products coming out this spring.
Marco:
Namely, I believe the MacBook Air was supposed to be the first one, according to the rumor mill.
Marco:
And we kind of knew, like, well, it's unlikely the A16 cores would be shipped this spring.
Marco:
They probably are doing them in the fall for the iPhone and then, you know, maybe a little while later for the M2.
Marco:
So I think it's...
Marco:
either option wouldn't surprise me at this point unless we do have to wait until like you know october for the first m2 based product then if it's based on the a15 it will seem old um even though i mean i'm sure you know if you look at like the scale of you know the number of cores that are in the mac chips and you know how they're configured and what kind of io and how they're clocked and everything usually the you know they're they're pretty performant even if it's based on a quote you know old core because
Marco:
um you know look at the m1 max and ultra compared you know now that we have or that are based on a core that came out you know a year and a half ago or whatever so it's probably it'll probably be the a16 if we actually are waiting until fall for um for the first one but you know we still the how the m series chips get updated over time is still a huge unknown
Marco:
And until Apple has a few years of updates out there on the market for us to extrapolate from and make predictions on, it's really hard to really say for sure.
Casey:
Yeah, I think that if I were to wager a guess based mostly on my gut, I think it will be the 15.
Casey:
I don't think it'll be the 16.
Casey:
I think, you know, Apple's still getting their feet under them and learning to, you know, jog and then run.
Casey:
I absolutely think there will come a time that the M whatever is based on the equivalent, also brand new A whatever.
Casey:
But I don't think this year is the year.
Casey:
I think it'll be an A15 this year and probably for the next year or two after.
Casey:
And then...
Casey:
sometime around, what are we on, like the M4 or 5, then I think it will be happening concurrently with the A-series chips.
Casey:
But John, what do you think?
John:
Yeah, like in addition to having no historical precedent for how they're going to do this, the supply chain stuff is absolutely screwing this up.
John:
Like it's already screwing up a lot of the shipping of products that Apple is making because of the COVID related shutdowns of factories in China.
John:
And it is possibly we discussed in the past shows like how the iPhone 14 was going to have still have the A15 and only the 14 Pro would have the A16.
John:
That could also be supply chain related products.
John:
It's hard to tell because supply chain stuff is not always about your most fancy, expensive part.
John:
Sometimes it's just about some little capacitor or resistor or a set of screws or whatever.
John:
It doesn't matter what the part is.
John:
If it's getting in the way of you making completed products, it kind of throws a monkey wrench into the whole works.
John:
I think that is also a factor in what are the next M-chips to be.
John:
The latest rumor is
John:
uh you know one of the latest set of rumors and again these are still kind of far out was that the new macbook air wouldn't even have an m2 on it it would come out either in the fall or even next year and it would come with an m1 and that tells me that whatever the roadmap previously was to try to update the m series chips may be pushed out and
John:
like it's not great when that happens but honestly a redesigned macbook air still with an m1 in it is not a terrible machine because it's not like the macbook air with the current macbook air with the m1 people are saying well by next year that's going to be dog slow no it'll still be great it's fine
John:
And if the redesign gives more benefits like longer battery life because it's not tapered anymore or just a new design and maybe with a different screen, I think it will still be a viable machine.
John:
But clearly, if that happens, whatever their plans were about like revising the Mac line to the next iteration of the M chips.
John:
Like if those M chips are being delayed, that really messes up their plans because that is a kind of an important component.
John:
And how do you even characterize like an upgrade?
John:
Like, oh, we've made all these computers with M1 based chips.
John:
Now we're going to make them with M2 based ones.
John:
But what if the M2 isn't available?
John:
Do you not revise the computers at all?
John:
Or do you like for ones with a form factor revision like the MacBook Air rumored to have to be changed the entire case structure?
John:
do you still launch that but just with the different insides in it or do you just delay it um so like i i think if if things keep getting delayed if like they're delayed into next year it may be time for the to be a16 base but like that's if that wasn't originally their plan which it seems like it probably wasn't it's not like they can turn that around and say oh never mind even though we totally plan to make all these m2 things on basically a15 cores and
John:
It's so late now that the A16 has been out for six months, so we should make them A16-based.
John:
Like, well, you can't do that.
John:
It's a year's lead time you need to make a Mac-based chip with A16-based cores in it.
John:
And that's, you know, that's not how we're doing things.
John:
So it's so hard to predict, but I found...
John:
no matter how late it is, I think it'll still probably be a 15 base unless the plan from day one was for it to be a 16 base.
John:
Like, cause again, we don't know what their plan was.
John:
If the plan was and one's going to be a 14, then we're going to skip the 15 and it's going to be a 16.
John:
That will still be the plan and they'll do that.
John:
But if the plan was for the 15, it's still for the 15.
John:
You can't change that now.
John:
And even if it comes out next year, it's still going to be a 15 based M two.
John:
If that was the plan from the beginning, just because the lead times in these things are so long.
Casey:
Quick aside, you know, I've been hearing about the issues in China with regard to COVID and, you know, factories being shut down and whatnot.
Casey:
If I were to replace my exact setup right now, so I would replace my 14-inch MacBook Pro.
Casey:
I'm looking at my MacBook Pro and my studio display.
Casey:
My MacBook Pro will come in at the local Apple store on Thursday, June 16th.
Casey:
So after – what is that?
Casey:
Like a week and a half after WWDC or a week after WWDC –
John:
and the studio display comes in monday june 27th so by the end of june i can have my setup back if i were to order right now that is not desirable at all yeah a lot of the there's a a bunch of tweets about this about how many different manufacturers apple has making various products and i think what i saw was that the macbook pros are only made by one manufacturer so if they get shut down
John:
like that's it there's you know you have to wait for them to start back up again whereas some other products are made by multiple i think actually alcohol is speaking of uh multiple manufacturers i think they're actually making some of their iphones in india now and if those so if even if the ones in china that are making that get shut down at least you get some supply but yeah the macbook pros i think it's just one manufacturer and if they get stopped uh you just have to wait
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Uncle Apple.
Casey:
Oh, by the way, that was Darren Kelkoff.
Casey:
I don't think I mentioned that.
Casey:
Uncle Apple writes, can Marco describe his setup for streaming for Team Arment?
Casey:
If I remember correctly, you said you each play on gaming laptops and are streaming from an M1 MacBook Pro.
Casey:
How are you getting six video feeds onto one stream?
Casey:
Maybe Elgato capture cards and OBS?
Marco:
So in short, yes, that is exactly what I'm doing.
Marco:
So I think I've, have I talked about it before?
Casey:
I don't remember.
Casey:
Yeah, I think you did very briefly and with a little bit of hand waving going on because we weren't trying to get into the weeds at that point.
Marco:
Yeah, so what I have, so yeah, we have three gaming PCs being captured over HDMI.
Marco:
Each one runs into an Elgato HD60S Plus, which is one of these little, you know, gamer capture devices.
Marco:
And those all output to USB.
Marco:
into a mostly into a cal digit ts3 plus thunderbolt dock because it has a whole bunch of usb ports um some c some a i also each computer because i wanted the output of the computer's webcam um to be included like using the using the built-in one i didn't initially know of a way to do that and so we just got some cheap logitech webcams um i see yeah whatever logitech webcam is like 50 bucks that everyone recommends
Marco:
We've got a few of those, one on top of each computer, and then those are also wired via USB into the TS3+.
Marco:
And all of that then runs over Thunderbolt into the MacBook Pro.
Marco:
And yes, OBS is indeed the software running all of this.
Marco:
That being said, this setup is finicky and unreliable.
Marco:
And I am not super happy with it.
Marco:
And I'm looking to potentially maybe change some things up about it if we're going to do this, if we're going to keep doing this longer.
Marco:
We actually just had a little bit of a family meeting the other night at dinner.
Marco:
We're like, all right, something is flaking out about the capture.
Marco:
One of the Elgados, I believe, is flaking out.
Marco:
And I'm like, all right, do we as a family, are we happy doing the streaming?
Marco:
Are we going to keep doing more of it?
Marco:
um because if we're going to keep doing more of it i might want to get more reliable hardware to capture it but if we're you know if we're kind of petering out and we're almost done with it maybe we'll just you know keep what we have and you know use it till we get bored and move on to something else and the family decided we're gonna keep doing it for a while so i learned in in the intervening times okay so first of all just quick quick aside the parts that are unreliable seem to be those elgato hd60s plus capture dongles and
Marco:
When you have consumer-grade hardware, a lot of times when people look at the cost of pro-AV hardware, which is pro-hardware in general, whatever it is, pro-hardware oftentimes is significantly more expensive than consumer-grade hardware that allegedly does, quote, the same thing.
Marco:
Now in practice, usually it's not the same thing.
Marco:
Usually the pro hardware has additional features or needs that cater more to pros.
Marco:
But a lot of what you pay for with pro hardware is it's just more reliable.
Marco:
Usually again, not always there are exceptions, but usually it is significantly more reliable or it works better in more circumstances.
Marco:
Or it has more tolerances so that things are less likely to break after a year or whatever.
Marco:
And so that's the kind of thing you pay for at pro hardware.
Marco:
And what I'm capturing with here, Elgato is a fine company.
Marco:
The hardware, it works most of the time, but it's really consumer grade.
Marco:
Like most consumer grade hardware, it seems to work just barely.
Marco:
And so like I already had to solve one problem.
Marco:
I wasn't sure if it was a bandwidth issue with the CalDigit TS3 plus hub or what, but I already had like one of them for whatever reason would just never work reliably through the hub.
Marco:
So I had to then use up one of my precious onboard laptop USB-C ports.
Marco:
So that's two ports right there.
Marco:
I also, my third port is taken up by, this is actually kind of a happy story.
Marco:
It turns out if you want a monitor, like a portable monitor in the like 12 to 15 inch range, there's a million of them out there and they're really inexpensive.
Marco:
They're like 200 bucks or less expensive.
Marco:
The way we're kind of set up in like an L shape around this giant kitchen island, I can see the laptop, but Tiff and Adam can't.
Marco:
And so I wanted a monitor that I could just put in front of them so they can see the stream output, because otherwise they can't even see themselves in the webcams.
Marco:
So by them seeing this, they're able to see all three of our screens and themselves in the webcam to keep themselves in frame and stuff like that.
Marco:
So I needed a screen.
Marco:
I first used an iPad for that using, um, whatever the iPad screen mirroring thing is called.
Marco:
And that was both a pain to set up.
Marco:
Cause every time, like literally every single time we were streaming, I had to like go into display settings, click on add, add the display and wait for it to turn on.
Marco:
And that would work about 90% of the time.
Marco:
And that's not good enough.
Marco:
And so eventually I'm like, you know, this is, this is stupid.
Marco:
Um, so I just got this external display, uh,
Marco:
First got one that was some no-name from Amazon, and it was garbage.
Marco:
It kept flickering.
Marco:
Eventually returned that one and got one from Lenovo.
Marco:
It's this wonderful little folding Lenovo.
Marco:
I think it's about 14 inches.
Marco:
And it was, again, like $200.
Marco:
And it's pretty good.
Marco:
None of these are good retina or anything, but for the purpose of an external monitor for showing something to somebody, it's fine.
Marco:
So the Lenovo one's great.
Marco:
So that's, that's our monitor.
Marco:
But anyway, so that's, that's port number three.
Marco:
That's all my ports, right?
Marco:
So I have one going, one, one of my USB-C is going to the Thunderbolt hub with most of the stuff on it.
Marco:
One USB-C going directly to the third Elgato capture thing because it won't work through the hub for who knows why.
Marco:
And then the third USB-C going to this monitor and then that's it.
Marco:
Now I'm full.
Marco:
Now,
Marco:
um this setup i i i am not super happy with as i mentioned because it is still not a hundred percent reliable it works most of the time but it's still not a hundred percent reliable and so i'm looking into alternatives i haven't had time to do many of them yet one thing that i didn't know about when i first set this up but i'm now experimenting with is this protocol called ndi um this is a thing that um it's basically a network-based video transmitting protocol and you can you can
Marco:
Set up NDI on the PCs and on the Mac.
Marco:
This free package called NDI tools that basically allows you to send and receive video between computers on the network.
Marco:
And it can do things like capture the screen as one of the video sources and then send that over the network.
Marco:
It can capture the PC's local webcam.
Marco:
It's built into their screen lids and send that over the network.
Marco:
And so I'm trying to see if I can use NDI to potentially replace some or all of this capture setup.
Marco:
oh the audio is a whole separate thing and that's that's all running into a mix pre with auto mixing and we all have headsets it's a whole thing that's that's that's my thing you know but anyway the video is the real challenging part here so anyway i'm looking into using ndi for some of it i also have considered other options so for instance
Marco:
Uh, right now I'm capturing three HDMI streams, you know, at their right, you know, at whatever it is, you know, 1080p probably.
Marco:
Um, and, and then shrinking those down for display and OBS.
Marco:
Well, you could also, there, there exists these boxes that are basically HDMI multiplexer boxes that, you know, like you, what you do for like a security camera kind of viewer where like, if you want to convert four inputs into a two by two grid on the screen, uh,
Marco:
There's a piece of hardware that will do that for you for like $100.
Marco:
So one thing I could do is put one of those, have all the computers going into that, and then only be capturing from one Elgato capture dongle thing.
Marco:
And that would probably make it more reliable.
Marco:
There's other challenges with those, but they're minor, so I could probably get around that.
Marco:
That's one option.
Marco:
Another option is I could upgrade to better capture gear that is made to capture multiple streams at once.
Marco:
And that is somewhat good.
Marco:
And that would probably involve some kind of PCI express card in a Thunderbolt enclosure.
Marco:
That's its own can of worms that I'd rather not necessarily tackle if I don't need to, but that's an option as well.
Marco:
So these are things I'm looking at.
Marco:
I love the idea of having more pro grade hardware to do this.
Marco:
However,
Marco:
Prograde audio hardware is one thing.
Marco:
Prograde video hardware is a different ballgame.
Marco:
Prograde video hardware is, first of all, thousands of dollars.
Marco:
It's significantly more expensive, and it's usually significantly bigger and possibly requires super weird software.
Marco:
And so that's kind of a whole can of worms I would...
Marco:
hopefully not need to get into but we'll see i mean the other thing i could do is just you know buy like two extra elgato hd capture cards and just when one gets flaky just swap it out but i i would hate that option for like moral reasons i don't like like the idea of buying more of this thing that is flaky is not i mean i guess that's my plan for my home pods but
Marco:
I don't love that solution.
Marco:
So we'll see.
Marco:
I'm hoping maybe I can alleviate enough of the bottlenecks with NDI that maybe I can then simplify things a little bit further.
Marco:
So we'll see.
Marco:
I'll play with it.
John:
surprised on your like because i watch some video game streamers or whatever and i suppose they're not doing three people like you are or whatever but there are people who essentially do this for their living and i can't imagine them dealing with flaky setups you know what i mean like especially you've been doing this for like a decade and as your main career like inevitably those people must eventually find a solution that is actually reliable because like you know they're streaming for eight hours a day
John:
it's just they're not gonna tolerate dealing with that and like it so do all of them have you know uh big tower pcs with internal video capture cards maybe maybe their situation is just so much simpler than yours because you know they're just one person who is capturing and streaming themselves and they're not capturing and streaming three people but they do multi-stream stuff with other people sometimes so i do wonder what the
John:
what the state of the art is there i know elgato is a name i hear come up a lot and maybe does elgato make an internal card maybe that's why i hear it as well like a capture card for pcs i don't know i think i think it's you know i'd be going to like black magic or something like someone like the pro companies like that yeah but i have to think it may be black magic but i have to think though that uh
John:
Despite the existence of extremely wealthy and extremely knowledgeable streamers, there's this sort of whole middle ground of streamers who do not have bazillions of dollars and nevertheless stream hours and hours every single day.
John:
So there must be some kind of consumer-grade solution that is eventually reliable.
John:
So I have some faith that you can in some way solve this without...
John:
moving to quote unquote pro equipment because i just don't think that streamers are doing that most of them are doing that but they just don't have the money to right like you know you don't make that much money on twitch streaming unless you're one of like the big top 100 people yeah i mean i i think though you're right like part of part of it is that most people don't have three people in one room and most people probably are not trying to run it off of a mac
Marco:
you know and yeah that could be part of it when you but honestly though it's fine like the part that runs on the mac seems to be rock solid reliable like you know the obs runs great on the mac it's totally fine that's not something i've heard from people obs runs great on the mac is not a phrase they go
Marco:
up a lot on the internet well it does for me i mean because maybe you know keep in mind like what i'm what i'm giving obs as a task is actually somewhat easy in the sense that it doesn't have to capture anything on the mac like it's not capturing the mac screen it's not like it's it's only taking inputs from usb devices and arranging them into a video signal and transmitting that and so maybe i'm giving it an easy problem but that's been fine i mean but you know the pc streamers i think a lot of them are almost all of them i
John:
probably running the capture on that computer so it's it's a computer capturing its own screen well they're not doing multiple people most of the time but i think most of them do have at minimum two computers and maybe it's basically doing capture on another computer but often it's because they have like a computer for doing like video stuff and then they have their gaming pc and they're not the same machine you know
Marco:
Oh, yeah, maybe.
Marco:
Or they want, you know, they want to be able to see OBS running on its own thing and have independent control.
Marco:
So but yeah, so it's it's simpler than, you know, what I'm doing is hard mode here.
Marco:
And for for a home setup.
Marco:
And also, you know, because this is effectively in our kitchen, I also don't want like a desktop computer to be involved.
Marco:
I don't want a whole bunch of gear if I don't have like less gear here is better.
Marco:
because of the setup like i would love for this to be a little more portable or just take up a little less space and be less complicated have fewer fewer individual parts that can break or flake out but ultimately like this is one of those things where like if you have one legato hd60s put into a computer
Marco:
probably works fine most of the time but once you once you want to have three of them working at the same time oh and then by the way you have to involve a thunderbolt hub because you don't have three usb ports on your computer like there's so many more complexities there and it's one of those things where like these products were clearly designed and tested mostly for single use cases simple use cases and then when someone like me comes in like oh how about i just buy three of them and use them at the same time everyone's like
Marco:
I don't know, maybe we shouldn't officially support that or using... I'm literally filling almost every port on the hub.
Marco:
I think I have one port free.
Marco:
I'm plugged because I have three Elgato capture devices and three webcams and a USB interface for the audio all plugged into one... I guess one is not plugged into it because it's... Anyway...
Marco:
It's a lot going through with these devices.
Marco:
Now, these devices are all, officially, they all support this.
Marco:
You know, on the marketing pages for the CalDigital, you see things like with every port full, you know, they have all these ports.
Marco:
They probably expect you to use them, right?
Marco:
But it's one of these things where if you actually use the full capacity of some of these things, it doesn't always work the way you think.
Marco:
Or it often has some kind of flaw, you know.
Marco:
certain things will be like possible bandwidth limitations like i i found when i was setting this up that where things were plugged in on the cal digit mattered now the cal digit it's actually helpful it tells you it's labeled right on the ports like it'll say like five gigabits and it'll have like a little bracket showing you like all right these two ports share five gigabits of bandwidth right so it's actually good so i've i spread out like the high bandwidth capture cards in
Marco:
kind of like on their own like sections of the hub so they would so they wouldn't all be on the same one to you know try to help that problem but there's still it's still kind of finicky and and that makes me nervous and i hate dealing with it when it breaks and so i should probably switch to something that is a little bit more pro in some area but you know what that means and whether whether i can stomach whatever trade-offs it'll require that's another story
John:
I mean, I think it means you get a tower PC to be your capture device and you buy one of those capture cards that goes in PC and you do everything in Windows.
Marco:
I mean, that could be the answer.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I'd rather that not be the answer, but maybe that is the answer.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
I hope not.
Casey:
Simon Edging writes, considering the probably huge amounts that Apple has invested in mini LED tech, is it really feasible for them to replace it with OLED and laptops and iMacs in the coming years, as rumors seem to suggest?
Casey:
I'm going to leave this to our display expert, Mr. John Syracuse.
John:
I'm not sure how much Apple has invested in MiniLED tech because Apple wasn't at the forefront of that, and it's not like they invented the technology.
John:
Very often Apple will pay for some of the R&D or pay for the factories or pay for the tooling or pay someone to develop a product to their specifications.
John:
They will contribute money towards this for other companies to make tech for them.
John:
But I'm not actually sure how much they did that with MiniLED because they weren't really first to market with that.
John:
But in terms of replacing it with OLEDs,
John:
um the problem that OLED has now is there are no OLEDs that can match the maximum brightness of even the laptop you know the 1600 nits that you get out of the XDR and you get out of the the MacBook Pro screens uh that OLEDs no OLED can reach that even on a 10% window OLEDs can't reach that they just can't get that bright
John:
and that's with like unlimited power plugged into the wall i'm not even sure how it would be for oleds in a laptop type scenario um so right now it's not feasible but in the coming years i mean it's kind of a it's it's a race and and uh screen technologies qd oled um
John:
has the potential to be brighter than the current crop of oleds again i don't know how that well that would work in a laptop but still no existing qd oleds can get up to 1600 nits and it's not like 1600 nits is the limit i think there is more room like some some video sources these days are mastered to 4000 nits there's nothing that you can buy in a consumer level that can display 4000 nits so everything is sort of display mapped down to not display mapped what is it called uh
John:
Uh, something starts with the dynamic tone map.
John:
There we go.
John:
Uh, it's tone map down to, to, to scale down to the right thing or whatever.
John:
But the, you know, the point is 1600 nits isn't the limit.
John:
Uh, so I think there's still some legs in mini led, uh, that OLED may or may not be able to catch up with.
John:
It doesn't mean that OLED is going to be useful stuff because in scenarios where you don't need that kind of brightness, like the Apple Studio display, for instance, only goes to 600 nits.
John:
And even then, only on a small window, if you do a full screen, I forget what the thing is on the Apple Studio display.
John:
I think it's maybe like 100-something nits, 200-something.
John:
OLED can match that right now.
John:
But, of course, it would be more expensive.
Yeah.
John:
i think there is the possibility to go to oled in scenarios where you don't need the super high maximum brightness and then to go beyond that we have to find out which technology eventually reaches and surpasses 600 and it's it's not mini led and by the way the reason you don't want mini led is because of blooming it is regions of backlight that are much bigger than pixels whereas oled lights up individual pixels so you don't have to worry about you know if you have a
John:
a black star field and you have a white pinprick of a star mini led has to light up an entire one like one inch by one inch or one centimeter by one centimeter or whatever square of light behind that pinprick of a star and so the pinprick is really bright but also around the star you get a little bit of bleed through what's supposed to just be black space whereas oh it doesn't have that problem it will literally only turn on the two or three pixels that make up the star
John:
and the other pixels will be off and not producing any light.
John:
So OLED has that ability, so does micro-LED, where every single little pixel is its own tiny little LED.
John:
If that technology eventually becomes feasible in consumer-sized displays and also has high brightness, that is another contender.
John:
But in the next few years, I don't see OLED sweeping across Apple's product line, especially considering how conservative Apple has been on screen technology.
John:
On the Mac, there are no OLED Macs.
John:
And, you know, practically speaking, there are really no extremely popular OLED screens.
John:
The cutie OLED Alienware Dell thing is, like, the first, like, pretty darn good OLED-based display.
John:
Even that, because of the...
John:
whatever it is the the the range of the sub pixels on it is a little weird so you probably wouldn't want to use it as a computer monitor it's good for the gaming monitor if you're just playing a game or whatever but i mean you use it to show text at the very least windows seems to not understand the little it's red green and blue sub pixels are in like a little triangle shape and windows seems to not understand that they're in a triangle shape so it tries to treat them like they're red green and blue in vertical stripes like most computer monitors are and it adds color fringes on everything
John:
uh yeah not a problem for tvs not a problem for playing games but probably not the way you want to read text at least until and unless operating systems can be updated to support it so i think you probably got a five-year wait to see something fully replacing mini led on the screens that have 1600 nits mac brightness or higher
Casey:
Finally, John Jurgatian writes, if the studio display had been released alongside the Pro Display XDR, would John and Marco still have chosen the XDR?
Casey:
This is a great question, which I have a feeling will have a very boring set of answers, but this is a really good one.
Casey:
So let's start with Marco.
Casey:
Would you have bought the Pro Display XDR or would you have just bought one or multiple studio displays?
Marco:
I would have only bought the studio display, and I kind of am happy it ended up the way it did.
Marco:
I am so happy with this massive canvas of screen space that I have with the XDR that even though the price was very hard to swallow, I actually really enjoy it.
Marco:
But no, to answer the question, if the studio display had been available when I wanted to buy a monitor, I would never have bought the XDR.
Marco:
John?
Casey:
John?
John:
Yeah, I would have bought the studio display, no question.
John:
And I'm not as happy as Marco as it turned out the way it did.
John:
But in hindsight, as I said on past shows, I have really come to appreciate HDR when I do photo and video editing, given that so many of my photos come off of iPhones and all of my video comes off of iPhones and they do use HDR and my monitor can display it.
John:
When at the time, if they had come out together, I wouldn't have known that.
John:
I wouldn't have cared about HDR at all.
John:
And I were like, studio display, no question, like not even close.
John:
In hindsight, I still would have made that choice because, come on, this thing is so expensive.
John:
It is not worth the extra size.
John:
And you only get used to the size once you have one.
John:
So if you've never actually had an XDR, you don't have to worry about that.
John:
But in hindsight, I would be disappointed because I would be like, okay, the studio display was the right choice.
John:
It's the thing I should have gotten.
John:
But the two things I would be disappointed about would be, one, it's not any bigger than the 5K iMac, so it doesn't feel like a big upgrade in terms of screen size.
John:
And two, I know that HDR exists.
John:
And then when the MacBook Pros came out and they had HDR, it would make me feel even worse because I'm like, oh, the laptops have it.
John:
The laptops have it, but my quote-unquote big desktop screen doesn't have it.
John:
That would make me disappointed, right?
John:
But the question is, you know, what would you have done if they come out at the same time?
John:
You know, studio display, no question.
John:
I mean, this...
John:
No one should buy the XDR.
John:
It's too much money.
John:
Yeah, it's ridiculous.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Sanity, and Linode.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join ATVs.fm slash join.
Marco:
Don't forget that merch discount.
Marco:
If you join, this is a good time to do it.
Marco:
Thank you, everybody.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arman, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They did it.
Casey:
I talked about my Sonos Roam when I got it, right?
Marco:
Did you?
Marco:
Wait, you have a Sonos Roam?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
You spent $400 on a portable speaker?
Marco:
I did not.
John:
I got a 50% discount, baby.
John:
I spent $200 on a portable speaker that's waterproof and I bring into the shower with me and I like it.
Casey:
You bring it to the shower?
Casey:
Jesus.
John:
I'm literally bringing it.
John:
It's waterproof.
John:
It's huge and heavy.
John:
No, you're not thinking of the right.
John:
Am I thinking of the wrong product?
Marco:
Oh, the Rome.
Marco:
Sorry, I was thinking of the Move.
Marco:
Never mind.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
The Roam is much smaller.
Marco:
The Roam is like a Tolerone bar.
John:
Yeah, the same way you feel about the people who took the defrost button off your Tesla thing, I feel about the people who designed the physical interface to the Sonos Roam.
John:
Like, as a speaker, it does what it's supposed to do.
Casey:
And it sounds really good, doesn't it?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
The software is fine.
Marco:
No, it doesn't.
Casey:
Oh, I feel like I've heard one of these.
Casey:
It's small.
Marco:
The Sonos Roam, if you ever had one of those, like, $50 Bluetooth portables things, it's similar.
Marco:
No, it's better than that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Because I replaced one of those $50 Bluetooth ones with it in their own.
John:
It was way better sound.
John:
I'm just looking at the podcast, so I don't care.
John:
But it's pretty good.
John:
But boy, the physical interface to that thing, I just do not know what people are thinking.
John:
Like, the one that drives me the most crazy is the, I mean, I don't know what you want to call it, but there's a button, a physical button that...
John:
functions somewhat as a power button but as you noted it's shaped like a Toblerone so it's triangular in cross section right and it's a long thin button that is on the ridge of one of the triangular edges so right away it's kind of a pain to press it's actually kind of hard to press because it's skinny and you have to press it directly you know because if you press it on a little bit angle you're going to rotate the little triangle in your thing and why would you care about how hard it is to press because to turn it off you have to hold that button for like 10 seconds you hold it and it makes one tone
John:
then it makes a second tone and then it makes a third tone and i accelerated that to be like 3x even without smart speed i swear it's like five seconds between and if you do not keep holding it between there oh you failed the sequence and then it like starts over and it's surprisingly you have to press it really hard and you it can't wiggle in your hand because if it wiggles a little bit in your hand because it's triangular it's like for god's sake people a power button i was going to say that when you said you had to unplug your your home pod like gee why didn't you just turn the power on and off oh because there's no power
John:
power button just like there's no power button on the apple studio display there's no power button on the five thousand dollar xdr but yeah no the power button is just a crime against humanity and why do i have to turn off why don't i just let it go to sleep because the thing the functionality that's supposed to make it sleep if you don't use it doesn't work very well and very often if you don't actually turn it all the way off when you come back to it the battery will be dead because it didn't go to sleep like like the setting said it was supposed to
John:
and then the buttons on the other end it's like we're gonna have buttons on the end and they're gonna be rubberized because it's waterproof and the buttons are like volume up volume down play pause but instead of having buttons it is a flat piece of rubber with the tiniest little plus and minus sort of bulging ever so slightly like they're so small like the head of a pin and the thickness of the rubber that's poking up is so small like you can't see them and you can kind of try to feel for them but both ends of the thing are rubberized
John:
so angry i just want someone from like fisher price or oxo to say just make buttons a power button and then buttons that you can press that do the things not the world's most subtle little like microscopic nanotexture designs for to indicate where you might have to press hard down into the rubber thing to make it go you know sound up or sound down or play pause
John:
so i don't understand how they fumbled it that badly on this type of product and it's got a usbc thing to charge which is fine although even the usbc one when you put it down to charge it the usbc plug does not come out of the device horizontally it either goes vertically out which looks like the harpoon you know mouse or it comes down in an angle so you better hope your connector is not too long otherwise the thing's going to be resting on the wire like your kids are using it or something
John:
I just, I just, with the power button, every time I'm sitting there holding that power button, I feel like I'm using one of those like 80s things for like grip strength.
John:
You're increasing your grip strength as I wait and listen.
John:
And by the way, sometimes it gets angry because it's doing something else and it doesn't play the right tones and you have to start over again because you lost the power off game.
John:
And I just, every time I do that, I just think about it like computers when they used to have a button that you would flip and it would turn the power off and how great that was.