Off the Pouch Lifestyle
I've had a terrible week for technology.
Oh, tell me more.
A few episodes ago, I described my choice to not get another Synology for the beach, but instead just get a couple of large SSDs in an external USB enclosure and just use them as local disks and host Time Machine for that and everything.
I got to interrupt you.
Are you in a mental place where I'm allowed to laugh at you for your misfortune?
Or are you in need of me to be sympathetic and understanding?
I have almost ordered a Synology to fix the problems I'm having.
Well, you're really trying me.
I'm not quite there yet.
You're really trying me here.
Okay, I'm going to try to be good.
To answer your question, you are totally allowed to gloat about how right now my solution is not working well.
All right, so all kidding aside, what's going on?
So I got these big SSDs in.
I had some weirdness where sometimes they would unmount themselves.
Or sometimes after the first time machine backup, it took a while.
And after the first time machine backup, I started getting errors that they couldn't complete another backup.
Yeah.
And the errors would report, you know, some kind of weird, you know, file system problem.
And so I would run like the disk repair healing thing and it would fail.
Like, okay, well, that's good.
So I tried blowing away the partition, start over, you know, like erase the whole disk, start over, start time machine again.
And it couldn't even complete a whole backup.
It would just like stall for a while and eventually fail.
Okay.
Or there's this weird step of Time Machine where it seems like after you do a first Time Machine backup, it then tries to encrypt the whole disk for some reason.
This is all still on Catalina, by the way.
It wouldn't get through that process.
It would just stall.
And so I eventually concluded, okay, it's very possible that these SSDs are already bad.
Or at least one of them is.
I know there are these micron 7.68 terabyte SSDs.
They're a very low price for that capacity.
But it's still not a low price in absolute terms.
So this is a decent amount of money at stake.
And for SSDs that are just outside of the Amazon return window, so I have to deal with Micron directly, which I don't want to have to do that.
What kind of case are they in, though?
That's the thing that I would suspect, because you have the two separate sticks, but they're being joined by a hardware RAID 0 thing.
It joined in this kind of like Cable Matters box that Cable Matters doesn't appear to make because a few other sellers on Amazon sell the exact same box and they're their brand names for the same price.
And it has a hardware RAID thing on it, but I have the RAID disabled, so they just appear as two separate disks.
But I also thought like maybe it's the enclosure.
That's certainly where my mind went first.
Wait, but you're using them as two separate disks, but which one of the two are you targeting with Time Machine?
Only one of them.
The other one was like my big archive drive, but fortunately I haven't put anything on it yet.
Did you try the other one with Time Machine?
I probably should have attempted that.
No is the answer.
I didn't.
Um, anyway, what did Micron say?
Well, I didn't go to them yet.
Cause first I figured, well, let me, let me, let me like order a couple of cheap enclosures that are just single disc, regular enclosures just so I can rule out is the enclosure being buggy.
As I'm working on that, as I have no time machine, Tiff's laptop dies.
Oh,
Oh, I heard about that.
That was the overheating thing, right?
I don't know if it was overheating.
However, as part of the... So the symptom is just would not power on, no matter what you did.
No matter what kind of crazy key commands, what kind of crazy SMC resets and PM whatever resets and all the... Reset the T2.
Every possible thing that we could think of to do, none of it would make this computer turn on.
Followed every single possible thing.
And
after a while of doing some of these uh things tiff's like oh my god i smell burning plastic oh no yes and sure enough out of the uh out of the right side vent uh it was the distinct smell of burnt electronics you know like the i don't know if it's like a burnt capacitor or what but it's like it's the smell of a dead power supply don't smell that yeah oh yeah we didn't take a big long sniff
yeah it's the distinctive smell of of a dead you know power supply or something coming from inside the laptop we're like okay i would have worried that it was a battery fire situation we did and in fact we we brought it outside holding it over a pit of sand uh while i continue to try to get it to power on just in case it would catch additional fire is that a butterfly keyboard it sure is because sand is its mortal enemy yes i thought of that as well that
of course it's the butterfly keyboard this freaking keyboard so anyway so tiff's laptop is totally dead this laptop is only like 15 months old it's a 29 it's a it's the 2019 15 inch the very last butterfly keyboard 15 inch it it just couldn't bear to go on
Yeah, exactly.
So that, and guess what?
We bought it last year and my standard policy is I don't buy AppleCare on most things.
This is the very first time it's ever really bitten me hard.
Well, did it bite you?
Because now you get to get one with a good keyboard.
So we look at this and we're like, okay, well, this computer is a $2,300-ish a year ago computer that we don't want it to be worth nothing now.
People usually don't buy them on the used market once the magic smoke has escaped.
Yes, exactly.
And we figured it would probably not cost $2,300 to repair it out of warranty.
And sure enough, it didn't.
Apple repaired it for something like $750.
It's on its way back to us now.
We'll see if it's actually repaired.
God, I hope so.
Did they tell you what they thought was wrong with it?
no it's it's funny actually like again i've never actually seen like an apple paid repair process for a computer like i don't think i've ever actually done a paid repair they'll give you like a parts and labor kind of breakdown at the end of it anyway so so that that also happened thank god for backblaze because we didn't have time machine during this
So we had no time machine because my time machine disk died.
Tiff's laptop then died.
And then my laptop works.
It worked in the sense that it was running the Big Sur beta and it functioned.
But now my laptop has to then take over and be two people's laptop.
And we had been using Tiff's for a few things because none of my audio apps work yet on Big Sur.
And so we had to keep like a Catalina laptop operating in the house.
So we still needed that.
So it's like, okay, well, we still kind of need a Catalina laptop.
I'm not going to go buy a new one now, like right before the arm transitions.
It's a terrible time.
It's like, I'm not going to buy something now.
I, there is no way I can rationalize it.
Oh, well, if I buy some new thing I want, then we can sell this when it gets back.
Like, no, like there's no way to rationalize that right now.
This is a terrible time.
So I'm like, all right, well, let me – I think the most pragmatic thing to do – I was having a lot of problems with my laptop's installation of macOS anyway.
And this is not necessarily Big Sur's fault.
I was having issues under Catalina.
Severe performance problems.
To the point where you kind of can't tell at first, is this a hardware problem?
It's things like every keystroke I would type in mail would bog down the system.
Or changing the selection between things in mail and other apps, it was just slow.
It would take a while to load every new thing it was doing.
So much about it was just slow.
And I would see – sometimes I would see problems like what people have reported with – I think it's AccountsD.
This is a common issue coming up recently for a lot of people where like some background demon in Catalina would just use – and Big Sur – would just use massive amounts of CPU power for no apparent reason, whether it's like FS EventsD or AccountsD or other various things.
You know, certainly the – what's the privacy one?
TCC?
Something like that or –
Whatever the privacy one is, that one too.
There were so many weird problems with that installation.
I've wanted for a while to do a clean install on this laptop.
Now that we suddenly are in need of a laptop that is not running this beta OS...
Why don't I just revert it and do a clean install?
So I tackled that during this time because we really needed a laptop that was usable so that Tip could use it while hers was out for repair and that I could have my audio needs satisfied better and get rid of this massive performance problem.
so going through all that now reinstalling all that stuff and then oh by the way during this process the entire family got a virus not the virus but a virus a real life one a like you know kind of medium grade cold not only was this not a good time to lose time machine
And not only was this not a good time to need possibly another laptop, this was especially not a good time to get a cold.
This is not at all a time that you want to have a cold.
so in the middle of all this we also have to like first of all freak out about whether this is a virus or the virus and then to get our kid to be able to go back to school we had to all get covid tests so that was fun too so it's been negative by the way but it's whoo it's it's been a week
I have to congratulate you.
I don't know if that's the word I'm looking for, but I admire that you didn't somehow, like Marco of just a year or two ago, end this story with, and then I bought a Mac Pro.
Because some way, somehow, Marco of a year or two ago would have ended this story with, and then I bought a Mac Pro.
Would it have made sense?
No.
But that was the Marco way.
And you didn't do that this time, so I'm very proud of you.
I mean, I almost bought like seven new laptops in the process.
Yeah.
I've got the pressure for, we'll talk about this later when we talk about the Apple, but the pressure for a new laptop in this house is building and I keep fending them off.
I'm like, just no, you said it would be the next Apple event.
It's like, no, maybe not this one, but just we're not buying another Intel laptop.
Yeah, exactly.
If you really, really, really, really have to find... And I was telling Tishfield, this is not a great time to need a replacement big laptop because the big ones might not be the first ones.
It's my theory, maybe we'll get to this later, but it's my theory that...
the Macs that need discrete GPUs to be competitive in their category might be coming later.
I don't think we're getting the discrete GPU category of Macs going ARM first.
I think it's way more likely that the things that go ARM first are Macs that historically had only integrated GPUs.
So basically, the small laptops, the cheapest iMac, and the Mac Mini.
But who knows?
Ugh.
I'm sorry.
That's no fun.
Although I am more than a little bit amused that the end of the story might involve you buying a new Synology.
we have some follow-up.
We, largely me, but, but we, uh, totally, uh, missed on the Facebook versus Apple thing from last week.
So this was disagree.
Okay.
Can listeners, all of your angry email do not direct to me this time.
John is the one who's saying that we handled it.
Okay.
So, uh,
What we didn't have in our notes and what I didn't talk about and what I think we should have talked about was the fact that the Apple takes 30% of this purchase that was shown under a button on Facebook.
That was a button where you were paying an individual or like a small company.
So like, I want to go take an online fitness course.
And so I can purchase access for $9.99.
And then Apple takes 30% of this purchase.
Learn more.
Well, I had thought, reading our show notes and not having spent enough time reading the article, apparently, that Facebook was the one losing out on 30%.
And that was not correct.
What was actually happening was the local business was the one losing out on the 30%.
And Facebook was just trying to let you know, hey, you know, Apple's being a little greedy here.
They're taking 30% of this.
We're not taking anything.
They're taking 30%.
And...
I grossly misunderstood that.
And furthermore, after a bunch of complaining and moaning from a bunch of people about this very issue, we missed last week because this had happened before we spoke about it.
Apple decided not to take that 30% cut after all, at least for now.
So we did miss some important context there.
And I, for one, am sorry about that.
John, explain why we're not wrong, apparently.
I mean, you did complain about Facebook in a few ways that were not fair.
But here's the thing.
This is interesting that, like, remember this issue where, like, Apple replied about the 30% thing and their reason was, like, it goes against this guideline that says you can't present the customers with irrelevant information, right?
Yeah.
I feel like the whole situation with how much money Facebook were taking is mostly irrelevant information in the context of how this item was presented.
Maybe not in the context of UKC going on and complaining about how mean Facebook was after that.
But anyway, this item from last week, this was the point of the item.
Apple is telling Facebook not not to tell the truth about what Apple does.
And that's a crappy thing that Apple for Apple to do.
That was the item.
It was, hey, Apple doing something crappy.
Like, why shouldn't Facebook be able to tell the truth?
It's kind of shady.
It's kind of crappy.
Right.
They should be able to stand behind their business arrangement.
It's bad, blah, blah, blah.
that was the story you would have thought from the feedback that the story was facebook is evil it was no apple was the bad guy in the story unequivocally it was the entire point of the thing was apple wouldn't let a developer say that they take 30 which was the truth at the time right and isn't that crappy of apple but the facebook people came out of the woodworks and say how dare you be so mean to facebook i'm like and for the longest i'm like wait what
mean to facebook no we were telling you that apple was the bad guy in this story then i listened back to the show and i heard that some mean things were said about facebook later which was unfair and and we should have we should have clarified that you know that that this was just you know that they were what uh facebook was calling out apple for was like don't blame us because this is apple doing this thing which is the point we kind of made is like look facebook's trying to uh
turn sentiment against apple to say look it's not facebook doing this this mean thing let me tell you exactly in print right underneath the button if you're worried not all this money is going to this thing it's apple's fault and which we agreed with it was apple's like that was their requirement or whatever right and so that part of the story was also true but it seems like all anyone heard in the story was facebook is mean which i don't understand at all so well anyway in all fairness like we we were missing some critical context yeah but also facebook is a
Both things can be true.
We can't have another barrage of that feedback, Marco.
Stop saying mean things about Facebook.
They're innocent.
I feel like it is irrelevant information.
Like, yes, this is about a live event, and Facebook wasn't taking any money and giving it all, and aren't they nice and magnanimous, and Apple was the meanie, which lends itself to the point of the story, which was Apple was being stupid and or mean, right?
That was the point.
It wasn't, you know, that, hey, Apple's taking this money and not even letting Facebook explain what's happening, so...
There we go.
And yeah, Apple did back down, although Apple back down temporarily.
We'll put a link in the show notes to a story about this.
It seems like Apple has not committed to forever allow this to happen.
Apple is just saying, oh, for now, we won't take the 30 percent.
But it seems like they reserve the right to later to say, you know what?
We want that 30 percent again.
I got to tell you, we get a preposterous amount of feedback for the show, which usually is very good.
And that means people are listening, people care, and that's wonderful.
But when you read a pile of feedback and it's defending Facebook...
No, no, you're digging yourself into gay cases.
Remember, everyone's all friendly to Facebook.
They're banning QAnon.
They're stopping political ads after the election, which makes very little sense.
But no, we're only saying nice things about Facebook.
Speak for yourself.
I agree to nothing.
Facebook is terrible.
Sorry.
Sorry, Facebook fans.
I tried.
I didn't.
All I'm saying is that it was an uncomfortable position to be in.
I'm not saying I was right.
I'm just saying my word.
When everyone's coming to the defense of Facebook, it makes you wonder what on earth did you do wrong?
Yeah, no, I was wondering about it because, like I said, it was baffling to me.
It was like, when did we say something mean about Facebook other than the normal sort of baseline level of our joint hatred of Facebook, which we're, you know, it's unspoken most of the time.
By the way, incidentally, in the last episode I recorded a rec diff, I also complained about Facebook a lot.
So if you love hearing me say mean things about Facebook, that's another podcast you can listen to.
Anyway, in the context of the story about how Apple is mean and dumb for not letting people tell the truth about their cut, the information about how Facebook was being magnanimous and letting all the proceeds of this thing go to the live event thing is irrelevant information.
But it is true.
So now we have said it on the program.
And Apple can't stop us.
Wow.
Jordan Ryan Moore writes to tell us that merchants have been allowed to add surcharges for credit card transactions since January of 2013.
Yeah, this is my fault.
I heard two things about this.
One was this bit about how there was a lawsuit and people wanted to be able to charge different amounts and all that stuff.
And the other thing was that there was actually a law passed to make it so that credit card companies weren't allowed to require this.
And I'm not sure if they're both true or if they both combine or they both did the same thing.
But it seems like
That old rule about not being allowed to charge two different prices and basically making the vendor eat the cost of the credit card transaction, they can't sort of pass it on to their customer, is no longer in effect.
And the thing I forgot to mention in the last show about this was that Apple used to do the same thing back in the day.
I also don't remember the details of this, but...
Remember a time when Apple said, oh, you can sell a thing on the web and also an in-app purchase, but they have to be the same price?
That was a very short-lived thing that everyone talks about as though it was a much longer-lived thing.
Yeah, like they stopped doing it probably for the same reason that people said, oh, come on, right?
But we remember it so much because it was so audacious.
It's like, you're going to charge 30% and then say...
You know, you can't pass that on to the customer because it puts us at a disadvantage.
Again, it's kind of like telling the truth.
Like, look, Apple is taking a bite out of this.
If you buy it from the web, you can get it cheaper because Apple's bite isn't there.
Right.
And that was something that Apple didn't want conveyed in the same way the credit card makers didn't want people saying, oh, if I pay for a credit card, it's one percent more.
Well, I'm going to pay with cash then.
I think the credit card thing lasted a lot longer than the App Store thing, but the instinct is the same to try to hide the fact that you are taking a bite out of somebody's income.
Real-time follow-up because I don't want to get email about this.
According to this article that we will link in the show notes, which may be a bit old, 10 states have laws restricting any type of surcharge fees.
California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Oklahoma, and Texas.
So as with anything in these United States, things tend to vary from state to state, even things that you might not expect, like rules about how much you can charge when someone uses a credit card.
And furthermore, I would love to hear an update on Adam's watch battery, please.
Oh, yeah.
So I said last week that after the very first day of school with Adam's family set up independent watch, that he only had like 33% battery left.
um second day was way better the the main difference is on the second day so not only is it just like not the first full day of use so that any kind of like you know background process that the system is doing with a new os install like that you know that had time to complete if that was ever a thing on watch os but also on day two i changed the watch from raise to wake to tap to wake only so
So it doesn't just respond to wrist turning and turn the screen on.
You have to tap the screen to turn it on.
And as a result of that change and whatever time has passed, now the typical school day ends around 60% to 70% battery instead of 30% battery.
And so battery life right now seems to no longer be a concern.
So far, so good.
And we remain very happy with the functionality of the family setup Apple Watch.
Moving on, Nathaniel writes, with regard to cell tower trees,
Rich the area, generally speaking.
Oh, just do it.
Come on.
No, I will not.
You can do it.
I believe in you.
You can take multiple runs at it, and Marco will put the right one in during the end.
No, no.
I'm not even going to do it.
The less receptive of the town is to having cell towers.
The most likely place in those instances where a town might have a tower is on the DPW's Department of Public Works.
Is that right?
Department of Public Works, yeah.
Or police station property.
And then the tower company provides space to the municipal service for their radios.
Yeah, I love the idea of making fake trees and then having to pay as the limbs break off because, you know, first of all, limbs fall off real trees all the time.
And second of all, real trees are surprisingly sturdy as compared to man-made ones and surprisingly resilient when it comes to wind.
Yeah.
It's kind of inevitable that all these sort of useless cosmetic only things like you're basically making a bunch of things to catch the wind that serve no functional purpose, but absolutely will bend and break off in the wind.
And now you have something else that you need to do.
Maintain your hideously ugly tree.
We got a lot of one batch of good feedback we got from last show was tons of people sending us pictures of the hilarious cell phone trees.
And I did see a couple of cacti in there.
And weird palm trees and pine trees and just you name it.
Cell towers are everywhere except near rich people.
And I'm sorry, if you didn't want to say rich, what else could you say?
Affluent.
I was just thinking about it and I was going to go the other direction, so I'm glad I didn't say anything.
I know.
You just need to get that pathway.
It's like an eFuse.
I've been reading too much about consoles.
You know what an eFuse is?
No.
This kind of blows my mind.
Electronic fuses inside...
right it's like it's like it's a fuse just like a regular fuse but it's inside the cpu and you can blow it at any time with software essentially and then once it's blown it's blown right what and when wait i forget which of the xboxes uh maybe it was a 360 maybe it was the most recent one but anyway they used e-fuses to they would blow e-fuses with updates to prevent you from being able to revert to a previous version oh wow what so how many e-fuses are there
I don't I don't know how many but it's like it's like that's the pulling out the big guns to try and of course it never actually stops piracy like the pirates are incredibly clever and they find a way around it but it just makes it harder Sony did not do this apparently but Microsoft did I'm like man can you imagine the pressure of like accidentally bricking or screwing something up when you know you're literally blowing tiny hardware fuses inside people's consoles when they update it's terrifying
I'm also told, a real-time follow-up from Jelly, that the Switch also has e-fuses, apparently.
Yeah, try not to think about this type of stuff.
Man, that's weird.
All right, moving on.
With regard to an Ask ATP question from last week and baby monitors...
Uh, I had recommended, uh, the infant optics DVR something, something, I forget exactly what it was.
It's in the show notes from last week.
Uh, we had a handful of people write in, including a friend of the show, Dan provost from studio neat recommending the wire cutter pick, which is the, I guess, Eufy space view.
um and dan writes i had the same infant optics monitors casey for our first baby but we decided to treat ourselves for to a new one for our new baby we went with the wire cutter pick the eufy and it is significantly better in every way except the kickstand just in case you're directing new parents to a baby monitor they definitely want the eufy and not the infant optics which had a good run but is outdated also i fully agree with marco i would never want a nest style solution even if the quality and latency were flawless just too too annoying to be constantly opening an app versus having a constant monitor
So, yeah, the Eufy, from what I understand, is somebody who gave a crap designed a baby monitor.
It is not flawless.
The kickstand, I guess, sucks.
It looks like the Nintendo Switch kickstand, which definitely sucks.
There's also no lights.
The infant optics has a series of LEDs that will light up so you can have the monitor screen off.
You can have the volume off.
You can still get a level of how much volume there is in the room.
The Eufy doesn't have that.
But apparently in every other way, it's actually modern, whereas the infant optics one is clearly out of like the mid 2010s.
And coincidentally, the Eufy Space View came out like six months after Michaela was born.
And so that's why I was not at all aware of it.
But if you haven't yet bought a monitor, I've heard and would recommend the Eufy Space View because apparently it is very good.
fuck these are all tongue twisters uh what casey was saying was infant as in a baby infant infant optics right so that's the first one infant optics that's infant space optics and then eufy is eufy which apparently is the smart home uh sub brand of anchor someone in the chat room says oh i didn't know that oh yeah eufy there you go
We are sponsored this week by Hover.
Get your domain name at hover.com slash ATP.
Hover is a jumping off point for a ton of entrepreneurs, and they want you to start your business with a domain name.
This is how I start everything I ever make.
Everything I make, I first have to have a name before I can really get into working on it.
That's just the kind of person I am.
I need to get a good name.
And the very first thing I do once I think of a good name is I go to Hover and I search to see what kind of domain names I can get for that name.
And Hover has over 300 domain name extensions to choose from when you're building your new site or your brand online.
No matter what you want to build, there's a domain name waiting for it.
They also have excellent technical support if you have any questions.
And their support team, not only are they really good, I've actually used them a couple times and they've been wonderful.
But they also don't try to upsell you.
A lot of places, if you contact support, they see it as a sales opportunity to try to push you into higher plans or more add-ons.
They don't do that.
They only work hard to help you get online.
They offer free Whois privacy protection, a very clean, easy-to-use UI for managing all your domains, and they have monthly sales on popular top-level domains.
So it's hard not to see why Hover is a popular choice for people starting all kinds of businesses.
It's just a wonderful thing being a Hover customer.
It's super easy to use.
They respect you.
You can get your work done quickly.
They have great services.
They also offer email service if you need email service for your domain.
I use that on a couple of mine.
It's great.
Check it out.
Get your domain name and many more at hover.com slash ATP.
Use that link, hover.com slash ATP, to get a 10% discount on new purchases.
Once again, hover.com slash ATP to get your domain name.
Make a name for yourself with Hover.
Is this the time, and I'm asking not sarcastically, is this the time that we do the report card year-in-review thing that Marco came up with a few years ago, or am I crazy?
Exit interview, he used to call it.
That's what it was.
Thank you.
I knew report card wasn't right.
I couldn't think of what the name of it was.
Thank you.
The exit interview.
We're obviously referring to there's going to be an Apple event on this coming Tuesday.
I don't know what day.
What is that?
The 13th.
Lucky number 13.
There'll be an Apple event.
And so this is the last week before our iPhones, our current iPhones are pieces of utter garbage.
And so now is the time to do the iPhone 11 Pro report card.
John, what?
Exit interview.
Sorry, exit interview.
See, we got to change in the show notes.
I'm like Ron Burgundy, for goodness sakes.
So anyways, so John, what are you on?
Are you on a 10 or an 11 Pro?
10S.
My wife has the 11 Pro.
Okay.
Um, so I am on the 11 pro Marco.
You're on an 11 pro as well, right?
I sure am.
Okay.
So I still love this darn phone.
The one major complaint I have about it is that I feel like, I think I talked about this on the show.
I, I feel like this screen has been scratched to smithereens and it is probably my fault because
I'm not saying it's not my fault, but it is scratched so badly in so many places, so much worse than any other phone I've ever had.
And I treat it the same way I've treated every iPhone since the 3GS, which was my first.
It is scratched to death.
Marco, do you find the same thing on your phone?
I actually haven't had that problem on the 11.
I did have that problem on, I forget whether it was the 10 or the 10 S one of them was the same problem for me.
Like where like I didn't abuse it anymore or less than any other phone, but it just got scratched to hell for some reason, like on the screen.
And cause you know, it's, it's hard when you're,
Designing the screen materials, there's a lot of tension between various physical characteristics to optimize for.
If you optimize for scratch resistance, that usually makes it harder and more brittle and more prone to cracks when people drop it.
And if you're being pragmatic about how you're designing a phone...
I think you probably want to protect against shattering when it's dropped more than you want to protect against minor scratchability from just the surface being a little bit soft.
And even though that's worse for people like us who don't drop our phones, it's much worse for us.
But if you're optimizing for the whole population, I can see why you would make that decision.
Sure.
Yeah.
And otherwise, I really, really love this phone.
I love the camera system.
I still think it looks a little quirky having the three big lenses back there.
But as with the notch, like within a couple of weeks, I mostly have been able to ignore it.
um the notch also i i don't mind it at all and in fact i i remember when we were all about to get our iphone 10s that i thought oh this is going to bother me for a long time and it didn't you know the notch really doesn't bother me i do think it would be neat to have one of the more circular pinhole style setups like the android phones have but i'm not going to complain if the iphone 12 or whatever's coming next has a notch as well i don't think it's a big deal
But the camera system's great.
The phone is still fast.
I don't even know what size mine is, but I'm not running out of space.
I love this thing with the exception of the screen getting scratched to smithereens.
And I am...
really hopeful that the next one by the way is mine is a 256 gig model i'm really hoping that the next one does indeed have the square sides like they're like the rumors say because i don't mind the curved sides and it's not the most slippery phone i've ever used in in my life but it is slippery and i feel like having those those uh solid or straight sides flat sides would be extremely nice um but i'm getting ahead of myself i suppose
I, I really, really love this phone and I am, I am definitely going to get a new one because I'm a sucker, but I, I am not actively looking to get rid of this one as much as I am actively looking to get a new screen or a new glass on the screen, which I could do to this, but you know, I would be without a phone for a little while.
Marco, other thoughts on the 11 pro?
Yeah, I think I agree with much of what you've said about it.
One regression of the 11 Pro compared to the XS, in my opinion, is they change the texturing on the back.
The back of these phones have alternated between almost like a sandblaster kind of textured finish and a flat, polished glass finish.
And on the 11, I believe, this is when they switched it.
It used to be that the whole back of it was glossy and then the area around the camera cutout was matte.
And with the 11 series, the entire back was matte and the camera area was glossy.
What that did for me was make the phone impossible to use without a case.
like the 10 and the 10 s i i would occasionally like for if i was wearing like tight jeans you know like you know my skinny pants then i would i wouldn't want the bulk of a giant case or any any giant phone really in my pocket and sort of minimize the bulk i would like take the phone out of the case for a few days and use it like that and with the 11 i cannot do that like the the 11 pro excuse me i think 11 actually the non-pro i think actually flips it around and actually fixes this anyway
The Pro, I can't do that.
It's so slippery.
I can't use this phone without a case.
And it's the first phone in a long time that I can say that about.
Like, usually, like, ever since the 6 series, I've been using cases just because of the stupid, you know, bar of sides design made case use nearly inevitable.
But I could get by with previous phones.
This one, I can't.
It's just, it's way too slippery.
So much more slippery than even the XS was.
So besides that, I am overall very satisfied with it.
But I really do wish for a lighter weight and slightly smaller phone.
I'm very curious about the rumored slightly smaller one, the 5 point something inch one.
Unless that phone has some kind of major feature cut downsides.
I'll probably go for that this year because this phone is just a little bit big and a little bit heavy.
That being said, the screen is great.
I love the screen when I'm using it, when I'm not just carrying it, when I'm not trying to wedge it into a pocket or move it around so it's not all sticking out weird as I walk.
But I don't like how this phone feels in my pocket.
It's too big still.
It's not super massive like the Macs,
But it's bigger than I would like.
So I'm really hoping for the smaller one.
I'm also hoping that if a smaller one comes, that it doesn't sacrifice too much on battery life.
Because historically, part of the trade-off of bigger versus smaller phones is that the bigger phones get bigger batteries, which does make them heavier, admittedly.
But that's usually a pretty good feature of the big ones.
The 11 has such great battery life
The 11 Pro, rather, has such great battery life that if the smaller one that comes out allegedly next week has significantly less battery life in practice, that's going to be disappointing.
But I think I'm still going to probably go for the smaller one unless, like, if the camera is not anywhere near as good.
Now, if I just lose the 2X lens, but I still have the regular and the wide, I think I'd probably still take that tradeoff and take the small one.
Really?
Yeah.
I wouldn't have thought this a year ago, but I actually have been using the wide more than I've expected to.
And I've been using the 2X less than I expect to.
Maybe if I suddenly lost it, I would realize I miss it more than I thought.
But I'm looking forward to a smaller phone, and if it takes the loss of a 2X camera to get that and nothing else about it is really significantly worse, then I will probably take that tradeoff.
Finally, again, I know this is a long shot.
I really still want USB-C.
Cosign.
I am so tired of lightning because my house is full of wires and they're all different.
And I have to have different chargers and different wires.
And I got to always know which cable, like just the entire world has moved to USB-C already.
Everything, like every accessory, like everything is USB-C except the iPhone.
And I know there are reasons why,
I will assert that those reasons are overruled by the incredible benefit we would have if the iPhone charged with USB-C.
So I really, really hope Apple will eventually do this.
I don't know if it's going to happen this year or next year or never, but every single year I'm going to hope for it.
I completely agree with you.
I would love to just simplify my life and go all USB-C.
I also agree with you.
I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon, if at all.
I think we are way more likely to get a Touch ID sensor on the sleep-wake button or lock button or whatever it's called than we are USB-C.
And I'm not particularly confident about either of those things, to be honest.
But I am way more confident about Touch ID than I am USB-C.
But I don't know.
We'll see what happens.
So, John, this is an on year for you, right?
So I presume you're looking to upgrade to some sort of iPhone 12?
Yeah, and since my wife has the 11 Pro, I asked her to come down and bring me her phone so I can look at it, check the screen for scratches and stuff to verify Casey's situation.
And because she loves me and cares so much about this show, she said, how long do you need it?
And I promised her it would only be a short amount of time.
Pokemon Go is a terrible thing.
People don't get addicted to it.
Wow.
So I looked at her phone, and there are definitely more scratches than there are in my XS, but she does not treat her phone like I treat mine.
She just throws it into her purse next to her keys.
She doesn't care.
She does things with her phone.
I don't understand how it's still in one piece, right?
I mean, to be fair, nobody should treat their phone the way you treat yours.
I mean, that's another thing I want to get to.
So you mentioned, you know, people who don't drop our phones.
Like I've never broken an iPhone, which, you know, maybe I'm getting lucky or maybe I just take care of it.
But this phone and many of my other phones have fallen from a height.
So, for example, this phone in within its lifetime got knocked off of the mantle over my fireplace because I was dusting and one of, you know, and it was on the mantle.
Right.
So it's from a mantle, a pretty high, you know, fireplace mantle height onto a hardwood floor.
right and this is the 10s right and it didn't shatter right and it's been knocked off my nightstand who knows how many times when i'm groggy in the morning reaching for it and knock it up but then it's just falling into carpet so it's not a big deal although sometimes it falls into hardwood depending on which side it falls off but the point is this thing has hit the ground it's just got the apple leather case on it it's hit the ground from reasonable heights many times as i either grew up for it or don't notice it's there and accidentally knock it over right
And it hasn't shattered.
And this is the XS, right?
So this is the one with the ostensibly harder, easier to shatter, but harder to scratch screen.
But anyway, I agree with Marco that I think the tradeoff of not shattering is the right way to go with this.
So, you know, the 11 Pro, like my wife does not take good care of it.
but i had to actually clean the screen to really assess how many scratches there were without me cleaning the screen off is really hard to tell like none of my scratches are so big that i would even have noticed them if i hadn't been looking for them so i don't think that's that big of a deal but yeah um this is my year for the phone and i haven't been keeping up with the rumors
mostly because I figured everything would be fine.
I know all the rumors about the different sizes and all that other stuff, but the thing I had been wondering, and I saw the supposed leaked flat-sided case and everything like that, but the thing I had been wondering and I could never keep track of, which is like,
So if the two sizes, I know there's supposed to be a smaller one, but not as small as the SE and then a bigger one.
But like my question was always, OK, but like, are any of them going to be the same size as my 10S or what is going to be the one that is closest in size to my 10S?
Right.
And the reason I ask that is because I felt like the 7 was the right size.
I felt like the 10 was a little bit too big.
But now that I've had the 10 size for a while, I'm like, okay, well, I appreciate the bigger screen and the size isn't so big that it's too big for me.
Yep.
what you know so when i buy a new phone next time i don't think i want the small one because i kind of like having the screen as big as it is if it went back to the seven size that might be okay but then somebody i'm assuming casey has put a bunch of the rumored sizes in here and it seems like my only choice is if i want to get the top of the line phone after the event next week is a phone that is three tenths of an inch bigger than my current phone
Right, and that's not a small difference.
That puts it, I believe, at the same size as the XR line, right?
The XR and base 11.
I think that's right.
I didn't verify that, but I think you're right.
Yeah, and I've never used one for more than a second in a store, but when I've handled them in the store, I've had the same feeling of when I use my 10-slash-10s-slash-11 Pro-sized phone, the 5.8-inch screen with the notch,
I've always thought, like, I can use this, but I wish it were a little bit smaller.
And so now the fact that they're going to make it a little bit bigger, that's what's making me really hope that that smaller phone is a real thing and that it's compelling in all other ways.
Because I just am not excited about this phone that is already a bit big for me getting a bit bigger.
Yeah.
Oh, and I have an update related to something I just mentioned in the chat room.
Pouch update.
You know about my phone pouch, right?
Well, so here, this is a side effect of COVID, right?
So COVID comes and everyone's in the house all the time and I'm never going anywhere, especially in the beginning, like really just never leaving the house, right?
And my sort of...
pattern of placement of stuff of like here's where I keep all my things I had like my stuff that I go to work with and just everything arranged in a particular place the stuff that I go to work with eventually just got put away because I realized well I'm not going into work anytime soon so I'm just gonna put that stuff away so the pouch got put away too which is fine because the pouch as we know is only a thing for when I go out of the house but if I'm never going out of the house I'm never gonna use the pouch
But eventually, the pouch got put so far away that when I did go out of the house, I'd go without the pouch.
I mean, granted, just going on a dog walk or whatever.
Oh, no.
But I basically trained myself out of using the pouch in the external world.
Part of it was because I'm like, well, I'm going to be getting rid of this phone soon anyway, so what do I care?
You know what I mean?
Like, although now that I've just examined the screen after cleaning it, I realize there are still zero scratches on my XS.
So I still think I'm babying it.
Like, I would never put it next to a set of keys, for example.
But...
I may we'll see how this goes.
I may be off the pouch lifestyle with my with this and my future phones.
It's hard to tell because we're still in COVID times and I'm still technically not really going anywhere ever.
Right.
So we'll see.
But I think I may be out of the I still have the pouch and it still fits this phone.
But maybe I won't buy a new pouch for my new phone and maybe I'll just see how that goes.
You know, since this is a safe space, I can admit to you that after... I think I noticed a scratch or two after one of the beach trips that I took with this phone.
And subsequent to that, there was a second beach trip that I took, and I actually employed a pouch for the purposes of letting it rest in a beach bag or in a tent or whatever, because I felt like... I don't know if I would go so far as to say I baby my phone, but I don't...
think with the exception of having dropped my first uh 11 pro on a cement driveway the day i got it after that after that i feel like i didn't do too badly with it and i'm guessing that it was during you know storage in a beach bag or something like that that it ended up getting scratched up and so i did employ just for the purpose of the beach bag i did employ a pouch and i don't think it made any darn difference because i think the damage had already been done but here we are i was living the pouch lifestyle
The pouch is transferred from me to Casey.
Yeah.
I don't know which of you has won there.
Yeah, me neither.
Well, one of us has a scratch-free phone, so.
We are sponsored this week by Mint Mobile.
Breaking up with your old wireless provider just got a whole lot easier thanks to Mint Mobile.
They were the first company to sell premium wireless service online only, and now Mint Mobile is introducing their unlimited data plan for just $30 a month.
So let that sink in.
An unlimited data plan for $30.
How much is your soon-to-be-ex wireless provider charging you for that?
So for people that hate their phone bill and are ready to cut ties with big wireless, Mint Mobile offers their premium unlimited plan for just $30 a month.
By going online only and eliminating the traditional cost of retail, Mint Mobile passes savings directly on to you.
All their plans come with unlimited talk and text and high-speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network.
You can use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and keep your same phone number and, of course, all your contacts and everything else on your phone.
And if you aren't 100% satisfied, Mint Mobile has you covered with their 7-day money-back guarantee.
So break up with Big Wireless and switch to Mint Mobile's premium unlimited data plan for $30 a month.
To get your new unlimited wireless plan for just $30 a month and get that plan shipped to your door for free, go to mintmobile.com slash ATP.
That's mintmobile.com slash ATP.
Cut your unlimited wireless bill to $30 a month at mintmobile.com slash ATP.
Thanks to Mint Mobile for sponsoring our show.
Real-time follow-up, the iPhone 11 is 6.1 inches.
The iPhone 11 Pro is either 5.8 inches, which is what Marco and I are talking about, or the big one is 6.5 inches.
So it's 5.8 for the 11 Pro, 6.1 for the 11, 6.5 for the other 11 Pro.
The 12 is rumored... The non-Pro 12 is rumored to be 5.4 inches, so that's four-tenths smaller than Marco's phone and my phone.
And the big one is rumored to be 6.1 inches, which is three-tenths larger than Marco's and my phone.
And then the 12 Pro...
is going to start at 6.1 inches, again, 3 tenths larger, and go as high as 6.7 inches, which I already think that the big phones at 6.5 inches are preposterously large.
So I can't imagine a 6.7-inch phone.
For me...
I think I mostly agree with you, Marco.
I would rather go a hint smaller if I could, but I know myself well enough to know that I will almost certainly be completely and utterly unwilling to give up anything.
So, like, if the non-Pro 12 has only two cameras, as you were describing, which I think is a very fair conjecture to make...
I don't think I would do it.
I think I would just suck it up and get a 6.1-inch phone, which I would really rather not do.
But knowing myself well enough, I think I would end up doing exactly that.
I mean, it's not a 6.1-inch phone.
Those are diagonal screen measurements.
And the flat sides should shave a lot off, right?
So what we're really going to be looking for once they announce these is go to the Apple site and find the thing that gives you the outside dimensions in millimeters.
And then we'll see how much bigger it actually is than an 11 or a 10s or whatever.
Yeah.
Also, a couple other things.
First of all, that's one of the reasons why I'm hoping for a case shape rethinking, like with the straight sides and everything.
If I can use it without a case, then that makes it effectively smaller for me.
And so maybe I would then stick with the medium size if it's something that I could use without a case.
But also, if you're interested in what the smaller size looks like, a couple of months ago, MacRumors published...
images of the like rumored sizes such that you could like whatever phone you have they have separate downloads and you could see like all right show me what the small phone would look like if i'm holding a 10s or an 11 or whatever and then you can view that image like at 1x in your camera roll at full screen and it shows you exactly what size that phone would be on your existing phone and
It's actually a really nice estimation tool.
And so I've actually had that tab open in my mobile Safari browser for like two months just so I could occasionally look over and edit and be like, hmm, I think I do want the smaller size phone.
It is noticeably narrower.
which i think would be the limiting factor like it is obviously shorter as well from you know top to bottom it's shorter but i don't really care so much about that like the ever since the notch era the phones are so tall that like i don't necessarily need all that height uh like i could spare that pretty easily so i'm it would mainly just be giving up width which would indeed make it significantly more holdable and would give you a lot more like touch range you know holding and touching it
But my concern with giving up the width would be when you squeeze the keyboard down, it's going to be a transition period for keyboard accuracy and possibly not a good one.
Well, but let's be honest.
Keyboard accuracy hasn't really existed since ML took over autocorrect.
So, I mean, it can only go up.
They should just do what they do with the laptop keyboards and just make it so there's one size keyboard and it's the one that fits on their smallest phone and use that software keyboard on all the phones.
And then just put dots on the left and the right.
Earlier today, I typed in Thursdays and it put an apostrophe on it.
thursday apostrophe s thursday thursday's child is full of whoa come on chat room what is thursday's child full of john why do you do this i got nothing on that one these two don't know what i'm talking about i'm i am relying entirely on the chat room we'll have some real-time follow-up as soon as someone finds the answer yeah it's like what who puts apostrophes like it's i don't want my correct grammar to be auto-corrected to be incorrect
The thing of it is, it just occurred to me, I don't know why I just thought of this, but I know that I can turn off autocorrect, but it is correct enough, and my fingers are incorrect enough, that I do want autocorrect on, but oh my word, if there was a way to turn off the machine learning portions of autocorrect, and maybe I'm misattributing this, maybe it's not machine learning at all, maybe something changed in the algorithm, maybe something is different, but
my feeling my recollection is that autocorrect up until like two or three years ago was really really good and then suddenly like two or three years ago and everyone assumed it was ml including me but maybe we're wrong but suddenly something happened where it got real real bad and if i had a switch to just turn off the ml portions of autocorrect i would flick the crap out of that switch i would turn that on or i guess off so fast and
because I really feel like it's the ML that's doing it.
Like, it's a bunch of idiots typing T-H-U-R-D Thursday apostrophe S. I got myself, I'm the idiot now, right?
Anyway, the point is, it's a bunch of idiots typing Thursday apostrophe S instead of Thursday S, and then the ML engine picks that up, and then all of a sudden, now we're getting it.
right it's like no like that and i understand like i i am probably benefiting from much of what that ml engine is adding to the dictionary uh but when it gets it wrong it's just like i'm being failed like like many other things i'm being failed by the collective idiocy of the rest of humanity here like i am right they are wrong and they're making my life worse as a result
related please vote yes please for the love of god real-time problem on what children are filled with monday's child is fair of face tuesday's child is full of grace wednesday's child is full of woe but thursday's child has far to go what in the crap are you talking about is this a destiny thing
yeah seriously it's either destiny church or some obscure it is not destiny or church again sports no it's not sports interesting guesses i'll put a screenshot by the way for you two in the slack so like in in our i don't i don't understand this is this is a gpu problem is this in our show notes we have the like the picture from the invitation for the apple event which i swear we'll get to in a second or two like the the invitation has high high comma speed right that one
right that's in our that's in our google doc paste it as an image in the google doc right so i opened another browser window to search for the thursday's child answer and i found it and would you two please look at the screenshot which contains in the background is my google docs window and in the foreground is my browser window what in the hell is that so in the google adsense boxes
on this unrelated page... The two Google AdSense boxes.
Yeah, on two Google AdSense medium rectangle units on the right sidebar of this page, it's showing the high-comma-speed Apple invitation image with a little, you know, Google Ad Choices X and forward arrow on the upper right corner.
I guess instead of an ad or is this an ad?
I mean, is it because I opened the email and there was a tiny like one pixel image tracker that because I didn't go to the Apple's website.
Yes, I did copy and paste the image out of Gmail.
But now when I go to a random web page, I see two copies of the high speed Apple event ad.
what happens if you click on it is it does it go to that ad or does it go to something else all right so i'll click on it uh it goes to uh apple.com slash apple events question mark gigantic tracking crap oh yeah so so there so it's not a gpu bug it's just incredibly creepy ad ad tracking in your google owned browser with your google owned uh spreadsheet thing oh wait if i scroll down more there's a scroll down farther there's a third google ad containing
You guessed it.
Same exact question.
It's unbelievable.
I want to know what code it is you're writing in the background there, sir.
What code?
That's not code.
What is that?
That is, this is using dispatch work item to delay or cancel tasks.
An article by Nathan Rolick, which will now be in the show notes.
Thank you.
Thank you, Casey, for spying my computer.
You're welcome.
Okay.
All right, so let's move on to the event.
It's going to be this upcoming Tuesday.
I obviously am and we're expecting iPhones.
Before we talk any more about a potential iPhone 12, are we expecting anything else?
I know both of you are begging for laptops, but actually, I guess now might be a good time for John for you to explore why it is you want a laptop so desperately.
oh yeah that's just simple like we need we need another one for the kids they're all doing like remote schooling stuff um and we just have one laptop and then we have one desktop computer and i like to work in the room with desktop computer but the kids don't like me to be in the room when they're working plus i have to be on calls all day too so anyway as soon as we get a laptop i can kick the kids back out of my room and then they can be in their individual rooms with their individual laptops and i can get to be in front of my computer again
I mean, I'm working on my laptop, too, but I also like to be at my computer desk with my real computer there anyway.
So that's why I needed a laptop.
It seems like I haven't really keeping up with the rumors here because there are many other things going on in the world that are distracting me and every other sane person.
But it seems like we're not getting Max in this event.
And, you know, every time, like I said, every time an event comes.
And my whole household goes, can we get a laptop now?
I'm like, seems like maybe not this time.
But there's going to be another Apple event before the end of the year.
And then they'll announce the first ARM Mac, which will probably be a laptop, but we're not sure.
But anyway, probably like before the end of the year.
So I don't even care about the new phone.
I don't care.
I do want a new phone.
But the thing that I want before the end of this year is an ARM Mac that is a laptop.
And it seems like, according to the rumors, that's not going to happen at this event.
Obviously, there will be iPhones.
The other rumor that I vaguely believe is about the headphone situation because, as we'll link in the show note, apparently Apple has stopped selling speakers and earphones ahead of the event, like a third-party one.
So anything that's not by Apple or Beats, right, not being sold in Apple stores anymore.
Does that mean an Apple over-ear headphone is coming?
Does that mean there's going to be a new, cheaper HomePod?
Does it have anything to do with this event?
I don't know, maybe, but it seems like, again, if the vague rumors that I've looked at are to be believed, both of those things are more likely than an ARM Mac, and that's really all I care about.
During this iPhone discussion, I pulled my phone out of its case to look at it and everything.
And it's been sitting here since then, just out of its case.
And it looks like... Have you ever had a hermit crab growing up?
I'm aware of what they are, but I've never had one.
It looks like when your hermit crab is changing shells, and it leaves its first shell, and it just walks around naked for a second until it finds the second shell it's going to go into...
When you see your hermit crab naked, it's the weirdest thing ever because you're really not supposed to see it that way.
That's how it feels looking at an iPhone without a case right now.
I see my iPhone 11 Pro sitting there without a case and it's like, where's the rest of you?
Put some clothes on.
Wow.
Anyway, so...
I think you're probably right, John.
It does feel like we haven't heard enough rumors about our Macs being imminent for them to be at this event in all likelihood.
But I kind of hope they are anyway.
Apple has been significantly better at secrecy in the last couple of years than they were before.
So they actually might have all this stuff ready and we just don't know about it yet.
When I first saw this ad, like the event invitation, before I'd read anything about it, I just saw it on my email box, which usually this doesn't happen.
Usually I see about it on Twitter before I get the email, but this time I actually got the email before I had read anything about it, and I was excited because it said high comma speed, right?
And I'm like, yeah, this makes perfect sense, Apple, because now you're finally going to reveal all the specs of the A14, which you kind of tried to hide at the, you know, with the iPad, the previous iPad event.
And, of course, you're going to have the ARM Max, and they're going to be super fast.
And then I read the rumors, and it was like, no.
don't get your hopes up for max like but it's perfect high speed it's all the fast things and yes the phones will be faster and yes this will be the a14s reel coming out in terms of performance but honestly the real demonstration of high speed things is going to be the r max right because they're going to be so much faster than the intel chips isn't that what the speed is about it just seems like such a waste of a speed related tease to only be talking about phones which i feel like phones in general are
are a place where you know we love that iphones are fast and everything but we're at the point now where i don't think people are like oh my god my phone is so slow if you have any kind of recent iphone i'm not saying there's no point in more speed there absolutely is but phones have always been apple's phones apple's top of the line phones have always been fast we are spoiled by fast phones we expect it and so if you're going to brag about speed brag about it on the platform that has had some speed challenges let's say over the last several years due to intel
but all the rumors all the rumors say no right so well but you know the rumors could also be i mean first of all they could just be wrong we've heard many rumors about this fall that have been wrong so far i mean air tags have been rumored for every event for like two years now exactly right do we already have sometimes i forget if we already have air tags do we already have though they didn't actually ship them they didn't actually even announce them it's just the thing that everyone knows that exists and just is never released
Right, exactly.
Who knows what – when the rumors say this thing is not coming yet, it's really hard to put a lot of faith into that.
That being said, the rumors could also be hearing things about supply and delivery timelines that might be different from announcement timelines.
Apple could announce our Macs at this event next week and maybe not ship them until November.
They could totally say, here's the first two or three Macs that use Apple Silicon, whatever they're going to call it.
They can show them off.
They can get us all excited.
And then they can say, shipping next month.
That's totally a thing they could do if they want to.
Yeah, to be clear, that's all I need.
That's all I need to get the pressure off me in this household to say...
They announced it, and ideally, we can place an order for it.
And if it doesn't ship until next year, say, like, well, we already ordered it.
It's on its way in December.
But, you know, I just need it to exist so I can point to it and say, we're getting that.
That'll be fine.
Exactly.
So they could do Arm Max at this event and just not have them shipping yet.
You know, there is some question about, like, how many events are they going to do in one fall?
Historically, I believe that's been capped at about two.
This would be the second one.
Are they really going to have a third one in another month?
Maybe they could.
These are just like online streams.
So they're kind of like fancier press release product releases.
So in a way, they could do as many of these as they want to.
There's some value in conserving or diluting press attention in certain ways, so they wouldn't want to do tons of them or only one for the entire season.
They should do the Netflix approach where they dump the whole season at once.
They should pre-record.
They pre-recorded all of these in June, and they're just sitting there, and they're releasing them one by one.
It's like, oh, just dump the whole season at once.
Just a binge, right?
Here's all the announcements for the rest of the year, and we're going on vacation.
Yeah, exactly.
So, you know, we'll see what it actually is, but I'm thinking I wouldn't rule out the other products besides iPhones, because otherwise, you look at what's expected, what's left, and
It's basically iPhones and our Macs as the definite things that we know are going to happen this fall.
Because they've told us, basically.
And then the likely maybe column...
Includes things like the audio products, which, again, I think that story about them being dropped out of Apple's retail stores, that's a pretty strong indicator that more Apple audio products are likely to arrive in the very short term.
So that's probably a real thing.
So very likely in the near future we're going to have the Apple over-ear headphones, the second HomePod, the HomePod Mini, whatever that's going to be.
It is, by the way, it's interesting that they've dropped all that stuff out of their stores because the amount of the real estate of Apple stores taken up by those $300 to $500 Bang & Olufsen speakers and all the weird $300-ish master and dynamic hipster-styled super expensive headphones –
Those have historically been a pretty significant part of the store with lots of the real estate, lots of people usually at them using all the broken iPod Touches to try to get music to come out of them.
So to eliminate those is actually pretty significant.
And Apple won't for a while, if ever –
have enough audio products themselves to fill up that, that the space that that would, that was usually given in the stores.
So it's actually interesting to think like, is there anything more to that?
Like maybe, maybe people just stopped buying them because AirPods killed so much of that business.
Like it's possible, like maybe people just weren't buying.
I mean, you know, the move from, from wired to Bluetooth was a pretty big damaging factor for a lot of those headphones, but you know, they switched to Bluetooth models and everything, but still like,
A lot of those headphones probably aren't being bought anymore because AirPods are so good.
So I wonder if that has something to do with it as well.
And maybe Apple is having to downsize that entire category because maybe no one's buying a lot of premium headphones anymore.
And on the speaker side...
I think a lot of that market, a lot of the nice home speaker for your phone to play music to market, I think a lot of that's been lost to voice cylinders.
And if people aren't buying the HomePod, they're probably buying Echoes and stuff.
And that probably takes away a lot of the market for the high-end, leather-wrapped...
be an oh five hundred dollar blimp thing you know but anyway so i think the the high speed thing on the invitation
The speculation that it's probably about 5G iPhones, it's plausible.
I don't give a crap about 5G, and I don't think Apple would push it that hard as a thing, because I don't think it's that good yet.
Yeah, it's a benefit that they aren't in control of.
Yes, they will have 5G, and yes, 5G can be much, much faster, but if they sell the phone based on that benefit, and you get the phone, and you be like,
it doesn't seem any faster than me it's like oh well because probably because 5g is not either penetrated in your area or the the fast version of 5g isn't near you or you don't realize to get the super high speeds you really need to be really close to one of those millimeter wave things like it it seems like a weird benefit to sell now we can to compare we can say well how did apple sell lte like when they're when their phones went lte i think they did make kind of a big deal about that but they were so late to that and lte was had much better penetration than 5g so
I mean, right or wrong, when I saw high speed, like I said, I thought of ARM Max, but I also saw the A14, which is very fast and was introduced already on the iPad, but in a very vague kind of way.
So I can imagine, like the reason I thought this would be a combination event, and one thing we didn't mention is like a revamped Apple TV with an A14 in it, is that if you release ARM Max, the new phones, and an Apple TV, and they all have some variant of the, you know, the new A14 cores, if not the specific A14 chips inside them,
that's a great place for you to just bask in benchmarks and be like, look at all this fast stuff we're giving you.
Apple TV is way faster than it was.
It's faster than a PlayStation four.
And the new arm Mac is amazing.
And it's super duper fast.
And our phones, of course, are fast too.
And it's all based on Apple Silicon and blah, blah, blah.
But it just seems like that's not the event that they're planning.
According to the rumors.
Well, it also seems like the A14 is not that much faster than the A13.
The initial benchmarks from the iPad Air that are kind of slowly trickling out, they show that it's fast.
It's great in absolute terms, but as a year-over-year upgrade to the A13, it's not that crazy of an upgrade.
I think it's just because we're spoiled by the previous ones.
Wasn't it like 20% or something faster in single-core performance?
Intel is lucky to eke out a couple of percentage every few years.
That's true.
We're going to say, oh, it's only like 15% or 20% faster in single-core.
The A14, if those leaked benchmarks would be leaked, is a beast.
It is faster in single-core performance than any Mac Apple sells currently.
And that's their phone thing.
but by apple's standards for the for the a chips like the the year over year upgraded from the a13 to the a14 is um it's nice it's welcome but it's not something you'd base an event around right so so that's why i think there must be something more to it yeah how can you brag about speed again on phones because the phones are already so fast exactly like i mean i guess what i just said is a thing that apple could say but i think they won't like
at various times apple could have said you know the single core performance of our phones is better than x amount of our macs now they can say it's better than all of our macs but you really don't want to slam your macs by by saying that like the the real thing that they could brag about speed though is gpu stuff right because gpus are easy to make faster by just adding more area and once you're putting an apple silicon chip in a thing with a fan suddenly you have the capacity to just
shove those GPU cores in there and to get a chip that is just a monster that, again, is like PlayStation 4 caliber power in a thing with a quote-unquote integrated GPU.
The benchmarks were showing that essentially the
I think this was just the A14 that's in the iPad, which is a fanless enclosure, right?
With very strict temperature and battery life constraints, right?
That chip, apparently, its GPU power is about equivalent to the base discrete GPU in a MacBook Pro.
So imagine you take that chip and you give it a fan and put it in a case with a fan.
Your integrated GPU could be fast enough to compete with many of the discrete GPUs that are offered in Macs today.
So I am very bullish.
Is that the right word I was getting confused?
I'm very bullish on the performance of ARM-based Macs.
But for the phones and the iPads, like you said, it's like, well, they've always been fast, and now they get faster again.
Fine, but...
Like, I just, we're reading too much into the high-speed thing.
Like, they're going to introduce things that are faster, and that is all the excuses they need.
I just, I have stars in my eyes about the potential of ARM-based Macs, and even the potential of a really fast ARM-based Apple TV to be, if not a good platform for games due to software mismanagement and so on and so forth, at least be extremely capable hardware attached to my television that could potentially play really good games were they ever to be released.
I can't see them having an invitation that says high speed at an event where the most likely headliner is the phone.
I don't know how they would say, unless they're believing in 5G way more than we are.
I mean, that's all it takes is 5G is faster.
There you go.
I think we're reading too much into the title.
Agreed, but the title matters a little bit.
I don't know why they would call it this if it was anything about the iPhone because the iPhone, yeah, it's going to get faster, but it's going to get faster mostly in ways nobody cares about.
And not like massively so.
Whereas the transition to Arm Max will probably make Max way faster.
And so to have this event named high speed in the fall of 2020, when they've said this is when the first Arm Max will come out, how can this event not contain the first Arm Max?
Of course it's going to contain them.
They said before at the end of the year.
Anyway, Apple, we've decided you have to ship Arm Max.
I got to tell you, I would love to see a new Apple TV.
And I think I've mentioned this a couple of times recently, but, you know, we have this almost a year old 4K LG TV downstairs and I'm still running a 1080 Apple TV on it because when we bought this a year ago, I thought, oh, surely there's going to be a new Apple TV in 2019.
Why wouldn't there be?
And obviously there wasn't.
And so surely there'll be a new Apple TV in 2020.
Why wouldn't there be?
I am ready to get a new Apple TV and I would really rather not.
I mean, at this point, I'm just going to continue to wait until I guess they cancel it airport style.
But I would love to get a new Apple TV that's 4K to put on my TV downstairs.
So I hope I see one.
AirPower.
And there were rumors about that coming back.
Have you seen the rumors about AirPower coming back?
I saw a couple, yeah.
Like they just started over and they're going to make another product that does the same thing, but like start over from scratch and make one that works.
We'll see if that ever happens.
Boy, if that beats AirTags out, I don't know what's going on with AirTags.
I don't know what the holdup is.
It's just not the right time, John.
It's just not the right time.
They keep catching on fire.
That might have something to do with it.
Aye, aye, aye.
I'm really looking forward to it.
I'm excited.
I'm not excited about the potential choice I'm going to have to make with regards to size, as we've already covered, because I feel like I'm going to be forced to go bigger, and I really don't want to.
But one way or another, I'm excited to see what's on offer.
Okay, so do you guys...
i'm gonna be forced to buy a new iphone to replace my one-year-old iphone and that will be forced i'll be forced to get the nice model that's big no you're right to call me out on that that's a fair point um but no i i am curious to the do the two of you guys think we're going to see uh ipad style a touch id thing in the side button let's start with marco
I would say it's possible.
I would hope to see it, but it might be a little ambitious because to get that, well, I think about it because like I think one of the biggest challenges for that would be the thickness of the case.
Obviously, you want that button to be as thick as possible to give you the most surface area possible to see as much of the fingerprint as possible and phones are not that thick.
but they do tend to be thicker than iPads.
So are they still?
I haven't checked.
Are the current phones?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure they're thicker than iPads, though.
Yeah, so if it can fit on an iPad, it might be able to fit on a phone, too.
So, yeah, maybe.
I would love to see that, and I would love to see a hybrid model where it's Face ID and Touch ID.
That would be awesome, especially if you pick...
you know tell it like oh just whatever recognizes me first let me in so you don't need both to match or you don't always need face it you can just like whatever recognizes me that that would be awesome i would love that um but i don't know if they're quite ready for that yet on the phone i might need one more year john
it seems like something we would know already through the rumor mills and leaked cases and stuff like that and the fact that i haven't heard anything about it makes me think that it's not going to have it like mostly because you know it's like the the touch id on the on the ipad what is the ipad the new ipad air yep like that's not a reaction to covid that was planned way ahead of time and even though i don't personally understand the cost trade-off between face id and that it seems clear to me that that's why it has touch id because they didn't put face id in
because it's the cheaper model and once you don't have face id but you still want to have the full screen gesture blah blah blah thing you need something and there's what touch id is whereas on the phone it's not the thickness that i worry about because again the phones have been thicker than ipads for a little while now it's like how much space is there inside the phone for you to put crap right and putting the touch id sensor it's not big like it's not huge but it's bigger than a power button right um and so it makes me think that
Because there's no reason to do it on the phone, that they've been perfectly happy with this design of just Face ID and it being fine.
And because this phone wasn't made in reaction to COVID, because it was planned way before this happened, that regardless of what Apple wants to do or plans to do, and certainly regardless of what we all want it to do, because I agree with Marco, I'd love it with a phone with both.
It seems to me that this phone is not going to have it, which is understandable and fine.
But for the next phone, hopefully COVID didn't come too late to influence the design of the next one, because now I can imagine making different tradeoffs and saying, well, we don't know how long we're going to be wearing these masks.
If you can, let's get Touch ID into the iPhone 13 or whatever.
To be fair, the demand for Touch ID on a phone existed strongly before COVID also.
There's a lot of people who still don't like Face ID and are still holding on to the older style phones.
And that's one of the reasons I think why the new SE is the older style, because there's a lot of people who just don't want Face ID for whatever reason or it doesn't work well for them.
And so Touch ID still has quite a fan base.
and i think app until apple can offer touch id on the high-end phones in some form whether it's like an under screen thing or a power button thing whatever it is some form of touch id i think they need to do it in order to capture the rest of that market again and to get them to be upgrading to nice iphones again who do you know who face id doesn't work well for because i know old people say touch id doesn't work because their fingerprints are all old and ever-changing apparently but like who has a face that's a problem with face id
uh well people who wear face coverings on a regular basis that's a big one you know and that was a big one before this it's just a bigger one now but you know that's that's a big one yeah yeah i mean i i totally agree they should do both of them it's just a question of like was this the year where they felt like the trade-off in internal space uh and cost i suppose was worth it to get it wedged in there and it's you know given the one device we've seen where they've done this it's the it's not the high end it's a
trade-off feature but i'm i my fingers are crossed for it because it's you know obviously we all wish it was there i just it just feel like it you know i feel like i would have seen uh confirmed rumors of it i'm this is again i'm casually paying attention but i think casually paying attention to the rumors is a good way to note uh when exciting things are happening because if it's maybe maybe the rest of the world isn't excited isn't as excited about touch ideas the power button as we all are but that they should be
Yeah, I would love to see it.
I strongly suspect that it won't have made the cut in terms of timing, but I would love to see it.
And again, to go back to what we were talking about earlier, I'd love this thing to be USB-C.
Do you think, well, John, did you weigh in on that earlier?
Do you think that it'll be a USB-C phone?
No.
Again, based on the fact that I haven't heard the rumors and the fact that the only rumor I have heard is lightning forever until there's no more wires at all, which could be as early as next year.
I'm not holding my breath for it.
Although on all these issues, Touch ID and USB-C, I keep eyeing the Gigantophone, whatever it is, the Pro Max, whatever, like the 6.5 inches, or 6.7.
If you have a 6.7-inch phone, you don't really have issues about internal space for the Touch ID sensor.
right and so maybe that makes it a potential candidate for that and also usbc again i know it's not a thickness issue but if you want if you're thinking of a phone that's starting to edge into ipad territory and all the ipads have usbc you can make an argument that you could just convert the monster phone to usbc but that would be ridiculous that they would just do it in one phone but like i think i would like it to be coming i don't want them to go from lightning to nothing i want them to go to lightning to usbc and then maybe to nothing when it actually is good
So I'm a little bit terrified of them just holding the line of lightning for as long as they can and then switching to pure wireless.
Because even though I have a phone that supports wireless charging and we have wireless chargers in the house, I don't use it.
I'm an old fuddy-duddy.
I plug it into a cable.
Yeah, wireless charging is very polarizing, and it's not a clear win for everybody or for all circumstances.
I use a mix of both.
I use wired in the car.
I use wired when I'm traveling.
Yeah.
I'm not going to bring a weird wireless charger with me if I don't need to.
And I also use wire when I need a fast charge, when I need just a faster charge or if I'm using some kind of USB battery pack or something like that.
It's very common.
And Tiff, she doesn't like wireless at all.
She never uses it.
I use it on my nightstand at night.
People have different preferences and different needs.
And wireless charging is not the same as a cable.
It is not universally better.
It's better in a few ways.
It's worse in a few significant ways.
One of the biggest ways it's worse is efficiency.
It's terrible for efficiency.
And you just end up wasting a whole bunch more of that electricity as heat.
So not only do you charge more slowly, which is a problem, but you also waste a ton of power.
If you think about if every iPhone in the world could only charge wirelessly, imagine the global power waste.
Compare that to whatever gains that you get by not including the power brick in the box.
It's laughable.
That's an interesting point.
I use a wireless charger on my nightstand, and I love it.
I don't particularly want to go back to having to plug in at night.
I mean, that's the first-worldiest first-world problem, right?
Well, no, the first-worldiest first-world problem is, oh my gosh, I don't want a bigger phone, and I have to get one.
But the second most first-worldly first-world problem.
You already hit that record.
So I'm going for a trifecta, and I'm on number two now, which is...
I don't particularly want to have to fumble with a plug at night.
It's not that big a deal, no.
It's not like an infomercial where I'm stabbing myself with a lightning cable, you know.
But it would be nice.
I prefer not dealing with it.
And it's funny because I think...
With the exception of when I'm doing development, I don't think I would have a problem with a completely wireless phone, you know, that has no lightning port, no USB-C, no nothing.
I could make everything else work.
Now, I agree with almost everything you said, Marco.
Like when I travel, I use a cable.
When I'm in the car, I use a cable.
But...
With the exception of a couple of things, like CarPlay come to think of it, but with the exception, I should say, with the primary exception of doing development, I don't think I would really mind having a completely wireless phone.
And the last time I tried doing Wi-Fi builds and debug and whatnot in Xcode...
It worked, but it was not fun and it was not consistent because as with all things at Apple, if Apple engineers don't use it all the time, then it's not going to be great.
And from the looks of it, they are not using wireless debugging very often at all.
And so in that sense, like in a hypothetical world where you could option a port on your phone, you know, so they have the 12 with the port and 12 with no port, I would absolutely option the port even if it costs a little more money.
I forgot about the development angle, but you're right.
Wireless debugging is terrible.
It would significantly slow down on device development.
If you can imagine how things work with the Apple Watch today, because that's all wireless, and trying to build and run onto the Apple Watch and trying to debug stuff is just painful in so many ways.
And
I have noticed too, because I occasionally do need to use wireless debugging on the phone as well, whenever I'm testing CarPlay, because my CarPlay rig is wired, so that has to be plugged into the phone as the lightning port, so then I have to use Xcode wirelessly to the phone.
And it is noticeably slower, significantly slower, than just doing a straight USB build, and it's less reliable.
And that would be a huge step backwards for iOS developers.
But if Apple made them wireless, wouldn't all of Apple's iOS developers also now be forced to use this wireless thing all the time, too?
And then maybe it'll get better?
Well, no, not necessarily.
I mean, a lot of Apple development happens on development hardware rigs, where they're not just running on a production phone, necessarily.
The app development?
Yeah.
A lot of it's running on development boards or development kits or modified hardware rigs.
I mean, maybe when they're doing the phone app or something, the camera app or something that has to take advantage of the new hardware, but the iOS mail team, I don't imagine they need to work on dev hardware.
You'd be surprised.
So my limited understanding about this is that a lot of Apple engineers, now I am not sure to your point, John, if it's
like the Apple engineers that work on mail or the Apple engineers that work on UI kit.
But I know that a lot of Apple engineers have, what do they call it?
I think they call it like dev fused or something like that.
They have these special kinds of phones that allow like SSH access and all this other crazy stuff that we don't get to do.
And I think that that's the phones that Apple will issue for their engineers.
And it would not at all surprise me if a dev fused or whatever it's called phone in the future was,
When Marco and me and you are all buying completely wireless phones, it would not surprise me not one bit if a defused phone also had a port.
It should have that little port that the Apple Watch has, you know, inside the band.
Right?
I don't know.
But...
It's funny because we're not for development in CarPlay.
I think I would be all in on a completely wireless phone because presumably it would be way more waterproof or be able to stay underwater longer or what have you, which is not a problem I can say I've run into often, but it'd still be nice.
Would it?
I don't think I would have a problem with it with the exception, the big exceptions of CarPlay and in development.
And because of those two things, I would absolutely option a port if I needed to.
I don't see what problems I have that would be solved by a portless iPhone.
I can see problems that would be created by such a thing.
I don't see what problems are being solved that make that worth it.
That's fair, and I think you're right.
Because you can already achieve amazing water resistance with ports if they're properly designed, as we see with both the current iPhones and with phones from other manufacturers that use USB-C and headphone jacks that are waterproof.
Like, this can be done.
It's not... The port...
I just don't see good reasons to go portless on a phone because wireless charging is not good enough.
Communication is not good enough.
It shuts down so many options.
It cuts off all peripherals.
It's a weird thing to do as the only option because it seems to have almost no upside but pretty substantial downsides.
It's a problem that Apple has because Apple has the problems of all of its customers in aggregate.
Us as individual customers might not have this particular problem, but what I'm thinking of is crap getting in the port.
How many Apple store visits are people picking lint out of their ports?
And now you may say, well, you don't need to pick lint out of the port because you can always do everything wireless.
But because the port exists...
And people want to use it rightfully because it's a feature of their phone.
When it stops working, they think their phone is broken, and it is in a way, and so needs to come in and get it cleaned out.
Now, only Apple knows what are those numbers like.
Is this really an epidemic of like, you know, 50% of the visits to the Apple store are belly button lint picking from ports, right?
Anecdotally, I know plenty of people whose ports get filled with gunk and then they stop charging both on iPads and on iPhones and so on and so forth.
Now, I've never had that problem individually, and it sounds like you two haven't either, but Apple writ large may have that problem.
And when I say Apple has the problem, it's not, you know, the problem Apple has is like, oh, I don't want to pay to manufacture a little port, like some sort of cost things.
But in this case, it's a problem that may be prevalent in Apple's customer base and give people lower satisfaction on the phone and take time in Apple stores and so on and so forth.
That's the only thing I can think of in terms of, you know, other than the basic, like, simplification.
We have to drill one less hole.
We have slightly more room inside the case now.
Like those are all very tiny, although real gains for Apple alone.
But the potential gain for customers is don't worry about getting lint in your little phone belly button anymore because there ain't no belly button.
I was going to say to your point, John, that when Marco was saying, what is this solving?
That's when all of the Apple geniuses that listen to us start writing in saying, you don't even know how often this is a problem.
So what if it's a problem?
People drop their phones and shatter the screens all the time.
So the next phone out of a screen?
i mean but they're trying to work on that too by making it you know i i don't know how big of a problem it is but like that that is the benefit i can think of of not having a port there now the question is okay but there are also drawbacks your phone charges slower it gets hotter reduces the battery life because the heat damages the battery yada yada are the trade-offs worth it i don't think that's clear at all but i can think of at least one benefit in that column to balance against all the other bad things that we just described
oh sure yeah like there's totally like a um you know apple saves money in various ways angle to that no question excuse me excuse me it's not apple saving money it's apple doing good for the environment thank you very much yeah with their sealed up unrepairable devices honestly i don't think that apple saving that much i don't think apple is actually saving that much money there but like it's you know it's the the simplification is one fewer thing that can break and when things break it's it's
The customers that suffer when their port stops working or their phone stops charging reliably or whatever, because Lint got in there, right?
So I think the main benefit of no ports is a customer benefit.
There are ancillary Apple manufacturing pricing, blah, blah, blah benefits, but those are much smaller in the benefit column than the benefit of not having to worry about the port getting gunked up.
So can you imagine something I hadn't considered because I have a couple of Qi chargers around the house is that it is unlikely in my mind that Apple would include a Qi charger in this fantasy completely wireless phone.
So now not only have they taken away the charger, which would tick everyone off something fierce just on principle.
But now you need to go buy a $10 to $20 to $50 to $100 or whatever.
I don't even know.
It looks like they're like $10-ish to $15.
I think they would include it.
You think they would include a Qi charger?
Just like they do on the watch.
Like it wouldn't have the brick, but it would have the little, you know, thing, something.
Because they have to give you something to charge it with, right?
They're not going to like, you know, as in...
physical thing that you can buy that you plug into something that has power right now and to be clear if everyone's listening to this none of us think this is happening in the apple event for whatever reason we're not speculating off into the future about thing i think it's because we were talking about usbc which we also don't think is happening right but this is this is for future phones not don't worry about the uh the iphone event they're gonna have wires it'll be fine they won't have power bricks but they're gonna have wires
but i think they would ship it with some kind of solution and maybe it's an apple hell maybe it's an apple proprietary solution that yes they would still do chi charging but there'd be these other apple manta ray suction cup bs whatever thing that you slap onto the phone in a slightly different way and maybe it attaches with magnets so it always goes onto the right spot and maybe it's really small you know what i mean like but there's still no actual port there and it charges faster and doesn't produce as much heat as chi charging but there's still no linty belly button like
that would totally be an apple move hell bring back magsafe i mean that had lint problems too but anyway like i'm my mind is open to potential quote-unquote wireless solutions that are essentially a magnetically attached little wire thing that clings to the surface somewhere on the phone and charges it and having the phone still have chi charging for the oh i stick it in my car and it charges the whole thing right because there's room for both of those inside there
By the way, for the record, if Apple does go to a portless phone at some point in the future, there is no way they include the cable in the box.
Whatever your wireless charging solution, there is no way.
That's what I was saying.
No way.
I mean, they do it with the watch.
Like I said, the reason they do it with the watch is because the watch thing is proprietary.
right yes i mean you can actually kind of charge it on sheet chargers and scrap like that because whatever inductance doesn't care but um i've never gotten that to work i've tried it i think it depends on the particular thing but if it is a proprietary apple faster more localized heat generation charging thing or whatever they would absolutely include in the box for exactly the same reason they include it for the watch because where else are you going to get your first one of those cables because they don't exist when you buy your first thing
I'm with Marco.
I think they would just say, well, it's G-charging.
Go get one.
Or you can buy the Apple Fast Charger for $29.
Exactly.
And actually, as I said last show or whatever it was about the power bricks, if they want to make the pricing of these phones a la carte and just subtract the price of all the accessories from the phone price, that's fine for everybody.
No one objects to that.
But it's not the way things go.
They keep the price the same but remove stuff from the box.
Yeah, exactly.
Record profits again somehow this year.
And even less e-waste.
Actually, I'm curious.
Do you think – so in the last year or two, there's been a noticeable –
push on Apple's end for much more aggressive sales.
And you see this in a lot of different ways.
If you're on any mailing list that they have, they've been pushing increasingly aggressively for you to upgrade constantly to every new product.
They especially push on iPhones.
If you know any business reps in any of the retail stores, they've been pushing way more heavily through them over the last year or two.
um they ever since the apple card last fall they've been pushing a ton uh of like you know put buy through this car thing they've been pushing through the upgrade program buy through this they they changed every price of everything on the website recently to put the new like per month lease price first instead of the actual cash buying price of everything they sell basically which i think is honestly i think that's kind of sleazy and gross but
Like, they've been pushing so hard on the more aggressive sales angle recently.
Do you think they're going to do anything differently this year in that area?
Do you think, like, is there going to be any more of a push this year, given that we're in such a weird time and maybe sales might be suppressed because of the global conditions?
Like, is anything going to be different this year, you think, on the sales or business side?
Yeah.
Well, you just mentioned all the stuff they're already doing.
So, like, I think they will continue to do that.
But I can't, I'm not, you know, they already have the up-to-date thing.
They already show you all the prices per month.
That stuff already exists.
They will absolutely do that for the new phones.
But what is one step beyond that?
Like, what's the next step up in what's it going to take to get you into this new phone today?
I don't know what the next step is.
I feel like they've...
already done all those things already done all the obvious straightforward things to make the phone seem more affordable to people do you think they would ever tie in with the apple one bundle of something like you know you pay kind of like what the new xbox has like you pay pay whatever this price is and it's you're basically buying a services and iphone bundle together
I mean, there's no reason they can't do that, but historically what they've done is the opposite, which is you buy a new Apple thing that we really want you to buy, and you get a free year of whatever service we're currently pushing.
Right, yeah.
So, I mean, yeah, I think that kind of deal makes perfect sense, although at a certain point when you start bundling things together, there's a point of diminishing returns where you're like...
Which of the seven things do I want and can I get them in a bundle?
Apple one is already kind of complicated enough.
So like it seems to me that they're much they'd much rather have you subscribe to one of their services.
And that's why, you know, buy a free Apple thing and get a year of Apple TV plus like it's the obvious biggest example.
that's the lever they've been using here not on the opposite direction i feel like the iphone is doesn't need anything to pull it along obviously covid times may change that but who knows like there there are lots of interesting things you can do in terms of marketing and advertising but i really feel like they have most of the big bases already covered and i i think they're i think they're fine with the
I mostly agree with that.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is eventually a merging of the Apple One and iPhone upgrade program, but we'll see what happens.
One final question I have for you guys, then we should try to squeeze in some Ask ATP.
Do you think that this will be for, say, the iPhone upgrade program or for people who are upgrading every year?
Do you think that this will be the shortest amount of time that...
That we will have a phone because this is going on in mid-October, presumably won't ship until next, you know, maybe next week at the earliest, but probably the week after that, or maybe even the end of October, early November.
Is this going to be the shortest amount of time that annual iPhone upgraders will have a particular phone?
Do you think next year will be back on the September schedule?
I think that it may just shift everything because it's not like the conditions that cause this delay go away or we suddenly get a time to catch up.
Right.
And I think that the main the sort of target, the sort of unavoidable target for the phone around this time of year is you really can't miss the holidays.
Right.
So September is like, I didn't miss the holidays.
I'm fine.
October, you still kind of haven't missed the holidays, and if this pushed this thing out to October, that might have also pushed the next phone out to October, so October could become the new September until they can slowly shift back.
That seems like a reasonable assumption to me, because October, you still got the holidays, right?
I still feel like that is fine, and...
If the schedule has to be shifted for a year or two and they could slowly ratchet it back to get to September, if they really care about that, I think that's a more likely outcome than like, I don't know.
I know what you're saying.
Like, oh, you get this phone in November and the next one comes out in September and it didn't have a long life at the top of the heap.
But that really depends on stuff in the world that we can't really predict at this point.
How the planet recovers from its current situation.
What about you, Marco?
I think they're going to get back to September as quickly as they can.
So if it's not this one, it'll be slowly over the next few phones.
They'll shift their way back.
But I have a feeling it'll be this one.
I have a feeling like next fall, they're going to be back on schedule.
Because like...
They don't care when they release the last one.
Most people don't buy phones every year, only us idiots.
So most people wouldn't care how soon they release the next one, really.
And if it's 11 months away instead of 12 months away, most people aren't even going to remember the difference.
So it's more a question of whether they can do it.
And I bet they can.
We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite place to host servers.
Whether you're working on a personal project or managing your enterprise's entire infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level.
You can simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier.
You can get started on Linode today with a $100 credit for our listeners.
You can find all those details at linode.com.
And if you aren't at your desk, no problem.
They have an easy way to get reminded of this.
Just text ATP to 474747 and you can get instant access to $100 in free credit at Linode.
Linode has 11 data centers worldwide.
They provide 24-7, 365 human support.
With no, like, little, you know, shallow tiers you have to fight through or handoffs, regardless of your plan size.
I can personally speak to this.
I've been a Linode customer for almost a decade.
I'm a huge fan of Linode.
And when I have used their support, I've been shocked at how good it was.
Like, this is totally right.
Like, you know, you don't get, like, screened out by a low-level person first and have to, like, fight your way up a chain.
You get instant responses from people who know what they're doing and they deal with your problem the whole way through.
It's wonderful for so many reasons being a Linux customer, but this is really a big one.
And they also have all sorts of plans and capabilities.
So in addition to shared and dedicated compute plans, you can also use that $100 credit in their new S3 compatible object storage or managed Kubernetes or so much more.
So visit linode.com slash ATP today and click on the create free account button to get started or text ATP to 474747 and get started on Linode today.
Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my servers and sponsoring our show.
All right, John, we have three minutes for you to cover the House Judiciary Committee antitrust report on Amazon and Facebook and Apple and Google.
The clock is ticking.
Go.
I'm going to need more than three minutes, but not too long.
So we talked about this when the people, when all the tech CEOs were in front of Congress and answering their questions and how bad some of their questions were and so on and so forth.
And now they released this 450 page report, PDF link in the show notes.
Interestingly, the old PDF link 404 today, and I had to find it elsewhere, but it's up still there.
The result of this report, the summary would be basically that the people who wrote this report think these big tech companies have a lot of power, probably too much power, and they sometimes abuse it to make things worse for people.
That's the summary.
Does this mean that there are going to be a bunch of new laws in the United States that constrain these companies?
If the people who wrote this report have their way, it will.
But the people who wrote this report currently are do not have their way in anything.
Right.
So that that is the executive summary that in general, this is mostly bad news for the big tech companies, because it means that.
A lot of people, at least one party in our crappy two-party system, think these companies have too much power.
I encourage people to look at it because you can read the first page or two and kind of get the gist of it.
One little part that I took out that I thought was interesting was...
All right.
So there's two aspects.
One is like we need some new laws to to address these issues, because obviously our current laws don't address it at all.
A lot of these things people are doing are illegal, but they're bad for the economy and bad for customers and bad for everything.
So we should make some new laws, which find them except they're the legislature.
That's what they do.
Right.
But the other aspect was relevant to the discussion we had earlier about like, well,
current antitrust law who's a monopoly and apple's argument that it does not have majority market share in any markets that it competes in or doesn't have dominant market share one section of this document says i'll read from the thing here um the subcommittee should examine the creation of a statutory presumption that a market share of 30 or more constitutes a rebuttable presumption of dominance by a seller um my translation of this is basically saying look
Right now, with the Sherman Antitrust Law, if we try to use the Sherman Act on, say, Apple, Apple's going to say, we have like 40% market share.
According to the Sherman Act, we're not a dominant monopoly, so you can't say anything.
And what they're saying is, we should consider...
changing the existing sherman antitrust act to say even if you have a smaller market share that doesn't mean you you you're automatically not subject to the constraints of our existing antitrust laws that is my interpretation of this paragraph it is written in a complicated way and i'm not sure if i'm reading it right but
But I feel like that two-pronged approach of, one, we need new laws because there are new companies doing new things that were totally unforeseen at the time the Sherman Antitrust Act was written long ago.
And two, maybe we should also consider revisiting the constraints that I kind of outlined, like sort of the stuff that was forged in the fire of the Microsoft antitrust file saying –
you know, do you have a monopoly?
It's like, well, Microsoft just owns the entire PC industry.
It was an easy slam dunk case.
Like, yes, of course they have a monopoly, but Apple's big defense is we're not like Microsoft.
And now Congress is saying, even with our existing laws, even when we pass no new laws, maybe we should examine the creation of a statutory presumption.
We should look at that.
Do you really need to have like 95% market share to be considered a monopoly according to current antitrustless?
Maybe not.
So this shows me that
A large number of Democrats in Congress really, really think that these companies need to be taken down a notch.
Will they be successful?
Will this happen?
In general, making any new laws that constrain the richest companies in the world usually requires many, many more people to die.
I mean, look how long it took to get laws to constrain like tobacco companies, right?
It is not easy, not easy to get in our current system of government to get new laws constraining the richest, most powerful companies in the world because there's so much working against it in our terrible, broken system of government, right?
But...
uh this report was entirely one-sided uh declaration that boy if a bunch of people have their way tech companies you will be newly constrained in some potentially minor way in the future that's it that's my summary
That actually wasn't bad.
All right.
Ask ATP.
Andy writes, what's the deal with disk images?
Why were they introduced?
And more importantly, why do they still exist?
I know people have gotten Macs and just booted apps like Steam directly from their disk image until they asked me to help them out.
What's going on with that, John?
So just a minute, it originally existed because Mac file system could support more kinds of metadata, resource forks, stuff like that, than could exist on other systems.
So if you wanted to take a bunch of Mac stuff, say an application that itself has finder attributes and resource forks and type and creator codes and all sorts of crap like that, and you wanted to transport that safely across any other system,
Right.
Right.
Right.
I don't think that's why disk images were created, but that's one of the reasons they still hang around, right?
Second thing is, disk images are just plain cool.
You can take a file and use it as a disk.
You can make an image of an existing disk and save it as a file.
And, like, it's a cool thing to be able to do.
I remember showing people disk images back in the DOS days, and it would blow their little minds, because it is just... Why are they little minds, John?
Come on.
Very little minds.
Their drives were named single letters, right?
Okay, and still... Anyway...
right i can name my hard drive whatever i want with spaces look it's got a cute cartoon icon anyway um so yeah so disk images are a useful thing to have just because it's useful sometimes to be able to make a fake little volume out of a file i do it sometimes even today like if i need a case sensitive file system somewhere to do something for example at work where we have files that differ only in case and it drives me nuts
If I want to do that on my Mac, I need to make a case-sensitive volume, but I'm not going to partition my thing.
I guess with APFS, it's much easier.
But back in the pre-APFS days, you'd make a little disk image, and you could make it any size you want, and it can be sparse so it doesn't take up all that space, and yada, yada.
Disk images are just a cool thing to have.
Now, as for why they still exist today in a world where our Mac applications shouldn't have any crap that can't live on the internet...
Why don't we just use zip files?
Well, a lot of applications do just use zip files, but there are still things that disc images can do that say a zip file can't.
For example, mount as a volume, open a window that has the stupid little arrow in the background that says drag this application over to this alias, or symlink usually, to your application folder.
How many apps have you gotten that do that, right?
If you just unzip it, it sits there in your downloads folder and then everyone just runs it out of their downloads folder.
Then everyone's got a right custom code that says, hey, it looks like you're running this application out of your downloads folder.
Do you want me to move it into applications?
None of these are a perfect system.
The Mac App Store is better where you just hit the button and you get the app and it goes in the right place.
But both of them fulfill a role.
And so that disk image convention today, yes, it technically does preserve all that specific metadata, yada, yada, but you probably don't need to do that anymore.
But it does let you do the little thing where you can instruct people to drag the icon into the application folder, which I grant most people don't even understand what's happening there and it's confusing and you're still left with the disk image that you have to unmatch.
It's a bad system.
We all know it is.
But I think that's one of the reasons they still hang around, right?
So...
To sum up, disk images are cool and should always exist.
People needed to use them for software distribution back in the day.
People don't need to use them now, but they still have some features that people like.
Is a zip file or a tarball a disk image?
No, not at all.
Because when you sort of unpack it, you get files out of it.
When you open a disk image, it mounts a volume.
Your computer thinks it has a new volume attached to it.
Just like any other volume and all the other tools you can use for volumes, including ejecting them and running file system check on them.
And like the volumes can have different file systems than the file system on your Mac.
Like totally unrelated, not even remotely close.
What about a WOD file?
Do you know what that is, John?
Because, you know, there aren't very many games.
There aren't many games on Macs.
I know what a WOD file is.
I don't know.
I think aren't WOD files just zip files, though?
i don't think they're literally zip files but they're effectively the same as far as i'm aware i think they actually might have predated zip files because that was what like doom used for its resources right yep i don't know if it predated zip but i think they are effectively it didn't it didn't predate zip but there are a lot of file formats that are really just either zip or tar under the covers what the hell is it is a xip though i would love to know what what that format is is that really a totally made-up apple thing
The Xcode zip?
Yeah, I thought that that was like a cryptographically secure zip file or something like that.
I probably have that wrong for the record, but that was my impression was that it's effectively a zip file that's got some, you know, certs and cryptographic magic that I don't understand sprinkled on top of it.
All we know is that it takes forever to decompress.
Yes.
The chat room is saying it's a signed zip, which is, I think, a better summary of what I was trying and fumbling to say.
Although I imagine that it takes forever to zip, not just because of the format, but also because Xcode itself contains a whole jillion files.
And also because you probably have Dropbox running, which is using 100% of your CPU while it's unzipping.
Oh.
Oh, come on.
Rookie mistake.
Never try to expand on one of those Xcode XIP zip files with Dropbox running.
Silly.
Small brain after all.
That should be the real benchmark of any new pro Mac hardware.
It's like, okay, this is all well and good.
You can have five 8K streams of video, but how long does it take to decompress Xcode?
All right.
Ian Oymaitiao writes, as users are starting to make their phones last three to four years between upgrades, do you think it's possible or reasonable for the useful lifespan of a phone to reach 10 years?
It feels like official software support is artificially holding older phones back.
I don't know.
I think I take a little bit of issue with artificially holding older phones back.
I don't think that's particularly fair.
I think 10 years is aggressive, but on an infinite timescale, you never know.
But I do think that it seems as though iPhones, anyway, are lasting longer.
And look at the Apple Watch, the Series 3.
Yeah.
Ah, bless its heart.
It's still still going.
So I do think that things are definitely getting or having increased longevity.
Ten years, I don't think we'll see for a while.
But I mean, the point is still other than the artificial thing.
I think the point is still fair.
Marco, what do you think?
I don't think any vendor is artificially slowing old phones down.
I think software moves forward, and the OSs move forward because they're able to assume things about how modern phones have more processing power and more RAM and stuff like that.
So the OSs will always move forward and will always be slower on really old hardware.
But the fact that the OSs run at all on the old hardware, I think that...
Letting that happen for a certain period back in your hardware lineup is the only obligation the platform makers have to old hardware.
And that being said, you could think about, could a phone last 10 years?
And I think to get to that point, you would need two things to happen.
Number one, you would need a dramatic slowdown in the advancement of phone hardware.
Now, we see on the PC side and Mac side, that has happened over the last decade or two.
And a 10-year-old Mac, as John knows, can still be usable.
It might not be the best modern performer by the time it gets there, but it is possible because phones will get to a point where they are advancing much more slowly as they have been for these last 12 years.
I don't think we're quite there yet, but you can see the shape of the curve.
It is flattening.
It is getting less steep.
Phones are accelerating in performance more slowly than they used to be.
So that, I think, has to happen to make this even possible.
And the second thing, from a practical standpoint, is that the batteries have to be much more easily replaceable or they have to last much longer on their own.
Because the main problem we have that limits phone and watch and laptop lifespan these days is the chemical useful lifespan of lithium ion batteries.
They degrade over time.
No matter how much or little you use them, there's a certain inevitable amount of degradation that happens just chemically to them that they lose capacity.
And if you actually are using them, if you're like discharging and recharging them every day, like you do with phones and watches at least, maybe not all laptops, depending on whether you use it plugged in most of the time, but like phones and watches, you're discharging to some degree, to some significant degree, and then recharging every day.
No battery can stand up to that for more than a few years without having pretty significant capacity loss, eventually to the point where the device is no longer useful.
And to reach 10 years, you would have to...
either have dramatically better and longer-lasting batteries, which I don't think we really know how to make yet in this category, and or you'd have to let the batteries be easily replaceable outside of warranty by any repair shop or end user, not just having Apple do it for whatever price they want.
And that I don't think is very likely either.
Yeah, battery, I feel like, is the main constraint.
The only thing I would add is that you mentioned, like, I don't think manufacturers are slowing down old phones intentionally.
The one instance where Apple was slowing down old phones intentionally was because of, ta-da, the battery.
As in, they had to, you know, it would overload the battery and the phone would switch off, so the choice was to run at a slower speed and draw less power, right?
Yeah.
The batteries is the real constraint here, both the changing of it and the technology.
The good news is that there is a potential for new, longer lasting battery technology.
The bad news is that the time horizon is not particularly good.
It's always as, you know, five to 10 years in the future.
You know, it'll probably come to.
Like, you know, the solid metal batteries or whatever probably come to vehicles before it comes to phones.
But who knows?
But that's what you really need.
And as for the phones, you know, Apple support for OSs, I saw a chart.
I wish I could remember it.
I couldn't find the link.
I saw a chart recently showing OS support versus phone hardware age on Android, and it is dismal compared to the iPhone.
Apple supports hardware so much farther back in time with its most recent OS than Android tends to.
So I think Apple's doing about as well as you can expect, given the fact that all their batteries are internal, are not particularly easy to replace, and are lithium-ion.
Finally, Luke Schulman writes, We are expecting our first child in January 2021.
We don't currently have a quote-unquote real camera.
With the newest capabilities of phone cameras, would you recommend buying a quote-unquote real camera?
What attributes would you prioritize?
You know, I was just thinking today that I haven't used my Micro Four Thirds camera, which is a small quote-unquote real camera.
I haven't used that in a little while and I kind of miss it.
I kind of miss, in the same way that, what did you guys call it, a tea ceremony playing vinyl?
I feel like to some degree there's a little bit of a tea ceremony now for my Olympus, my Micro Four Thirds camera.
Up until the iPhone 11 Pro, I don't personally feel like any of my iPhones took good enough pictures to be comparable to that phone.
And I still don't get the really good bokeh off of the iPhone, even with portrait mode.
Oftentimes, it feels synthetic even to me, and I don't have the world's most discerning eye.
um but there's things about and and i'm comparing only one data point which is my olympus and so this is this math may be different for other cameras but like the iphone's hdr mode so you can capture a very bright sky at the same time you're capturing a a normally exposed like person um that works much better on my iphone than it does on my olympus and
video is much better on my iPhone than it is on my Olympus.
And my iPhone is always on me.
So in a lot of ways, I would say, no, you shouldn't buy a real camera.
But I will tell you, even with my Micro Four Thirds camera, which is way less fancy than the cameras that the two of you gentlemen have,
When I get a good shot, it is a good, good shot.
And I don't feel like there's been many pictures on my iPhone, even the 11 Pro that I love so much.
There haven't been that many that I've been like, wow, that was a great shot.
I've gotten a zillion shots that are very good, but not to the same level.
But the thing of it is, is that, you know, the real camera's bigger, it's slower, it's heavier, it's got its own battery I need to worry about charging.
It doesn't automatically, like, geotag all the pictures.
There are many disadvantages to it, but...
I personally still think it is worth it.
And whenever we're doing something that's even remotely unusual, which for the last seven months has been never, but when we're going to my parents' house, when we're going on a vacation, I will still bring the big camera out a lot.
And I am always glad that I did because I will always find at least a handful of shots that I think to myself –
This may have been taken differently with the iPhone.
You know, maybe the sky wouldn't be blown out on the iPhone, but I've zoomed three times further than my iPhone can zoom, or the background blur that bokeh in the background is so much cleaner and crisper than it is, or I guess not crisp, you know what I mean?
It's so much less synthetic than it would have been on the iPhone.
And so...
That is many words to say that I still think it is worth it, but it is a much, much tougher call now than I think it has ever been before.
And even, you know, one phone ago, I didn't have a 10S, but I did have a 10.
With my 10, I would have been like, absolutely get a real camera.
Now, I'm not so sure.
John, let's start with you, because I think even though you are extremely opinionated, I think you might have actually softer opinions about this.
And let's have Marco round us out.
No, easy answer.
I mean, this is another one of our perennial questions that we get all the time.
Absolutely get a real camera.
Like, your kids are not going to be this age, you know, they're only going to be this age one time.
You will never regret spending more money to get even a tiny bit better pictures.
I regret getting... I had a real camera because camera phones weren't much of a thing for my kids.
I regret not getting a better camera because they were just too darn expensive.
We got a good camera, but not the best.
I look back at those pictures now and I say, you should have spent $3,000 to get whatever the best, you know...
uh slr camera you could have gotten was which you didn't right i i feel like for memories like that especially your young child where this will be the time you have the absolute most motivation to deal with all the damn size casey said oh it's big it's bulky it's expensive when it's your first child coming you will find yourself find the motivation to carry around the big heavy camera if possible you will find the ability to dig out that much money from your savings to pay for the thing just like you're paying for all the other baby stuff when the new baby's coming right
And then in later years, you will never regret having an even slightly better than phone camera camera.
It doesn't mean you're not going to take pictures with your phone because you totally will, but I think there is no question.
This is the loss aversion model, right?
What will you regret more?
Lugging around a big camera and not using it as much as you quote unquote thought you would or having phone quality only pictures of your baby?
Yeah, I know I need to give you a chance, Marco, but one thing that I used to convince myself to get my first Olympus camera was that I thought of it kind of like an insurance policy in so far as I don't want to regret that.
not having had the best camera, or maybe not the best, but a really good camera for this time, like you said, John, that you can never get back.
And so I think that's a really good point that I didn't consider.
And it's something that should be considered, you know, that there's no way to go back in time and get better photos.
So you might as well get a good camera now.
Marco, I apologize.
It's your turn.
I think for the first time ever, I might take the other side of this.
What?
Somebody who has pictures of his child with a Canon 5D, which look amazing and would not be possible with current phones, let alone phones that were back when Adam was a baby.
So it's a tough call because...
It's so much more complicated now.
Every year that goes by, this decision gets more complicated because phones get better, and they keep getting better and better at more and more things.
The, like, iceberg that, like, SLRs or mirrorless, you know, other cameras, basically, they're, like, standing on this iceberg, and it just keeps shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, and...
Full-size or other cameras are still better than phone cameras and will always be better than phone cameras in certain ways.
And those ways are significant.
They're always going to have way more resolution, way better optics, way better low-light noise performance.
Big cameras are always going to be able to capture better pictures in ideal circumstances when you have them with you, when you have good light, when you have good glass, when you have the settings right.
When everything is right, the big cameras will always be able to capture amazing shots that phone optics simply can't do because they're so much smaller and cheaper.
There is a lot of value to the pictures that big cameras can capture that you are just not going to get out of a phone camera no matter what.
But you will take so many more pictures with your phone.
So many more.
And you'll take video with your phone.
And you'll be largely looking at many of these pictures now.
On phones, where the difference in quality is not that big and not that noticeable.
You start seeing these differences when you're talking about large-scale viewing, like viewing on computer monitors or printing.
That's when you start noticing quality differences much more.
But viewing the phone sizes, even the quality advantages of big camera photos are getting less and less noticeable compared to well-done phone photos.
And the phone can now succeed so much better in areas where the big cameras struggle or where the big cameras can work if you're a pro, but you have a high chance of making an error.
So like what Casey was saying about exposure problems of like when you have a bright area, like you can capture high dynamic range general imaging with big cameras.
It's just harder and you're more likely to do it wrong and it might require post-processing that you will probably never do.
So there's that whole issue.
There's the ways in which the big cameras are so much worse.
The workflow is such a big one.
As Casey mentioned, the big camera photos are not going to be automatically geotagged.
You got to remember to set the clock right on the camera.
Otherwise, they're going to even have the wrong timestamps.
You have to somehow import them from the camera to your whatever your photo collection is, whether it's the Apple photo roll or whatever else you might do.
That process is going to be heavy and clunky and error-prone.
It's so much harder to work with them even beyond the physical side, which is itself not trivial because no matter how small of a camera you get, it's not going to be pocketable.
And you're not going to have it with you most of the time.
So you have all these... There's so many issues that make standalone cameras so much harder to use in practice.
And you just get such amazing output from modern phones.
It's just increasingly hard to justify a standalone camera.
So what I would say is...
If you're the kind of person who loves gear and you just want a reason to buy some cool gear and you're going to actually therefore be motivated to use it when you get it, by all means, get a cool camera.
Having your kid is a great time to scratch that itch of I want good camera gear.
If you're into it for the gear's sake, go for it.
But if you just are thinking, like, I should have this because I, quote, should, I think phones are just about at the threshold now where they are good enough at the things that the big cameras are really good at, and they're better than the big cameras in many common situations.
Casey mentioned video.
I agree.
Even though like my big cameras are capable of shooting better video in professional hands, in professional settings, I don't have professional hands and I'm usually not in professional settings.
And so in the settings I'm usually in with the hands I have, I grab the phone in my pocket and I shoot video and it looks incredible and it looks better than what I could have done in those same situations with my big Sony camera.
That dynamic of the phone actually doing better in the situation I'm actually in than the big camera could do, that keeps broadening to accommodate more and more use cases.
One of the biggest ones now is in low light.
That if you want a photo in low light, if you have a giant full-frame sensor on a nice big Sony sensor, full-frame sensor, a nice big wide-open lens, you can do really well in low light and get an amazing amount of detail with not nearly as much noise as you think you would get.
But if you go a step below that and you need to shoot a picture in a dark restaurant of your family...
An iPhone 11 will do a better job of that than almost any big camera because it's combining its crappy optics with amazing software that the big cameras never will have.
Or at least they seem to have shown no interest in ever adding.
Even like an area like that where, you know, the area of low light, you would think this would be an area where the big cameras would outshine them just because they have just simple physics tremendously in their favor with the amount of light they can capture.
Yeah.
And it turns out in a lot of cases, no, the iPhone does better in practice because of its software.
In another example, the, oh God, what's the super resolution, the sweater mode called?
Deep learning or something like that?
Oh, yeah, I completely forgot because I think I have that off, but I know what you're thinking of.
Oh, you have it off?
Turn it on.
It's great.
No, but I thought it took away, like, something else.
It takes away the thing where it would capture the outside of a frame, like, using the wide-angle camera when you weren't using wide-angle, and then you could, like, crop out.
But I used that... Deep Fusion!
Thank you, Oshkosh in the chat.
Um...
Deep fusion is a real thing.
Like I wasn't sure it would be much of a gain when they announced it.
Again, another area that big cameras usually excel is just sheer resolution.
Like if you want to zoom in and start pixel peeping and you can see that you're capturing way more detail usually with a big camera than you are with a phone camera.
until deep fusion and deep fusion closed that gap significantly the gap is still there big cameras will still capture way more detail in ideal circumstances you know than an iphone but the gap is a lot smaller and so at some point as these gaps get smaller or go away
every time that happens, you have to ask yourself, like, is the big camera still worth it?
And I have never used a big camera less than in the last two years.
It's the point now where I, I, I've mentally decided like, I'm just not going to buy any more of these because our phones are just so good.
We're just never using the big cameras, all of their downsides, all how incredibly clunky they are at certain things.
It's,
don't make the upsides worth it to us anymore so john's argument is the correct one it's totally worth considering like you know the the kind of you know you only have one shot at this kind of angle you know no pun intended where like you only have a certain amount of time where your kid's going to be super young and you're going to want to capture as much as you possibly can and so if you want the camera for for that purpose go for it
But if you're looking at it like a little more pragmatically and analytically, if you're not super excited to have a big camera and to use it as its own thing, as a gear thing, or if you aren't like super photographically inclined –
i don't think it's worth it anymore and it's really weird to finally admit that but i think i'm at that point now i i think you have two factors working here one your kid is getting older and when kids get older you take fewer pictures of them that's a real thing and two i think it's a false dichotomy because of course luke is going to have a phone too like it's not an either or we're saying do you want a big camera in addition of course to the smartphone that you already have
You're still going to have a smartphone for all the things that it's better at and for all the times when you don't have the big phone.
We're just saying, on top of that, like Casey's scenario, in the situations where you want the big camera, the day of the child's birth, first birthday, vacation, stuff like that, in context where you will be motivated to have a better camera...
Would you recommend buying a real camera?
Absolutely, I would recommend it because you don't lose out on any of the things Marco said.
It's just a question of how much you're going to use the big camera.
And I think, A, because Luke is writing us to ask this question, and B, because when people have babies, they were all very highly motivated to take lots of pictures of them.
That is the prime time when no matter how little you care about real photography and big cameras, you will be the most motivated to lug the big camera more than you would.
i imagine it fading just like marco's scenario where the kids get older you don't take as many pictures of them that continues to happen the whole time and then the trade-offs become like well i don't really need the big camera but i would say even today even though marco you are not using your big camera that much tiff still uses to take pictures of birds right so you know it's almost never still good it's she just did an instagram like three times this week
That's true, but that was a very rare thing.
What I'm saying is, is it worth it to have a real camera?
Yes.
You should have a real camera in your house, certainly when you're having a baby, but even just for the rest of your life with the camera, it's good to have one around.
You're not going to use it as much as you did when the baby was an infant.
Certainly, you're not going to use it as much as when you go on vacation, but it is definitely a thing worth having.
The second part is, what attributes would you prioritize, given the trade-offs that we just described?
the attributes i would prioritize the one attribute i would prioritize is essentially sensor size all other things being equal the one thing that the big cameras are going to have up on the iphone is it's not going to be video uh right it probably still is low light performance just in general but like
Sensor size, because everything else flows from that, right?
Obviously, don't get a camera that's too big that you're not going to use it, right?
And don't buy one that's super duper expensive.
But if you have to pick one thing to prioritize, pick that.
Pick the biggest sensor size that comes in a form factor that you think appeals to you and get that camera.
Because that's what the big phone has.
The big cameras have.
They can gather more light through better lenses that go to a bigger sensor.
If you get an expensive camera with a relatively tiny sensor, that might not actually be better than your phone camera in many scenarios.
Whereas in lots of scenarios where the phone excels, it's thanks to software, so on and so forth, but there's nothing that phone can do to get real depth of field, whereas the camera with a big sensor and a wide-oval lens will get you that, right?
And I still think in low-light performance, the phones can do amazing things, but what they're basically doing is hiding incredible amounts of sensor noise that will not be as noisy on your camera with a big sensor.
But if you get like a little pocketable sort of integrated...
quote unquote big camera well it's not a phone but it also is not an interchangeable lens camera with a tiny sensor that will literally have worse low light performance than your phone even ignoring any software processing so if you're gonna get a big camera which you totally should prioritize sensor size
Yeah, I will say, to answer the second half of this question of what attributes would I prioritize, I agree with John that if you're going to go through all the downsides of something not being your phone camera, you want it to be amazing.
There's no room for anything in between.
I would say you can skip anything smaller than micro four thirds or APS-C.
I would even say if you're asking this question and you're a listener of our show, you should strongly consider full frame.
There are many good full frame options these days that didn't exist back when we were buying cameras and...
including a new one that's not much bigger than my APS-C camera but is full frame which is the Sony A7C I think yeah and I have not been paying attention to this market at all but
That even made splashes that I saw because it was so small and compelling.
Because it's not that big.
If you want specific model recommendations, the current line of the A6600, that's an amazing compromise between image quality and amazingly good autofocus, way better than an iPhone in terms of tracking people and keeping them in focus, which is important once your kid starts running around a little bit.
that's a great sort of compromise but if you can afford to go up to the full frame version either the a7c or the big real a7r and all that stuff all those are great cameras but all those sensor sizes are bigger than micro four thirds and you know i would agree with margo just forget about anything with the sensor size that's not hilariously bigger than your phone yeah exactly yeah so if you're going to do this at all do really do it go all out uh but but there are certainly a lot of reasons why you might not want to do it
And also, one quick final note, LensRentals.com, not a sponsor, but I've used them several times in the past.
You can not only rent lenses, but entire cameras from them.
And so before Declan was born, I thought I wanted the Olympus camera that I ended up getting.
It's in the show notes.
But I wasn't sure.
I wanted to try it.
And so I rented the camera body that I thought I wanted and the lens I thought I wanted.
And I used them together for about a week.
you know, like a month or two before Declan was born.
And I spent some time with it and thought, yeah, okay, I like this.
This is going to work for me.
And then I bought the camera and lens that I had tried.
Well, not literally the same ones, although you could.
But I, you know, went to Amazon or B&H or wherever, and then I got that same setup.
And I was...
Even though it cost me like $100 or $150 more to rent for a week, I was so glad I did it because that convinced me that it was something I was going to want to use and that it wasn't some really clunky user interface or something like that that would just drive me nuts for the next several years.
Yeah, I too have used Lens Rentals and they've been wonderful.
Anyway, thanks to our actual sponsors this week.
Hover, Linode, and Mint Mobile.
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
You can join yourself and get all the cool member benefits at atp.fm slash join.
Thanks, everybody, and we will talk to you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Because it was accidental.
Accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
Accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
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-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A
I'm finding links to Sony cameras.
Now you got John shopping for cameras again?
Yep.
No, I just... John, it's fine.
John, stop.
We can talk about the A7C, actually.
so yeah so what what is the deal with the a7c like what is so sony has been frustrating me lately and that they for all these new cameras they come out with there's always some annoying caveat and you're like that caveat didn't have to be there on these phones and it's kind of annoying um cameras
I'm going to bring up the 7C again.
So the 7C body looks a lot like the body on the 6100, 6400, 6600, like my model of camera, right?
That's more or less the same size and shape body, which is fairly small and compact, but it's interchangeable lens camera.
And the 7C, when you first look at it, it's like, wow, they fit a full frame sensor in that same package.
But it's not the same package.
It is actually.
It's a little bit beefier.
It's a little bit thicker.
It's a little bit wider.
It's just it's a little bit bigger.
Right.
And it uses the full frame lenses.
So that makes it feel bigger, too.
The annoying compromises is like they can't.
They can't seem to get the software situation sorted out across their line.
So, like, they have a new interface that's not as terrible as the old, like, two-dimensional menu interface.
Like, they have a new touchscreen-based interface, but it's not evenly spread across their line.
I forget which models have it and which don't.
But that's annoying.
Like, you just wish they had it on everything.
And those type of compromises are, you know...
Every one of the cameras has one of those little things.
So no one of these current crop of Sony cameras will look at it and say, that's the one.
It's got all the features.
It's got all the newest stuff.
It's got all the newest ports.
It's USB-C.
It has the touchscreen.
It has the joystick on the back.
It has amazing battery life.
It doesn't overheat.
None of them have all of that, which is frustrating.
But the 7C is super-duper close.
The 7C has almost everything I could hope for.
My only reservation for it is it's kind of like the iPhone X. It's like...
Can I handle one that's just a little bit bigger?
And am I going to die with these full frame lenses like they're so much bigger than my current ones?
Or is that what I just need to step up to?
Because I've been I really wanted the CC 600 for a long time, assuming we actually went on vacation this year to the ocean and I had to take pictures of kids in the surf again.
I lust after Sony's sort of best in the industry, like software autofocus and object tracking, um, which for whatever reason, hasn't been something that Apple has really either touted or jumped on top of.
But if you're trying to catch, you know, action of things moving around and keep them in focus, um,
sony's got the best system it's the fastest it understands how to do pet eye tracking now in addition to human eye tracking it's really phenomenal it combined with the ability to take many many pictures right so the 6600 which is just my camera with essentially improved software and in-body stabilization
i that may be my next purchase instead of the 7c thing because i feel like the 7c i'm not i'm not sure if i'm ready to graduate to uh that size essentially and and sort of i think it invalidates all my lenses too because none of my lenses are full frame lenses so i don't know i can't really decide but i i'm glad sony's making progress and i'm glad this camera existed but i was like 900 more excited about it than i was after i watched all the reviews
Wait, so I'm sorry.
This does or does not have the new UI.
So let me rephrase.
Other than size, other than size, what are the drawbacks?
I forget which other than size, which this had.
I think it might not have the new software.
I think it might lack the joystick on the back.
I don't remember the detail, so I don't want to commit to it because I just saw a bunch of preliminary reviews.
But mainly the thing that Barry that's keeping me is like I would deal with those things that I just described, even if they were all true, is I'm worried about the size.
The good thing is that one of the things that doesn't screw up is battery life.
Like apparently the battery life is phenomenal.
um and most of sony's recent cameras they've really repented from the bad battery life now they just put now they just put massive batteries in everything so the number of shots is is insane um so yeah it's really just the size keeping away oh i know the other one um this is sounds stupid but it came i noted it before i watched any review and then i watched all the reviews and everybody complained about it so i'm like good it's not just me the little eyepiece thingy where you stick your eyeball on the back of it
all of these cameras all the 60 you know 6xxx series have like a rubber hood that's over the little place where you put your eye and the 7c doesn't nor does it have a place for you to attach one it's just this little stump that you just shove your eye up against it's like what happened to the hood the hood is awesome why would you get rid of that and i maybe they did it to make it feel smaller like the hood is actually removable you can take it off if you don't want it right why would they not just put it there and if you don't want it just take it off
that and that annoys me that and the size are probably the two biggest physical barriers to me getting this phone it's like how about i want the little eyepiece hood because it's rubbery and comfortable and i show i shove it up against my glasses basically like because they've got the what is it called marco the name of the thing where you adjust it so if you have vision you can yeah whatever the diopter dial i shove this thing up against either my bare eyeball or against my glasses and i don't want to do either one of those things with a hard piece of plastic i want to do it with a soft piece of rubber
So, I mean, this is the first version of this camera and they'll have complaints or whatever, but they fix so many other things.
So like they fix like the card slot, they fix the little flappy doors on them.
It's USB-C, like everything about it is like they updated all the things, but they made a couple of sort of unforced errors in the design.
And the handle is a little bit more shallow, which, and it's a bigger camera.
So it's like a shallower handle and a bigger camera and it's heavier.
Yeah.
I say this now, we'll see how long I hold out against full frame because that is obviously the next step I need to jump to, but we'll see.
It does have all the cool tracking and sensing.
The sensor is exactly the same resolution in terms of megapixels as my current camera, but obviously physically bigger.
So the low light performance, I haven't seen the final reviews of the actual photos taken up, but the low light performance has got to be good because it's the same number of pixels, but a way bigger physical sensor than my camera.
yeah and it's just you know sony's sensor progress over the years is just remarkable like their sensors are world leading in low light performance and every year they get better so or every generation they get better so that's that that is non-trivial and it is probably better my concern for you with going full frame is your love of long-range zoom lenses
That is just an area that is just either non-existent or garbage on full frame.
Or weighs 1,000 pounds.
Right, and costs $2,000.
To get a good full frame zoom lens, it's very large and doesn't have that much reach usually.
uh you know usually has less less overall reach than what you're getting out of out of like a consumer grade or even semi-pro you know even prosumer i guess um you know super zoom lens for a crop sensor camera but the full frame it's yeah that's one of the things that annoys me about this is that the megapixels aren't like it's only 24 megapixels so you can get the reason you can get away with a zoom it doesn't have much reach if you have 41 megapixels is to just crop it yourself
But if it doesn't, and it's just 24 megapixels, and I can't get a long zoom, I can't even crop into it because I just don't have the resolution.
Again, megapixels are all about how you use them.
But it would be hard for me to justify buying a new standalone camera today that was only 24 megapixels.
Just because, like, the sensors go so much higher.
You know, you can get easily up to, like, in the 40s with full-frame sensors that aren't even that crazy, you know, up the market.
At least in the 30s, I mean...
I know there's trade-offs there and everything too.
One advantage to 24 is that the photos will be smaller for your post-processing workflow.
There's also to consider things like the actual resolvable resolution of the lenses that you're going to be using might not be 24 megapixels.
It might be lower depending on what lenses you're using.
The path to full-frame happiness is
is primes like prime lenses not not zooms you can zooms exist for full frame but they're so big and so heavy and so expensive that really the path to happiness is to get some some small fast primes my favorite by far my favorite lens in the sony lineup is that 35 millimeter f 2.8 prime with a little inward facing hood thing because it's so small and so good
And they have tons of great primes in the Sony FE line.
I love the 55 1.8 as well.
They've added even more since I've been really looking.
But that 35mm 2.8 is so good because it's just so tiny.
Overall, I love a camera that has a small prime lens on it because it's just so much easier to handle.
And it's so much easier to get in and out of a bag.
And it's so much smaller and lighter that you just end up using it way more.
And if you can get...
shockingly good optical performance out of that at the same time even better that's why like one of my one of my favorite types of camera to use is the small boutiquey like fixed lens but still full frame roughly 28 to 35 millimeter lens camera and that that would be things like the sony rx1 series or the leica q series but yeah i mean ultimately though
I can't recommend specific models because I just haven't been paying attention at all.
I know Canon's new mirrorless thing is getting a lot of rave reviews.
Nikon has one now.
This is all much more recent than when I stopped paying attention.
The one I'm still waiting for, you know, Sony's very confusing naming.
The A7R is the one, maybe the R is for resolution, but it always has the most megapixels, right?
and then they have the a7s which is i think is the video focused one yeah usually right yeah and then they just have the plain old a7 with a roman numeral after it and that's usually it's it's like the same body as the r but the sensor doesn't have as many megapixels but it's still full frame in the big body and anyway i may i may be screwing up these names but the bottom line is that that model that i just described that basically the what used to be the a7iii or whatever
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The plain old 7 one, which is the body of the R and the S, but not video-focused, but not as many pixels as the other one, they haven't released that camera yet as far as I know.
So that's the last shoe to drop to say, okay, what number of megapixels do they choose for that?
Because it is the bigger, bulkier body, but the thing about the 41 megapixel is...
like your hard drive spaces you're just going to be weeping from the size of those photos right and so i feel like 24 isn't exciting to me because i already have something close to that resolution if not exactly i forget if my thing is is uh 21 or whatever um but 41 is probably too much so somewhere in the middle maybe the sweet spot for a full frame thing but then do i want the big case and i have looked at the other ones as well the new cannons and icons but i'm pretty firmly in the
sony campus they have so many models that are sort of orbiting around the sweet spot for me in terms of size and resolution and features it's just i haven't wanted to choose one what you know i would have bought a new camera this year if it wasn't for covid i would have probably bought the 6600 right and taken it and used it but covid kind of squashed those plants so i've got a year reprieve next year if the world goes back to normal and i can go on my normal vacation i will probably buy a new camera it's just a question of which one it will be