A Mental Laxative
John:
i know i just gotta just gonna get on all on the same page and get the balls rolling agreed love those balls see if someone other than marco edited the show that little clip would be like at the beginning or the end of the show oh without question without question it's just just want to point that out
John:
so this apple event kind of came out of nowhere like what it's not an event we had an item in the notes that you know now is moved and should be deleted i'll go to that now that was like oh rumor is that there won't be an october event it will just be a bunch of products uh you know put out into the world through a press release but we never got to that topic and that's what happened so if you didn't see that topic down in the notes marker you might not have known this was happening i saw that you were like doing something else and when you came back online you're like wow new apple products but everyone else knew it was happening
Marco:
Yeah, that's literally what happened.
Marco:
I was deep in work mode, which, by the way, it's going amazingly.
Marco:
I decided to try this other product.
Marco:
I mentioned last week that I was making this dumb little app for sand drivers here to share condition reports with each other.
Marco:
This is an app that's going to be used by maybe 15 people.
Marco:
It's not a major audience or business kind of thing.
Marco:
However...
Marco:
I'm using it in part as a break from Overcast, both to regroup after a very difficult summer of nothing working that I was doing, that was very demoralizing, and also to help me learn all the new stuff.
Marco:
I'm doing everything in Swift, SwiftUI, and the new Swift concurrency stuff, all the async, everything.
Marco:
And it is glorious.
Marco:
Because what I'm making, effectively, is the kind of app that is simple enough that it's almost like the WWDC video, or the example apps they make, where it's like, oh, I have this simple JSON list that my web service is dumping out, and I have to show it in a UI, basically.
Marco:
They're a little fancy.
John:
Wasn't the food truck app actually had a lot of screens and features this past year?
Marco:
Yeah, well, and it turns out, you know, everything... Like, part of what I'm doing requires location access.
Marco:
And talk about, like, needing some UI there, like, to try to manage those permissions and getting the user to understand what's going on, especially because for it to work really well, I want some people to use the always location access.
Casey:
Ooh, uh-oh.
Marco:
And good luck, like...
Marco:
That's a whole thing.
Marco:
Apple really does not want you to do that, and they really make it difficult.
Marco:
But anyway, which is probably for the best, honestly.
Marco:
But anyway, using SwiftUI and doing all this stuff, using all the async stuff, oh, it's finally coming together.
Marco:
It's finally clicking.
Marco:
My journey with both Swift itself and certainly with SwiftUI and more recently the async stuff that I barely have used yet, it really has felt like
Marco:
I was going to say starting a car in fifth gear, but... That's not at all what you mean.
Marco:
I know what you mean, but that's not what you mean.
Marco:
That metaphor is difficult in part because my start was even slower and in part because I don't even know how many gears modern cars have.
Marco:
oh god like when fifth was the highest gear it's like starting a car in fifth gear and that was back when engines sucked too and so they were not very powerful and unless you had a fairly hefty uh you know grunt there that was fairly difficult to do that's not to say i never did it but just a bit as you start out really slow and maybe you stall a few times and then but eventually if you keep at it you can build up quite some speed
Marco:
It takes a long time.
Marco:
Well, anyway, that's how I started all this stuff.
Marco:
And by hopping out briefly of my massive legacy code base and just trying something brand new from scratch, the way we, quote, should be doing it now at the most modern way,
Marco:
oh my god it really got everything moving like it it's like a mental laxative for for developer block like it's just just everything's moving now like i'm i'm on a roll like i'm super i'm happy i'm because like you know i think part of the reason i was so miserable all summer and first half of fall so far is because everything i'm doing with overcast recently has just not worked and like i i used to tell people
Marco:
Whenever people ask me, should I be a programmer or could I be a programmer, the gist of what I always say is, look, programming is a bunch of frustration and hitting your head against the wall followed by making something and something working.
Marco:
And the satisfaction of that, of when it works, has to be motivating enough to you.
Marco:
to make all the other stuff worth it, to make the road to get there, banging your head against the wall, being frustrated by weird bugs or weird compiler errors or whatever, the process of getting there, the payoff needs to make all that worthwhile.
Marco:
And for the last six months, I've been on the wrong end of that ratio.
Marco:
I've been putting so much work in to...
Marco:
Server-side stuff that didn't go anywhere.
Marco:
Client-side ideas that didn't go anywhere.
Marco:
Client-side stuff that took longer than I thought it would because it was using old code.
Marco:
There's been so much, just to mix a whole bunch more metaphors, grinding my gears and just generally not getting anywhere and not ever getting that payoff of things working nicely and things being done.
Marco:
And so, to take a week to do this thing to help out some, you know, my local community and myself here in some small way, that has some value.
Marco:
But the greater value to me is that it's basically unfreezing my mental block.
Marco:
And it's like...
Marco:
And it's a good fix for my developer depression over the last few months of just like, let me get something that actually works.
Marco:
I'm a programmer.
Marco:
I need that.
Marco:
And I haven't felt like a programmer recently.
Marco:
And this has made me feel like a programmer.
Marco:
And I'm very happy about that, even though it's a dumb little app that is not going to have a lot of obvious value.
Marco:
But it has quite a lot of knock-on effect value for me.
Casey:
No, I think that's extremely important.
Casey:
And, you know, I have not had near the slog that you have with Overcast, but I've been fiddling with something new over the last couple of weeks.
Casey:
And similarly, like I'm not leaving behind this like legacy code base like Overcast is, you know, neither of my code bases are particularly old.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I wanted to scratch an itch and try something.
Casey:
And I've been working on this new thing.
Casey:
And it's using APIs, like Apple APIs, but APIs that I've not really used before, including a little bit of AV Foundation.
Casey:
So I feel like I'm suddenly Marco Jr.
Casey:
over here.
Casey:
But it's...
Casey:
But no, it is really refreshing to get a clean slate.
Casey:
And I feel like with every piece of code I write, I learn a little something and I get a little bit better.
Casey:
And I make more mistakes, but then I learn from them usually.
Casey:
And so every time I write something new, I feel – usually I feel proud of that new thing and I see where I've improved in my craft.
Casey:
Which is really valuable.
Casey:
We don't need to belabor this because we have a lot to talk about, but out of curiosity, what are you thinking about the async stuff?
Casey:
Because I don't feel like I'm great at it, but I do like it.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I kind of especially like that I can intermingle, combine, and async if I so choose, which I usually don't for the record.
Casey:
But there are some affordances to going back and forth between the two.
Casey:
How are you enjoying it?
Casey:
And when you say you're using async stuff, are you simply using APIs that Apple's exposing?
Casey:
Or are you doing checked continuations and checked throwing continuations and the whole rigmarole in making your own async streams?
Marco:
mostly Apple's some of... I've made a couple of my own basically to get around Apple APIs that don't yet offer async calls.
Casey:
It's so frustrating.
Casey:
I understand it, but it's so frustrating.
Marco:
Yeah, like requesting location permission is one of those things where you have to request permission, then you have to wait for a delegate call to come back to you.
Marco:
And it's like... And yeah, it's like... I know this stuff is all very, very new.
Marco:
I'll give Apple a pass for a while.
Marco:
I really hope in the coming years all of that gets wrappers around it that make it async compatible because...
Marco:
oh my god, it's so nice when that's there.
Marco:
For the few APIs that do offer that, oh man, it's nice.
Marco:
And so to answer the first-rated question, how am I liking it?
Marco:
So far, I don't have yet a great understanding of what's happening, of how some of these things are implemented.
Casey:
Me neither!
Marco:
And so I want to go back and re-watch.
Marco:
Back when it was announced, I watched the WBC sessions on it and everything.
Marco:
But not only was that two years ago now, but also I hadn't used it yet.
Marco:
And so the information didn't stick as well.
Marco:
Now that I've used it some, and I've seen how it behaves, and I'm getting a feel for how it works, now is a good time for me to go and watch not only the intro talks, but to watch all of the talks that have been on Swift concurrency so far to just learn some of those details of, okay, well, when I do this, this, and this, what threads is it going to be called on?
Marco:
Or what's going to wait for what?
Marco:
And what happens when this thing throws an exception and whatever else?
Marco:
And so there are all those little implementation details that
Marco:
I really feel more comfortable when I know them, even though you don't necessarily need to.
Marco:
I mean, I'm using it right now and not knowing them.
Marco:
But that's the kind of programmer I am.
Marco:
I like to understand everything that's happening below the surface.
Marco:
You don't usually need to know that deep of the knowledge, but sometimes you do.
Marco:
and yeah i kind of pride myself on that so anyway um so i i'm really enjoying it and it's making me you know i came to a realization i talked a little bit about it on under the radar last week um it's a very good episode if you if you find yourself ever like in a slump uh motivationally or things like that but i found myself realizing like the more time i spend in xcode versus other apps like textmate terminal the web browser like
Marco:
xcode is my happy place i want to rearrange my priorities and such so that i can increase the amount of time i spend in xcode and decrease the amount of time i spend doing other types of work for apps and so that means less server work less web stuff you know less running my own backends i'm still gonna have to run them but you know but run less complicated ones that need less input from me possibly using semantic services but you know that's
Marco:
I need to get to a place where I'm doing more Xcode time.
Marco:
Because this past summer, I would sometimes go a week without even opening Xcode.
Marco:
It was that bad.
Marco:
This is not where I want to be.
Marco:
I've gotten to the point now, and I hate to say it, but I've finally gotten to the point now where I really don't want to work on Objective-C code, first of all.
Marco:
But not only that, I don't want to work on UIKit anymore.
Casey:
Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
Casey:
I'm right there with you.
Casey:
I can go on quite a rant and quite a terrorist, I'm sure you could as well, about how much of a pain in the hindquarters SwiftUI can be.
Casey:
But golly, it's hard not to look at it and say, well, yeah, this is probably the future.
Casey:
Like, you know, there are warts, there are blemishes, there are pimples, there are zits.
Casey:
But all told, it's clearly the direction that I would like to walk, whether or not Apple wants us to, I think,
Casey:
You could still make an argument one way or the other, although certainly the party line is they do want you to walk that way.
Casey:
But I really think that SwiftUI has so much potential.
Casey:
And if Apple really does keep cranking on it, I really think it could be quite incredible.
Casey:
It will mean...
Casey:
That, you know, things will be different for the developers.
Casey:
They will potentially be different for users.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I really think it is impressive.
Casey:
It's the same with the async stuff, right?
Casey:
Like, I think the async stuff is more solid so far.
Casey:
But I really like where this is going.
Casey:
And I really like when all these things work together and just click.
Casey:
And it's such a refreshing experience and so lovely.
Casey:
And I really can't wait for both of them to get better.
Casey:
And I mean, coincidentally, this thing that I'm working on that may or may not ever see the light of day, you know, I'm using Location Manager.
Casey:
And so what did I have to do?
Casey:
I had to wrap CL Location Manager to give it an async API.
Casey:
And I would have talked to you about this had I realized you were working on it, which I've actually come to think of it.
Casey:
I think you might have mentioned this and I should have thought about it.
Casey:
But anyways, you know, maybe we could have worked together for a hot 30 seconds until we both decided we wanted to do it our own way and then turned our backs on each other.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I want there to be more robust async await support in more APIs.
Casey:
I want more control in SwiftUI and more ways of doing the things that I want to do or simpler ways of doing the things that I want to do.
Casey:
But golly, when it really is working well, when you're not bumping up against one of the many, many, many walls, it is so nice.
Casey:
It's just so, so nice.
Marco:
When you're dealing with a very opinionated, prickly situation, like Swift, like AppReview, there's a lot of these that, again, it's like a starting in fifth year kind of thing.
Marco:
It's really hard to get going from nothing because you hit every single sharp edge there is.
Marco:
You hit every single spike.
Marco:
You hit every single opinionated wall.
Marco:
And a lot of times in ways that are very frustrating and that don't make sense with error messages or anything like that.
Marco:
And so this is how SwiftUI has been for me.
Marco:
But now I'm getting really fast at it.
Marco:
and I'm getting to the point where I like, and I keep hitting instances where I know how to do the thing I want to do in UI kit.
Marco:
And I know that it's a slog and I just did it in Swift UI in 30 seconds.
Marco:
Like, and that I, and I'm hitting so many of those now.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
there are still areas where it's still a buggy mess and it's very difficult to use.
Marco:
For instance, complex navigation hierarchies, it's still crappy at that.
Marco:
And someday it might get better.
Marco:
I hope it does.
Marco:
But that's still tough for it.
Marco:
However, there are fewer and fewer areas where you shouldn't use SwiftUI.
Marco:
And over time, that's going to shrink.
Marco:
And Apple is going to keep telling us
Marco:
UIKit is not going anywhere.
Marco:
In the same way, they're saying you can still use BXC.
Marco:
You can.
Marco:
You can still use UIKit.
Marco:
You can still do these things.
Marco:
However, it is very clear to me how many years have I been using UIKit since 2008?
Marco:
So a 14-year veteran of UIKit?
Marco:
it's extremely clear to me that there are lots of capabilities being added to the frameworks that you can only do in SwiftUI, even within UIKit kind of areas.
Marco:
Things like, how do you put this kind of thing in a navigation bar, but I want the text to be over here.
Marco:
I keep hitting stuff like that where I know how to do it in UIKit and it takes a whole bunch of hacks or a huge amount of configuration and a huge amount of code.
Marco:
Or there are certain things that I know
Marco:
really aren't possible to do in UIKit without rewriting the whole control from scratch.
Marco:
And SwiftUI lets me do it in two lines.
Marco:
So I'm seeing now, there's so many areas where I'm using SwiftUI and I'm hitting things that I know I couldn't do either at all or without a whole bunch of work in UIKit that just happened in SwiftUI.
Marco:
And so it's to the point now where I had to adjust something in UIKit.
Marco:
I forget what it was.
Marco:
And it felt like writing assembly code.
Marco:
compared to what i've been doing it's like what why i have to do everything what why do i need to do all this this is so clunky and yeah so swift ui i i don't think swift ui is the future it's the present like it is it is here now and i think that anybody who is making uh iphone apps in particular
Marco:
or iPad, iOS apps.
Marco:
We'll get to that, but this whole thing, we're calling iPad OS its own thing.
Marco:
It's iOS.
Marco:
Anybody who's making iOS apps, you need to be using SwiftUI.
Marco:
If you want your skills to be modern and to have a strong future,
Marco:
he's using swift ui that's it ui kit is on its way out i'm telling you it is very obvious when you use swift ui oh this is where the work is going and ui kit is not you know that's ui kit's clearly in maintenance slash legacy teams mode because there's still a huge amount of ui kit code out there and there will be for decades you know so they have to maintain it
Marco:
But that's not where the effort's going.
Marco:
The effort's going into SwiftUI.
Marco:
And when it comes to Apple, you want to be where the effort's going.
Marco:
You don't want to be where they're in maintenance mode.
Marco:
They don't often put a lot of resources into that.
Marco:
So you want to generally be where the maintenance is going.
Marco:
I think what I want to do now is really take Overcast very strongly into the present day, code-wise and API-wise, and to some degree design-wise as well.
Marco:
I was happy with the redesign that I did last winter.
Marco:
I need to go further with that, much further, and I need to rewrite vast swaths of the app in SwiftUI.
Marco:
and vast swaths of the underlying code in swift and swift async and possibly cloud kit that's the direction i need to go because if i stay where i am i i'm stuck i can't go anywhere like i i'm so burdened by my by my huge amount of complex legacy code i need to start the very long and
Marco:
painful process of modernizing it all.
Marco:
But the good thing is, I think at the end, I'll be in a much better place and it will have a much better future because, frankly, getting a little bigger picture here, I don't want to sell this app and go do something else.
Marco:
I want to keep working on this app.
Marco:
I like it.
Marco:
I still use it.
Marco:
It's still a great business.
Marco:
I don't want someone else to take it and mess it up.
Marco:
I haven't had great experiences with selling stuff and having it be working out well for me.
Marco:
So
Marco:
I want to just keep this.
Marco:
I want this to be kind of my long-term thing.
Marco:
And as an app monogamist, I guess, a serial app monogamist, like you were saying, Casey, a few minutes ago, like how fun it is to do something brand new and to see like, oh, this is how I would do it if I was doing it new.
Marco:
When your job is basically like you have one app and you stick with that app for like five to 10 years, you hardly ever get to do that.
Marco:
You hardly ever get to get to do things the new way or rewrite things from scratch or like that's almost never on the table when that's the way you work.
Marco:
If there was some, you know, hot new thing I wanted to do, this is the time in my life where I would just go do that.
Marco:
But there isn't.
Marco:
I want to still do this.
Marco:
I just want to do it like, you know, well and modern and and, you know, get myself moving again.
Marco:
So that's that's what I'm going to do.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's funny, too, because even though the apps that are already in the app store for me are not that big, and they make a little bit of money, but it's not overcast money, and I don't mean that to be flippant.
Casey:
I'm being genuine.
Casey:
But even still, when I work on this new thing that may or may not ever be a real app, I can't help but feel guilty that I'm leaving my existing kids, you know,
Casey:
To wither.
Casey:
And yet I feel like in ways that you articulated very, very eloquently that sometimes you just need that.
Casey:
You need that distraction.
Casey:
You need that to rev your engine and to get yourself just cruising again.
Casey:
And as we beat these car analogies to death.
Casey:
But no, I agree with you.
Casey:
And even though I feel guilty,
Casey:
I figure I'll give myself a little bit more time with this.
Casey:
And if I hit a wall where I'm really like, oh, this is just not worth it, then that's my answer.
Casey:
And then that's that.
Casey:
But if I continue and next thing I know I'm releasing this to the App Store, then hey, that's awesome.
Casey:
There's nothing wrong with that either.
Casey:
So we'll see.
Casey:
But I am also having fun right now.
Casey:
And I don't want to lose that momentum.
Casey:
And I hope you don't either.
Casey:
Real-time-ish follow-up.
Casey:
The modern Corvette C7, modern 911s, last I checked, seven-speed manual transmissions.
Casey:
Most cars still six speeds, though.
Marco:
Okay, so starting in seventh gear.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
And it's totally different for automatics, which now have like 12 gears.
Marco:
Oh, and to answer HeyUDVD in the chat, HeyUDVD asks, is there a way to have the smart speed settings in overcast detect when music is playing and automatically switch to 1X and then resume the factor speed when talking resumes?
Marco:
Or is it a difficult problem to solve?
Marco:
Well, HeyUDVD, now I'm announcing for the very first time, this is one of those features that I've tried to do over the last few years and have failed to do.
Marco:
This is something that I have put a significant amount of time into.
Marco:
In fact, when...
Marco:
I briefly mentioned that when I talked about the 16-inch and how I've only heard the fans spin up once and it was because I was stressing the CPU and GPU for multiple hours, what I was doing was training a model to detect music versus speech.
Marco:
That's what that was.
Marco:
I gave it a huge amount of samples that I pulled from podcasts everywhere and was detecting music versus speech and this massive amount of data and it was churning on that trying to generate an ML model to do that.
Marco:
And
Marco:
The answer is, yes, it is possible to detect music.
Marco:
It doesn't work as well as I want it to.
Marco:
And there are a lot of limitations and a lot of costs to doing it that I'm not yet willing to bear for it, for the quality that I was able to achieve.
Marco:
So maybe in the future, if I get it to work better and to have fewer downsides, yeah, I'd love to do that.
Marco:
But I'm not there yet, and I don't know if I'll ever get there.
Marco:
But that's one of the many things that I have tried to do, and it just didn't work.
Casey:
I remember you talking about that privately with us, and I still do admire the lengths you were going through in order to try to get this to work, but I don't blame you for not only getting frustrated by it, but putting it aside as well.
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Casey:
That was a much longer pre-show than I think any of the three of us intended, but that's okay.
Casey:
I think that was valuable.
Casey:
But we should plow through some follow-up before we get to the meat of the episode.
Casey:
And let's start with Apple TV's match content, which, by the way, I tried.
Casey:
I had it off, and I tried it very briefly.
Casey:
And I turned it on, and forgive me, I don't remember the exact settings because there's like sub-settings or whatever.
Casey:
I think I just turned it full on.
Casey:
And literally that very day, like an hour later, Declan came running out.
Casey:
I think I was on the screen and Porsche came running out.
Casey:
Dad, dad, dad, something's wrong with the TV.
Casey:
It's going black like a lot.
Casey:
Like anytime I do anything, it goes black for a long time.
Casey:
It's like, oh, I bet I know what that is.
Casey:
And so I turned it right back off.
Casey:
It was on for like three hours.
Casey:
And I decided it was not for me.
Casey:
But that's just my experience.
Casey:
I know you should probably listen to John because John actually knows what he's talking about.
Casey:
But tell me about HDMI QMS, John.
John:
Yeah, so the black screen thing is one of the big downsides.
John:
I warned everybody about it, but now people are trying and they're like, you weren't kidding.
John:
The screen goes black between doing stuff.
John:
Yeah, it does.
John:
And the analogy I made was to, you know, when we got the ARM-based Macs and all of a sudden changing screen resolution was like instant and plugging in an external monitor was like instant as compared to the Intel days when your screen would go black for a while and then it would come back in at the new resolution.
John:
It's like we need that to happen in the television world.
John:
There is actually a sub part of the HDMI 2.1a spec, a feature called quick media switching that is trying to address this problem.
John:
Unfortunately, it does it by leveraging VRR variable refresh rate.
John:
Because the variable refresh rate lets things like games, like not be at a fixed refresh, not have the television not be at a fixed refresh rate.
John:
So the television doesn't say, I'm going to show you 30 new pictures every second.
John:
The television instead is kind of led by the game and saying, hey, game, when you've got a new frame, give it to me.
John:
And then I, the television will display it.
John:
I'm not going to, you know, be on this regimented schedule.
John:
I will vary my frame rate based on, you know.
John:
so it's good for games well that same feature as you can imagine could be used to seamlessly change the frame rate when going from say a 60 hertz apple tv menu screen to a 29.97 hertz uh television show that you're watching on netflix or something like that right why go why have the screen go black why not just use vrr to change the frame rate that's what qms does uh but there are caveats uh the first one is that
John:
it's part of the HDMI 2.1 a spec and like everything in HDMI 2.1, it's optional.
John:
So you're a thing that says HDMI 2.1 somewhere in the specs.
John:
Maybe it doesn't have this feature.
John:
Second thing is this thing works only as long as the resolution remains the same.
John:
So the only thing that can change is the frame rate, right?
John:
I don't know because I haven't tested this.
John:
I don't know, uh, if that also encompasses SDR versus HDR, uh,
John:
I imagine that's also excluded because the sentence, again, I'll read it right from the spec.
John:
As long as the resolution remains the same and only the frame rate changes.
John:
Well, changing from SDR to HDR, I would say that counts as not only the frame rate changing.
John:
But still, it could help in those cases.
John:
Another caveat...
John:
both devices have to support this optional feature so the apple tv has to support it which i'm pretty sure it doesn't and your television or your receiver or whatever have to support it so you have to have both ends of it it could be added to devices through a firmware update according to this fact that we'll link in the uh show notes so there is some hope that you might not have to buy new devices but if the thing you have doesn't even support hdmi 2.1 which is common for a lot of people's older setups then you can forget about it i kind of wish they had
John:
you know, reached a little farther for the stars here and say, we're going to solve this problem, but only for a frame rate.
John:
Well, you know HDR and SDR are a thing.
John:
And I feel like that is the main time, the most difficult decision I have in, you know, choosing what the settings are is,
John:
Going forward, I would imagine there will be more and more HDR content because HDR content looks better than SDR content.
John:
It's, you know, what I'm looking for in my fancy new TV.
John:
The best they can do is show me 4K HDR content.
John:
But there's stuff that's just 4K and SDR.
John:
There's stuff that's 1080p and SDR, you know, all the way down the line.
John:
So I would imagine over time there will be more and more HDR.
John:
And that's why I run the UI on my Apple TV.
John:
in 4k uh 4k dolby vision like just the little thing with the little rectangles that run that in 4k dolby vision which just like doesn't make any sense like there's no there's no hdr content on the menu screen like why are you even doing that i'm doing that because i hope against hope that i can go from the 4k hdr menu
John:
right into 4k hdr content and it won't have to black out the screen because nothing changes in practice i can tell you that rarely happens if ever because maybe just the way the apple tv does the app launching where it always blacks it out or whatever that's what i'm hoping will happen so anyway keep your fingers crossed for seven years from now when hdmi qms quick media syncing is available on all our devices
John:
Another thing people sent me in response to this was the YouTube app.
John:
Apparently, if you watch the YouTube app on your Apple TV and you don't have like whatever the hell it's called where you don't see ads on YouTube.
John:
Honestly, I don't even know what that is.
John:
I've been paying for it for years.
John:
If you see ads on YouTube.
John:
Every time YouTube plays an ad, blacks out the screen because the ads are a different frame rate or resolution or HDR than the video.
John:
And it's just maddening.
John:
It's like impossible to use.
John:
You can't keep match content on if you use YouTube TV or whatever to actually watch stuff.
John:
Because can you imagine every commercial break it blacked out?
John:
It's ridiculous, right?
John:
And on that front, if you want to, if you just can't run it because the blackouts are too much because you have a kid who will not deal with the blackouts.
John:
And I mean, I don't blame you.
John:
Like I put up with it because I want the best of the best.
John:
I don't want it to be clean straight through and everything match up.
John:
I can tolerate the black screen for two seconds.
John:
I'm also not channel surfing or going from app to app.
John:
I'm watching one show like it's fine.
John:
Most modern TVs will actually undo the damage done by trying to watch 24 frames per second content in a 60 hertz thing, right?
John:
So what happens is you put your Apple TV in, you know, whatever, in 60 hertz, right?
John:
And it's just locked there all the time.
John:
And then even when you watch a movie, it sends...
John:
60 Hertz signal to the television filled with janky 24 frames per second video where some frames are displayed longer than other frames.
John:
So it sends that gross signal to the television.
John:
And then the television says, well, I've got a 60 Hertz video signal talking to me, but it like looks at the image and says,
John:
yeah this is 60 hertz but it looks kind of like it seems kind of like it's actually 24 frame per second content where some frames are being shown longer than others so i'll fix that for you and basically it takes the incoming frames batches them up into batches okay so these four these three 60 hertz frames look like one frame because nothing changed then these two 60 hertz frames look like nothing changed so these are a frame and then it basically shows 24 frames per second by de-janking your content so
John:
It's called judder, auto-de-judder.
John:
So we'll put a link into the Artings article where Artings, when they rate television, tells you whether your television can do this or not.
John:
Obviously, me with my empathy for the machine thinks, this is awful.
John:
Why would I send a screwed up signal to my TV and let my TV use video processing to unscrew it up?
John:
why don't I just send the TV 24 frames every second?
John:
And that's why I turn on match content, and that's why I recommend it.
John:
But if you really can't stand the black screen, check out this Artings link.
John:
See if your television can de-judge it.
John:
And if your television can't, what you'll see is, like, there's a little hitch in the movement.
John:
You'll see it mostly, like, in slow panning shots or whatever, but it shows certain frames for longer than other frames.
John:
And it's, you know, if you're not sensitive to it, maybe you'll never notice, but...
John:
i noticed and i don't like it so uh so there you have it i still recommend the match content john sir keeps the story yeah and also the so i was going to ask you casey but it seems like you can't remember and i haven't looked at it recently i think there are two settings one is there are to match the frame rate and the d judder thing will fix that for you but the other one is do you want me to match hdr versus sdr
Casey:
I believe you are correct, and I didn't spend the time to piddle about and figure out which one was the more offensive one, if one was the real issue.
John:
Well, I can tell you which one is definitely more offensive.
John:
So the frame rate thing the TV can save you from, but HDR versus SDR...
John:
If you don't have that turned on, then I think bad things will happen no matter what.
John:
Because if you have it just set to SDR and you try to watch a show that's supposed to be in HDR, best case, you'll just miss out on the HDR, which is crappy.
John:
Like you paid for an HDR TV.
John:
Don't like never see HDR content because you have Apple TV stuck into SDR, right?
John:
But worst case, it will try to show it in HDR or like the TV will think it's getting an HDR signal, but like it could be really messed up and your picture will be all screwed up, right?
John:
So I think match HDR versus SDR,
John:
you kind of have to turn that on.
John:
And if you try to do the other way, like I'm going to force everything into HDR, that will also screw up all your SDR content.
John:
So really, I think that one is the one that no television, I don't think there's anything that the television can do to save you from it.
John:
You really need to watch HDR content in HDR and watch SDR content in SDR.
John:
The frame rate, the television can try to save you from using image processing, but it's kind of gross.
Casey:
So I'm talking straight out of my keister because I don't have an Apple TV in the room I'm in and I don't have a TV that I can see from where I'm sitting.
Marco:
Have you heard our show before, Casey?
Casey:
Fair, fair.
Casey:
If you're interested in talking out of our keisters, then let me tell you about neutral.
Casey:
But anyways, my recollection is that I had everything off when I arrived at the setting after we spoke last week.
Casey:
Again, I could be lying by accident, but I had everything off.
Casey:
And I can tell you that all the video content that I have been watching on this Apple TV 4K for the last year or so,
Casey:
It all looked correct.
Casey:
Now, maybe I wasn't getting HDR when I thought I was.
Casey:
As we all know, of the three of us, I have probably the least discerning eye for this sort of thing.
Casey:
But I can tell you that when I watched Dolby Vision content on my LG C9...
Casey:
it shows a little Dolby Vision icon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen for a couple seconds when it goes into what I presume to be the Dolby Vision mode.
Casey:
And when I watch something on Disney+, for example, that I know should be Dolby Vision, it shows up as Dolby Vision on the television.
Casey:
And that's not an Apple TV thing, as far as I'm aware.
Casey:
That's the actual television showing that.
Casey:
So even if I'm in the fully off-matched content mode,
Casey:
it appears that it is doing something to give me the Dolby Vision stuff that I'm asking for when I'm asking for.
Casey:
Does that make sense?
John:
Yeah.
John:
If you look in the Apple TV interface, it has this weird... I don't know if it's an Apple TV distinction or something else.
John:
Like, it's not...
John:
not just the Apple D, some televisions do this, distinguishing between Dolby Vision and HDR, which sounds dumb.
John:
You're like, aren't they both?
John:
Isn't Dolby Vision just a kind of HDR?
John:
It is.
John:
The other standard, the competing standard is HDR10, and there's also HDR10+, but very often Dolby Vision is treated- Wait, is it pronounced HDRX?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Dolby Vision is treated as a separate thing.
John:
So Dolby Vision may be excluded from the like match HDR versus SDR because it'd be like, well, forget about HDR and SDR.
John:
This is Dolby Vision and we're always just going to send this through.
John:
So I don't know the details.
John:
And obviously it varies by television as well because different televisions, I mean, for example, my television doesn't even support HDR 10 plus, which we'll talk about later in the show.
John:
But does support Dolby Vision and Samsung televisions are basically the opposite.
John:
They don't support Dolby Vision, but do support HDR 10 plus and lots of televisions support plain old HDR 10.
John:
It's very complicated.
John:
So anyway, try these features out, see how they work for your actual programming.
John:
If match content just degrades your user experience to the point where you can't handle it.
John:
then at least look up your TV on the de-judder list and see if it can do the right thing with the frame rate.
John:
And then if you're happy with how the colors look, then either you're not getting HDR and don't miss it, or you are getting it anyway, like Casey seems to be.
Casey:
Well, I think.
Casey:
Who really knows?
Casey:
But I think so.
John:
There are things you could use to test this.
John:
But if your television says that it thinks it's getting a television signal, it's probably right.
John:
I mean, like you said, if it's a television UI doing that, the Apple TV wouldn't have any influence over that.
John:
Right, right, right.
Casey:
Very, very quick follow-up.
Casey:
When the iPhones... What are we on?
Casey:
14 now?
Casey:
I've already lost track.
Casey:
When the iPhones 14 came out with only eSims in America, I was grumbly a little bit because I had said in years past with AT&T...
Casey:
i would take my sim my physical sim i would move it from one phone to the other and at&t would be not well i mean they would know but they would be none the wiser from a billing perspective they would not bill me the 35 upgrade fee or whatever that they are want to do when you order like an at&t locked iphone or what have you well this year i'm on verizon this is my first year using an e-sim and i transferred my physical sim to an e-sim before i got my new phone as we spoke about on the show
Casey:
And then when the phone came, I did the eSIM transfer, and it has been a month and whatever, a month and change now.
Casey:
And to the best of my knowledge, I did not get charged a ridiculous upgrade fee for upgrading my phone.
Casey:
Now, that's in part because I bought the phone outright.
Casey:
So I think the upgrade fee is often associated with when you're like financing the phone through the carrier.
Casey:
But I just wanted to follow up that as far as I can tell, I did not get charged an upgrade fee when I have a phone that I own and I switch from that to a new phone that I also own, which is very good.
Casey:
I'm excited about that.
Casey:
And I feel like I've heard AT&T people say the same thing, but don't quote me on that.
Casey:
I also have some follow-out for the most recent episode of Upgrade, number 429, Freedom Doors, which Jason was very perturbed and lit me up in a very gentle and polite way, lit me up privately about the fact that we did not mention trackpad gestures during our...
Casey:
disaster of a window management segment and uh and i wanted to to mention that that for me i really really love hot corners one for show desktop one for expose where it shows all the open windows hot corners sounds like some kind of like junk food that you would love and we'd make fun of you for oh hell yeah burn the roof of your mouth by eating your hot corners too fast yeah
Casey:
You know, I haven't had a Hot Pocket in years, and man, did I love them back in the day.
John:
I didn't say that.
John:
That's their brand.
John:
Their brand is so strong that the word hot plus burning your mouth immediately says, oh, Hot Pockets.
Marco:
Well, I feel like they have the problem of being a food designed for microwaves always means that you're going to have the edges be way too hot and the middle be frozen.
Yep.
John:
Is that the problem with the Hot Pockets?
John:
I thought the problem was that they are basically, what is it, like a containment vessel?
John:
You know how you make a bomb while you put something with lots of energy inside a contained thing, right?
John:
So the Hot Pockets, the container is the pocket, and the stuff that's inside it is the lava-like filling.
John:
And so it's like a bomb waiting to go, like a cherry tomato, right?
John:
So when you bite into it, you burst the containment, and then the hot lava squirts out against the roof of your mouth and burns the skin off.
John:
Like it's a design.
John:
It's part of the design.
John:
It's the fact that it's a pocket.
Casey:
Yes, yes.
Casey:
No, I can attest to this.
Casey:
But man, I should get some hot pockets.
Casey:
I haven't had those in years.
Casey:
But anyways.
Casey:
It doesn't take much encouragement to have Casey eat junk food.
John:
Please stop.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Have a carrot.
Casey:
Anyway, the point is, so I like these hot corners that I set to expose and show desktop and whatnot.
Casey:
And Jason was very, very perturbed with me that I didn't mention the gestures on the trackpad.
Casey:
Because if you like splay four fingers out, that gives you expose.
Casey:
And if you do the same motion with five fingers, that gives you show desktop.
Casey:
And then if you pinch all five fingers back in, that will bring you back from show desktop mode.
Casey:
And wow, this animation is just kind of disturbingly fast.
Casey:
I don't even know what to make of that.
Casey:
But anyways, that's the thing.
Casey:
that if you use trackpads, which I actually do, and I have for a couple of few years now, that that's something you can do.
Casey:
And I would like to perhaps excuse or at least provide justification for why I didn't mention them.
Casey:
So I was a devout mouse, like actual mouse person, like John, for years.
Casey:
And up until the last, I don't know, two to four years, I just wouldn't, and this is well after the trackpads were a thing on the
Casey:
touch a trackpad on the desktop.
Casey:
Like it was not for me.
Casey:
Of course I used it on the laptops, but I just did not care for it.
Casey:
And I don't know what changed to be honest with you, but all of a sudden I was like, well, let me switch and see what I think.
Casey:
And then I never turned back.
Casey:
So when I was mousing, I didn't have the gestures for show desktop and expose and stuff like that.
Casey:
So I had to use hot corners.
Casey:
Then, at this point, my muscle memory was established, and I wasn't seeking a replacement for it, right?
Casey:
Seeing that these gestures are a thing, yes, that's probably what I should have brought up, and it is probably a better approach.
Casey:
I am issuing my formal apologies to Mr. Jason Snell for not saying anything about this.
Casey:
I am so sorry, Jason.
Casey:
I failed you, and I failed the listeners.
Casey:
But it's for a reason.
Casey:
It's because I was a dumb mouse person, and I didn't know any better.
Casey:
I'm so sorry.
John:
I'm going to rescind Casey's apology.
John:
We weren't giving a comprehensive tour of every feature of the Mac UI.
John:
We were just saying how we managed Windows.
John:
Obviously, it's not going to be comprehensive.
John:
We also didn't mention the bazillion third-party applications that do stuff.
John:
We just talked about our own habits and gave some suggestions of large categories of ways that people work.
John:
i suppose if we can be faulted it's because we didn't list well we did i think one of the major things was like trackpad gestures right but it was it was thumbnail sketch by saying oh use full screen and then swipe your fingers around the trackpad to switch apps and there's obviously more to it that than that because you can do more than just swipe you know sideways to get from one space to the other there's all those other gestures but anyway yeah there's a lot the mac has lots of features and that's even before you consider third-party apps of which there are many
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So, John, tell me, you have some things going on with your mouse now.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It's just like my cheese graters, right?
John:
So we already went through the whole thing with my Microsoft Precision mouse and one of them went bad and I had to return and I had to send the video and I bought the backup mouse and it was making noise.
John:
I don't remember what episode that was in.
John:
We talked about it a while ago.
John:
Anyway, it's about almost exactly a year anniversary of me doing that exchange.
John:
And guess what?
John:
One of my Mises is going bad again.
John:
Yeah.
John:
same problem as before like at first I thought like oh is the trackpad you know is the mousepad like gummy or something and I'm like wait a second no it's like it's like missing you know I'll move the mouse from left to right three inches and like a couple of random millimeters of that three inch movement are not sent to the computer
John:
and so i took out my other backup mouse and plugged it in and sure enough the backup mouse works fine and you know i can a b test them it's not as bad as it was before so now i'm like do i try to rma this thing again do i have to make a video again because the video before was super convincing because i had let it get so bad because i had misdiagnosed it so many times now i know it's coming and it's like it's just a fatal flaw of this mouse i guess is that eventually a year later it just stops working right
John:
really disappointing but if you remember the reason i was using this mouse and i i can't for the life of me remember if the one that has gone bad is the one that they sent me back as a refurbished thing or if it's the brand new backup one that i bought i can't i don't even know which is which which is kind of i'll have to look up the serial numbers and see if i can figure it out but they look identical obviously so i can't tell right um
John:
But the other mouse, the reason I was using the mouse I was using is because the other mouse was the one that made the noise when I typed.
John:
You remember that whole thing?
John:
Like it would type and it would shake a thing.
John:
And so like, but I can't, I can't stand use now that I know what the problem is.
John:
It's like, imagine if the mouse just like only translated 98% of your motion.
John:
It sounds like, oh, that should be fine.
John:
You can use it and you can, but it's so annoying for me, a devoted mouse user who hates track pads with a fiery passion, right?
John:
I need to have a mouse that works.
John:
And it was just making me so upset.
John:
So I took out the other mouse, but then of course you got the noise.
John:
And so there I am trying to figure out what the noise is again.
John:
It's just so weird.
John:
It's like, oh, the noise goes away when you unplug the USB cable.
John:
So maybe it's something about the cable connector.
John:
Can you make the noise happen on its own?
John:
Why is it that it goes away?
John:
But I think I found it.
John:
In fact, just earlier today, after days of like... Because then I can't stand the noise of this thing.
John:
I'm typing.
John:
I can't stand the noise, but I can't stand the mouse.
John:
I was between a rock and a hard place.
John:
But today, I think I figured it out.
John:
Tell me.
John:
The thing that was making the noise... You should bring up a picture of this button.
John:
It's the Microsoft Precision mouse.
John:
The thing that I think was making the noise was the very skinny three side buttons on the mouse...
John:
One of the reasons I like this mouse is I don't use side buttons at all.
John:
And these side buttons are very, very thin.
John:
They're just kind of, they're kind of like wedged in a gap between the top surface of the mouse and the side surface of the mouse.
John:
Three very skinny buttons.
John:
And one or more of them were rattling up and down within their sort of, you know, containment cage.
John:
And that's what was making the noise.
John:
So I took a carefully cut piece of post-it note, folded it up a few times, took a knife and wedged it in underneath those buttons.
John:
No more noise.
Casey:
Is this the Surface Precision Mouse?
Casey:
Is that correct, John?
John:
No, it's not.
John:
It's just called Microsoft Precision Mouse.
John:
There is a Microsoft Surface Mouse, but Microsoft Precision Mouse, it's black.
John:
It has three buttons on the side.
Casey:
I see.
John:
A track, you know, a scroll wheel.
John:
There's a couple of products that look almost identical that aren't exactly this thing.
John:
But yeah, that's what was making the noise.
John:
So now I have one working mouse that doesn't make noise and one mouse that doesn't make noise, but the tracking is going.
John:
not sure what i'm going to do about it i'm kind of upset that the one mouse i really really like has multiple problems because remember the other problem is that where my thumb rests it slowly wears away the soft touch plastic and it gets kind of rumply and annoying and like eventually like you know so that still got that problem and then they go bad in tracking after about a year and then also this one had a rattle but at least i've solved the rattle so i'm not sure what i'm going to do about this but my plan to just buy like 50 of these like marco's keyboards and have them in reserve is really like i stopped it too because they
John:
They were going bad, and the second one that I bought had a rattle.
John:
Maybe.
John:
I don't know.
John:
And I don't want to spend... Like, this is an expensive mouse.
John:
It's like $99 retail.
John:
Maybe you can get it for $80 or $70 if you see it on sale.
John:
I don't want to spend that every year on a mouse.
John:
But, I don't know.
John:
Maybe I do.
John:
Maybe it's the type of thing when they stop making this mouse, I'll be like, you know what?
John:
I would be willing to pay $100 a year if I could get a new one of those mice every year.
John:
So...
John:
We'll see.
Marco:
I mean, I'll tell you what, like I, for whatever it's worth, you know, for the gaming PCs, we have the Razer mice.
Marco:
Those are, I think like 70 or 80 bucks each for the ones we have.
Marco:
I have, I've used Logitech mice before, not super heavily recently, but the Apple stupid magic mouse is still my favorite mouse in part because I just love the, you know, the touch nature of it and the touch scrolling and everything is just invaluable to me.
Marco:
That's the biggest part.
Marco:
But just for whatever it's worth, it lasts.
Marco:
Like I've never, I don't think I've ever had one of these die.
John:
Yeah, Apple mice are good quality.
John:
I just don't like the shape of that one.
John:
Like I'm not shunning it for any other reason.
John:
It's just not, you know, and you know, that's basically it.
John:
If it was shaped like this one, I would get it because it's not like I have some dedication to the scroll wheel versus touch.
John:
I just don't like how that's shaped.
Marco:
Yeah, I feel like it's almost a different kind of device than... Like, if you're expecting... It's like sour beer.
Marco:
Like, if you say, give me a beer, and somebody gives you a sour, it's like, okay, people like this, but if you're asking for a beer and you get a sour, you're going to be very surprised, probably in a negative way.
Marco:
So I feel like it needs... It's almost like a separate thing, right?
Marco:
See also Chicago Pizza.
Marco:
So I feel like the Magic Mouse is... Like, if you're expecting a mouse...
Marco:
This isn't that.
Marco:
This is a different thing that you might really like, but you have to go into it knowing, like, okay, you're going to have to get used to holding this differently, moving it differently.
Marco:
Like, your whole grip is going to be different with this than it is with a mouse.
Marco:
And I feel like if you are open to that, then it's wonderful.
Marco:
And that's, like, where I landed.
Marco:
I love this mouse, and I've...
Marco:
forsaken all other mice since discovering this one because it's just that good and none of the other ones have the touch scrolling integration with mac stuff so like to me there's there is no other mouse basically anyway i'll just say like when i've used like you know the razor ones for the gaming pcs we have three razor pcs with three mice i think i've had to replace four of them in the last two years oh my gosh like
John:
it's just like they're they're terrible like they're just bad and i probably should switch to logitech or whatever but you know it's kind of what i'm used to but logitech has better reliability if i liked how the like the mx master 3 or whatever one fancy one i have like i like that mouse it's just not quite the right shape like i'm shopping almost entirely by shape and then within shapes that i find acceptable obviously i want expensive feeling and good and this microsoft was a nice
John:
had had all those best attributes a lot but the logic ones like we've had serious logic mice and they've never gone bad it's just a question of whether i like the shape or not and you know the apple one is you know super high quality it's just like an apple thing it's got dumb charging but other than that it's real nice i just wish it was shaped the way i want it to be which is not like a low profile piece of sushi yeah no that is very true
Casey:
I will put links in the show notes.
Casey:
I'm not sure which episode is the one in question, but ATP number 449, which was in late September of last year, and Unclean Mouse, which I think was more about your mouse pad than it was your mouse itself, but maybe that was it.
John:
Yeah, because I thought it was the mouse pad.
John:
Yeah, I did the return on September 9th, 2021.
John:
Okay, there you go.
Casey:
And then also ATP episode number 361, A Button in the Thumb Shelf.
Casey:
which I presume is also about your mouse.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Where were we?
Casey:
My goodness.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then you have had some speaker adventures or problems or things.
Casey:
What's going on there?
John:
It's related to your discussion last week about, uh, setting up your new Sonos thing and the surround speakers and calibrating them and all that stuff.
John:
And of course I talked about that when I got all my new TV set up, how I use that Dirac live, uh, app that you run on your Mac and then it connects to your receiver and you have a microphone that you move to 17 different spots in the room to calibrate things or whatever.
John:
Uh,
John:
And, you know, I did that calibration.
John:
And then shortly after that, when the family started watching the fancy new TV, it was a persistent complaint from everybody, including me, but especially my wife, that she couldn't understand people's dialogue.
John:
And I'm like, oh, that's a problem I can solve because I can adjust the channels individually.
John:
In fact, my receiver even has like a quick way to adjust, like just crank up the center channel, because if you have surround sound, the dialogue pretty much always comes through the center channel.
John:
So it's really easy to just make the dialogue louder and leave everything the same volume.
John:
And I would do that, but that setting wouldn't stick because the Dirac settings would always take over.
John:
And I'm like, oh, I just need to readjust this with Dirac.
John:
But eventually it was just like, you know, she refused to even let me use the external speakers because the dialogue sounded terrible.
John:
And I'm like, you know, it does sound pretty bad.
John:
And I was listening to things.
John:
I'm like, why is the dialogue?
John:
Why can none of us hear the dialogue, right?
John:
So I finally got a chance, like, you know, because I would have done this a long time ago, but to do the Dirac calibration,
John:
you need quiet the app yells at you if you try to do anything like it'll be in the middle of doing some calibration thing and they'll just stop and pop up a dialogue and be like i'm sorry something made a noise so that means kids can't be home wife can't be home dog can't be home construction cannot be happening which by the way they've been ripping up the gas mains of my street this entire summer so no construction can be happening outside you know it's just it actually needs to be quiet so i
John:
finally found a time when everybody's gone and my dog is at the you know her doggy play date right and i'm just in the house by myself and i do the calibration and the dirac app is really fancy and i got okay at using it the first time i did the calibrations but i got to go through so many more times that i'm much better at using it now and it's kind of a it's not a it's not a native mac out first of all second of all it's weird it reminds me of like a unix app it's like something from linux not even from windows it's really weird looking
John:
Or maybe Java anyway One of the things you do is after you do the volume adjustment, which I you know I didn't even know how to use the first few times that I kind of kind of figured that out Another one is where it does.
John:
I don't know what you'd call them like frequency response graphs But you see this for speakers a lot, but you know you put the microphone somewhere in a room and
John:
And then it plays tones through all the speakers.
John:
And you'll see a graph with one line for each speaker saying, I guess it's amplitude is the y-axis.
John:
I guess it's like how loud it was.
John:
And then the x-axis horizontally is frequency range.
John:
So low frequencies on the left and high frequencies on the right.
John:
And what you want to kind of see for a linear response is pretty much a plateau.
John:
speaker doesn't reproduce any you know frequencies below whatever hertz and then for most of the range of human hearing you want to see a nice long steady plateau with some wiggles saying here you look at the speaker it's able to reproduce all these different frequencies at more or less the same amplitude right obviously no ideal speaker is going to be a perfect plateau they're going to wiggle around and everything and that's what dirac is adjusting for at different locations in the room to try to level that out with dsp right
John:
But what I noticed when I looked at these graphs is you got all my 5.1 speakers, but one of the lines was not with the other lines.
John:
It took a nosedive like three quarters of the way through the graph.
John:
Basically, my center channel had no high frequencies.
John:
Right.
John:
And my center channel speaker has like a, you know, a big cone and driver.
John:
And then it's got a little one of those little tiny metal looking tweeter drivers.
John:
Tweeters.
John:
Yes.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And so I took so I took off the little the mesh, whatever.
John:
What is that thing called?
John:
The grill.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, I took that off and I'm trying to figure out, does this tweeter work?
John:
So I'm playing some dialogue and I'm just like, you know, putting your ear next to the speaker is weird and you can't.
John:
So I'm just I'm going to touch it with my finger because if a speaker is working, I'll be able to feel some kind of vibration.
John:
I'm not sure if that's entirely true of tweeters, but I basically determined that my tweeter was blown on my center channel.
John:
And I couldn't figure it out because I don't have, like, ears that are used to picking this up.
John:
I couldn't figure it out from listening.
John:
I just said, the dialogue sounds weird.
John:
Like, it's not clear and we can't hear it.
John:
But when I saw the graph, that was like, no high frequencies.
John:
Tweeter broken.
John:
Right?
John:
So, I guess I'm a visual learner, as they say.
John:
So,
John:
uh my center channel was bad i was pretty sure it was bad based on the graph that's pretty in crunch for reference so i needed to buy a new center channel speaker but of course this this surround speakers i got are just some cheapo surround speaker setup i got years ago like it just came in all one package you get all the speakers on the subwoofer that comes together in a package deal and this one was pretty well rated for you know the price and the quality or whatever and importantly the speakers are very small because i have to tuck them into weird places in my room like i don't have room for real speakers right um
John:
So you can't buy just the center channel.
John:
You can only buy the full set again.
John:
So then I have to go on eBay and find people selling just the center channel, find the one that I thought was the least gross looking.
John:
They sent it to me and it was only slightly broken when I got it in terms of like the grill was snapped off and it was all kind of, but whatever.
John:
I swapped it out for the other one and lo and behold, the graph leveled out and you can understand dialogue again.
John:
So yay for applications that show you a visual representation of how your speakers are performing.
John:
And by the way, I recalibrated everything and put it in an inherent like four or five decibel bump to the center channel, but of everything else.
John:
And now everyone in the family is much happier with the audio.
Casey:
Who'd have thunk it?
Casey:
So I'm sorry, not that I'm really looking to defend Marco on this issue, but you're beating the snot out of Marco last week for having a two channel setup.
Casey:
Yet one of your channels was effectively broken.
Casey:
And by your own admission, all of your speakers are straight up trash.
John:
They're not trash.
John:
They're just not really good.
John:
I mean, I would have bought better speakers if they would have fit.
John:
But the places where I have to physically put them are not big enough to put like speakers that sound better than these.
John:
But, you know, you say, oh, it was broken when the tweeter doesn't work.
John:
I mean, I'm sure someone who's more versed listening to, you know, the speaker has a blown tweeter.
John:
most of the frequencies of speech are not up in the super high or super low end right so it's reproducing most of them but missing out on the few things that do go into the highs makes the dialogue like a little bit muddier right like if i wish i had saved i really wish i had taken a screenshot because i would have put it for like a chapter art like if you look at the graph
John:
it falls off earlier than all the other ones.
John:
But if you look at the actual Hertz number or whatever, because I was, that's what I was Googling.
John:
Like maybe center channels are supposed to do that.
John:
What is the usual frequency range of speech?
John:
And I looked at this frequency range of speech and I'm like, yeah, the frequency range of human speech is right in the plateau part.
John:
So maybe that's not, you know, but anyway, it was just broken.
John:
Um, yeah, you can, any part, you know, a speaker can, if speaker fail in any system and you have to fix it.
John:
So if one of the tweeters fails on one of Marco's stereo speakers, he would have to figure that out somehow and replace the speaker as well.
John:
It's not a, uh,
John:
you know side effect of surround but yeah my fan my speakers are not particularly fancy uh but they're you know like it's it was like five or six hundred dollars for the system when i bought it a few years ago and for a complete surround system that is very very small uh it works well and as far as like sonos and stuff when you're talking about that one of the features i need for my setup is i need them to be speakers that are small speakers that are connected with speaker wire because i have no place to plug in anything so they either have to be battery powered
John:
wireless surrounds which i don't want to deal with charging them up or anything like that or you know speakers connected with speaker wire that are small enough to fit in the places i squirrel them away my room is not designed for television i'm doing what i can here right uh but yeah they're pretty good for what they are
John:
And most importantly, they're way better than the speaker that's built into the television.
John:
In fact, our television has a feature where it can use the TV itself as the center channel.
John:
And that really lets you A-B test exactly how much better even this sort of like cheap center channel speaker is than the television speakers.
Casey:
I think it's funny that here you are telling Marco that he's a monster for using only two channels, yet I bet his two speakers that he's using are pretty, pretty nice.
Casey:
And it sounds like I'm not sure I could say the same for yours.
John:
Yeah, but I wouldn't want to watch a movie on his two speakers versus my five, that's for sure.
John:
Does the movie contain any music?
John:
I'm sure it does, but surround sound, man.
John:
Surround sound.
John:
It surrounds you.
John:
Gacy got all done talking about it.
John:
It is an experience that cannot be duplicated by two speakers sitting in front of you.
Casey:
Moving right along, Marco, tell me about the Apple Watch Ultra screen size, if you please.
Marco:
So as I mentioned last week, as part of the reason I got the Ultra, one of the biggest reasons I got the Ultra was I said the screen is so much bigger, it makes everything feel different.
Marco:
Like apps feel different, layouts need to be different.
Marco:
And a few people pointed out the screen is actually not as much bigger as I thought than the 45 millimeter Series 7 and 8 screens.
Marco:
Last year with the Series 7, when the screens got bigger, you got a lot more screen space with that move than we had before.
Marco:
And I've been using the 40 and 41 size recently, and so I was used to the smaller size.
Marco:
So when you actually look at the pixel differences, the Ultra is bigger than the 45, but it's a smaller step than going from the 41 to the 45.
Marco:
And so anyway, now that I've been using the Ultra most of the past week, where I think it's still very different is the shape of the screen in addition to the size.
Marco:
So I still am very happy I have it and I'm not going to return it because...
Marco:
It is still very different not having those curved corners, like the way that the regular Apple Watch is, the crystal is this big kind of rounded plateau shape.
Marco:
The Apple Watch Ultra is just a single piece of flat sapphire.
Marco:
And so it is still different enough that I think if you design an Apple Watch app, you should probably have one.
Marco:
That being said, if you're only going to have one Apple Watch size that you're going to design for, the 44 or 45 is fine.
Marco:
I looked at my own stats to compare.
Marco:
The 44 slash 45, if I treat it as one size, which...
Marco:
arguably they might not need to be but anyway if you treat the 44 and 45 as the same size 60 of my apple watch users use that size 30 use 40 or 41 6 use the uh roughly 6 use the old uh sizes that are like the the serious zero through three sizes still and already about five percent of my apple watch users have the ultra wow
Marco:
which is very impressive for a model that's only been out for a couple of weeks and is still in very short supply and is the highest end on the price scale.
Marco:
Well, excluding Hermes and stuff.
Marco:
So I think this is going to sell like crazy, especially throughout the holiday season, especially as supply increases.
Marco:
So I think, again, if you design an Apple Watch app, I think you should probably have an Ultra if you can.
Marco:
you know granted it's a luxury but it's funny like so like somebody on twitter was like you know they were like feeling bad for me that i'm buying an ultra for you know almost no users and it certainly wouldn't pay off for me to have this when i tell you that you know i think let me see uh of i have something like 20 or so i think of my active users have the apple watch app installed
Marco:
So it's like, that's not a small number of people.
Marco:
That's like, that's way more than things that I've spent a lot more time on.
Marco:
So trust me, it matters.
Marco:
I should probably have every Apple watch size.
Marco:
I don't, I probably should.
Marco:
Like that's, that's how much it matters.
Marco:
And then secondly, as you know, wearing the ultra, a few more impressions after a week of wearing it most of the time.
Marco:
It is really big, but it's looking less ridiculous on me as I'm used to it.
Marco:
It's funny.
Marco:
I took my Tide G-Shock watch out of my car to compare, which when I first got the Tide watch, I tried it on just to see what it was like to wear a G-Shock that I never had before.
Marco:
And it seemed ridiculous.
Marco:
And I'm like, I could never wear this.
Marco:
Well...
Marco:
When I put it on tonight, like after wearing the Ultra for a week, the G-Shock is about the same size and a million times lighter.
Marco:
So it's actually... I will say for the Ultra, the weight of it, I think, is the biggest challenge because it is such a large watch.
Marco:
They did a good job making it light for its size.
Marco:
However...
Marco:
It is so big that it needs like a pretty strong strap.
Marco:
And I've been kind of going back and forth between different straps.
Marco:
I haven't loved any strap option I've found for it yet.
Marco:
I have the orange Alpine loop.
Marco:
That's the one that came with it in part because that's what was in stock, but also in part because I think it probably looks the best out of all the straps that are officially for the Ultra.
Marco:
I think it really needs the orange to be used in the straps.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I got separately from that because I really in my lifestyle, as mentioned before, you know, things are wet all the time around here.
Marco:
So I really like rubber straps.
Marco:
So the rubber strap that it has offered does not have an orange option.
Marco:
It only has blue, white and yellow.
Marco:
I saw them all in the store, played with them all.
Marco:
Didn't really love any of them, but I would set her to go with the blue to try that strap out.
Marco:
just because i have white for all my other rubber bands i kind of want it's like something different for the ultra and i didn't think the white looked amazing with the orange accent of the watch whereas the blue i thought kind of played with that contrast a little bit better and so anyway i tried the tried the blue ocean strap
Marco:
it's okay.
Marco:
Uh, I still like the sport bands better.
Marco:
Um, main reason I like the sport bands better is that the tail tucks in on the sport band and on the ocean strap, the tail sticks up the way, you know, all other watch straps tend to work.
Marco:
And I understand why they do that.
Marco:
It's more secure the way they do it.
Marco:
Um, and the keeper that, which is the little metal loop that you tuck the tail under after you attach the, you know, the main buckle, um, there, you know, you had like excess strap, you tuck it under this little loop.
Marco:
It's called a keeper.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
um on the ocean strap i initially thought it was going to be bad for me because i like when i tried it on the store i just had too much excess and i was like i don't want this excess like tail like snagging on things as i walk past things but it turns out you you put the keeper wherever you want you know the ocean strap it's there's a bunch of holes all on the whole strap and the keeper comes out and you stick it in whatever hole you want it to be in
Marco:
So you can stick it like near the top.
Marco:
And so you tuck in almost the entire tail and just a little bit of it sticking out past the keeper.
Marco:
So that I thought was a really nice little detail there.
Marco:
That being said, I haven't quite found a comfortable fit on that strap yet.
Marco:
And fit on the Ultra is really important because it's so big and kind of heavy.
Marco:
If you don't have a nice snug fit, it scoots around your wrist a lot.
Marco:
Like it flops back and forth as you move your wrist.
Marco:
The bigger and heavier a watch is, the more they do that.
Marco:
And I still have that problem a lot with the Ultra, where I haven't yet nailed the fit of a strap.
Marco:
What has fit the best so far...
Marco:
is I just put the regular sport band on it.
Marco:
And I don't even have any 44 or 45 millimeter sport bands.
Marco:
So I just put on the regular like 40 millimeter ones that I have that, you know, they don't fill the whole slot where they go in, but it actually looks reasonably okay.
Marco:
And it's not a perfect fit.
Marco:
uh it the the way the the way those straps kind of curve out from the watch body looks kind of stupid on me um but it does hold it better against my wrist than the other ones have so far um so i'm still still kind of dealing with that um this company nomad goods has this orange sport strap um for pre-sale right now that looks pretty good so i ordered one of those to try um i i wish they had more orange straps and
Marco:
And I'm pretty sure the reason they don't is because of the Apple Watch Hermes deal.
Marco:
Hermes is, you know, orange is like their color, and they're probably protective of that.
Marco:
And I'm guessing they probably have some deal with Apple, with the Apple Watch Hermes, where maybe Apple's not allowed to use orange in that many other watch products.
Marco:
But somehow they negotiated the Alpine loop, so I don't know how.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
What the Ultra really needs is a really good orange sport band.
Marco:
The problem is that already exists for the Apple Watch Hermes.
Marco:
Because what I didn't know until I researched it last year is that the Hermes edition watches, whatever strap you get with them, like the $500 leather straps, they also come with sport bands that are the Hermes orange.
Marco:
Apple has occasionally sold orange bands before, but they're never really orange.
Marco:
They're like salmon or they're kind of like, you know, pinkish orange or yellow.
Marco:
Like they're not really bold orange.
Marco:
So the Hermes ones, though, they're only sold with Hermes watches.
Marco:
So I got one on eBay last summer.
Marco:
And I didn't find much use for it as much as I wanted to with my regular Apple Watch.
Marco:
But it looks really good with the Ultra.
Marco:
So right now, I'm just using an eBay Hermes one.
Marco:
Ultimately, I think what the Ultra, I think, what I hope they make for it is the orange, what is it called?
Marco:
The ocean band.
Marco:
So the rubber one that's made for it with all the circles in it.
Marco:
I hope they make an orange version of that.
Marco:
I think that would look really good.
Marco:
It has these wonderful orange accents on the watch, and you have to really play with those and work with those to make it look good.
Marco:
Like, I don't think the yellow strap looks good because it kind of clashes with it.
Marco:
What you want with orange is you want navy or, you know, dark gray or white.
Marco:
Maybe, you know, that's kind of where you want to be to pair up with orange, so...
Marco:
I'm happy with my orange strap for now.
Marco:
And I'm going to keep looking for other strap options.
Marco:
Hopefully that Nomad Goods one ends up being good.
Marco:
Because if so, if that ends up being a good strap, then that's it.
Marco:
That's what I want, you know.
Marco:
But it's not out yet, so we'll see how that goes.
Marco:
Anyway, Ultra Life, other than that, is pretty good.
Marco:
I have noticed, I don't know if this is simply because of differences in fit.
Marco:
During my workout, the Ultra is able to seemingly keep a much better lock on monitoring my heart rate.
Marco:
My Series 7 and I think all watches before it, I'll look down during a workout to check my heart rate and a lot of times it'll be like the grayed out numbers where it's not really measuring yet, you know, and you got to kind of wait and keep checking it over the next few seconds and it'll eventually pop in.
Marco:
The Ultra seems better at...
Marco:
locking it in and just having it always be monitored.
Marco:
I don't know if that's a thing that actually has changed with any of the hardware or whether that's just, you know, I happen to have a better fit on that for, you know, the hole in the sport band I'm using or whatever, who knows.
Marco:
But that is something I've noticed.
Marco:
And if that actually is a thing, that would be a valuable difference to me.
Marco:
But anyway, I still, during the few times that I have in the past week, put back on my regular, you know, Series 7 Titanium 41.
Marco:
it's a dream to put that back on.
Marco:
I'd like after wearing this thing and then to put that on, it's like, I feel like I'm wearing nothing at all.
Marco:
And I, I'm like going under sleeves.
Marco:
No problem.
Marco:
It's not chunky.
Marco:
Like, yeah, I still, I still very much love the regular Apple watch.
Marco:
Uh, so this is, this is a wonderful thing to play around with and get a feel for and design my app for.
Marco:
Um, but I don't, I don't think I'm going to be sticking with it longterm, especially as we head, you know, solidly into long sleeve season.
Marco:
It's good news for your Tesla.
Yeah.
John:
New watch coming its way.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Go to Linode.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
There's so much at Linode, and it's all backed by an amazing control panel, amazing support if you ever need it, a whole API to automate things as you need them.
Marco:
and it's just been really reliable for me and all of this has been brought with incredible value like it'd be one thing if you had you know the good host and over here some other company they're the cheap host and you could decide you know between them it's not like that linode is the good host and also the cheap host and this is this is usually not been the case in my in my you know history before using them uh it that was hard to find it didn't exist
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Create a free account there and you'll get $100 in credit.
Marco:
Once again, linode.com slash ATP.
Marco:
New accounts get $100 in credit.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for being an awesome web host and for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, we should probably get to the elephant in the room, and that is Apple has released a bunch of new stuff, and they did it via press release, as the German gods foretold.
Casey:
We've got, very, very briefly, we've got a new regular iPad, we've got a new iPad Pro, and semi-surprisingly, we've got a new Apple TV.
Casey:
So I guess we can start with the regular iPad.
Casey:
This is the iPad 10th generation.
Casey:
A short, short version.
Casey:
It's using an A14, which is from late 2020, the iPhone 12.
Casey:
Flat sides, no home button, touch ID on the power lock, whatever you call it, button.
Casey:
Blue, pink, yellow, and silver.
Casey:
And isn't there like a gray as well?
Casey:
Yeah, I believe gray as well.
Marco:
By the way, they called it the top button in the presentation.
Casey:
Ah, my mistake.
Casey:
10.9-inch screen.
Casey:
There's USB-C, Wi-Fi 6, 5G.
Casey:
It offers both physical and eSIM.
Casey:
And then there's a – the front-facing camera is on the side, the way we think of it as the side, or on the top when you're in landscape, which –
Casey:
Here, here.
Casey:
I'm definitely enjoying that.
Casey:
Then it does not support stage manager, and it starts a little more expensive.
Casey:
$450 for the Wi-Fi version, $600 for the Wi-Fi plus cellular version, which is about $120 more than last year's model, and that's 64 gigs.
Casey:
Also, it uses the original Apple Pencil, which we have plenty to talk about in just a minute.
Casey:
But I want to gloss over that for just a moment.
Casey:
And then it also has a new Magic Keyboard Folio, which is, I don't know what Microsoft calls their Surface Keyboard, but it is basically that.
Casey:
And I have some thoughts on that as well.
Casey:
But that is the nickel tour of the iPad.
Casey:
Where would we like to start with this?
John:
A couple of items that you bounced over that I think are worth adding, especially as it relates to the price.
John:
The screen is not P3.
John:
The Bluetooth is 5.2, which may not mean anything to you, but it'll be interesting to see from the hodgepodge of products they announce.
John:
What Bluetooth standards do other products get?
Casey:
Yeah, and very quickly, I looked into this briefly this morning.
Casey:
It doesn't seem to me, and maybe I'm missing something, but it doesn't seem to me that 5.1 adds a whole lot over 5.0.
Casey:
But 5.2 adds low energy audio, which I presume is something that Apple is interested in, unless they're already doing that with AirPods, but I didn't think they were.
Casey:
So 5.2 adding low energy auto, which is on this iPad, that might be a big deal in the future.
John:
This does have a SIM slot, so it's got an eSIM as well, but it also supports nanoSIM, so it's got a slot on it, so they didn't do what they did with the phones there.
John:
It's interesting for both the speakers and the camera, like you know the camera is
John:
not along the short edge it is along the long edge they call it the landscape camera the landscape 12 megapixel ultra wide camera right and the speakers they call landscape stereo speakers i don't know where the speakers were on previous models but i'm assuming this is saying that the speakers are on the short edges but they call them landscape stereo speakers because they're stereo when you're holding it in landscape mode anyway
John:
Their naming is weird, but the camera being moved... Everything about this iPad is weird.
John:
Yeah, well, the first one I saw, they had moved the landscape camera.
John:
Everyone's like, oh, that's good, because when you do FaceTime, it'll look more normal, because if you've never done FaceTime in landscape mode on an existing iPad, you're always not quite looking.
John:
It's like sideways to you.
John:
It's to your left or to your right, so it looks kind of weird.
John:
When it's above, it looks more like you're doing FaceTime from a Mac, so the camera looks at you a little bit from above, but at least your eyes are aligned left-right-wise, you know, to be...
John:
straight at the screen but when i saw that i'm like oh that's great that means when i'm unlocking it my hand won't block the face id thing and it won't have that arrow oh it doesn't even have face id never mind right so the exciting thing about this product the reason oh one more i think the the battery exactly the same size as the ipad air 28.6 watt hours right and so that's what's interesting about this product before you can get into the pencil thing is how is this not a macbook and a mac an ipad air because i look at this i'm like isn't that the ipad air
John:
And the answer is no, it's not the iPad Air.
John:
It's close.
John:
So here are the differences between this and the iPad Air.
John:
So obviously the iPad Air has the M1 and this doesn't.
John:
And that also means this gets stage manager.
John:
Despite the fact that they just announced that they're extending stage manager down the line to, I think, A12-based devices.
John:
And this has an A14 but doesn't get stage manager.
John:
But whatever.
John:
iPad Air, M1, stage manager.
John:
So better system on a chip and stage manager.
John:
a12 x and z get it but the base a12 does not right okay um the the ipad air obviously uses the the second gen apple pencil we'll talk about that in a bit the ipad air is older so it has bluetooth 5.0 not 5.2 the ipad air has p3 color and a fully laminated display with 1.8 reflectivity basically the screen's a little bit better on the ipad air um
John:
I think the cameras are the same.
John:
External display support is quite different.
John:
The iPad Air supports up to a single display with 6K resolution.
John:
I think this one only does 4K.
John:
What are the stats?
John:
Oh, just 4K at like 30 hertz or something where I thought I had that.
John:
Yeah, supports one external display at 4K and 30 hertz or 1080p at 60.
John:
So the iPad Air does have a leg up on this in many stat categories.
John:
But if you saw them both sitting on the table,
John:
You'd be forgiven for thinking that this is an iPad Air, unless you use the Apple Pencil with it.
John:
And that, I think, is, of all the things we listed, the most baffling thing about this product.
John:
They changed the cheap, low-end iPad to have flat sides in the modern design.
John:
It doesn't have a home button, in case it doesn't go without saying.
John:
It's got the Touch ID button on the top.
John:
It's got all flat sides and everything.
John:
But it doesn't use the pencil that sticks to the flat-sided iPads.
John:
It uses the pencil that's completely round, the first-generation Apple Pencil, which does not stick to this in any way, shape, or form, nor does it plug into this in any way, shape, or form.
John:
You have to have a little adapter that allows you to connect to the USB-C port at the bottom.
John:
By the way, this doesn't have lightning, right?
John:
This is USB-C.
John:
It's like the iPad Airform Factor, but it does not support the flat Apple Pencil.
John:
So if you buy a new first-generation Apple Pencil today, which they're still selling, it will come with this little adapter,
John:
that lets you plug it into a USB-C iPad.
John:
And why would you need to plug it in?
John:
Like, why do you care?
John:
Can't you just charge it someplace else?
John:
You plug it in to basically pair it.
John:
Like that's how the Apple, the Apple pencils that plug in work.
John:
You plug it in to pair it with the things.
John:
You need to be able to actually physically stick it into the iPad.
John:
It's not just a matter of charging it.
John:
It's a matter of pairing it with the iPad.
John:
And it also charges it through that.
John:
If you have an old Apple pencil, a first generation Apple pencil, you can buy the stupid little dongle thingy for $9, right?
John:
This is disappointing.
John:
like not super disappointing like what if you already have a first-gen apple pencil that's great i get to reuse my pencil i'll buy a nine dollar adapter i keep using my pencil but it's flat-sided man like you want to stick a pencil on there but you can't you it doesn't work with the apple pencil too it's not that and this is one of the questions some people are asking is
John:
Can I use an Apple Pencil 2 with it?
John:
Like, is there any crossover between a device that's supposed to work with Apple Pencil 1 and Apple Pencil 2?
John:
And as far as I know, no, there's not like they use a different way of like you can't write.
John:
So if you have an Apple Pencil 2, it's useless with this device.
John:
It won't stick to the sides.
John:
You can't pair it with it and you can't draw on the screen with it.
John:
only the first generation round apple pencil which again this is the thing that steve jobs used to do because he had a bee in his butt about this when the new better thing comes out wipe the table clean of all that old junk because why would you ever want the old junk let's do the new and that is not how apple has operated uh since he's been gone for better or for worse very often for better in terms of having cheaper products it's you know stay in the lineup longer so people can buy them right
John:
but for worse with this stupid first generation apple pencil which is not a bad product but apple did apple pencil second generation everyone agrees oh yeah that's much better you fixed all the problems with the first one i like get rid of the first generation apple pencil stop making it and more importantly stop making new products that require that pencil because the second generation one is just plain better it's better that it magnetically attaches to the side
John:
It's better that it doesn't roll off the table.
John:
It's better that there's nothing, no little cap that you're inevitably going to lose.
John:
It's better that you don't stick it into the side of the thing to pair it.
John:
So it's precariously sticking out the end and waiting for someone to snap it off.
John:
Apple Pencil 2 is better.
John:
Get rid of Apple Pencil.
John:
This is like the Watch Series 3 all over again.
John:
We've moved on.
John:
The world has moved on.
John:
You yourself made a better pencil product.
John:
Just so frustrating.
Marco:
Yeah, and just to point out, the Apple Pencil 2 came out four years ago.
Marco:
This is not like a cutting-edge thing.
Marco:
That's pretty old in computer terms.
Marco:
It's a four-year-old change, and it was badly needed for all the reasons you mentioned.
Marco:
I mean, when I saw...
Marco:
That picture on Twitter that showed the old teenage boy charging method and then the new cable plus dongle.
Marco:
I'm like, there's no way this is true.
Marco:
I had to verify.
Marco:
Surely this can't be real, right?
Marco:
And no, it's real.
Marco:
Basically, what they're basically saying is, or what I will say is,
Marco:
is if you want to use an apple pencil just don't get this model of ipad just don't like it it is not that that hassle is not worth it or if you if you insist on it get the logitech crayon instead which is this is a thing not a lot of people know about this logitech has been selling a a pencil like stylus called the logitech crayon
Marco:
for a number of years now through at through apple like it's it's with their cooperation it works basically the same way as a pencil it lacks some of the power usury things like i believe it doesn't have pressure sensitivity um but if you're just using it for like you know drawing and stuff where you don't really need pressure sensitivity um it's great it is a little more um friendly in certain ways like it has just like a charging hole on it there's now a usb-c one i believe the the new logic crayon works with both
Marco:
old style and new style iPads, I believe.
Marco:
And it is cheaper also.
Marco:
So if you don't need the pressure or the tilt, some of that advanced drawing stuff, that's an option.
Marco:
I bought one a while ago.
Marco:
It was pretty good.
Marco:
Oh, it has an off switch too, which is nice sometimes.
Marco:
So anyway, that's an option that people don't often know exists.
Marco:
But going back to it, this product...
Marco:
This is a very strange product to me.
Marco:
The rumors had been for a while that Apple was going to do exactly what they did today, which is a new iPad Pro and a new low-end iPad that used USB-C.
Marco:
And while we got both of those things...
Marco:
I think there are so many little asterisks on them that no one was expecting.
Marco:
And by the way, I don't think anybody had the Apple TV on their bingo card.
Marco:
We'll get to that later.
Marco:
But this is such a weird product.
Marco:
We'll start with this because it's a little more interesting than the Pro.
Marco:
This makes me wonder, like, how many different COVID and supply chain related problems is this the result of?
Marco:
There is no way they planned for this.
John:
I'm not so sure about that.
John:
I don't see anything here that says supply chain.
John:
It's an awkward product, but it seems to be an awkward product that they chose to make.
John:
As people are pointing in the chat room, the Apple Pencil 2 not magnetically attaching to the side and charging there, one explanation could be that that's where the camera is.
John:
They could have decided, well, okay...
John:
We can't figure out for this cheap iPad how to have the quote unquote landscape camera and also the pencil.
John:
So which one do we think is more important?
John:
And someone decided, if people want the good pencil, they should buy the expensive one.
John:
Let's do the landscape camera.
John:
And you could argue that's the right call.
John:
But a series of decisions like that leads to this product that is just kind of awkwardly in the middle.
John:
I mean, not awkwardly.
John:
It is in the middle.
John:
Like the reason I was talking about the iPad Air is, first of all, they're still selling the previous one.
John:
Like they didn't discontinue the home button one.
John:
Yeah, that's the weird thing.
John:
That's one of the weird things.
John:
Right, so, but if you look at the lineup and you see it go from, later in the document, you can see it goes from, you know, the iPad, the old iPad, the ninth generation iPad, the 10th generation iPad, the iPad Air, and the iPad Pro.
John:
The prices spread those things out and the features spread
John:
Spread those things out.
John:
It's just that trying to spread the features over four iPads leaves you with some iPads that have some features that you like and some features that you don't.
John:
And because the flat sides was so defined by the Pro, when we see a flat-sided one, you're like, okay, well, we get all the flat-sided stuff, right?
John:
And I was like, no, you don't.
John:
You get flat sides, but you don't get the other stuff.
John:
You get USB-C, but you don't get the pencil, right?
John:
Do you get quad stereo speakers?
John:
No, but you get two of them, but they're in a different position.
John:
It's just, is the smart connector on the back or is it on the side?
John:
Well, it's on the side of this one, and we'll get to the Magic Keyboard Folio in a little bit, but like...
John:
This does fit in the slot in the lineup between those two things.
John:
But to get something to fit there, there's not a clean feature set where you're like, this is one set of features that work in harmony.
John:
And this is a second set of features that work in harmony.
John:
Like it's features that work in harmony from the neighbors.
John:
A bunch of them pulled into this product and them working together not quite in harmony.
John:
All the way down to the system on a chip and just everything about it is a little bit...
John:
weird i don't necessarily think it's bad because it's better than the one with the home button but it's not as good as the air but it's also 120 cheaper so like okay but the apple fun so like you said it feels not like an insult but it feels like this product is telling you if you're really into the pencil don't get this one
Marco:
Yeah, it's... I mean, there's... This is such... You know, they do have a lineup now that covers most prices in the range.
Marco:
But with the exception of covering prices, no other part of this lineup makes a lot of sense.
Marco:
Almost every model that they sell, if not every model...
Marco:
There are questions about it where it's like, wait a minute.
Marco:
Why don't you just get the one above it or the one below it?
Marco:
Or why does this model have something nicer than the thing above it?
John:
It's because they haven't refreshed them all at once.
John:
This always happens when they do piecemeal refreshes.
John:
Because the newest one has some of the newer stuff.
John:
but then the older ones have some better stuff but they don't have the newer stuff so example of a newer stuff a newer stuff apple seems to have finally decided i guess people use their things in landscape so the camera should go in the landscape edge right that's a new decision they've made and that's by the way that's great i fully support that in practice the ipad is usually a landscape device for every person i've ever seen using one including everyone in my household for sure it's like
Marco:
yeah optimize it for landscape it's obvious like yeah leave it leave it the ability to rotate like it's always had but it should be a landscape first design and that's so it makes sense to move the camera to the top and and when you know if for the face id models in particular like that you know the the i think it's just the ipad pro um when i first when we when they first moved to that in 2018 uh four years ago
Marco:
um they that that was one of the biggest annoyances of like oh i'm accidentally covering up the camera because my hand goes there on the left side and i'm covering up the camera and so i can't unlock it yet like it took them four years to have the first model uh that that ever moved the camera over to the landscape um but
John:
then if it's going to come with all these trade-offs like does it really have to be centered does it have to only be one camera well we don't we don't even know if that's a trade-off but the point is that is a that is a new feature not necessarily an expensive feature in terms of just moving the camera right but then when you see the models that didn't get as heavily revised like the pros that we'll get to in a little bit they don't get that new feature even though they were supposedly updated at the same time it's clear that they have just you know like spec bump update whereas this is an all new design
John:
For this product, like the low-end iPad has never had the flat sides, right?
Marco:
But this isn't even the low-end iPad.
Marco:
It's called iPad, but instead of being the low-end iPad, it's $100 more.
John:
Well, the problem with Tim Cook's thing is like the fact that it's called iPad, I think it is low-end iPad, but he'll keep around products that like, well, people still want them.
John:
And I think that's the right move here to keep around the home button because it is significantly cheaper.
John:
And maybe you don't care about the stupid flat sides and you want the cheaper one.
John:
But they didn't make a new name for this slot.
John:
Like iPad Air was a new name to say, hey, there's a place between the Pro and the regular iPad.
John:
This is just called iPad.
John:
It's called iPad 10th generation, and you can also still buy the iPad 9th generation.
John:
So they clearly both think they are filling the iPad low-end role.
John:
It's just that, hey, now we have an extra one from last year that we can keep there for an even lower price.
John:
And I think that's an okay move, but...
John:
you know eventually when that one goes away this one will be the only low end maybe something will slot above it like why aren't there two are we gonna get two generations of ipad air or do they only does the low end like is this the ipad se like the ninth generation becomes the ipad se or something like what we would like to see
John:
if we had our way and have less confusing lineup is all the iPads have flat sides.
John:
There's a coherent scale down of features from top to bottom and whatever good ideas that they have about iPad design, whether it's the landscape camera or the folio thing or whatever, that they either all have that or all don't like because, because they all do have cameras.
John:
And if Apple has decided the best place for the cameras on the landscape edge, then it should be there in all of them.
John:
But if you don't update them all at the same time, you can't do that.
John:
Or if you don't update them all like to the same degree at the same time,
John:
where one is an all-new design and the second one is just an internal revision, right?
John:
Then you end up with this kind of lumpy lineup.
Marco:
I mean, geez, there's so much about the iPad that's, you know, lumpy.
Marco:
But yeah, I think time will tell, like, does this get resolved as we slowly pull our way out of this weird supply chain, you know, thing that the world's been going through?
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
I mean it's so it's so hard to tell with Tim Cook like whether whether this was planned to be this weird and so such a like you know it had to be planned because what because what supply are they missing that would have made them make a different choice.
Marco:
Well, this brings us right to the iPad Pro.
Marco:
If you look at the iPad Pro and the updates it got versus the rumors we've had for like two years, I think it slipped.
Marco:
I think what happened was the iPad Pro that was supposed to be for this generation, I think a lot of stuff had to be delayed until some future version.
Marco:
Again, like the world's been going through so much stuff with supply chain and everything.
Marco:
And Apple, again, they've been doing a really good job of insulating us from it, from their products.
Marco:
Like their products have mostly not appeared to have any problems to the outside world.
Marco:
But I bet internally they've had all sorts of struggles and all sorts of things.
Marco:
Oh, we can't get this part in enough volume or this is going to have to wait till the next version.
Marco:
I'm sure that happens to a lot of their stuff.
Marco:
You can't just say like, oh, this isn't from COVID.
Marco:
This is definitely Tim Cook's weirdness.
Marco:
Tim Cook has no shortage of product fit weirdness and no shame about charging high prices and keeping old things around.
Marco:
That's, of course, that's all Tim Cook.
Marco:
That's just him.
Marco:
But we can't brush off the fact that this is probably also the result of what's been happening in the world, whether they say so or not.
Marco:
They'll never say so.
John:
But like what specifically about this product makes you think that I think they chose this feature set for this product.
John:
Maybe the ship date changed based on supply constraints or whatever.
John:
But I think somebody sat down and like the product, the iPad product designs, which don't involve Tim Cook at all, decided this was the feature set.
John:
This is the right feature set for the new low end iPad.
John:
This set of compromises.
Marco:
I think we've seen over the last couple of years, Apple has been more willing than before to introduce new things at higher price points and keep the old ones around and not lower their prices.
Marco:
So this happened with the Apple Watch situation.
Marco:
This happened with some of the phone stuff.
Marco:
It certainly happened with the Macs, some of the Macs.
Marco:
It happened with the new MacBook Air.
Marco:
And now it's happening with the low-end iPad.
Marco:
The low-end iPad, the iPad with no name, just iPad, has been around for a number of years now and has gotten very regular updates.
Marco:
And the price has stayed very regular.
Marco:
And they sell a ton of those things.
Marco:
That's bulk buys for schools and stuff like that.
Marco:
They sell a ton of those things.
Marco:
To now get this new update that is substantially more money for a product whose entire existence is to be inexpensive and to say, all right, we're going to keep the old one around.
Marco:
and not even discount it.
Marco:
Just, okay, now we have this new one that's allegedly going to replace it.
Marco:
Again, see also the MacBook Air.
Marco:
Like, this is supposed to replace this, but we're going to keep selling both, and the old one doesn't get cheaper.
Marco:
That's Tim Cook right there.
Marco:
But I do think, again, like...
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
Maybe there were certain features that they wanted to put in that they couldn't for supply reasons.
Marco:
Maybe it is something like the Apple Pencil magnetic mounting stuff that maybe they couldn't get that cheap enough or they couldn't redesign it fast enough because they were at reduced capacity for the last couple of years.
Marco:
Who knows what it was?
Marco:
But
Marco:
This product lineup looks very confused, even more so than you'd expect from Tim Cook Apple.
Marco:
And so I think stuff happens that we don't know about that is keeping things from coming out normally.
John:
One interesting supply chain thing may be that it has an A14, which you may think, oh, it's low-end iPad, whatever, it's got the A14.
John:
But as we'll see in a little bit, the Apple TV got the A15 and the iPad gets the A14.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, it's a little bit weird.
John:
And another thing, they did bump the RAM.
John:
It used to have three gigs.
John:
The old iPad had three gigs.
John:
The new one has four, which is nice.
Casey:
So I wanted to briefly talk about the Magic Keyboard Folio.
Casey:
So the iPad itself starts at $600.
Casey:
The Magic Keyboard Folio is $250.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
Almost half the cost of the entire iPad.
Casey:
And the Magic Keyboard, by comparison, is $300.
Casey:
The Magic Keyboard Folio only comes in white.
Casey:
So white, ladies and gents and peoples, can just happen to you.
Casey:
It really can.
Casey:
The way this works is it's got a case on the back of the iPad that has a kickstand.
Casey:
And then a detachable keyboard.
Casey:
So again, if you've seen the Microsoft Surface, it's very, very similar to that.
Casey:
What's interesting to me about this, though, it has a function key row, including an escape key.
Casey:
Two things that I would kill for on the floaty hinge magic keyboard that we know and love.
Casey:
I suspect the reason it has all this is because there's more space.
Casey:
Because if we think of the way the Magic Keyboard and the iPad Pro works, the very, very back of the keyboard, there's like two to three to four inches of just empty space because that's where the bottom of the iPad kind of hinges or hangs over it, particularly when you tilt it so it's pointed upwards.
Casey:
So there's a bunch of dead space there.
Casey:
Whereas here, there is no dead space.
Casey:
The
Casey:
that pain that that surface is available for keys and trackpad and so on and so forth so i'm guessing that's why but i want i want this i want function keys and i don't i don't necessarily want to give up the hinge the the floaty hinge thing the cantilevered whatever hinge thing because i really really really like that a lot but i want to i want a function row key and i want an escape key please and thank you
John:
That function might even come in handy with Stage Manager.
John:
Oh, never mind.
John:
Oh, just kidding.
John:
Another interesting thing about this when I was looking at Apple's page for this is one of their snippets of marketing text was no pairing or charging required, which is true.
John:
Like this is one that uses a smart connector, doesn't have batteries.
John:
But that felt like a subtle dig at all the third party iPad keyboard products that either have their own battery or have to be charged separately.
John:
You have to pair during Bluetooth.
John:
It's like, yeah, it's nice.
John:
It's nice when you make the hardware, isn't it, Apple?
John:
you can just have the keyboard that snaps right on to the brand new product and uh yeah i mean it this is interesting i'm not sure unlike the landscape camera which seems like something that we all wish was here like this thing with the kickstand and the floppy detachable keyboard it has you know advantages hey you can detach the keyboard kickstand some people like kickstands it also has disadvantages it's not quite as sturdy and laptop like as the other thing and
John:
By the way, speaking of the other things, Zach Hall had a good tweet here.
John:
I'm not sure if this is exhaustive, but he says, Apple now makes smart cover, smart keyboard, smart keyboard folio, smart folio, magic keyboard, and magic keyboard folio for iPad.
John:
Wow.
John:
Is there any wonder we can't keep track of what these freaking products are?
John:
Smart and magic and keyboards and folios.
John:
Anyway, they make a lot of floppy things that snap onto your iPad and make it try to be a laptop.
John:
But this is an interesting and new set of compromises.
John:
And I think this is a good set of compromises for the low-end iPad.
John:
Hey, you get a keyboard and a trackpad and you get the function keys, which seems to be like what you said about the space case.
John:
It makes a lot of sense, but also the idea that Apple is...
John:
has heard the cries of the people who want that row of keys and said, let's find a way to provide them.
John:
This is a slightly less expensive product.
John:
It's $250, like half the price of the iPad.
John:
But still, lightweight, small-ish, not as fancy as whatever the one that's called that's like a...
John:
you know that stiff little robo hinge thing um so i think it's it's the it's the right accessory for this and it is another example of a new thing new thinking apple has about accessories you know mainly the function row and also the idea that a keyboard without a trackpad for for the ipad in this day and age is not as useful because their cursor support is so great it should have the trackpad and so it does
Casey:
I just wanted to call a quick mention to Dan Morin's take on six colors, which talks about all the iPad lineup.
Casey:
And we're going to talk about the iPad Pro right now.
Casey:
But I wanted to make mention that that article was really good and worth reading as well.
Casey:
So let's talk about the iPad Pro.
Casey:
It gets the M2, as we would expect.
Casey:
It now says iPad Pro on the back, which is new.
Casey:
It has Wi-Fi 6E, which is allegedly up to 2.4 gigabits per second.
Casey:
Also, the cellular models get 5G and my beloved millimeter wave on my don't call it a park bench picnic table.
Casey:
It gets Bluetooth 5.3, which I looked into the difference between .2, which is on the iPad, and .3, which is on the iPad Pro.
Casey:
Didn't see anything special.
Casey:
Again, maybe I missed something.
Casey:
It gets hover with the Apple Pencil.
Casey:
We'll come back to that in just a moment.
Casey:
Price is unchanged, and otherwise it looks like it's basically the same stuff.
Casey:
So the hover with Apple Pencil, this is with the same second-generation Apple Pencil, reading a quote here from the Newsroom article that Apple put out.
Casey:
Apple Pencil is now detected up to 12 millimeters above the display, allowing users to see a preview of their mark before they make it.
Casey:
This also allows users to sketch and illustrate with even greater precision and makes everything users do with Apple Pencil even more effortless.
Casey:
For example, with Scribble, text fields automatically expand when the pencil gets near the screen, and handwriting converts to text even faster.
Casey:
Third-party apps can also take advantage of this new feature to enable entirely new marking and drawing experiences.
Casey:
They showed an example of this in their 10-minute marketing video.
Casey:
I forget what app it was.
Casey:
But the user was hovering.
Casey:
It was Procreate.
Casey:
OK, thank you.
Casey:
They were hovering their pencil over the iPad screen and then using their left hand, this was in their right hand, using their left hand to pinch and zoom.
Casey:
And I believe that was adjusting the size of the mark that they were using with their, they were about to make with the pencil.
Casey:
And you can see like a little shadow of what that mark, where that mark would be and how big it would be on the screen before the pencil actually contacts the screen, which is pretty cool.
Casey:
And we'll put a link in the show notes to a video of this happening.
Casey:
which is pretty slick.
Casey:
So yeah, the prices are the same, between 128 gigs and 2 terabytes, starting at $800 for the 11-inch Wi-Fi, $1,000 for the 11-inch Wi-Fi starting from, and starting from $1,100, excuse me, I'm sorry, $1,000 for cellular, starting from $1,100 on the 12.9 for Wi-Fi, $1,300 for cellular, and these go all the way up to $2,400 for a 12.9-inch 2 terabyte with cellular.
John:
Yeah, so we can start talking about all the things that this thing didn't get.
John:
No landscape camera.
John:
No keyboard with any function keys on it.
John:
You know, no detachable keyboard thing.
John:
You know, the 11-inch does not get a mini-LED screen.
John:
It's still only on the 12.9-inch.
John:
None of them get OLED screens or anything.
John:
So it's kind of just like an internal refresh.
John:
Basically, they kept, in Mac parlance, they kept the case the same.
John:
It's got the same...
John:
features the same ports the same not that there are many ports to speak of but it's the same stuff on the inside on the outside and on the inside just swap out the m1 for the m2 which makes sense you know um the m2 does have uh the prores encoders like this is not new to the ipad it's just part of the m2 um but it allows it to do things that the m1 just couldn't do in terms of like this is from apple's marketing copy
John:
Allows users to capture ProRes video for the first time and transcode ProRes footage up to three times faster.
John:
That means content creators can capture, edit, and publish cinema-grade video from a single device out in the field.
John:
As long as you consider the iPad camera, which is unchanged, to be cinema-grade video.
John:
But the editing part is totally cinema-grade.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So it's, you know, in isolation.
John:
Oh, hey, they updated the iPad Pro and now it's got the M2 and the specs are a little bit better.
John:
Like, for example, the Wi-Fi 6E, that's twice as fast as the previous Wi-Fi in theory, you know, a little bit over two gigabits instead of one gigabit, right?
John:
This is a good spec bump upgrade to the iPad Pro and, you know, Bluetooth 5.3, whatever.
John:
The problem is you got the other iPad over there saying, hey, you got a spec bump, but I got some new ideas about what makes an iPad.
John:
like the landscape camera and the detachable keyboard and you didn't get any of that stuff uh and you know and by the way you didn't even i'm kind of catching up to you in some ways like your cameras aren't massively improved over what they were before and i have some pretty good cameras now too so what do you think of that um and the the hover apple pencil thing one of the most clever things about that is it doesn't require a new pencil if you have an apple pencil second gen that you bought you know four years ago or however old the thing is
John:
uh you can use it with this new ipad and it does the hover thing right and that's i've used that uh most people won't be familiar with that feature from tablets from my the wacom tablets or wacom or however you're supposed to say it um and lots of other companies have had the hover pencil pen thing for a while it's interesting that
John:
apple you know the apple pencil does not have a button on it right uh lots of tablets third-party tablets for mac have had a button on them and one of the things you can do with that is kind of use it as a hovering cursor and then click with the mouse button with the button that's on the the stylus on the apple pencil you can i believe you can tap the pencil and the accelerometers will register that you like double tap the side yeah which is in my experience fairly unreliable and it's hard to get right
John:
it's not quite the same as a button but it would be way better if it was a button because it would be so much less likely to to have accidental input or miss yeah and that's an interesting way to if you ever tried to use i mean it's mostly a mac if you ever tried to use a mac by hovering a stylus over a tablet and using the button to click it can be done and it's kind of interesting um but apple's not quite ready to go there and i kind of don't blame them because it is much simpler to have it without the the thing and 12 millimeters is not that big of a range either um
John:
this feature the hover thing like obviously the pencil always had whatever it took to support this and it was just a matter of having you know the os integration and maybe some additional hardware i'm not sure if it's just one or both of those things uh but importantly cursor support
John:
Because cursor support was required in iPad OS to even have the concept of a place on the screen where there is like something hovering, you know what I mean?
John:
But not actually clicking because your fingers don't work with hover, right?
John:
At least as far as I know, they're not going to enable our fingers to work with hover.
John:
They could do that with a future iPad, I suppose.
John:
But right now they don't, right?
John:
You're either touching the screen or you're not touching the screen.
John:
But hover basically gives you a cursor and you can move that cursor around just like you would by using a trackpad.
John:
But you're not clicking anything yet until you do a click motion, which could be in some applications whacking the pencil or whatever.
John:
So I think that's great.
John:
And I think that would get a lot of, you know, oohs and ahs if people weren't saying, oh, man, my hand's still going to cover the FaceTime camera.
John:
What's up with that?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So a couple of really good tweets or excerpts from articles.
Casey:
Federico Fatici says the base model iPad gets landscape camera.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
And a brand new magic keyboard folio.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
With a detachable keyboard and kickstand.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
And function keys.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
But the iPad Pro gets none of this.
Marco:
This is why, again, you look at what's been rumored for the last couple of years.
Marco:
Wireless charging, mag safe.
Casey:
OLED screens.
Marco:
OLED.
Marco:
And this got none of it.
Marco:
That's why I have to think it was not planned to be this small of an update originally, and things had to change for whatever reason.
Marco:
And they shipped what they could, and sometime in the future we'll get the better one.
Marco:
Okay.
John:
The thing that I think that prevented them from doing the thing is I think supply – even if COVID had never happened, I don't think that there are screens ready that meet their – OLED screens ready that meet their requirements in this application.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I think mini-LED seems like a supply chain thing because obviously they do have mini-LEDs that fit their specs, but it's still only on the 12.9.
John:
Why didn't you get 11-inch ones of those?
John:
That seems like a supply chain thing.
John:
But I don't think anybody makes an OLED that meets their requirement.
John:
They're not using OLEDs in any of them.
John:
They're not using it on their laptops.
John:
They're not using it anywhere.
John:
But again, look at the laptops.
John:
It's clear that...
John:
In a laptop application and in an iPad application, many LED screens exist that are phenomenal.
John:
It's just that does the iPad 11-inch Pro 11-inch get one?
John:
No, it just doesn't.
John:
For the second year in a row, it just doesn't.
John:
The 12.9 gets it.
John:
The laptops get it.
John:
But the poor 11-inch iPad doesn't get it.
John:
And that just smells like a supply chain or a pricing thing.
John:
But OLED, they need to wait until...
John:
When OLED is ready to be better than the mini LEDs in these applications, some product will get it, whether it's the laptop or the iPads, and then it'll roll out.
John:
So I'm just waiting for that because I watch a tremendous amount of TV on my iPad, and that'll really be an upgrade to the picture quality.
John:
But yeah, having this be just a spec bump update...
John:
i don't think is bad in the grand scheme of things like it's the ipad pro is a good design it's just having its little brother have some new thinking about ipads that makes you go oh i'd like that new thinking over here too that's what you get for updating a line not in sync with each other in terms of the tick tock thing of like when do we do a whole new case design and when do we do a spec bump next year uh the regular ipad 10th gen is going to get a spec bump right and
John:
And maybe the Pro will get the big redesign because the Pro did get the big redesign and the non-Pro was looking pretty, you know, cruddy next to it for many years because the Pro got the flat sides, new pencil, all the features.
John:
And it took a while for those to roll out.
John:
I mean, the Mini has the magnetic pencil.
John:
I was reminded of this when I was in an Apple store recently.
John:
The pencil fills the whole side of the Mini, but it's got the good pencil.
John:
The new iPad does not.
Casey:
Yeah, it's a little bit wild.
Casey:
And I've been thinking a lot about this, obviously, and I don't have any good answers and I'm not plugged in enough to get good answers.
Casey:
But the only conclusion I can come to is, you know, there's only and we say this a lot about Apple, but there's only so many people that can work on all these things.
Casey:
And
Casey:
If you're going to work on something, I would assume the most lucrative, or God help me, the best return on investment, is to work on the thing that most people are going to buy.
Casey:
And that's got to be the regular, plain old iPad.
Casey:
And yeah, you're making it more expensive, which might ruin my whole train of thought here, but...
Casey:
I feel like if they're going to choose one iPad to work on, they're going to work on the one that's selling the best, and that's probably the now 10th generation iPad.
Casey:
But it still bums me out, and it's still incongruous that the allegedly cheap one, again, leaving aside the 9th gen iPad...
Casey:
The cheap one is the one that has all the new hotness.
Casey:
And the pro one, the one that's for your most ardent and loyal fans, shrug, you'll get there eventually.
Casey:
And I don't know, I get it, but I can't help but it bumming me out a little bit.
Casey:
And so I'm jumping ahead slightly, but I was going to ask you two if you bought anything, but I'll tell you that I did buy a half terabyte 11-inch cellular iPad Pro.
Casey:
And most of the reason I did that was because my current iPad Pro is a 2018 model.
Casey:
It was the original OG Face ID iPad Pro.
John:
and and i think i'm not going to cancel this order the more i think about it yeah what what upgrade between those two models we're looking for because it's same form back there same same features face id good apple pencil blah blah blah obviously this one is tremendously faster but does that manifest like it has and this one has more ram i'll sell you my m1 one for a good price
Casey:
Well, and that's the thing is that part of the reason I told myself I was going to get a new iPad this year because it's been four years.
Casey:
And I feel like four years is a pretty decent longevity for an iPad.
Casey:
Like, I mean, hell, four years for a computer for Marco, that's like 15 computers for you.
Marco:
And about a third of a computer for John.
Casey:
Well done.
Casey:
But I feel like four years for an iPad, that's not unreasonable.
Casey:
And it just felt like time.
Casey:
But I spoke to a couple of friends who also are on 11-inch 2018 iPads, iPad Pros.
Casey:
And I've been thinking about it.
Casey:
And I think I would like... I think I'm going to keep this one that I'm going to be picking up at the store on Wednesday or whatever day.
Casey:
But to answer your question, John...
Casey:
I don't have a great answer for that question.
Casey:
I do want 5G because, again, I like having a cellular iPad.
Casey:
I would like it to be a little bit speedier when I'm not connected to Wi-Fi.
Casey:
I'd like a faster processor, but I don't often feel like I'm hamstrung by whatever processors in this one.
Casey:
I don't even remember anymore.
Casey:
um a 12x yeah yeah i think you're right actually um and then i'd like to be able to use stage manager because i feel like that's relevant for my job you know as in to talk to you guys about it because i guess i could use it on the on the one that i have now but it's slightly hamstrung if i if i remember correctly who even really knows how it's going to work out no you can you can use everything except external screens i believe
Casey:
Okay, there you go.
Casey:
But I mean, I'd like to try with an external screen, not because I think I'll do that often, but because I'd like to talk about it.
Casey:
But more than anything else, the thing I think I'm most looking forward to is my current iPad.
Casey:
It's just showing age.
Casey:
The screen looks like garbage in no small part because my kids use a lot.
Casey:
The battery is okay.
Casey:
It's not trash, but it's not great.
Casey:
I mean, it's four years on.
Casey:
So I think just having like a fresh start would be nice.
Casey:
But your point, your implied point, John, is very good that I'm not sure I'm getting that much in terms of like what I would do day to day.
Casey:
I'm not saying the math is the same for anyone else.
Casey:
But for me, I'm not getting that much.
Casey:
I'm probably going to attempt to just keep the same keyboard because I really don't want to buy another one, even though my smart keyboard is showing its age and it's kind of peeling away at the edges a little bit.
Casey:
But I'd rather not spend $300 on a new keyboard that does the exact same thing.
Casey:
I don't plan on getting a new Apple Pencil.
Casey:
So if I can skirt by by just spending $1,300 or whatever it was on this iPad, I think that's reasonable.
Casey:
It's a reasonable thing to do after four years.
Casey:
But the couple of friends that I spoke to, they were like, yeah, I think I'll pass.
Casey:
I don't think I'm going to do it.
Casey:
And I'm not sure that I'm right and they're wrong.
Casey:
They might be right.
Marco:
Well, and if they, you know, if in a year and a half or so, we get, like, what this was maybe supposed to be, like, if we get one that's, like, a little bit more redesigned, has maybe, you know, with some of the, maybe it moves the camera, maybe it has a different keyboard that detaches and has an escape key and a function row, like,
Marco:
mini led screen on the 11 inch uh improved improved cameras moved cameras uh yeah right like like if that if that comes out next which is probably going to be you know roughly 12 to 18 months from now are you going to wish you would have waited for that rather than getting something that you know i think in day-to-day usage i i would be surprised if you even noticed the difference going from the one you have possible to this possible
Casey:
And I'm glad you phrased it that way, like, would I regret not having waited?
Casey:
I don't think so, because it is going to be at least a year.
Casey:
I mean, unless Apple changes its cadence, which is possible, but if history tells us anything, it'll be at least a year, to your point, maybe a year and a half, before we get a new iPad Pro installed.
Casey:
And I feel like in a year to a year and a half, I can get some pretty good use out of this one that I'm picking up Wednesday, hypothetically.
Casey:
And I could always trade in or resell it a year, year and a half on.
Casey:
And I wouldn't make all of my money back, but I'd presumably make at least half of my money back, especially for a half terabyte and for a cellular model.
Casey:
I got to imagine I would be able to get a few hundred bucks for that.
Casey:
So I don't think I would regret it.
Casey:
But here again, I take your point that in day-to-day use, with the exception of cellular, I really think the cellular upgrade might be a somewhat big deal because I do use the iPad on cellular semi-often.
Casey:
But other than that, I'm not sure day-to-day would make that much of a difference.
Casey:
But sitting here now, I think I am going to stick with the order that is forthcoming.
Casey:
But who knows?
Casey:
Maybe I'll decide to save my shekels and wait.
Marco:
Yeah, cellular is great.
Marco:
It's almost the whole reason I currently have an iPad is because I needed something that was separate from my other devices and had cellular.
Marco:
And it's great for that, but oh my god, it drives me nuts.
Marco:
I just hate iPadOS.
Marco:
For everyone, it's four.
Marco:
I'm happy for you.
Marco:
It's not for me.
Marco:
Every time I use it, I wish it was a Mac.
Marco:
If there was just a MacBook Air with cellular, I would throw this out the window.
John:
I literally use mine as a small television.
John:
I think I do at least half of my television watching the iPad.
John:
I use it as a small television with an iPhone attached to it because when I'm watching shows that don't require full attention, I can pull Twitter and slide over or Slack and slide over.
John:
while i'm watching the show and the rest of the screen it's basically a two-screen experience on one screen that's my main and then you can see why i'm very interested in noled screen because if you use your ipad primarily as a television like television tech is what i want out of my ipad i do other things with it too but like if you've looked at the hours just the television hours are just so monstrous and you know the fact that it runs all the streaming apps right so you know it's not like i'm just watching netflix it's all the various things that i subscribe to plus i can use my tivo app and watch my you know television shows wherever i'm
John:
um so that's what i'm using it for so i tend not to get into the frustrations of ipad os uh but you know i will give stage manager another try in the official release i just i tried it in the betas and pretty much ran away screaming yeah i tried actually like doing my work in stage manager like for the for this little ipad and it's simple it's like you know mail and notes and the browser going back between those three mainly
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
I hated every second of it.
Marco:
And I tried.
Marco:
I'm like, let me give this a good, honest try.
Marco:
Similar to how I'm wearing the Ultra, even though I didn't think it would fit me.
Marco:
But I'm like, oh, let me give this a good honest try.
Marco:
So I tried working on the iPad in Stage Manager for, I think, two weeks this summer.
Marco:
and it just it just fought me at every turn and nothing ever worked the way i thought it would it was oh god it was awful and and i i wanted so badly to like it that's the biggest reason i upgraded to this ipad in the first place is because i couldn't quote couldn't run stage manager on my old one which of course was later modified to have stage manager support thanks for that apple
Marco:
No, it's cool.
Marco:
It was the right move.
Marco:
I'm glad they did it, even though it screwed me a little bit, but it's all right.
Marco:
I'll forgive you for making Swift Async so good.
Marco:
Anyway, I tried it.
Marco:
The entire way people work on iPads
Marco:
is, I think, incompatible with both the things I do and just the way I like to work.
Marco:
And it's a shame because the hardware, even though we just said how much it didn't change, but the hardware, I really like a lot about the hardware.
Marco:
And I wish the Mac would get some of the niceties that the iPad has, especially in regards to cellular.
Marco:
That's like the number one thing I want to see on the MacBook Air.
Marco:
But even again, I would love to have a MacBook Air that's a little bit closer to the size of the 11-inch.
Marco:
So maybe a 12-inch MacBook Air.
Marco:
I would love to see that with cellular.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
Take my money.
Marco:
But in the absence of that, I wanted to really make this work, and I just couldn't.
Marco:
But look, if you're an iPad power user out there and you're excited about all this stuff, great.
Marco:
All this is to say I didn't buy anything today.
Casey:
So I was on Clockwise earlier today, and I had asked on Clockwise, you know, do you buy cellular iPads?
Casey:
And, you know, why or why not?
Casey:
And bonus question, you know, would you buy a cellular MacBook?
Casey:
And as I told the three co-hosts, which was Dan Moore and Jason Snell and Kathy Campbell, all of whom I consider very good friends, I would kill all three of them, and the two of you, by the way, to get a cellular MacBook.
Casey:
Like, we
Casey:
kill for one I would love it so much and oh my gosh I am I am holding out hope that now that Apple is in the modem business that maybe that will be a thing one day because I would love it uh all right anything else on iPad we still have to talk Apple TV John did you buy an iPad today
John:
I did not.
John:
I've got an M1, and there's nothing for me in this upgrade.
John:
Watching my streaming apps, it would not be improved by an M2.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, I don't think we need to believe it anymore, and we also talked about this on Clockwise today, but the middle section of the iPad lineup, the Air, the iPad 10th gen, and the iPad 9th gen, it's just weird.
Casey:
I don't feel like there's any clear answers, and
Casey:
That's okay, I guess, but I don't know.
Casey:
I feel like in an effort to have an iPad at every price point, we've ended up with an iPad at every dollar value between whatever the iPad mini starts at and the $2,400 or whatever I said it was for the 13-inch iPad Pro.
Casey:
There's a lot there.
John:
they didn't bump the ram right it's still the specs for the new ipad pro is eight gigs of ram on the models with up to 512 gig storage and 16 gigs of ram on the one and two terabyte and i think that's the same as it was it is kind of weird that the ram is tied to the storage in that way because hey what if you need a lot of ram but not a lot of storage well tough luck but uh that's a healthy amount of ram uh you know you can get an ipad with an m2 and 16 gigs of ram but you can't have more than four windows in stage manager
Casey:
All right, let's talk about the Apple TV.
Casey:
We're running a little bit long, so maybe there won't be much to say about this.
Casey:
There are two models.
Casey:
There's 64 gig, which is Wi-Fi only, and there's, what is it, 128 gig, which is Wi-Fi and Ethernet and...
Casey:
thread radio because the 64 gig does not have ethernet and it does not have a thread radio which okay that that's a little interesting to me but i'll go with it um it has an a15 which is from late 2021 this is the iphone 13's chip it did have an a12 in the past that's from late 2018 which is the iphone 10s uh to put things in perspective michaela was born in 2018 just throwing that out there um
Casey:
And apparently, maybe I knew this and I forgot, but I don't know if I knew this.
Casey:
Apparently the Apple TV used to have a fan.
Casey:
And now because of how efficient the A15 is, does not need more.
Marco:
Yeah, I believe ever since the 4K... I mean, first of all, the very, very original one did.
Marco:
The one that was, like, basically an Xbox inside.
John:
It was a Mac Mini.
John:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
Not really, but it looked like it.
Marco:
Well, it was kind of like an Xbox, so you look at the processor.
Marco:
Anyway, wasn't it like a 700 MHz Celeron?
John:
That's kind of very similar to what the Xbox... Anyway... I've got to look up what the hell was in the... It was more like a Mac.
John:
It ran basically a variant of Mac OS...
John:
inside anyway that's that was far away in in the era of the black puck apple tvs i believe they were fanless and then they got a fan i don't know anyway i believe the 4k ones went to fans when they when the 4k came out i believe that added the fan but the important thing about the fan of the apple tv is it is literally inaudible like you cannot i it is like of all the things i applaud removable fans everywhere
John:
but this and the airport extreme that marco gave me the like the tower airport extreme both of those things had fans and both of those fans were completely inaudible to my uh middle-aged adult ears from like any distance like i would shove my ear up to the thing you could it was just so but hey kudos for getting rid of the fan because that's one less thing that can go wrong right
Casey:
So I'm trying to figure out what the original Apple TV was running.
Casey:
And the answer is some variant of a Pentium M processor and apparently ran a variant of Mac OS X Tiger.
Casey:
But I go to Wikipedia and I go to Apple TV.
Casey:
Apple TV.
Casey:
This article is about the hardware media player.
Casey:
For the streaming service, see Apple TV+.
Casey:
For the media player app from Apple, see Apple TV app.
Casey:
For other uses, see Apple TV.
Casey:
What a frigging mess this is.
Casey:
Oh my gosh.
John:
Really?
John:
to that the the new puck all right so it's got the a15 it's got no fan in it it is smaller than the previous puck uh it is you know it is shorter so it's not as high and it also dimensionally this little square or the edges of the square are smaller the old one was 3.9 inches this is 3.66 inches the old one was 1.4 inches tall this is 1.2 inches tall and no fan and the other one said on top of it
John:
Apple TV, but it didn't say the word Apple.
John:
It had the Apple logo and then a lowercase T and then a lowercase V. The new one just has the Apple logo dead center.
John:
So it is smaller, quieter in theory if you had amazing hearing.
John:
And selling one without Ethernet, that makes sense.
John:
Only weirdos have Ethernet by their TV.
John:
Everybody should, whatever.
John:
Selling without the thread radio, the Apple TV is the ideal HomeKit hub because it's plugged in all the time.
John:
It's probably in a central location.
John:
That's a great thing to be your HomeKit hub.
John:
Why wouldn't it support Thread Radio?
John:
But part of the explanation of this is if you go down to the pricing, these are actually cheaper than the previous horrendously overpriced Apple TVs.
John:
So these are less horrendously overpriced.
John:
The old one was you'd get for 180 bucks, you get a 32 gig one and for $200, you get a 64 gig one.
John:
Now you can get a 64 gig one for $130.
John:
So $70 price reduction for basically the same amount of storage.
John:
But of course you get no ethernet and Thread Radio, the other one didn't have that either.
John:
And then $128 for $150.
John:
So there is no more $200 Apple TV.
John:
And the storage sizes have doubled on both of the things.
John:
So they're going in the right direction.
John:
It would have been better if the low-end one had a thread radio and was $99.
John:
But, you know, baby steps.
John:
We'll get there.
John:
So I ordered this immediately.
John:
of course i did i order every apple tv i ordered the big one uh with with ethernet port uh and it's a good thing too because i was like gosh i get the one with the big storage and then because i was ordering so fast and you know i just took a glance out of the corner i'm like wait a second why does that say ethernet so i'm glad i didn't accidentally order the bad one oh you forgot to mention the uh the the they now support hdr 10 plus that is the television related feature that they've added they
John:
I think they cranked up the wireless to 802.11ax with 2x2 MIMO and, you know, HDR10 Plus support.
John:
And, of course, an A15, which is, you know, a significantly better processor.
John:
So this is all around a better Apple TV than the old one.
John:
I don't think there's any other big TV-related stuff.
John:
I'm assuming those changes are just related to tvOS, but...
John:
This is, oh, and it has Bluetooth 5.0, not 5.2 and not 4.3, just plain old 5.0.
Casey:
But we've buried the lead because the most interesting thing about this, that everyone is cheering, and I think I am too, the Siri remote, which looks identical at a glance.
Casey:
now charges via USB-C.
Casey:
And it also weighs one-tenth of an ounce or three grams more, which is interesting.
Casey:
But USB-C.
John:
Insert it's happening gif here.
Casey:
Finally.
Casey:
It's finally happening.
Casey:
It's happening, everybody.
Casey:
It's happening.
Marco:
We're going to USB-C slowly.
Marco:
It's going to take a long time, but we're going there.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And actually, just very briefly, to go back to the iPad Pro, you know what I really, really wanted on the iPad Pro, which I didn't expect to get, but I really wanted... Another USB-C port?
Casey:
Well, maybe, but no.
Casey:
Actually, what I really wanted was MagSafe.
Casey:
Like, the same MagSafe I have for my laptop, I wish was on the iPad...
Casey:
And I can think of a thousand and ten reasons why that wouldn't be there.
Casey:
But I wanted it, you guys, and I didn't get it.
Casey:
And that makes me sad.
Casey:
But anyway, I am happy that the Siri remote is USB-C.
Casey:
What is it?
Casey:
The canary in the coal mine has croaked.
Casey:
So things are indeed happening.
Casey:
It's happening.gif, like you said.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And the reason we're saying this, if you're not steeped in the lore of Apple stuff, is lots of Apple peripherals and devices have lightning connectors just as sort of their way of charging.
John:
So my keyboard is like that.
John:
The Apple mouse is like that.
John:
The Apple trackpads are like that.
John:
The remote was like that.
John:
It was kind of the default.
John:
This doesn't have any kind of data connection, but we need some way to charge it.
John:
It's got a rechargeable battery.
John:
So how about I use a slim connector for that?
John:
Let's just use lightning.
John:
Right.
John:
That's been Apple's default for years and years.
John:
Now, in a sane world, you would say, well, that shouldn't be Lightning anymore.
John:
That should all be USB-C.
John:
And so this is the first product that has been revised with the new thinking that we assume is, okay, every single one of those products I just listed, if and when they eventually revise those, they will come with USB-C.
John:
And of course, culminating or perhaps leading to the big one, which is we've talked about a million times the iPhone going to USB-C.
John:
So that's why when we see this remote and it's got a USB-C connection, why do we care about that?
John:
Why are we excited about that?
John:
Who cares?
John:
It shows that Apple understands the time of lightning as the default Apple.
John:
Oh, I just need a charging port on this thing is coming to an end.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
I'm very, very happy about this.
Casey:
Um, I insta ordered this for also not great reasons.
Casey:
Um, it's so cheap by two.
Casey:
Well, it's funny you say that because it, first of all, it does feel a lot cheaper, even though it is still expensive compared to its peers or compared to not buying anything because all these apps are built into your smart TV.
Casey:
Also true.
Casey:
But what I've decided to do is I've wanted, and I was waiting for this to launch whenever it may be, be it this year or next year, and it turns out it was yesterday as we record.
Casey:
I wanted to take the Apple TV 4K that's currently in my living room.
Casey:
I wanted to bump that back to our bedroom, even though we very rarely use the bedroom TV.
Casey:
And if we do, it's usually for exercising.
Casey:
But nevertheless, like, you know, doing a Fitness Plus video or something like that.
Casey:
Well, anyways, we have a 4K TV in the bedroom, a very unremarkable 4K TV in the bedroom.
Casey:
But we have the Apple TV, whatever it's called, the 1080 Apple TV that still supports apps.
Casey:
What is it, the HD or whatever?
Casey:
HD.
Casey:
Yep, thank you.
Casey:
Which is now dead, by the way.
Casey:
But anyways, we have that on the bedroom TV.
Marco:
That's even more than the Apple Pencil One, I think.
Casey:
You're probably right.
Casey:
And so the one that is currently on the bedroom TV will get demoted to a full-time travel appliance because when we go anywhere for more than just a couple of days, I like to bring an Apple TV.
Casey:
uh you can think i'm nuts for that that's totally fine but that's what i like i like to do that so that'll be the the travel apple tv until it doesn't work anymore the current apple tv 4k will then get bumped up to the bedroom and then this guy will go down in the living room and be connected to our nice lgc9
Casey:
and uh and i'm looking forward to it even though again i have no particular problems with my current apple tv i'm excited to have this i did get the ethernet model because there is ethernet back there and i prefer it to be on ethernet uh especially when air playing maybe this will get better when i eventually move to like wi-fi 60 or whatever it's called but i really find that the airplay experience is a lot better when at least one of the things air playing is on ethernet even better when both are so
Casey:
Your mileage may vary, but that's what I like.
Casey:
And so, yeah, that'll be coming.
Casey:
When is it coming?
Casey:
November or something like that?
John:
Yeah, a couple of weeks.
John:
I'm doing exactly the same bump up.
John:
That's always been my strategy.
John:
Every time I get a new one, it goes on the good TV.
John:
The one who's on the good TV goes in the bedroom.
John:
The one who's in the bedroom becomes the travel Apple TV.
John:
That's just that's just that's why I buy them every time a new one comes out, because I always want whatever new things they have.
John:
And I think the thread radio, another forward looking thing, like what is the iPod?
John:
The HomePod mini has a thread radio.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Now, one of the Apple TVs has it.
John:
But the previous generation, they both had it.
John:
I just feel like they were trying to hit a price with the cheap one, and the price wasn't even $99, which is what it needs to be.
John:
And I think a lot of that is, it's A15, right?
John:
I think A15 seems like a little bit overkill for this, but maybe their gaming angle is like it makes game development for Apple TV easier, as if the problem was the SOC.
John:
But anyway, it's great that it has the A15, but if you could have made it $99 with a thread radio with an A14, that would have been a better product.
Casey:
Yeah, I think I agree with you.
Marco:
Yeah, but that being said, you know, with the exception of the small one lacking the thread, overall, this looks like an even better update than the iPad update today, honestly.
John:
No, it's absolutely like this.
John:
If you ignore the low-end Apple TV and just look at the high-end one, it is just a pure win.
John:
Everything about it is better than the old one.
John:
Significantly better SOC, no fan, smaller, lighter, less power, some new features like HDR10, better Wi-Fi.
John:
It is...
John:
a spec bump and also a form factor slight revision again form factor doesn't really matter for something that sits on your tv you don't touch it or whatever but in the aspects that do matter size heat but they improved on all that so good job apple tv another pretty good revision that suckers like me will just continue to buy until you stop making it
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
I really, I really, really like my Apple TV.
Casey:
And now that I'm all in on the Apple TV by way of not having really any other thing connected to the TV other than the switch.
Casey:
And did we talk about actually dug out the Wii recently?
Casey:
I don't remember if we talked about that, but anyway, um,
Casey:
The only thing that we do for TV watching is the Apple TV.
Casey:
And I can totally make arguments that it's overkill, it's silly, it's expensive, etc.
Casey:
But I really like it.
Casey:
I really do think tvOS has its problems.
Casey:
But all in all, I really, really like it.
Casey:
It's really nice to have our cable television coming through the Apple TV.
Casey:
John, I'm not asking you to agree.
Casey:
I know that you love your TiVo.
Casey:
That's fine.
Casey:
That's fine.
Casey:
But for me, I really, really like the combination of, you know, channels for live stuff and DVR, Plex for anything that, you know, we want to watch that's kind of like our long-term storage.
Casey:
And then stuff like Disney Plus or whatever else, the Apple TV apps for all these things tend to be very, very good.
Casey:
And I just really, really like having this as my TV setup.
Casey:
And basically...
Casey:
any television that has an Apple TV with an internet connection connected to it, it's no different than being at home, which is so awesome.
Casey:
I can watch my cable TV anywhere.
Casey:
I can watch my Plex anywhere.
Casey:
I can watch Disney Plus anywhere.
Casey:
It's so nice.
Casey:
It's such a small little box, and it's an internal power supply.
Casey:
You don't have to worry about a stupid brick or anything.
Casey:
I really, really love it, and that's why I take it traveling is because
Casey:
It is so nice, not only for times when the kids want to watch a little TV, they can do it themselves.
Casey:
But then when I want to watch a little TV at the end of the day, then it's all my stuff right there.
Casey:
So I really love the Apple TV a lot.
Casey:
And I insta-bought one of these just because why wouldn't I?
Casey:
Marco, did you say, I'm sorry, did I miss it?
Casey:
Did you say if you bought one of these?
Marco:
I did not, but it's only because I think all the Apple TVs that we regularly use are currently the last 4K model that was just replaced.
Marco:
And so they're fine.
Marco:
Whenever they stop working, then I'll replace them with this, but I don't have any immediate needs.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, if it wasn't for me wanting to do the trickle down like John and I were both talking about, I don't know that I would have bought it.
Casey:
But because I had a quote unquote need to trickle down, that's why I did it.
Casey:
But I'm totally with you.
Casey:
I'm not sure that there's that much to gain.
John:
But you have Samsung TVs, don't you?
John:
Do you have any Samsung TVs that support HDR10 Plus?
John:
Maybe yours are all too old for that.
Marco:
Well, I mean, they're just the frame TVs, and therefore I don't even think the panel is capable of high dynamic range anything.
Marco:
They're terrible panels.
Marco:
They're terrible TVs.
Marco:
Nobody should buy them.
John:
You don't need this Apple TV, then.
Marco:
No, I really don't.
Marco:
Now, on the OLED I have back in Westchester that's burned in with the Minecraft HUD, that could probably use it.
John:
Does that support?
John:
But I think it might support Dolby Vision, though.
Marco:
It is, yeah.
Marco:
I already had HDR through the Apple TV through that.
Yeah.
John:
All right.
Marco:
Cool.
Marco:
Well, that was a long episode.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Collide.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
For members, this episode was six minutes shorter.
Marco:
You could have saved six minutes.
Marco:
Anyway, thank you so much, and we will talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental And you can find the show notes At ATP.FM
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R
Casey:
I have a quick story.
Casey:
It's a little bit of a sad story, I guess, to offset my delightful story from last week about my Sono stuff.
Casey:
I got ripped off on Amazon.
Casey:
This is such an odd story.
Casey:
Maybe this is something that everyone knew about but me.
Casey:
So I have for a long time been looking at, and I think it was Marco that brought this to my attention, the Lenovo ThinkVision M14.
Casey:
It sure was.
Casey:
Okay, so it's a little, I mean, I've never actually seen one in person, so jump in when you're ready, Marco, but it's a little 1080p 14-inch monitor that you can power and give data to just over USB-C.
Casey:
Is that a fair summary?
Marco:
That is correct.
Marco:
And it's great for like portable things is really what it's made for.
Marco:
We use it as like a monitor so that Tiff and Adam can see what I can see.
Marco:
So it just mirrors my laptop screen during our streaming so they can see themselves and the webcams and the chat and everything else.
Casey:
So I have had my eye on this for a while.
Casey:
It currently is on Amazon for $260.
Casey:
And I'm not trying to say that's an unreasonable price for this thing, but I didn't want to pay that much.
Casey:
So I think I had on Camel, Camel, Camel a price watch for it, and it dropped to something like $200.
Casey:
I could look it up, but it doesn't really matter.
Casey:
It dropped enough that I was like, oh, oh, oh, okay, now's the time.
Casey:
Again, it's happening, .gif.
Casey:
And so I went ahead and bought it.
Casey:
And this was like a month ago now, but we hadn't had a chance to talk about it.
Casey:
So I bought it and I bought it.
Casey:
It was one of those like third party sellers that's, you know, selling on Amazon or whatever.
Casey:
And so I bought it and that was that.
Casey:
And they sent me a tracking number and that was all well and good.
Casey:
And I watched it march across the country from California to my town.
Casey:
And so I don't actually live in Richmond proper.
Casey:
I live in one of the suburbs.
Casey:
So the town name is a little different.
Casey:
And but we'll just say it was Richmond for the sake of this discussion.
Casey:
And so I'm watching it march from California to Richmond.
Casey:
And then one day, the day it was due to be delivered, I am I had, I think, Parcel, which is my preferred delivery tracking app.
Casey:
I had Parcel open and it did its periodic check to say, OK, what's new, what's updated?
Casey:
And it said, oh, it's been delivered.
Casey:
That's odd because I knew it was coming via the post office.
Casey:
And my office in my house has a view of the front of the house, and I can very clearly see the road, and I can see our mailbox.
Casey:
And I had been in the office for the last several hours, and I hadn't seen the mail truck go through.
Casey:
So, okay.
Casey:
And I thought, well, my father-in-law was a postal carrier for a long, long, long time.
Casey:
And I've talked to him about things like this.
Casey:
And he said that other postal carriers will sometimes scan things before they've actually been delivered or whatever.
Casey:
So I thought, okay, well, I'll just wait.
Casey:
And surely it'll show up in just a few minutes.
Casey:
And sure enough, like half an hour later, the postal worker came by and dropped off our mail.
Casey:
So I went running downstairs to collect my treat.
Casey:
and there was nothing there so that's weird okay so i reached out to the post office and was oh no i'm sorry i waited a day because a lot of times you know things will just get a little gunked up especially in these unprecedented times especially with the post office there they play they play a little fast and loose with the with the shipping statuses do you guys have that feature where you can see a photo of your mail before it's delivered to your house yes yes no
Casey:
oh you've not heard of this what is it uh shoot it's uh uh informed delivery i think you should definitely do this um it's an american i don't have mail delivery to my house i mean they probably send you the picture a day after you get the mail where you live that's probably true yeah right uh but anyway so i i i don't recall that's a good question i know what you're driving at i don't recall if it had anything in informed delivery i don't think it did
Casey:
But I knew from parcel or parcels or whatever it's called.
Casey:
I'll put a link in the show notes that it was due to be delivered that day.
Casey:
So, you know, I wait, I see the truck pass by.
Casey:
It's not there.
Casey:
I wait another day, collect the mail, nothing there.
Casey:
So I'm like, okay, I reach out to the post office and I fill out a little form and I expect that form to go to DevNull.
Casey:
But I say, you know, this thing says it's delivered.
Casey:
Here's the tracking number.
Casey:
It never showed up.
Casey:
Do you happen to know what's going on?
Casey:
Sure enough, I got a call pretty early the next morning, which I'm stunned by and I'm very thankful for.
Casey:
And I forget exactly how the conversation went.
Casey:
Again, this was like a month ago.
Casey:
But I got on the phone.
Casey:
I was like, hey, you know, this is the situation.
Casey:
Yeah, I totally hear you.
Casey:
We delivered something, but it wasn't to you.
Casey:
Sorry, what?
Casey:
What?
Casey:
We delivered something here in Richmond, but it definitely wasn't to your address.
Casey:
And it matches that tracking number.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Did you buy something on Amazon or something like that?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
You totally got scammed.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Wait, so hold on.
Casey:
You're saying something got delivered to Richmond, but not to me.
Casey:
Yeah, this happens all the time.
Casey:
This is not unusual.
Casey:
It totally was delivered to somebody else.
Casey:
Wait, but...
Casey:
And I basically like blue screened, right?
Casey:
Okay, so hold on.
Casey:
How much did this thing weigh that got delivered?
Casey:
Can you tell me that?
Casey:
Like, I know you probably can't tell me where it went or whatever.
Casey:
That's fine.
Casey:
But can you tell me how much it weighed?
Casey:
Oh, let me look.
Casey:
10 ounces.
Casey:
I have not held one of these monitors, Marco, but I have to assume that it weighs at least a pound.
Casey:
And a pound, last I looked, is 16 ounces.
Casey:
So I'm pretty sure whatever was delivered was not one of these Lenovo ThinkVision M14s.
Marco:
It is pretty lightweight, but it's not that lightweight.
Marco:
And also, if I recall, it had a good deal of packaging.
Marco:
It comes like a sleeve.
Marco:
It comes with a whole bunch of stuff.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
So apparently it was delivered somewhere.
Casey:
So at this point, I'm like, OK, that's really fishy.
Casey:
So I go back to Amazon and I look at, OK, who the F sold this to me?
Casey:
And it was sold by Alex Smart LLC.
Casey:
which, okay, I've never heard of it, but that's fine.
Casey:
And I will put a link to Alex Mart LLC in the show notes on Amazon.
Casey:
And sure enough, as I'm looking through the feedback for Alex Mart LLC, it says, package never delivered, one star.
Casey:
I never got it, one star.
Casey:
This is a scam, one star.
Casey:
This is BS, one star.
Casey:
And this goes for like two, three, four pages.
Casey:
I'm looking at it right now, right at this very moment.
Casey:
0% positive reviews in the last 12 months, 115 ratings.
Marco:
Oh my God.
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
So apparently this is a thing where they take your money, they ship something to somewhere in your town so that as far as you're concerned, oh, sorry, the post office screwed up.
Casey:
It must be the post office because something went from California or wherever to Richmond, but it just didn't show up in my doorstep.
Casey:
It must have been the post office.
Casey:
Well, that's BS because the post office, and I mean, maybe the post office was lying to me, but I really don't think so, especially when she said 10 ounces.
Casey:
And at this point, I don't believe I disclosed what it was.
Casey:
I just asked how heavy was the thing?
Casey:
She said 10 ounces.
Casey:
And I was like, well, there's no way a computer monitor was 10 ounces.
Casey:
So I got on the horn with Amazon via their chat.
Casey:
And I was like, hey, this never got delivered.
Casey:
Oh, well, you have to wait until the end of your delivery window, which was in like three.
Casey:
It was probably like now, even though this was a month ago.
Casey:
And at that point, you can request a refund.
Casey:
And I'm like, no, no, no.
Casey:
This clearly, I mean, I've spoken to the post office.
Casey:
They said it was a scam.
Casey:
This is not going to work for me.
Casey:
Okay, fine.
Casey:
Here's what we can do.
Casey:
We'll refund you now.
Casey:
But if you do get that monitor, we expect you to send it back.
Casey:
Okay, sure, fine.
Casey:
If I somehow, by miracle, get this thing, I promise, I pinky swear, I will send it back.
Casey:
And sure enough, Amazon refunded my money.
Casey:
And as far as I'm concerned...
Casey:
everything is fine now, but never in the almost 20 years at this point that I've been using Amazon, have I ever had to work?
Casey:
Like you've had to worry about buying counterfeit, like Apple's, like, you know, power supplies, you know what I'm saying?
Casey:
Like power bricks and things like that.
Casey:
Like that was known to be ripe for gross, you know, white labeled stuff or I'm sorry, that's probably not a kosher, but you know, whatever it is where they rebrand, they, they make some garbage and they make it look like an Apple thing.
Casey:
And then you get it and you're like, Oh, this is totally not an, Oh, first party thing.
Casey:
Well, I've known to look at that.
Casey:
I've never known that these sellers would swoop in, create what appeared to be a valid listing, send garbage to your own town, and then take away your money.
Casey:
Like, this is, again, maybe this is a thing that I should have known about, but I was not aware of this at all.
Casey:
Have you guys heard of this, or am I the only one that's in the dark?
Marco:
I haven't heard of this particular scam, but Amazon is indeed filled with scam attempts.
Marco:
And I think we've been lucky that, you know, like the amount of stuff that I order from Amazon, I've been lucky that I haven't really been scammed as far as I know, at least I can remember, you know, in any major way.
Marco:
But they make it very easy for people to register as sellers.
Marco:
They make it very easy to blend your listings in with everyone else's listings.
Marco:
And they make it very difficult when you're buying to see who's...
Marco:
who you're buying from unless you look really carefully.
Marco:
And it's really easy to not look at the tiny little text that says who it's sold from and just assume when you're buying a major brand product from a major website that's going to come from that website or whatever.
Marco:
Amazon's design is intentionally, I think, set to blur everything together into one giant soup and to make it very difficult to be very diligent about who you're buying from and when.
John:
This sounds like an improvement on the old scam where they would like ship you a brick or something because now they don't even need to ship you the brick.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
It's so true.
John:
Because, you know, that 10 ounce thing that they're sending is like, you know, a bunch of tissue paper that they send to like a random P.O.
John:
box or something like it's, you know, then whoever got it is either, you know.
John:
just someone it's some sort of non thing just to show a package transfer but 10 ounces that's like just all packaging right there's nothing actually in that and then you don't have anything on your end uh gt in the chat room is talking about a uh scam they experienced where ordered uh you know expensive four four terabyte ssds and got an empty box with nothing in it just like you know
John:
No signs of tampering, just an empty box, and so complained to Amazon.
John:
And they said, oh, there's nothing we can do about it.
John:
You need to file a claim.
John:
So this person filed the claim, and the claim got rejected.
John:
So then this person did what most people do is just tell the credit card company to reverse the charges, right?
John:
Because credit cards are usually good about not paying when you feel like you got scammed.
John:
And Amazon responding by locking this person's account.
John:
oh the account they've had for 20 plus years they lost access to all of their kindle and audiobooks and music and stuff like that because amazon gets angry when you reverse the charges on an expensive purchase apparently but but yeah i feel like if you if you order something and you get an empty box and it's you know it's a completely sealed empty box and i'm like oh sorry nothing we can do about it like i mean this this alex mart page that you were gonna put the link into it you should check that you were out because i was getting a weird error when i was trying to open it
John:
Anyway, it says, about the seller, Alex Mart LLC is committed to providing each customer with the highest standard of customer service.
John:
And again, it is 99% negative ratings, 1% neutral.
John:
Lifetime, lifetime for this vendor.