Midrange Snob
John:
is it only sprite on those rare once a decade occasions that you treat yourself or is seven up acceptable oh seven up is we'll do in a pinch but not i mean i like seven up i do i like it but it's it's like saying is it just chocolate or vanilla like i like both of them but when you want vanilla and you get chocolate you're like oh but i wanted vanilla right so even though they look the same and people will say they taste kind of the same
John:
Anyway, I have no Sprite or 7-Up in the house, and I never do.
John:
What about Sierra Mist?
Casey:
Oh, good question.
John:
That is garbage, and maybe you could use it to clean something.
John:
I don't know.
Wow.
Casey:
All right, so I'm sorry.
Casey:
You said 7-Up if you can.
John:
I mean, I don't know.
John:
It depends on what mood I'm in, right?
John:
It's like, well, chocolate if you can, otherwise vanilla.
John:
Sometimes you want vanilla.
John:
Sometimes you want chocolate.
Casey:
I'm trying to nail you down.
Casey:
You're not letting me.
John:
I mean, I don't have strong feelings about a drink that I almost never drink.
Casey:
This is the only thing you don't have strong feelings about, John Syracuse.
John:
Well, here's the thing.
John:
The only reason I'm known for this drink is because when I go out to a restaurant and either the thing comes with a drink or I don't want to just have water because we're doing everything fancy, I have to pick something to drink.
John:
It's not water.
John:
And when I'm at home, I'm not forced to make that choice.
John:
I just have water all the time.
John:
whatever makes you happy john i used to have milk but that's got too many calories and not good for your cholesterol so well almond milk man come on again maybe if i need to clean something wow wow almond milk is good come on if you listen to the milk episode of top four none of those none of those so-called milks are good
Marco:
Well, yeah, they're all just different forms of sugar and starch.
Marco:
But yeah, almond milk would be also a terrible choice to clean things with.
John:
Maybe it's like Skin So Soft, where you're trying to get the sticker scum off, where it's so slimy that it'll make the sticky stuff not stick.
John:
It's like an oily thing.
John:
No.
John:
Almond milk.
John:
You can't even clean with it.
John:
Golly.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We don't have time to kill John.
Casey:
We have to hurry it up.
John:
You're the one who's pressing me on my choice of drink.
John:
I have a glass of water next to me on a different level than my computer's.
John:
What else is new?
Casey:
I have a water bottle directly behind my keyboard and a glass full of ice that is prepared for later that is sitting to the right of my Magic Trackpad.
Marco:
And I have a giant 20-ounce bottle of Hal's Black Cherry Seltzer sitting on my desk at the same level as most of my gear, except for my MacBook Air, which is on top of a speaker, which is running this entire operation through my LG 5K Ultra Fine monitor.
Casey:
Oh, man.
Casey:
We're going to get to that, but let's not get there yet.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I would like to re-air my grievance, and I will be very quick about it.
Casey:
Erin is still having intermittent SMS or really group MMS issues.
Casey:
Please, Apple, for the sake of my marriage, please, can we fix this for real this time?
Casey:
You sort of fixed it in, what was it, like 14.1 something, and then 14.3 or whatever just came out.
Casey:
It was like, no, no, no, we fixed it for realsies this time.
Casey:
Literally an hour ago, she was not receiving group MMSs.
Casey:
I filed a feedback before you all get angry.
Casey:
Feedback, FB8893003.
Casey:
There will be a link in the show notes.
Casey:
Apple people, please save me.
Casey:
Save me.
Casey:
Aaron is so over this, and I am almost as bad as she is.
Casey:
This is ridiculous.
Casey:
This is a communication device that doesn't communicate.
Casey:
Please fix this.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Tell me about B&O Headphones.
John:
These are Bang & Olufsen headphones that I mentioned in the last show that are sort of like AirPods Max.
John:
And I think it's an interesting comparison because Bang & Olufsen is a similar kind of like luxury, fancy brand.
John:
And in fact, the appearance and construction is very similar.
John:
You know, metal or the appearance of metal.
John:
You know, they even have a white model with the white pads and white strap and everything looks kind of AirPod-y.
John:
So these are the Beoplay.
John:
God, I really don't like it.
John:
I understand where they're going with B and O, but it's B-E-O-P-L-A-Y.
John:
It's a bad name.
John:
Anyway, the Beoplay H95s.
John:
They are $800, as you would imagine, from Bang & Olufsen.
John:
It's like a little step up in terms of price from Apple because Bang & Olufsen is clearly a luxury brand.
John:
It doesn't have any pretense of being a real consumer brand.
John:
They are 323 grams instead of 385 like the Mac, so a little bit lighter, but they do have metal on them.
John:
I'll put a link in the show notes to these.
John:
They come with a hard case.
John:
And they are symmetrically folding, but they do fold the ear cups into the negative space made by the headband.
John:
So they get smaller than the Apple ones and they come with a hard case.
John:
Two things that Apple chose not to do and or blew it on, including depending on your stance on it.
John:
And they come with a regular 3.5 inch, 3.5 inch, 3.5 millimeter audio cable thing, plus the two prong little airplane headphone adapter, plus a USB C to A, what looks like C to A charging cable.
John:
And Bangal also makes a bunch of different models.
John:
They make this $800 one.
John:
They also make a $300 one and a $500 one, which drop various amounts of features from the $800 one.
John:
so this is a very direct competitor in terms of pricing feature set and aesthetics that gets a bunch of things right that apples doesn't by the way i think this fancy one also like the entire outside of the year cup is like a giant dial so it even gets the physical controls right i believe that's a swiping thing
John:
I think it actually turns.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Most of B&O's headphones, they have like touch panel controls, which frankly, I've tried a bunch of these.
Marco:
People keep asking me about whether I've tried the H95s and B&O made a wonderful wired headphone.
Marco:
The H6 second gen was one of my favorite wired headphones ever.
Marco:
But I have tried almost all of their Bluetooth models up to about two years ago, and they were all garbage to me.
Marco:
And I couldn't believe that the company that made that amazing wired H6 second gen could then never follow it up properly.
Marco:
with anything that sounded nearly as good as it in their wireless segment.
Marco:
And they've always had really finicky controls.
Marco:
However, I think they have more premium materials than what Apple's going for.
Marco:
I think they are, by some tastes, including mine, I think more attractive than the AirPods Max.
Marco:
But, you know, I see what they're going for.
Marco:
But as far as I know, they have not yet made a great sounding wireless headphone.
Marco:
But I have not yet tried this model.
Marco:
But honestly,
Marco:
They burned so much credibility with me over the years that I would not drop $800 to buy this, even if I thought I could easily return it.
John:
I mean, that's kind of the bang and awesome thing, is they're always going to be overpriced for what you get.
John:
Like, that's their whole brand.
John:
In fact, if they weren't, it would be damaging to their brand to be reasonably priced.
John:
No, except the H6.
Marco:
The H6 second gen was like, I think, $250 or $300, and it sounded like it.
Marco:
It was great, and it was light and comfortable, and it was just an amazing headphone.
Marco:
That's why they had to get rid of it.
John:
It was damaging to their brand.
John:
Yeah, it was too good.
John:
I just double-checked, and these ones, they do actually have a physically turning dial.
John:
I'm not sure how easy it is to use, but the reason I bring them up is just because they look so much like the AirPods, and because Bang & Olufsen being...
John:
I don't know, more experienced, more practically minded than Apple, which sounds strange for a company that is known for its impractical looking electronics.
John:
Having a compact folding headphone with a hard case that comes with the accessories you would expect in an $800 headphone.
John:
I feel like Apple really needs to learn something.
John:
If they want to play in this space, it's okay to include the cable and not make you pay $35 for it.
John:
It's even okay to make a hard case and an adapter for airplanes.
John:
It's fine.
John:
It doesn't diminish your brand to do that.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Mack Weldon, one of my favorite clothing brands and the only one that I wear every single day.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
They have men's basics that are guaranteed to keep all the men in your holiday list comfortable.
Marco:
I personally love their clothing.
Marco:
Every single day I wear a pair of their silver lined underwear.
Marco:
Not only is it really well made, it's comfortable, and the silver fibers make it so it's pretty much impossible for it to ever stink.
Marco:
I also love their silver lined shirts, their t-shirts.
Marco:
I absolutely love the silver line of those.
Marco:
As mentioned in the intro, the warm knit shirts.
Marco:
These are basically like waffle knit, long sleeve shirts.
Marco:
I love the warm knit shirts.
Marco:
I wear them all winter long.
Marco:
I love their stuff.
Marco:
It's cozy.
Marco:
It's well made.
Marco:
And they have stuff for all seasons that I love.
Marco:
You know, the summertime, that silver line is fantastic.
Marco:
The wintertime, that waffle line is fantastic.
Marco:
Their tech cashmere stuff is really nice.
Marco:
Socks, shirts, hoodies, underwear, polos, they have comfort, consistent fit, and easy shopping.
Marco:
It looks great, it feels great, and this stuff lasts.
Marco:
It's a wide range of fabrics you can pick from, from fitness stuff to cozy stuff.
Marco:
They also have this wonderful free automatic loyalty program called Weldon Blue.
Marco:
Level one gets you free shipping for life.
Marco:
Once you spend $200, you hit level two and you get 20% off all your orders for the next year.
Marco:
And they have a guarantee they want you to be comfortable.
Marco:
So if you don't like your first pair of underwear, you can keep them and they'll still refund you.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Mac Weldon, reinventing men's basics.
Casey:
The AirPods Max button can cycle between three states, one of which is off, which is selectable in Bluetooth preferences.
Casey:
Wait, which are we talking about the the digital crown button or something?
John:
The other button.
John:
There has been confusion about this.
John:
Marco will be able to clarify.
John:
But here I'll lay out the confusion.
John:
Then you will give us definitive clarity in the review section, which is coming.
John:
Don't worry, everyone.
John:
um so the confusion about the airpods max and uh battery life last time was like oh do you have to put them in that stupid case to make them go to sleep if you don't do that they'll be on all the time and we're like well why would they be on all the time they have a million sensors they can tell when you're wearing them wouldn't they go off uh matt pans Reno said that they fall asleep we read that in the last episode his tweet about that that if you take them off they do you know go to sleep or go into an off mode and other people are like no it's going to drain your battery right
John:
So this was a twist on this as the reviews started coming out, that the button on the top, the one that normally toggles between transparency and noise canceling, there's a preference in Bluetooth settings, and I think you can get to it through a control center as well, where you can change that to cycle through three things.
John:
You press it once, and it goes to transparency, press it again, and it goes to noise canceling, press it a third time, and it goes to a setting called off.
John:
right so it's like okay well i guess you don't have to use the case for that because it goes to a setting called off but that doesn't mean off as in the headphones are off all it means is that it's not transparency and not noise canceling at least that's what we know so far so yes it's just like the airpods pro yeah which is exactly it's the same it's the airpods pro feature set now all that being said people are still freaking out about the idea that you can't turn them off and so i mean i'm not sure how long have you had these marco a couple days
John:
a couple hours oh well maybe you can't tell us about the battery life things but i will just add now that everyone who's had them for a little bit longer has said uh if you're freaking out about the idea that you can't turn these things off don't worry because if you wore them all day long and played music really loud all day they would still last all day so it's more of an academic concern than a real one i would say that fairly definitively at this point if you get these and never want to use that stupid case
John:
you'll probably be fine until i mean maybe the batteries go off a cliff in two years and they get they start getting terrible battery life and you have to replace the battery but anyway there's that um and and panzer chimed in again about this saying um this is important from his tweets there are several states obviously they pause right away then a few seconds later they shut down the connection they they aren't just on forever when you take them off
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Real-time follow-up, that bug about SMS is not being received properly.
Casey:
I just got a, like, three-hour late group MMS.
Casey:
So it's happening to me, too.
Casey:
I'm over it, Apple.
Casey:
Over it.
Casey:
So over it.
Casey:
Okay, so, Marco, last we heard, our intrepid hero was about to make his walk of shame with his extremely large computer, presumably in your bespoke carrying case.
Marco:
what's going on with your setup you've been talking about the lg5k your favorite monitor of all time can you update us on what the world is what the world is going on here uh so yeah my i brought my imac pro into the apple store i i brought it in my giant case on top of the dolly i bought for it so i wheeled this giant case in front of the apple store
Marco:
I'm amazed they let me in the door with that thing.
Marco:
But yeah, they were very nice.
Marco:
The store is in limited operation because of quarantine, and so they just had a few Genius Bar stations spread across the front right as you walk in.
Marco:
The whole rest of the store is shut down, so it's kind of a minimal operation.
Marco:
But they handled everything really well.
Marco:
They at first said, oh, that sounds like it might be software, ran a little diagnostic process,
Marco:
But then the lead genius oversaw and was like, hey, this might be some other kind of weird thing.
Marco:
Let's take it in.
Marco:
So they, I don't know, did they use the term admitted it?
Marco:
Like in a hospital?
Marco:
Whatever it is, they took it.
Marco:
They took it for a few days and then have called to say that it indeed failed some kind of firmware level test so they could rule out software, whatever that means.
Marco:
And they...
Marco:
have determined that it needs a new logic board.
Marco:
And parts for that are a little slow right now, it seems.
Marco:
The logic board could be 14 days out.
Marco:
Holy smokes!
Marco:
So here I am as my temporary solution, which I knew I would have to use this for a little while, and this is part of the reason why
Marco:
I did this around Christmas because we don't really do much for Christmas week, so I don't have heavy computing needs.
Marco:
So I knew this would be a good time to not be with my main computer.
Marco:
But in the meantime, I have this ultra-fine LG 5K monitor plugged into my quite wonderful and pleasant new M1 MacBook Air.
Marco:
And I have it in clamshell mode.
Marco:
I'm not using both screens.
Marco:
I'm only using the LG.
Marco:
The air is closed and on top of a speaker over there with two cables plugged into it because the ultra-fine LG monitor is just so bad.
Marco:
As a screen, it's fine.
Marco:
It is one of the only screens that has ever existed, and I believe the only one currently for sale, that is 5K resolution at 27 inches.
Marco:
As far as I can tell, there are no other ones.
Marco:
There's one by Planar, which gets even worse reviews and uses DisplayPort instead, and it seems to be out of production, or at least in very low production.
Marco:
And then there's this one, and that's it.
Marco:
all the pc people are like oh just there's a million 27 inch monitors yeah they're all 4k because that's what gamers want that's what windows users want and none of them buy macs and mac people don't buy them and so it's a whole different world and that doesn't cover this and the dpi is wrong and screen elements would be all the wrong sizes and everything so i'm not interested in any of those
Casey:
Let me just interrupt you real quick because I can hear the typing of listeners saying to you, what is wrong with you?
Casey:
Get one of the 97-inch curved displays or one of those god-awful things that I don't want to speak for you, Marco, but as a fellow old man, I probably can.
Casey:
I don't want a curved display.
Casey:
I don't want a 30-some-inch display.
Casey:
I want something that's like my iMac.
Casey:
Well, I mean, I have my iMac.
Casey:
You know, in this hypothetical, I want something that's like my iMac
Casey:
that's nice and flat and rectangular and 5K.
Casey:
Now, I could alternatively, and this is what I did at my jobby job, I could get smaller 4K monitors.
Casey:
But in my personal opinion, you need to be at 5K if you're going to be at 27 or more inches.
Casey:
That's just my opinion, but that's the way I like it.
Casey:
And I think I speak for you in saying that.
Casey:
I have zero interest in
Casey:
in one of these 96 inch curved displays.
Casey:
None.
Casey:
Do not care.
Casey:
I know people love them.
Casey:
They are not for me.
Casey:
Do not want.
Casey:
Please do not write us because we know they exist.
Casey:
We do not want.
Marco:
Well, I mean, two things.
Marco:
Number one, like those are almost always not high DPI.
Marco:
So if you're what you're going for is like the retina look for Macs, they usually don't have the density to do that.
Marco:
But number two, this is very much not just your opinion.
Marco:
There's a range of DPI that monitors can have where screen elements on Macs will look like they're in roughly the right size range.
Marco:
How many square inches does a thing of this size take up?
Marco:
That's in a fixed range.
Marco:
So we have these ranges of what's a correct resolution for 27 inches?
Marco:
And the answer is either 2560 by something, which is 1x and non-retina, or...
Marco:
5120 by something which is 2x retina and no one makes 3x in this range yet interestingly dell makes an 8k monitor um but it's actually too high density to be 2x but too low to be 3x it's 8k at like what are we it's like 32 inches i think and 8k at 2x would have to be about 40 inches to have the right dpi range um but anyway
Marco:
And you're right, there are some 4K monitors that are in the right DPI range, which at 4K is roughly 22 to 24 inches.
Marco:
There are some of those that exist, but not a lot even of that.
Marco:
And one of them is the LG UltraFine 4K.
Marco:
Anyway, so the LG, man, I haven't used this monitor full-time in a number of years, and I've forgotten how mediocre it is.
Marco:
To me, the two biggest problems are that the stand is total garbage, that it's very wobbly, like...
Marco:
Talk about, like, typing on your keyboard and having your monitor wobble.
Marco:
This is way worse.
Marco:
It's a terrible stand for wobble.
Marco:
Way worse than, like, an iMac.
Marco:
Even on the same desk with the same keyboard and the same person banging on the keys.
Marco:
Also, it has the, you know, like most PC monitor mounts, it has a 360-degree rotating thing, so you can rotate the monitor to portrait orientation or landscape if you want.
Marco:
But it doesn't like latch in very well to those even 90 degree rotations.
Marco:
So the most common thing of having it just regular in portrait orientation, it's really hard to get it exactly level.
Marco:
Like it's it's feels like it's slightly off all the time and you can like move it slightly and it stays like it's.
Marco:
it's it's a crappy cheap stand and the monitor is wrapped in a crappy cheap enclosure with a crappy cheap backlight and there's tons of backlight leakage around the bottom edge and so if you have like a very dark screen in a very dark room you can see the bottom edge kind of glowing a little bit and it looks like gray instead of black so yeah backlight leakage but besides the stand the other major problem with this monitor is
Marco:
is that the USB ports that are on it, you basically can't use for anything that matters because they are unreliable.
Marco:
Extremely, extremely unreliable.
Marco:
And you can't use them for things like audio or keyboards.
Marco:
I'm not even sure what you can use them for.
Marco:
I guess, like, charging your phone, you can use it for that.
Marco:
But that's about all you can do reliably on those USB ports.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I have ordered the CalDigit Thunderbolt dock because it has by far seemingly the best reviews for Thunderbolt docks.
Marco:
Because I'm relying now on – while that gets here, which it isn't here yet, I'm relying on my USB-C hubs that I have.
Marco:
I have two USB-C hubs.
Marco:
One I've never talked about because it's weird and boring and doesn't seem to exist anymore.
Marco:
And the other one is, is like, you know, the, one of those that everybody has for their laptops that has like the ethernet and the two USB a and the card reader, you know, an HDMI, like that thing, the thing that everybody has, it costs about 50 bucks.
Marco:
Like I, so I have one of those and this other weird thing that has USB C upstream ports.
Marco:
but they're both unreliable in different ways.
Marco:
And I, at one point to get everything working, I had to daisy chain them both, which is not a good idea.
Marco:
And I had to then, the second one didn't have enough power to, to power USB devices off of it.
Marco:
So I had to use it's,
Marco:
input port to like to plug in a separate usbc power adapter so now i have this big like square of power routing and i'm like this there's no way this is going to work and it actually kind of did for a while but it caused weird uh noises and things not even just ground loops like weird other electrical noises
Marco:
in various things.
Marco:
I'm like, all right, I can't be running an audio business and have all this noise everywhere.
Marco:
But anyway, this is just an unreliable setup.
Marco:
And what I ultimately want, I am so far temporarily okay with having the laptop as my primary computer put into a monitor.
Marco:
It's not ideal.
Marco:
I would rather have a desktop.
Marco:
But right now, you can't get the new M1 Mac Mini in any reasonable amount of time if you want 16 gigs of RAM.
Marco:
I still ultimately want more gigs of RAM than that and more disk space than 2 terabytes for my desktop solutions here.
Marco:
So ultimately, I think I am going to wait for an iMac or a higher-spec Mac Mini or a Mac Pro before I totally replace this desktop.
Marco:
But in the meantime, using it temporarily as MacBook Plus monitor...
Marco:
It seems to be fine so far.
Marco:
I haven't ran into any major issues that have to do with the laptop interfacing with this crappy display.
Marco:
The only issue I've had have been with peripherals and just getting all these terrible ports to work reliably.
Marco:
And the only thing that I think is going to fix that is if the CalDigit Thunderbolt thing is of the quality that everyone seems to think it is and say it is, then I will plug the laptop directly into that.
Marco:
And then plug everything else into that and not even use the monitors, ports, or any of these terrible USB-C hubs that I have at all.
Marco:
And that should theoretically fix my problems if it works.
Marco:
now i was tempted instead of ordering the cal digit thing on amazon and having it take almost a week to get here because island uh i was tempted to island slash covid slash christmas by the way um i was tempted to just set money on fire and just go to the damn apple store and get the xdr and the apple store also sells the cal digit so
Marco:
I was looking like, hey, what stores have this in stock tomorrow?
Marco:
And what's the boat schedule that could possibly get me there with enough time to get back before the last boat?
Marco:
And I was looking into all this stuff and looking into, you know, what does the XDR seem like in practice?
Marco:
And what does the LG 5K seem like in practice?
Marco:
And do I really want to be looking at, like, I'm a professional.
Marco:
I am an Apple commentator and a professional developer.
Marco:
I am 38 years old, goddammit.
Marco:
Do I want to be looking at this screen that I hate every day?
Marco:
Or do I want to get the screen that I like and look at that every day?
Marco:
Like, what am I working for?
Marco:
Why do I like Apple products?
Marco:
Why do I want something terrible and ugly that has all these problems?
Marco:
if I can get something great.
John:
I love this glimpse inside your internal monologue that leads you to buy expensive things.
John:
This is the devil that's on all of our shoulders.
John:
It looks just like Marco and it sounds like that.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
So I looked, but...
Marco:
Ultimately, I basically made a pro and con list between the XDR and the LG 5K, and it's not as clear-cut as I would hope.
Marco:
The XDR has some things about it that are significant downsides to me.
Marco:
The price is the biggest downside.
Marco:
The configuration I want would be $6,000 plus $500 for AppleCare plus tax, so just under $7,000.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Marco:
Yeah, I have a very hard time justifying that for what it is and for what I need.
Marco:
Because I don't need the HDR side of it.
Marco:
I don't need that at all.
Marco:
I really don't like that it has a fan.
Marco:
I know, John, I know you said that you never hear it in practice, and you're probably right, but...
Marco:
I really dislike that it has a fan at all, because for something that's that expensive that I would hope would be so long-lasting and so long-lived, having a fan is a warning sign for me.
Marco:
I don't love that.
Marco:
There also is practical downsides.
Marco:
I couldn't do my one cable solution.
Marco:
with that because 6k takes up so much bandwidth over the thunderbolt 3 connection that there's not enough speed left and like you know i know there's like the weird display compression thing but there's not much bandwidth left for those ports on it that's why the ports are not thunderbolt they're usb and they're in many configurations usb 2 speeds instead of usb 3 speeds
Marco:
and you can't plug the 6K into Thunderbolt docks or Thunderbolt base stations or whatever they're called like the CalDigit.
Marco:
You have to plug it directly into the computer.
Marco:
At least as far as I know, it seems like no Thunderbolt dock supports it.
Marco:
So now there's two cables instead of one going to the laptop, and two cables I have to keep plugging and unplugging every day as I take my laptop upstairs and then bring it back downstairs.
Marco:
So it adds a lot of downsides.
Marco:
And I also...
Marco:
I don't like the backlighting method of having those 576 LEDs that can all be individually controlled because that creates the potential for non-uniformity in the backlighting.
Marco:
It creates the potential for those halos where you have something bright in the middle of a bunch of dark and you have a big halo blob around it.
Marco:
To me, that's incredibly inelegant.
Marco:
I don't like when TV started doing that.
Marco:
I don't like Apple doing it.
Marco:
I'm not looking forward to the rumored micro-LED screens that are coming in their higher-end products, I guess, next year or sometime, because that's probably going to do the exact same thing.
Marco:
I don't like that.
Marco:
To me, that's inelegant.
Marco:
I would rather have every pixel be individually controlled and totally independent and totally consistent and uniform with every other pixel, no matter what they are showing.
Marco:
I don't like display technologies that rely on hacks like that.
Marco:
And I know why they do it to get their XDR dynamic range.
Marco:
I know that.
Marco:
But I don't like that, and I don't want that.
Marco:
I want uniformity and elegance across the entire display panel.
Marco:
And I don't have that with the XDR.
Marco:
It comes close, but there's that giant asterisk on that, and I don't like that.
John:
If you're worried about it from an elegance perspective, that's your prerogative.
John:
But I can tell you that when you're not showing HDR video,
John:
you will never see like that's that does not manifest if i just told you oh the backlight's on 100 all the time you would have to believe it because there's nothing you can see on the screen with your eyes without like an electric instrument to show the dynamic backlighting now if you put it in hdr mode and show a star field or a black background with a white square moving across it maybe then you can pick it up but even then you know it's it's hard to say but for
John:
regular like desktop computer mode which is the only way you're going to use it because you're not doing hdr video you can't see any bloom you can't see any halo in fact for all i know when in this 500 nits mode the backlight is on 100 all the time i don't even know i just i can tell you that you don't see the halo so i know that sounds gross to you and you could worry about the you know electronic sophistication that causes that to happen but i'm going to say in practice in regular 500 nit i'm using my thing as a mac mode it is a non-issue visually speaking
John:
All right, that's good to know.
John:
So you've never noticed that ever?
John:
No, I don't think, even in the, so when you see the thing where people do, like, when they do reviews of dynamic backlight television sets, and they do them in HDR mode to show this exact effect, like, hey, it's a black background with some white text, I'm going to show you the hallowing, even when they do that,
John:
For televisions, which exhibit this much more, they have to adjust the exposure on the camera because with the naked eye, it's actually a little bit tricky to see.
John:
I don't, you know, I do very little in HDR with this as well.
John:
I play Destiny in HDR occasionally, and I have some HDR videos that I watch, but none of them really show off the hailing.
John:
But I'm absolutely sure I could see it if I give it the worst case scenario of a 100% white square moving across a black screen in HDR.
John:
But in any other mode and I'm staring at my screen right now, like there's black against white all over the place and I cannot see any bloom whatsoever.
John:
So, yeah, it is.
John:
I don't like it either.
John:
I would never buy it in my television set, but I didn't worry about it for this monitor because it monitor levels.
John:
It just doesn't show up.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
That's good to know, and that will probably factor into whatever I decide to do.
John:
And you'll find out if these mini-LED things come out.
John:
Eventually, you're just going to get one no matter what, but you won't have a choice, right?
John:
And then you'll see that it's like, well, for non-HDR applications where nothing is really that bright, it's fine.
Marco:
I hope so, because it's so inelegant of a solution.
Marco:
It's not...
John:
We don't have OLED computer monitors yet, so that's really what you want is individually lit up pixels with also high contrast.
Marco:
Right, yeah, exactly.
Marco:
So anyway, I've decided based on these concerns and these inelegances for me, I'm not going to get the XDR for now.
Marco:
I'm going to stick with the stupid LG as long as it continues to work, asterisk.
Marco:
But
Marco:
I just have to not use the LG's built-in ports and hope that it works well through this CalDigit thing that's on the way.
Marco:
And if it doesn't, then I'll reevaluate.
Marco:
And I'm not excited at all about the LG for long-term use.
Marco:
I'm intending it now to be just a bridge between now and...
Marco:
either when I decide to switch back to my iMac Pro, which I might do whenever it comes back, or if I decide not to switch back to it, if I get too hooked on the M1 lifestyle, then this will just be a temporary thing until I figure out what my next desktop will be.
Marco:
And then we'll see what happens.
Marco:
But if the LG breaks, or if something goes wrong with it that I haven't hit yet in the last few days that I've been using it so far,
Marco:
I would not replace it.
Marco:
As much as I have a hard time spending $7,000 on a 6K, I could not bring myself to buy another one of these LGs.
Marco:
It's here temporarily, but I don't anticipate this being a permanent solution.
Casey:
You know, I understand that you're trying to stay within a $7,000 budget, and I'm happy to tell you that on Craigslist here in Richmond, you can get a 2011 Chevrolet Cruze.
Casey:
At CarMax here in Richmond, you can get a 2012 Fiat 500 Pop.
Casey:
There are all sorts of automobile options that you can... Oh, actually, here's a $7,000 2005 Jeep Grand Cherokee.
John:
I've always liked those.
John:
So far, of all the cars you've named, I'd still rather have that monitor.
John:
Can you find a decent car?
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, me too.
Casey:
Oh, you could finally get your dream car for $6,995, a 1997 Jeep Wrangler.
Marco:
Oh, great.
Marco:
I bet that sounds reliable and comfortable.
Marco:
Totally elegant, too.
Casey:
You could drive on the beach, remember?
Marco:
Yeah, with a permit I don't have that I will never get.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
I hear it's a lot of money, but golly.
Casey:
If that LG breaks, you should just get a 4K monitor and use it.
John:
You'll survive with limited screen space for a while.
Casey:
I agree that, you know, truth be told, I know that you don't particularly do the two monitor thing, but at my jobby job, I had two, I think they were LG, if I remember correctly, two LG 4K monitors that were like 22 inches, something like that.
Casey:
And truth be told, like, if you can get over the fact that you have two monitors on your desk, which for me isn't a big deal, it actually was really, really nice.
Casey:
They were both Retina for all intents and purposes.
Casey:
And, you know, when you have two of them, you get a roughly equivalent amount of real estate as a 27-inch 5K.
Casey:
Certainly in a perfect world, I prefer a 27-inch 5K.
Casey:
But if you don't want to set $7,000 aflame, you can do this for like $500 or something like that.
Casey:
Now, I'm sure you'll hate them for some reason or another, but, I mean, it's another option.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, the price difference is so vast.
Marco:
Like, it is kind of funny to think that I could get, like, six of these LGs for the cost of one of six games.
John:
It would annoy you six times as much.
John:
Maybe you could daisy-chain all the USB things together to get enough power.
Casey:
Oh, that's funny.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So one last piece of follow-up.
Casey:
An anonymous Apple genius writes, when taking a product into Apple to be serviced, please just ask them to run the full service diagnostic suite available to all Genius Bar technicians.
Casey:
For this particular issue, we do have a cooling diagnostic that will assist with determining the amount of spider eggs in the iMac Pro.
Casey:
The other two recommended diagnostics are FSD EFI and FSD OS.
Casey:
I'm assuming full service diagnostics for the EFI, which is what does that actually stand for?
Casey:
It's the BIOS, right?
Casey:
But what does it actually stand for?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Something firmware interface, enhanced firmware interface.
John:
I've forgotten.
Casey:
All right, and then whatever, the OS, I presume that's like a software thing.
Casey:
As we are technicians, we do rely on diagnostic tests to advise how we proceed and have troubleshooting guides made available by Apple Engineering.
Casey:
On a personal note, I'm sorry for your previous experiences that have caused you to audibly groan at the thought of having to come see us, but I can assure you there are a number of us who are fans and supporters of the tech media slash influencers in your audience, and this individual said they bought the ATPT with wheels, which means they are the right kind of person.
Casey:
And this person additionally suggests that we do find it discouraging, that the geniuses do find it discouraging to hear those we admire think so little of us.
Casey:
First of all, real-time follow-up.
Casey:
Somebody added, I think, John, it's extensible firmware interface.
Casey:
So thank you for that, John.
Casey:
Second of all, I assumed your groaning was not about going to see an Apple genius necessarily, but just about the fact that you have to carry this stupid 27-inch computer on a boat to an Apple store.
Casey:
But correct me if I'm wrong.
Marco:
Yeah, for me, the reason why I don't like bringing in my desktops for repair is
Marco:
has almost nothing to do with the people i'm going to be interacting with i've had almost entirely positive experiences there it's it's all about just the logistics of getting it there and then the inconvenience of being without it for all the time in the meantime and then if i get it back and it's been you know wiped out because you know either because they restored it themselves or because they had to replace something that caused data loss like replacing the ssds or their
Marco:
T2 or whatever, which I think is going to happen.
Marco:
If they're replacing the logic board, I assume that the T2 modules go with it because of the encryption keys and everything.
Marco:
So I assume I'm going to have an empty Mac on the way home.
Marco:
So that's going to mean not only did I have to bring it there, which is an ordeal.
Marco:
bring it home from there, which is an ordeal.
Marco:
But then also, I'm without it for probably two weeks at least.
Marco:
And when I get it back, I have to restore from everything and deal with all the, you know, little tiny nitpicks and paper cuts that come along with having restored a computer.
Marco:
So you have to do it, which takes a lot of time.
Marco:
And then all the things that didn't have, like that stored things in ways that doesn't restore properly or like whatever, all that I have to deal with for the next weeks after that.
Marco:
So it's just a big ordeal.
Marco:
for my primary computer and and i'm not looking forward to to doing all that um and it's you know it sucks like i depend on these computers and part of the reason why i buy things like the mac pro and the imac pro is that they tend to be pretty reliable over time and that decreases the chances that i need to do this another another part of the reason why i don't keep computers for like five six years usually is that i want to get rid of them before they need service
Marco:
So I don't have to deal with this because I'm running businesses here.
Marco:
I can't afford tons of downtime.
Marco:
And it's just it's very costly to to have to deal with all this crap.
Marco:
So I want to minimize the time to deal with it.
Marco:
So it's nothing to do with the Apple people who are largely great and everything to do with just the hassle of doing all this.
Marco:
Finally, I wanted to clarify a number of people have written in.
Marco:
to tell me that they have some kind of business service or AppleCare service where they will send a technician to your house to pick up your desktop and take it away and service it and bring it back to you.
Marco:
And while that sounds fantastic, maybe, that only eliminates some of these problems, and I guarantee you they don't serve where I live.
Marco:
Once the steps to get here include get on a boat, I think that's where their service contract with Apple ends.
Marco:
And I think that's when they say, sorry, we can't serve your area.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Flatfile.
Marco:
You've experienced data onboarding, but probably haven't heard that term.
Marco:
Think back to when you needed a CSV template to import data online, or that one time you had to email an Excel file that might have had sensitive data in it.
Marco:
There are problems inherent with data onboarding.
Marco:
Companies spend exorbitant amounts of money trying to fix it, usually with implementation and services teams.
Marco:
Luckily, our friends at Flatfile are solving data onboarding for companies of all sizes.
Marco:
They've just interviewed over 100 companies and compiled a 2020 State of Data Onboarding report that quantifies this hidden business cost.
Marco:
Not surprisingly, 96% of their respondents ran into problems when importing data.
Marco:
23% said it takes weeks or months to migrate customer data.
Marco:
So while you may not have heard of data onboarding, chances are you or someone you know has experienced it.
Marco:
Want to check out the full report on data onboarding?
Marco:
Check out flatfile.io.
Marco:
Once again, to see their report for 2020 state of data onboarding, go to flatfile.io.
Marco:
Thank you to Flatfile for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Speaking of new toys, and in this case, toys you've actually bought, tell me about your new Fancy Pants headphones.
Casey:
Are they your favorites?
Marco:
they're significantly better than i expected oh well look at now you're gonna make me spend a whole pile of money i don't want to spend so maybe i shouldn't ask you for details well maybe not so all right so here we are i got my airpods max i've had them for about half a day and so i can't give any useful information on battery life or obviously travel or anything like that um
Marco:
But I can tell you how they sound.
Marco:
And I was comparing them all day, listening to different music and comparing them to every pair of headphones I have in this house.
Marco:
And so I have a number of opinions on comfort and sound and control and things like that.
Marco:
So just some very quick terms I'm going to be using a lot in this.
Marco:
I assume everyone's familiar with the concept of bass and treble.
Marco:
I'm also going to be talking about the mid-range a lot.
Marco:
The mid-range is what's between bass and treble.
Marco:
If you ever played with the mid-range control or the middle part of an EQ, it kind of boosts vocals and the kind of middle range of the frequencies.
Marco:
It's vocals, electric guitars, some instruments like pianos kind of live in that range.
Marco:
So that's what I'm talking about here.
Marco:
And then finally, I'm going to be talking about the soundstage, which is an audio term for...
Marco:
Like how wide it sounds like the music is coming from or like how big of a room it sounds like you're in.
Marco:
So anyway, moving on to the actual information here.
Marco:
The first thing you notice besides the comical packaging and case and...
Marco:
Oh my god, the case.
Marco:
It's as bad as you think.
Marco:
It's as awkward and clumsy to get them in and out as you think.
Marco:
It would not surprise me if a number of the people who buy these who aren't nerds and don't follow their reviews mistake it for packaging and throw it away when they throw away the box.
John:
it reminds me of the case on the original ipad do you remember that one that had like yeah those pointy little seams and was made of that same cheap material i had it it was terrible remember they use leftover ipad one cases to make this case oh god like the best the best thing i saw in one of the reviews is that when it's in the case like they have a little notch cut out so you can see the lightning thing like through that little slot the little slits that are at the bottom inexplicable slits to allow scratches to get in i don't know
John:
They didn't even line the slits up with the lightning thing, so they had to put a notch in the slit, but the notch doesn't always line up exactly with the lightning port that it's supposed to be on.
John:
It's just shoddy all around.
John:
Like an ill-fitting suit.
Marco:
Everything about the case is as bad as you think it might be.
Marco:
It's a shame.
Marco:
It really is, because...
Marco:
it really puts a damper on this product in a pretty big way.
Marco:
If it is indeed intended to be like traveled with in any capacity, whether it's even, even if it's just like, you know, to and from work or something like it's just, it's not the case is hilariously awkward and bad.
Marco:
It's both it's ineffective as a case.
Marco:
It's annoying to get them in and out.
Marco:
Like it's, it's not good.
Marco:
Um, so anyway, um,
Marco:
We talked a lot about the weight and everyone was kind of worried.
Marco:
The weight I actually don't think is that big of a problem for me in practice.
Marco:
Now granted, these are not my heaviest headphones.
Marco:
My big planers are like 500 grams.
Marco:
So these at 350 or whatever is less than that.
Marco:
But they certainly are heavier than most headphones.
Marco:
headphones that people will be comparing them to.
Marco:
Things like the common noise-canceling headphones for planes, most portable headphones for portable music walking around in fashionable ways and fashionable cities for fashionable people.
Marco:
They're generally heavier than those.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I didn't really notice the weight as being a problem.
Marco:
Comfort-wise, they do have a bit more clamping force, like how hard they squeeze your head, than I would like.
Marco:
And part of that is just necessary because of the weight.
Marco:
I wish that was a little bit nicer.
Marco:
the ear cups themselves leave a lot of room for your ear like compared to other headphones in this category so other you know small fashionable portable over ears not compared to like giant you know the flagship headphones from the big brands that now have all these like nice kind of raindrop shaped ear cups compared to those they're still small but compared to their category of like portable ish trendy looking headphones they do have surprisingly deep and roomy ear cups which
Marco:
significantly nicer ear cups or at least more spacious ear cups than the um the sony's and the bose's that people will be comparing them to and that i will be in a minute the downside for the comfort for me is that the ear pads themselves are not super comfortable pads um
Marco:
Now, some of this ear pads do break in a little bit over time and headbands do kind of stretch and loosen a little bit over time.
Marco:
So this comfort might improve over time.
Marco:
But I think the major theme is going to say the same here, which is that it's a little bit heavier and that therefore causes a bit more clamping force on your head.
Marco:
And the ear pads are not that soft and they're not that they don't spread the weight over a very wide
Marco:
thick rim if that makes sense what makes super comfortable headphones super comfortable is like you can imagine the opposite you can imagine if like the ear pads formed little like triangle ridges that just ringed your ear with the thinnest thing possible like a like a piece of cardboard that would like that would be uncomfortable because it would be putting all the weight of them on a very tiny little circle around your ears
Marco:
And then the opposite would be some giant, thick rim, looks like a fat tire, that kind of pad that puts a huge surface area against your head so it spreads the weight out.
Marco:
The AirPods Max are too close to the former.
Marco:
They don't have a wide enough earpad rim to distribute the weight evenly.
Marco:
And so it ends up being uncomfortable primarily because of that, because of the earpads themselves.
Marco:
And the earpad...
Marco:
covering material you know on most headphones it's either real or fake leather some kind of you know vinyl or you know something like that the earpad covers here are this kind of almost rough fabric that's almost itchy it's not particularly comfortable and i would not i would never describe it as luxurious so if what they're going for is luxury materials they're
Marco:
I think they've achieved the look, but not the feel.
Marco:
Like, it does not feel luxurious at all.
Marco:
And their other competitors, you know, Bang & Olsen, as we mentioned earlier, and even the other noise-canceling, the Bose and Sony noise-canceling models, have way nicer-feeling earpads than these.
Marco:
And I think if Apple chooses to, they could dramatically improve the comfort of the AirPods Max,
Marco:
With just different earpads.
Marco:
And they're replaceable.
Marco:
They're magnetic.
Marco:
You pop them off in two seconds and put new ones on.
Marco:
So they could actually release revised earpads for these down the road that could fit this.
Marco:
I don't know if they will, but they could.
Marco:
And I think they should because that could dramatically improve comfort with a few design tweaks and maybe materials changes on the earpads.
Marco:
Moving on to sound.
Marco:
The AirPods Max is a headphone that is not afraid of treble.
Marco:
Now, this is kind of a divide in the headphone world, whether you want to hear treble response and treble detail or whether you don't, whether you want it to be like, you know, quote, rolled off.
Marco:
Treble sounds crisp and sharp, but it can be a little bit fatiguing for some people.
Marco:
The rolled-off, reduced treble sound is very popular among high-end headphones because it sounds like warm.
Marco:
It's a very old radio voice warmth here, but kind of not a lot of detail.
Marco:
And the treble is like, yeah, right in your face.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
This has kind of been a split in headphone tuning for a while.
Marco:
The Max likes treble.
Marco:
It gives you a lot of it.
Marco:
If you like Beyerdynamic headphones or Hi-Fi Man headphones, this is for you.
Marco:
If you like the Sennheiser or Odyssey sound, this is probably not for you.
Marco:
Fortunately, I'm in the treble lovers group.
Casey:
I was going to say, I'm surprised you're going on about this because this sounds like it's made for you then.
Marco:
Yeah, for me, it's great.
Marco:
For almost any other headphone in this category, this is going to sound like too much treble.
Marco:
But if you've heard headphones with good, well-done treble response, like my beloved HE6, it sounds right in line.
Marco:
It's closer in line to what you'd get from, quote, fun headphones, which I'll get to in a minute.
Marco:
Because what that involves basically is a sound that is not trying to be completely flat frequency response, but is aiming for something that is just a little bit more pleasing.
Marco:
Imagine if you had a bass and a treble dial.
Marco:
Imagine if you turned up the bass and the treble each a little bit.
Marco:
Not too much, but just give the bass and the treble a bit of a boost from neutral.
Marco:
And it makes it a little bit more live, a little bit more fun sounding to most people.
Marco:
That is what headphone people call a V-shaped sound signature.
Marco:
Because if you imagine on the EQ, the left is the bass, and the right is the treble, and they're boosted, but the middle's not.
Marco:
So it forms a little bit V with the controls.
Marco:
These have that.
Marco:
But it's not super aggressive about it.
Marco:
It's not really in your face about how much treble and bass it is boosting.
Marco:
Usually that kind of toning of a headphone means the bass especially is usually really overpowering and that the mid-range is so withdrawn by comparison that the vocals are kind of hard to hear over all the bass.
Marco:
The vocals are almost withdrawn into the background.
Marco:
Electric guitars are often falling into the background because the bass is pushed so high.
Marco:
The Max does not have that problem.
Marco:
It is...
Marco:
It is a little bit V-shaped, a little bit fun, a little bit boosting and treble and bass, but it's much closer to neutral than we usually get with that kind of boost.
Marco:
And the mid-range does not feel buried or overpowered or withdrawn.
Marco:
So mid-range is, I'm a mid-range snob.
Marco:
And what converted me to a mid-range snob was planar headphones.
Marco:
And, you know, the way headphones work, they have to move air somehow.
Marco:
And very quickly, I don't waste too much time on this.
Marco:
Very quickly, they can move air by having this cone with a magnet that drives it forward and back, which is how almost all headphones work.
Marco:
Those are called dynamic headphones.
Marco:
Speakers usually almost all work that way as well.
Marco:
You've seen these speaker-shaped cones.
Marco:
It's in the volume icon.
Marco:
It's everywhere.
Marco:
A different way that some high-end headphones work is called planar magnetic or orthodynamic.
Marco:
It's the same thing.
Marco:
And what they do is suspend a very, very thin diagram with some conductive trace on it between two grids of magnets.
Marco:
And by running current through the trace on the diaphragm, it induces motion with those magnets.
Marco:
And that's how they move.
Marco:
And what that results in is less mass of the thing that's moving than the typical cone dynamic driver that you see in most speakers and headphones.
Marco:
And what that does, when you have less mass moving, it allows it to have usually, not always, but usually not only better base response for reasons, physics and such, but also a more smooth frequency response.
Marco:
It doesn't have as many weird peaks and valleys usually as dynamics, just because, again, the physics, when you're moving less, it's easier to better control how it moves.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
What this results in, in practice for me, when I've tried most of these kinds of headphones, planar magnetic headphones usually have much smoother mid-range.
Marco:
And what I mean by smooth, it's kind of hard to explain, but you would know it if you heard it
Marco:
When you hear bad mid-range, it almost sounds like the vocals are crunchy or distorted in a crunchy or harsh way on your ears.
Marco:
That's a very, very common flaw in cheap dynamic headphones.
Marco:
And that's one of the reasons why so many of them are tuned to boost everything else and withdraw the mid-range because they can't reproduce it well.
Marco:
And so they kind of bury that in bass and hope you don't notice.
Marco:
I notice, and I care, and the mid-range is my favorite part, because that's where all the guitars and vocals are, and I'm a guitars and vocals person.
Marco:
So I want that to be awesome and smooth, and it's very unusual for a dynamic headphone, as opposed to the planer, to achieve a smooth mid-range.
John:
You love vocals and you listen to Phish?
Marco:
And guitars, I said.
Marco:
All right, all right.
Marco:
I'm just saying.
Marco:
The lead singer of Phish is Trey's guitar.
Marco:
And that is solid mid-range music, right?
Marco:
So I care a lot about how electric guitars sound.
Marco:
And yeah, because of that.
Casey:
No, here's the thing.
Casey:
It's funny you say that, John, because...
Casey:
I don't want to make it sound like I think any of Marco's opinions are wrong, but it is important, listener, that you understand that Marco has a very particular kind of music, and his preferences match with that kind of music, as your preferences match with your kinds of music.
Casey:
And I'm not saying that's bad or wrong or indifferent or otherwise.
Casey:
It's just...
Casey:
When you said it was planar headphones that got you to love the mid-range and treble, oh no, sir, it's Phish that got you to love that.
Casey:
It's just that planar headphones match it well.
Casey:
And so for me, like, for example, and I don't have AirPods Max, I haven't listened to them yet.
Casey:
I tend to like, when I listen to music, I tend to be drawn to music that, and I think we've talked about this like a year or two ago.
Casey:
I tend to be drawn to music that has a stronger bass or rhythm section and drums than I am wowed by a really strong guitarist.
Casey:
It's not always true, but often true.
Casey:
And so for me, the kind of boominess that Marco would not care for, of course, everything has limits.
Casey:
But I think I would be more receptive to it because I tend to focus on that part of a band more than Marco does.
Casey:
And so none of this, again, Marco's not wrong by any stretch of the imagination.
Casey:
It's just if you're making a decision about whether to spend money on what is a $600 headphones, just consider that Marco's opinions are based on someone who, to his own admission, really likes a particular kind of music.
Casey:
And if you'd like a different kind of music, take that into consideration.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And I try to test with a lot of different tracks.
Marco:
Assuming you don't listen to Phish, although they sell at stadiums somehow, but anyway...
Marco:
You're all out there somewhere.
Marco:
They're very popular.
Marco:
They're very popular.
Marco:
No one wants to admit it.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
Anyway, but like, you know, so like one of the bands I test with for all iPhones I test is the Avett Brothers because not only are they one of my favorite bands, but also Avett Brothers, their earlier stuff before they had like really fancy expensive producers, their earlier stuff
Marco:
is a little bit more rough.
Marco:
And I think, in my opinion, better for that.
Marco:
That gives it a level of personality and realness that I feel like it sands it off a lot as they increased their production levels in later albums.
Marco:
But their earlier stuff...
Marco:
Their voices are almost harsh and they go right up to that edge, but they don't cross it if you're listening on good equipment.
Marco:
And it sounds incredible to hear someone's voice that's almost too harsh, but then it walks right up to it and it just doesn't cross that line.
Marco:
It's an amazing energy to hear.
Marco:
The early Avett Brothers records are murder on bad headphones because they will reveal every flaw in mid-range reproduction that a headphone can offer.
Marco:
It's one of the reasons I use them as test tracks because not only do I like them, but it's very clear when you have bad mid-range reproduction.
Marco:
The AirPods Max do not achieve the level of smoothness of good planar headphones.
Marco:
But they get damn close.
Marco:
And that is incredibly impressive.
Marco:
They're not the only dynamic headphone to get that close, but they're one of very, very few.
Marco:
That alone is worthy of praise.
Marco:
It's very, very good at not having that kind of crunchy sound, not having any kind of weird distortion that I can identify in any obvious place across the frequencies.
Marco:
But
Marco:
it's just a nice smooth pleasant sound that is a little bit aggressive in the bass and treble to make it sound a little bit more fun and honestly that's probably not like a flaw that's probably by design because that's what most people want i'm very happy about the sound of these uh i've spent a lot of time with open backed headphones because open back headphones they leak sound like crazy in and out and so they're unsuitable whenever you're near anybody or any noise sources uh but
Marco:
They usually sound way better.
Marco:
It's hard for closed headphones to sound good to somebody once they're accustomed to open headphones because they just sound so much better.
Marco:
But again, there are a few models of closed headphones that I've ever tried that are really good sounding in absolute terms, not just like grinning on the closed headphone curve.
Marco:
And the AirPods Max are one of those.
Marco:
They are one of the best closed bag headphones I've ever heard, possibly even the best.
Marco:
And they're one of the best dynamic headphones I've ever heard.
Marco:
Again, possibly even the best.
Marco:
So sound quality, I am extremely happy with them.
Marco:
They don't beat my favorite, you know, my HE6, but they really, they beat almost everything else I have in sound quality.
John:
Can you list those headphones, by the way?
John:
All the headphones that you tested against?
Marco:
I'll get there in one moment.
Marco:
Before I do direct comparisons, I want to talk about control.
Marco:
The digital crown we were talking about last week, I speculated that it was the same part as the watch.
Marco:
John, I believe you said it must have been much bigger.
Marco:
You were right.
Marco:
It is much bigger than the watch's digital crown.
Marco:
That being said, because of where it is and the fact that you're not looking at it as you're operating it,
Marco:
it actually feels a little too small still, and it feels a little bit fiddly as a volume control.
Marco:
And it's not actually great as the primary button, which is track skipping or play-pause.
Marco:
It's not great for that either, because it's a digital crown.
Marco:
There's a lot of travel to push it in, and way more travel than the regular button that's next to it to control the noise cancellation modes.
Marco:
And it's actually, again, because it's a digital crown...
Marco:
it's a little bit difficult to click it in without accidentally changing the volume slightly.
Marco:
So I think I actually, another button would have served this role better.
Marco:
And if they're going to only have a digital crown and one button, I would argue they should flip the roles of them that pushing in the digital crown should be the noise cancellation toggle and the much easier to press much easier to double and triple click button.
Marco:
That's right next to it should be the play pause and skip and everything.
Marco:
Otherwise, we covered earlier, the ANC has the same three modes, the transparency, ANC, and off modes as the AirPods Pro.
Marco:
They work very similarly.
Marco:
Automatic head detection, which is basically what activates the AirPods Max automatically when you put it on your head and it makes it take over the current audio playback route.
Marco:
That works fine.
Marco:
It's also an option that you can turn off.
Marco:
one thing that i don't think you can turn off yet that i that i hope they add the ability to turn off is the automatic pausing when you take it off your ear for whatever reason like you know airpods pro it makes more sense you're like taking it out of your ear that kind of makes more sense um but on this sometimes i like got to like put my finger under the ear cup slightly to maybe itch my ear or something during a long recording and if you do that with these the audio pauses like
Marco:
If it's away from your ear at all, even just to move a finger or maybe adjust your glasses or whatever, it'll pause.
Marco:
And that's kind of annoying.
Marco:
So I hope that becomes an option down the road.
John:
One of the good things about these headphones, speaking of all these things, you're talking about the buttons and all the different things that they perform, is that my assumption is that all the buttons are essentially...
John:
programmable and in that if they change their mind about what the buttons want to do or even something as dramatic as you just said oh let's switch the uh the noise canceling versus the crown button to do opposite functions that they could in theory do that because it's all software controlled right yeah as far as i know right and that leads me to a question that came up uh actually we should have talked about it follow but we missed it and i'm not sure you know the answer to this uh maybe i fix it can know is
John:
is there any electrical connection between the ear cups like is there a wire essentially going from the left ear cup to the right ear cup or are they essentially two completely independent little computers because there are two little h1 chips in there that like on your airpods where there's no wire between them they just communicate with each other and coordinate to be a pair of headphones together for you or is there actually a wire connection between them
Marco:
Well, they have to be powered, so there has to be at least a power cable between the two.
Marco:
Maybe there's a battery in each one?
Marco:
Sure, but there's only one charging port.
John:
Ah, there you go.
Marco:
There is a power cable between them at least, and I would guess there is probably a wired audio coordination signal between them as well.
Marco:
Actually, there almost certainly have to be, because as I'm about to get to, the wired mode is indeed zero latency.
Marco:
and so and it would be nearly impossible to do that like wireless sending it across your head without introducing any latency anywhere that would be that would be very difficult if not impossible so um at least doing it in the digital domain so that's that would be very unlikely so yeah it's it's almost certainly that they are wired together um just you know through one of the sides of the headband but anyway wired mode speaking of which yeah works great
Marco:
are you using them right now yeah are you using it now no because the comfort is just not good enough for me for long late or long listening like but i could and that's the important thing if i was on a trip or something and i wanted to just bring you know a small well a well-traveling pair of headphones maybe this maybe these aren't the right ones because of their stupid case but um
Marco:
But yeah, I could bring these if I wanted to.
Marco:
And I could use the cable for that.
Marco:
The cable, like the little, you know, the $35 backwards wire is kind of comical that it costs $35.
Marco:
Talk about luxury.
Marco:
This is the thinnest, crappiest feeling cable that I think I've ever seen Apple sell.
Marco:
It's so bad that had I not ordered it directly from Apple, I would assume it was counterfeit.
Casey:
Oh, delightful.
Marco:
Because I'm pretty sure – I'm guessing that this is only analog audio, so it's only three conductors.
Marco:
It doesn't even have – it isn't even the TRRS with the remote pin.
Marco:
It's only TRS, like the regular old three-pin or three-conductor cable without the remote control.
Marco:
So it's just those three wires in there, and it is such a thin, crappy-feeling cable.
Marco:
It's also very short.
Marco:
It's only one meter, and so at a desk, it's too short.
Marco:
If you're plugging it into a laptop on a trip or something, it's probably fine for that.
Marco:
Or if you're plugging it into something in your pocket for some reason, somehow, if you still have anything in your pocket with a headphone jack, then it would be fine for that as well.
Marco:
But it is too short for desks.
John:
Or plugging it into a microphone directly if you're using it for podcast monitoring.
Marco:
Yes, exactly.
Marco:
The cable does not have a microphone or remote on it.
Marco:
You have to use those things built into the headphones.
Marco:
It's also weird, too, that when you're using the cable mode, the headphones still have an independent volume control on them.
Marco:
They don't just run at line volume level of whatever you're plugging it into.
Marco:
They have their own volume control that you have to turn up and down separately from the device you're plugging it into if you want to, which confused me at first.
Marco:
I thought they were broken because it was just super quiet.
Marco:
It took me a while to figure out, oh,
Marco:
I should turn up their volume as well.
Marco:
But anyway, so comparing it to other headphones.
Marco:
And just a quick thing, this is a very important thing to do when you're comparing audio quality or even comfort because...
Marco:
It is so hard to remember how something sounds.
Marco:
Our brains play tricks on us.
Marco:
Our memory is not that good.
Marco:
And the only way to really compare headphones is to compare them, like, side by side, immediately.
Marco:
Like, try this.
Marco:
Now, quickly switch.
Marco:
Try this.
Marco:
And quickly switch back and try that.
Marco:
Try to listen to the same segment of the song on both.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
it's trying to use any other way trying to like do any kind of testing by memory or by comparing frequency response graphs like it doesn't really work our brains are not good at that you have to do it this way and this is what i did so this is why i'm only going to compare it to headphones that i actually had with me and tested today also people talk about uh break-in or breaking in speakers and headphones and this concept that they sound better over time as they break in
Marco:
This has been disproven.
Marco:
There's no science to back this up by anybody ever.
Marco:
The headphones aren't breaking in.
Marco:
Your brain is breaking in.
Marco:
Your brain is getting accustomed to their sound profile.
Marco:
So anything you get after listening to it for a while, your brain is accustomed to it.
Marco:
It might be doing a bit of correction, and it'll sound good to you.
Marco:
So that's fine.
Marco:
So anyway, and also note, as I compare this to the Sony noise-canceling headphones, that the current Sony model is the WH-1000XM4.
Marco:
I don't have the XM4.
Marco:
I have the XM2, two versions back.
Marco:
It is very similar in most ways.
Marco:
The main things they've changed between the 2 and the 4 are they switched to USB-C and they've changed some of the smart features and some of the available audio processing features.
Marco:
But there's not much else that's different between them as far as I can tell.
Marco:
Anyway, so first, comparing them to full-size wired headphones, which is not a fair comparison in many ways, but my beloved Hi-Fi Man HE6, my big flagship, my favorite headphone of all time,
Marco:
It's open-backed.
Marco:
This is not a fair fight at all.
Marco:
The HG6 is, first of all, discontinued many years ago.
Marco:
Costs twice as much wired, open-backed.
Marco:
Requires ridiculous amps to supply enough power to it.
Marco:
But the HG6 does sound better.
Marco:
But not as much better as I would have thought for all those trade-offs.
John:
Did you try the AirPods Max with a wire for the audio to try to compete to remove the Bluetooth factor?
Marco:
I tried it both ways.
Marco:
I did some of the testing with the wire and some without.
Marco:
Honestly, I could not tell a difference.
Marco:
Bluetooth as a codec and as a thing, like audiophiles argue about this all the time, about what it does to their sound quality.
Marco:
The reality is it's complicated.
Marco:
There's been multiple Bluetooth codecs over time, multiple codecs that different devices support.
Marco:
If you're using like the old A2DP codec, it does indeed sound kind of crappy with good enough headphones.
Marco:
Like you can hear the difference.
Marco:
Um, but no, no, no modern headphone communicates that way.
Marco:
Um, the, the Android and Sony camps, uh, for a while use something called apt X, which was like a higher end codec.
Marco:
Apple has always used AAC.
Marco:
So they're simply, as far as I can tell, they're still doing this simply encoding on AAC on the device, uh,
Marco:
sending it over the air as AAC and then decoding in the headphone.
Marco:
They've done that for a long time now.
Marco:
Whatever they're doing is at a high enough bit rate that it's pretty transparent.
Marco:
I cannot tell a difference.
Marco:
Anyway, I compared it to my current closed headphone favorite, the one I'm using right now, the Dan Clark Audio Eon 2 Closed.
Marco:
eon 2 is way more comfortable it's just it's a it's a huge headphone like it's one of those teardrop shaped ear cup things a massive headphone huge comfortable pads uh but it's also the eon 2 is tuned for one of those warm sound signatures with with relatively weak treble response i actually i actually thought the sound from the max is more fun because it has that increased treble and
Marco:
um but eon 2 is a little bit smoother has you know more refined mid-range and everything but anyway moving down the price range a little bit the wonderful venerable headphones that i think case is probably wearing right now the bear dynamic dt 770 pro the way they sound the tonal balance you know treble bass everything like that is actually very similar to the airpods max
Marco:
The DT770 has a V-shaped EQ curve that boosts treble and bass a little bit.
Marco:
But the 770's bass is a bit weaker.
Marco:
The treble is a bit stronger.
Marco:
And the midrange is very slightly more crunchy on the 770.
Marco:
So overall, a surprisingly similar sound.
Marco:
of all the headphones i tried it against the dt 770 sounds the most similar to the max but the max sounds like a slightly better a bit smoother and a bit more refined i mean a bit better balanced version of the dt 770 so it actually sounds significantly you know it sounds better but like if you if you you have to like try them back to back to really even notice most of the difference so it's basically a wireless dt 770 and i consider that a very good thing
John:
Like three times the price, right?
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
But, you know, it's wireless.
Marco:
It has noise cancellation.
Marco:
Like I wouldn't want to travel with my 770s.
Marco:
I have, but it's not fun because they're so big and bulky.
Marco:
But certainly like for, you know, at a desk, you know, the 770s put up a pretty good fight.
Marco:
Now, compared to the AirPods Pro,
Marco:
The AirPods Max have a worse transparency mode.
Marco:
And I don't know if this is just the physics of having these cups that sit over your ears that don't quite maybe seal as uniformly or as evenly as the AirPods Pro, which are going partially in your ears.
Marco:
And the AirPods Pro benefit from having your ear itself as...
Marco:
as part of the thing that is adjusting the noise on the way in, like the shape of your ear actually changes sound on the way in.
Marco:
And so over-ear headphones, where their microphones are outside of your ear, don't have the benefit of knowing how your ear is going to shape the sound on the way in.
Marco:
Whereas the AirPods Pro, the microphones are like partially in your ear.
Marco:
And so they are getting some of that ear processing that your ear is doing on the sound.
Marco:
They're getting some of that on the way to their microphone.
Marco:
So they're able to have, I think, a better transparency mode as a result.
Marco:
Transparency on the Macs, honestly, is not very good.
John:
Everybody loves it.
John:
All the reviews are saying, wow, transparency mode is amazing.
John:
And I'm hearing these reviews from people who have used the AirPod Pros, right?
John:
So it's not like people who have never been in the Apple ecosystem and haven't tried the other Apple products.
John:
So that's a little bit surprising, but you know what makes me think that what Apple needs here...
John:
is to talk to the sony folks because what you want is your own personal head related transfer function yes so that knows the shape of your ears and because the airpod max doesn't know the shape of your like you know exactly like the actual sound landing on your head is hitting giant aluminum cups
John:
with pinholes in them right it is not it is not bouncing around in your ear and so apple probably has some sort of best guess standardized head related transfer function to try to make transparency sound more or less normal but the airpods pro have your literal actual ear there
Marco:
Yeah, and to be clear, the AirPods Pro transparency mode totally destroys the Boses and the Sonys.
Marco:
It's not even close, but the AirPods Pro is a little bit better.
Marco:
The transparency on the Macs, I was able to notice it sometimes.
Marco:
whereas I use it all the time on the Pro, and I almost can never notice artifacts of it, whereas on the Max, they're actually pretty clear.
Marco:
You can't forget that you're using transparency mode on the Max, whereas on the Pro, you can't.
Marco:
That's how good the Pro is, and the Max is close, but it's not quite there.
Marco:
Also, compared to the Pro, the Max just sounds way better.
Marco:
It's much larger soundstage, stronger bass, much smoother midrange,
Marco:
The AirPods Pro sound very good for what they are, but in this case, physics wins, and the Max sounds way, way better.
Marco:
But that's to be expected.
Marco:
I sure hope so for the price difference.
Marco:
Moving on to one of the most commonly recommended alternatives, the Bose 700.
Marco:
This is Bose's current flagship noise-canceling headphone.
Marco:
Very similar overall size.
Marco:
It's a very similar bad folding where they only fold down.
Marco:
They don't fold in.
Marco:
But Bose has like a normal case, and that is far more useful if you're going to like throw it in travel bag or something.
Marco:
Bose also has significantly better comfort.
Marco:
Overall, out of all these headphones I've tried, the Bose is my favorite for comfort.
Marco:
Just barely edging out the Sonys.
Marco:
The Sonys are also excellent, but the Bose has a bit of an edge for me.
Marco:
um bose has noise cancellation that i think is a little bit stronger uh you can also adjust how much it is from zero to ten like it's it's very adjustable it's very nice on the bose um it has useful voice prompts like when you connect a device the bose says connect to to marco's iphone
Marco:
um sony's actually have a similar feature um it tells you like noise canceling 10 noise canceling 5 it'll tell you battery 57 like it announces that all in the ear cups which is just a nice feature and apple has the tech to do that obviously they choose not to they choose to just like play tones instead and have you look at your phone for all this info um i wish apple would
John:
go a little bit more in this direction it that's a very useful feature in practice when you're actually using these actually traveling the way that would manifest is is you'd hear this voice just a moment just a moment i'm working on it i'm sorry i couldn't connect to your device it's the main voice i hear in my house when apple speaks to me with uh with a voice
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So unfortunately, my Bose love fest ends when it comes to talking about the sound.
Marco:
Bose has the worst sound in the group by a mile.
Marco:
It's not even close.
Marco:
Talking about like a crunchy mid-range.
Marco:
bose is the worst i i'm pretty sure bose's audio engineers don't listen to any music with vocals i don't know how they would possibly think that that sounds okay uh it's terrible mid-range is the worst treble response is significantly weaker than everything else yeah by far the worst sound in the group um but that being said on planes that isn't actually that big of a problem anyway
Marco:
Compared to the Sony's, WH-1000XM2 is the one I have, very similar to the 3 and 4 and the MDR-1000X, which is the one.
Marco:
Sony has, by far, the best folding, the best travel case.
Marco:
They have excellent comfort.
Marco:
The ear cups are a little small.
Marco:
They could be a little roomier, but overall, excellent comfort.
Marco:
Sony has my favorite ear pads.
Marco:
Just how soft and pliable and how much they spread the weight.
Marco:
They just are awesome.
Marco:
The Sony's...
Marco:
To date, at least before I got my AirPods Pro, the Sonys were my headphones of choice while traveling.
Marco:
I wouldn't use them in normal circumstances, but on planes, I would go for those instantly.
Marco:
Sony has a much bass-heavier sound.
Marco:
It's a little bit too boomy on the bass, a little more crunchiness in the midrange, and a little weak on the treble response compared to the AirPods Max.
Marco:
but way better sound than the bows.
Marco:
Like the bows, you play it and you just are sad.
Marco:
Like you can't believe like, oh man, I'm, I'm really doing Neil Young a disservice here playing his music through this right now.
Marco:
Whereas the Sony would know.
Marco:
So God, I forgot about that.
Marco:
Whereas the Sonys are like, okay, yeah, I think Neil would be mildly okay with this.
Marco:
Whereas, yeah, the Bose, you're just like, you're sad, he's sad, everyone's sad.
Marco:
The Sony has a pretty rough transparency mode.
Marco:
This is like a constant hiss that you hear, and it sounds like you're listening to the world through an intercom.
Marco:
It's not good.
Marco:
um but otherwise sony is is very good overall a great all-arounder i think if you need noise canceling headphones and you don't want to spend the airpods max premium and you don't want airpods pro to serve that role just get the sony's there's a reason everyone recommends them they they really are like great all-arounders they're not amazing at any one thing except for the the folding and everything they're like they they're super amazing but they are really good at everything
John:
How is the noise cancelling on the Apples?
John:
I've heard a lot of people say that people who find the noise cancellation on Bose and Sony is a little bit oppressive or they get it feels like there's this pressure in your ear that somehow the Apple ones were less pressure though obviously if the Bose one has an adjustable adjustability for the noise cancelling maybe you can dial that down but how did you feel the noise cancelling was in terms of ability to cancel noise and if you're one of those people who feels that sort of pressure effect?
Marco:
It's hard.
Marco:
So I am one of those people who has historically not liked noise cancellation that much.
Marco:
That was like with some of the older ones, like the QuietComfort 35 II and stuff like that.
Marco:
I didn't like those as much.
Marco:
Ever since the era of the Sony 1000 series, I've liked it when I'm on planes.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And similar AirPods Pro I have found to be fantastic for noise cancellation because it's not too much.
Marco:
It doesn't feel or sound unnatural to me.
Marco:
Same thing with the Sony.
Marco:
The Bose I don't keep at level 10.
Marco:
I keep it at level 5.
Marco:
And I found that to be okay when I used it.
Marco:
um the airpods max seem overall with noise cancellation they they you know again this is hard to test because i'm not flying anywhere right now um so it's hard to test but i tested it like you know tip was vacuuming in the other room and so i kept switching between all these headphones like the vacuum's going and i like played a podcast out of a speaker also nearby to kind of see how it how it you know compare to that and and overall um it's very similar sounding in noise cancellation to the airpods pro um
Marco:
I expect it to be much stronger, and I think it's a little stronger, but it's not a massive difference.
Marco:
But as for the unnatural feeling, in my, again, limited testing so far, it seemed fine.
Marco:
I think if you're okay with the way the AirPods Pro do it, you'll be okay with the way these do it.
Marco:
Finally, what would I use this for?
Marco:
Like, what wins these battles?
Marco:
And, you know, compared to, like, what would I use at a desk?
Marco:
I really enjoyed listening to music on the Macs at a desk.
Marco:
And if I walked around listening to music, which I don't.
Marco:
I walk around listening to podcasts.
Marco:
But if I walked around listening to music, maybe.
Marco:
But at a desk, it was fantastic.
Marco:
I loved the Bluetooth integration.
Marco:
If I was going for a more minimal setup to get rid of my desktop headphone amp and get rid of the wire and just have wireless headphones that I listen to.
Marco:
Or if I was going to an office and I wanted something for the office and I didn't want a big setup there.
Marco:
then maybe.
Marco:
The problem for me, though, is that they don't offer all-day comfort.
Marco:
When I'm listening to them, they feel great, but every time I would listen for a while and then take it off, it would be kind of a relief that it was off my head.
Marco:
And that's not good.
Marco:
The comfort is not good enough.
Marco:
Ideally, if you're going to have headphones at a desk, you're probably going to be there a while.
Marco:
And in that case, you probably want something that has better long-term comfort, like the DT770 or the Eon 2, or if you want to go wireless, probably the Sonys for that use.
Marco:
And I think there's a reason why so many tech people, probably many of you listening to this right now,
Marco:
use the Sony headphones all day at work when that's a thing because they're comfortable if you need noise cancellation all day at work, which I've never been a fan of using it that often, but many people do.
Marco:
The Sonys are probably the way you would go for that as well because, again, they are better for long-wearing comfort.
Marco:
If the AirPods Max had better earpads and a little bit lighter weight, a little bit better earpads, they could take over that market, but the comfort is just not there.
John:
Wasn't one of the rumors about the AirPods Max is that the production of it was delayed a little bit because the headband was a little bit too tight and they needed to loosen it up as a manufacturing sort of adjustment?
Marco:
Yeah, we heard that.
Marco:
I mean, I don't know.
Marco:
It's hard to know whether any of those rumors hold any water.
John:
But I think we heard that before anyone had warned them.
John:
So it doesn't seem like that as a rumor is a reaction to people trying them and thinking they were a little uncomfortable.
John:
It was like before anyone had even touched them, that was a rumor.
John:
So it makes me wonder if there was...
Marco:
some sort of comfort adjustment stuff going on what i really like to hear is the explanation of the case like how did we get that but what happened there yeah so so at a desk they're they're a good option for sound quality and for the integration with the os and everything i just wish they were more comfortable for long wearing um while i'm walking around i'm gonna pick airpods pro every time
Marco:
They're pocketable.
Marco:
They're less conspicuous, if that matters to you.
Marco:
Even for the conspicuous angle, I don't think I'd even want to wear the Maxes on a Zoom call or something because it would just feel conspicuous to me.
Marco:
AirPods Pro, also for walking, having the better transparency mode matters to me.
Marco:
I'm always using transparency with them while walking.
Marco:
And the Pro are also less sweaty in the summer.
Marco:
They fit under hats in the winter.
Marco:
It's wonderful.
Marco:
The AirPods Pro are great for walking, and I don't think the Max is going to change that for almost anybody.
Marco:
um on a plane what would i use guess what i'd use the airpods pro still because sound quality matters far less on planes than comfort and like travel practicality travel logistics so the max having this amazing sound quality that doesn't matter so much on a plane um
Marco:
And all the Max's big disadvantages, like the long-wearing comfort, the terrible case, those are the highest priorities on planes.
Marco:
So I feel like the case situation and the comfort situation on the Max really cost it that market pretty big time.
Marco:
And so I would not pick it on a plane.
Marco:
I would continue bringing my two pairs of AirPods Pro.
John:
Sounds like you would not use these things in a box.
John:
You would not use them with a phone.
John:
You would not use them here or there.
John:
You would not use them anywhere.
John:
Does that mean TIFF is getting a pair of blue headphones?
Marco:
I don't know if she likes them yet.
Marco:
We didn't have time for her to test them today yet.
Marco:
But it's a shame.
Marco:
I really want so badly to like these because I love the way they sound.
Marco:
I really very much enjoy their sound.
Marco:
But I have a hard time thinking when I'm going to use them.
Marco:
So as for whether I'm keeping it or returning it, the answer is I don't know yet.
Marco:
I wish they were more comfortable.
Marco:
And I'm going to try wearing them a little bit more.
Marco:
You know, we're in the holiday extended return period now.
Marco:
I think I can return them up until January 15th or something.
Marco:
I'm going to wear them a lot over Christmas and just kind of see, like, you know, does it break in?
Marco:
Do the earpads get a little bit softer?
Marco:
Does the headband loosen up a little bit to matter?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But ultimately, I hope I can make these work because I do love the way they sound.
Marco:
But the comfort has me concerned enough that I think I wouldn't give it a high chance.
Casey:
So let me take a different approach at this.
Casey:
Who should be buying these?
Casey:
Like, what do you think the AirPods Max are best suited for?
Marco:
Well, ultimately, I think try them.
Marco:
And if they're comfortable on you, great.
Marco:
Like, you know, headphone comfort varies because people are different.
Marco:
We have different shaped heads.
Marco:
We have different shaped ears.
Marco:
We have different preferences.
Marco:
We have, like, it...
Marco:
Some people are going to probably find them comfortable enough.
Marco:
Some people aren't.
Marco:
Comfort is going to be the biggest limiting factor once you get past the massive price and terrible case.
Marco:
Again, they sound great and they function pretty well in most ways.
Marco:
i i wish i could wear them more often but but ultimately the comfort is is a pretty big problem for me but again i'm just one person they might be comfortable on you i don't know so all i can say is go into it with you know with that potential warning in mind that the comfort might not work for you or it might and see if it works for you and if it works for you good you know more power to you it sounds like the target market is someone who values audio quality so all right away you're willing to spend more money even though these are only in
John:
you know, marginally better sounding than, say, the DT770s, right?
John:
And maybe doesn't like things in your ears, which I don't like.
John:
So that rules out the AirPods Pro, right?
John:
And so that's, you know, like if you're in that realm and you're like, well...
John:
I'm not super bargain conscious.
John:
I don't like things in my ears.
John:
I do like the sort of wireless experience, and I want them to sound really good because the only ones of the headphones that you listed that you said you like the sound of better are the way more expensive open-backed, which is a totally different category.
John:
You're not going to use that in an office, right, because it costs loans.
John:
I don't even use it in my office most of the time.
John:
Right, and it mostly rules out travelers because of all the travel issues or whatever, so...
John:
yeah so i mean like the thing i was afraid of with these headphones is that everything we had previously surmised about them would be true and the sound quality would just be like meh right but it sounds like the sound quality is better than meh so now they do have they do have a place in the market maybe not a place for marco who you know has got his green eggs and ham thing going on because he's got too many other headphones and he's got other headphones that he already likes for the other purposes right but most people don't already have like their three favorite headphones for different contexts like
John:
marco you know he's got the airpods pro for walking the dog and for being away from his desk and also on a plane which is weird but that's what he likes and for at the desk he's got his fancier you know open back ones when no one's around or whatever so this thing doesn't have a place in his life but if you have zero over your headphones or you have just let's say you have just the bose ones for an airplane these sound like again if you're willing to spend tons of money for something that sounds good
John:
This could fill the role in your life where I want to listen to music on headphones without disturbing people and I want that music to sound really good and I'm an Apple user.
Marco:
Yeah, basically.
Marco:
But only if the comfort works for you and only if the price works for you.
Marco:
And those are two pretty big ifs.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, the comfort, I think, is also part of the context of comfort is how long do you expect to be wearing them?
John:
If you're going to be, you know, in the olden times, at your desk all day long in a stupid open office where you have to wear them for eight hours, comfort is super important.
John:
But if you're just going to wear them, you know, to listen to some tunes while you fiddle on your computer for 45 minutes, comfort, maybe you're more flexible on that, right?
John:
Maybe, you know, maybe it's not as big a deal that after three hours they start weighing on you, right?
John:
And the magnetically attachable headphones thing, that makes me... I mean, it's probably going to be expensive, but...
John:
surely they'll be knockoff third-party something or other earpieces.
John:
Because as I found out when I'm looking for earpieces for my DT770s, there's a big market for replacement ear things for headphones.
John:
And this sounds like a goldmine, because if you can just make some knockoff ones that sort of kind of fit in there with the magnets and charge everybody a ridiculous amount for them, someone's going to buy the leatherette or plush velvet replacement ear cups.
John:
And the good thing about them is they'll be way easier to replace than on your average headphone.
John:
You've got to do that stupid thing with the little...
John:
flange rim and you're trying to carefully put it around like yeah some headphones are better than others some actually do have a mechanical thing but these are super easy just yank these things off and throw other ones on and if it turns out that that is your main comfort issue scratchy fabric or and that doesn't distribute the weight and you get a pad that is a nice fabric or a leather that has a bigger contact patch and tire parlance maybe that solves the comfort problem for you
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I hope that kind of thing develops.
Marco:
Like, I hope there is some kind of ecosystem for third-party ones, but I don't know that there will be.
Marco:
I mean, I thought there would be a lot of third-party AirPods Pro tips, and there really aren't.
John:
There's at least one brand that we keep hearing about our friends recommending for the AirPods Pros.
John:
What are those?
John:
The Foam Pro?
John:
uh airpod pro tips yeah i know what you're thinking of i can't remember what they're called yeah so we'll see but yeah ultimately i i'm impressed in so many ways by parts of this product and and other parts just seem so bizarrely unimpressive yeah the thing i was thinking about when in between these two shows when we talked about this like because i was thinking about the fact that we spent an entire previous episode talking about a product that none of us had and then people like oh how can you talk about you don't even have it but
John:
There's this phenomenon.
John:
You'll experience this if you ever work for any company that releases anything to the public or in general and puts anything out to the public.
John:
When you're working on a thing, whether it's a software product or a real world physical product or whatever it is, you're like you're you're on a small team or even if you're in a big company, but there's a finite set of people who's working on this thing.
John:
And you're doing your best you can.
John:
You're trying to make it the best you can within the time and the budget.
John:
And you're thinking about all the different features and the things that it has or whatever.
John:
But you're only 10 people, 20 people, 100 people, however many people you are.
John:
And you have weirdly aligned objectives.
John:
If you're a manager, if you're a developer, if you're a product marketer, you're looking at it from your perspective within the context of the people making this thing.
John:
It's true of movies, true of podcasts or whatever.
John:
And when you put it out into the world, the reason the wisdom of crowds is like we make fun of that saying, but the reason it's a saying is because you put it out into the world and it takes like 39 seconds for out of the 2 billion people that see it, if you're Apple, because you put out something and everybody sees it, a fraction of a percent look at it and immediately say...
John:
Oh, well, here are some three obvious problems we think.
John:
That case is terrible.
John:
The thing should fold tighter.
John:
Your competitors fold tighter.
John:
Why doesn't it come with a cable?
John:
Like, how many people, if you heard us say it last week, how many other places did you see that?
John:
You saw it on Twitter.
John:
You saw it on every tech website.
John:
You saw it on every review, right?
John:
How is it that Apple developed this product in-house for months or years?
John:
and either didn't know about this or didn't think it was that a big deal and the second we get to see it not even touch it reviewers don't even have it we just look at it and you can just look at it with your eyes and go oh no what's going on with that case because you can look at it and like we did last show say here's my knowledge of the existing market here's how that thing looks like it works and i can imagine it has problems and lo and behold people get them and they all say that
John:
And you might think, oh, Apple's so dumb.
John:
Don't they know the thing that everyone else immediately realizes that's wrong with their product?
John:
But I can tell you as someone who's produced things to put them out to the world, the answer is sometimes no.
John:
Like you're just so, you have such a different perspective on it when you're making it.
John:
very often you can convince yourself that one thing you think is super important and the other thing you think is not that important and you get it wrong because you're a small set of people with a limited perspective.
John:
And the wisdom of crowds is as soon as you put your product out into the real world, if there's some stupid thing about it, they'll find it before they even touch your product.
John:
Uh, and you know, obviously the better you are at it, the fewer of those that you have.
John:
And it's great when you nail it all in the first try, but there's a reason there are revisions and iterations of products.
John:
So yeah,
John:
You know, we look at this headphone and we go like Apple before we even release that.
John:
I'll let you finish.
John:
But let me tell you the five things that are wrong with those headphones.
John:
Maybe wait and revise, like maybe include a hard case, maybe include that cable, maybe ditch whatever that case thing is or whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
It's so easy to sort of armchair quarterback that.
John:
But.
John:
That's how we judge a product, right?
John:
How many things did they get right?
John:
How many sort of unforced errors did they make?
John:
And it sounds like these headphones, like a lot of things that Marco was talking about that he really loved, surely people spent a huge amount of time getting that right.
John:
Doing the dynamic EQ in the sound stage and adjusting it so that it essentially sounds to Marco like it is a nice V-shape to EQ.
John:
Whatever it's doing, whatever computerized crap that it's doing, they probably spent so much time on that because they're like, this is our number one priority.
John:
And maybe they spent less time on the case, right?
John:
Maybe they didn't think too much about that.
John:
Or maybe there was some other thing that was, you know, like...
John:
And even though these flaws are obvious to us, when you're working on it, you're like, but we did so good on the sound.
John:
I'm like, yeah, yeah, but if the whole world looks at your product and can immediately see a couple of big problems, you've got to work on those for the next revision.
John:
So I have hope, some hope, that
John:
Apple will take what seems like fairly uniform feedback, like, we appreciate the things that you did well, here's some small areas where you can do better, and come up with a Rev.
John:
2 or Rev.
John:
3 of these, like all the other products you just described, like the Sonys have changed a little bit and the Bose have changed a lot, and, you know, sometimes for the worse.
John:
But anyway, feed this back in and come up with a second and third revision of these, assuming this product is successful enough for them to have a second and third revision.
John:
to just tweak the few things that are wrong and keep the things that are good about it.
John:
And that can really elevate this from a product that has a very narrow appeal, especially at the given price, to one that is easier to recommend people with fewer caveats.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my servers and for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
So Marco, I don't really know why you brought your iMac Pro to Apple because clearly if you just uninstalled Chrome, all your problems would go away.
John:
Part of the magic of this program is that very often we put something into the show notes and
John:
And if you just leave it there long enough without getting to it because you're talking about other things, the story develops and sometimes even almost resolves itself on its own.
John:
And here I think this topic benefited from us not talking about it immediately because I think now we have more information than we did before.
Marco:
It's kind of like how if you just don't answer email, most of the need for it just goes away after a few days.
Marco:
Before we get to this, yes, everyone, thank you for telling me about this.
Marco:
I am aware.
Marco:
And while I think it was not the problem on my iMac Pro because they did their firmware diagnostic and found that it's not software-related and that something is wrong with the logic board, apparently, with controlling its thermals, I
Marco:
This might have actually been the problem with my 16 inch back.
Marco:
I did like a full OS restore reinstall on my 16 inch a few months back, which was a huge pain in the butt because it was having all the problems that Lauren reports that his 2015 or his wife's 2015 computer having of like just everything slow, like slow keystrokes.
Marco:
Even like I was having bizarre problems on that and I could not figure out why.
Marco:
And unfortunately, I can't test this theory on that because I already got tired of it and blew it away.
Marco:
And it didn't have those problems after I did an OS reinstall.
Marco:
But it was bad.
Marco:
I've never had to do that on a Mac before or since to solve a problem like that in that way.
John:
You mentioned Lauren.
John:
What we're talking about here, for people who haven't already been following this story, is Lauren Brichter, a famous developer of Tweety, inventor of Pull to Refresh.
John:
generally a technically knowledgeable person, was having problems with his Mac.
John:
And he turns out that uninstalling Chrome and all the crap that Google uses to control and update Chrome solved his problem.
John:
He made a website, chromeisbad.com.
John:
Chrome is bad is all one word, where he describes his problem.
John:
He describes how to implement the solution and has a bunch of testimonials from other people who had similar problems.
John:
And this whole story set off just this big chain of people discussing it.
John:
Many people saying, I went to your website.
John:
I'm having similar problems.
John:
My computer seems slow.
John:
The fans run all the time.
John:
It's just generally crappy.
John:
I followed your instructions.
John:
I uninstalled Chrome.
John:
I uninstalled the Keystone updater that Google installs that updates Chrome behind the scenes.
John:
And it solved my problem.
John:
And then other people are like, okay, sure, but what actually is the problem?
John:
What symptoms are you seeing beyond my computer seems slow?
John:
And what is it about the steps that you took that solve that problem?
John:
And despite this story having been stewing for a week now, two weeks, whatever it's been, we don't have a great answer to that question.
John:
I think there are a couple things at play here.
John:
One is
John:
This is revealing sort of the dark matter of computer dissatisfaction where people have Macs, right?
John:
And the Macs are unsatisfactory in some way.
John:
They always run hot.
John:
The fan is always going.
John:
They always seem slow.
John:
They're just unsatisfying in a way.
John:
Often it's in a way that's a difference from a change.
John:
It's like when the doctor asked you, have you seen any change in your health recently?
John:
They just want to know, is it different than it used to be?
John:
right that the people don't expect it to be like this like marco said maybe typing is slow and you're like typing is slow like like what's going on there maybe you hear the fans all the time you're like i don't feel like i'm doing anything that's making the fans go and maybe that's a change from previous behavior right so there's there's this dissatisfaction right and then that someone comes along and says i had similar problems
John:
In that, here is my vaguely expressed dissatisfaction on my computer.
John:
Seems slow, fans running all the time, right?
John:
Here's what I did.
John:
And it's like, uninstall some third party program that a bunch of people already don't like for various reasons.
John:
And by the way, the final step of this cleansing is to reboot your computer.
John:
And if you do all these steps, it's like you have a new computer.
John:
Your fans don't run high anymore.
John:
Your typing is fast and responsive.
John:
Everything is snappy.
John:
And then a bunch of people follow those steps and write in and say, hey, I did that and it worked for me.
John:
And for, you know, for the people who did that, great.
John:
Like they, presumably, solved whatever problem they were having by doing this thing, right?
John:
Now, maybe three days later, the problem came back.
John:
You probably don't hear about it then, but, right?
John:
But at least there was some positive thing.
John:
But the question any technically minded person has is, okay,
John:
But what was the actual problem?
John:
And what was the actual solution?
John:
I can tell you now that sometimes when your computer gets into a weird state, as we all know, rebooting it, especially if you have your Mac configured not to relaunch all the programs that you were previously running, rebooting to the Finder with no apps running...
John:
And no swap in use, right?
John:
Wow, everything is like the fans are low and everything feels snappy.
John:
Yeah, because you're not doing anything on your computer yet.
John:
Maybe after a week when you relaunch all your programs and compile everything and get four gigs into swap, maybe you're, you know, it starts feeling slow again, right?
John:
We don't know.
John:
What we want to look for is what is the cause?
John:
and chrome being the idea like i uninstalled it and that fixed all my problems it's like okay but what was the actual problem that i can tell you from personal experience one chrome related problem i see a lot is guess what you've got a million chrome windows not on my computer my wife's computer got a million chrome windows you would never have a million chrome windows
John:
I do, but here's the important distinction.
John:
None of those windows are showing Facebook in any form or a page with crazy ads that go nuts.
John:
Like, you know, in the middle of the night, some tab in some background window, a background tab and a background Chrome window has some ad in it that decides, you know what?
John:
100% CPU.
John:
Is it Bitcoin mining?
John:
Who knows what the hell it's doing?
John:
But it's always an...
John:
Chrome itself has like a task manager inside Chrome to tell you which tabs are being naughty, which I feel like if you know which tabs are being naughty, like suspend them.
John:
And there's a Chrome extension that will do that for you and suspend all your background tabs.
John:
But anyway, I'll go there.
John:
I'll do that.
John:
I'll find the three Facebook tags that are, for whatever reason, are freaking out because some ad running in the sidebar is Bitcoin mining.
John:
And I'll close those tabs.
John:
And then suddenly all the fans go back down.
John:
right so that is a way that chrome can be a culprit if you uninstall chrome or if you simply don't run chrome you will never have an open chrome tab with a crazy bitcoin mining ad right or just some web page that goes nuts and starts just grinding your cpu forever and that will make your fans spin up and so on and so forth right so that's one thing that could be solving these people's problem and by the way safari is way nicer to your battery is way better on your cpu and
John:
If you care about that at all, do not use Chrome, especially if you have a laptop and battery, use Safari.
John:
It is better on your battery than Chrome.
John:
The other thing is this Keystone thing that updates Chrome in the background for you.
John:
Some people say, look, I'm not even running Chrome, but Keystone is doing something terrible on my computer.
John:
The second I removed Keystone, everything got better.
John:
And one of the culprits they label is the Windows Server, which is part of the Mac operating system.
John:
Its job is to composite the various buffers that you see that make up the windows on the screen, right?
Right.
John:
that it would be using a huge amount of CPU.
John:
And they're like, I uninstalled Chrome and Keystone and Windows Server CPU usage went down.
John:
Lots of people say that.
John:
Lots of people say that my computer was running hot.
John:
I'm not doing anything.
John:
I open up Activity Monitor and I see Windows Server taking 100% CPU.
John:
Uninstall Chrome and it solved that problem.
John:
Maybe.
John:
Maybe it did.
John:
But again, as technically minding people, we want to know, yeah, but how?
John:
Like, how did a program that's not running make Windows Server go nuts?
John:
And there's one theory, and this unfortunately is still on ChromeIsBad.com, I think.
John:
Let me just double check.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Something called Keystone.
John:
This is the top of the site, which bizarrely hides what it's doing from activity monitor.
John:
There's a footnote now.
John:
What does it say?
John:
Hiding from activity monitor?
John:
Inconceivable.
John:
Trust me, I know computers.
John:
correct the keystone updater process itself doesn't hide from activity monitor it briefly shows up and disappears on schedule that is not the issue it is causing something else in the system to consume massive cpu that leaves no indication that chrome and keystone are in fact the culprits all right yeah well that's an interesting theory but you kind of have to say but how does it do that how does a program that runs briefly and when it runs it does not hide from activity monitor it runs it appears and then it quits the whole point is it's checking for updates
John:
How does the act of running and then not running at all cause Windows Server forevermore to flip out?
John:
Is it plausible that that can happen?
John:
Sure.
John:
Trigger bug in the OS.
John:
Call some private API that makes Windows Server freak out and go into an infinite loop.
John:
Could happen.
John:
But we don't know that that's what's happening yet.
John:
and there are many counterexamples as in everyone else who's running chrome where key server the keystone thing runs periodically on its own and it doesn't make their windows server freak out i run chrome 24 hours a day seven days a week on my computer keystone presumably is running in the background
John:
my windows server never freaks out doesn't mean this bug doesn't exist just means i'm not experiencing it so the people who are experiencing it are you know getting this bug they're getting unlucky they have a problematic setup the thing i haven't seen anyone to mention yet although if you do some googling you can find it when chrome auto updates itself at various times it has done weird things behind the scenes like archiving previous versions of itself and keeping state around about how many different versions it is updated from and stuff
John:
Or it would fill your disk with old versions of Chrome or get its database of what versions it's dealt with corrupted and flip out about that.
John:
So I don't find it entirely inconceivable that the Chrome updater and all of its bookkeeping can end up getting into a state where the auto updater itself does bad things or spins for a while or fruitlessly tries to get an update that it's never going to be able to get or otherwise, you know, spins its wheels.
John:
um and one thing related someone uh installed uh another chromium based browser i think it was uh that was brave i think and their like new their default new tab page uh was making windows server goes nuts and if you turn on like the quartz debug uh thing which shows you screen updates you could see that the
John:
the default like new tab page and brave was redrawing itself like as fast as it possibly could over and over and over again which was basically asking windows server hey composite this buffer hey composite this buffer hey composite this buffer over and over and over again as fast as it possibly can that if you ever see windows server going up in cpu something is asking the windows server to composite buffers or do some screen related window compositing thing over and over and over again and if you're looking at your screen you're like but nothing's happening it's possible that some program somewhere
John:
maybe even something that's not even visible is flipping out and doing something wrong that's causing the windows server cpu to increase right so unfortunately maybe we didn't wait long enough this is not a particularly we don't have a conclusion no one knows what the actual problem is no one knows if chrome is involved at all we do know that if you follow a bunch of these steps that can make your computer feel better so can just rebooting
John:
so can just quitting all of your programs so can logging out and logging back in right so can just not using chrome and using safari instead because chrome in general is more of a cpu hog right but none of that is satisfying like we people want there to be a culprit it's because i had a problem i took steps the problem is gone therefore the steps i took uh exactly correlate to fixing the problem maybe they do but with computers and with programmers you kind of want to know yeah
John:
Yeah, but why?
John:
But how?
John:
But what actually happened, right?
John:
What is the bug?
John:
Now, we don't know that.
John:
We don't have the source code to Keystone.
John:
And honestly, it's not our problem to figure that out.
John:
If there really is a problem with Chrome, it should be the Chrome team's job to figure it out, right?
John:
And there have been bugs in Chrome many, many times.
John:
There's bugs in all sorts of programs.
John:
But when it's a general malaise, as in my computer is unsatisfactory in some way,
John:
There are so many things that can be from spider eggs to malware to like just, you know, a bad tab open in Chrome to who knows what.
John:
Like we've all had processes go awry or things freak out that are part of the operating system or third party software or drivers or flaky USB device like computers are really complicated.
John:
so i am immediately suspicious of anyone pinning blame on any one particular thing especially when they can't tell me what the actual problem is again it's not their responsibility to tell me but if you're going to conclusively say chrome is the problem uninstall chrome and it will fix your computer and if it doesn't uh i don't care because it fixed my computer i don't know like i'm not here to carry water for chrome even though i use it all the time and i like it um but
John:
I feel like this is an unsatisfying technical mystery.
John:
Like the most satisfying ones are the ones where your computer is doing something weird and someone eventually figures out what the problem is.
John:
The less satisfying ones are my computer is doing something weird and I found a solution, but I don't know why it worked.
John:
And that's the situation we're in now.
John:
There is a problem.
John:
There's a vaguely specified problem.
John:
There is a very cleanly specified solution, but there is no explanation for why it worked other than those steps I took.
John:
They must have stopped something from doing something that was bad.
Casey:
I know there's a lot of people who swear it's true though.
John:
I mean, like what can be true is I did the thing and my computer got better, but that doesn't, that doesn't, you can't jump from that to say, therefore Keystone is nefarious and doing something there, but you can't even jump to therefore Keystone has a bug.
John:
We don't even know if Keystone, for all we know, the Windows server has a bug triggered by Keystone doing perfectly normal things.
John:
Like if you don't know what the problem is, you don't know where to assign blame.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, that explanation wouldn't surprise me in the least because I haven't used Big Sur for enough time to know if this is still true on Big Sur, but for Catalina, I have never had a macOS version
Marco:
have as many problems as catalina has in specifically this kind of area of like random performance slowdowns for no apparent reason that are solved by rebooting and oftentimes you know correlating to background demons just going nuts for no apparent reason like the other day i posted a screenshot on twitter like about you know like all the high cpu usage and
Marco:
the handful of Catalina background demons that were seemingly consuming all these things for no reason.
Marco:
And one of them was Dropbox.
Marco:
So everyone's like, oh yeah, Dropbox.
Marco:
Well, I quit Dropbox and a half hour later, those same system processes were still like spinning 100% CPU each.
Marco:
And so I eventually rebooted and of course the problem went away.
Marco:
And this is like...
Marco:
It doesn't matter.
Marco:
I don't know whose fault this is.
Marco:
I don't know, as you were saying, John, I don't know if this is like a bug in the OS or a certain way that certain apps that I have installed, like whether it's Dropbox or Chrome or whatever, a certain way that they trigger bugs in the OS.
Marco:
I don't know, but it is a real problem, and these solutions do often fix it.
Marco:
From my point of view as a user, it's like, well, look, you guys figure this out.
Marco:
Apple, Dropbox, Chrome, whoever you are, figure it out amongst yourselves.
Marco:
This is your fault in some way, but it becomes my problem as a user, and I have to take measures to deal with it.
Marco:
We don't know enough to assign blame, but it does seem like there is a real problem here that many people face that is solved by removing Chrome.
John:
I mean, but there's a million problems that are potentially solved by a million things, including the rebooting, which is the final step.
John:
So we don't even know if it's just one thing.
John:
Like you said, if it's an OS-level problem, there's a little bit of the doctor hurts when I did this, then don't do this thing.
John:
It's like, well, when I use my computer, occasionally background demons freak out and cause high CPU load.
John:
It's like, well, just don't use your computer.
John:
You won't have that problem.
John:
Yeah.
John:
If you think it's some piece of third-party software and you stop using that software, but then it happens again, what do you do?
John:
I'll just stop using my computer.
John:
I'll just stop using Finder.
John:
I'll just stop using a web browser.
John:
When there are OS-level bugs, especially if those OS-level bugs are triggered by completely valid, normal, non-nefarious application behavior, any application you run can potentially trigger that bug, whether it's DiscoveryD freaking out and not looking up names or whatever.
John:
That's the nature of OS bugs, and they will manifest essentially no matter what.
John:
If there's just one program triggering it and Chrome triggers it, but like Brave or Edge don't or Safari doesn't, then yeah, you solve your problem by saying it hurts when I do this.
John:
Okay, well, don't do that.
John:
Don't use Chrome.
John:
Use something else, right?
John:
But you still don't know what the actual problem is.
John:
The thing about like Dropbox and stuff is it's somewhat satisfying to at least have a plausible theory.
John:
Dropbox, to know when things happen on disk, has to monitor changes in the Dropbox folder.
John:
And there are a bunch of APIs for doing that.
John:
but one of them is essentially to drink from the FSEvents fire hose, which is just like, look, Apple operating system, just tell me everything that happens related to the file system, and I'll figure out whether I care about it or not, right?
John:
And doing that is expensive, because if you do something that does a lot to the file system, say expanding Xcode, which creates a bazillion files,
John:
Every single one of those bazillion files is firing off an FS event and Dropbox is there running and saying, oh my God, look at all these events.
John:
Do I care about this one?
John:
No.
John:
Do I care about this one?
John:
No.
John:
Do I care about this one?
John:
No.
John:
And that burns CPU.
John:
And so when you're running Dropbox and you're expanding Xcode and you see your CPU usage going up,
John:
and then you try that same process with Dropbox not running and it gets faster, you have a plausible, somewhat provable theory of what's happening because you can run strace on Dropbox when you're expanding Xcode and watch it calling the FS events.
John:
That is much more satisfying when it's just like...
John:
My computer does weird things and I can't figure out why it can be so many things.
John:
And that's why the sort of the anecdotes of I followed your instructions and it made it better is very much like, I mean, you can make a bending instruction, stand on one foot, touch your nose and reboot your computer.
John:
And it's like, oh, everything got better.
John:
Well, yeah, rebooting your computer fixes a lot of problems.
John:
It's not it's not very satisfying.
John:
but it's true but if i tell you do anything before you reboot or let's say you don't reboot just quitting program solves lots of problems because if you quit the program that was causing a problem or that one program was using a lot of memory it put you it pushed you into swap and that was your problem everything got slow because it's swapping right even though you have an ssd swapping is still bad and you can get into a bad way like people aren't equipped and shouldn't be have to be equipped to diagnose their computer anymore they know what that weird noise is under the hood of their car
John:
right?
John:
They just know that something is wrong.
John:
And that's why you take your car to someone who knows or you hope like Apple or the developers figure out how to make it so there aren't problems.
John:
But anytime someone comes up with like a, you know, try this one weird trick to fix your computer, the chances of that one weird trick being the solution to everyone's problem is very, very low and more likely literally doing anything to your computer to perturb what you were doing before.
John:
Doctor, it hurts when I do this.
John:
Stop doing that.
John:
Hey, it solved my problem.
John:
So I don't like the idea that people are thinking this was the solution.
John:
I do like the idea that people are having a better experience with their computers, but we won't make forward progress in our computers getting better unless somebody...
John:
able to figure out what's going on right like apple figured out hey discovery d not so good we gotta we gotta fix that if instead apple's like oh i don't know it's just some vague problem we can't figure it out it had to be pinpointed had to say this is the thing that's wrong because when i swap it for the old thing all of a sudden my whole computer gets better and it's not because you're running a web browser and it's not because you're doing this it's because there's an os level component that's hosed right that's the solution i want to see or
John:
explanation right either someone's using a private api someone's doing something to trigger a bug in the os but someone has to figure this out and just not running chrome the world's most popular web browser i think is probably not the best solution so either chrome's got to figure it out or apple's got to figure out or someone's got to figure out so i really hope all the people who are following the instructions that i think are on this website or at least tweeted of like how to provide diagnostic information to the chrome team
John:
The Chrome team is like, look, if you think it's us, like help us help you.
John:
We want to fix this too, but we need to know that it's us first.
John:
And it's a difficult situation because as Marco always says, like it's not his job to help Apple debug their crap.
John:
But on the other hand, if nobody does it, nothing ever gets fixed.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode, Mack Weldon, and Flatfile.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You, too, can join at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thank you, and we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't
Casey:
You know, in our super secret private chat, copyright due by Friday, Marco had said in exasperation a couple of days ago, you know, screw it.
Casey:
Maybe I'll just go get an XDR.
Casey:
And it occurred to me in our super secret private chat, and I said to you, Marco, that you getting the XDR first and then saying, well, I mean, I have this XDR.
Casey:
I've got to get a Mac Pro to match it.
Casey:
That was not the route I expected you to take.
Marco:
God, I have never wanted more for Apple to just make the monitor I want.
Marco:
There's such a giant hole in the market, especially now as they've just released these amazingly compelling laptops and Mac minis.
Marco:
And there is not yet a similarly compelling iMac or Mac Pro.
Marco:
So many people want to be using these brand new laptops and Mac minis
John:
as their desktops all of a sudden and the only option is either this terrible lg monitor or apple's seven thousand dollar monster i mean the only reason they all want them is because these are the only r max that are out and they're the low-end ones and i like i think everyone who's like i'm gonna use a fanless air as my main computer that that instinct that desire that whole thing is just going to go away as soon as apple releases the presumably much faster much better much you know much better suited to people's needs pro
Marco:
arm max and then and then you say hey i thought you were going to use your arm as your as your main computer like yeah but now the iMac is out yeah and that's the thing like and i right now i am using my amazing little fanless mac mini as my main computer and you know there are some things about it that are not as fast as they could be but i think most of that is most of that feels like software for
Marco:
problems honestly it doesn't feel like hardware there's still a lot of stuff that is that is not optimized for apple silicon that that i'm that kind of surprises me like like dropbox they claim that it works but it doesn't like if you look in activity monitor it still says different intel binaries um one password and all of its sub processes are still not um i can't run call recorder at all for skype because that's that's not at all compatible yet um
Marco:
So there's certain things about it that are weird and not yet optimized.
Marco:
Yes, I am fully aware that my own two Mac apps are also not optimized, but that doesn't really matter because they work fine.
John:
Wait, why aren't your two Mac apps optimized?
John:
Why don't you just recompile them?
Marco:
Quitter, I haven't touched Quitter in so long.
Marco:
I bet it will be an ordeal to do it because now I have to deal with things like notarization and all that other stuff.
John:
It'll be fine.
Marco:
forecast uses the um the mp3 encoding library lame uh and i and it like it uses one that's built from homebrew and so i kind of have to like i think i assume i have to wait for that to be easily buildable on our max and it isn't yet as far as i have does it does it run it in a separate process or is it all in process no it's in process but it's separately built dilib yeah all right well that one's going to be a pain but i think quite right you would just be a matter of recompiling
Marco:
But it also doesn't matter.
Marco:
I don't even run quitter anymore myself, honestly.
Marco:
It's kind of abandoned.
Marco:
You quit quitter.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And forecast should matter.
Marco:
But in practice, you're only running it for a few minutes here and there.
Marco:
And it's so fast anyway.
Marco:
And Rosetta is so fast that in practice, it doesn't really matter.
Marco:
for that app so once it becomes easy to support the encoding library on that on Apple Silicon then I will issue the update but it isn't yet easy and so it's not worth the trouble
Casey:
I want to go back a step, though.
Casey:
I think even though I have used the LG 5K briefly, but many times because my dad has one, I didn't find it nearly as offensive as you.
Casey:
But again, I've only been using it for 10 minutes at a time once every month or two.
Casey:
So this is not extended use by any stretch.
Casey:
But despite that, and even though I don't find it to be that particularly terrible, it does kind of baffle me that Apple doesn't have something less than the Pro Display XDR.
Casey:
And I know we've been around this several times, but I just, I keep coming back to and thinking about, you know, and you guys have said this, other people have said this.
Casey:
One of the great things about Apple in the same way, like with Coca-Cola, and I think John especially said this before, is
Casey:
The president is drinking the same Coke or Diet Coke that I'm drinking.
Casey:
And the president may or may not be using the same iPhone I'm using.
Casey:
And yet Apple, in certain circumstances, much to our request, is reaching into these ridiculous stratospheres where no normal human, other than John Syracuse, is buying a $7,000 monitor for his home computer.
Casey:
Like, why would you do that?
Casey:
That's ridiculous.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And so I don't begrudge them having the Pro Display XDR because we told them we want professionals to feel catered.
Casey:
And they said, okay, well, here you go.
Casey:
You know, now we're catering to professionals.
Casey:
But that kind of attainable, if challenging, level that like...
Casey:
I feel like Apple isn't fulfilling that in a lot of spaces right now.
Casey:
And that's very frustrating.
Casey:
And it's like Apple lost a little of that.
Casey:
I keep coming back to prestige.
Casey:
And I don't know if that's the right word for it.
Casey:
But Apple is kind of a prestige brand to some degree.
Casey:
It's a brand that a regular human can reach out and grab.
Casey:
On a regular human income, you know, you don't have to be making $10 million a year to buy a really nice iPhone.
Casey:
And it bums me out that there's no reasonable Apple monitor for these computers that from everything anyone has said are unreal.
Casey:
They're phenomenally great computers.
Casey:
They're bringing back, like I'm listening to my friends and I'm listening to press talk about these computers and there's that like...
Casey:
I mean, it's not a glint in the eye because I'm listening, not seeing these people, but there's that verbal glint, if you will, that this computing got fun again all of a sudden.
Casey:
It's not just incremental every year.
Casey:
This is like, this is fun.
Casey:
This is brand new in a lot of ways.
Casey:
And yet we're mating it to these god-awful displays.
Casey:
And it's just – it stinks.
Casey:
And I guess it would be less offensive if the market as a whole catered to these needs.
Casey:
You know, if there was some $2,000 – and it's not even about the money, but for the sake of discussion – if there's some $2,000 Dell monitor that had like a really nice enclosure and a really nice stand –
Casey:
I can still imagine you guys saying, well, ugh, it's still got the Dell logo on the front, or ugh, I don't really like that it's black and not gray, or ugh, it's plastic, not metal.
Casey:
But still, you know what?
Casey:
It's a great panel.
Casey:
It's a great monitor, so whatever.
Casey:
Not that big a deal.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Marco:
That's exactly what I did.
Marco:
The problem is the direction that the market went.
Marco:
For a while...
Marco:
pre-retina and pre-high dpi for a while the pc monitor market and the mac monitor market was compatible and not only in like the technical sense of it will work but they wanted the same things and the high end was kind of the same or at least like it was a lot closer and and so for a like for before in the pre-retina days like what pc monitors wanted in the 24 inch lcd range
Marco:
was the same thing that Apple monitors wanted in the 24-inch LCD range.
Marco:
And then what happened was Apple went Retina, multiplied everything by 2x, and the PC world didn't.
Marco:
And things have diverged in how each one of these worlds handles high DPI monitors, whether they even want them at all, and then what their priorities are.
Marco:
The PC monitor market is largely either the absolute worst bargain basement crap for business buyers who don't care and just need screens, or
Marco:
Or it's stuff targeted at gamers.
Marco:
And gamers have very, very different priorities.
Marco:
Like for gamers, it's much more about high refresh rates and about, yes, high pixel densities, but not as high as Apple goes because those are harder to drive at high frame rates.
Marco:
And so the markets have diverged now.
Marco:
And so now what Apple users want and need and prioritize is not at all satisfied by what the PC makers are making to satisfy their market.
Marco:
So there's basically no one left to solve this need except either Apple themselves or, in the case of this LG monitor and many of their peripherals by, say, Belkin, some third-party manufacturer where Apple has basically handed someone the parts and market to make the thing themselves that Apple doesn't really want to make.
Marco:
Obviously, these LG monitors were designed with Apple's help.
Marco:
And they're obviously...
Marco:
There might even be a business deal where LG makes these for Apple as part of some contract because Apple wanted this to exist but didn't want to bother having to make and sell it and support it themselves.
Marco:
So who knows how that worked out.
Marco:
But clearly there was some cooperation between the two companies to make this.
Marco:
Same thing with all the stupid little adapters that Apple kind of co-makes with Belkin that Apple doesn't want to sell themselves.
Marco:
And yeah, so that's what happened with the monitors.
Marco:
And it's a shame because if the monitor situation was better, if Apple still did what they did forever, which is sell a good monitor in the, you know, 27 inch to 30 inch range for, you know, 1500 bucks, 1200 bucks, whatever it would be.
Marco:
That would be amazing.
Marco:
And the panel that they could sell is what they've been shipping in the iMac since 2014.
Marco:
This is not new.
Marco:
It's not like the technology is just cutting edge and they can only fit it in an iMac.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Maybe that might have been true in 2014, but that's not true now.
Marco:
Because obviously LG can make it.
Marco:
Obviously Apple can make it too.
Marco:
And it's just so frustrating that they're just choosing not to.
Marco:
I like what you said about they are leaving these huge gaps.
Marco:
I've kind of thought when looking at certain products, when looking at
Marco:
the AirPods pro max for sure.
Marco:
Uh, when looking at, uh, certainly the pro display XDR, the Mac pro, uh, and even, you know, like their accessories business, like all the, the weird, super expensive iPad cases and stuff, the super expensive, um, MagSafe double charger thing, the duo that doesn't include the power break.
Marco:
Like it almost seems like there's two apples.
Marco:
Like there's one, one side of the company, uh,
Marco:
is getting pretty good or has been pretty good at delivering decent value and there's other side not only are they not even trying but like it's almost spiteful how bad of a value they're delivering or how how much of a market they are intentionally leaving totally unaddressed but i don't think that's necessarily profitable like
Marco:
You know what happens when Apple charges $129 for a little bedside charger?
Marco:
Most people don't get forced into buying it and go, I guess I'll reluctantly give Apple $129.
Marco:
No, they just buy something else from some third party on Amazon for cheap.
Marco:
That's what actually happens here.
Marco:
If somebody needs a monitor,
Marco:
And the only one Apple sells is $7,000.
Marco:
Almost nobody except jerks like me and John are going to be like, okay, I guess I'll buy that reluctantly.
Marco:
No, most people are like, well, I'm just not going to buy that no matter what you say or do or no matter what I need.
Marco:
So I'm going to find other options.
Marco:
And it's a shame because that's really just lost business for Apple at the end of the day.
Marco:
And it's worse products for everyone else.
John:
But not much lost business.
John:
Like that's the reason.
John:
Like the thinking that leads them not to make that thing is the same thinking that leads them not to make Wi-Fi routers and all these other things where even Wi-Fi routers had a bigger mark in this.
John:
Like most computers Apple sells come with monitors.
John:
The ones that don't are the Mac Pro, which is now you're already in the market for a $7,000 monitor.
John:
So that's a perfect match set there.
John:
No, there's no discontinuity there, right?
John:
The Mac Mini, which is like, well, that's a weird ass computer that nobody uses and, you know, let them fend for themselves.
John:
The whole point is you bring your own monitor and keyboard or use in a data center or whatever.
John:
Definitely like a sideshow.
John:
And then all those people with laptops who just buy Dell 4K monitors that Marco doesn't like because everything is the wrong size, but no one else cares.
John:
Or they buy those really big wide monitors.
John:
Like that overlap between like what the PC monitor market is.
John:
...fits fine for people who just... ...who want one of those big curved monitors... ...and don't care and hook it up to their laptop.
John:
And so what's left?
John:
What's left is weird people... ...and now weird people like Marco or me conceivably... ...where you have this very specific desire.
John:
Like you buy a monitor to list computer from Apple... ...or you want to use it with your laptop...
John:
but you don't want any of the PC ones because you don't like the curves and you want the DPI to be what you expect it to be.
John:
And it's like, it's getting narrower and narrower.
John:
And it's like, I feel like Apple learned from making like the Thunderbolt display, the 24, 27 inch Thunderbolt display and a 24 inch Apple LED display before that, that they just don't sell a lot of those monitors because people look at those just like the weird $129 bedside thing.
John:
They're like, eh, I'll pass.
John:
I'll buy a Dell monitor, right?
John:
And who's left?
John:
Just, you know,
John:
Just the people who want an external monitor, which is already a fraction of a fraction, and just the people who are willing to pay the, admittedly not ridiculous, Apple premium for a monitor instead of just buying the cheap Dell that is the wrong shape or whatever.
John:
So the bean counter perspective on why they don't make this make sense
John:
Same way it does for getting out of printers or Wi-Fi routers or whatever, because everyone looks at the Wi-Fi router and they're like, oh, I like that one, but I'll just buy the cheaper Linksys router, right?
John:
But the thing that everyone's missing, the bean counter perspective missing, is sometimes you've got to make products that don't particularly make sense on a spreadsheet.
John:
just to give a better sort of cohesive product story, right?
John:
It satisfies your most loyal, most stupid customers who are willing to spend tons of money.
John:
They become evangelists for your brand.
John:
And even if you lose money in every single one of those 5K Apple displays that you make, in the grand scheme of things, in the long run, it helps your business.
John:
And that pitch is the one that you need to make inside Apple to make this happen.
John:
And it seems like
John:
that pitch has been a tougher and tougher sell.
John:
I mean, it's the same kind of pitch that made Apple take its eye off the Mac.
John:
It's like, yeah, but we make our money off the iPhone and we just need to satisfy existing Mac users of some minimal level.
John:
And they learned that lesson of like, no, you actually have to, you have to put more in than you think to the Mac market, even though when you, you know, when you look at those line graphs, like the Mac is in the mix with like, I don't know, like,
John:
But whatever other products that it's in the mix with, it's like the iPhone and now services and then the other products Apple makes.
John:
Charging bricks and also the Mac, right?
John:
That's kind of the same level of stuff.
John:
But it's like sometimes you have to spend more than it seems like it's worth.
John:
to keep the ball rolling, right?
John:
And they learned it on the Mac, but they haven't learned it on the sort of accessories thing, the sort of the idea that you want to provide a holistic Apple experience.
John:
Steve Jobs seemed to be into that because he liked the idea of being able to sell you all the things, even though the vast majority of customers aren't going to buy all the things, right?
John:
But having all the things on offer, I think makes your product and brand more valuable.
John:
I mean, obviously you have to draw the line somewhere, like probably Apple shouldn't be making printers anymore, right?
John:
but a monitor for your computers that matches them that almost nobody's going to buy, that you already have the panels for that you're using in your iMacs, right?
John:
That I feel like is a small reach.
John:
Just make an iMac no chin, no computer guts.
John:
Like it's right there.
John:
It's not that much more.
John:
And you're like, but I can't justify those development expenses.
John:
No, you probably can't.
John:
You're probably not going to make it back, right?
John:
But do it anyway because it makes your most loyal customers happy and it looks good in product shots and consider it part of your marketing budget.
John:
There, Apple, there's my pitch.
John:
Hire me.