Drain the Attic
Casey:
If we didn't go until super duper late tonight, that wouldn't be so terrible.
Marco:
Oh, yeah?
Marco:
What do you think is going to happen?
Casey:
I'm waking up early.
Casey:
Well, no, I'm waking up early to FaceTime with Jelly.
Casey:
Time changes mean that there is no convenient time for me to talk to Australia.
Casey:
And so I'm waking up early after having gone to bed late because I'm a big baby and an old man.
Casey:
That means it would be lovely if we ended before 1030.
John:
How early is early?
Casey:
5.30 I'm going to be on the FaceTime call.
John:
Oh, wow.
John:
Yeah, I remember those days.
Casey:
I forgot that you had all that time with, what was that, East Asia, is that right?
John:
FaceTiming with India, yeah.
John:
I mean, there was lots of overlap times, but sometimes the overlap times are, you know, 5 a.m., 5.30 a.m.
John:
local time.
Marco:
My reason for waking up early tomorrow morning is to meet the movers.
Marco:
I am finally... We're moving out of the old house.
Marco:
And, oh my god, this has been a process.
Marco:
Fine.
Marco:
You know, I have a couple of...
Marco:
family members who over the years we've been like, why, why don't, why doesn't he move?
Marco:
Like he's, he's unhappy where he lives.
Marco:
Why doesn't he move?
Casey:
You're talking about other family members.
Casey:
So like Joe and Susie or whatever.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
I'm with you.
Marco:
And now that I am moving as an adult for the first time, like, you know, I moved, like, before we bought a house, I moved between apartments here and there every few years, like most young people do.
Marco:
That was also a terrible process.
Marco:
But moving a house that has accumulated, like, you know, 13 years of stuff...
Marco:
Wow, what a process this has been.
Marco:
I no longer fault anyone for not wanting to do this process.
Marco:
Like if you're somewhere and your family is like, you should move and you don't want to move.
Marco:
You are right.
Marco:
You probably shouldn't move because moving is terrible.
Marco:
Oh my God, is it bad?
Casey:
I mean, momentum is a mother.
Casey:
It's a lot.
Casey:
Momentum is a lot.
Casey:
And the thing is, like you said, if you don't happen to live in a house, and I don't necessarily mean a standalone dwelling, like a townhouse or like a place where you have lots of nooks and crannies for things, let me assure you that no matter how clean your house is, you have put, in your case, 13 years of miscellaneous detritus
Casey:
All over that house.
Casey:
And the easy answer for you, Marco, is to just throw money at the problem and have movers collect all the detritus and all the other things and pack it up and move it to somewhere else.
Casey:
But if you're smart, and I know you are, and certainly TIFF is, you will try to figure out places or cull and get rid of some of the detritus.
Marco:
Oh, we've done all of these things.
Marco:
So we have called.
Marco:
We filled a whole dumpster.
Marco:
I think I mentioned it on the show about a year ago.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, that's right.
Marco:
We have called.
Marco:
We have gotten rid of lots of stuff.
Marco:
There's lots of stuff that we are not taking, that the new buyers of the house, they're taking some of our furniture from us because we don't need it.
Marco:
And yet, you're in a house for so long.
Marco:
You're like, oh, I'll hang a shelf here.
Marco:
And then that shelf collects stuff.
Marco:
Now you have more stuff, and it's just there forever until move-out day.
Marco:
So we have gotten rid of stuff.
Marco:
We have cleared out stuff.
Marco:
We have given away stuff.
Marco:
We have given away lots of our possessions and furniture and things that we don't need in the new house to friends, relatives, neighbors, some of them to the new buyers, just trying to minimize stuff.
Marco:
But there's still so much stuff because behind and under and around and on top of all the stuff is more stuff.
Marco:
Like it's ridiculous how much – and by the way, like the most shameful part of this is we probably need like 10% of this stuff.
Marco:
Like most of the stuff we really don't need.
Marco:
Oh, man.
Marco:
There is just so much.
Marco:
That's just – the easy state when you have a house, the easy state is to slowly fill it.
Marco:
And so when you are somewhere for 13 years, and especially this is where we've gone through a huge change in our life in this house.
Marco:
We first got a dog, then we had a kid, and the kid has grown up here.
Marco:
And we've grown over the last 13 years.
Marco:
So it's just been...
Marco:
all these different phases of our lives and different people and, and members of the family, you know, and going through all this stuff and collecting all this stuff, going through different ages.
Marco:
Oh my God.
Marco:
It's so, so much.
Marco:
And I, I've read the books that Merlin recommends to like get rid of your stuff.
Marco:
And I know about Marie Kondo.
Marco:
There's still so much stuff.
Marco:
I can't believe it.
Marco:
So anyway, we did everything.
Marco:
We got rid of stuff.
Marco:
We called stuff.
Marco:
We gave stuff away.
Marco:
And for the first time, we have hired packer movers.
Marco:
They pack and move your stuff for you.
Marco:
I don't know how that goes.
Marco:
I've never used that service because any previous time I moved, we couldn't afford that kind of service.
Marco:
So this is a new thing.
Marco:
So we'll see how this goes.
Marco:
But also...
Marco:
Of course, we care a lot about certain stuff.
Marco:
So a lot of our stuff, we've packed ourselves anyway, even though there's literally going to be people here tomorrow who we are paying to do this for us.
Marco:
But in advance of them coming, you have to pack some stuff yourself.
John:
Not only do you have to pack some stuff, move some stuff yourself.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
My car is full.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Again.
Casey:
For what it's worth, I think we've talked many times about how my dad has a multi-hundred album vinyl collection.
Casey:
And for years, we moved every couple of years because my dad worked for IBM.
Casey:
And it just so happened that part of his role, we moved geographically, you know, many hours away from home every couple of years when I was growing up.
Casey:
And early on in this process, mom and dad...
Casey:
found, it happened to be a Mayflower moving company, a Mayflower truck driver, owner, operator, whatever, that they explained, all right, we're very particular about this, that, and the other thing.
Casey:
You know, please treat this, that, and the other thing in a respectful way, and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And the guy was really, really great about it, right?
Casey:
Well, then they moved to Connecticut, which is where I went through middle school and high school.
Casey:
And both of my younger brothers went through effectively their whole schooling.
Casey:
So they were there for something like 20, 25 years.
Casey:
And when he came down to Virginia, I think they either lost contact with their beloved Mayflower mover or what have you.
Casey:
And they had Mayflower, the company, but a very different operator.
Casey:
go ahead and do the move.
Casey:
And among the things they did, despite I'm pretty sure having been instructed otherwise, is they just randomly threw dad's multi-hundred album vinyl collection into random cardboard boxes.
Casey:
So we get to Virginia, and Aaron and I start unloading it and realize, oh my God, these have been effectively randomized.
Casey:
And my dad, whom I love dearly...
Casey:
does not deal with that kind of thing well.
Casey:
So Aaron and I, we tell my mom quietly, here's the situation.
Casey:
The vinyl is completely out of control.
Casey:
We're going to alphabetize it all.
Casey:
Don't tell dad.
Casey:
And he was running around like a crazy person doing other things.
Casey:
And so that's what I ended up doing with Aaron and I, re-alphabetized this several hundred album vinyl collection.
Casey:
And I think that saved all of us potential heart attacks because he would have been beyond...
Casey:
had had he had to deal with that so yeah i don't blame you for wanting to pack your own stuff and at least in for the important stuff and i concur with john's assessment even though john you haven't moved in like 20 years yourself but still he's yeah but when uh when we moved from uh georgia up to massachusetts it was uh my wife's work paid for the move and we had those packer movers uh and so that's all i know like you know from experience um
John:
They did an okay job, but if you really care about certain things, can you guess which things I packed and moved myself?
John:
Keep in mind that I had a 1992 Honda Civic DX with one side mirror.
John:
That was my transport device for anything that wasn't going to go on the truck was going to go in there.
John:
And I had a wife and a dog.
Marco:
It's got to be your Mac collection and maybe the dog.
John:
Mm-hmm.
John:
The dog was in the car.
John:
That collection was not.
John:
No way it would fit.
John:
It was books.
John:
Oh.
John:
You know me and my books.
John:
Because you cannot let... Because they don't care about, like, the corners of the books or the spines of the books or the dust jackets.
John:
They don't care about any of that stuff.
John:
So they will just...
John:
I mean, they'll try to do an OK job, but books are heavy.
John:
I mean, you get a bunch of them in a box and they're sloshing around with each other, especially dust jackets are easy to tear.
John:
Corners are easy to pinch.
John:
It's really bad.
John:
So, yeah, I carefully packed my books in liquor boxes, you know, like a very thick cardboard boxes meant to hold large glass bottles with liquid.
John:
So they're very heavy duty.
John:
and pack them in the car.
John:
There's no way anyone I'm asking.
John:
Remember, this was the CRT.
John:
I had a 17-inch Apple, what was it called, cinema display?
John:
The big 17-inch CRT.
John:
The box that thing came in probably wouldn't have fit anywhere in my Civic, except for maybe in the backseat if I could have got it in, but definitely not in the trunk.
Casey:
i mean it makes perfect sense given your um unique perspective on keeping your books extraordinarily pristine and perfect i'm not surprised now that you say that that that's what you chose to do so what time are you waking up then marco uh like six that's early but that's not completely obscene well good luck and so the move is hypothetically just tomorrow or is this a multi-day affair in theory
Marco:
Well, in reality, this is a multi-month affair because we are moving into the new house, which is not currently livable yet and still does not have a bathroom yet or interior doors or other requirements to make things livable.
Marco:
And so we are moving the stuff into...
Marco:
into not a storage unit because we did that already and it's full uh we did that with like early an earlier calling of stuff resulted in us getting a storage unit and putting like you know stuff that that couldn't tolerate like temperature extremes in there the rest of our stuff is going into the new house's garage for a little while until the new house is livable and at least for stuff and then we can bring the stuff into the house
Marco:
And no, while the stuff does not require a bathroom, we can't bring it in the house yet because we are sanding the floors next.
Marco:
And of course, that's not something you want your furniture around for.
Marco:
Sounds fun.
Marco:
I would strongly suggest not renovating houses.
Marco:
And if you do renovate your house, I would strongly suggest never moving houses.
John:
just don't just never move moving is terrible get the right house the first time and then never move way ahead of you yeah you love your house so much john it's definitely the right we got we got the right house uh and we haven't moved oh my god yeah don't i mean leaving aside the whole house falling down thing or so you claim yeah well to me you keep throwing money at it and it stays up and uh you don't have to move
Marco:
so john i know you've discussed in in past podcasts um you've discussed like your plan with your family was basically like your deal with your wife was that um at some point uh you retire and move to move back to long island is that is that still the plan like do you do you plan to actually do this i'm telling you i i have trouble believing that you will do it now that i'm seeing what it takes to do it
John:
I mean, the good thing about that plan is it presupposes retirement.
John:
So that gives you several years to do the process you're trying to cram into like a few months here.
Marco:
Yeah, true.
John:
And it will take several years just to drain the attic.
John:
And, you know, who knows if I die before then, my kids have to deal with it in the grand tradition of parents dying and leaving all their crap to their kids to deal with it.
Casey:
For what it's worth, you are not allowed to retire from this program.
Casey:
You can retire from everything else.
Casey:
I would say you could retire from your blog, but you've never really been unretired from your blog.
Casey:
But you are not allowed to retire from this program.
Casey:
That is part of the deal.
Casey:
We have some information about keyboard wear.
Casey:
Ezekiel Ellen writes, note on keyboard wear, I experienced this too, especially in my 2014 and 2016 MacBook Pros.
Casey:
In every case, the Apple Store would do on-site replacements for free, including on the butterfly keyboard.
Casey:
Oh, sorry, trigger warning, Marco.
Casey:
Even though not under warranty, they just took it in the back and clicked on a new keycap in five minutes.
John:
yeah i wonder if that i wonder if that's a policy or if they just got lucky because i actually went back and forth i said did they was your thing under warranty because under warranty yeah sure they'll replace it that makes sense but not under warranty they'll just do it for you that sounds great i think everybody with the worn key should take advantage of that uh we talked last week about open ai and as predicted everything changed at least six more times since the time we had recorded and as we sit here right now and it's
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
The company's board of directors will be overhauled, jettisoning several members who had opposed Mr. Altman.
Casey:
Adam D'Angelo, the chief executive of Quora, will be the only holdover.
Marco:
Fun.
Casey:
Also, I think, John, you put in the show notes, there's a pretty good overview article called Five Days of Chaos, How Sam Altman Returned to OpenAI.
Casey:
And we aren't going to go through the minutiae about how this happened, but you can go ahead and read.
Casey:
That's a pretty quick and easy summary.
Casey:
So check that out.
Casey:
We'll have links in the show notes.
Casey:
moving on uh neil weinstock was one of a couple of people i think who wrote in to remind us of something so neil writes anyone thinking of buying a new thermostat should check out their energy company to see if they have deals on the on these things look at the bonkers deals on the store page on jersey central power and light all of which blow away anything you'll ever get on amazon or best buy or whatever yes that's the cheap nest for one stinking dollar they really want you to have these things
Casey:
I briefly looked into this for my power company, which is called Dominion Virginia Power.
Casey:
And the Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium, they're selling for $190, which allegedly is down from $250, if you believe Dominion's on the website.
Casey:
And it looks like the Fancy Nest is down from $250 to $144.
Casey:
So yeah, that's a thing.
Casey:
You should check it out.
John:
I think that's what I did for mine.
John:
When I bought mine, I don't think I bought it through the power company, but I think Massachusetts has something where they'll give you a rebate, so you just got to send them the receipt, and I think I got like $100 back on mine.
Marco:
You do have to check, though.
Marco:
Sometimes there are some strings attached.
Marco:
A lot of utilities will have these programs where somehow they are able to control your thermostat.
Marco:
If, say, for instance, they're overloaded during a peak summer hour, everyone's ACs are on, and they need to raise you a few degrees...
John:
Yeah, they're going to turn off my AC.
Marco:
Yeah, you don't have that problem.
Marco:
But yeah, so anyway, it's worth, like, make sure if you are getting one of these discounted thermostats from your energy company, make sure either there are no strings attached or that you are okay with the strings they are attaching.
Casey:
Yep, fair enough.
Casey:
Marco, a lot of people were either confused or grumpy about your Ecobee slander, I tells you, slander.
Casey:
So do you want to talk to me about how many taps it takes to change temperature, please?
Marco:
Okay, so I was complaining last episode that my Echo Bee... I think it was two episodes ago, actually, wasn't it?
Marco:
Whenever, yeah.
Marco:
I was basically complaining how I'm tired of how clunky it is, and they redesigned the UI, I think earlier this year, there was some kind of software update sometime recently, redesigned the UI to make it even clunkier.
Marco:
And a bunch of people wrote in, some of them said, you are right, it is terrible.
Marco:
Most of them said, you are wrong, you are terrible, which is a good summary of most feedback that most podcasts get about anything.
Casey:
Can't confirm.
Marco:
but the the gist of the i am wrong uh people is that uh apparently the one that i have is an older generation of the hardware and so when i bought i bought them about three years ago they were transitioning between two models i bought the best one that didn't have a microphone and a voice assistant built into it because i thought that's kind of weird i don't need that in my thermostat i think what that actually meant was it was older hardware too like older guts maybe slower processing guts
Marco:
Well, that was fine under the software that came with them, which it was never... Look, the UI was never great, and I had lots of problems getting them set up with HomeKit.
Marco:
I had lots of problems overriding their dumb smart behaviors that they wanted me to keep doing, and they would override HomeKit, and HomeKit would override them, and they would fight, and HomeKit would say it was holding, but then Thermostat wouldn't be holding, or it said it to some...
Marco:
ridiculous temperature that would make the thing go full blast like all the way up to 80 degrees or whatever so they took a lot of babysitting and a lot of weird setup stuff they were never great but at least with the original software they were slightly usable and the software update that they did earlier this year whenever that was made them substantially slower and less responsive so for me to change my thermostat temperature actually requires walking up to it tapping it to wake it up it doesn't wake up on its own for some reason tapping it to wake it up waiting a second for it to wake up
Marco:
Then tapping the little zone of changing the temperature, which is a very small tap target now for some reason, waiting for that to activate because that's not responsive either.
Marco:
So that's another second gone.
Marco:
Then tapping the actual temperature up or down or whatever.
Marco:
So in practice, I hardly ever do it.
Marco:
And I will instead prefer to do it via Siri or whatever through HomeKit.
Marco:
But still, that's what I was annoyed about.
Marco:
apparently the newer model with the newer hardware is faster and more responsive and most people say when they walk up to it it wakes up reliably before they even get to it so that saves them one of the taps and one of the animations and wake up delays so maybe the new echo bees that i don't have are less crappy than the ones i have but you know what's even better the nest
Marco:
I also, I was told by a bunch of people over many months, actually, about this product called the Starling Home Hub.
Marco:
And this is this little like $100, basically what appears to be like a pre-configured Raspberry Pi kind of box, where it's like a bridge product, a self-contained automatic bridge thing that bridges all Nest products into HomeKit.
Marco:
Nest cameras, Nest thermostats, whatever.
Marco:
It bridges them into HomeKit.
Marco:
And a bunch of people wrote in over the last few months to basically say, I have one of these things and it's great.
Marco:
And it bridges Nest into the HomeKit world perfectly.
Marco:
So I order one of those.
Marco:
I'm going to see how it goes.
Marco:
But everyone recommended this thing.
Marco:
We've been hearing about it for a while now.
Marco:
Now that I just bought some new Nest stuff, I figured I'd give it a try.
Marco:
So I'll report back once I have some time with it to see how it goes.
Marco:
But it comes very well regarded.
Casey:
No snark.
Casey:
Why buy this thing and not like a Raspberry Pi?
Casey:
You just wanted the problem to go away?
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
The last thing I want to do is try to monitor like various, you know, things like Homebridge or whatever.
Marco:
I don't want to be dealing with that stuff.
Marco:
And for a product that kind of just is like a self-contained version of that that someone else manages and makes sure works.
Marco:
that is very appealing to me.
Marco:
And plus, I think it was only $100.
Marco:
And to get a decent Raspberry Pi setup these days, you're not looking at that much less than that.
Marco:
So it was a no-brainer to me.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Hatch.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
So first of all, they have this wonderful light feature.
Marco:
I have personally loved and used these like sunrise simulating alarm clock lights in the past.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
If you want it to be, you can set it and customize whatever you want.
Marco:
There's all these different color profiles you can go through for different styles of waking up.
Marco:
And then there's music that goes along with it or sound effects that go along with it.
Marco:
So you can wake up or critically fall asleep to your choice of different types of soundscapes, music, whether some of them are like meditation focused, some of them are like nature focused.
Marco:
It's fantastic.
Marco:
It is so good.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
One last time, that's hatch.co.atp.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Hatch for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
We've got a whole bunch of feedback about chip packaging.
Casey:
I can read it.
Casey:
You can talk us through it.
Casey:
How do you want to do this?
John:
You can read it and I'll just stop off at each point to give you a rest.
All right.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Anonymous writes a stop one on our journey, everyone.
Casey:
I'm stopping you already.
Casey:
Anonymous writes.
John:
No, I'm stopping you already.
John:
Really?
John:
Yeah.
John:
um the fact that i meant to make this point later but here we are uh this is an anonymous bit of feedback okay um one of the things that you have to keep in mind when getting an anonymous bit of feedback is usually these people aren't going to tell you anything secret but they know secret things and they're going to hint at them and i will point out at various times when this anonymous person tries to do that and i will translate from anonymous podcast feedback to english
Casey:
All right, I'm excited.
Casey:
Anonymous writes, for anyone interested in the topic, I would like to highlight two excellent videos by Asianometry, I think I have that pronounced right, which is a YouTube channel on packaging that should be very accessible to a tech enthusiast audience.
Casey:
And I did watch two or both of these.
Casey:
And yes, I think they were pretty accessible.
Casey:
So they're, I think, a sum total of like 20 to 30 minutes altogether, and they are worth checking out.
Casey:
When Gelsinger, which is the Intel head, and Sruji, who is the chip head for Apple, talk about packaging, they are mostly talking about the increased level of integration, where components that used to sit on a shared PCB are now much closer together and integrated into one unit.
Casey:
Apple's Ultra Series chips are the result of state-of-the-art packaging.
Casey:
The trend is to increase integration and go from 2.5D to 3D architectures, from chiplets, to use AMD's terminology, that are mostly packaged side by side, to packaging solutions where chips are also layered on top of one another.
Casey:
Components that used to be in different locations on the motherboard are put closer and closer together.
Casey:
i see a few main drivers that are behind the increased importance of packaging and so this is like topic number one beating the reticle limits the reticle is the area that a lithography machine can expose in a single shot currently the reticle measures 858 uh square millimeters is that right yes uh some xeons are close to 700 square millimeters nvidia's hopper chip has a die size of 818 square millimeters
Casey:
The next generation of ASML lithography machines, High NA EUV, High Numerical Aperture Extreme Ultraviolet, have a reticle that is half as big.
Casey:
That means NVIDIA will not be able to fab a chip the size of Hopper on a 2nm process.
Casey:
Even about 400 square millimeter chips, such as Apple's Mac series chips, are close to the reticle limit of a High NA EUV tool and will be less economical as a result.
Casey:
Technically, you can expose two half reticles and get back to the old reticle limit of 858 square millimeters, but this will be significantly more expensive.
Casey:
Moreover, wafer output is decreased.
Casey:
I doubt many customers will opt for this route and will choose the chiplets instead.
John:
Yeah, so when Suruji was talking in his interview about how they're interested in different approaches to packaging and how changes in technology are going to essentially change the way chips are made, he didn't mention the reticle limit, but I have to think,
John:
this is a probably the biggest factor like apple makes chips that are bigger than the reticle limit like it's gonna the new reticle limit after uh three nanometer right it's half as big so i mean even even right now the m3 max could not be fabbed at five nanometer because it's too big for the reticle limit of uh five nanometer it can only they can only get that onto a single die because at three nanometer the feature sizes are a little bit smaller uh
John:
So if they're going to have the reticle limit next generation, all sorts of stuff that Apple already makes will no longer fit.
John:
So what do they do?
John:
The two half reticle thing sounds expensive, and Apple has in the past chosen, you know, N3B, a very expensive way to get out of a problem like this.
John:
But it seems like one of the reasons that everyone is suddenly becoming super interested in chiplets and different packaging things is nobody wants to have half the area available.
John:
that they had in the last generation.
John:
And yet that seems to be the case.
John:
So everyone's like, I guess we make smaller chips and stick them together.
John:
And so that, you know, it'll be mentioned later about that.
John:
Well, what is it?
John:
The, uh, EUCI or whatever the, uh, interconnect standard for, uh,
John:
You know, putting a bunch of, you know, UCIE, I was close.
John:
The UCI interconnect standard that we talked about in the last episode, all the different manufacturers are getting on board so they can all agree on how these chips are going to talk to each other.
John:
Everybody is motivated by the same thing because nobody has some secret technology that can fab at two nanometers with the old reticle size.
Casey:
The next topic, producing chiplets in optimized process nodes.
Casey:
There are process nodes specific to DRAM memory, which are developed completely independently from process nodes optimized for logic.
Casey:
They have completely different names, such as Micron's one beta process.
Casey:
Caches could be manufactured with cheaper process nodes, since there's little or no gain in terms of memory density by using a smaller node.
Casey:
But you can go even further.
Casey:
Cell radios and other components with analog circuits need to be manufactured with yet other processes.
John:
Yeah, that's what we talked about last week of, you know, some RAM doesn't benefit from these processes.
John:
But of course, if it's all in the same die and you're talking about your L1 cache or L2 cache, that's all in the same die as your SoC and you're doing the whole SoC at three nanometers.
John:
So that means you're doing the RAM at three nanometers too.
John:
And that's just a waste because...
John:
there's no benefit to using that super expensive node but once you're breaking things up and if you want to have you know if you're breaking up into little chips anyway if you can get some of that cache memory onto an entirely different process that is optimized for memory that may even be better than trying to do in three nanometer and it frees up space on your actual die that's interesting and then the cell radio thing obviously apple has been trying for many many years now to stop buying qualcomm cell radios recently they
John:
Didn't give up, but they delayed their triumph even further by signing a new deal with Qualcomm that says, yes, we'll buy your cell radios for another whatever years because Apple's attempt to make a cell radio themselves using Intel's old cell radio business that they bought has not been going well and there's been many delays.
John:
And this is just, as far as I know, as far as any of us, as far as I think we know from the outside, what they're trying to do is just make a chip to replace the chip that they buy from Qualcomm.
John:
But it would be even better if the cell radios could be shoved into the same package with the SOC using some technology like this.
John:
And those cell radios and other sort of analog components...
John:
they don't want to be or need to be and maybe some of them can't even be manufactured on these uh very tiny processes because they need to be little radio chips so having them manufactured on whatever is the appropriate process for them but also shoved inside the same package apple would love that uh tune into in 2027 i guess
Casey:
Next topic, integrating components from different manufacturers, especially memory.
Casey:
While TSMC might make Apple's SoCs, memory is supplied by someone else.
Casey:
The big driver is integration of memory, though.
Casey:
AMD has versions of their last two generations of chips that feature an extra cache chip on top of a CPU chiplet, for example.
Casey:
Hypothetically speaking, you could integrate a modern chiplet with other components into a single SoC.
Casey:
The UCIE interconnect standard should make that easier and cheaper.
John:
So when an anonymous source says, hypothetically speaking, they're telling you about a thing that exists.
John:
Someone, maybe not Apple, but someone is integrating a modem chiplet with other components in a single SOC.
John:
I don't know who that is.
John:
It might be Apple, it might be somebody else.
John:
It might be, you know, whatever.
John:
And they're probably using UCIE to do that.
John:
And I think in the videos that Casey mentioned earlier, one of them talks about how iPhones have been doing the thing where they... It's not the same thing here because they're talking about things being kind of
John:
you'll see in the video like uh in the same i don't know i should say in the same package but like if you take two chips and slap them on top of each other uh that's what's in iphones today and has been for a long time but they're basically two independent things that are manufactured independently and shoved on top of each other so there's kind of like a sandwich of crap between them actually layering them without that middle stuff saves space because you don't have to make two independent things that are sort of you know weather sealed again i'm using the wrong terms here watch the videos but anyway it isn't really called a sandwich of crap
John:
yeah but putting two putting two chips on top of each other without encasing each one individually saves you depth essentially and that would be useful for a phone so uh whenever apple can do that i'm sure they will
Casey:
Next topic, leveraging economies of scale.
Casey:
Chips made up of chiplets are cheaper to produce for more reasons than just yield.
Casey:
AMD can produce the exact same chiplets for a vast array of products, starting from its consumer desktop CPUs to its server parts.
Casey:
The only thing that changes is the IO die and potentially the number of CPU chiplets.
Casey:
AMD can dynamically and flexibly change what products it makes based on demand, margin, and other considerations.
Casey:
Whether it makes more server or consumer chips is up to them.
John:
Yeah, obviously Apple hasn't gone this route, but they have tried to do things to save money, especially in the M1 and M2 generations, making the M1 and M2 Pro and Max basically the same chip, but the Pro had a bunch of GPU cores chopped off.
John:
That's a way to save money and time because you don't have to design a whole third chip.
John:
This generation, they did design a whole third chip.
John:
The M3 Pro is different than the M3, which is different than the M3 Max.
John:
And none of those things are sort of like, there's nothing modular about them.
John:
There's modular things in the design, but they're still all done on one die.
John:
In a chiplet world, Apple could pull an AMD and try to break out the parts of the chip and reuse the I.O.
John:
component across all the Pro chips, for example, instead of having to design each one of the dies.
John:
But we'll see.
John:
I feel like AMD did a lot of this stuff...
John:
Not just necessarily because it's the best, but because of the economies of it.
John:
And if you do put everything all in one die, it has advantages.
John:
It's more expensive and it's more of a pain, but that is an advantage that Apple has.
John:
They can pay for the more expensive thing and endure the pain that AMD couldn't.
John:
So we'll see how this goes.
Casey:
And then final topic, cross-pollination of key technologies.
Casey:
I have to be vague here, but a lot of the technologies that enable new process nodes for a single chiplet also enable better integration of different chiplets and vice versa.
Casey:
For example, finding another quote-unquote boring application allows companies to develop a tool or technology over the years until it matures and entirely new applications suddenly become possible.
Casey:
Other times, the same processing step can be used in very different ways.
Casey:
I'm very excited about what is around the corner.
Casey:
One last thing, often the buzz is all about the fabrication of CPUs and GPUs, but many forget about all the other product categories.
Casey:
When Apple's Vision Pro was announced, I was fascinated by the displays.
John:
You know, a lot of this manufacturing of sticking stuff on top of stuff, using more technical terms, you know, at sort of dye level...
John:
The sensors for cameras, for example, use some of that technology of putting stuff on top of stuff mostly to make sure that the light sensing stuff takes up most of the area of the chip, even though there's also circuitry kind of behind it.
John:
And screens, obviously, are a kind of reverse version of that where you want to put a bunch of control circuitry behind a bunch of things that produce light.
John:
I'm not sure what this person is getting at with the Vision Pro and the displays.
John:
I mean, we know we saw the stories about Sony making those really fancy displays that are used in the thing, but I'm not sure how that connects to the things we just discussed, like chiplets and boring technologies and older process nodes.
John:
But maybe we'll find out with time.
John:
Just make a mental note of this.
Casey:
All right, now let's go into ECC corner.
Casey:
So the context here was, I think it was an AskATV where we were asked, hey, how come there isn't ECC and Apple Silicon stuff?
Casey:
And Grady Borders wrote in, historically, the only way to add error detection or correction to a computer was to add more DRAM chips to store all the data plus the parity information.
Casey:
These implementations covered both errors in transit and errors in memory.
Casey:
This was implemented by the chipset independent from any coordination with the memory outside of extra DRAM chips on the DIMMs.
John:
Okay.
John:
And I remember these on my Mac Pro.
John:
There's some more detailed feedback on this.
John:
But when you would buy ECC memory for your Mac Pro or for your Xeon PC or any sort of Intel architecture that's a quote-unquote supported ECC memory, what you got was a memory DIMM
John:
that had one more chip than the ones without ECC.
John:
And they were all just the same type of chips.
John:
It wasn't like there was like eight regular chips and then a parity chip.
John:
It was just nine chips.
John:
I don't even know what the number was, but whatever it was.
John:
And they were all the same.
John:
And they were treated all the same.
John:
It was just a dumb bucket of memory.
John:
And it was the circuitry that talked to them and filled them with stuff that used that extra space to store parity information.
John:
But the interesting thing about is obviously those dims are more expensive, even more expensive.
John:
You bought them from Apple, obviously.
John:
But, you know, they were practically speaking, they were more expensive because they had one more RAM chip on them than anything else.
John:
They were also bigger.
John:
They were also hotter.
John:
Everything about them was more, you know, pro-y or enterprise-y or however you want to say it.
Casey:
Grady continues.
Casey:
Today, these two error paths are covered in different ways.
Casey:
Communication errors are covered by some type of link CRC or ECC.
Casey:
Link coverage is optionally supported by DRAMs on DDR4 and LPDDR4 and subsequent memories.
Casey:
Implementations require both DRAM and chipset support.
Casey:
In addition to taking a small amount of bandwidth, the chipset has to implement a buffer to hold transactions until it is sure no DRAM chip will send back a link error.
Casey:
The next generation of memory standards will likely require more link ECC as the data rate keeps increasing.
Casey:
Starting around LPDDR3, the low-power memories began to implement internal memory array ECC.
Casey:
Then different feedback from Joe Lyon, continuing on that idea.
Casey:
With array memory ECC, instead of the system having additional DRAM chips to account for parity data, each DRAM chip itself has additional quote-unquote array space built directly into the chip.
Casey:
So a one gig chip has one gig of addressable memory, but about 1.13 gigs of physical storage, obviously at the cost of a larger chip, fewer dies per wafer, et cetera.
Casey:
Additionally, the ECC logic is built directly into the DRAM chip and at the interface between the DRAM array, where the data is stored, and the DRAM data path, how data moves from the array to the chip IO pins.
John:
So this is in contrast to the old sort of dumb bucket of bits approach with the DIMMs, where it was the chipset doing the stuff.
John:
This is...
John:
This is why the separation of link ECC and memory ECC are two separate things here because the chips themselves have some ECC circuitry built into them.
John:
But that's just for the data when it's still on the chip.
John:
It hasn't left the chip yet.
John:
So there needs to be a second form of ECC for once the validated ECC corrected data leaves the chip, it could still be damaged on its way to the thing that's receiving the data.
John:
And that's why there's this separation that didn't really...
John:
exist before because before it was just a big dumb bucket of chips and then the chipset would fill them with data and parity data and the memory controller would do all the ECC calculations when it received the data from the big dumb bucket of chips.
Casey:
The M1 Pro and beyond all use LPDDR5 or LP5.
Casey:
The M1 SoC used LPDDR4X or LP4.
Casey:
All LP4 and LP5 chips have on-die ECC built in, which is always on and always working.
Casey:
On-die ECC will capture and correct DRAM array related failures, which are historically the vast majority of memory related bit flips and memory corruption problems.
Casey:
As with any ECC, there are limits on the number of bits that can be corrected per access.
Casey:
All the LP5-based SOCs have the option to enable link ECC to provide additional ECC protection for channel-based corruption.
Casey:
From a system perspective, I think we have no way to know if the M-Series chips use link ECC or not.
Casey:
It can be enabled or disabled in real time, so it's possible that the SOCs always use it, never use it, or sometimes use it.
Casey:
But all the LP5 SOCs are capable of it.
Casey:
The combination of OnDye ECC and Link ECC is effectively equivalent to the traditional system or module-level ECC that servers and high-end workstations use.
Casey:
So you could say that basically all M-series systems already have better ECC protection than any consumer-level Intel Mac ever did, and potentially equivalent to the ECC protection on the high-end Xeon E-Mac, or Xeon Macs.
Casey:
So, boom!
Casey:
How's that feel, John?
John:
that's pretty good i mean i'm kind of surprised that the the link ecc can be turned on and off in real time like that's so weird we had a bunch of people speculating like maybe the apple only turns it on for the pro max or maybe they only turn on when it's above a certain temperature i have to think it's either on all the time or off the time but the other thing to consider is the path from the ram chips to the cpu is really small and
John:
in the m-series processes the ram chips are right you can see them in the you know the the package like there's the soc and there's the ram chips that are like millimeters away from it they're not going across a bus on a motherboard they're not going through a bunch of connectors that a dim slot thing goes into so i wouldn't be surprised if in apple's testing they said you know what uh link ecc is not worthwhile because the link is two millimeters in length and most ecc based corruption errors
John:
happen inside the chip and not on transit.
John:
But then if you're able to turn it on off in real time, it makes me think you basically get it for free.
John:
I know there's supposedly a bandwidth cost to doing that or whatever, but maybe you're paying that price all the time.
John:
So if you're getting it for free anyway, maybe they have it turned on.
John:
I guess we need someone...
John:
in the know at apple to tell us whether link ecc is enabled or not on the lp5 based uh apple socs but uh yeah this is this is sort of a much more concrete explanation of the thing that i had heard way back when when they went lp ddr4 that lp ddr4
John:
had some kind of thing inside them that, you know, that was effectively the same as ECC, but not quite.
John:
And this is the detailed explanation.
John:
Like the thing they have handles it on the chip, errors that happen within the chip, but then you still need another form of ECC to make sure the data that is safely leaving the chip makes it to its destination without corruption.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Breaking news from, I think, last week was that Apple announced that they will support RCS, which is, what is it, Rich Communication Service, something like that?
Casey:
Which is sort of kind of, and don't jump on me yet, but sort of kind of like iMessage, but not strictly for Apple stuff.
Casey:
Basically, it would allow, from an Apple user's perspective, it would allow you to send...
Casey:
images to Android users that are not potato quality and presumably receive them in good quality as well.
Casey:
I believe it has an affordance for typing indicators and read receipts and things of that nature.
Casey:
So there's a lot of very cool and interesting features that would improve the messaging experience between iPhone users and Android phone users.
Casey:
Additionally, we got confirmation that these messages would remain green, so it's not like they're going to get a different color.
Casey:
They're certainly not going to be blue, but they will remain green, so they are still second-class citizens.
Casey:
I mean, they're still not iMessages.
Casey:
And it is worth noting that RCS does not have any official...
Casey:
spec for end-to-end encryption, which is allegedly why Apple was sticking its heels in and refused to implement it.
Casey:
We don't know what their change of pace is, but I'm sure it had nothing to do with increased regulatory pressure basically everywhere.
Casey:
Surely that had nothing to do with this whatsoever.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I think Apple would have searched anyway because here's the deal, especially with the way they're handling it.
John:
iMessage is Apple's messaging service, but there's also the messaging service that is not owned by any of the platforms.
John:
It's not owned by Google, it's not owned by Apple, and that in the olden days was SMS, because it was part of the cell network, it was sort of shoved into the cell network in a clever way.
John:
It predates the existence of these big smartphone platforms, so that was kind of like the messaging system that nobody owned.
John:
But of course, SMS was terrible, very limited, very old.
John:
not secure in any way whatsoever.
John:
Right.
John:
So Apple from day one, not day one on the iPhone, I guess.
John:
Well, I don't know.
John:
Do you remember when, how, when did iMessage come?
John:
Was that before 2007 or after?
Marco:
It was after, I think it was iOS 4 or 5.
Marco:
Steve Jobs was alive during, for that.
John:
Right.
John:
Well, anyway, in the whole history of time that Apple has had iMessage, which is its better messaging service that, you know, uses encryption and Apple owns it and controls it and uses the Internet as built in, you know, that's Apple's thing.
John:
They've also always had to support the thing that everybody else uses.
John:
which back in the day was SMS.
John:
I don't think that's ever going to go away.
John:
There's a huge explosion in things like iMessage, WhatsApp, Line, WeChat.
John:
Those are giant platforms, but still, they have all those combined.
John:
iMessage, or maybe it's because they're separate, iMessage, WhatsApp, Line, WeChat, all those things have not yet been able to eliminate SMS.
John:
sms is still the lowest common denominator so many things that you do online or whatever essentially expect lowest common denominator i need to be able to send you a quote-unquote text message with sms at least in the u.s um obviously in other countries things like wechat are just so dominant that maybe they have essentially eliminated sms but globally sms has not been expunged like smallpox they're still not like smallpox maybe but
John:
What was that thing?
John:
Polio they recently almost entirely got rid of, right?
John:
Anyway, the U.S., we still have SMS and a little bit of polio.
John:
Anyway, because it's vaccine deniers.
Casey:
It's worth building on that just very briefly because if you're a European or basically any other developed country, it is extremely weird to think that SMS is still a thing.
Casey:
But truly –
Casey:
If you're in the United States, the only common denominator that you can pretty much guarantee that everyone can communicate with is SMS.
Casey:
We don't have a de facto standard between Line or WeChat or... What's up.
Casey:
Thank you, what's up.
Casey:
I couldn't think of the name of it.
Casey:
I know that each country or region tends to kind of settle on one of these third-party apps that's not by a platform vendor.
Casey:
What's up?
Casey:
America never really did that.
Casey:
And so the closest we have to, you know, everyone being on WhatsApp is everyone can send SMSs.
Casey:
And so if I were to send a text message to the people in my life that have Android phones, that's going to be an SMS.
Casey:
And like John said, that technology is ancient as crap and it's creaky as crap and it stinks for everyone involved.
Casey:
But that's what we've got.
Casey:
And a real-time follow-up iMessage was 2011.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And the thing not only is like, oh, we have this lowest common denominator businesses and websites and other things.
John:
They don't just do the lowest common denominator.
John:
They do nothing else.
John:
There's not like, oh, well, if you have our message, we'll send you an iMessage.
John:
And if you use WhatsApp, we'll send you.
John:
No, they'll never do any of that.
John:
They will only send you SMS, which sucks for so many reasons, like, you know, SIM cloning and other security things like two factor stuff is very often SMS and online.
John:
only SMS.
John:
They don't give you an option to use iMessage.
John:
They don't give you an option to use WhatsApp.
John:
They don't have an option to use Signal.
John:
No, it's just SMS.
John:
And I know like so many other things, the metric system or whatever, it's like, well, it's just the US and a few other weird things, but we're pretty big and Apple and Google are here, so sorry, we apologize.
John:
But that's the problem, right?
John:
So RCS, right?
John:
RCS is not as terrible as SMS.
John:
It is not as good as any of the modern end-to-end encrypted systems or whatever,
John:
But in theory RCS is not controlled by any of the individual platforms not controlled by Apple's not controlled by Google It's kind of controlled by all the carriers together, but they're so technically incompetent.
John:
We don't worry about them too much so if and when The lowest common denominator changes from SMS to RCS, of course Apple was going to support it.
John:
They're not in a big rush.
John:
They're not enthusiastic about it They're not going to say RCS is great.
John:
Everyone should use it.
John:
No, but
John:
Apple hates SMS just as much as all of us do.
John:
And I think one of their complaints about RCS is like you made a new standard and you didn't deal with encryption.
John:
That was seems like a bad move.
John:
And I agree.
John:
But it's like, look, if it's better than SMS, it was inevitable that Apple would support it.
John:
It remains to be seen whether RCS will supplant SMS.
John:
like i know that's kind of the plan it's like it's sms is old and this is the new carrier supported thing that's not owned by apple or google so blah blah blah although of course google has its own proprietary encryption uh extension on top of rcs that apple's not going to use because why would they use a thing made by google but i'm not entirely sure that rcs will come and slowly but surely everyone who's getting sms messages will start getting them through rcs but if it's successful
John:
You know, people who live in our world where when people say text message, what they mean is SMS and MMS, that people will continue to say text message, but oh, they don't know it's actually arriving through RCS, the new lowest common denominator.
John:
So I'm not surprised by this, but...
John:
Apple will always, you know, as long as Apple continues that policy of supporting their thing and also the lowest common denominator, they will track the lowest common denominator.
John:
They will.
John:
And it really should be greatest common denominator.
John:
I know the mathematical foundation of that expression in English does not make sense.
John:
I'm sorry.
John:
People from other countries who don't like the math, but that's what we call it here.
John:
Again, we use literatively to mean figuratively and vice versa.
John:
It's a mess.
John:
so i think that this is a straightforward thing like you know unless apple decides you know what we're just going to go all i message and that's going to be that and maybe we'll expand i message to other platforms this is just going to be a fact of life if and when rcs comes up with an end-to-end encryption thing which apple is trying to contribute to like not google's proprietary extension but a thing that's part of the standard for encryption i think apple will support that too
John:
Apple's job with iMessage is to continue to make it better than the lowest common denominator.
John:
And I think they're currently succeeding.
John:
And even if RCS gets standard end-to-end encryption, I think iMessage will still be slightly ahead of it due to the integration, due to the probably additional security, and so on and so forth.
John:
So...
John:
I give Apple a thumbs up on this move.
John:
I was never quite sure why they were so cranky about RSCS other than trying to highlight how much better iMessage is.
John:
But I'm not surprised to see it supported.
John:
And I'm not surprised to see them continue to be green bubbles because that's what RSCS is.
John:
The new thing that's behind your green bubbles, maybe.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's a coincidence that this was sat on until...
Marco:
very large regulatory scrutiny came about.
Marco:
Look, Apple means well, and they don't usually hold stuff back artificially.
Marco:
That's true in almost every way, but Apple knew and knows as well as we do that
Marco:
those blue bubbles and the iMessage functionality is not only very strong lock-in to iOS, but also it creates peer pressure.
Marco:
When you have that one friend who turns all your group chats green and makes them suck for everyone else because they're on Android, when it comes time for that person to replace that phone, you know their friends are telling them, just get an iPhone, please.
Marco:
Like, for the love of God, stop greenifying all of our group chats.
John:
And by the way, the other the other part of that dynamic is another reason Apple is doing this.
John:
All right.
John:
So that's that dynamic we're all familiar with.
John:
Oh, you green bubble fight it.
John:
You feel like the flip side of that, which I'm sure Casey has experienced is you're you're in an iMessage thread and someone is a green bubble.
John:
Right.
John:
And yes, so they get the pressure of like, oh, why don't you have an iPhone or whatever?
John:
But then what happens is that thread becomes unreliable.
John:
People are missing messages.
John:
You can't tell what's what.
John:
Things are going out of order.
John:
You only see it on one device.
John:
And when that happens, you've already been angered at the Greenewald person.
John:
Like, oh, why don't you have an iPhone?
John:
Be like us, get iPhones or whatever, right?
John:
That's already happened.
John:
Now what happens is, why don't we use something other than iMessage?
John:
Because it's clear that...
John:
The iPhone, quote unquote, or your iPhones or our iPhones or iMessage cannot are not up to the task of communicating in this group of people that we need to communicate with.
John:
So why don't we go to WhatsApp or whatever?
John:
Right.
John:
Because WhatsApp is available on Android.
John:
WhatsApp is available on the Mac.
John:
And now the thread doesn't lose messages anymore.
John:
And that is what Apple absolutely does not want.
John:
So one of the things that is touted about RCS is, oh, now you can have group conversations with those green bubble people and maybe they'll actually work.
John:
That's the promise.
John:
I don't know if that's actually going to happen, but that is, I think, becoming the dominant factor.
John:
And I see a lot of my, you know, people I know in my life and my children getting off of iMessage and moving to something like WhatsApp because it is cross-platform and actually works.
Marco:
I'm sure that plays a role, no question, but I think the regulatory pressure here played a much greater role in the timing of this.
Marco:
I think what Apple is going for here, strategy-wise, there's places like the EU are looking at iMessage as this major abusive monopoly kind of lock-in thing, and a couple angles about it that I think Apple wants –
Marco:
to minimize in the eyes of regulators.
Marco:
Maybe they want to say iMessage isn't its own separate network, but it's part of SMS or part of messaging or whatever.
Marco:
So that might be part of their argument.
Marco:
But I think a bigger thing is there is this perception, which I think is backed by pretty solid evidence, that
Marco:
the iPhone makes SMS or makes messages from other platforms worse.
Marco:
It makes the experience worse.
Marco:
And look, if everyone else, if all of Android supports RCS features and Apple's sitting here with the limitations of old ancient SMS, I can see that argument.
Marco:
That Apple is maybe, quote, artificially holding back non-iPhone chat capabilities to make them look worse and to make people want to buy iPhones more or whatever.
Marco:
And if Apple...
Marco:
goes to the level of RCS, and not Google's variety of RCS, but just says, we're going to support this standard, and we're still going to color them green, so that way they can say, look, people want to know whether they're secure or not, or whether they support the full feature set or not, but we're going to rise to the standard of...
Marco:
The industry cross-platform standard features, we will support those just fine.
Marco:
So therefore, we are not holding anything back.
Marco:
We are not artificially penalizing Android people.
Marco:
We're going to support this industry standard just fine.
Marco:
And also, if the message is blue, you know that's more secure.
Marco:
I think that's going to be more their argument here.
Marco:
I don't think they really care...
Marco:
that much about having the experience actually be nicer for Android people in this particular case, because this is a very powerful thing that sells iPhone.
Marco:
So I think ultimately this is a hundred percent regulatory defense.
Marco:
And again, I don't describe, uh, you know, less than good motives to Apple with a lot of this stuff, because I know it's usually not true in this particular case, the strategic and lock in value of the iMessage is so massive to Apple's most profitable and most important platform and product that
Marco:
It would be, I think, foolish to rule it out as a reason.
Marco:
I think this is absolutely regulatory defense, probably on those angles.
John:
I think it's more like USBC, where Apple is going to do it anyway.
John:
It's just a question of the timing.
John:
And yeah, regulatory pressure can rush along the timing or dictate the timing.
John:
But, you know, USBC, they did it a year before they had to.
John:
RCS, I'm not sure how much this is actually going to defend them.
John:
I mean, it looks good and it's a little bit of cover, but...
John:
If the complaint is that the platform owns a messaging service that they privilege, they will continue to privilege it, right?
John:
Yeah, RCS exists, and you could say, oh, see, look, we upgraded from SMS, so now it's not as bad.
John:
The interoperability angle, though, is actually a problem for Apple's customers, and if they're not thinking this, they should be, because...
John:
Not being able to have a group conversation, a quote unquote heterogeneous group conversation, meaning people from Apple and non-Apple platforms, not being able to have that reliably makes Apple's phones worse, right?
John:
And it makes people not want to be on iMessage because...
John:
Very few people can sort of purify their life by ensuring that everybody they communicate with is going to have an iPhone.
John:
I certainly can't.
John:
It's probably like 50-50% of the business text messages I send and text messages to other parents or other school-related things or anybody like...
John:
people coming to my house to do work, are they going to have blue bubbles?
John:
Are they going to have green bubbles?
John:
Am I in a group conversation with multiple parents in a school thing?
John:
You just can't, there's no way to say they're all going to be blue.
John:
So what actually happens is you buy an iPhone, you want to use iMessage, you find yourself in heterogeneous conversations, and they're just not reliable.
John:
And that's frustrating, and it makes you think your phone is broken.
John:
And in this country, at least, you can't say to the whole parent-teacher group,
John:
Hey, everybody, let's get it on WhatsApp.
John:
That does not work.
John:
No one knows what that is or wants to do it or they just say, I just want to use text.
John:
And so you're the problem now.
John:
You're the blue bubble person is the problem because it's working fine on my phone.
John:
I don't see what your problem is.
John:
I'm not missing any messages or whatever.
John:
Again, I'm not saying that's why Apple is doing this, but it should be part of their motivation because they actually have a problem.
John:
And if adopting RCS can make heterogeneous conversations more reliable, that's going to be a perhaps surprising to Apple huge win for them, whether they know it or not.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then another quick piece of I guess this could have been follow up, but we'll treat it as a topic.
Casey:
Apple has kicked the can with regard to the iPhone 14 satellite features.
Casey:
This is the year ago iPhones.
Casey:
They had said on launch that you would get free satellite 911 or 999 or whatever your particular equivalent is.
Casey:
You would get that for free for a year.
Casey:
Apple announced sometime earlier this month they're going to extend it for an additional year for iPhone 14 users.
Casey:
And for the 15 users, well, you get it free for a year.
Casey:
So we don't have to worry about that yet, at least.
Casey:
So we're just going to kick that can and hope for the best.
Marco:
Yeah, so basically to summarize, since launching emergency SOS via satellite, Apple has not yet announced what the plan will be when your free coverage period of that runs out.
Marco:
So because so far no products have lapsed into that, you know, out of the free state yet.
Marco:
And looking at this, can you imagine what a PR and just a human nightmare it would be if someone dies and could have been saved by this feature, but their subscription expired?
Marco:
I don't see any good way out of this PR-wise, except just make the feature free for the lifetime of these phones.
Marco:
And ultimately, I think that's probably what Apple will end up doing here.
Marco:
When they launched it, I think they set a time bound in part because they probably didn't really know what their usage of this feature and therefore costs of this feature would really be.
Marco:
I mean, I'm sure they had some kind of estimates, but until you get this out into lots of people's phones in the real world, it's hard to really know.
Marco:
Well, now they know.
Marco:
They have a year of usage from the iPhone 14 line having it.
Marco:
Now the iPhone 15s, of course, also have it.
Marco:
By now, I think they have a much better idea of what this feature is actually costing them in practice.
Marco:
And that allows them to do two things.
Marco:
Number one, it allows them probably to go to the satellite vendor that they're doing this through and maybe negotiate better rates over time because now they have more predictable usage.
Marco:
And then number two...
Marco:
This allows them to better account for it and control their costs in terms of how are they accounting for this and the purchase price of the phone.
Marco:
And I just don't see any other outcome other than they just keep kicking the can down the road until they finally just say, all right, you know what, it's just free forever for these phones.
Marco:
Because I don't think it's being used so heavily that they would need, cost-wise, that they would need to limit it too much.
Marco:
Because the feature itself, it's already limited in terms of you can't do a lot of chatting or data usage over the satellite.
Marco:
It's engineered to do extremely low data usage kind of preset things and not cost that much in terms of satellite usage.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I bet it costs them little enough that they will eventually choose just to make it free for the last time of these phones because the alternative of asking people to pay for this or only including it in certain iCloud Plus plans or whatever, if they ask people to pay for it, they know most people won't pay for it.
Marco:
And I...
Marco:
Apple is especially like, you know, I've heard Tim Cook in particular has apparently multiple occasions use the phrase Apple products don't kill people like really like he believes very firmly Apple products don't kill people in parentheses directly.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And that, by the way, I heard that was in the context of the old car project.
Marco:
You better make sure you don't mess this up because Apple products don't kill people.
Marco:
And that's a whole... The car project, I think, if it wasn't dead already, I think their carbon neutral plans killed it because there is...
Marco:
You talk about like, how would you make that product carbon neutral beginning to end, including the energy it uses during its lifetime?
Marco:
Good luck.
Marco:
So anyway, I think that project is well and truly dead at this point.
Marco:
But anyway, going back to the satellite SOS thing.
Marco:
I think Apple loves that feature.
Marco:
They, I think, feel very proud, as they should, that it really is saving people's lives.
Marco:
You see these news stories pop up all the time now from some car accident victim or hiker or something that was saved by this particular feature in an area where they wouldn't have had any or many other options.
Marco:
So,
Marco:
That is a great thing for the world.
Marco:
It's a great story for Apple.
Marco:
It's a great thing that sells iPhones.
Marco:
And it really is helping people greatly and in many cases saving people's lives.
Marco:
And I think for the probably very minimal cost it is costing Apple in satellite usage relative to the overall margin on these phones and everything, I think they will probably conclude whenever the time comes that they have to make a firm decision, they will probably conclude it is not worth
John:
risking losing people's lives who could have had this feature who have the hardware to do it and just didn't buy the five dollar a month extra thing on their on their plan to allow it now because it's so inexpensive the easy way to still get money for this is you just charge for per usage retroactively right so no one signs up for anything no one pays for anything but oh did you use it to save your life guess what you get charged 10 bucks and once you've been saved from the wilderness you'll pay that ten dollars happily it's the best ten dollars you ever spent in your life right you're never going to
John:
be stopped from sending you never need to sign up for anything right but like again they know how low the usage is if the usage is pretty low and you you'd only charge them retroactively right and and they just eat the cost like what if someone's on an iphone and they don't even have an apple id then just do it for free right but in in the common case where someone has an apple id apple knows who they are apple probably already has their credit card charge them retroactively
John:
you know and and charge them retroactively a small fee uh you know what i mean and that's like oh it's going to discourage people from doing it if you're trapped in the wilderness you're going to use it you're not going to care that you're going to get charged two bucks like you won't buy that extra icloud space but when you're freezing on the mountain you'll use the sos feature despite the fact that you know that in your next month's bill from apple you're going to see a two dollar charge or whatever doing for free would be great but i mean once you start going that route you say but you know it would be great if apple gave you like two years of unlimited cloud storage with each phone that you bought because that would
John:
encourage people to get new phones then people would actually save their photos i just had this conversation with my sister where she said hey i need you to help me set up the icloud thing for my photos and it made me realize she still doesn't have icloud photo library enabled so all her photos are only on her computer what is she casey
Casey:
Oh, I have it enabled now, you big jerk.
John:
She doesn't have a cloud backup or anything.
John:
Why?
John:
Well, who pays for storage?
John:
But she's finally succumbed to this.
John:
After years of being my sister and hearing me complain about this, now she's finally willing to pay, but she doesn't quite know how to do it.
John:
But anyway, people won't pay to save their photos.
John:
And when the photos are gone, if you told them, hey, retroactively, if you give me $100 for every year that you use this phone and I give you all your photos back, they'd throw that money at you, right?
John:
Because then their family photos are gone.
John:
But before it happens, like, I'll be fine.
John:
It's not quite the same as dying on a mountain, but it would be nice if Apple built into the cost of the phone enough money to give Apple its margins for two years worth of iCloud storage.
John:
But of course, if you look at that, well, how much does that iCloud storage actually cost?
John:
They make so much more money from the tiny number of users that actually pay for it.
John:
Because, you know, what is, like you buy a 256 gig phone, what does 256 gigs of iCloud storage actually cost you per year?
John:
It's not like two extra dollars.
John:
So anyway, it's just...
John:
part of the topic that we probably won't get to this week, uh, about, uh, when you pay more for our product, uh, like how do you deliver extra value for the extra money?
John:
And lots of historically, lots of expensive products have been very expensive, but have given you something that you can't get for less money, whether it's like,
John:
buying clothes from an expensive store where you get easy hassle-free returns or back in the day you'd buy very expensive you know luggage and they would be high quality and last a long time remember those days um you used to get things for the money not proportional you'd pay two times as much and but it would be 20 better or you'd pay 17 times as much and it would be 15 better but it would actually be better and it'd be better in ways that
John:
that are perceived to be more valuable than they are.
John:
Like, well, you know, I don't have to deal with hassles of returns.
John:
If I don't like it, I just return it no matter how long it's been.
John:
What was the story about that Merlin tells about?
John:
Some returning snow tires at Nordstrom or something, and they don't sell snow tires, but you just take the return anyway because that's how you keep rich customers happy, right?
John:
Apple is not in the same class as that, but they also sell very expensive phones.
John:
So it would be nice if paying that extra money
John:
got you some stuff that people consider valuable and free sos satellite service for every iphone customer definitely fits that bill so would uh free storage equivalent to the size of the phone that you bought for the life of that phone and if you only did it for two years instead of for the life of the phone it might encourage people to upgrade as well but apple is not yet on that page so we get five gigs for free
Marco:
Two more little quick things on the SOS thing before I forget and before people write in about it.
Marco:
Number one, there are a lot of cellular Apple devices.
Marco:
I don't know if iPads do it, but I know phones do it.
Marco:
And I think watches might do it, too, where even if you don't have a cellular plan activated, you can place free emergency 911 calls from those devices at any time.
John:
Yeah, that's a legal requirement in some places, too, I think.
Marco:
Yeah, probably.
Marco:
And I'm sure there's some deal with the carriers where maybe Apple doesn't really have to pay for that.
Marco:
But there is some precedent for free cellular 911 access for the life of the device.
Marco:
And again, I'm sure it works differently with satellite providers and legality and everything, but that is something to think about.
Marco:
as like a possible parallel or precedent to set here um and then secondly there was a rumor that breezed through this fall rumor season um that apple might be looking to expand the satellite sos feature into what sounded like from the rumor basically free text chatting like like like free form full texting not just uh you know sending kind of canned messages or locations and
Marco:
I wonder if maybe the plan here, and maybe they just haven't finished it yet, but maybe the plan here is to launch a paid satellite messaging plan where maybe the current thing that we know of as Emergency SOS, which is just like location and 911, basically.
Marco:
If that remains free, but then they have a premium tier, whether separately or part of one of their bundles, maybe that is...
Marco:
You can text wherever you are, and that might be useful for people who frequently go outside of cell phone coverage areas.
Marco:
So maybe the plan here is this free thing will remain free, and it will be partly funded by this premium thing that we're going to launch as an extra bonus at some point in the future.
John:
Yeah, that would be small potatoes to Apple, but maybe to the satellite companies, they would like those customers.
John:
That's lucrative for them because they can, you know, charge Apple a lot, which then Apple can charge their customers even more because so few in the grand scheme of things, percentage wise, iPhone customers need to be able to take some edges from SOS.
John:
But the ones that do, you can probably charge them a lot because they're, you know, they live in the mountains and it's worth it to them.
John:
And again, that's a tiny, tiny percentage of iPhone users, but a tiny, tiny percentage of iPhone users is a large number of people and absolute values to these satellite companies, maybe.
John:
So we'll see.
Marco:
Yeah, and there already are.
Marco:
Garmin sells these products called InReach satellite communicators that a lot of hikers and stuff use, and they're literally just little tiny smartphone-like things that just have satellite modems built into them, and they sell these plans, and I think they're like $10 to $50 a month for the...
Marco:
I have one buried somewhere for super emergency stuff, but I have the bottom end plan that allows almost nothing.
Marco:
This is a whole market of these satellite communicator things that allow text messaging at certain plan levels and stuff like that.
Marco:
There is clearly a market.
Marco:
It wouldn't surprise me to see Apple get into this market with their new SOS feature and to just have it be a $5 or $10 a month add-on or part of Apple One Premium Plus, whatever.
Marco:
I think that's probably where this is going to head.
Marco:
I still bet that the SOS feature set we have now, like the emergency 911 calling and stuff, I bet that remains free forever.
John:
I sure hope so.
John:
Yeah, and it was designed from day one to be as minimally intrusive, to use as little bandwidth as possible, just basically to be as cheap as possible, essentially.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
And to work in more places.
Marco:
Because a lot of times, if you don't have a very good view of a satellite, suppose you're stuck in a canyon or something.
Marco:
If you don't have a great view of a satellite, it might take you a very long time to reliably transmit enough bits to even communicate what you need to communicate.
Marco:
So the protocol that it sends the satellites is very...
Marco:
very simplified and uses very few bits of actual data transfer because it has to get through some pretty severe, not only very long distance, but also like some severe conditions and like very low signal or high noise ratios and stuff.
Marco:
It's made to be extremely resilient and simple.
John:
That's what I need to use when I'm picking my daughter up from her school because her high school, of course, is in a cell phone dead zone.
John:
So when you arrive and you want to text your child and say, hey, I'm here to pick you up, you can't.
John:
You get to see the little blue bar iMessage go almost all the way across the top of the screen and then just sit there.
Casey:
Oh.
John:
You're just waiting to see that word delivered.
John:
And they're trying to text you.
John:
And, of course, they're on school Wi-Fi, so they think all their messages are going through, but none of them are reaching me.
John:
And why they don't just stick a gigantic cell tower in the center of the school's campus, I don't know.
John:
But by the time that happens, my kids will have all graduated.
John:
But, yeah, maybe I should try satellite next time.
John:
Help, I'm in a canyon slash outside the high school.
Yeah.
Marco:
my kids it's like when people used to like like bit pack uh their their um messages to their parents when you're calling on the pay phone from school come pick me up into the like uh the collect calling name field yeah well you accept the charges from hey pick me up at the high school yeah yeah exactly like i explained to my kids that not only could i not text message my parents went to get me i would just sit outside of the high school and just wait and assume at some point a parent will realize i'm not home and come to get me
John:
It could be hours.
John:
It just could be hours.
John:
I was just there for hours.
John:
Other people are getting picked up by their parents.
John:
The late bus is long since gone.
John:
I missed that one.
John:
I'm just going to be at the school.
John:
It's getting dark now.
John:
Now I'm inside because it's cold.
John:
The janitors are cleaning up.
John:
And your life is, if I don't immediately respond to your text message to come and pick you up, it's like, where are you?
John:
Kids these days.
Casey:
oh goodness so we've had something in the show notes for months at this point i don't even know but uh we've had a heading thunderbolt 5 and a link to an intel announcement announcing thunderbolt 5 thunderbolt 5 will deliver 80 gigabits per second of bi-directional bandwidth with and with bandwidth boost it will provide up to 120 gigabits per second for the best display experience built on industry standards including usb 4 version 2 because how could that be more confusing i know
John:
There's a USB 4 V2?
John:
USB 4, all caps, no space.
John:
Then a space, then a capital V and a number two.
John:
Because why not?
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
How many different ways has the USB consortium named versions of USB?
John:
It's so bad.
John:
It's like the joke about, you know, you know,
John:
uh term paper final final v2 you know for real this like they have they have gen numbers they have version numbers with dots in them they have 2x2 now they've got v but then they took the number and shoved it against the thing it's just i feel like it's a contest to see how many like they they wrote down at the beginning they had a brainstorming meeting they said here's all the ways we can think of to version something and they're just going down the list and checking them off
John:
indeed well anyways uh built on industry standards including usb4 space v2 thunderbolt 5 will be broadly compatible with previous versions of thunderbolt and usb why do we care john why do we care well first thing i think is fun about this is the bandwidth boost thing so it's eight gigabits per second which is twice as fast as our current thunderbolt 4 so yay because thunderbolt 4 didn't get any faster than three it just like up the usb4 compliance to crap but it was still 40 gigabits
John:
Now they're going to 80.
John:
We like that.
John:
Great.
John:
Double speed, right?
John:
But it also has 120 gigabits bandwidth boost.
John:
It's like, where do the extra gigabits come from?
John:
Why don't you use them all the time?
John:
Does it come from a turbo button that you have to push to make it go faster?
John:
Yeah, no, it comes from NAS.
John:
So the reason they have it is basically to support big displays with lots of pixels at high frame rates.
John:
Like that's why that feature exists.
John:
And I'm assuming they're not doing it for data because it's like, well, this is the display mode and we trust that you won't have really long display cables.
John:
I'm not entirely sure how they can build the standard so that it supports this for high bandwidth, high frame rate displays, but not support it for data.
John:
But whatever, that's what they're doing.
John:
It's part of the spec.
John:
And I'm glad because if you look at, you know, 40 gigabits is
John:
not really enough to do like an 8k display or even a 6k one at like 120 hertz and stuff you know what i mean like so we need a new standard just the new display port standards that they'll tunnel over this we're also having you know so now let's go to 80 but no let's not just go to 80 because if i do the math on 80 what if you have an 8k display and you wanted 240 hertz oh we're at a bandwidth again how about 120 and of course you have display stream compression all that stuff so i give this thumbs up and i like the fact that it has um extra bandwidth for display purposes but
John:
The one small thing that I want to say about this other than, yay, I can't wait for Thunderbolt 5 to be on our Mac someday, is whatever we talk about, Thunderbolt, USB, setting aside the stupid versioning number things, we always complain about the same thing, which continues to be an issue.
John:
Because this one, as they say, will be, quote unquote, broadly compatible with previous versions, which means the connector will be a USB-C shaped plug.
John:
And that's a good connector.
John:
But our complaint is always, I have a bunch of cables that have that connector on them and I can't tell which ones support which things.
John:
Is it just power?
John:
Is it Thunderbolt 1, you know, 2 or 3?
John:
What version of USB does it support?
John:
You know, just you can't tell by looking at the cable and it's annoying.
John:
And I agree with that.
John:
But I feel like with Thunderbolt 5, it's a time to at least recognize the thing that we never talk about but still exists, which is the advantage of doing this.
John:
And I thought of it related to when we were talking about dynamic caching, where they're like, oh, we used to have three buckets of memory in the GPU.
John:
And if you didn't use them efficiently, one of the buckets would be going to waste and the other one would be full.
John:
That's the problem we used to have on the side of laptops.
John:
or on the back of desktop computers, but laptops, space is tighter.
John:
You would have to divide up your connectors into buckets.
John:
Here are the connectors for this purpose.
John:
Here's the connectors for that purpose.
John:
And here are the ones for this purpose.
John:
And especially as Apple reduced the number of connectors, if they only gave you two from this bucket, one from this one and one from this one, like, oh, I really need three from the middle one, but I just have one of those.
John:
Having all of the holes in the side of your MacBook Pros or most of the holes be USB-C shaped and on the good computers, all support Thunderbolt or whatever, lets you avoid having to do, the other analogy I use is the Linux partitioning thing where I got to figure out ahead of time how much I want for user, how much I want for slash, and how much I want for swap.
John:
It's just all uniform.
John:
And again, on the good fancy computers, they're all Thunderbolt.
John:
your cables, you've still got that problem.
John:
But it solves a real problem on the side of laptops is we don't have to guess how many display connectors do you need?
John:
How many networking connectors do you need?
John:
How many storage connectors do you need?
John:
Storage, display, you know, the, what was the other one I just said?
John:
Like everything that you can do, it's all the same shaped whole and all the same capabilities, again, on the high-end computers.
John:
And on the low-end ones, they're all USB-C or whatever.
John:
That is an advantage.
John:
It's better than the bad old days when Apple would come up with a new laptop and you'd have to get all new cables and all new devices sometimes because this one comes with FireWire 800 and all your things are FireWire 400 and you can try to get a dongle and it was just, we don't have that problem anymore.
John:
When they go from Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 4 to Thunderbolt 5, you won't need to get a new Thunderbolt drive.
John:
You won't need to hopefully get a new monitor that, you know, all your old stuff will continue to work.
John:
It will fit in the same size and shape of whole.
John:
We still just have the problem of, you know, you can't tell what the hell the wires support or what the devices support.
John:
But I think on the whole, I prefer this world where we can't tell what the heck the wires are, but the holes are all the same than the old world where all the wires were easily distinguishable.
John:
But every time we got a new laptop, we had to get all new wires and sometimes all new devices.
John:
yep it's uh it's gonna be a mess as always the usb consortium my point is not gonna be a mess my point is we should appreciate we should appreciate thunderbolt and usb and all the usb things we should appreciate the good that's about them if we know thanksgiving is on but we should give thanks because it was worse than the old days it is silly that that that is still a problem
John:
But we should appreciate the important advantage that Thunderbolt and USB-C give us, especially now that our phones have the same shape hole in the bottom of it.
John:
It's a better world.
John:
Could it be better still?
John:
Yes.
John:
But it is better than it was.
Casey:
It's better, but it's still going to be such a mess.
Casey:
I just...
Casey:
I keep coming back to the very oddly named thing.
Casey:
I'm going to have to look it up and put it in the show notes.
Casey:
It's like cable QC or something like that.
Casey:
I forget what it is.
Casey:
But it's a Kickstarter that I backed forever ago that has two USB-C receptacles in it and a crap load of LEDs that light up based on whether or not individual lines within the cable are connected or not.
Casey:
Because if you have a USB-C shaped cable that
Casey:
You can have like USB 2 compatibility, USB 3 compatibility, Thunderbolt compatibility.
Casey:
And this at least gives you some notion as to what that cable can handle.
Casey:
But it's just nuts that this is a thing that we have to worry about.
Casey:
And yes, I agree with you that it's better to have one connector generally, but it's bananas that we have to go through all this to figure out what the hell this connector or this cable can handle.
Casey:
It just drives me nuts.
John:
Yeah, and then by the way, my proposed solution to that would be if they had, as part of the standard, come up with a tasteful, this is the problem with Apple, with why Apple rejects this, a tasteful standardized labeling policy for connectors.
John:
is they came out with a standardized labeling policy where like the spec requires you to have this symbol on it if it's thunderbolt 2 and this symbol it would be so ugly apple would hate it and they would put it in really light gray ink on their white connectors and no one would be able to see it so it would have to be like in cooperation with apple come up with some kind of thing preferably some kind of like inset arrays thing that you could feel like it's a hard design problem i admit because these connectors are small the quote-unquote good connector companies
John:
do do that they put some kind of thing on them where you can tell thunderbolt 4 and it'll say TB4 on it or it'll have a little lightning bolt and a 4 like or say USB put a gigabit rating or the ones that have the little LCD displays in them which is a little bit over the top or whatever but like that's where the solution to this problem lies it's not like let's make all the connectors different again it's
John:
Let's solve the actual problem is I can't tell what this cable does.
John:
And yes, a cable tester solves it, but that's stupid.
John:
Like just we have room on the cable to print or emboss something.
John:
It's just that everybody does something different.
John:
There's no standard.
John:
And if there was a standard, it would be so ugly that Apple refused to use it.
Marco:
For whatever it's worth, first of all, I would love if there was not a Kickstarter, but just a regular product you could buy that was a cable tester that would actually tell you not only physically what lines are connected, but tell me what consumer-facing standards this cable supports.
Marco:
yeah so like i don't need to know if it's connected to the to the g positive three line like just tell me like does this support usb 3.2 2 by 2 speeds or does it support thunderbolt 4 or like tell me that and and one thing i've seen from um a couple of people have suggested on mastodon i'm sorry if i i forget who so sorry um but a couple of people i've seen suggest that like wouldn't it be cool if you plugged in the two ends of a cable to two usb c ports on your macbook
John:
and apple told you what the cable supported oh that would be amazing like that would be so cool they could just test it to run the data though i think i also saw mastodon one company is doing like look we know people don't know the names of the standards so they just put a gigabits rating on them even better yeah i mean it's hard again because the print the printing has to be small and embossed and you know like it's it's a little bit tricky and standardization would help but if you're if you're interested you can find cables
John:
that are labeled in a sane way we don't we all own ones that aren't i mean look at the look at the uh the image in this diagram or in the show notes it's from like an intel presentation that will link even in their thing they have a thunderbolt and a four and a thunderbolt and a five so in the in the picture we can tell oh that's the thunderbolt four one that's they otherwise are identical but hey a number four and number five i bet though when intel sells their connectors they don't have the four and the five of them or the thunderbolt
Marco:
One thing also, as we've been lamenting how weird and broken this world tends to be, the weird and broken area of this world is much more in the USB neighborhood than in the Thunderbolt neighborhood.
Marco:
A while back, I think it was at the 2018 Brooklyn event that we went to, Casey, with the Apple press event that had the new at the time MacBook Air, Retina MacBook Air, and the 2018 11-inch and new 12.9 iPad Pros.
Marco:
At that event...
Marco:
I had a briefing afterwards, and I probably shouldn't say who, but somebody at Apple who was fairly high up.
Marco:
I was complaining about how, look, you're leaning so heavily on USB-C here with all these new products, but the world of USB-C dongles and hubs and everything is terrible.
Marco:
Again, this was 2018.
Marco:
You think it's terrible now.
Marco:
It was way worse then.
Marco:
And what this person said has stuck with me.
Marco:
They said, really, the world of Thunderbolt stuff, if you get Thunderbolt-certified stuff that actually – that has passed a number of tests from Intel and certification and everything.
Marco:
The Thunderbolt products that actually bear the logo and are tested –
Marco:
are held to a much higher standard than most of the usb products and so yes thunderbolt products are fewer in number they are more expensive for sure they usually you know have like less graceful things like you know the power situation like they usually require these giant external power bricks because thunderbolt can supply a lot of power to its ports um so you know thunderbolt hubs and thunderbolt equipment
Marco:
There's less of it, and it's more expensive.
Marco:
But it usually tends to be really rock solid.
Marco:
Like, this is what this person said in 2018, and I've remembered that ever since.
Marco:
And whenever there's a Thunderbolt version of something I'm looking at, I choose that.
Marco:
And that is not very often.
Marco:
But whenever there is one, I choose that.
Marco:
And sure enough, they've been right.
Marco:
Like, the USB hubs and dongles and docks and stuff I've gotten over the years have all been flaky pieces of crap.
Marco:
The Thunderbolt things have all been solid.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
it is unfortunate that like this is the more technically complex protocol that therefore brings a lot more cost and limitations to it and everything but the world of usb-c shaped equipment is much much better on the thunderbolt side than the usb side so if you need something to be really reliable and if there's a thunderbolt option and if you can afford it
Marco:
It really is better.
Marco:
So that area of this world, I think, is fine.
Marco:
It's just limited.
Marco:
But it's the USB side of things.
Marco:
On that side of the wall here, that's been where I've seen the most problems.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And it is the holiday season.
Casey:
In fact, as we record this, it is the end of Cyber Monday.
Marco:
Still can't believe people use that term.
Casey:
Gary Owen wants to know, now that we are seeing the new crop of TVs, is this the year I should splurge and upgrade my bargain bin 4K LCD TV to something better?
Casey:
John, I think you should probably handle this.
Casey:
So what's the situation?
Casey:
What is the landscape these days?
John:
First, I want to apologize to Gary.
John:
His question is from January 2023.
John:
Sometimes you don't get to these questions for a while.
John:
He was talking about CES.
John:
I removed the CES part.
John:
But I did put this in here because this is my last chance to do this, and people very often ask about this very topic.
John:
I'm going to tell you what the best TVs of this year are to buy.
John:
First, to answer Gary's question, yes.
John:
This is a good time to buy a television to get rid of your crappy old bargain-making 4K LCD.
John:
Uh...
John:
If I could have waited until this year, I would have.
John:
I couldn't wait.
John:
I already waited too long.
John:
But Gary, you've probably already waited too long.
John:
So if you haven't already bought a new TV, you should.
John:
Now, people ask me, what TVs should I buy or what are the best TVs?
John:
You have to first understand where I'm coming from.
John:
When I'm looking for, quote unquote, the best TVs, what I want from my television is...
John:
is a TV that shows the image as accurately as possible.
John:
And what does that mean?
John:
What does accurately mean?
John:
Well, when video content is made, there are various standards for every part of the process, but also including the coloration of the video.
John:
that the people making it adhere to.
John:
They have very expensive monitors, sometimes upwards like $30,000, $40,000 that adhere to these standards so they can say, I want it to look like X. And they look on their $50,000 monitor, and if it looks like the way they want it to look, that's how they want it to be.
John:
What I want is when I see it in my house for it to look like it did on their $50,000 calibrated monitor.
John:
Because otherwise, they're making it a certain way
John:
ah and they think all right i've made this scene so it looks kind of this tinge with this color and it's this dark and it's this light in this area looks the way i want it people whose job it is to do that the various colorists and the people who control the lighting on the show like they want to look a certain way they've made it a certain way if they send it out into the world and it gets into people's houses and their television is just screwed all up and it looks weird they're like oh that's not that's not what i made i made i wanted it to look like this but then all these people are seeing it this way and that is the difficult uh the difficulty facing anyone who's making video content
John:
You want to make it a certain way and have control over the process.
John:
Ideally, it would look that way in people's houses.
John:
That's how I'm picking TVs.
John:
That is not how most people pick TVs.
John:
Most people, as we've discussed in the past, pick TVs on whichever one is brighter, right?
John:
Kind of like you pick whatever stereo is louder, pick whatever TV is brighter.
John:
Whatever colors are the most garish, the most oversaturated, like people just want things they think look startling, look, you know, they look dramatic, but that's not what they're supposed to look like.
John:
So if you don't care about that, then don't listen to any of my TV recommendations, right?
John:
The second thing is I'm looking for the best.
John:
The best also is going to mean the most expensive.
John:
These are very, very expensive TVs.
John:
You should not buy one of these expensive TVs unless you care a lot about the television looking as good and as close to quote unquote correct and accurate as possible.
John:
If you don't care, don't spend this much money on TV.
John:
Spend it on something you do care about.
John:
So with that aside, in case you're wondering, given that framing...
John:
what tv should you buy in 2023 the answer is the sony a95l for the second year in a row sony has the best television by a nose uh it's an oled display comes in 55 65 and 77 inches we'll put links in the show notes to reviews from my favorite youtube channels about this tv including bunny limb which was a blind uh one of the channels does a traditional blind uh
John:
viewing tests where they invite a bunch of people from the industry in and tv calibrators and stuff to judge televisions with a bunch of test footage but they disguise the televisions so you can't see any part of the bezel or any part of the stand like they you know put cardboard and black stuff all around it just because otherwise you'd be able to tell which tv is which and then your biases of like liking a particular brand might come in and for the second year in the row the sony won that contest as well
John:
it's a quantum dot oled television it is much brighter than it was last year uh and it now comes in 77 inch size and it is horrendously expensive but that's the answer sony a95l the answer next year may be different so don't hear this and think you're gonna buy next year's best sony because maybe won't be the best next year maybe things will have changed but for 2023 if you want a tv and you want it to be the best it's the sony a95l
Casey:
Which for the record is $3,300 on Amazon on Cyber Monday.
Casey:
But that's a 65 inch, right?
Casey:
Correct.
Casey:
77 is even more expensive.
Casey:
That is five grand for a television.
John:
And you can't get it bigger than 77.
John:
TVs do come in bigger than 77.
John:
Anyway, so the runner up is the LG C3.
John:
LG has traditionally been the leader in OLED televisions.
John:
They don't have a quantum dot television, but they do have these micro lens array things where they put the
John:
tiny, tiny microscopic lenses over the front of them that makes it super duper bright.
John:
It does have some advantages of the Sony 85L, but it has more disadvantages.
John:
One of the advantages it has is it comes in 83 inch size.
John:
It's also way less expensive than the Sony.
John:
It's less expensive because LG in general is less expensive than Sony.
John:
And it's probably less expensive because the LG makes the panels, the OLED panels, and the Quantum Dot ones are made by Samsung.
John:
So Sony has to buy them from Samsung and has to repackage them.
John:
lgc3 is great if you care about gaming which you'll notice i didn't mention before the lg televisions support more high bandwidth ports for like pc gaming if you want to connect a gaming pc to this and play it like 120 140 hertz the lg supports more better gaming related standards so
John:
Not that the Sony is bad for gaming, but if you are connecting a gaming PC to it, or even if you're connecting, you know, an Xbox Series X and you want to run that at really high frame rates with HDR and everything, the LG TVs are a better bet.
John:
Speaking of OLEDs, the final thing I'll tell you about the best televisions this year is since they are both OLEDs, OLED burns in.
John:
It just does.
John:
Uh, if you have never had an OLED television or you leave CNN on your television all day for hours at a time, don't get an OLED.
John:
You'll be sad.
John:
If you are going to play a game with a permanent opaque HUD on the screen for hours and hours and hours every day for years at a time, you will burn in your television.
John:
Don't do that.
John:
Don't get an OLED.
John:
We'll put links in the show notes to our tings, uh,
John:
many months at this point maybe years long uh burn-in tests of OLED so you can just hopefully it'll be like one of those scared straight videos that they show you to try to keep you off drugs in school when you see what these televisions look like if they're left tuned to CNN all day with a news ticker at the bottom you will maybe think twice about leaving the room with the television pause to go to the bathroom I know these TVs all have screensavers and they'll have all sorts of features to mitigate this but the bottom line is do not leave static elements on your OLED screen for long periods of time they will burn in you will be sad it will look bad don't do it
John:
That's also part of the price you're paying for the very best picture quality.
John:
It means you can't play a video game with a permanent hut on it for hours and hours a day.
John:
You cannot watch CNN for seven hours a day on these televisions.
John:
It will ruin them.
John:
Don't do it.
John:
Watch movies.
John:
Watch TV shows.
Marco:
Yeah, and definitely don't play Minecraft unless you want to see the heart bar on everything you ever watch forever after that.
John:
Yeah, that's why I was so excited about Tears of the Kingdom, because I forget of Breath of the Wild this, but Tears of the Kingdom has a mode with no HUD.
John:
I was like, yes, played the whole game, hundreds of hours on my television, no HUD.
John:
It's also a more immersive experience.
John:
It's great.
John:
Although the Hallmark Channel is now putting a stupid bug in the bottom corner of the screen half the time, which is really annoying.
Marco:
Does the Hallmark Channel usually specify in very immersive experiences?
Yeah.
John:
i just like what they have in the bottom is like uh you know i don't know what that the branding is for like hallmark home for the holidays it's like i get it we know we're watching a hallmark movie you don't need to put red text in the lower right corner of the screen for two hours it's annoying um so what if you can't deal with an oled what if you plan on leaving it on cnn all day what other options do you have they do make televisions that are not oleds that are almost as good but not quite
John:
and my recommendation there is the sony x95l which comes in 75 and 85 inch sizes only so this is a really big tv this is an lcd television with led backlights sony does a really good job with these of controlling the backlights and controlling bloom while still again sony's big thing is still having accurate color and all these things you have to actually go to the settings and turn them into whatever the accurate mode is called uh i forget i think it's called like
John:
custom or professional on the sony's it's called filmmaker mode on the lg which supports filmmaker mode which is a branded thing to basically say just show it how it's supposed to be shown setting up the televisions is complicated and it's beyond the scope of these buying recommendations but uh yeah uh
John:
And the other option for LCD televisions is the Sony X90L, which is, as far as I can tell, it's like a smaller size version of the X95L.
John:
It comes in 55, 65, 75, 85, and 98.
John:
I guess it's probably older.
John:
It comes in really big size.
John:
It's older than the X95L.
John:
I just don't understand why the X95L only comes in 75 and 85, but it does.
John:
But both of these televisions are good choices if you don't care about gaming, because you should just get an LG something if you do, or
John:
But you can't handle OLED because you're just not going to deal with that burn-in stuff.
John:
So Sony X95L, Sony X90L, these televisions will not have OLEDs burn-in issues.
John:
They will not look as good as OLEDs, but they'll look pretty darn good.
John:
And by good, I mean pretty darn accurate.
John:
And the final thing that I'll say is if you want to hear about televisions that are not horrendously expensive because you don't care about any of this accuracy BS, watch the Digital Trends Best TVs of 2023 video that we'll put a link to in the show notes.
John:
It shows you televisions that regular people buy for way less money that are also really good and that are also way, way better than Gary's Bargain Bin 4K LCD television.
John:
because technology has come a long way and for reasonable pretty low prices you can get a really good looking tv that is way better than the television you bought like five years ago especially if what you bought five years ago was not a horrendously expensive television
Casey:
That actually took a lot less time than I thought.
Casey:
I think that might have been quicker than your Thunderbolt 5.
John:
And I've also gone through, I've been advising a friend about buying fancy televisions this year.
John:
So I had to, not that I'm not usually on top of this stuff, but I had to go through the list and find what all the best televisions are.
John:
And for a little while it was touching go because 885L was released after all the other televisions.
John:
So for a while, it was like, is the Sony going to be the best one this year?
John:
But the answer is yes.
John:
So it's kind of a shame because 2024 is going to be here.
John:
And the 2024 TVs, guess what?
John:
They'll be better.
John:
So you have to do what I did, which is like at the time you buy, you just look at what's available and buy the best choice.
John:
If you keep waiting till next year's model, next year's model will always be better.
John:
So there's just no getting off that treadmill.
John:
And that's how you end up replacing a plasma television with an OLED like I did.
Marco:
Out of curiosity, what part of the year does the model year typically turn over for TVs?
John:
That's a good question.
John:
It used to be more synced up to be kind of like spring after CES, but the Sony barely came out in the fall.
John:
I think some of that might have been delays with the second-generation QD OLED panels.
John:
So at this point, it's like...
John:
I mean, it's still mostly spring, but because the best TV this year is out in the fall, it spreads it over the whole year.
John:
So, like, the reviews have kind of been staggering out.
John:
It's like, oh, the LGs are out pretty soon because they're not too different from the ones that came before.
John:
And then Samsung's QD OLED comes out because they make the panel and they give them cell source dibs.
John:
And then finally Sony's comes out.
John:
So...
John:
they're smeared across kind of the whole middle of the year, which kind of sucks, but it's just, that's something you have to do.
John:
You can't like, there's no like, Oh, buy now.
John:
And then there'll be a year turnover.
John:
If you buy the Sony 85 L now, but Sony comes out with a new TV in the spring, you'll have a very short window when this was the best TV available.
John:
But you know, that's,
John:
that's the way it is you can't you can't wait forever and i honestly i think the jump from the first generation qd oled panel to the second in terms of maximum brightness and everything is bigger than whatever the jump will be next year from the second generation to the third and who knows maybe there won't be a new panel and maybe it'll just be a new chipset that is the one annoying thing that i should mention here which again you can't do anything about but um
John:
The reason LG is good at gaming is because they make their own chips for handling like the HDMI crap and everything.
John:
I think they're the only company that supports full bandwidth, 48 gigabits per second, HDMI 2.1 on all their HDMI ports.
John:
Every other TV in the entire world supports it on like two ports.
John:
And why?
John:
Because they have to buy their chipsets from, I think, MediaTek or whatever.
John:
There's a couple of other companies that do it as well, maybe.
John:
And these companies only support 48 full 48 gigabits per second on a small number of ports.
John:
Their chipsets just don't support it on.
John:
So they put four HDMI ports, but only two of them are the quote unquote good ones.
John:
Again, this only matters for high frame rate, meaning like 120 frames per second, high bit depth stuff.
John:
So it really only matters for PC gaming or high, you know, high end console gaming, but really PC gaming.
John:
So most people don't care.
John:
But it is disappointing that like we've been, you know, HDMI 2.1 has been out for many years now.
John:
And still, when you buy a television, you have to look in the manual and say, which one is HDMI one or two or three?
John:
Like which one of these are the quote unquote good ones?
John:
And do I care for the device that I'm connecting it?
John:
There was a rumor back before CES, speaking of CES, that MediaTek was coming out with a new Pentonic chipset that was going to have HDMI 2.1 on all four ports.
John:
But that was marketing BS live because, as we discussed before, you can call yourself HDMI 2.1 if you support, like, any subset of the features.
John:
So, yeah, only two of the ports were 40 gigabits per second, and that was disappointing.
John:
So, you know, it does make that much of a difference, but, like...
John:
i next year the year after at some point all the hdmi ports are going to be the good ones it's kind of like if you bought a macbook pro and there was like one thunderbolt 4 port and the rest of them were usb and you had to remember which one it was that's what televisions have been like i don't know for many many years now and i just we're just all waiting around for one of these third-party companies that does the
John:
the chipsets say all the ports are good they're all they all support all the things and we're still not there and that's one of the reasons by the way one of the reasons sony is expensive and one of the reasons it wins it's because sony puts its own additional processing chips inside there to help out the crappy media tech one to make the television look better it also adds a little bit of input lag which is another reason you should get an lg if you care about gaming
Casey:
Stephen Teller writes, ever have a file stored in iCloud Drive randomly revert to an earlier version?
Casey:
I had a large PDF stored in iCloud Drive.
Casey:
On my up-to-date MacBook and iPad, I found that iCloud Drive suddenly reverted back to a version of the file that predates the most recent edits by four days, losing around 10 sets of edits that happened over those four days.
Casey:
I had no time machine backup because I had been away from my time machine external drive and assumed I was safe because I was editing a file live synchronized with iCloud Drive.
Casey:
Apple support escalated to Apple engineering and engineering replied that no forensic data was available and the recovery of the most recent version would not be possible.
Casey:
So, uh, in other words, apparently piss off Steven Teller.
Casey:
Uh, that's not fun.
Casey:
I, I use iCloud drive extremely sparingly.
Casey:
So I can't say I've witnessed this.
Casey:
Uh, Marco, have you ever had anything like this happen?
Casey:
Are you even using iCloud drive for anything?
Marco:
I use it, again, like you, extremely sparingly.
Marco:
I only have a relatively small number of files in there.
Marco:
Usually it's the handful of documents that I have in numbers and pages and stuff just for ease of cross-device use from those apps.
Marco:
But for the most part, I don't really use it.
Marco:
I still use Dropbox as the backing store and the Maestral client app to access it.
Marco:
on my Macs.
Marco:
Basically, I use Dropbox with a third-party app.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
I've never seen this problem.
Marco:
In part, one of the reasons I don't use iCloud Drive for more things is that we occasionally hear about problems that are in this ballpark, some kind of data integrity problem or data loss problem that it just makes me
Marco:
I know lots of people out there are using iCloud Drive just fine and never having any problems.
Marco:
And in my very light use of it, I haven't seen any problems like that as far as I'm aware.
Marco:
But because we've heard occasional things like this from people, it makes me hesitant to ever dump Dropbox and go all in on iCloud Drive.
John:
Yeah, well, one thing to emphasize here is, once again, cloud storage is not a backup.
John:
I know that's, you know, like, oh, he's away from his time machine drive, like, what can you do or whatever?
John:
But like, you know, you think you're safe because it's safely in the cloud.
John:
That's not a backup.
John:
That's a live, that's the live place where you're messing with the data.
John:
And if that service messes it up, that's when you need your backup.
John:
And if you don't have one, it's bad.
John:
iCloud Drive, I've always been wary of it.
John:
In the beginning, it was super duper buggy.
John:
And even though it's supposedly gotten better,
John:
So regardless of what you think the reliability is going to be based on anecdotes that you hear from people or on podcasts or whatever, one thing we do know is it has very limited user control.
John:
There's not a lot of knobs and buttons that you can press.
John:
We'll put a link in the show notes to some articles from Eclectic Light Company, which is a website that delves into lots of these nitty-gritty details.
John:
icloud drive on mac os has changed so much since it was introduced it's always been the same service and you like you pay for it and it has like a branded name or whatever but what has implemented that the actual code that runs on your mac and probably also as far as you know we don't know but it's the code that runs on the servers that has changed so much over the years but through all of it it has never been a time where it's been like dropbox where there's like a button you can press that say sync everything now
John:
Or, you know, like do the thing, like Dropbox, it would just, in the olden days, you'd just launch Dropbox and it would, when it starts up, it would look at all your files and it would look at everything that's in the cloud and it would synchronize them and do something.
John:
And if you wanted to do the thing again, you could quit it and relaunch it, which is a crude type of control, but not even having that type of control in the Mac has always been a problem.
John:
People will be like, I'm getting on a plane.
John:
I want to make sure these three files are synced.
John:
Which little icon in the finder do I click?
John:
How can I make it do it now?
John:
I click the little cloud icon and it should be downloading, but it's not changing.
John:
What can I do?
John:
Apple has this problem.
John:
We talked about it with photos or whatever.
John:
It's part of the design of iCloud.
John:
When I say design, I don't mean the way the code is laid out.
John:
This is the features that they've chosen to expose.
John:
It's great if it worked 100% reliably, but it doesn't.
John:
And when it doesn't, you're left reading articles like these, like company ones and doing kill all bird D or whatever the hell to try in front of whichever demon controls this these days and figuring out what's changed in Sonoma versus the previous version and whether you're using the file provider version of the thing or like just, it's not what I want out of my cloud storage.
John:
Dropbox is also increasingly helpful when I want it on my cloud storage.
John:
Sometimes I look at it and I'm like, I yearn for the days of FTP, where you explicitly did operations, and when you did them, they were completed.
John:
Obviously, the best defense against all of this is having actually real backups, but I'm personally super-duper wary of iCloud Drive still because I don't feel like it gives me enough control.
John:
And I'm still using, miraculously somehow, the non-file provider version of Dropbox, which I mean is the version of Dropbox that doesn't use Apple's new file provider APIs and uses whatever the bad old version of Dropbox used where it did sneaky things behind the back of the OS.
John:
But that one still, for me, despite all of its nags and annoyances, works reliably.
John:
And when I quit it, I know it's not running.
John:
And when I launched it, it syncs everything back up again.
John:
You know, there are other solutions to, you know, many other companies that are looking to be cloud storage for you.
John:
I know iCloud Drive is built in.
John:
My kids use it for all their stuff.
John:
So far, they haven't come crying to me to tell me all their stuff is gone.
John:
And practically speaking, most of their stuff is not backed up.
John:
My son is at college.
John:
He's not getting time machine backups onto the Synology like he would when he was back in the house.
John:
So it's just iCloud Drive or nothing.
John:
In my experience, Google Drive is more reliable.
John:
Not the Mac version of Google Drive, but Google Drive as used through the web, which is a lot of what both of my kids use for their schoolwork, because schools, as we've discussed in the past, like to use the Google family of products.
John:
And I have faith in Google Drive as used on the web.
John:
I say this at the night that there's a story about Google Drive files disappearing, and we'll put a link to that in the show notes.
John:
So no cloud storage is perfect, right?
John:
That's why you have to actually have backups.
John:
Cloud storage is not a backup.
John:
You could have a backup in cloud storage, but if you're like, I don't need a backup.
John:
My files are in Dropbox.
John:
My files are in Google Drive.
John:
My files are in iCloud Drive.
John:
That's where your files are.
John:
That's what you need a backup of.
John:
That is not a backup.
John:
That's what you need to backup.
John:
Make another copy of that.
John:
Put it elsewhere.
John:
Take it to the stuff that's in iCloud Drive and put it someplace that's not iCloud Drive.
John:
Take the stuff that's in Google Drive and put it someplace that's not in Google Drive.
John:
You can cross back up them to each other.
John:
Hell, my photos are also, quote unquote, backed up to Google Photos as a backup of last resort in addition to the 700 other places they're backed up just because it's another place, right?
John:
And what you're hoping is they don't all get hosed at the same time.
John:
So, yeah.
John:
Anyway, moral of the story is I personally would still stay away from iCloud Drive, but I know lots of people use it and it does come with your back.
Casey:
All right, Marcos Vinicius Petri writes, considering that push notifications are unaffected by disabling background app refresh, which apps should we allow or block from refreshing in the background?
Casey:
What kind of convenience will I lose by disabling it, and how much more battery will my phone consume if I leave everything turned on?
Casey:
So just as a single data point here, with CallSheet, I sync a handful of things like search history and spoiler settings and stuff like that.
Casey:
I sync that via iCloud, via CloudKit.
Casey:
And that is done, as far as I can tell, that works by Apple sending push notifications to your phone to say, hey, go update yourself.
Casey:
And I'm not explicitly requesting that.
Casey:
That's just based on the fact that things have changed in CloudKit.
Casey:
Apple will say, oh, you need to go and fetch these updates.
Casey:
And
Casey:
That all happens through this background app refresh mechanism, as far as I'm aware.
Casey:
And so if, for example, you turn that off the call sheet, is that not true?
Casey:
Okay, so correct me.
Marco:
Well, so background refresh for apps is an API that apps can register with the system and say, basically, wake me up six hours from now and let me know when I can update my data.
Marco:
ClydeCut seems to be kind of a separate process, but background refresh, there's this framework called BGTask, and it used to be done via a few older methods, but that's the current way to do it.
Marco:
And it's literally, you request that the system wake you up sometime in the future so that you can then have...
Marco:
A short time, usually like maybe a minute or half a minute in the background that you can fetch the newest data from your server or update your widgets or whatever else.
Marco:
There's a couple other mechanisms as well.
Marco:
There's a background processing task, which the phone will only let your app do if it's plugged in.
Marco:
but that allows you to use a bunch of cpu power in the background which normally you'd be terminated for doing but so if you need to do something like overcast does its search indexing with that process where if you if you plug your phone in overnight you know it'll probably wake overcast up at some point in the night and overcast will make sure the search index is up to date for all the all your you know downloaded podcasts
Marco:
the other method of background refresh sort of is you can send from your servers you can send a silent push notification that simply wakes the app up it's called a content available push notification and that wakes the app up in the background and gives you a few seconds really to like you know kick off network tasks or try to try to do something in the background and those are not guaranteed to wake your app up they're kind of like a best effort thing and the system can throttle them if it's not really a good power state or if it thinks you're sending too many of them
Marco:
And so all those mechanisms are throttlable and actively throttled by iOS depending on the power state, whether there's Wi-Fi or not in some cases.
Marco:
But power state is the most important.
Marco:
So in low power mode, I believe it does almost none of these things or none of these things.
Marco:
That's one of the things that changes when you turn on low power mode.
Marco:
Normally, in other cases, it will monitor the battery level.
Marco:
So if your phone is plugged in, it will allow these things to run pretty much whenever they want to on some responsible, non-abusive interval.
Marco:
If your phone is not plugged in, but you have 75% battery, it's probably going to let these things run.
Marco:
Now, yes, you can go in there and you can manually toggle off all these switches and everything.
Marco:
But my hot take on this is you're wasting your time.
Marco:
Don't bother.
Marco:
Let the system manage it because the system is really good at managing it.
Marco:
When you have background app refresh enabled for an app, the system is not letting the app continuously run in the background.
Marco:
It is still doing a kind of like, you know, wake up periodically, do something quickly, and then we will suspend you again kind of mechanic there.
Marco:
So the app is not running continuously.
Marco:
And as mentioned, you can only do the super CPU-intensive tasks from the background processing task type that only runs when the phone's plugged in.
Marco:
The regular background app refresh when you're out there on battery, the phone is also enforcing certain CPU usage limits so that you're not burning too much battery power then.
Marco:
And it only lets you run for a certain amount of time.
Marco:
So you can't be doing that much for that long.
Marco:
The other side of it is, like, if you turn off background refresh for an app, oftentimes you are making things worse for yourself.
Marco:
There is precedent, like, you know, when a while back, we've talked about this before, a while back, if you would, quote, force quit an app, if you'd remove it from the multitasking switcher, it wouldn't allow background refresh.
Marco:
And Apple, in a later iOS version, changed that to no longer affect background refresh state, or at least maybe it acts as an input to how frequently to do it, maybe, but probably not even that anymore.
Marco:
Because people were disabling background refresh unintentionally by, quote, force quitting the app, and then the apps weren't working that well.
Marco:
They were not getting updates.
Marco:
The apps were not working the way the user expected them to work.
Marco:
When you go mesh with these settings, you think you're achieving a certain gain, but you probably are not achieving that much of one because the system's automatic behavior is really good at managing this stuff.
Marco:
I mean, again, see also forced quitting apps.
Marco:
There's a lot of overlap in what I'm saying here.
Marco:
You know, forced quitting an app because it is stuck on something is one thing, but forced quitting an app just because you think it'll save your battery power...
Marco:
That's a little squishier and a little bit harder to prove and oftentimes not doing what you think it's doing.
Marco:
So same thing with disabling background refresh.
Marco:
Generally speaking, you should leave it alone unless there is a specific problem you've identified with a specific app that is really out of control in some way.
Marco:
But it's very unlikely to be due to background refresh because the system manages it pretty tightly.
John:
One factor you might want to consider is if you have a lot of apps installed, but there's a bunch of ones that you never use.
John:
Ideally, the system would notice that you never use them and not allow them to background refresh.
John:
It does.
John:
I don't think it currently does that to the degree that it should.
John:
No, it does.
John:
Well, I'll give you an example.
John:
I have Flighty installed.
John:
I rarely use it, but I do use it.
John:
But very rarely when I'm picking someone up from the airport or when I'm flying myself.
John:
which is enough to allow Flighty to do stuff in the background, because it's not like, well, he never uses this app.
John:
But 99% of the time, I do not want Flighty to refresh in the background.
John:
So if I found that it was using a lot of background energy or whatever, if it showed up in my battery list or whatever, I would say, why is Flighty on the list?
John:
I don't have a flight that I have to deal with for three months.
John:
At that point, you could turn flighty off.
John:
You have to remember to turn it back on, though, because you're going to be like, why isn't flighty working?
John:
To Marco's point, like, why aren't I getting updates about this flight?
John:
Yeah, you wanted to, you know, so if you're not going to remember to do that, if you're not going to micromanage it, then...
John:
you might want to deal with it manually for apps that you not apps that you never use but apps that you use infrequently and flight tracking is a great example because this especially things that do a good job they're constantly checking where is this flight where is this you know and hopefully there's the apps are smart and when you don't have anything in your my flight so i still won't do that or whatever but
John:
like you want the value from that app when you use it but if you know for sure i'm not interested in flights for three months then you can turn it off um the other option is just uninstall apps that you're not actually using which might be better for your life for a lot of reasons but um yeah and if you really want to if you if you're like oh i'm gonna i'm gonna do the opposite i'm gonna do opt-in i'm gonna turn a background refresh off on everything and i'm only going to turn on on the apps that i care about just use low power mode at that point
John:
Low power mode will do that for you.
John:
Essentially not allowing things to run in the background except for super duper essential stuff.
John:
If you really care that much about your battery or if you have a phone that like the battery is dying on and you don't want to replace the battery, use low power mode and you'll see what it's like to have a phone that doesn't really refresh in the background anymore.
John:
And then every time you launch an app, all the data in it's out of date or whatever.
John:
If you have apps that are currently disabled, if you ever launch them and you're like, oh, I launched it and I just got to wait for it to refresh.
John:
If the app is good and you enable background refresh, it will make the experience better so that when you launch the app, oh, look, all my podcasts are already up to date.
John:
I don't need to pull to refresh them because it did it already when it was plugged in overnight, right?
John:
That's a great example because like podcasts, you know, people mostly care about, let me see my new podcast for the day.
John:
They don't need to see the new podcast every two minutes.
John:
It'll refresh during the night when it's plugged in if you allow background refresh.
John:
So, you know, consider that for the apps that you do use.
John:
Make sure background refresh is turned on for them.
Marco:
I mean, I would even go as far as to say don't do what John just said, but turn it off if you don't use it for a while.
Marco:
Because A, iOS... I don't know if the current versions do this, but frequency of use and most recent use were factors that iOS would consider when deciding how frequently to allow apps to background refresh.
Marco:
So that's already kind of being done automatically for you as far as I know.
Marco:
At least it was.
Marco:
And secondly...
Marco:
the whole idea of, Oh, I'm going to turn this off now.
Marco:
And I'll, maybe I'll remember to turn it back on later.
Marco:
You won't, you definitely won't.
Marco:
It will stay off and flat.
Marco:
It will just suck for you.
Marco:
Like that's like, so like you shouldn't be like, this is like, you know, back, back when I worked on the internet, um, it was always kind of frustrating when we would get reports from people saying feature X is broken on your website.
Um,
Marco:
And after some digging, it turned out to be, oh, they're running some browser extension that interferes with the JavaScript that breaks this website.
Marco:
And so it's like they modified their experience.
Marco:
Then later something broke and they blamed us and not themselves and the modifications they made.
Marco:
And that causes support headaches and it causes bad user experiences and it causes oftentimes bad reviews.
Marco:
I feel like when you're going and messing with those kinds of settings with, you know, I'm going to lock down these apps and make sure they can't abuse my system, then what happens is you have worse experiences with those apps and you might not remember why or you might not realize why or you might be toggling a switch that does something that you didn't quite intend for it to do or you didn't fully understand what it did.
Marco:
And so you're better off, again, unless you've identified a specific problem with a specific app that you need to address this way, don't mess with it.
Marco:
Just let it do the defaults because, again, iOS does a very good job already at managing background refresh frequency for apps.
Marco:
And so you don't really need to override it.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Hatch and Notion.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental, they didn't know.
Casey:
So long.
Casey:
What do we have to talk about?
Marco:
I had the idea of maybe our fitness requirements slash routines because we were talking about that earlier, Casey, and it seems like you seem to be wanting to exercise every day or something like every day.
Marco:
And I thought that was kind of an interesting thing to discuss because I don't think that has always been the case for you.
Casey:
No, it certainly hasn't.
Casey:
Near history, yes.
Casey:
Longer history, no.
Casey:
I'm trying to think when this became a thing, but it's probably... I would guess it was during COVID.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I can look at my streak in the health app and see how long it's been.
Casey:
There have definitely been days that I have not done a dedicated workout, but...
Casey:
My streak for closing my exercise ring, which is my trends.
Casey:
Yes, my trends, which I don't know if underscore even supports anymore.
Casey:
I have 870 days of that's with rest, I think, which I know that's without rest.
Casey:
um 870 days of exercise goal hit and move goal hit apparently i missed my stand uh stand uh ring once a couple hundred days ago so i only have 204 days there i guess i'm no longer a blue ring stud but nevertheless
Casey:
Um, yeah, I think whatever, uh, that's a deep, that is a deep cut.
Casey:
So whatever 870 days before today was, um, I started getting more serious about doing something that at least vaguely smells like exercise every single day.
Casey:
Um, typically I'm doing some sort of video based workout.
Casey:
Sometimes that's Apple fitness plus, um, and often, but not always it's lifting weights.
Casey:
Occasionally it'll be, um, like a hit high, what is it?
Casey:
High intensity interval training.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Um, oftentimes, and I feel like, I feel like I've talked about this on the show at some point, but it certainly hasn't been recently.
Casey:
Um, a lot of times what I'll do is I'll do, um, it used to be called beach body.
Casey:
Now I think it's called body.
Casey:
You would know them because they're the P90X people.
Casey:
Um, and the,
Casey:
Their whole service is very interesting.
Casey:
There's a lot of really gross stuff to it about how, you know, you need to take such and such supplement and otherwise you'll never get the exercise, the gains that you want and so on and so forth, which I don't pay any attention to.
Casey:
But what they do have is they do have a pretty robust library of basically fitness and exercise videos.
Casey:
I don't like Fitness Plus.
Casey:
One of the things I like about Beachbody is that there are programs.
Casey:
So where Fitness Plus, in my opinion, falls down, and I haven't really used Fitness Plus in the last couple of months, and I think they're starting to add features like this.
Casey:
But one of the ways that Fitness Plus falls down to me is that it doesn't have any concept of a longer-term thing.
Casey:
And so you can go every day and just pick out a random, you know, strength training video and you can specialize and say, I'd like an upper body, you know, strength video, or I'd want a lower body one or a full body one.
Casey:
But there's no real concept of like over time, I would like to have some sort of consistency that is externally directed.
Casey:
Whereas with Beachbody or whatever they're called now,
Casey:
You can do like a three to six to eight week program where you're, you know, you're doing basically the same moves in different orders and in different combinations and whatnot over the course of that two months or what have you.
Casey:
And so unfortunately, because I like food too damn much, I don't know the next time you see me, Marco, I don't know that I'll look that different.
Casey:
In fact, for all I know, maybe I've gotten bigger.
Casey:
I haven't been on a scale in a while because that doesn't really matter to me that much.
Marco:
I don't recommend it.
Casey:
Honestly, I understand the utility of it, but I mostly agree with you that I don't think that number is terribly useful.
Casey:
But I can tell you unequivocally that I am the strongest that I think I've ever been in my life.
Casey:
Not to say that I'm an exceptionally strong person, but I am way stronger than a total complete weakling, which is how I spent the first 38 to 40 years of my life.
Casey:
So there's that.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
There are definitely bulgy things that vaguely resemble muscles in places that never used to be.
Casey:
And I mean, again, you'll look at me and probably be like, you look about the same to me.
Casey:
But there's certainly I can notice some changes.
Casey:
And Aaron said something in this all but stemmed from Aaron starting to take fitness and nutrition.
Casey:
She's much better with her nutrition than I am with mine.
Casey:
She's taken that much more seriously over the last two to three to five years.
Casey:
But one of the things she said to me a couple of years ago now that really rang true to me was leaving aside that you want to be there for your kids, leaving aside that it's the right thing to do to exercise if you have the ability to do so.
Casey:
And the three of us now have the luxury that we can do this at basically any time of day.
Casey:
And if I'm completely honest with you, most of the time I work out at about two o'clock in the afternoon, sometimes after an afternoon siesta.
Casey:
Not always, but sometimes.
John:
Hey, whatever works for you.
Casey:
Whatever works, man.
Casey:
But one of the things that Erin said to me, which now is less relevant because both the kids are in school, but she said, you know, I want to see my kids, our kids, you know, taking... I want our kids to see us taking care of ourselves.
Casey:
And for that to be...
Casey:
clear to them that it's an important part of our lives is doing some sort of physical exertion and activity.
Casey:
And so, like I said, you know, typically during the week, I'll do some sort of generally strength or, you know, HIIT training, generally directed by some sort of program on Beachbody or whatever it's called.
Casey:
Uh, a lot of times I'll do a, like an eight week program on, on beach body, and then I'll take a couple of weeks and just do random Apple fitness plus workouts to kind of clear my palate.
Casey:
And then I'll choose a different program on, you know, a week program or what have you.
Casey:
Um, and then typically in the weekends, um, in lieu of like a full on rest day, Aaron and I will go on a long walk together.
Casey:
So we'll walk like effectively a 5k.
Casey:
So like three, you know, three ish miles and we'll do that on the weekends.
Casey:
And that gives us our exercise.
Casey:
Um, and, and, and we're not lifting over the weekend.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
That is probably 80,000 words where 10 would have done.
Casey:
But since you asked, that's where I stand.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
But you also, you and Tiff both have also gotten very, and this happened, I think, before the pandemic, because I feel like I saw the beginnings of this when we last saw each other in 2019.
Casey:
But you guys have also gotten extremely serious.
Casey:
You made mention of your bespoke laptop for fitness and your personal trainer and what have you.
Casey:
So this has also been a pretty serious thing for you guys.
Marco:
Yeah, it really has.
Marco:
It started out that it was probably seven or eight years ago.
Marco:
Tiff started training with this trainer that was in our neighborhood that a few of our other friends here were using.
Marco:
And I thought it was just for all the moms because that's what all the groups were.
Marco:
And then one day, Tiff's like, you know, you should really start this.
Marco:
I'm like, I don't think the moms want me to come into their fitness class.
Marco:
And it turns out that he was just starting a guy class together.
Marco:
There was one guy's class that was happening one day.
Marco:
I'm like, all right, you know what?
Marco:
I'll go to that, sure.
Marco:
And it was hard for me because...
Marco:
I was in my early to mid-30s at this point.
Marco:
I've never been super overweight, but I've never been fit in my life before that.
Marco:
And so I never felt good going to gyms.
Marco:
I'd go to a gym and there'd be all these big guys and their big muscles going on all the equipment.
Marco:
And I can't do any of that.
Marco:
And I don't even want to be here seeing you do it.
Yeah.
Marco:
And the last thing I want is for me to try to do that in front of all of you.
Marco:
So I'd had gym memberships occasionally before, and it just never stuck because I would go and I would be intimidated or not know what to do, frankly.
Marco:
And I never really enjoyed it before.
Marco:
Anyway, so fast forward.
Marco:
So this trainer, I was a little, you know, he's still skeptical to go, but I finally made myself go.
Marco:
And this guy, he has really become a very good friend of our family.
Marco:
We've been training with him for, geez, something like seven or eight years now.
Marco:
He is very unlike what you would expect a trainer to be if you've never had a good trainer.
Marco:
Like, you know, when most people picture, you know, trainers from gyms, you picture those guys or some kind of like, you know, drill sergeant.
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
Come on, step it up.
Marco:
Don't be a wimp.
Marco:
You picture that kind of thing, and I am not compatible with that at all.
Marco:
But the good thing is our trainer is wonderful and is nothing like that at all.
Marco:
He is relentlessly positive.
Marco:
He never makes you feel bad about yourself at all.
Marco:
He trains people at all levels.
Marco:
Like I went to the first class I went to, that was a group class with him.
Marco:
There were guys who were older than me.
Marco:
There were guys who were younger than me.
Marco:
There were guys who were more fit than me, guys who were less fit than me.
Marco:
Like I didn't feel intimidated.
Marco:
And he is so amazing and positive and awesome.
Marco:
If anybody actually needs a trainer, feel free to write it because what happened was during COVID, he moved and we switched to FaceTime.
Marco:
And so he does training via FaceTime and Zoom now, which you would think wouldn't work.
Marco:
It surprisingly works.
Marco:
He sees everything.
Marco:
And look, the downside, of course, I'll tell you, I'll be honest, the downside is personal training one-on-one is expensive because you're paying for someone's time directly to work with you.
Marco:
So, of course, it's going to be way more expensive than most other ways to do this.
Marco:
The advantage, if you can swing it, is that for me, nothing ever stuck with
Marco:
Because I would be like, oh, you know, I'm really busy today or I'm feeling a little low energy today.
Marco:
I'm going to skip the workout today.
Marco:
When there's a person who you are going to meet, that changes things.
Marco:
I will make all sorts of excuses to not do a workout on my own.
Marco:
But I also, one of my greatest personality flaws that makes me vulnerable to every type of salesperson imaginable is that I really want to please people.
Marco:
I very much care about being there for people in my life, showing up, pleasing people, making people like me.
Marco:
I very much care about that to a fault.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
I never miss workouts basically like if I I will jump through ridiculous hoops to make the scheduled workouts in part because I am meeting a person who is now a friend of mine and I don't want to disappoint him and anything he asked me to do in the workout even if it seems really hard I'll try it.
Marco:
because the last thing i want to say is i don't think i can do that like and and so you know it is it is wonderful again if you're in the market for for a virtual trainer um i can strongly recommend my trainer he is the best and if you think there is like if you think like oh he's maybe you know if you're intimidated by the idea of a trainer or you think it's like some kind of drill sergeant thing trust me this is not that at all like
Marco:
He's so good and so positive and never makes you feel bad about yourself.
Marco:
And every workout is different.
Marco:
And you can be like, oh, I slept weird on my neck.
Marco:
My neck hurts.
Marco:
Like, all right, we'll modify.
Marco:
And we'll modify it on the fly to like, you know, fit whatever you need to fit.
Marco:
Like, he's great.
Marco:
Anyway, so that...
Marco:
that really has changed things for me because I went from, you know, before training with him, I went from basically never exercising or, or very rarely exercising to at first doing it once a week, then slowly ramped up.
Marco:
Now we're, now we're doing three times a week.
Marco:
And between those, I will occasionally row or run depending on the season.
Marco:
Um, and,
Marco:
now i've finally crossed over to the point where i care enough that i feel bad when i don't work out for a while like if we're traveling and have to miss a couple workouts like i really feel bad and i'll try to like you know go to the hotel gym or whatever and do something just so i'm you know so my body stays awake in certain ways like and that's kind of how it feels now like when
Marco:
Whenever I go on vacation for a while or I'm not able to work for a while, my brain kind of feels like, oh, I really want to use my brain, but I haven't been able to because I'm out or whatever.
Marco:
Now my body feels like that.
Marco:
Now if I'm out and I'm traveling or whatever and can't work out for a few days, my body gets that same kind of itch to like, hey, I want to do something.
Marco:
I need to do something, which...
Marco:
if you would have told me 10 years ago, that was, that'd be saying that right now.
Marco:
I would have told you you were crazy, but that's what happens.
Marco:
And, and I'm glad, I'm glad I have gone through this, this journey because I too, like you, like I, I don't, I probably don't look that strong because I'm not doing like bodybuilding stuff.
Marco:
I'm also 41.
Marco:
It's only so ripped I can get, but, um,
Marco:
I am way stronger than I've ever been before, even though I look about the same, I think.
Marco:
Right, right, right.
Marco:
I would never think to do some of the exercises that we do.
Marco:
Most of them I would never think to do.
Marco:
And there's all sorts of little weird muscles that I'm now strengthening and training and toning and everything.
Marco:
And that's great as you get older because that is good for avoiding...
Marco:
injuries as you get older or you know chronic pain centers and stuff like that like i used to get rsi i don't anymore i used to get back pain i don't anymore and now i know like as i get older the areas in which you can get pain or injuries only go up as you get older and so now i know like because i'm doing all this you know wonderful mixed training of all these different muscles i know that my odds of getting those injuries and chronic pain down the road are lower so
Marco:
And if I do get any kind of weird injury, my odds are better that I that it will heal better and faster.
Marco:
And, you know, it won't affect my life as much maybe.
Marco:
And so as you get older, it's kind of like saving for retirement.
Marco:
Like you should really start doing it as soon as you can, ideally.
Marco:
And the earlier you start, the more you'll appreciate that when you're older.
Marco:
That's how like an exercise routine is also like when you're young, you can get away with not doing it.
Marco:
As you get older, you really can't get away with that as easily anymore.
Marco:
And the best time to start is now, if you can.
Marco:
Like, do something and whatever it is.
Marco:
Like, I know our friends over at Cortex love the FitBot app.
Marco:
I know Gray talks a lot about how that has really changed his life.
Marco:
And that's something that, like, if my trainer ever stopped working or something, I would probably try that next.
Marco:
But ultimately, for me, I really need the human that I want to please for me to really stick with something.
Yeah.
Casey:
Very quick real-time follow-up, and I'd like to hear, John, what your situation is.
Casey:
I was poking about generating links for the show notes, and I thought I had seen something about this, and it appears I was correct.
Casey:
On Fitness Plus, they now have a feature called Custom Plan, where the little marketing blurb reads, stay consistent on your fitness journey with custom plans.
Casey:
Choose your personal preferences, including the day's durations, workout types, meditation themes, trainers, and music.
Casey:
And Fitness Plus will generate a custom plan just for you.
Casey:
And with stacks, which is another new thing of theirs that I haven't played with yet, you can move seamlessly from one workout or meditation to the next with no interruptions.
Casey:
Just set it and then get it.
Casey:
So this is more along the lines of what I feel like I do get from the Beachbody stuff, which I think is called just body now.
Casey:
And I never felt like I got that from Fitness Plus, particularly the plan part, like the stack thing where you roll from one workout to another, whatever.
Casey:
But
Casey:
the whole custom plan thing.
Casey:
Again, I haven't fiddled with this yet, but once I finish my current program on body, then I'll probably at least fiddle with this custom plan thing.
Casey:
And I will say that if you're new to this, well, first of all, talk to somebody who actually knows what they're doing, preferably like a doctor or a fitness specialist, which is not either of us.
Casey:
But the Fitness Plus stuff is a really good introduction.
Casey:
And
Casey:
They're really, really good about not being bro-y.
Casey:
The body stuff can get a little bro-y from time to time.
Casey:
And not to say it's all dudes that are training, but given that it came from P90X, you can see how it could get a little aggressive.
Casey:
And generally speaking, it isn't bad.
Casey:
And generally speaking, I actually quite like it.
Casey:
Again, if you can filter out all the, you know, take this chemical, that's the only way you'll get fit business.
Casey:
Um, but nevertheless, uh, the fitness plus stuff is a really approachable way to ease into any sort of fitness and just see if it's something that you can physically do without hurting yourself.
Casey:
And if there's, if it's anything that you enjoy.
Casey:
So, uh, especially if you happen to be an Apple one or whatever it's called subscriber, um, I would definitely at least give it a whirl.
Casey:
And I really do quite love having, and this is unique to fitness plus because, you know, it's, uh, integrated and all that.
Casey:
You can see your rings right there on the screen as you're doing a workout, which is super nice to see yourself as you're doing this workout, see yourself cranking through your red ring and your green ring and what have you.
Casey:
I find that to be very motivating.
Casey:
And speaking of rings, and I promise, John, I'll give you a chance here.
Casey:
I think what has helped for me is having gotten a 800 plus day streak going and
Casey:
And there definitely have been a couple of days where I probably should have just not worked out or whatever.
Casey:
But on the whole, I think similar to you saying, Marco, that you had someone to answer to, I have this momentum that I don't want to lose.
Casey:
And I think that has been helpful for me.
Casey:
And so, you know, I'm going to be doing a little bit of traveling soon.
Casey:
And I've been thinking through, and I was talking with Marco about this, you know, what
Casey:
What can I do for some modicum of exercise during this travel window?
Casey:
And I think what I'll end up doing is just going for a walk, which is not what I would normally do on a weekday, but it's fine.
Casey:
I just want to do something to get my body moving, something to close my rings and keep that momentum going.
Casey:
Because I probably speak for Marco, but I definitely will say for myself that too many missed days and I can see myself immediately just giving up on it.
Casey:
just out of complacency, like not because I desire sitting here to not work out.
Casey:
I actually do enjoy it, like Marco was saying, but it would not take that much to get me to be very complacent and fall into my natural state of being, which is, I'll worry about that tomorrow.
Casey:
So the rings have been helpful for me, even though they've probably also caused me to exercise at times, and maybe I shouldn't have.
Casey:
uh john i i will stop talking now i apologize what is your regimen to have you worked on this at all i think before you you quit and and went full full indie i thought you had said that this was one of your priorities but have you had time to make it a priority yet i hate working out i don't like it at all that's
John:
not what i prefer uh in in my youth uh what i wanted to do was play sports uh and as a side effect of playing sports you get exercise but that's not why i'm doing it i'm doing it to get better at the sport and to enjoy the sport and the exercise is just a nice side benefit uh
John:
uh i ran i played tennis in high school i also ran in high school and in running i got terrible terrible shin splints which uh kind of ended my running career prematurely at the end of my high school career uh and surprisingly has stuck with me since the age of 18 to the ripe old age of 48 or whatever the hell i am now um
John:
they're still there lurking.
John:
Uh, they, uh, you know, and what it, what it basically does is eliminate running for me as a possible activity, which I think I probably would have done because even though running is not, you know, I'm going to say it's not that much of a sport, but it's not like a sport with a ball or a type of skill thing.
John:
It's more of a, you know, it's an endurance thing.
John:
It's, it's aerobic activity and stuff like that.
John:
But there is a goal, like you're trying to get your times to go better or whatever and not being able to run for exercise kind of sucks.
John:
Um,
John:
But I hate the idea of just doing a workout for the sake of a workout, like exercise with no goal in mind.
John:
And so for most of my adult life, I haven't done any exercise or working out at all, which is probably not a great plan.
John:
I also didn't do much sports stuff because a surprising number of sports things make my shin splints flare up.
John:
Even something as simple as basketball or tennis, even though you're not don't seem like you're running that much, you are kind of running a little bit.
John:
Uh, and so, and you know, uh, practically speaking, especially when I was, had my jobby job and doing all my extra things at the same time, there was just no time.
John:
Kids, family, work, uh, side jobs, all that.
John:
It's no time to do anything.
John:
It's part of my burnout.
John:
Part of what, uh, made me leave my job was I need some time to do something.
John:
Right.
Um,
John:
So now in my indie career, I have carved out some time to do something.
John:
And what I've latched on is the thing that I can do, which is not it's better than nothing, but it's not really complete.
John:
There's still lots of holes in my thing here.
John:
But what I've latched on to is the thing I can do.
John:
It's kind of like running, but you don't go anywhere.
John:
And that's weightlifting.
John:
Because weightlifting has the same kind of number-go-up mentality as running, or I guess in running it's number-go-down, right?
John:
But that's essentially the game, right?
John:
There is a gamified component of it.
John:
There is progression.
John:
Oh, my time is getting better.
John:
I'm lifting heavier weights.
John:
It has the advantage that lifting weights doesn't take as much time because you do a couple of sets of a handful of reps, and it's really hard to do, but it's over relatively quickly.
John:
And even if you have like, you know, 30 seconds between them or whatever, like it doesn't take a really long time.
John:
Unlike like if you're doing some kind of aerobic exercise, you might have to do it for a very long time to get benefit from it.
John:
But, you know, five sets of five reps with a weight that's just at your limit that you slowly increase over each week as you do it.
John:
That does something, and it's better than nothing.
John:
I still need much more aerobic exercise than I'm getting.
John:
I still am not really doing a complete workout.
John:
I should still really be playing sports, but it's not really a surprise to me, but maybe a surprise to people who have young children and think, oh, it'll be so much easier when they're older.
John:
Maybe there's a period in the middle there where that may be true.
John:
But once you start getting towards high school in the end and like the whole rush of college and, you know, the whole college application process and SATs and driver's licenses and the teen years in general, there's a big push kind of towards the end of like getting the kids out of the nest.
John:
Yeah.
John:
that involves a surprising amount of parent involvement so much more than you had been doing when they were like 12 or 11 kind of at the same level that you were doing it when they were much younger only it's much much worse because they're full-fledged people and the things they're doing are more like have adult annoyances because now they have to deal with bureaucracies and you have to help them navigate them and it's just anyway
John:
All of that is to say that although I have carved out time, I do weightlifting about three times a week.
John:
I'll put a link in the show notes to Casey Johnson's couch to barbell program, which is loosely what I initially based what I was doing on and bought a bunch of weights during COVID like so many other people did.
John:
And I've upgraded that weight set a few times and have an adjustable things.
John:
Now, I don't have a very fancy setup.
John:
I don't have a home gym.
John:
I don't have a gym membership.
John:
I don't want to go to the gym.
John:
That's another good thing about weightlifting.
John:
If you can buy the right kind of heavy objects for lifting, you can do a surprising number of exercises in your house.
John:
I think Marco is also doing all his exercises in his house with limited equipment.
John:
You don't necessarily need a gym to do stuff.
John:
And believe me, the weights on lifting are not heavy.
John:
but they're heavier than nothing and that and that is what's important and for the few periods of time when i have like you know i didn't do any working out when i was on my long island vacation and i came back from it you feel it you skip a week and you're like what happened i mean i guess it also doesn't help that i'm you know old and getting close to 50 or whatever um but yeah like it shows me that something's happening and guess what number goes up
John:
You know, you start out lifting this much weight and then after a week you add five more pounds and you add another five more pounds and you add another five more pounds.
John:
Like eventually you get to a limit where I mean, eventually I'll get to the limit of my my weight sets where they can't put on anymore.
John:
But I haven't reached that yet.
John:
So that's what I'm doing.
John:
It's better than nothing.
John:
But it's not enough.
John:
And so my you know, it's always like, oh, tomorrow will be better.
John:
Right.
John:
My current plan is like, OK, but I have one kid in college now and one kid going through that process when I have both kids out of the house and in college, then I won't be which I'm currently drive my daughter to school in the morning, picking her up in the afternoon, driving her to see her friends in the evening.
John:
Driving her to her driving lessons, driving her to her driving tests, which is scheduled for December.
John:
And we'll see it like lots of driving people around.
John:
That's not good exercise, but that does occupy a large portion of my day.
John:
Dealing with, you know, kids activities, driving to get my son at school, driving him back to school, which I did today.
John:
A lot of driving.
John:
And so even though I have more time and I have carved out three days a week to do exercise and I have tried to pack an efficient kind of exercise in there, because, again, I think weightlifting is very time and space efficient.
John:
um i i would like to do more and honestly if i get more time you know my daughter goes off to school i want to do a sport i don't want to work out like wait i don't i don't enjoy the weightlifting either even though it's kind of gamified i would much rather be doing a sport but in terms of like the results that i see like in capabilities gained before you couldn't do x and now you can do x right weightlifting does have that going for it it's just super boring and i'm not really into it so
John:
I really want to get back into sports, but tune in in about a year and a half.
John:
When I have a year and a half, two years, I don't know what it's going to be.
John:
When I have both kids in college, assuming I'm not destitute and living on the street at that point, I'll hopefully be doing more exercise.
John:
God.
John:
This is how much college will cost for Maggie.
John:
You got to put it in the clip from the Simpsons.
Casey:
It's terrifying.
Casey:
I don't even want to think about it.
Casey:
Scholarships, kids.
Casey:
It's just to put a period on the sentence from my point of view to build on what I think both of you have said.
Casey:
It is a pretty amazing feeling, particularly as someone who has always associated himself or is self-identified as a nerd, as someone who is not strong and not fast for more than about, you know, 50 yards away.
Casey:
It is extremely cool to get to the point that I need to pick up a bigger weight than I did before.
Casey:
And then what's really amazing is when you have to order a bigger weight than you previously had.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I don't remember exactly when it was, but Aaron and I both needed, you know, a set of 40 pound dumbbells relatively recently, a few months ago.
Marco:
I had those.
Marco:
I hated them.
Marco:
Cause like they're so big and clunky.
Marco:
Like they, they're very difficult to, to manipulate.
John:
I love them.
John:
I love to be able to just, just dial in the weights.
John:
Yeah.
John:
They are kind of big and clunky, but like, I feel like that's part of the challenge that makes them more harder to deal with.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I get this because I did when I was using the smaller weights, I was using non-adjustable ones.
John:
But then I had to I had to go the next size up like Casey's talking about.
John:
And at that point, I just went adjustable and I don't regret it.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, one way or another.
Casey:
But the point is to say, you know, when you when you're ordering something that facilitates 40 pounds, be that because it's literally 40 pounds or because it can add plates or what have you to get to 40 pounds.
Casey:
that's a cool feeling and then you know eventually we needed a 50 pound dumbbell and we're getting to the point that we probably need a second 50 pound dumbbell and we didn't get two at the time because we didn't think we would need a second but both of us are kind of getting to that point we'll maybe need 50 pound dumbbells and that's a really awesome feeling and in the same way like you said John that you're seeing a time go lower and lower as you're running seeing my weights go up and up is a really rewarding thing that I never had that experience as a kid so oh yeah neither did I
Marco:
I mean, John was the most athletic of the three of us probably.
John:
I was never strong, but I was always – yeah, I felt like I was athletic.
John:
And even before I was working out, a good judge is doing crap around the house.
John:
Like to compare before I was lifting weights and after I was lifting weights, both of those eras I had to carry my downstairs freezer up and down out of my basement.
John:
And it felt similar both times.
John:
Like, so even when I am totally doing nothing, I've been coasting on good genes, essentially, to not be terrible.
John:
I mean, it's, I don't know, you know, maybe I'll feel when I get old eventually, but it's like, I still feel like I can do all the things I did.
John:
I could spend an entire day crawling around a crawl space and, you know.
John:
picking up things in the yard or going up and down on ladders all day or like whatever.
John:
Uh, and I have no problem doing it.
John:
The only difference is, is that if I'm not in my pre-working out times, I would be more sore the next day or these days probably not sore at all.
John:
Um, but I can still do it all.
John:
I don't get out of breath doing things.
John:
I, you know, I do need more aerobic exercise, but I'm coasting on good genes a lot for that.
John:
So that needs to be short of, I like bike riding too, but I feel like I'm going to die by being hit by a car.
John:
Because I do not live in a bike friendly place.
John:
So the risk reward trade off is not great.
John:
So then you're like you're driving your bike to a bike trail that feels like weird and wasteful.
John:
So aerobic activity is still a problem.
John:
A stationary bike is so boring and I don't have room for one in my house.
John:
So it is still a thing that I'm working on.
John:
But, you know, we'll revisit this topic when both my kids are in college to see how much better I'm doing.
Marco:
yeah i mean ultimately i think the the best answer to that is figure out something that you can get in your house like whether it's a stationary bike or elliptical or a rower or something some kind of aerobic machine that you can tolerate that can fit somewhere somehow in your house like in a child's bedroom who no longer lives with you yeah i mean honestly yeah that's what a lot of people do like there's a reason for that um that is the ultimate answer because you know generally like yeah weightlifting is great but you're right you should also be doing some kind of aerobic something um
John:
I mean, I'm walking the dog every day, but you know what that's like.
John:
I mean, Tess is technically aerobic.
John:
I'm walking a few miles every day, and I walk at a brisk pace, but meh.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, ideally, you'd have more than that, but yeah.
Marco:
I too, Casey, the number of times that somebody has called me strong in my life, I can probably count on one hand, but...
Marco:
they've almost all been like in the last two years so and i remember every single one of them uh because that it means a lot to me because i was always the scrawny nerdy kid you know i was i was not very athletic um i actually was held back in t-ball for an extra year you couldn't reach the t oh that's brutal
Marco:
No, I just kept, yeah, anyway.
Marco:
So, but like, you know, to be, you know, growing up that way and spending most of my life that way and then, you know, at age 40, you know, to be able to have someone else notice that you're strong, that is not the common case in most of my life.
John:
I'm not strong either.
John:
And my son has zero ounces of body fat his entire body and is young.
John:
But when I was doing my weight workout, when I first started, I encouraged him to this was over the summer after his freshman year of college, I encouraged him to do one workout with me.
John:
And he had one and he's like, I'm never doing that again.
John:
he could do it like it's not like he couldn't do what i was doing but i was at the point where i was about to increase the amount of weight and he was just like the next day he was complaining about how sorry he was everything so i think he's got college student bod which is looks fit from the outside again he's you know six pack abs not an ounce of fat his entire body but he's weak he's small and weak
Marco:
Yeah, and the problem is once your metabolism slows down and you get a little older, that becomes much harder.
John:
Yeah, I said take a look at my midsection.
John:
This is your future, so.