Monks at Drafting Tables
John:
we were all over the place yeah even for us we were all over the place covering a lot of important ground involving dogs and leather and televisions i don't know
Casey:
All right, let's start with some follow-up.
Casey:
Stuart Hay had a lot of information on chroma subsampling, and I can try to make my way through this, John, but I have a feeling you're better suited for this one.
John:
No, you got to do it.
John:
You can do it.
John:
This was about the naming.
John:
We were saying, why is it called 422444?
John:
The explanation in the artings thing didn't make any sense, so Stuart Hay explained it, but you can read through it.
Casey:
Oh, it's just super.
Casey:
Okay, well, here we go.
Casey:
I believe in you.
Casey:
Thanks.
John:
I cut it down to what I think are the essentials.
John:
I have my doubts.
Casey:
Yeah, seriously.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, anyway, here we go.
Casey:
So, and by the way, all the snark has nothing to do with you, Stuart.
Casey:
Your feedback was excellent.
Casey:
It's all with me dreading having to make my way through all of this terminology.
Casey:
So here we go.
Casey:
Buckle up.
Casey:
I'm going to say you just say 444 for that one.
Casey:
I'm just trying to establish.
Casey:
Play in the space, people.
Casey:
Play in the space.
John:
Well, we did like YCBCR last time, right?
John:
I think it's like 444, 422, 411.
John:
I think it's the nomenclature.
John:
Do you want to do this?
John:
And I think like for the other ones, you can just do Y and CB and CR.
John:
Don't worry about the primes.
Casey:
I feel like a married couple.
Casey:
Is this my story or yours, John?
Casey:
Keep going.
John:
Did you watch Encanto as well?
John:
I feel like they shouldn't have used that joke twice in the song.
John:
Yes, I understand the end of the song.
John:
They're just resummarizing all the things they said earlier, but I still feel like it would have been stronger to just use it once.
John:
Anyway, go on.
Casey:
It was very good, by the way.
Casey:
I extracted the below from the Tektronix glossary, which I found useful throughout my career.
Casey:
422, the numbers 422 denote the ratio of sampling frequencies of the single luminance channel to the two color difference channels.
Casey:
For every four luminance samples, there are two samples of each color difference channel, hence 422.
John:
All right.
John:
So before you go on, like this is a piece of historic information that I think we were missing that this nomenclature comes from the pre digital days and that based on the sentence here, the way they did things in the analog world was to have a luminance channel and then two color difference channels.
John:
I'm assuming that they split up the color signal and made two things that when you combine them, you get the color back.
John:
I don't know the exact details, but the point is that there was
John:
two color difference channels and one luminance channel that's why you end up with the three numbers despite what we're talking about is luminance and chroma which is just two things so that was enlightening for me and that starts to make a lot more sense how that really it's digital is a little bit weird but it's you know for broadcast stuff i can imagine it's like for historical reasons back in the day we we transmitted the information over analog wires in this way and that's why it's three numbers
Casey:
411.
Casey:
411 indicates that Y has been sampled at 13.5 MHz, while CB and CR were each sampled at 3.375 MHz.
Casey:
Thus, for every four samples of Y, there is one sample each of CB and CR.
Casey:
420.
Casey:
A sampling system used to digitize the luminance and color difference components Y, RY, and BY of a video signal.
Casey:
The four represents the 13.5 MHz sampling frequency of Y, while the RY and BY are sampled at 6.75 MHz.
Casey:
effectively between every other line only.
John:
So what we learned is that analog ruins everything by making it weird and complicated.
John:
And when we went to digital, we got saddled with a lot of the same terminology.
Casey:
That's a fair, pretty fair summary.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Moving right along.
Casey:
But thank you, by the way, to Stuart Hay for that feedback.
Casey:
Moving right along.
Casey:
Hyper has released a new Thunderbolt 4 hub.
Casey:
Additionally, a turntable dock, which I thought was quite funny, but that's actually not what we're trying to talk about.
Casey:
The turntable dock is designed so you can put a new iMac on it and you can then spin the iMac left and right in order to show like a coworker or what have you.
Casey:
But anyway, but what we're interested in is their Thunderbolt dock and reading from Mac rumors at CES hyper announced what it claims is the first Thunderbolt 4 hub with an integrated 100 watt.
Casey:
How do you pronounce this?
Casey:
Is it GAN?
Casey:
What is it?
Marco:
I go with GAN.
Marco:
That's how I read it in my head.
Marco:
That's how the anchor CEO pronounced it on a podcast interview.
Casey:
What is it, like gallium?
Marco:
Gallium nitride or something like that.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Power supply.
Casey:
The hub features one Thunderbolt 4 upstream port and three Thunderbolt 4 downstream ports.
Casey:
So this is very similar to the dock that I have that I'm using that I've already forgotten the name of, which I like.
Casey:
However, I am really into, no sarcasm, the 100-watt power supply thing.
Casey:
Because what is the 14-inch take?
Casey:
It takes like 60, 70 watts, something like that.
Marco:
65, something like that.
Marco:
And then, yeah, then the 16 takes, I think, 95 or 100.
Casey:
I think that's right.
Casey:
Somewhere in that neck of the woods.
Casey:
So this would be able to power, you know, one of these new MacBook Pros much more effectively, which is super neat.
John:
That's not the big selling point.
John:
The big selling point is no giant power brick.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
That's why it's a giant dock.
Yeah.
Marco:
But yeah, this is – so yeah, because as far as I can tell, this is basically the same guts, like the same functionality, the same ports and how they are split up as many of these other docks that we've mentioned recently that many companies are making for around the same price point.
Marco:
But this is nice because it is, first of all, providing 100 watts of power, which many of them don't.
Marco:
I believe the CalDigit one I think is 60 watts.
Marco:
um the owc one i think is 85 or 90 something like that um so you know this might this might be the highest power uh that's being provided by this whole category of products um so if you happen to be plugging in like a you know a 16 inch macbook pro and you actually run it hard enough to need that kind of power all the time um which i actually like i run mine with the xdr's power and i believe the xdr only powers up to something like 85 watts um and i've never it's never been an issue because i don't i'm not like encoding video 24 7 but um
Marco:
if you need that or if you prefer the internal power supply and not having some giant power brick like i did like i like i would definitely prefer um this looks pretty good so good for them i'm glad that somebody got the memo that you know hey not everything has to be a tiny little box for product marketing shots and this giant black power brick somewhere on the cable you know to to outsource the problem so that they don't show up in your marketing shots
John:
Look at this thing I just put in the chat.
John:
I was at Hyper's website and they have this other product, which it looks a lot like the kind of like the things we got for laptops at work.
John:
It's got an HDMI on the side of it and then, you know, USB stuff or whatever.
John:
But look what it's got on top.
Casey:
Whoa.
Casey:
Play, pause.
Marco:
It's media keys.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Play, seek back and seek forward.
Marco:
That's and this is only for iPads.
John:
No, this is like for, well, yeah, I guess it's for iPad.
John:
Does it not work on laptops?
John:
I mean, obviously on laptops, you have these keys on your keyboard.
John:
Now they're actual real physical keys too, right?
Casey:
The side of it that the USB-C connector is on is molded to fit a modern iPad.
Casey:
But if you look at the one, two, three, fourth image down, it says extension cable for universal compatibility.
Casey:
So in case you don't want to plug it in directly to an iPad, then you can use this little like two or three inch little jumper cable, if you will, in order to plug it into a regular computer.
Marco:
so i guess it probably just like simulates keyboard commands for the for the media controls i guess yeah i imagine but like when you have it on the side of an ipad the play button points upwards and then the left the back and previous are up and down i mean in all fairness almost any ipad accessory makes it or itself look sideways at some point like it's that there's just no getting around that yeah yeah anyway i thought it was interesting that is neat
Marco:
I will say it is quite an ugly setup.
Marco:
When you scroll down and you see the one where the iPad has the cable sticking out, what is now the top port on this thing, it says, get phenomenal, 4K video.
Marco:
Yeah, that is weird.
Marco:
Oh, man.
Marco:
Part of the problem with...
Marco:
with any kind of like you know bolt-on accessory or dongle kind of thing for any you know you get you get these great computing devices like an ipad or an iphone and okay well now i want to add this functionality to it and then you have to have this giant like clunky things and there's wires everywhere all of a sudden and yeah you start to again it's just like the power supply thing you start to lose the appeal of the
John:
and spoilers for uh for a six colors like apple yearly report thing that i just filled out and sent to jason today but one of my comments about the ipad was like basically now the macbook pros uh got their ports back maybe it's time to reconsider whether the ipad pro uh should have more than one port on it uh because hey it is pro and they're pretty big and the one port they have is like a thunderbolty usbc type thing but really just one on the pro product there's room for more and that could save you from at least some of this mess
Marco:
Yeah, although, I mean, honestly, like, having Thunderbolt on there on the most recent ones is great because then you can just use one of these hubs if you need to.
Marco:
But, yeah, definitely, obviously, you know, it's much better to have, you know, built-in ports, as I've always argued, because, first of all, they're free, you know.
Marco:
it's you know a lot of people will excuse the lack of some kind of port by saying oh it's fine just buy a dongle but like you don't consider like the cost of dongles like these these thunderbolt expansion dongles are two hundred dollars and for a lot of people that's a significant investment for something that you know like they think should probably be built in to the product um but then you also have to carry it you gotta plug it in somehow like you know you gotta power them it's it's it's a big thing to have them built in so
John:
obviously they're not free free when they're on the ipad and then it costs more to manufacture them so on and so forth but we're not saying like hey you should have hdmi and sd card slot and five usba or whatever we're just saying maybe how about how about two thunderbolt ports one and maybe three you know on all three sides like just it's just rethinking whether one is the right number for especially for the really gigantic you know uh 13 inch or whatever it is ipad pro
John:
maybe one or two all you know one or two also very small thunderbolt ports would be appropriate for a device at that price and capability do you think though i mean i don't i don't want to start a thing with the ipad people but like do you think anybody's using the port for more well that gets into your story from the previous week about like uh how terrible ipad os is at taking advantage of the stuff that's in there so like it's got the same m1 chip as the max right
John:
But the Macs are just so much more capable and it's not because the hardware is less capable.
John:
The hardware on the iPad is great.
John:
It's because the OS is cranky about just doing what you would expect a computer to do when you plug in a storage peripheral.
John:
And again, it's not like Apple doesn't have an OS that understands how to deal with external storage.
John:
Like it's the hardware is limiting it a little bit and then you only got the one port acting like it's an iPad from, you know.
John:
What year did the iPad come out?
John:
2010?
John:
It's not 2010 anymore.
John:
The iPad is so much more powerful and capable.
John:
It's an amazing machine.
John:
Still just got the one little thingy little port on it.
John:
And then on top of that, the OS, even though it's making moves in the right direction, is so slow to just sort of let us do what we know the hardware can do.
Marco:
yeah i don't know i i i still i mean again i don't want to get into a thing but i think apple really still hasn't found like where the ipad pro is supposed to be what it's supposed to really be able to do software wise hardware wise it's it's very capable and and this we've been saying this for years everyone's saying this for years like
Marco:
the iPad hardware seems to be way over-provisioned for the software's actual needs and actual usage and limitations.
Marco:
And that iPad power users for years have said, hey, this hardware is great.
Marco:
Please make the software allow us to do more things or make it more pro-friendly in some way.
Marco:
And it just seems like that whole dream...
Marco:
really kind of fizzled out a lot over the last couple years with the massive improvement happening in the macbook line with the switch to the m1 and i i know a lot of ipad people have recently switched back you know to to macbook airs or something and and are are very happy there and i wonder like if that if the whole ipad pro um project maybe or initiative maybe is not panning out
John:
I mean, I think it's working fine.
John:
They're just going slowly.
John:
But I think the match in hardware, now that it's M1, just like the Macs, just really highlights, like, we don't, like, iPadOS doesn't need all that baggage it used to have, that it used to have because iPads were obviously less than Macs.
John:
Like, all the stuff about, like, oh, we can't have too many background processes and we're going to kill your thing as soon as you add a memory and don't use too much CPU and don't do, it's like,
John:
you could i know they're not exact matches now but you could introduce an ipad pro that has the same amount of ram and the same system on a chip as a macbook air or even a low-end macbook pro in the case of the big thing right um
John:
And then what's your excuse?
John:
Why are all those limitations there in iOS?
John:
And some of the limitations are there for safety, sandboxing and having APIs that can't do weird things and security.
John:
Like, I understand all that.
John:
Keep all the good stuff.
John:
But all the rest of the things about we don't want you to see too many apps on the screen at once because it could be too confusing and, you know, that we have really limited multitasking and we don't want you to be able to arbitrarily place things and don't have too many floating things and don't have many programs once and only give yourself limited time in the background and the OS will kill you.
John:
Your app, like...
John:
Those type of limitations make less and less sense when you have when you could have essentially identical hardware in a low end to mid range Mac and the high end iPad.
John:
And that's before we get to the stuff of like, why is the files app so cranky, right?
John:
Like why did it not read Marco's card, but the Mac did?
John:
There's nothing about that, that, you know, reading external storage in a sane way.
John:
no no feature that we like about the ipad the simplicity the security the sandboxing or whatever none of that precludes doing a better job at what marco was trying to do with external storage on these pro products and none of it precludes having one or two more ports either like you can do all of that it's just the os has not doesn't seem like it's caught up it's like when you're like when a teenager grows real fast and their sort of brain doesn't uh keep up with the new size of their body and they become awkward and bump into things that's like what the ipad pro is
Marco:
And it's wonderfully capable.
Marco:
The hardware is amazing.
Marco:
And the software can be amazing for certain use profiles.
Marco:
But it just seems like they have had a lot of trouble expanding what those use profiles are.
Marco:
Expanding the number of people who can and are willing to easily get their work done on iPads.
Marco:
If you're one of the people who fits into it, it's great.
Marco:
But that number of people seems to have a lot of trouble expanding.
John:
Think about the use case that we always hear about because we're podcasters and we know a bunch of podcasters.
John:
Doing podcast recording on an iPad, you can do it, but it's way more difficult than it should be.
John:
And there's nothing about...
John:
podcast recording that is should be a challenge to ipad pro hardware in the slightest it is all software limitations apple could address that use case that should be one of their their test cases can you do audio production both the editing of it which is getting much better with the new apps that are out now but also the recording of it
John:
The limitations of the iPad are it doesn't have great ports for that.
John:
There's no way at the OS level to have the kind of control over streams of audio from different apps that the Mac has.
John:
And there's no way for third parties to introduce that.
John:
So basically, people are stuck.
John:
It's like, why do you have to use a Mac to record your podcast?
John:
Because it's just so much more of a pain on the iPad.
John:
It's so much more limiting on the iPad.
John:
And it doesn't have to be.
John:
But so far, Apple has not addressed that use case at the OS level or the hardware level.
John:
And it's a shame because the hardware, you know, in terms of how strenuous would it be to
John:
stream something over zoom at the same time as you're recording it into two different files and formats that you care about at the same time as you have a soundboard hooked in or whatever the ipad hardware can do that no problem it's like it's going to choke on the audio streams it would barely break a sweat but the software support just isn't there
Casey:
I think your analogy of a teenager growing too quickly is really apt because I feel like – and all of us have said this many times, so I'm trying not to repeat myself too much here.
Casey:
But I feel like the foundations of iPadOS – well, not bad by any stretch of the imagination.
Casey:
I think they're getting a little – the foundations are getting a little creaky because so many things have been bolted onto the side of it.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I cannot tell you the amount of times that I'm browsing in Safari and I go to do a right-to-left swipe.
Casey:
What is that, going forward again?
Casey:
Yeah, going forward on Safari.
Casey:
And next thing I know, I have a slide-over app coming in from the right-hand side of the screen, which is...
Casey:
arguably the gesture that the iPad thinks I want, but it is certainly not the gesture I actually want.
Casey:
And because there's no real equivalent for a mouse, again, the trackpad on the Magic Keyboard notwithstanding, you can't assume that there's always a mouse connected.
Casey:
And so all these things have to be done with gestures, but there's only so many ways to gesture on a single rectangular screen.
Casey:
And I just feel like...
Casey:
I hear what you're saying, and I agree with you about doing audio production on an iPad, but thinking about how to manage, I don't know, microphones and connectivity and the thought of doing something with loopback, which presumably wouldn't be possible, where you're creating virtual microphones and things like that.
Casey:
The thought of managing all that in iPadOS makes me want to cry, whereas managing that in macOS is mostly okay.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
And it makes me want to cry both as a user and a developer, like thinking, putting, putting myself in Apple shoes, like, how do you manage that?
Casey:
Like, what is a not crummy user interface for that?
Casey:
Especially since an iPad is supposed to go from a completely casual user to a complete, like from my grandmother to Federico Vatici, you know, like it's supposed to span that whole range and,
Casey:
And it's actually in some ways the same problem that Swift is running into.
Casey:
And that Swift fancies itself being able to be a learning language and being able to be like a firmware, low-level language.
Casey:
But that is such a wide swath of problems to solve.
Casey:
And there's so many trade-offs involved that someone's getting screwed no matter how you slice it.
Casey:
There's a really good tweet that you retweeted from not underscore David Smith, the Apple employee David Smith that talks about this.
Casey:
If I can find it, I'll put it in the show notes.
Casey:
But anyway, it's just so much to ask the iPad to do.
Casey:
And I agree, like, hardware-wise, it's not a problem.
Casey:
But software-wise, it is so much that I don't – I just – I can't fathom – and this is why I don't work at Apple – I can't fathom how to make that livable.
Marco:
Well, and I think it covers, like, the simpler end of the spectrum of needs.
Marco:
Like, you know, like our – the old example of, like, oh, I have this non-technical friend or relative, and they have an iPad, and –
Marco:
They love it, and it's their only computer, and it's freeing them to do whatever.
Marco:
That's real, and that's big.
Marco:
And I would say that's probably the majority of the iPad users that I see in the, quote, real world.
Marco:
Anecdotally, when I see who's using iPads around me or out there, outside of my immediate tech bubble, and
Marco:
It's not nerds.
Marco:
It's usually people for whom that is their primary computing device, maybe secondary to their phone.
Marco:
But it's people who don't use a laptop or desktop computer routinely.
Marco:
That is their laptop or desktop computer.
Marco:
And for that role, it does very, very well, and it has for a decade.
Marco:
That's great.
Marco:
It's how you get the higher end of usage.
Marco:
Most iPad Pros that I see...
Marco:
were bought because at the time they were sold they were the biggest ipad or and they still are but you know so it was bought more like for size or for one of their hardware capabilities like the pencil support or something like that rather than i need this to be really fast and to have a thunderbolt port and plug in you know my mixer or whatever like that i see that way less and maybe that's just the people i'm hanging out with uh or the people that i hear from or whatever but
Marco:
It seems like – I mean the iPad even from its entire existence, the iPad has always covered the simpler end of needs very, very well in many ways better than desktop and laptop computers do.
Marco:
But –
Marco:
But it's like, how do you broaden that to cover more productivity needs, high-end needs?
Marco:
And they've tried a bunch of different things, I think, with mixed success.
Marco:
Some of the areas that they have gone in the pro direction, they've done very well in, but...
Marco:
It almost – it seems like there's – if I can characterize it, it always kind of feels like in my mind kind of like a city of very tall skyscrapers.
Marco:
And it's like you have all these – a skyscraper is basically like a very tall walled garden.
Marco:
If you're in one of these use cases, you can go – the sky's the limit.
Marco:
You can go great.
Marco:
But as soon as you try to step out of it a little bit or if your needs are not quite –
Marco:
in you know in the square peg hole or whatever like i know i'm missing a lot of metaphors here forgive me i'm tired but if you it's if you like if your needs fall a little bit out of the norm or out of what apple considered or or designed for you hit a wall you just can't like you just can't do that on the ipad or jumping over that wall is a ridiculous amount of effort that
Marco:
It really would take a Federico or somebody on that level to actually overcome.
Marco:
And it's that characteristic of the kinds of barriers you run into on iPadOS and how hard you hit them and how few options you often have to go around them.
Marco:
That, I think, is where people run into so much trouble and frustration trying to get it to do slightly out-of-bounds things.
John:
I think Apple's close, though.
John:
Like, they're creeping up on it.
John:
They haven't found it yet, mostly because they're resisting the urge to just put Windows on it, not, like, Microsoft Windows, but, like, the actual interface element of Windows.
John:
But just to give people an example of, like, what we're all doing on our Macs as we speak here now, like, whenever we record a podcast...
John:
uh we've got our show notes open it's a google doc so it's in a web browser it's in a tab uh we've got something recording our audio for me it's audio hijack which is recording my audio and sometimes into multiple files depending on how we care it lets you either record a single file or multiple files with different tracks or all sorts of stuff like that of course we're running zoom it's what we're using for the live not live stream but like that that's what goes on to the live stream is our zoom conversation because it has a higher quality
John:
than Skype.
John:
We're also in the chat room that we refer to.
John:
It's an IRC channel and we have an IRC client that we're running on our screens.
John:
And then if we ever go to a link or something, we say, hey, check out this link and we'll open another browser tab or another browser window to look at the link we're discussing.
John:
um or if i say i put something in the slack then we hop over to slack and see that but in general on the screen at the same time we're able to see our audio recording our show notes maybe a web page and irc already we've pushed past the limits of what you can reasonably do on even the biggest ipad not because of the hardware limitations it's a 13 inch screen the power of the system on a chip is entirely there all those capabilities are there but just because the ipad is like no you can't i'm sorry you can't do that many things at once and honestly it's not that many things right it's it's a
John:
It's a web page, a tiny window with an IRC channel, and I can look at our levels in the little recorder.
John:
I don't even really need to look at the Zoom window, although I do like to have it there because I can hit the little mute button that's on the Zoom thing when I cough or whatever, right?
John:
This is not like, oh, I need system hacks and extensions and loopback is not involved.
John:
Now, granted, Audio Hijack that we're using to record does have a system extension thing that lets it do that, but this is why Apple should build this into the US.
John:
What does Apple need to do this on the iPad?
John:
They need a system-level service where it says, hey, do you want raw access to the audio streams flying through iOS?
John:
Here is a public API for you to use.
John:
You know, maybe Rogamiba wouldn't jump on it because they really hate Apple's usual limitations.
John:
But if they just made a thing for that, third parties will fill that gap.
John:
We have a choice of IRC client.
John:
We have a choice of what we want to use for our communication.
John:
We use Skype.
John:
Now we're using Zoom.
John:
Choice of web browser, Google Docs, other type of document.
John:
Those choices exist on iPadOS and on iOS.
John:
The only thing that doesn't exist is, hey, hardware that's totally capable of doing this, can I sort of do all those things at once?
John:
It's like, yeah, I hope you like swiping.
Right?
John:
it's not it it's it's so they're so close right and again we're not asking for i need command line access and no sandboxing and total free for all no you didn't like to do what we're doing now the ipad is very close to allowing that but it's far enough away that it's really annoying to do that so much so that when any of our podcaster friends need to record a podcast they usually turn to a mac to do it
Marco:
I'm not sure we're as close as you think we are.
Marco:
Because, you know, on the Mac, you just mentioned, many of us use Audio Hijack.
Marco:
Audio Hijack relies on a system extension, as you said.
Marco:
And you just can't do that on iOS.
Marco:
There's lots of, you know, security and policy, app store policy reasons why you just can't do anything like that on iOS.
Marco:
And that's the kind of thing, like, I can't see Apple ever adding that on iOS.
Marco:
Because if you think about...
Marco:
Not only would you need some kind of, again, Apple-approved method of controlling and intercepting the audio of other apps, which I know they have audio bus.
Marco:
That's a very different thing.
Marco:
This is like apps that have not opted into this system can have their audio captured or rerouted by this program.
John:
I don't know that they would never do it because I feel like if it's a sort of opt-in dual handshake, you know, the two applications have to mutually agree that they allow it to happen.
John:
The only way you can do this right is at the OS level, because you're never going to allow it a system extension like they do on the Mac.
John:
So Apple has to do it, and Apple can do it in a way that's secure.
Marco:
Oh, they could, yeah.
Marco:
I mean, it could be very similar to the Mac permission dialogues that say, do you want to allow this app to control your screen?
John:
Oh.
John:
Please make it better than that.
John:
That's true.
John:
You can do so much better.
John:
But I'm saying like make it have dual handshake.
John:
Not only does one have to request it, but then the other have to receive it.
John:
Just make a better UI to that.
John:
Like by all means, it can be as sort of it can be technically it can be as cumbersome as you want.
John:
I'm just arguing for less cumbersome, but the number of steps required can be the same.
John:
you know, two-way handshake, double confirmation, explicit connection between two apps.
John:
Because for our situation, it's not like we need arbitrary apps every week.
John:
We know the apps that are going to be involved.
John:
And if we change our mind and use a different thing, we'll just re-handshake those.
John:
Like, this is all possible.
John:
And the main thing I was trying to get at is...
John:
It's nice to be able to see all these things at once.
John:
And even on a 13-inch screen, even if you have to make the windows small, just talking to Jason in Slack because he's listening to this thing live, my IRC window for looking at the chat room is tiny.
John:
Even on my XDR, I could make it a lot bigger, but I don't.
John:
Like, I don't need to see thousands of lines of everything.
John:
Same thing with the show notes.
John:
I don't need to see the entire document.
John:
It's way too long for that.
John:
I just need to see a little bit.
John:
And for the audio hijack, I make the window as small as I can.
John:
I wish I could make it smaller.
John:
I think I complained to Paul about that one, but I wish I could make my audio hijack window smaller because I just want to see the levels meter and see that it's recording and maybe see the timer, right?
John:
This fits on a 13-inch screen.
John:
provided you can use the amazing technology that we call lowercase w windows ipad os isn't there yet i'm not saying it necessarily needs to go there but the current system of slidey things plus maybe a floater here and there is not not adequate for being able to do this and then like i said and then there's a thing of like oh i want to look at a web page now do i lose everything how do i get back to it
John:
i don't know how close we are because like casey said you know what is the solution it's not super obvious i'm like you should do exactly this thing you'll make everybody happy that's not clear because unless your answer is just make it like a mac and in which case why even have the ipad exist i don't say just make it like a mac we've got macs for that but i think there is a way to get from where we are now to something closer to the capabilities of a low-end small mac
Marco:
Maybe the way it is now with all these limitations is the best balance.
Marco:
The answer to many of these things is, well, if you need to do that, I guess you should just get a Mac.
Marco:
You're right, that is kind of a crappy answer to give somebody, but what if that's true?
Marco:
All of the reasons why people love iPads, many of those depend on the extreme software limitations that it has.
Marco:
I think what we've seen with
Marco:
iPad multitasking over the years is it's been a really bumpy road trying to expand the iPad software capabilities into something that works more like a laptop in those kind of more power user-y ways.
Marco:
We're trying to keep the iPad exactly as great as it is.
Marco:
We're trying to lose none of the greatness, none of the simplicity, but somehow add complexity without losing any of the simplicity.
Marco:
And I think what we've seen over the history of multitasking so far is that it basically has failed at doing that.
Marco:
That iPad multitasking, I think, has largely been a failure in the sense that it hasn't been very easy for people to figure out and it has made the simplicity of the iPad less so and less successful because many people accidentally invoke multitasking gestures and they can't figure out how to fix them and stuff like that.
Marco:
So right before the iPad came out,
Marco:
There were heavy rumors that Apple was doing a tablet.
Marco:
Tablets were the cool thing at that moment.
Marco:
That was the hot thing, and everyone in tech was like, tablets are the future.
Marco:
But nerds like us were writing blog posts and stuff saying, okay, tablets are interesting maybe, but how are we going to solve the text input problem?
Marco:
Tablets historically, the few that had come out before that, they always kind of had weird, not very good text input.
Marco:
And there's not really a good way to have a physical keyboard with a tablet unless you make some giant flip-around thing.
Marco:
On-screen keyboards or handwriting recognition or voice control or something, those are all possibilities, but they all have very strong limitations.
Marco:
And when Apple was rumored to be making a tablet, everyone's like, oh, this is going to be great.
Marco:
And everyone kind of thought that somehow they would have some idea that would somehow break through that text input barrier and would somehow be amazing.
Marco:
And the iPad came out and it just didn't.
Marco:
It didn't break through the text input barrier.
Marco:
It just supported whatever awkward method you wanted to use and figure, well, we'll kick this can down the road and see if we ever come up with anything better.
Marco:
But for now, we're just going to stick with the weird balance of options we have.
Marco:
And you're going to find ways that you love this thing anyway.
Marco:
Maybe that's what multitasking is.
Marco:
And maybe that's what a lot of this pro feature wanting will end up being where like we keep thinking like, oh, they have to somehow figure out a way to keep every bit of the simplicity and security and all that stuff and yet somehow add all this power to it.
Marco:
And maybe the answer is they can't do that and they shouldn't do that.
Marco:
Maybe the answer is if you actually want to do those more powerful things, the Mac is probably what you should be using.
John:
i think it's definitely possible like because they're so close like i agree with you that they screwed it up like i think they tried too hard to to be different and simple and in the end made something that's actually more complicated in terms of the multitasking we've discussed this a lot in the past it's mostly because they didn't want to just do the obvious thing but i think speaking of text input sometimes the obvious thing is pointing you in the right direction eventually they did just make a flippy keyboard and you know what people loved it like that's the obvious solution hey how did we deal with text input what if i had a keyboard attached
John:
oh i don't want a keyboard attached that makes it more like a laptop a weird floppy people love it right cursor support how long did they fight against no there's no cursor on the ipad what are you talking about it's it's direct manipulation as discussed on previous episodes right i touched my finger there's no cursor they added cursor support they did it in an ipad way and people love it and cursor support and keyboard support does not take away from the simplicity of the ipad if you give someone an ipad without a keyboard
John:
They'll never need to know about cursor support.
John:
They'll never need to deal with a floppy keyboard.
John:
They'll just use the on-screen thing.
John:
Like, I think it is possible.
John:
Again, we're not saying you have to be able to do everything you can do on a Mac Pro, on an iPad.
John:
We're just saying, can we get close to the use cases that would fit on, like, a MacBook Air?
John:
And I think we can.
John:
Apple just hasn't yet.
John:
And there are lots of barriers, as Jason's pointing out in the chat room here.
John:
He's the fourth member of the show this week.
John:
Some of the stuff that Apple is doing, like with the Quick Notes and the floating windows, right?
John:
It's like, oh, those might be useful elements, but they're only Apple and third parties can't add them or they're very limited or Apple only wants you to float certain things.
John:
I saw it recently.
John:
What was it?
John:
they turned sort of basically the now playing widget into a floating thing.
John:
Like they made like a video player app that shows a now playing interface on it or whatever, because they just wanted to have a floating thing that showed the currently playing music.
John:
So they could have like a window on screen all the time with, with their music controls on it.
John:
I'm surprised they didn't get rejected from the app store saying, no, that's only supposed to be for playing video.
John:
I don't want you cheating with the playing videos.
John:
You can show useful thing like music controls.
John:
I guess you got to get one of those dongles and stuff.
Marco:
I'm shocked that was allowed, by the way.
John:
It's probably torn down from the start by the time this episode is released.
John:
But what Apple wants you to do, I guess, is buy that dongle from Hyper with the physical media buttons on it or something.
John:
I think we're close, and I don't think it's unplausible.
John:
I think you can add this functionality without making the iPad more complicated.
John:
Again, we're not saying you need a command line, root access, kernel extensions, any of that.
Marco:
Wait, hold on.
Marco:
By the way, you do need command line.
Marco:
It can just be in its own little sandbox.
Marco:
But command line is actually really nice and really important to lots of people.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like non-CH rooted sandbox.
John:
You don't need all that stuff.
John:
To get back to the Perl thing that I think I quoted last week, make easy things easy and make hard things possible.
John:
right and we're not saying make hard things like as as easy as they are on the mac the mac makes lots of easy things kind of hard and it makes really hard things possible i don't know like it's it's if you draw a little overlapping thing the ipad expands from very very simple up to about the amount of complexity that you'd manage to tackle on a small mac laptop this is setting aside my continued hobby horse of like the drafting table ipad that's the size of an xdr but lays down on your table in which case at that point maybe you should
John:
you know make hard things not just possible but extremely you know extremely possible anyway this is supposed to be followed by it and we went off on a long ipad tangent but i think uh i think we are i think apple is traveling down this road they're just going more slowly than we'd all like all right two things that direction table thing would ruin your neck and back and secondly um is there a way to disable quick note on the mac
John:
Wait, why would it ruin your neck and back?
John:
Drafting tables are not a new technology.
John:
They've existed for like literally centuries.
John:
And I don't think they're ergonomically perfect, but they're not so terrible or at least not any more terrible than using a mouse and a keyboard.
John:
Centuries of humans did tons of work for hours and hours.
John:
Monks are illuminating manuscripts at drafting table type things.
John:
I don't think they're ergonomically that terrible.
John:
You can have a bad one.
John:
You can have a good one.
John:
But mice and keyboards probably cause more widespread RSI than monks at drafting tables ever experienced.
Marco:
I buy maybe maybe like cumulative total, but I don't think per capita per capita.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm saying it's not it's not ridiculous.
John:
You can have a drafting table type setup that is especially if you're doing like fine art type things like the artists choose to work on, you know, an easel and not like, you know, direct manipulation of what's on their canvas.
John:
And the easel is kind of slanted.
John:
Like the whole point of a driving table type setup, kind of like the Microsoft one, is you can sort of choose the angle and position.
John:
You have to find a setup that works for you.
John:
You could be standing or sitting.
John:
It's not, again, it can, if you just chucked it on someone's computer desk, maybe it wouldn't fit right.
John:
But, you know, like any new sort of ergonomic setup, you'll have to adjust to it.
John:
Just like people have to adjust to standing desks.
John:
How should they work?
John:
Where should the keyboard and mouse be?
John:
Where should the monitor be when I'm at my standing desk versus my sitting desk?
John:
I think it could work.
Marco:
By the way, quick real-time follow-up from non-rev guy in the chat.
Marco:
You can disable Quick Note on the Mac.
Marco:
It's apparently just implemented as a hot corner.
Marco:
So if you go into system preferences, desktop, screen saver, go to hot corners, it's just preset as the bottom right corner.
Marco:
And so you can just turn that off.
John:
I'd forgotten it was on the Mac because I had never seen it.
John:
And I would have disabled it immediately if it didn't.
Marco:
Yeah, it keeps popping up whenever I hit that corner with the mouse.
John:
Which corner is it by default?
Marco:
Bottom right.
Marco:
Yeah, no, I've already got that set to something.
John:
Yep, same.
Marco:
Okay, yes, mine was just nothing.
Marco:
So maybe it overrode it if it was nothing.
Marco:
But yeah, I'm very happy to lose that feature.
John:
Lower right should be show desktop.
John:
It's really handy.
John:
Everybody try it.
Casey:
No, it's not show desktop.
Casey:
It's turn your monitors off.
John:
No, that's upper right because any old school Mac user knows upper right is activate after dark or whatever your screensaver is.
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Casey:
Very quickly before we leave the iPad topic, I would like to say, because I feel like this may come across negative if you're not really listening to what we're saying, but all three of us are really enthusiastic about the future of the iPad and how it could end up so much better.
Casey:
All of us?
Casey:
Well, I think the two of us at least, in that it could be a really phenomenal computing platform.
Casey:
I mean, it is already a phenomenal computing platform.
Casey:
And I would hope and I would encourage the listener to realize that we're not – I mean, it may sound like we're complaining, but I actually don't think we are.
Casey:
We're trying to figure out a way to make it better because it's so great and it has so much potential.
Casey:
And I'd also like to quickly point out that I have not bought an iPad since –
Casey:
When Michaela was barely like six or seven months old, because the last iPad I bought was the iPad Pro from 2018 with the new form Apple Pencil at the time and so on and so forth.
Marco:
The first 11 inch with USB-C.
Marco:
That's the same one I'm using still.
Casey:
And it still runs great.
Casey:
It's running better three years on than I think any other iPad I've ever owned.
Casey:
And although in a perfect world I'd love to upgrade it, I don't have any pressing need to upgrade it.
Casey:
And a lot of people, particularly those who don't particularly care for Apple, really like to say that Apple believes in planned obsolescence and they deliberately make everything run like crap so you get new stuff.
Casey:
And
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
Maybe that's true.
Casey:
But I don't think it is.
Casey:
And this, you know, three, almost four-year-old iPad is running great to this day.
Casey:
I still use it all the time.
Marco:
Well, yeah, me too.
Marco:
And, well, I don't use it much anymore ever since I did the upstairs laptop.
Marco:
But it's... I really...
Marco:
enjoyed for many many years having that just always in the kitchen and ready to go and the problem is like you know as we talked about like you know the hardware is so over provisioned like the reason i bought the ipad pro was i wanted the pencil support for like doodling and stuff and diagramming for quick things and i wanted a really good uh four speaker system um
Marco:
i couldn't care less how fast it is because what i do on the ipad pro is like play podcasts and type into apple notes when i remember i need something on my shopping list like oh that's next time i go to the store better get more milk i'll go to my ipad type that in and add it to my list like that's the kind of usage i have and that's why like that's why i can use one from 2018 and not it doesn't even feel slow the battery is not what it used to be anymore but it's you can plug it in frequently anyway and that's fine uh and
Marco:
Frankly, though, my usage of it has gone down so much since I decided to just have a laptop in that role that I don't know if I would replace it if it broke.
Marco:
Or I certainly, if I were to replace it, I would replace it with probably an iPad Air, maybe even the base model if it uses USB-C by then.
Marco:
need that advancement and I think that's been a problem for the iPad since day one of like what most people do with it is pretty computationally easy and so there really hasn't been a lot of drive for people to upgrade their iPads unless it changed some other factor or unless their old one broke
Marco:
I'm very optimistic that the iPad has a clear future, but I think the iPad's future is largely going to be what the present is.
Marco:
I don't see it expanding significantly from where it is now because...
Marco:
I don't see that as being the right tool for the job, for the jobs that it currently today doesn't do well or doesn't do easily.
Marco:
That's where I see it being a very good product line for the indefinite future, but not a particularly expanding one.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So let's go back to follow up.
Casey:
How long is that?
Casey:
40 minutes later.
Casey:
Good grief.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Moving right along or something like that.
Casey:
We were talking about I think this was in the context of John, your son, doing development in writing his own apps.
Casey:
We were talking about setting up an Apple Watch for development, which is everyone's favorite thing to see in Xcode.
Casey:
Marco and I immediately said, oh, reboot everything.
Casey:
But Andy Norman pointed out, make sure you've looked at the watch and noticed if it's asking to trust the Mac.
Casey:
It took me a couple of attempts before I noticed that.
Casey:
I didn't realize that was something that could interrupt this whole process.
Casey:
I'm going to have to pay close attention now.
Marco:
Oh, that's the worst.
Marco:
Okay, so the first time you plug in your phone in development mode with a watch paired to it, and I think it resets every major OS version, and of course if you restore either device, the first time on the phone it will say, trust this computer, and you've got to hit trust and enter your passcode.
Marco:
It'll do the same thing on the watch if there's a watch paired to that phone.
Marco:
And if you either miss that...
Marco:
Or if you dismiss that dialogue, it won't show again until I think you reboot at least the watch, if not both devices.
Marco:
And if you miss that, this is correct.
Marco:
Everything will just not work, and it's kind of hard to figure out why.
John:
Yeah, it'll just spin, and it will not tell you why it's failing.
John:
In the case of my son's thing, it stopped him from deploying to his iPhone.
John:
He couldn't deploy his app to his iPhone.
John:
He said, oh, I'll deploy it to your iPhone just as soon as I get this watch set up, and it would just never finish.
John:
And so, yeah, we had the process of rebooting and trying everything again.
John:
Eventually, we saw that dialogue.
John:
I forgot to mention it last week.
John:
I just didn't want people...
John:
to get stuck and not understand why they couldn't progress reboot everything try again make sure you watch make sure the watch is close by that it's charged it's in proxy i hadn't put the watch on his wrist just because i'm like maybe it doesn't like being on the charger i was trying to do everything to say everybody's cool we're all near each other we're starting this whole thing over and then you have to watch for that little thing to pop up and then make sure you tap the right thing on it
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
We got some recommendations for slideshow apps to fix Marco's problems.
Casey:
All of them will go away if you just use the right app.
Casey:
Right, Marco?
Marco:
Yeah, and I've been keeping track of them and of what people have said.
Marco:
I've shown Tiff a few of the options.
Marco:
Yeah, so basically...
Marco:
By far, the most recommended option is an app called PhotoMagico, which we're probably going to try out when we make the next slideshow.
Marco:
A few other people recommended that we just use iMovie or Final Cut Pro.
Marco:
The reason why I think we didn't jump to that, and I should let Tiff talk about this at some point, but the reason why we didn't jump to that is because
Marco:
iMovie had really good or not iMovie well back in the day maybe but photos you know previously iPhoto has really good templates where you can just kind of select a whole bunch of photos and just say here just make something using these and then I'll adjust if I want to.
Marco:
And it will do things like multiple photos on screen at once and have them like flip around in custom ways and blend into each other.
Marco:
But like in like a tile arrangement or have them appear as though they're in like one of those flipping photo album books.
Marco:
You know, so it's that kind of like that kind of wonderful, friendly consumer template for photo slideshows that shows more than one photo on screen at once.
Marco:
That's the kind of thing that's hard to find a replacement for, at least a good replacement for.
Marco:
and photo magical isn't even i don't even think does that necessarily but that that seems to be the the highest recommended thing for this a few other options people also recommended something called adobe premiere rush which i haven't tried yet but we do have the adobe you know all the crap subscription that you know we pay absurdly for it because it actually makes sense for us to do that for you know barely for other reasons but um so i will probably try that as well so we'll see i will follow up next time we have to make one of these
John:
I think what you want is what they call motion graphics.
John:
Another, I think, term that comes from the analog age that is weird.
John:
You know, it's like, oh, you want things to move?
John:
You need motion.
John:
That's why Apple's app was called Motion.
John:
It did motion graphics.
John:
Anyway, I think Photo Magico does multiple images, but it maybe doesn't do all the themes and stuff.
John:
When you were saying the images looking around, it was making me think of two things.
John:
One, iDVD had menus that were like that.
John:
Like, I remember doing a baby thing when Alex was a baby.
John:
But it was like...
John:
like a mobile, like that you put over a baby's crib.
John:
And that was like the menu.
John:
But then in the mobile, you'd have little thumbnails of movies playing.
John:
Like it was a template that you threw in there.
John:
Like it's basically motion graphics that look really cool and professional.
John:
The only thing you add to it is your movies get displayed here and it'll play a little music or whatever.
John:
Same things for slideshows.
John:
And the second thing you maybe think of is that
John:
The screensaver I use on all of our computers is it's called, what is it called?
John:
Floating?
John:
It's a theme for Apple's like show photos from my photos app thing.
John:
Let me just pull it up here.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Screensaver.
John:
It's a top left screensaver.
John:
It's called Floating.
John:
And it shows just a bunch of floating images.
John:
And you can tell it to pull images from a folder full of images.
John:
Or you can tell it to pick an album from your photo library.
John:
It gets angry when you have hundreds of thousands of photos in your photo library.
John:
But you can eventually hook it up.
John:
Of course, because Apple doesn't understand families, the only person who can use that screensaver connected to the actual photos library is my wife because she owns the photos library.
John:
But what I've done to work around that is periodically I just go to the photos library and I do a full export of all of my favorites into a folder, redundantly storing them as just a bunch of JPEGs in a folder, and then I point the screensaver at the folder instead of a library.
John:
But anyway, the reason I bring this up is...
John:
This whole screensaver, the one that shows a bunch of your images, totally broke in Monterey.
John:
Like Monterey, the original version that was released 12.0 and 12.0.1, this would just show a black screen and never show an image.
John:
But it was fixed in 12.1, so I'm happy to have my screensaver back.
John:
It took me, I didn't notice until I read about it on the internet because I also have my screen like go to sleep sleep.
John:
It's like, you know, if you leave my computer idle or you lock the screen by chucking your cursor to the upper right corner, it's supposed to turn on the screensaver.
John:
But then shortly afterward, it will go totally black and turn off the monitor.
John:
So I never even noticed it was broken.
John:
I should have thought, you know, you haven't seen the screens ever run in a while because normally you chuck the cursor and you just leave.
John:
And by the time I come back, the screen's black.
John:
I'm like, oh, it probably went to sleep.
John:
Right.
John:
But no, it was just totally broken.
John:
It was some maybe some weird OpenGL thing.
John:
I don't even know.
John:
But anyway, it's fixed now.
John:
And that reminded me of what you're thinking of, which is like, I have a bunch of images and I want to show them.
John:
in some cool way as like a bunch of photographs that are being thrown onto like a virtual table or as tiles that flip around or as floating things and the screen server has many different versions of that i wonder if these are all like quartz composer things that's why they can't port them but it seems like apple somewhere oh interesting at the very least has a lot of these themes already done it's just they may be in some legacy technology that they can't easily port to imovie or photos or whatever
Marco:
We'll be right back.
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Casey:
Canon's flagship DSLR line will end with the EOS 1D X10 Mark III.
Casey:
Eventually.
Casey:
Maybe.
Casey:
I'm going to say EOS, not EOS.
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
This is not my world.
John:
You don't know about Canon EOS?
John:
They had a big marketing campaign when you were a teenager.
John:
Okay.
Marco:
Because obviously we would have been paying attention to that then.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
You are a Canon EOS.
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, I just brought this up just because I think we talked about it in a past show of like, and I think a lot of people are confused.
John:
I think I pointed this out once before.
John:
I think when we were talking about like, oh, Casey was told the story about being in Disneyland.
John:
All the photographers have a fancy, fancy DSLR.
John:
They take your pictures of and I was like, well.
John:
They have a fancy camera, maybe not necessarily a DSLR because DSLRs are kind of old and creaky.
John:
And I think when people hear DSLR, they think big digital camera, but that's not what they should think.
John:
SLR doesn't just mean big digital camera.
John:
It means single end reflex of what SLR stands for.
Marco:
Yes, it is a type of camera.
John:
right and it's got a flappy mirror inside it then when you take a picture a mirror physically moves out of the way to allow light to hit the sensor and then the mirror flaps back down uh and it is a setup that uh has mostly been supplanted by what they call mirrorless cameras which are so weird they're defined by the thing that they don't have mirrorless cameras work like you would imagine if you just started in the digital ages there's a sensor and there's a thing that opens to let light hit the sensor and
John:
And a thing that closes that stops light.
John:
And by the way, they even have ones that you can use electronic shutter where it just stays open all the time and just use electronics to record the image or whatever.
John:
But no more flapping mirror, which has pros and cons, but in general, the market and the world has decided that the advantages of mirrorless far outweigh any disadvantages of you not being able to look through the lens of your camera with a prism and all this other crap that you can do with an SLR, right?
John:
So mirrorless is one.
John:
Even the, you know, the...
John:
The standard bearers for SLRs and DSLRs, Canon and I imagine Nikon will follow, and I don't think Sony has any SLRs right now, or if they do, they're very obscure.
John:
The DSLRs are going away, but that does not mean big digital cameras are going away.
John:
They're just all going to be, quote-unquote, mirrorless cameras.
John:
So nobody freak out.
John:
It's not as if we're all going to have to use iPhones from now on.
John:
If you like interchangeable lens, fancy digital cameras, rest assured, there will still be a couple of companies willing to sell you some for the price of a car.
Marco:
Well, and keep in mind also like what this item, like what this news item actually is.
Marco:
Many, many people interpreted this to mean Canon is not going to make DSLRs anymore.
Marco:
That's not what this is.
Marco:
Canon makes many lines of DSLRs.
Marco:
The very, very, very top of the line one is the 1DX series.
Marco:
That is what they are saying they're not going to make any more of after this current one.
John:
I think the writing's on the wall for the rest of them, though, too.
John:
It starts from the top.
John:
You can read the quote from the CEO.
John:
Market needs are rapidly moving towards mirrorless cameras.
John:
So accordingly, we're increasingly moving people in that direction.
John:
You're right, it's not a definitive statement, but this is the way the world's going.
John:
And just to describe why mirrorless is winning...
John:
the big giant mirror that flaps up takes up a lot of room.
John:
It's like a little periscope type thing where the light has to go in, then it has to bounce off the mirror, then it goes up to the little prism, then it comes out the little eyepiece, which lets you essentially look with your eyeball optically through the lens that is going to take the picture, which has lots of cool advantages to it.
John:
but it takes up a lot of room.
John:
Mirrorless cameras are just smaller because you don't need room for the mirror.
John:
You don't need to flap the mirror up and down.
John:
You can do shutters, you can do mechanical shutters much faster and then you can do electronic shutters.
John:
You can't do an electronic shutter if the mirror is in the way because when the mirror is there and you're looking through the eyepiece,
John:
the the sensor can't see anything because the mirror is blocking it and when the mirror flaps up now your eye can't see anything so it's blacked out briefly right so the mirrorless mode is just this sort of more straightforward way to get light directly onto the sensor and you know and it's like how did they do the eyepiece well they have a digital thing where you're seeing a readout from the lens like it's taken a long time for as for digital cameras to get close to the performance of dslr but now they're getting in the ballpark
John:
So the DSLRs are slowly being phased out just because mirrorless are smaller.
John:
So this doesn't mean the complete end of all of them tomorrow, but it seems this is sort of the company signaling we're going in the, kind of like all car makers are going in the direction of electric.
John:
It's going to be years and years before the internal combustion cars are gone, but every single car maker has said, we're kind of planning to go all electric and they put all these fancy dates.
John:
We'll be all electric by 2030, 2035, 2040.
John:
We'll see if they hit those dates, but they've all announced plans.
John:
And this is essentially Canon saying,
John:
Yeah, the SLRs are probably gone away.
Marco:
Yeah, and this, because they're acting like their highest end one, I mean, I'm sure there's many reasons for that.
Marco:
First of all, I don't think the 1DX series has been selling in great volume recently.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
but also you know there's i'm sure there's there's much stronger competition from mirrorless cameras at that segment as well but also you know the the reason this is significant even though you know they didn't they didn't mention for instance the 5d series which is still extremely popular although i think that is also you know the writings on the wall i think for that as well um you know but that's that's very popular in different markets but the
Marco:
The reason this is big news is that even though Canon's not saying we're getting rid of all of our DSLRs, to axe the flagship one and from Canon of all companies, like Canon has probably been the most successful DSLR company by probably a pretty big margin, especially at the higher end.
Marco:
So for them to axe it is as significant as like if BMW said, all right, all M cars from now on are going to be all electric.
John:
Or Ford said they're no longer making cars, which they said several years ago.
John:
And by that, I mean they're just making trucks and SUVs, which by the way, in case you didn't know, Ford hasn't made a quote unquote car in what?
John:
Three years now?
Marco:
Did anybody notice?
John:
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
John:
Most people don't realize it was, hey, Ford, they make like pickup trucks and SUVs, right?
John:
They make cars too, right?
John:
And most people would say yes.
John:
And I'd say, okay, name a 2022 model of Ford that's not an SUV or truck.
John:
And you can't because there isn't one.
Casey:
Mustang.
Casey:
Because they don't make one.
Casey:
Mustang.
Casey:
Mustang.
John:
No, it's not a car.
John:
If you looked at it, it's the Mach-E.
John:
Isn't that an SUV now?
John:
Yeah, the Mustang Mach-E.
John:
Isn't it like a crossover?
John:
He's talking about like the GT3.
Casey:
I'm just being a turd because your point is completely fair.
John:
Yeah, I know.
John:
I mean, I think that what is the latest model year of the Mustang?
Casey:
I think that they're still making them as far as I know.
John:
They make the flat plane crank one.
John:
But the point is, that's not a new car that was developed for 2022.
John:
It's a car that they developed and they continue to sell.
John:
And I guess they make new model years each year with different trim levels and stuff like that.
John:
But yeah.
Casey:
To go back a step, I don't think of it as a car, John.
Casey:
I think of it as a horseless carriage.
Casey:
It's a mirrorless camera and a horseless carriage.
Casey:
It's a crossover.
John:
They're not station wagons.
John:
They're crossovers.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
Also, I would like to slightly real-time follow-up and correct you.
Casey:
I would not talk about going to Disneyland.
Casey:
I go to the one real Disney park.
John:
I know.
John:
Disney World.
John:
I'm sorry.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yes, I agree with you on this 100%, even though I've never actually been to Disneyland.
John:
But come on, just look at the maps, people.
Casey:
Right?
Casey:
Disneyland is like one one hundredth of Disney World.
Casey:
I understand it's the OG.
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
John:
No, Epcot.
John:
Epcot is my is unsurprisingly my favorite part.
Casey:
Of course.
Casey:
Well, I mean, it's most people.
Casey:
It's the nerdiest part.
Casey:
Without doubt.
Casey:
Anyway, all right.
Casey:
So we should probably try to squeeze in a topic or two before we jump to Ask ATP.
Casey:
So, John, you would like to get on your soapbox about new TV stuff at CES?
John:
Soapbox is just exciting news.
John:
We don't talk too much about this on the show other than me hemming and hawing about what TV I'm not going to buy.
John:
So I feel bad that we hadn't talked about this years and years ago.
John:
The story is old as podcasting.
John:
this is not like a new a new technology like when i was going i was looking for like explainer videos figure out i'd have links to the show notes to explain some of this stuff and all the explainer videos i found were like six years old so this is not new technology but the news at ces related to television is that someone has actually shipped the television with this technology in it which we thought was coming and there's some interesting stuff about who is shipping it um but anyway uh the the technology is qd oled which stands for quantum dot oled um
John:
brief review of television technologies.
John:
So most people probably have at this point flat panel LCD televisions, which use a technology similar to what is in most of our Mac screens or computer monitors.
John:
There's a backlight that shines light, usually white light out.
John:
And then there's a bunch of little pixels in front with using liquid crystals that have red, green, and blue sub pixels that turn on and off and allow varying amounts of light through.
John:
So when they're all open, you get red, green, and blue filters with the white backlight shining through them.
John:
and red, green, and blue combined to your eyes make one white pixel.
John:
And when you turn the shutters all the way off, it tries to block all of the backlight light.
John:
The ones in fancier screens, like the ones on the Pro Display XDR and MacBook Pros and the fancy iPad are called Mini LED.
John:
And what they do is instead of having one giant white backlight,
John:
They have a bunch of smaller white backlights, like 2,000 of them.
John:
And instead of the white backlight being on all the time, it's only on behind the pixels that need to light up.
John:
So if you make the screen all black, they just turn off all the blacklights.
John:
That gives you better blacks.
John:
And if you have some part of the screen that's light and some part of the screen that's dark, they just turn on some of the backlights.
John:
Obviously, there's a problem called blooming where the backlights are not the same size as the pixels.
John:
So if you have, like, say, a starry night where there's a black sky with the pinpricks of light, there's no pinprick backlight.
John:
So they have to turn on like a, you know, one centimeter by one centimeter backlight behind the pinprick star.
John:
And that may, and the, and LCD shutters are not that great at blocking the light.
John:
So you'll see a little bit of a halo glow around the light when really you should just see one pinprick of light.
John:
But anyway, that's LCD technology.
John:
And you often see it's described as an LED TV.
John:
That's just referring to the backlight.
John:
The backlights of these televisions are LEDs instead of being cold cathodes or whatever they were before.
John:
But it's still a liquid crystal display in the front controlling the shutters, right?
John:
So the best TV technology for many years has been OLED, which stands for Organic Light Emitting Diode, where there's no backlight.
John:
There is no big white light behind a series of filters.
John:
Instead, every single pixel emits its own light.
John:
And so you can turn on and off individual pixels.
John:
Our iPhones have OLED screens, right?
John:
So when you do an iPhone, you know, and you want to make it a starry night on the iPhone where it's all black with pinpricks of light, all it does is turn on the individual pixels that are the stars.
John:
So there's no halo effect on whatever.
John:
Problems with OLED is they can't get as bright because LED backlights can get super duper bright.
John:
And then OLEDs have burn-in problems if you do make them super bright and OLEDs also wear out.
John:
There's a bunch of limits of OLEDs.
John:
But in general, for televisions, the best TVs you can get are OLED because it is much, much better on a television to be able to control the individual pixels.
John:
It's just a shame they can't get quite as bright.
John:
Televisions has another problem with the brightness thing is, you know, if you're looking at it in a well-lit room or whatever, it has to be brighter than...
John:
you know, a little phone screen or whatever.
John:
So most modern OLED televisions are actually WRGB, which is they have RGB subpixels, and then they have a big honking white subpixel.
John:
And that's just to boost the brightness, right?
John:
So they mix in white, like an actual white light with the colors.
John:
And as you can imagine, they can wash them out.
John:
A lot of it is there, like if you want to make the screen entirely white, you use mostly the white subpixels.
John:
But that's called a WRGB OLED.
John:
And all the best televisions use that right now.
John:
The only company in the world that makes a WRGB OLED for televisions is LG.
John:
And they make it for everybody.
John:
Anybody who has an OLED television as of before CES 2022, that's an LG panel in there.
John:
So Sony's television, Panasonic's television, Philips, like Sharp, they're all LG OLEDs in there.
John:
But OLED is the best in town because you can control the individual pixels, but it doesn't get as bright.
John:
So finally, QD OLEDs is let's take OLED TVs, which is the best available thing, and let's fix some of their problems.
John:
Their main problem is they can't get as bright.
John:
right so what can we do to help with that the way oleds actually work is they don't have you can do this with oleds but they don't do it for expense reasons they don't have a a red green and a blue sub pixel or even a white sub pixel what they have are individual pixels that are bigger than i think they're bigger than the three red green blue but anyway they have individual pixels that just emit blue light that's what they're still individually controlled but every individual pixel is just blue
John:
And so how do you get all the colors?
John:
Well, they put filters in front of every pixel.
John:
There's a little green filter, a little red filter, a little blue filter, and a filter that turns it white, I guess.
John:
I think, yeah, I think that's basically how they work.
John:
I'm not sure about the white subpixel and WRGB.
John:
But anyway, there's filters.
John:
But of course, filters lose you some of the light, right?
John:
You're taking a blue backlight and you're trying to like, you know,
John:
change it to red green and blue you end up losing the the wavelengths that are not the color you want them to and that reduces the brightness which is one of the problems that oleds have so the reason i'm talking about all this is because quantum dot oled sounds like a sci-fi thing and i put some links in the show notes that explain how it works again quantum dots are many many years old but they're finally to the point where they can put them in a television hopefully in an economic way we'll talk about that in a second
John:
What they do is they have the same blue backlight because that's like the cheapest way to make it.
John:
You know, it's not a backlight.
John:
I'm sorry.
John:
Every individual pixel is a tiny blue pixel, right?
John:
Every individually controlled pixel on an OLED is a tiny blue individually controlled OLED.
John:
The quantum dot sits in front of each one of the individual pixels.
John:
And changes the light to be the wavelength they want.
John:
One of them changes it to green, one of them changes to red, and they just let the blue one straight through.
John:
And the quantum dot thing does it, using some physics stuff that's explained in these videos, in a way that loses you almost none of the light.
John:
It like changes the wavelength of the light without like blocking it or filtering it.
John:
It just it's quantum physics.
John:
It's literally quantum physics.
John:
The bottom line is now you have individually controlled pixels where you don't lose as much of the light through the stupid red, green and blue filter thing.
John:
They're red, green filters in this case.
John:
You don't need the W subpixel anymore.
John:
You don't need the big honking white subpixels.
John:
You can have red, green, and blue subpixels, and you get almost 100% of the light from the blue OLED that's behind it.
John:
You do get 100% in the blue case because there's not even any quantum dot in front of that, I think.
John:
I think it just comes through as blue because it's a blue, you know, LED.
John:
And what that means is OLED televisions with way better brightness without the white subpixel to wash out the images so they have better color reproduction and all the same advantages of OLED.
John:
And so this is super cool.
John:
In theory, maybe also less burn in because you don't have to drive the pixels as hard because you're not losing a bunch of light to the filtering.
John:
And the harder you drive the pixels, the more they wear out because they have organic compounds in them and crap.
John:
We'll see.
John:
All right.
John:
So right now, the only company that makes QD OLED panels is not LG, but Samsung.
John:
Oh, Samsung also makes televisions, but Samsung is not shipping QD OLED TV.
John:
I think it's the same kind of deal with like LG display and LG electronics.
John:
There's like this adversarial relationship between the people who make the panels and the people who make the TVs.
John:
So the only company, as far as I'm aware, in 2022, that's selling a QD OLED TV is Sony is selling a QD OLED containing a Samsung QD OLED panel.
John:
No pricing has been announced yet, and there's some scary things about it that say it might be like $8,000, in which case I'm not getting one.
John:
But...
John:
uh that's the situation now and i find it really exciting if you've never heard of qd and you might have heard of qd quantum dot stuff for q q leads because quantum dot lcd televisions also exist where they use quantum dots instead of filters but with an lcd backlight but those have all the same problems with the backlight thing if the backlight is across the whole thing that's bad and if the backlight has 2 000 regions for 4 million pixels that's also bad right so quantum dots are not new but quantum dots plus oled is new and i'm super excited about it um
John:
I'll probably talk more about the Sony television on Rectifs because that's where I get to complain about the stands people put on televisions.
John:
But that's the TV news for 2022.
John:
And the reason it's related to, I mean, it's the tech stuff too, but also in terms of Apple stuff.
John:
if you're looking for what is the sort of next next step in i guess ipad but also even like pro display xdr type stuff uh it's either quantum dot oled which i can imagine them may be using on an ipad someday um or micro led which is where instead of having a blue led with three filters in front of it every individual subpixel is its own colored uh led those are insanely expensive and not within the realm of
Casey:
commercial viability or size viability for apple's devices yet um but we'll keep your eye on that meet back here in five to ten years okay are you i mean are you ever really going to buy a new i almost said new computer i'm so used to saying that a new a new television like is this ever really going to happen
John:
I mean, I was waiting to see what they were going to say at CES because the rumors ahead of time thought somebody was going to ship a QD OLED TV and just assumed it would be Samsung because they're making the panels.
John:
But now it's Sony and that makes me want it more because I hate Samsung.
John:
Like their TVs are more scummy.
John:
But before CES, I was like, I should buy a Sony A90J when they get cheap.
John:
Like as soon as the new TVs come out, like I should buy the last of someone's inventory of Sony A90J, which is like the one of the better one of the best OLED televisions from last year.
John:
In particular, I like it because they have a heat sink in it and the heat sink in theory helps with image retention.
John:
It just seems like a good idea for me.
John:
all of the new top end oled tvs have at least one or two models with heat sinks in them so i feel like sony was the head of the game by introducing one last year but i figured you know like i know qd oleds coming out if qd oleds are eight grand or something then maybe i'll get an a90j for you know under two thousand dollars uh but i haven't seen the pricing for the sony yet so we'll see
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Casey:
So there was a very interesting article that came out, or that I was made aware of sometime in the last week, and it was on whathifi.com, which is a pretty funny name for an online magazine.
Casey:
And it's an interview with Gary Geeves, I hope I pronounced that right, who is the vice president of acoustics at Apple.
Casey:
And, you know, some of this is exactly what you would expect from this sort of thing, but some of it was really, really good.
Casey:
And there's a few quotes that I think John and I have pulled from the article that I'd like to read you.
Casey:
uh gary says so from the analytic to oh sorry let me give you some more context so this is about you know creating new airpods 3 and to some degree the other airpods as well and gary is very much in charge maybe not in charge of but very integral to creating these particularly with regard to um doing the mathematics and science behind acoustics right is that fair summary sure
Casey:
So a couple of quotes from the article.
Casey:
So from the analytic tuning, we work closely with an expert team of critical listeners and tuners.
Casey:
Many of these are folks from the pro audio industry, and really what they try to do is intentionally refine the sound signature for each product, AirPods in this case, so that it's accurate, but it's also exciting and moving.
Casey:
So they're trying to work with people who are actually doing this sort of thing for a living and trying to make it sound good, which is pretty excellent.
Casey:
Moving along, this is further down in the article.
Casey:
When watching a movie on Apple TV, oh, I just thought this was fascinating.
Casey:
Using spatial audio, the virtual speakers are placed further away from you than when you're watching on an iPhone.
Casey:
So let me kind of repeat that and change how it's phrased.
Casey:
So if you're doing that spatial audio thing, which is like the fake surround sound, like the computational surround sound,
Casey:
If you're doing that with an iPhone, the virtual center, if you will, of all of that audio is, and I'm making the numbers up, but it's like, you know, a foot in front of your face.
Casey:
Whereas if you do that with an Apple TV, they place the virtual center of all that audio, like six feet in front of your face.
Casey:
So it seems to be commensurate with the screen you're watching, which is obvious once you hear that, but I don't know, I just think that's really cool.
Casey:
And then a final quote from this.
Casey:
Obviously, the wireless... Oh, this was kind of the money quote of the whole article.
Casey:
Obviously, the wireless technology is critical for content delivery, but also for things like the amount of latency you get when you move your head.
Casey:
If that's too long between you moving your head and the sound changing your remaining static, it will make you feel quite ill.
Casey:
So we have to concentrate very hard on squeezing the most that we can out of Bluetooth technology.
Casey:
There's a number of tricks we can play to maximize or get around some of the limits of Bluetooth.
Casey:
But it's fair to say that we would like more bandwidth in...
Casey:
i'll stop right there we would like more bandwidth and then apparently he smiled so this everyone is taking this and i think reasonably so to mean hey guess what apple's going to do some custom thing instead of bluetooth or you know some like custom overlay perhaps of bluetooth in order to get more bandwidth and less latency from from their wireless you know headphones and
John:
And well, I think I think the the more reasonable interpretation is when someone says that and we've seen a lot of Apple people on stage saying this type of thing is they they talk about a technical limitation in the abstract.
John:
And then what they'd like to tell you is and future products will will fix that in some way.
John:
But then they stop themselves and say, well, of course, they're not going to tell you about future products.
John:
But the only thing they're saying is here we would like more bandwidth and our future products will have more bandwidth.
John:
but there's lots of ways future products can have more bandwidth maybe it's a new bluetooth standard maybe maybe they use wires for everything probably not likely maybe it's a totally custom thing and so that's the mystery of like all this is an apple person saying is yes bluetooth is bandwidth constrained we don't like it and it's a thing we're going to fix so that's sort of like confirmed apple says future audio products will have more bandwidth which is like duh they have all this lost audio that they can't play over their headphones that's not a situation that's going to stay for a very long time
Casey:
Yeah, so let's pause right there.
Casey:
This is what I was about to get to, and it's an important point.
Casey:
So Apple's been working really hard to get their entire catalog—if I'm not mistaken, I might have the particulars wrong, it doesn't really matter—to get a lot of their stuff to be lossless.
Casey:
So typically when you compress audio—we've talked about this on ATP a bajillion times—when you compress audio, you arguably lose data that arguably nobody can hear anyway—
Casey:
But one way or another, another approach you can take is to compress it in such a way that you are not losing any data, hence lossless.
Marco:
Basically zip for audio.
Casey:
Yeah, actually, it's a good way of looking at it.
Casey:
You're exactly right.
Marco:
It works slightly differently, although not that much differently.
Marco:
And it's the same similar effect.
Casey:
yeah so uh so a lot of people are really into lossless audio i will let you decide the listener if it's snake oil or not but one way or another i kind of think it is too but neither that's neither here nor there um one way or another in order to send lossless audio to a you know say a set of airpods you need a lot of bandwidth in order to do that or at least compared to the bluetooth standards of today
Casey:
And so if Apple wants to be able to say, oh, our fancy schmancy new AirPods 2 support lossless audio, which we conveniently have in our entire Apple Music library, then hey, guess what?
Casey:
They're going to need to have a different method of communicating between your phone or computer or what have you and the AirPods.
Casey:
And so that's kind of what everyone's putting together.
Casey:
And this is what John was just starting to say is that, hey, Apple's saying they want more bandwidth.
Casey:
They probably want it because of this big push for lossless audio.
Casey:
Snake oil be damned.
Casey:
And so this is all starting to fall into place.
John:
yeah so yeah the way the next step in the story is a good uh i talked about max tech's youtube channel that tries to sort of summarize and gather up all of the uh the rumors kind of the way same we do on this podcast max tech had a good video uh collecting this info uh and here is the rumor uh that i think makes a lot of sense and i'll be kind of now that i've sort of read all about it and everything i'll be kind of disappointed that this ends up not being true again all the apple person said was we you know
John:
more bandwidth would be good and dot dot dot apple was probably going to do a thing with more bandwidth one way that apple can get more bandwidth and other stuff that is useful to apple in many different ways is to use ultra wideband which is something uh you should have heard of if you listen to this program because or if you watch apple keynotes because apple has been shipping the u1 chip in many of its devices and that is an ultra wideband chip right now apple uses it to what help you find your air tags
John:
And unlock your car.
John:
And what was the thing they showed?
Marco:
Airdrop.
Marco:
It lets you do airdrops slightly cooler.
Marco:
It's a very minor difference.
John:
But as it's relevant to audio, here are some stats about it.
John:
So first, bandwidth.
John:
That's what we were just talking about that Gary Geeves says they want more of.
John:
Ultra-wideband apparently goes up to 675 megabits.
John:
That's as compared to 2.1 megabits for Bluetooth 5.0.
John:
and 9.2 megabits for apple's high-res lossless audio so plenty of headroom there like that you know apple's audio is 9.9.2 megabits and that's not you know that's that can't fit in the 2.1 megabits of bluetooth but 675 you're fine right power consumption another thing that's important to apple apparently ultra wideband uses 10 times less power than btle bluetooth low energy
John:
So that's great.
John:
It's looking really good.
John:
Range, this is the one that seems iffy.
John:
I put citation needed in the docs, but actually there is a citation in the video.
John:
Lots of different things you can find about the range of ultra-wideband.
John:
It varies widely, but this video cites a paper that says in their testing of file transfer using ultra-wideband, they were getting 25 meters versus 10 meters for Bluetooth.
John:
In practice, as I walk around my house, I have extensively tested the range of Bluetooth as I leave my phone in the kitchen and go up to the attic while listening to a podcast.
John:
I know how to move quickly throughout the house to not run out the audio buffer and to get back into the range.
John:
But Bluetooth goes much farther than you think it does.
John:
And so if ultra-wideband is anything close to twice the range, I think it's great.
John:
The next one is latency.
John:
You might think this doesn't matter too much when you're playing a song or something, but latency is super important to things like AR.
John:
That's what Gary was talking about in this thing here of like turning your head and the audio and not lagging behind it or whatever.
John:
The latency of Bluetooth is not great.
John:
in this article that we'll put a link to in the show notes uh they measured it to be 20 to 30 milliseconds at best an ultra wide band that this company called spark has demonstrated a sub 0.2 millisecond latency so from 30 milliseconds to 0.2 milliseconds possibly down to 0.1 if they really push it so way lower latency
Marco:
And that, by the way, that would allow it to be probably used as a live monitoring headphone, which current Bluetooth headphones just cannot do because of, among other problems, latency.
Marco:
But if you wanted to, say, have that be your live monitoring headphone while you're podcasting or playing music or recording video or something, right now we all have to use wired headphones to do that.
Marco:
That kind of latency, if it can be that low end-to-end, that would allow live monitoring, and that would be great.
John:
I was thinking of that when I, I was just thinking, I heard a discussion between some people about this, but I realized I didn't hear a discussion.
John:
It was actually a Twitter conversation that shows how I sort of like reify things in my brain.
John:
When I'm reading Twitter, I actually hear the voices of the people talking, especially if I know them.
John:
And it was someone responding to someone else that I know that like, oh, Apple keeps removing these headphone ports.
John:
And it's terrible because if you're doing live audio monitoring, you need that zero latency connection.
John:
I was like, A, nothing is zero latency.
John:
And B, you don't need it to be zero.
John:
It just needs to be
John:
low enough that you don't notice.
John:
This person was talking about editing video.
John:
All the things you just talked about.
John:
Real-time applications where it's annoying if there's even a few milliseconds of lag.
Marco:
If it can be the low single digits of milliseconds at the most, then that really enables a lot of those applications.
John:
right and if it can be 0.2 milliseconds then that's going to be as good here's there's the like in this and this quote here from this article the the 0.2 milliseconds that this company says this is far beyond what bluetooth can do and it's even faster than what many commercially available usb wired mice can deliver so sometimes sometimes usb wired peripherals can't even get this low latency so this would solve the latency problem for devices without headphone jackson
Marco:
Well, at the protocol level.
Marco:
I mean, you would still have whatever the software stack is that's feeding it and everything.
Marco:
So there would be other complexities to overcome, certainly, but that would go a long way for sure.
John:
And as the article interview with the Apple person said, very relevant to VR AR goggles and whipping your head around and having spatial audio and having the audio correctly and very quickly react to how you're moving your head.
John:
This is very relevant to Apple's interests, all the specs that we've read so far.
John:
And finally, there's specs
John:
you know where it's also relevant wireless headphones for games and probably i would assume game controllers like wireless game console controllers i would imagine that would also be very valuable yep although most of them don't use spatial stuff and the lag they did because i use wireless audio headphones when i'm doing destiny things and the lag it's not like editing audio in real time where you're kind of annoyed by the lag uh and it doesn't do head tracking so there's no sort of spatial queasiness and the the lag that is there is
John:
not as big an effect if you're not doing that but the vr headset stuff is more relevant and by the way sony did announce a new vr thing for ps5 but they did it as a press release with no pictures it was great they just described it they're like we have a vr headset and it has this many pixels per eye and this many frames per second and this much latency and these features and no we can't tell you anything more about or show any pictures but
John:
She goes to a different school.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
Canadian girlfriend VR helmet.
Casey:
God, that took me a second.
Casey:
Well done.
John:
So Spectrum.
John:
We'll put a little link in the show notes that has this graph from this Android Authority article showing the Spectrum.
John:
I don't know if the scale on the bottom is – if the scale is to scale.
John:
But as the name –
John:
you know would make you suspect ultra wide band uses a very wide band of spectrum uh they use like 500 megahertz wide channels uh and part of the thing that makes ultra wide band work is that it's very very wide like lots of different frequencies i think this was made possible by freeing up a bunch of frequencies that maybe were used for analog applications in the past so it's very very wide band and it's out of the way of other standards like it's out of it's not in the same range as bluetooth and wi-fi which are both in the well they can both be in the 2.4
John:
gigahertz range so bluetooth can mess with wi-fi if you're not using five gigahertz wi-fi and everything um but ultra wideband is super wide so it can avoid interference and and other things and it doesn't interfere with any of our existing standards and it's very very low power in fact according to this article below the noise floor of most of the other standards so it's like invisible to them because it's so low power they ignore signals that are that low
John:
um so this i read all this and i'm like you know i guess i i knew the u1 chip was in there i knew about ultra wideband i knew what it was capable of like a lot of the things that the applications were saying like of how you can use to find your air tags or point it at your phone to airdrop with people and stuff use the uh
John:
improved ability to get time of flight information for multiple devices so you can tell how far away it is and which direction it's pointing and stuff and knows when you get close to your car.
John:
But I never thought of it as like, can we just use this as a replacement for Bluetooth?
John:
And believe me, we need a replacement for Bluetooth.
John:
Bluetooth sucks.
John:
It's gotten so much better over the years, but it really is the main thing that annoys me about...
John:
wireless audio i like the fact that every device has bluetooth i like the fact that my car has it my phone has it my ipad has it i don't like how long it takes for things to connect and disconnect and apple tried to do the best they could to make that better with its whatever h1 chip and it is better and i actually do like the automatic switching even though marco doesn't and i do like oh actually can we let me interrupt you real quick
Casey:
I have been a... I don't think I've said it, but I've been an automatic switching apologist for a long time.
Casey:
And after the 95th time that I'm actively listening to something on my phone, but one of the kids is using the aforementioned iPad to play a kid-friendly educational game, and I think it's because I hadn't touched my phone in a while...
Casey:
and the iPad is actively being used, suddenly I'm like out in front of the house and my stupid AirPods Pro, which I still love, are suddenly jumping over to the iPad.
Casey:
Even though I'm actively listening to a frigging podcast, I finally decided that at least for the iPad, I am turning off auto-switching.
Casey:
Because what is nice is that, maybe I misunderstood it, but I think it's by device.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
In order to disable auto-switching for the AirPods, you have to turn it off on every device that has ever connected to them.
Casey:
Which actually in my use case is kind of nice because I want it on my computer and I want it on my iPhone, but I don't want it on the iPad that the kids occasionally steal to play kiddo educational games.
Casey:
So I have to mea culpa a little bit and eat a little bit of crow and say I am at least partially embracing the no auto-switching lifestyle because it was driving me bananas.
Marco:
Is there a way for me to disable the prompt on the Apple TV where...
Marco:
oh seriously ipad iphones airpods are nearby yes yes when i walk in from a dog walk and adam and tiff are watching adventure time like six feet away on the tv in front of the front door and it pops up a thing and i'm like okay now i'm like all right don't click my headphones right now because it'll take the audio from the tv that's i i i please if anybody knows how to turn that off in a quick way please let me know maybe you just turn off bluetooth on your apple tv somewhere
Marco:
The remote control is Bluetooth.
Marco:
I was going to say.
Marco:
That kind of feature probably works great if you are single and live alone.
Marco:
If you're the only person who's ever going to use the devices that are physically in your place, that probably works fantastically.
Marco:
But I think it breaks down a lot once there's multiple people around.
Marco:
Then it's like, okay, well, now somebody could be watching the Apple TV and you could be walking in with your dog listening to a podcast and not be able to click the button on your headphones now because it'll take the audio from the TV.
Marco:
And by the way, they have to then look at this giant overlay saying, hey, AirPods Pro nearby.
Marco:
You want to connect?
Casey:
Well, and it's funny because I am terrible in that I use the little case cover of the AirPods as like a fidget spinner, which I know I shouldn't do.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
So it's like constantly?
Casey:
But that's the thing is that it's on the TV like constantly, which is my fault.
Casey:
But Aaron, literally today, Aaron said to me, because we were standing in the kitchen and you can see the TV from the kitchen.
Casey:
And I was looking at Aaron, but Aaron, I guess, happened to be facing the TV and I'm doing the...
Marco:
Flip, flip, flip, flip.
Marco:
I'm just doing that over and over again.
John:
She's like, leave it, leave it.
Casey:
Seriously, it was like she was talking to Penny.
John:
We should get you a dedicated case just for fidgeting and just remove the battery from her.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
But seriously, it was basically like she was talking to Penny and she's like, can you stop playing with your AirPods, please?
Casey:
I was like, what?
Casey:
Oh, right.
Casey:
Sorry.
John:
before we get back to ultra wideband i will say that i still enjoy the auto switching like when i'm sitting in my bed at night watching a tv show on my ipad and someone texts me something on my phone i pick up my phone and i'm still watching the tv show with my airpods in i'm watching it on the ipad i pick up my phone my phone brings down the overlay that says like oh john's airpods
John:
But the audio is still coming out of the iPad.
John:
And then I look at the message and it's like, oh, someone sent me a funny TikTok.
John:
So I tap on the funny TikTok.
John:
It starts playing immediately through my headphones.
John:
And then I put down my phone and the audio goes right back to my iPad.
John:
It's like magic.
John:
It works exactly like Apple says.
John:
And if I had to manually switch, I would never do that.
John:
But I do want to see the TikTok, but I don't want to annoy my wife with TikTok audio.
John:
I love the audio switching.
John:
Can't live without it.
John:
It can live without everything that has to do with Bluetooth because it really is not my friend and it takes way too long.
John:
That's setting aside all of those stuff.
Marco:
Today I learned that I can send you funny TikToks.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So this ultra wideband stuff, I really hope these rumors are true because every, I think, I couldn't look this up, but according to this video,
John:
every iphone since the iphone 11 has had the u1 even like the cheap se stuff i'm not sure about that certainly all the flagship phones have but the point is these u1 chips are out there and we talked for years like why are all these u1 chips in these apple devices what are they what are they doing there it's like oh i guess they can use you know again when it was just airdrop it was stupid and every time they add a feature to it's like oh maybe that's where they added the u1
John:
But imagine if ultra wideband becomes the wireless audio connection standard for all AirPods, starting with the new AirPod Pro 2 and continuing for like revisions of all their products after that, including their ARV or headset, including all future AirPods.
John:
Maybe they'll also support Bluetooth because they have to work in cars and stuff like that.
John:
but please bring on the ultra wideband revolution if this works as advertised with these type of specs it seems so much better than bluetooth and hope and again ultra wideband is not something apple invented it's an open standard just like bluetooth anybody can implement it i think if apple does a good job with this and if this standard is better than bluetooth in all the ways that we know with like modern eyes
John:
And the use cases people are going to use it for.
John:
I want this yesterday.
John:
And we can kind of get it yesterday.
John:
Because if they introduce.
John:
Unfortunately they'd be AirPod Pros too.
John:
And I don't like the Pros because they go on my ear canals.
John:
But if they introduce AirPods with ultra wideband.
John:
It's not like you have to buy all new devices to use them.
John:
All the way back to the iPhone 11.
John:
They'll work.
John:
They won't work in your car.
John:
Which means I hope they also support Bluetooth.
John:
But wow.
John:
I would love.
John:
And I don't care about the high bandwidth for the lossless.
John:
I don't care about any of that.
John:
I just want the range.
John:
The power.
John:
And hopefully faster connect faster more reliable connect disconnect.
John:
So as far as I'm concerned bring on this rumor
Marco:
Yeah, they've had those U1 chips in the phones for a few years now.
Marco:
And when they first came out, it's always been the story of... Everyone's kind of wondering, well, they have to have some kind of other plan for these.
Marco:
They've been putting them in for so long, and they've done suspiciously little with them in public.
Marco:
And so the idea has always been...
Marco:
I bet they're planning on using these in a clever way in the future.
Marco:
And I think the fun thing where the AirTags show you how to zoom in on the AirTag when you're getting near your object, that is probably not the only plan they had for that.
Marco:
I think this is a very, very plausible theory that this could be the direction they go with the AirPods in.
Marco:
I hope it's true, just like you.
Marco:
I really want this to be true because Bluetooth is awful for so many reasons.
Marco:
It has surfaced well for many years, but its time has passed, and this would be great if this works nearly as well as they say it will.
Casey:
Real-time follow-up from Alex Sebensky in the Apple TV.
Casey:
Settings, remotes and devices, Bluetooth, suggest nearby AirPods off.
Casey:
And I will put that in the show notes.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
I'm doing that yesterday.
Marco:
Right after this podcast, before I go to bed.
John:
I'm setting that on both Apple TVs.
John:
The other good thing about ultra-wideband is...
John:
Because it's not a proprietary thing.
John:
In theory, it could also be in all of our cars in the future, too.
John:
It's not like, oh, Apple's doing its own thing.
John:
Like, this is why it's better than Apple coming up with its own protocol and its own everything, right?
John:
It's using a newer, better industry standard that suits this purpose.
John:
And I think this ultra-wideband would also be better for all the same reasons in all of our cars.
John:
Obviously, car technology takes a long time to catch up, so I'm not holding my breath for that.
Marco:
Well, but in the meantime, we'll be able to buy some $12 thing off Amazon that plugs into the cigarette lighter and offers an ultra-wideband receiver.
John:
That's the big question.
John:
If this rumor is true, does Apple continue to support Bluetooth everywhere?
John:
I think they...
John:
probably obviously like phones would still have bluetooth to work in cars that's the main use case but like maybe the airpods no longer support bluetooth so you can't use them as generic bluetooth uh headphones anymore or maybe the first version has both the ultra wideband and bluetooth but then eventually they drop the bluetooth in the headphones only because it's not like people are using their airpods to connect to their car i don't think right it's like more of a well but like do max have ultra wideband chips in them like do the recent the m1 max have that chip face id yeah
John:
That's true.
John:
Just because something is cool and works in lots of Apple products doesn't mean Macs have to have it.
John:
I think that's stupid, and I think Macs should have U1 chip.
John:
I don't know if they do.
John:
Like, maybe the M1s do?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I don't remember hearing about it, so I would assume they probably don't, but that could be interesting.
John:
Go to System Profiler and look at the device tree on your Mac and see if there's anything that looks like a U1 chip.
John:
I mean, would it show up here?
John:
Somewhere.
John:
I don't know.
John:
We'll find out by next week.
John:
Someone who works at Apple, tell us whether the Macs have U1 chips.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Do we have time for a little bit of Ask ATP?
John:
Maybe we can pick and choose questions.
John:
Is there any one of the questions here?
Casey:
Any one of these three that you like?
Casey:
I have one I would like to ask because I want to know the answer to this.
Casey:
I feel like I've talked to you about this before, actually.
Casey:
Nathaniel Gorey writes, how much sleep do you each get on a night on average?
Casey:
In particular, does John sleep at all?
Casey:
Preach.
Casey:
He seems to have an endless list of commitments between a jobby job, regular podcast, app dev, destiny, media consumption, oh yeah, and two kids.
Casey:
Yes, I would also like to know, John, when do you sleep?
Casey:
And I know we've talked about this in the past, I think privately mostly, but I don't understand how you do as much as you do.
John:
Yeah, so the answer is, I don't know how much sleep I got on average, but the answer is not as much as I should.
John:
Like, that's the unfortunate answer.
John:
I do have a lot of commitments.
John:
Over the years, I have adjusted things in my life to fit the amount of time and energy that I have that has varied.
John:
When my children were very young, like infants and toddlers, obviously it was much worse.
John:
But on the other hand, I think I had fewer podcasts then.
John:
It's a balance.
John:
The number of podcasts I have and what my recording schedule looks like and the job that I have and how much time I spend on all the other stuff,
John:
It just barely fits.
John:
Mostly kind of doesn't fit because I'm not getting enough sleep.
John:
And the way that works is, you know, how do I get to do any fun stuff?
John:
Like if I have a day where I just, you know, from the moment I wake up is I'm always doing something right.
John:
And then the day ends and I felt like I've worked like the entire day because it's like.
John:
You know, doing kids stuff in the morning, getting kids off to school and then a regular nine to five ish job, plus or minus working from home.
John:
COVID weirdness, ferrying kids around, doing other stuff and then getting dinner and then cleaning up after dinner and then doing a podcast.
John:
And by that point, like now my day is over.
John:
Now I get to have the me time.
John:
Right.
John:
And how do you end up having me time?
John:
Where do you get to play Destiny?
John:
You get to watch some TV shows.
John:
Uh, sometimes to get more quote unquote me time, the way I do that is by cutting into sleep because it's the one part of the day that has some flexibility.
John:
I can't really, you know, work fewer hours at my jobby job.
John:
I can't really record fewer hours of podcasts because it's kind of regular schedule on a commitment.
John:
Um, I can't avoid driving kids around or doing, you know, all that stuff or whatever.
John:
So the only thing that is a flex block kind of is sleep.
John:
And that's why I don't get enough sleep because I'll want to watch, you know, not just one episode of a show, but I'm actually behind two episodes or I'm behind one episode in three of my shows, or I want to do a thing in destiny to take several hours to complete or whatever.
John:
And yeah, I end up eating into sleep.
John:
Weekends do still exist, though.
John:
And I try not to have any podcasts on weekends if I can at all help it so I can play more Destiny on weekends if I'm not doing other things.
John:
Right.
John:
I would like to get eight hours of sleep.
John:
I do not.
John:
I like usually if you want to know, like what my current situation with the current set of responsibilities and stuff like that.
John:
In general, I'm in bed by midnight and the alarm goes off at six thirty.
John:
That's not enough sleep.
John:
I do not recommend this approach.
John:
Do not do this.
John:
That's terrible.
Casey:
Yeah, that really is.
Casey:
So my well, Aaron's alarm goes off, I think, like 615 ish.
Casey:
And then usually I'll loiter in bed for just a few more minutes before I get out of bed.
Casey:
And I'm out of bed no later than 630 on a weekday.
Casey:
And I am usually climbing in bed around 10, give or take a little bit.
Casey:
And I'm usually not falling asleep until around 11.
Casey:
So I'm getting easily an hour more sleep than you are, John.
Casey:
And I feel like I still accomplish quite a bit less.
Casey:
Marco, what's your schedule?
Casey:
I'm really boring.
Marco:
I go to bed most nights around 1030 and wake up most mornings around 630.
Marco:
So I get the eight hours you're supposed to get most nights or something close to it.
Marco:
Maybe, you know, one hour less if I stay up too late watching TV or something.
Marco:
But, you know, it's it's pretty, pretty boring.
Marco:
I didn't always get this much or little, depending on how you look at it, sleep.
Marco:
But that's kind of where I am now.
Marco:
That's why when I briefly did sleep tracking with the Apple Watch this past fall, and I stopped doing it after about a week or two because I'm like, well, this isn't really actionable information that this is telling me.
Marco:
Right now, in this point in my life, I seem to have fairly normal, functional sleep.
Marco:
And that's it.
John:
If you want to feel like an underachiever with your sleep, you should get... I recently got a new tracker dog collar thing that I'm trying for my dog.
John:
I was going to say for you.
John:
And it also does sleep tracking.
John:
For your dog?
John:
Yes.
John:
And I'm fairly shocked by the numbers in the dog sleep tracking.
Marco:
No, dogs sleep a lot.
Marco:
I mean, they're kind of supposed to.
Marco:
They're made for that.
Marco:
They're built that way.
Marco:
They do get a lot of sleep normally in a healthy way.
Marco:
so what's your guess i mean i still don't have like i think i only have maybe like a couple weeks worth of data here but what's your guess for sleep numbers for my dog hours per day oh geez i would say i mean i don't know dogs seem to be like in a very light sleep a lot they're almost like screensavers like like if you if you don't play with them for a few minutes they go into power save mode and just fall asleep like well
John:
My dog is young.
John:
She's only four years old, and she goes to a doggy play date most days during the week where she sees other dogs and runs around in the backyard and is just generally a crazed beast.
Marco:
I'm going to say something like 16 hours a day.
Casey:
Yeah, I was going to say somewhere between 12 and like 18.
Casey:
So, yeah, I'll go 50.
Casey:
Are we doing Price is Right rules?
Casey:
Sure, Price is Right rules.
Casey:
Price is Right rules, $1.
Casey:
No, I would say 15 hours.
John:
What did Marco say?
John:
16?
John:
16, yeah.
John:
Actual answer, 18 hours per day.
John:
Ah, damn.
John:
But here's the breakdown.
John:
8.9 hours per night, because my dog is up by like 6, 6.30 a.m.
John:
every single day, which is one of the reasons the household has to get, or at least someone in the household, although it's usually my wife, she usually does this for me, has to take the dog out at 6.30 a.m., although the whole house starts at that time of day on the weekdays anyway, just to get everyone up and out.
John:
But then during the day, 9.3 hours average nap time.
John:
And that's with like going to a doggy play date and going on multiple walks and doing a lot of stuff and getting way more steps than us during the day because it's a step tracking too.
John:
As the notifications frequently say, my dog is crushing it.
John:
Crushing it by sleeping 18 hours a day and getting like 37,000 steps.
Casey:
I fully understand this is not an endorsement.
Casey:
You just got the device.
Casey:
But which tracker are you using now?
John:
Yeah, so this is actually a good tech story.
John:
Like the reason I have any kind of tracker collar thing is because my dog is a flight risk.
Casey:
Oh, same.
Casey:
Is there any way to fix this?
Casey:
Because it's driving me better.
John:
There is in theory, but like you read a lot of stuff about it.
John:
And here's the thing.
John:
Dogs with very strong prey drive are very difficult to train to come back to you because the whole the whole training process relies on you having something that the dog finds motivating.
John:
So you can use like pieces of steak or hot dogs or whatever you think, like a whole live chicken, like whatever you think your dog is going to be into.
John:
right to get you can as soon as you get something the dog finds desirable you can train a dog to do anything right the problem comes when the most desirable thing in the entire world as far as the dog is concerned is the squirrel the bird the whatever and nothing you ever have no piece of food meat treat nothing you ever have will ever compete with what's out there i feel like it's impossible to to to train a dog to do that now that's not always true because maybe that would
John:
is interesting now but maybe when the dog was a puppy it was more interested in whatever you could find and i just did a bad job of training recall or whatever but my dog has a very very strong prey drive so birds squirrels rabbits those are the most interesting things in the world and so when we take the dog to the dog park which is unfenced because of annoying people who live near me who who consistently block the ability for us to put a fence around our dog park
John:
because they think it would be ugly or something because their dogs aren't flight risk or because they just don't care anyway i don't like those people we take her dog to the dog and she runs and she runs around and plays with the other dogs and it's like she's on a timer because eventually when she gets bored of the other dogs that are there she will see a bird a mile away and say you know what i'm going there now and she's off like a shot so
John:
We need too many times that happened.
John:
We said we need to get a GPS on this dog.
John:
So we want to have a GPS.
John:
So when the dog runs off, we can pull out our phones and literally be able to track this dog anywhere to find the dog and bring it back home.
John:
Right.
John:
So we had this with the whistle thing for the longest time.
John:
But my dog is small.
John:
It's like a 40 pound dog.
John:
And the whistle GPS is a big cube.
John:
Like it's literally like a rectangular solid.
John:
And I feel bad putting this big rectangular solid on the car.
John:
It's not very heavy.
John:
But I feel bad when the dog's laying down and like the little cube is in the way.
John:
I'm always rotating out of the way.
John:
So it's, you know, just I wanted something that was slimmer.
John:
So, you know, me and Marco are Instagram ad victims.
Casey:
Instagram advertising.
John:
Half of my ads on Instagram are now dog stuff because they've got my number on that.
John:
um and there's there was this new company i think i saw them like a couple years ago maybe they were even a kickstarter that was like now a new gps dog collar i'm like wow that looks way slimmer than the big brick that i have now but i just forgot about because i figured the company would go out of business never make a product but somehow they did make a product and it's a real shipping thing and i started getting instagram ads for it and i ordered it and it is slimmer there are other problems with it that i'm currently working on because it like it's
John:
it's this weird detachable thing and it's like integrated with the collar but i'd rather not have it integrated with the collar i'd rather just have it attached to the collar and just have a conventional collar so i'm working out the collar details still iterating on this process but the point is i got it it is slimmer the app is a little bit fancier than the old one it does sleeper tracking the old one didn't the other hand the whistle did lick tracking how much is your dog it did licking and scratching how much is your dog licking and how much is your dog scratching and is that abnormal or not to see
John:
you know anyway that's interesting yeah because like yeah that is a those are common problems for dogs i i feel like i would notice them in person like i don't need the app to tell me that but it's interesting that it do that really only we're just using for the gps feature but the main thing i wanted to check is like how how good is the g how long does the battery last and how good is the gps like when the dog is lost does it update once every five minutes because that kind of sucks you'll always be you know
John:
behind where the dog was you'll get to where the dog was five minutes ago but now it's not there anymore right um so this seems to work pretty well updates every 60 seconds the battery is pretty darn good uh the original whistle battery was terrible the new whistle battery is so good that i forget to charge it because it's like you can last like a month
John:
the new one says it lasts from one to three months i think one month is probably what it's going to end up lasting uh let me find the so what's the name of it you never actually told it is uh f i i don't know if it's fee or fi uh the url is tryfi.com try fee try fi um because i guess they couldn't get fi.com
John:
So you can see it's way slimmer than a giant rectangular thing, but on a small dog, the default collars are one inch wide, which is a little bit too wide for me.
John:
And I don't like the tracker to be an integral part of the collar just because I don't trust that...
John:
the little hinge things will hold and if the tracking collar breaks off of your dog right then that you've defeated the purpose because now your dog is loose and doesn't have the tracker on it so i'm trying to look into a thinner collar that's not as wide and that also the collar is just a complete collar and then the tracker goes on the outside of it the nice thing about this company is i bought this collar because i saw it advertised
John:
And I got it and hooked it up and used it.
John:
And, you know, it's going well and everything.
John:
And then, like, two days after I got the collar and started to use it, I started seeing Instagram ads for $100 off the collar.
Casey:
What?
John:
Why don't you tell me about these things?
John:
I just ordered it.
John:
And now Instagram just constantly was showing it to me.
John:
It was like the ad I kept seeing.
John:
I was like, it's rubbing it in my face.
John:
$100 off.
John:
Uh-huh.
John:
So I was like making jokes in my life.
John:
I'm like, I should email these people and just say, I know you shouldn't honor this.
John:
Like, I just thought of Merlin and like the people who are like the Walgreens with an expired coupon saying, I know this coupon is expired.
John:
Can you honor it anyway?
John:
It's like, that's the point of the expiration date.
John:
No, you can't honor it anyway.
John:
It's expired.
John:
It's like, yeah, but I'm me.
John:
Can't I get the discount, right?
John:
I know you ordered this before we had this sale, but I figured it's worth a try.
John:
I'll try to be nice about it.
John:
And basically I just sent them screenshots of the Instagram ads and I said, I'm seeing these ads everywhere.
John:
I know I ordered this collar like a few days ago and the sale wasn't on then, but is there any way you can give me the discount anyway?
John:
And they immediately replied and said, oh, yeah, sure.
John:
You're still within the return window, which is essentially them saying, we know that you could just return this and buy it again.
John:
But please don't do that.
Casey:
We'll save you the effort.
John:
And so they just gave me the discount retroactively, which I thought was great.
John:
So this ended up being like a $50 purchase.
John:
for a brand new gps dog collar obviously you have to pay a yearly subscription for the gps thing this one does wi-fi gps and lte so it's like in every possible band and the way the way it does the power savings is you have to make sure it's on wi-fi when it's in your house because that's way lower power and it just checks in periodically and then when it leaves your house then it goes on cellular and that takes way more power
John:
uh anyway um so far so good with the feed thing still working on the collar it is actually it's hard to find a collar that is that fits well on a small dog and like i said i'm still trying to work through the issue of like i don't want the i don't want this to be a structural element of the collar or the dog yeah like when like when uh the transmission and engine are structural elements of fancy sports cars i don't want that for my god i just want a plain old collar where the collar is the collar and this is thin enough that it will go on the outside of it
John:
um so that's what i'm working on now i ordered like there's a whole sort of sub ecosystem of fee compatible collars like third parties make collars that work with this so that can like sort of latch onto it and there's a whole range of them and a lot of them seem like etsy type sellers so i ordered one and it's completely customizable what color what size what color do you want the things what kind of buckle class what thickness right do you want your dog's name engraved on it or whatever but then it's like two to three weeks for them to i assume hand make this collar and send it to me so
John:
I ordered one of those a few days ago and a few weeks when it arrives.
John:
So hopefully it'll be better than the default collar it comes with.
Casey:
So how much is the annual service?
Casey:
Because I'm looking at this $150 collar, you know, Instagram ad notwithstanding, but I don't see anywhere on this website, maybe I'm a moron, that it talks about how much the service is.
John:
yeah they i don't think they advertise too much because obviously that's where they get you as they say right the service is the whole thing because you pay for it once but you pay the service every single year i think they give you 30 days for free so it's like don't worry about the service you don't have to pay anything you just buy it and you use it and that's great for trying it out but i believe it's a hundred dollars a year after that i think you can get a discount if you buy two or three years in a row but it's kind of the same and the whistle was the same the whistle is like you buy a yearly plan and it was like a hundred bucks a year but for keeping track of your dog it's money if you have a dog that it's flight risk it is money well spent
Marco:
I'm just laughing at how big these collars are because hops wears a three eighths inch wide collar, which is basically like, it's basically a cat.
Marco:
It's fair.
Marco:
It's he's, he's, you know, a 14, 15 pound dog.
John:
He's not, not a big dog.
John:
Yeah.
John:
That's the problem with a lot of these GPS things.
John:
Like,
John:
tech wise you know you can only make it so small and the smaller you make it the worse the battery life is so people with very small dogs is difficult although i will say that in my research and looking at all these things i do run across cat collars because cats are also flight risks but i feel so bad for the cats in these pictures because cats are not large animals compared to a 40 pound dog most of the time and so when you put a big tracker on a cat they just must feel so terrible like get this thing off
John:
me but i but again i feel for the people who are constantly losing their cats who have cats that are escape artists it better to be able to keep track of your pet use modern technology but uh yeah for i don't think hops is flight risk so you're probably fine yeah he's really not well if you see another one of those a hundred dollar off coupons on instagram let me know they're there right now i guarantee you they are there if you i don't get dog advertising the code i'll look at my sent mail it's it's like a coupon code that you enter i'm gonna read it off on the air and sell some college here let's see um
Marco:
Use code ATP for $100.
John:
There is a referral code thing.
John:
I will try to put the referral code.
John:
Oh, do that.
John:
Do that.
John:
Yeah, I'll try to put it in the show notes link.
John:
There is a referral code.
Marco:
Also, for whatever it's worth, Casey, as John will tell you, I'm sure as well, this does get easier with age of the dog.
Marco:
You know, like puppies will run out anywhere for anything.
Marco:
As dogs get older, it becomes easier to keep them from doing that or they will just naturally not want to run away as much.
John:
Yeah, I keep waiting.
John:
But obviously, Daisy is not that old.
John:
She's only four years old.
John:
So that's
John:
Not a puppy, but it's not old yet either.
John:
But she has not lessened in her furrow to destroy every small animal she can find.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, some dogs never change, but the odds are on your side that this will get easier.
Casey:
I sure hope so, because it happened just a day or two ago.
Casey:
You know, we had gotten a bunch of snow.
Casey:
Actually, it's worth briefly discussing this.
Casey:
So Richmond got somewhere, I would say, around four inches of snow starting Monday morning and the first day of school since...
Casey:
mid-december that that the kids have is tomorrow because four days of school ruined richmond for three days um and so and anyways uh penny ran out because declan was trying to go from the backyard with within the fence area to the front yard and apparently was not quick enough and penny was like freedom
Casey:
And she was running halfway down the neighborhood.
Casey:
And I looked at Erin and said, basically, if this happens again, I hope she finds her way home because I'm not chasing her.
Casey:
And I think I mean that because I'm so sick of it.
Casey:
Oh, come on.
Casey:
But I'm not sure.
Casey:
But anyway, so I feel like it would be nice to have something like this on her.
Casey:
Because even though it only happens at most once a month, it infuriates me disproportionately to the frequency in which it happens.
Casey:
Because I am just...
Casey:
She's furious when it happens because she just does not care.
Casey:
She's like, oh, there you are.
Casey:
Now it's a game.
Casey:
See you.
John:
You just got to be more careful with the opening closing of the doors.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Tell my kids that.
John:
Well, I know.
John:
I mean, it's a pain with small kids as well, but they can also be trained to do it, especially if they care about the dog.
John:
But you can also train your dog to recall at this point.
John:
I don't think she's passed the trainability point.
John:
See if you can find something that she likes more than freedom.
John:
Absolutely nothing.
John:
I found I went to the app.
John:
There's like a QR code and there's a referral.
John:
So my referral code for T-R-Y-F-I dot com.
John:
Try feed dot com.
John:
My referral code is five nine R-M-G-2.
John:
I will put this in the show notes.
Casey:
Great podcasting.
Casey:
Use that referral code.
John:
This is not a sponsor.
John:
They're not a sponsor of this program at all.
John:
Um, and the code for $100 off, I'm assuming it's still active is New Year's 100, all one word, N-E-W-Y-E-A-R-S-1-0-0.
John:
$100 off $150 car.
John:
Why?
John:
Because they get $100 a year from you and that's where the real money is made.
John:
It's not on this device.
Marco:
I'm just glad that you found something good as a dog product on Instagram because that is one area, you know, I will buy pretty much any cool looking, you know, jacket or something off Instagram, but dog stuff between Instagram and Kickstarter, I've had terrible luck with any kind of dog related product.
John:
Usually it's like a holistic medicine, but for dogs, try this magic powder.
John:
Your dog will stop chewing.
John:
Oh, really?
John:
Don't try that stupid evidence-based medicine.
John:
Try these magic crystals.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Don't go to your vet and ask about allergies.
John:
Just try this thing that we wave over your dog's head and it will tell you that your dog is allergic to grass.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Iodine.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
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.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
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-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A
Casey:
Something appeared in the show notes a while back, which is an interesting question, and I'm not sure how to answer it.
Casey:
And the question is as follows.
Casey:
Should Apple stop using leather?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I feel like real honest to goodness leather, like the skin, the hide of an animal, probably not the wisest choice to use anymore.
Casey:
But aren't there like, and Marco, I presume you would know best of any of us.
Casey:
Aren't there some pretty good like synthetic or fake leathers at this point?
John:
You should know about this from the automotive world.
John:
That's fair.
John:
It's been a very big trend, especially recently to not use leather in cars, even super expensive ones, obviously for all the obvious reasons, like aside from leather, having to kill animals because they don't give you their skin for free.
John:
Raising animals is expensive and bad for the environment and all, you know, it's like if we can do better than leather, but of course you want something that feels expensive and is fancy.
John:
And in our childhood,
John:
fake leather it was not a sign of fanciness right if you had a fake leather interior or a vinyl interior in your car it was seen as less but these days in lots of very fancy cars there's a trend towards having things that have some of the qualities of leather but that are not leather often they call it vegan leather which is a really weird way to phrase it but that's what they do
John:
And so lots of car interiors from lots of makers and very expensive cars have seats that are made of things and not leather.
John:
I've never been a big fan of leather seats just because they're cold in the winter.
Casey:
Strong disagree.
John:
They're cold in the winter, even when you have seat heaters.
John:
And I guess you can pre-warm them.
John:
But I've always liked cloth seats because they grip you better.
John:
But I understand cloths can seem cheap and can wear off if your butt wears a groove in it and leather can be more...
John:
more sort of tough over time but it depends on the leather sometimes leather wears out near the bolsters and everything too right so i think we can do better i think apple should not use leather for all the reasons we stated but also because we can do better i think the experiments in car interiors and dashboards and other parts of cars that you touch have shown that there are other better options that are just plain better than leather that feel good but that are more durable and more grippy and maybe also not as cold in the winter
Marco:
The arguments against using leather I think are worth noting here because in the context of the kind of company Apple is, the kind of values and priorities they have, especially regarding environmentalism, it is kind of surprising.
Marco:
If Apple didn't
Marco:
sell leather goods already.
Marco:
And we're talking mostly phone cases, but they also have those weird leather pouches for Macs and stuff, and obviously iPad covers.
Marco:
That's mainly what we're looking at here.
Marco:
If Apple didn't sell those things initially, like in the present day, and they started selling them,
Marco:
I think that would seem weird.
Marco:
If there was no historical baggage, if they just started selling leather stuff as this company that's all about environmentalism and politically they're pretty progressive, that would seem odd that they would start selling animal-based leather as a mass market item in their stores.
Marco:
That wouldn't be the kind of thing you would expect Apple to do.
Marco:
I think there's – I mean there's all sorts of ways you could look at this question and all sorts of people's opinions on the role of animal products in our supply chain, our food.
Marco:
One way to look at this is like using –
Marco:
Animals is very expensive in certain ways.
Marco:
It's very expensive to the environment.
Marco:
It's very expensive morally in certain ways, and people have different levels of which they care about that, but it's something that is very inefficient and has a lot of downsides.
Marco:
And, like, I personally – I eat animal foods, but I've been dramatically reducing how much of them I eat in the last year or so because I've started caring more about that kind of thing, about, like, you know, if –
Marco:
If I can make this dish with oil instead of butter, I'll make it with oil.
Marco:
If it doesn't make that big of a difference, who cares?
Marco:
There's so many meat alternatives on the market now that are really good, many of which I actually prefer to the meats that they are being alternatives to.
Marco:
Alternative eggs, alternative dairy products, a lot of this alternative, you know, milks and stuff, a lot of this stuff, I have learned to, I have preferred the alternatives recently because they're just, in many ways, they're better and
Marco:
I've started to realize I really don't want to use animal stuff wastefully in ways that it's not really providing a big benefit to me or in ways that there are good alternatives because using alternatives is better for the environment.
Marco:
It is better morally.
Marco:
It does solve a lot of problems or reduce a lot of problems.
Marco:
So I think leather, you can look at that same way.
Marco:
You could say, well...
Marco:
If there's benefits to using things that are not leather, we should probably look into that.
Marco:
And there are.
Marco:
So that question is answered.
Marco:
Are there benefits to not using leather?
Marco:
Yes, absolutely.
Marco:
And then the question is, are there good alternatives?
Marco:
And yes, there are.
Marco:
And not necessarily in every possible way or style, but I think they're close enough.
Marco:
There's enough great alternatives to leather that I think Apple should stop using it.
Marco:
That's not to say that everyone should stop using leather phone cases.
Marco:
Other companies will make them as they do now, and that's fine.
Marco:
But I think that it's weird that Apple makes leather products now.
Marco:
With today's sensibilities, today's realities of environmentalism and climate change and the kind of stuff that's really important to the world, it does seem weird that Apple still does sell leather.
Marco:
And I think we have enough good alternatives that cover enough of the previous need for leather now that while other companies will continue to sell and that's fine for them, I think Apple should lead the way here and stop.
John:
And like I said, it's not just that we get things that are close enough to leather.
John:
We have things that are better in some ways than leather.
John:
Worse in some, but better in some ways.
John:
And so for your particular application, you may find a thing that is superior to leather in all the ways that you care about for your use case.
John:
And even if you don't, you'll find something that is superior to leather in one way, but slightly worse in another way.
John:
Yeah.
John:
There are lots of good alternatives and you have to be careful with the alternatives because the alternative is like, oh, this is a petroleum based product.
John:
That's not great either.
John:
Like, or it takes some huge amount of energy to make this alternative that it's worse than like the amount of fertilizer and runoff and grazing and methane put out by the cow that, you know.
Marco:
I mean, it would need it to be a lot – to be worse than a cow.
John:
But some synthetic stuff, they can end up being very expensive and energy inefficient or use rare chemicals or terrible processes.
John:
You have to be careful.
John:
That's why a lot of the car interiors aren't just, oh, we use like vegan leather, but also they say things like, not only do we not use leather, but this entire dashboard is made from recycled materials or the seats are made from ground-up magazines or like whatever.
John:
Like they try to –
John:
not just say it is an alternative that we didn't have to kill an animal for they try to say and also it took less energy to make it is you know less costly to the environment that has less external side effects and stuff like that so we've made a lot of advances in that area and you know one example is fancy high-end supercars if they're trying to be performance oriented haven't included leather for years because it's too slippery like you want to sit seat that grips you that's why like alcantara and all the other sort of
John:
faux leather faux suede type of synthetic materials come in because performance wise the one characteristic that matters the most is how grippy it is and leather just falls down there so if you see a leather seat in a car you know it's the more luxury oriented one because it's not as grippy as the other ones right
John:
I think that's true of phone cases as well.
John:
I said about my leather case that I have on my phone that it almost seems like it's synthetic leather, and I would be perfectly happy if it was synthetic leather because it doesn't even seem like good synthetic leather.
John:
It's just grippy enough.
John:
I don't know what alternative.
John:
Does it seem like it's vinyl or whatever?
John:
I want the performance characteristics of leather, but if you saw this leather case...
John:
It would take a lot for you to realize that it's not fake leather because it looks so artificial.
John:
It's so uniform.
John:
It doesn't smell like leather.
John:
It just has a few of the performance characteristics of leather.
John:
So I would totally buy a first party or third party case with fake leather if it felt like this.
John:
And I believe that's definitely possible.
Marco:
Yeah, and I think moreover, it's a sign like Apple, they care so much about environmentalism in so many other ways.
Marco:
They'll change the materials they use in their cables or their chip boards or whatever to avoid certain dangerous or toxic chemicals.
Marco:
They make other decisions across their product lines for environmental reasons.
John:
um even even when it's not you know popular or economical super well like they'll they still care a lot about environmental concerns and they will make changes for those reasons even when they're worse by the way yeah yeah even when like the like the the wires like the the plastic whatever they were using for the plastic and like headphone cables and power cables for many years before apple figured out how to make something that was close to as good they were just plain worse oh yeah the cables were more brittle
John:
They weren't as nice as they used to be.
John:
They didn't feel as expensive.
John:
They didn't hold up as well.
John:
But Apple made the change anyway just to try to prevent whatever environmental harm was coming from the old one.
John:
And eventually, Apple got better enough at the more sustainable plastic that it's not as, you know, people have forgotten about the old ones.
John:
It's kind of like all the things you hear about, like, when I was a kid, product X was made with Y, and that's why it was better.
John:
I'm trying to think of a good example.
John:
Maybe it's like McDonald's fries made with lard.
John:
I think that maybe I'm the only one.
John:
Beef tallow.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I'm maybe I'm the only one old enough to remember those.
John:
And then they changed to like vegetable oil or whatever.
John:
And it was way worse.
John:
And it took McDonald's many years to try to get them back to an acceptable level.
John:
And people will still say, yeah, but they're not like they were when I were a kid.
John:
But, you know, people eventually those people die and people grow up just having McDonald's fries the way they are.
John:
And we all move on, right?
John:
And on the meat front, the exciting slash weird slash gross thing to look out for potentially in our lifetimes is people always trying to grow artificial meat.
John:
uh you don't have to kill any animals and it could be like cellularly exactly the same thing as beef we're not quite there yet it's super expensive to do and it doesn't quite taste and isn't quite formed the same way as real beef but you feel like you can see a path to get there because the fact that we can do it now in a not quite very good way at huge expense that's how technology starts so we just don't know how long will it take to perfect this but if you could get it to be done economically
John:
it would literally be beef like it would be like put it under a microscope it is exactly the same thing as beef you just grew it in a petri dish you didn't have to kill an animal for it and then you can grow it and you know breed out whatever harmful parts there are not breed because you don't have any animals but like eliminate the harmful parts and make essentially synthetic meat that is also real meat but is also synthetic but is healthier than real real meat
John:
And then you can have a whole subculture of people who celebrate killing animals because, of course, they only have beef tallow, McDonald's fries, and they only kill cows to get their beef.
John:
But the rest of us will be healthier and happier.
Marco:
Yeah, that's the thing.
Marco:
I've tried to improve this area of my life recently, and I think if you look at the data and health studies that have been done over time and certainly environmental concerns are a big one, carbon concerns –
Marco:
It would do the world a lot of good if we ate less meat and consumed less animal products.
Marco:
You don't have to all become vegans, but just doing less, that makes a big difference.
Marco:
Right now, especially beef, it's really comically inefficient in terms of environmental stuff, but...
Marco:
Just eating less meat, not having it be like the bulk of every meal goes a long way.
Marco:
Going back to Apple with leather, I think it's surprising that they still have it at all because I don't think they actually are selling a huge quantity of leather.
Marco:
The phone cases, I think, are probably where they have the most of it.
Marco:
I don't imagine they're selling a ton of their laptop pouches for $300 or their expensive leather watch bands.
Marco:
Most of the leather is probably just phone cases.
Marco:
And Apple's phone cases are nice, but they're also more expensive than the competition.
Marco:
And typically, most people don't want to spend the Apple price on their phone case.
Marco:
They usually buy some other case because it's cheaper.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
they're probably not selling a huge amount of leather.
Marco:
And so that's why it makes it even more curious why they keep doing it at all.
John:
They got that partnership with Hermes.
John:
That's all leather stuff and fancy.
John:
I guess they even did the AirTags thing.
John:
Isn't that one leather too?
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
That's why it feels like they're just doing it for like high profit accessory sales.
John:
Cause it's fancy.
John:
Like, cause that's why, I mean, same thing with cars.
John:
Like why the expensive ones have leather?
John:
Cause it was fancier and it was better in many ways.
John:
And you know, it was like, it felt more expensive and that's why it was in the fancy cars.
John:
But like I said, even in the fancy cars, sometimes there is a performance character that's more important than it being a fancy, but Apple still seems to be hanging on it just because it's a fancy thing.
John:
Like,
John:
how the 20th anniversary Mac had leather on the trackpad area, right?
John:
It was the signal from the 80s on.
John:
I mean, it's always been a signal of fancy things in sort of the modern era or 20th century leather.
John:
But these days, I think the tide is turning, not because people care that much about animals, but just because we can make synthetic products at a reasonable price, especially for high-end goods.
John:
You can afford to use a more expensive material
John:
and consumers can be and have been in many ways convinced that that is fancier uh you know the same sort of cachet that comes with well i have an electric car so i'm not polluting the environment or whatever that is a thing that rich people can get behind and feel good about doing it and it feels fancier to them to have an electric car than to have an internal combustion because internal combustion feels old and teslas are cool right and if that tesla comes with an interior that's made from recycled golf balls or something that's a thing that
John:
that they can feel it you know they feel fancier about that they're like oh well their friends get into their cool car and their door handle pops out and the weird lights go around the thing i'll say did you know this dashboard is made from recycled golf balls like we're turning that corner now where to be the cool rich person thing doesn't have to be leather anymore that can be eventually we can turn it around where eventually that seems like a
John:
barbaric lower class thing and you can sell the rich people the expensive and in the beginning the alt the good alternatives are probably going to be more expensive than leather but you know it trickles down right so i think we are slowly turning that corner we can especially in material science where it's not things that people are eating getting people to eat less meat is going to be much more difficult right but in material science we're working on that well and like you said marco on the eating stuff
John:
we're making some headway there with the fake meats not necessarily the lab grown ones but like the you know impossible burger and beyond burger and all the other things and fast food restaurants have that as an alternative i personally think veggie burgers that don't even try to be like meat are better than the fake meat ones but that's just me
Marco:
uh you know i know some people like the other ones i i used to agree with you same which one do you like i i don't like beyond uh beyond tastes like it smells like somebody who has yes yeah beyond stuff it yeah beyond stuff is very much not for me it tastes like meat designed by people who haven't tasted meat in a very long time
John:
And my daughter is a vegetarian and she likes beyond the best.
John:
So don't take my word for it.
John:
But I personally don't like beyond.
Marco:
No, I'm a big fan of impossible.
Marco:
Like I use the impossible grounds whenever I make tacos and like, you know, because like in that kind of situation, it's like, again, it's mostly the sauce.
Marco:
yeah it's mostly seasonings and accessories so it's like if the if the you know quote meat tastes a little bit different it's not even that different but if it tastes a little bit different nobody cares like it's in the context of taco night like you're there for all the other stuff the meat is mostly a delivery device for chili powder and salt so you're not really there it doesn't really matter right
Marco:
So it's so I like I haven't made ground beef tacos in like over a year because the value of the meat is not high enough to offset its costs to to the world and to my mind, you know.
Marco:
So that's an easy substitute, right?
Marco:
But for breakfast, I have just egg instead of scrambled eggs because it's healthier and I like the taste better in the way I make it.
Marco:
And other things like the Impossible grounds, they stay in the freezer for a long time really nicely.
Marco:
And so often I'll take out a pack of ground beef to make tacos in the past and I'll make it and it'll smell kind of funny because maybe it wasn't very good to begin with or something.
Marco:
And sometimes I even have to throw it out because it smells like it's rotten or something.
Marco:
That's never happened with Impossible.
Marco:
stuff.
Marco:
There's advantages.
Marco:
You don't have to feel weird when you're like... I hate having to deal with raw chicken and then having to wash everything, scrub everything down so hard afterwards and worry about all these bacterial infections.
John:
If you want to find a way to reduce your meat consumption, one thing that's worked for me was you keep talking about all these things with ground beef and I'm like, oh, I very rarely have ground beef or much less than I used to.
John:
Shortly after I was first married and we were in our first place together...
John:
Both my wife and I had at various times bouts of food poisoning that we attributed to ground beef that we just eaten, often in tacos or other dishes with ground beef.
John:
So eventually we just right or wrong.
John:
I'm not saying this is true because very often people misattribute what gave them food poisoning.
John:
They just assume it's the last thing they ate, which is sometimes not the case because it takes a long time.
Marco:
Yeah, a lot of times it's like the spinach that was on the burger or something.
John:
Yeah, who knows?
John:
But anyway, for whatever reasons, both of us just kind of got turned off to ground beef and just basically slowly but surely eliminated everything that we were eating that had ground beef in it with the possible exception of hamburgers.
John:
And it was just because of bad experiences with food poisoning.
John:
And yeah, foodborne illnesses come on vegetables too.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
In all fairness, there's lots of reasons not to eat ground beef.
Marco:
It's really quite dark.
John:
I very rarely have hamburgers.
John:
I have hot dogs instead, which is not any better, I realize.
John:
Anyway, this is how people change their diets.
John:
You eventually get to the point where the thing that you used to like starts to turn you off.
John:
Yeah, that's where I am with a lot of this stuff.
John:
Um, you'd be surprised how you can change over time and it's, you know, it becomes, it doesn't become a thing that you have to work to do if you're just actually turned off by it and more turned on by some other food.
John:
Like it no longer becomes a thing that you have to make an effort to do.
Marco:
Yeah, and I think, again, I think it's very important to think about this kind of stuff as, you know, think when you are making a choice about food.
Marco:
Consider things like the environmental cost more than we have in the past.
Marco:
And that's not to say, like, you know, if I go to a steakhouse, I'm going to get a filet mignon.
Marco:
I'm going to get a real steak, and I'm going to eat it, and I'm going to enjoy it.
John:
I thought you said you're going to get a real steak.
John:
You said you're going to get a filet mignon, which is it.
John:
No.
Marco:
there it is no the reason okay no the reason i go with fillets is that first of all they're good and i don't care and second of all they're the smallest steak offered because i want to have the most room for sides i don't want to have 16 ounces of cow in my stomach and blocking out all the other stuff from getting in the whole reason to go to steakhouse is to get sides and stuff and the steak is good too i disagree but okay
Marco:
Anyway, but, like, you know, the point is, like, it's important for, you know, as we – in our climate realities that we're in and our environmental realities that we're in, it's important for people to realize, like, okay, this type of thing is more costly to the world or morals or my own health in some way.
Marco:
Yeah, this is an interesting scenario.
Marco:
I just want to bring this up as you keep talking about making different personal choices.
John:
Unlike things like energy consumption, where it was a an actual explicit strategy of fossil fuel companies to introduce the concept of a carbon footprint to make us all think that our individual personal choices about our recycling and living is the way to prevent global warming.
John:
It's basically just a way to distract people from saying, don't regulate us as fossil fuel companies.
John:
This will be solved by you making individual choices.
John:
There's no systemic change we should make.
John:
You should just be more careful and take shorter showers.
John:
That's the only way to save the world.
John:
That's a load of crap.
John:
Not to say that we shouldn't make individual choices that are good for the environment.
John:
Just to say that it's absolutely not the solution.
John:
The real solution is to regulate fossil fuel companies and actually care about climate change at a systemic level.
John:
That's the only way to fix it.
John:
But...
John:
And that's because individuals have very little control about how they get their energy.
John:
It's kind of like cable internet access, but worse.
John:
It's like if you don't want to use fossil fuels to heat your home,
John:
very often that is the only solution that is economically viable for you in your place at your income level, right?
John:
Not everyone can just like, I'm going to live in a solar home and everything's going to be, that's incredibly expensive, right?
John:
Sometimes all you can get is, well, you can get oil or natural gas and you don't have control of that because there's these huge utilities and fossil fuel companies with huge subsidies from the government and blah, blah, blah, right?
John:
But in the case of food, the only thing that can change the variety of the food we get are changes in demand, right?
Right?
John:
If nobody wants to eat mealworms, they're not going to spend, you know, like 50% of the acreage of your country raising mealworms because nobody wants to eat them, right?
John:
Lots of people want to eat cows.
John:
They're going to use up a large portion of some land somewhere to raise those cows to sell to you.
John:
Your individual choices may not matter, but unlike the case with fossil fuel companies,
John:
It's not like you're going to be stuck in a situation where you say, well, I have to eat beef because it's the only thing I can buy.
John:
Now, it is true that things that are healthy tend to be more expensive.
John:
In America, you can get corn in everything.
John:
Everything you eat can be made of corn, right?
Marco:
Because it's subsidized and it's not that great.
Marco:
Everything you wear can be made of corn.
Marco:
Your house can be made of corn.
Marco:
Right.
John:
And so there is a systemic issue there, especially with the cost.
John:
Because if you want to eat fresh fruits and vegetables, it's way more expensive than just eating corn syrup and corn for everything, right?
John:
But...
John:
on mass like if we start eating less beef that will cause less beef to be produced and so on and so forth and there is no place where you live where you're like well i even though there's no demand for beef the beef manufacturers push it on us and it's the only food we can buy that's true of corn but not beef right so setting aside corn for now which is technically a vegetable it is mostly just a sugar delivery device
John:
Changing our collective individual choices about how much meat we eat can actually have a material influence on the food that is made.
John:
Because over the centuries, the food that is made has been the food in some respects that is demanded by the people.
John:
Again, they give the mealworm example because in this country we tend not to eat a lot of insects.
John:
right which is why we don't manufacture a lot of insects for eating but it's not because they're not good food and healthy and and you know sustainable and economical or whatever it's just because people in this country don't want to eat insects for the most part right that's the only reason right whereas no matter how much you like or dislike natural gas and oil and coal or whatever it's freaking everywhere in this country because we our individual choices can't change that because there's a huge infrastructure behind that and wherever you live it's not like you have a choice of 17 different kinds of electricity and heating in most cases
John:
Maybe you have a choice of one or two.
Casey:
But the Impossible Burger, if you haven't tried it, try it out.
Casey:
They sell the, what is this, a Whopper at Burger King?
Casey:
Actually, that reminds me.
Marco:
Burger King sells it.
Marco:
A lot of places sell Impossible Burgers now.
Marco:
And you can, in many U.S.
Marco:
grocery stores, you can get the one pound, like little squares of ground, you know, quote beef, but impossible meat.
Marco:
We always keep a few of those in our freezer.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
Again, for stuff like tacos, it's fine.
Marco:
I wouldn't have a massive steak out of it.
Marco:
I think that might be a little bit weird.
Marco:
A whole other thing, too, is meat substitutes are...
Marco:
oftentimes not significantly healthier in certain metrics than meat.
Marco:
It's not like you can – because usually there's high amounts of oil and stuff in them.
John:
There's just different kinds of fat and sugars and everything there.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But what's nice is that they can help you –
Marco:
not only have a meat-like experience if you don't want to be eating meat, but also they feel like kind of a stepping stone in many ways to a more vegetable-heavy diet.
Marco:
They allow you to go from the traditional American diet more easily to like, hey, you know what?
Marco:
Maybe every meal doesn't have to have a big block of meat next to a big pile of dairy.
Marco:
Maybe there is an alternative way to eat that's a lot healthier than this.
Marco:
And it's nice to have it be like a stepping stone on that way.
Marco:
You know, you shouldn't be eating impossible tacos every single night because you shouldn't be eating tacos every single night.
Marco:
And you shouldn't be eating like burgers every night either.
Marco:
And veggie burgers are not significantly better in certain in certain metrics.
Marco:
But, you know, this it's a good stepping stone on the way there.
Marco:
And, you know, in the same way that really nice fake leather has been a good stepping stone in that in that area.
Marco:
And going again, going back to where we were starting all this.
Marco:
Yeah, I do think.
Marco:
Apple should stop using leather because it's not that important to them and there's lots of good alternatives and there's lots of benefits to stop using it.
John:
I feel like we're going to get someone writing in to tell us how much water almonds used in California and how it's starving out the rest of the state because for every almond you eat, it's like 10 bajillion gallons of water or whatever.
John:
And yes, lots of things can be grown unsustainably or in environmentally harmful ways.
Marco:
Just don't ruin coconut for me.
Marco:
So many good things are made of coconut now.
Marco:
If coconut is somehow horrible, please don't tell me.
John:
We bought a whole coconut on a lark from the supermarket and were very disappointed when it was completely rotten inside.
John:
That's sad.
Casey:
That's a bummer.
Casey:
Hey, you know, talking about the Impossible Burger and the Whopper reminded me of our friends at Fun Fact, where they put the follow-up at the end, which is unequivocally the wrong place for follow-up.
John:
And I tried to convince... Like we follow any rules.
John:
It's all over this freaking show.
Casey:
Well, so here we are.
Casey:
I've got some follow-out, as it turns out.
John:
I tried to put it at the beginning, but...
John:
It's an uphill battle.
Casey:
But I would just like to say to our friends over at Fun Fact, Eric and Alan, that follow-up belongs to the beginning.
Casey:
Come on, get with the program.
Casey:
But anyways, they did a small segment on episode 52, which aired a few days ago, with regard to the origins of the word vamp, which I think I had kind of casually asked what the origin of that was, or maybe it was one of you guys, probably John, asked the origin of the word vamp, and they discussed that on episode 52.
Casey:
And I meant to mention that during follow-up, and I forgot.
Casey:
And so I'm putting it at the end, which is the wrong place for it.
Casey:
And also I wanted to quickly congratulate our mutual friend, David Sparks, who has decided to shut down his law firm and go completely and utterly independent with Max Barkey and Max Barkey Labs.
Casey:
So we'll put a link in the show notes to check that out.
Casey:
And I just wanted to quickly put a shout out for him as well.
John:
The question is, will he be getting more or less sleep now?
John:
I mean, I guess he won't be staying up at night worrying about his clients if he read his posts, but maybe he'll be up all night making more of his guides and stuff.
Casey:
I don't know, but I just wanted to say congratulations because I'm really excited for him.
Marco:
Yeah, I love Unphrenical Independent, Casey.
Marco:
Took you long enough, but you eventually got here.
Casey:
Hey, we got to work on John now.
Marco:
Oh, that's a lost cause.
Casey:
We're never going to get John.
Casey:
It's so true.
Marco:
do you think we're going to get like worse feedback on telling people you should probably eat less meat than when we like people are fine with that like what do you think is more dangerous to say on a podcast like that or like tabs versus spaces we're just going to get the the one person is going to send us a thing about almonds but then they're going to hear me talk about it maybe later and feel bad
John:
Almonds are overrated.
John:
It's not just almonds.
John:
There's lots of things.
John:
If you live in a desert state and they redirect a lot of your water for agriculture, people are going to be angry about whatever you're redirecting to.
John:
Yeah, don't grow almonds in the freaking desert by sucking all the water away from the one river in your state.
John:
But that's more of a California problem than an almond problem, I feel like.
Marco:
Also, almond milk is overrated.
Marco:
Coconut milk is awesome.
Marco:
I heard the top four.
Casey:
I don't particularly like coconut, though.
Casey:
So I drink almond milk because I don't like coconut.
Marco:
I don't like coconut-flavored things or those crunchy toasted coconut bits that are in some candies.
John:
I'm going to say you don't like coconut because you're the one who didn't like the toasted coconut because you felt like it was chewing on little fibers.
John:
That's the whole good thing about coconut.
John:
So I feel like you don't like coconut.
John:
If you don't like that, you don't like coconut.
Marco:
You have no idea how much coconut I consume.
Marco:
Trust me, I like coconut.
Marco:
but who was the one maybe it was tiff who didn't like the little crunchy like stringy bits there's lots of different i mean look earlier today like i i'm see john you bought a whole coconut and you cut it open and i'm sure that process sucked and then inside you couldn't eat it right the coconut is the one remaining thing i will defend as worth getting pre-cut at the grocery store
John:
Well, I mean, it needs to be cut, dried, shredded, and toasted.
John:
Then we're on to something.
Marco:
No, I just, Whole Foods sells, I'm sure other grocery stores sell, like, you know, cut up chunks of coconut meat.
Marco:
I don't like that.
Marco:
No, I need it to be dried, shredded, and toasted.
Marco:
Well, that's different.
Marco:
That's a whole different food.
John:
No, that's just coconut.
John:
That's the way, that's the good way for half coconut.
Marco:
People in the chat are saying coconut oil, coconut oil is fine for certain things.
Marco:
No, but I just like, I like coconut chunks, and I like coconut milk.
Marco:
When I say coconut milk, I'm talking about the Thai kind where the ingredients are coconut and water, not in a big bowling pin shaped bottle and it's like, this is some coconut along with blended with some
Marco:
almonds and also blended with a bunch of like gums and salts and preservatives no that's not i'm talking about coconut and water in a in a solution like that's that is coconut milk and it's really good in lots of things including by itself sometimes um and yeah and and those coconut chunks i also like even coconut water can be delicious although it's usually pretty sugary i don't get a lot of that but do you like a coconut unlike a uh what is it like the german chocolate cake is that the one that has the coconut in the icing that is the one and no
John:
Do you like Mounds or Almond Joy?
John:
No.
John:
See, I'm going to say you don't like coconut because that is the quintessential.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm kind of coming around to John on this one.
John:
I love Mounds, Almond Joy, and whatever that cake is.
Casey:
Almond Joy's got nuts.
Casey:
Mounds don't.
John:
I sang that song to my kids.
John:
I'm saying, just why does everyone my age know the song?
John:
Because it was an ad on TV.
John:
I think they said they were confused about which one had the almonds.
John:
I'm like, I'm not confused.
John:
In fact, let me sing you a song.
Marco:
I had to go find it on YouTube.
John:
It's like in different versions.
Marco:
oh great example of what I was just saying about coconut stuff and food stuff so tonight for dinner I made butternut squash soup now I wanted like a good protein source and so I used chicken bone broth as like the broth base because that's a fantastic protein source especially if you're trying to be somewhat healthy yeah it's chicken based but you know that's one thing where like vegan options don't really have a good like protein heavy broth that's not really available yet as far as I know if you know otherwise please tell me but
Marco:
Instead of using cream, as you would traditionally use in butternut squash soup, I used a bit of coconut cream, which is basically the coconut version of heavy cream, like in a can.
Marco:
It's weird.
Marco:
It comes in these little skinny cans, but I used coconut cream instead, and you couldn't tell any difference at all.
John:
Yeah, when you're baking with stuff, like we have so many milk alternatives, and half the time when I'm baking things, I would just substitute something for the milk, and no one can ever tell.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
There's so many contexts where we use animal stuff that we don't really need to.
Marco:
It's not really making a big difference whether we use it or not.
John:
This is a case very often, though, where milk actually is cheaper than the fancy milks, especially because the fancy milks are for fancy people.
John:
And so sometimes getting almond milk or coconut milk or whatever is way more expensive than getting actual milk.
Marco:
oh yeah and that's that's a whole different issue as well obviously that has to be considered and and of course there's there's the issue of like how various you know farm subsidies make certain things way cheaper than they than they naturally would be yeah that's what we're gonna get people are gonna say you think meat isn't subsidized yes all the things that are bad for us are subsidized yeah oh yeah yeah no and yeah milk is like suspiciously cheap
Marco:
If you don't care about getting organic milk, if you just get any milk, it is weirdly cheap.
Marco:
Eggs, too.
John:
I'm not putting down milk.
John:
I love regular milk, and it is a good, cheap, healthy food that you don't need to kill the animals for.
John:
It doesn't mean that animals aren't treated terribly the way you milk them, but that can be improved.
John:
I feel like milk and butter and stuff like that is the type of thing where it is possible to have a world in which...
John:
uh we get butter and milk uh in a way that is not cruel to animals and that still is also very cheap and makes good use of land where like that's the type of thing it's like a renewable resource type of uh food product um and the alternatives on milk coconut milk all those other alternatives often have more sugar added and lots of artificial things and are expensive to make and produce and are expensive to buy so i feel like there's definitely still a gap there
John:
Oh, more people are lactose intolerant these days, so that could solve itself with demand based on lactose intolerance.
Marco:
Yeah, totally.
Marco:
And as you mentioned, there are certainly a lot of asterisks on the like, well, it's better for the animals.
Marco:
Yes, it's better than killing them, but there is still a lot of area for improvement in that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Especially anything involving chickens.