A Tesla Full of Kindles
Marco:
marco you still have a tesla i do still have a tesla i i was gonna actually sell it over christmas break um but i because because my son got the flu and that kind of delayed it like we had to move all of our timing of all of our travel and it made it so that there was no extra time that i was going to be spending around the tesla to to get it sold so it didn't happen yet but there there are two more breaks coming later this winter so we'll see
Marco:
I got to sell it while it's still worth anything, because it's certainly worth a lot less now than it was last summer.
Marco:
It's Elon's final middle finger to me.
Marco:
It's like, fine, you leave Twitter, I'm going to devalue your car.
Casey:
So true.
Casey:
What is, if you're willing to discuss, what is your sale strategy for this?
Casey:
Are you Carvana-ing?
Casey:
Are you going to sell it privately?
Casey:
Because you're not looking to buy something, so a trade-in doesn't seem possible.
Casey:
Are you going to go to CarMax?
Casey:
What's the plan?
Yeah.
Marco:
so none of these things will give me a real quote so so here's it when i was like when i was last home for like you know two days i'm like oh let me let me try to sell the tesla while i'm here so i went you know i tried like carvana and everything and that none of them they were all like well because of this not being a common car you need to schedule an appointment and bring it into us la la la and i'm like well that's not gonna you know happen on christmas eve or whatever so like all right well that's i guess i'll do that some other time um and then i i stupid oh i made a mistake
Marco:
So I went to Kelly Blue Book to see, you know, what's my current like I figure like you're right.
Marco:
I'm not buying anything new.
Marco:
So that weakens my position for sure.
Marco:
But I'm like, you know, you know, when you go to Kelly Blue Book, you get the three values.
Marco:
You get the dealer traded at the lowest.
Marco:
Then you get the private sale, which is the highest.
Marco:
And I forget what the middle one is.
Marco:
I'll take the lowest value, the dealer trade-in.
Marco:
I would take that.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
At least it would be out of my hands.
Marco:
I don't want to deal with a private sale.
Marco:
It's a pain in the butt.
Marco:
And it takes more time than, frankly, I ever have around.
Marco:
I'm never there for long enough to do a private sale.
Marco:
Because I've done that in the past, and you list it somewhere, and you've got to wait maybe a week or two, show different people the car, have them come around and kick the tires, and go on a little test drive, and then decide not to buy it.
Marco:
It's a huge time suck.
Marco:
That's why I don't do that anymore.
Marco:
It's terrible.
Marco:
And I never had a good experience with a private sale.
Marco:
And so I'm like, all right, as a seller, at least as a buyer, I've had great, great experiences.
Marco:
But as a seller, I never had one.
Marco:
So I thought, okay, well, fine, I'll just whatever the dealer trade in prices, I'd be happy to take that.
Marco:
So I go on Kelly Blue Book, and I get the dealer trade-in price, and then they offer at the bottom of the screen, hey, get our instant cash offer price now, and we'll buy the car from you without you buying a vehicle.
Marco:
So I thought, okay, let me see what they'll offer for that.
Marco:
And it's one of those stupid scams where they're not really going to buy your car from you.
Marco:
They give your information to like 14 dealers in the region.
Casey:
Oh, gross.
Marco:
And then you get spammed like crazy from these desperate vultures.
Marco:
And they're all offering like $15,000 below the dealer trading value.
Marco:
Boo.
Marco:
So I'm like, okay, well, like first of all,
Marco:
This is literally the site that just told me what my car was for.
Marco:
And this is way below that.
Marco:
And second of all, now I'm going to get spam forever from these rando, desperate used car dealers.
Marco:
Thanks a lot.
Marco:
So I can't recommend Kelly Blue Book for anything at this moment, for either the valuation, which seems to be wrong, or for their stupid cash offer thing.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I'm probably going to go to Carvana or CarMax or whatever those things are and take whatever they give me, which is probably going to be very, very low.
Marco:
And I'm going to really be grumbly about it for a while, but at least I won't have to deal with it anymore.
John:
Well, through the magic of YouTube advertising, I'm going to recommend something to you that maybe Casey will be familiar with.
Marco:
Cars and bids?
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
No, because here's the thing.
Marco:
I like browsing cars in bits to see, like, you know, what are the Rivians costing these days, you know?
Marco:
But the reason I would not want to sell on a site like that, that's a site that is browsed by car nerds.
Marco:
I don't want to sell my car to a car nerd.
Yeah.
John:
But it's like eBay though, like you just put pictures and then a bunch of people bid and they're probably going to pay a lot because car nerds know what they're getting.
John:
Like they understand the nuances of why this is good, low mileage, good condition, one owner, blah, blah, blah.
John:
And they understand this is the one before they ruin the steering wheel, so on and so forth.
John:
So you'll get a lot of money for it and you don't have to deal with showing people the car and kicking the tires and they have to like it.
John:
Someone's going to win the thing and then they're going to buy the car and they're a car person.
John:
So they'll probably understand what they're buying and know how to go and get it from you.
Marco:
no cars and biz is the kind of place where casey should sell a car because casey's cars have been have been detailed and washed and kept in great condition no cars and biz doesn't care that yours is a little scratched up it'll be fine it's not gonna be no car nerds they're gonna see things i've never seen they're they're gonna be the panel gap people but
John:
Like I said, they also they'll also appreciate why your car is desirable above and beyond the fact that, you know, because all the like Carvana or whatever, all they care is like make model year mileage condition as a as a one to five scale.
John:
Like they don't understand the nuances of why this car is worth more than an uglier color or a model year that was worse.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like, I feel like you'd get way more money for there.
John:
And it should be just as little hassle because you don't have to deal with showing people the car and, you know, all that stuff.
John:
It's just you put up the pictures, people bid, you get a decent price, you sell.
Marco:
Yeah, maybe.
Marco:
I mean, the other thing, too, is like I also have and would want to sell with the car.
Marco:
a second set of rims that had snow tires on them now the tires aren't usable anymore so i'll probably have to dispose of those myself but you know there's a second set of tesla rims that you know that's probably worth a thousand bucks or whatever cars and bids people will also understand that those are valuable that is true actually and be willing to buy them from you because they'll just resell them for more
Marco:
right so maybe but then then i gotta like first of all you know i'll have to do this not in the winter you know because it'll have to look nice no totally do it in the window i'm looking at a ford bronco right now it's pictures of it in the snow then i have to like go get it detailed and like it's just it's a it's a much greater hassle you just got to slum it on cars and bids you're like look i've got a car i know you want this car here's a bunch of pictures i've got a car you've got bids
John:
Let's make it.
John:
You have a desirable car in good condition with low mileage.
John:
Like it's a slam dunk.
John:
Do not let Carvana buy this car for you for like 10 grand less than it's worth.
Casey:
I also think, I don't know.
Casey:
I've really soured on DeMuro over the years.
Casey:
I would also consider bring a trailer in.
Casey:
Because it's not that different.
Casey:
It's a very similar thing.
Marco:
eBay for cars is what we're saying.
Marco:
So you don't have to deal with lots of people looking at it.
Marco:
Let's see.
Marco:
Here's pretty much exactly my car with three times the mileage that sold for $10,000 more than what they offered me.
Casey:
That's what I'm saying.
Casey:
I'm coming around to John's point on this one.
Casey:
I hate to bring it to you.
John:
That's a substantial price difference.
John:
The things that your car has are intangibles, and those intangibles are only going to be appreciated by car people who know what they're getting.
Casey:
What intangibles are you thinking of?
Casey:
Previously owned by Marco Arment?
John:
Single owner, good condition, low mileage, and it's the Model S before they screwed it up.
Marco:
It's the last one with a goddamn sunroof.
Marco:
And a round steering wheel.
Marco:
And a complete steering wheel.
Marco:
You get the entire steering wheel with this price.
John:
And it's just driven by a little old man in Westchester to church every Sunday.
John:
It was not flogged.
John:
It was not abused.
John:
He was not drag racing on the weekend.
John:
Only hit by one plow.
John:
No teenager ever drove it.
John:
It's only accidents for when it was parked unattended.
John:
It's a good car.
John:
The battery has probably got tons of life left in it.
John:
Check the battery health thing.
Marco:
The stock tires are not that well worn because I kept snow tires on it for a year and a half straight.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
And at this point, you can be pretty sure it isn't one of those ones that's assembled with roofing screws, right?
John:
Because it would have fallen apart by now.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
So whoever built this one was not like, you know, just slapping it together in a tent.
John:
I guess I should probably do this.
John:
But how, I mean, this, oh, this sold in Texas.
John:
I don't know.
John:
You don't have to deal with that.
John:
They'll come and get it just there.
John:
The people who want this car are going to want it.
Marco:
So wait, how does it work?
Marco:
They literally just send a trailer to come get it or what?
John:
Yeah, usually.
John:
I mean, whoever buys it is going to do that.
John:
It's the buyer's problem.
John:
You say where you are, and it's the buyer's problem how they're going to get it, but it's not your problem.
John:
You don't have to ship it to them or something.
Marco:
Oh, this one has a bunch of paint chips.
Marco:
Mine's in less crappy condition than this one.
Marco:
See?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
What if I just pay John like $5,000 to just come do this entire thing for me?
Marco:
Because I'll make way more than that.
John:
Just use it as packing material for some other thing you're going to send me.
John:
I'll take the Tesla off your hands.
John:
I'll fill the Tesla with Kindles and send it to you.
John:
As you know, I enjoy stick shift cars, but if I'm going to have one without a stick shift, it'll be electric.
Casey:
Amen to that, brother.
John:
Amen to that.
Marco:
Yeah, you know what's better than manual transmission?
Marco:
No transmission.
John:
There's still a transmission.
Marco:
not really not i mean tesla is a single speed i know but it's still anyway whatever is is it a transmission if it can't change gears yeah yeah because it's it changes the gear ratio it's it's not just like one to one no i think it's i don't think it does it does
Marco:
How?
Marco:
Marco, because it transmits its power.
John:
It is a fixed ratio, but it is a gear ratio.
John:
There are different numbers of teeth on the gears.
John:
That's just called gears.
John:
There's just a set of gears.
John:
Right, but they don't all have the same number of teeth.
John:
The gear ratio is not one-to-one.
John:
Otherwise, your back wheels would be turning at 20,000 RPM.
Marco:
But I don't think, like, do Teslas have more than one gear besides forward and reverse?
John:
No, I mean like actual gears as in circular things with teeth that mesh with each other.
John:
Go look at exploded diagram of the thing that powers your car.
John:
You will see several gears that mesh with each other with different numbers of teeth on them.
Marco:
But doesn't a transmission require to like change between ratios at some point?
John:
No, it just requires the power to be transmitted through a series of gears with different numbers of teeth on them unless it's just one to one gear ratio.
John:
Okay, so then a watch is a transmission then because there's gears that change.
John:
It's not a car, so...
Marco:
Lots of things have gears that aren't cars.
Marco:
This is like robot or not.
Marco:
Like, is my hand mixer, is my electric hand mixer upstairs, is that a transmission?
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
Like, what about my kitchen aid?
John:
Does that have a transmission?
John:
Well, kind of.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, gosh.
Casey:
What have we done?
Casey:
I have regrets.
Casey:
All right, let's bring us back around and let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
Jonas writes, I was a bit worried about the Time Machine iCloud photo library thing, but it seems that it's included in Time Machine backups.
Casey:
And so I guess Jonas or maybe John found a knowledge base or whatever article about this.
Casey:
So tell me about this.
John:
Yep, at Apple.com, so we can be pretty sure they know what they're talking about.
John:
It says, Apple says, even if you use iCloud Photos, it's important you always back up your library locally using one of the followed methods.
John:
And the two methods they list are use Time Machine, and it claims that will back everything up, or manually copy your library to your external storage device.
John:
I think what I was misremembering last episode was...
John:
And again, I don't know if this is true, because all we have is this vague advice from Apple that says, hey, back it up, use Time Machine.
John:
So thumbs up on that.
John:
Maybe I was misremembering a thing where when you use Time Machine, it will not back up the SQLite metadata databases, but will only back up the photo files and the rest of the structure.
John:
If you use iCloud photo library, because it assumes it can always regenerate the SQLite databases from the iCloud photo stuff.
John:
That's the thing now.
John:
I don't know if it's true, but apparently you're safe using Time Machine if you just want to back up the actual photos.
John:
And it will back up the whole thing, the whole photo library.
John:
There was just some big blow up a couple years ago of people being mad that a Time Machine wouldn't back up what they consider to be an important part of the photo library.
John:
And the reason they don't back it up is because if you use iCloud Photos, that source of truth is in the cloud anyway.
John:
So your local backup of it is just going to get overridden with what's in the cloud, and that's why I think they didn't back it up.
John:
Maybe more follow-up on this in the future, but for the main question of will it back up my photos, the answer is yes.
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
There are some new monitors that we need to talk about.
Casey:
We talked about the Samsung 5K last week, and actually we have some updates on that.
Casey:
And then there's a Dell we need to talk about.
Casey:
But tell me, we have a little more information about the Samsung, I guess?
John:
Yeah, we talked about the camera last time.
John:
We're like, oh, it's a 4K camera.
John:
It's a good camera, not like that crappy one on the Apple Studio display.
John:
Well, 4K camera is about 8.3 megapixel, and the studio display has a 12 megapixel camera.
John:
I still think the one on the Samsung is probably better because we don't know what the crop factor is on that 4K camera, right?
John:
Apple's super ultra wide camera that it uses on the studio display tracks you through a wide range of, you know, you can move all over the place, right?
John:
I would imagine Samsung is going to take a less extreme approach with its 4K camera, and when it says that it tracks you, I bet it crops out a portion of the 4K frame, but not as tiny a portion as the studio display does.
John:
We'll see when the thing ships, but that's a software question more than a hardware one.
John:
But just wanted to clarify, 4K is about 8 megapixels, and the studio display is a 12 megapixel camera.
Casey:
And then Dell has a new 6K monitor that makes your XDR look like a pile of garbage.
John:
It does not, but it exists as a 6K monitor.
John:
So here's what's important about it.
John:
It is a 32-inch 6K monitor, which is the same as the XDR.
John:
It has more pixels than the XDR.
John:
The XDR is also 32 inches, but the Dell 6K monitor is 6144 by 3456.
John:
And the XDR is 6016 by 3384.
John:
Sorry for reading those numbers that way, but that's the way my brain works sometimes.
John:
So the Dell monitor has 875,520 more pixels than the XDR.
John:
The PPI is very similar on the Dell.
John:
It's 223 and on the XDR, it's 215.
John:
So this is a Mac appropriate monitor with more pixels than the XDR.
John:
So it's looking pretty good here.
John:
You know, same size, more pixels.
John:
It looks pretty good until you see it.
John:
we'll get there we'll get there um it is it is not a fancy display like the xdr though it is is an lg uh ips uh monitor it you know it's covers p3 but that's about it it does 600 nits max which is not anything close to the xdr 1600 nits max
John:
It has the good old familiar from last episode display HDR 600 certification.
John:
But according to Ars Technica, it does have local dimming.
John:
It has 12 zones.
John:
That's not good.
John:
All right.
John:
I think I would just turn it off at that point, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
The peak brightness is less than half of the XDR and the XDR has 576 dimming zones.
John:
And even that is paltry compared to modern mini LED monitors that have way more dimming zones.
John:
12 dimming zones is not good.
John:
um but it does claim that it has a good ips display or whatever anyway uh high digestible stand included of course with rotation because why wouldn't you have that on such an expensive monitor that would be crazy wait it's not a thousand dollars no yeah we here's the thing i mean this is cs this is coming from cs so we don't know the pricing of this so we can't make fun of how badly priced apple things are because we don't technically know about the price but i'm going to say it's going to undercut apple um
John:
It has a 4K dual-gain HDR webcam that uses quote-unquote AI to keep you in the frame.
John:
You know, sounds familiar, huh?
John:
This is apparently a dual-gain HDR CMOS sensor with multi-element lens.
John:
The webcam has independent hardware tilt, so even though the camera is built into the monitor, you can apparently tilt it with your hand.
John:
It uses Dell Express sign-in technology to detect your presence when you're nearby and logs you in automatically, locking your PC when you walk away.
John:
uh you know i want face id on the mac and i would love it if it locked the screen when i walked away because it knew i did that because of the camera but i'm sure there's all like a windows feature and not a monitor thing if it works as well as the windows face recognition thing to log in you're not missing much yeah i mean that's better than nothing i feel like but we'll see it's not no it's worse than nothing well i if it worked as well as face id on my ipad and my iphone i would be happy so and i feel like apple could make that happen someday maybe
John:
It has a mute and camera disabled touch sensors accessible on the front of the monitor because it's nice to be able to do those things quickly.
John:
14 watt stereo speakers, auto KVM built in, lets you control two PC sources with a single mouse and keyboard, viewing content from two computers with picture in picture and picture by picture modes.
John:
I think you can put the two monitors like side by side.
John:
um like two images on the on the screen connectivity of course it has tons of ports why wouldn't it such an expensive large monitor right hdmi display port 2.1 uh thunderbolt 4 rs calls this thunderbolt 4 downstream i'm assuming that means that's how you connect your computer to it i'm not sure um usbc upstream four usba ports 2.5 gigabit ethernet port
John:
And a front panel with two USB-C ports at 10 gigabits with 15 watt power delivery and one USB-A port with 10 gigabits and BC 1.2 power charging, which is apparently an abbreviation for USB battery charging revision 1.2, up to 140 watts of power delivery.
John:
So it's not the same specs as the SDR, XDR.
John:
It's kind of an XDR for people who don't need 1600 nits, great color fidelity, so on and so forth, but just want a big single monitor with tons of ports and lots of features and all that good stuff.
John:
Unfortunately, as Marco alluded to before, it's ugly as sin.
Casey:
it's so ugly let me paint you yeah let me paint you a word a word picture so imagine like a standard computer monitor with a ugly plastic base you know or stand on it but as you look up you notice that there's a a forehead that must be a couple of inches tall and that is way out of line with the bezel on the rest of the sides of the display and as big as the forehead is is it so big because it contains the camera
Casey:
no it does not contain the camera no john i'm glad you asked only half of the circular camera is within the forehead half of the huge camera like huge just it's like the size of a golf ball right and then the other half of this golf ball sized camera is above the top bezel it's the top of the monitor it looks preposterous i it looks like an enemy from half-life like
John:
yeah it's like so ungainly looking like anything where the bezel is bigger on the top and the bottom always kind of looks like the monitor is upside down and then it's got the big thing um you know but if you look at the like the videos of this thing on the stand is you know tilt adjustable height adjustable rotates so many ports on this thing so many features it's got all the stuff that you can want and i bet the price is going to be pretty good and
John:
I don't think there's really any other game in town for, Hey, I want an XDR, but I don't need, you know, 1600 nits.
John:
Now, as I said, when we talked about this and kind of, you know, a few months after I got it or whatever, I really do.
John:
I didn't think I would care about the HDR, but I really do appreciate it because my phone, my family's phones take HDR video and photos and,
John:
And when I view them on the big screen where I do my photo editing, they look HDR.
John:
Like, I actually use those 1600 nits, and so do Apple's Pro laptops now.
John:
So I'm kind of at the point where I, you know, if you had asked me before about the XDR, I'd be like, oh, I just love something like the XDR that doesn't have that HDR stuff that I don't care about.
John:
But now I'm kind of over the line where I think...
John:
I don't ever want to buy a monitor that doesn't do HDR for my quote-unquote good monitor.
John:
So in that respect, this one is not to my liking.
John:
But I think having a 6K monitor for people who don't care about HDR that has all the features and connects to all the things and has a good camera built in and everything, like, if this thing is priced reasonably...
John:
I'm just super glad this exists because now we have an alternative to the, you know, another alternative to the Apple 5k.
John:
And now finally we have something I never thought we'd have an alternative to the XDR that again, assuming it's not more expensive, is great to just have in the market for people who want a big monitor, but don't want to pay six grand once you add the stand.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I'm guessing this is probably not knowing anything about what these components cost these days.
Marco:
I'm, you know, Apple's at six grand from a monitor that's now a few years old that has higher specs in certain areas and, of course, higher design and everything else.
Marco:
I'm going to say this is probably going to be under four grand for the Dell one.
Marco:
And if I'm right about that, you know, even if it's four grand, it's probably going to be less than that.
Marco:
that's going to be a great deal like for for what you're getting compared to what else is in the market i think this is going to be well under the xdr's price maybe even half you know it could it could be 3 000 i don't know but whatever it is it's probably going to be a really compelling price and the money you're saving you can buy anything that will make you not see how this looks maybe you know
Marco:
Maybe if you look through one of those cartoon ninja masks, you're looking through a slit, if you can just cut off the top and bottom and not see anything beyond that.
Marco:
I don't know.
Casey:
You know what I do think is kind of cool?
Casey:
It's really ugly, but I like the principle of it.
Casey:
So they have some, I guess, capacitive buttons on the bottom left-hand side of the screen.
Casey:
Not in love with that, but at least they have a button.
Casey:
Imagine how cool it would be if your studio display had a power button.
Casey:
That would be amazing!
Casey:
But anyway...
Marco:
No, you know what?
Marco:
I love hearing about everyone's student display bugs because you know how many times I've had to unplug my XDR?
Marco:
I'm going to guess none.
Marco:
Yeah, correct.
Marco:
None.
Marco:
Oh, wait.
Marco:
Once I rewired my desk.
John:
But both of these monitors should have power buttons.
John:
Like even the XDR, which I've also had no problems with, it should still have a power button too.
John:
No, it's an Apple device.
John:
It's not going to have a power button.
John:
Their headphones don't even have a power button.
John:
There's not a chance the monitor will.
John:
But they should.
John:
We got them to add back the good keyboards, SD card slot, HDMI to laptops.
John:
I think we can convince them that power buttons are a thing that electronic devices should have.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
I tell you, I actually, for interesting reasons, I used someone else's 12-inch MacBook today.
Marco:
And it's the first time I'd seen one of those in a long time.
Marco:
And, of course, the space bar is broken.
Marco:
But it did feel really small.
Marco:
Damn, I wish I wish this size still existed.
Marco:
But wow, I'm glad this keyboard doesn't still exist.
Marco:
Yep.
Casey:
Anyway, next to these capacitive buttons, there's a little like MacBook Air original MacBook Air style door that drops or not door, but like I don't like column that drops down.
John:
It's a USB-C hub is what it is, basically.
Casey:
Yeah, so it has two USB-C ports on it and a USB-A port on it.
Casey:
And then you can shimmy it back up within the contents of the inside of the monitor and confines of the monitor.
Casey:
That's what I was looking for.
Casey:
You can slide it back up inside the monitor and it disappears.
Casey:
And I think I'm supposed to hate this, but I think I kind of like it.
John:
No, front-facing ports, useful thing to have.
John:
So you don't have to constantly reach around behind the monitor.
John:
Like, this is exactly what PC makers will do.
John:
It's like, oh, let's just add all the features that we think will be useful.
John:
Sometimes inelegantly, and sometimes they go overboard, but it's such a nice, that's why you need, Apple needs competition.
John:
And you need contrast.
John:
The Apple overly simplified thing is contrasted with this thing that has every feature anyone could ever think of.
John:
Somewhere in the middle is probably where we want to be, but it's good to have the two things balancing each other.
John:
So if you don't like what Apple has done, you have an alternative.
Yep.
Marco:
Do you think as you type on your desk that this stand will wiggle the whole monitor?
John:
I think Dell usually has pretty good stands, and this one looks pretty sturdy.
John:
It's LG that can't make a stand.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
But I used to love Dell monitors.
Marco:
In the pre-written days, I had two Dell 24 inches, and they were fantastic.
Marco:
At that time, when those came out in 2006 or whatever...
Marco:
Those were really great, very competitively priced, very well-performing monitors, and they were great.
Marco:
But that was a long time ago, and I wouldn't make any assumptions unless I've heard otherwise that they would still be even the same company, let alone making the same quality stuff.
Marco:
We are brought to you this week by Sanity, the composable content cloud that powers awesome digital experiences for companies like Puma, Sonos, Skims, Figma, and more.
Marco:
With the new year comes new beginnings, and you're probably taking a good look at how you manage content across your apps.
Marco:
Maybe you're tired of wrangling APIs that are poorly documented, working in a CMS that's bloated and unintuitive, or dealing with data stores that sneak in surprises like weird caching or, worse, data loss.
Marco:
But believe me, I can relate.
Marco:
Sanity is a complete solution for authoring, managing, and distributing your app's content to any device, channel, or service.
Marco:
Teams can deploy an entire production-ready backend in seconds that handles all the hard stuff like content caching and global distribution.
Marco:
Your content editing tool, the Sanity Studio, is completely customizable and can be deployed as a React dependency available on slash studio or even slash WP admin if you're feeling nostalgic or wherever you want it to be.
Marco:
Sanity treats content as data, making your content readily programmable, queryable, and reusable for any use case, such as building an e-commerce store, personal blog, media site, or digital enterprise.
Marco:
And some features Sanity customers love include real-time content previews, a highly customizable block content editor, TypeScript support, and just so much more.
Marco:
You can see for yourself at sanity.io slash ATP.
Marco:
Sanity is offering our listeners a free boosted plan with increased API and bandwidth limits so you can try it out yourself.
Marco:
Visit sanity.io slash ATP to get started.
Marco:
Once again, sanity.io slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Sanity for sponsoring our show.
John:
John do you need Marco and me for the next like 20-30 minutes or can we just take a little nap you'll have to be my camera crew as I report from the CES show floor my annual trip to CES that I don't actually take this is it so CES is going on I've never actually been to CES but I will be virtually reporting from there on the
Marco:
tiny amount of things that i actually care about at ces and those are having to do with televisions what's going on in the world tv is just a quick overview here so well hold on i'm curious before we begin i know from being on the more computer side of things that ces does not have a strong correlation to what actually comes out on the market is that better for tvs like do tvs have a better track record of what what's shown at ces actually then gets delivered to the market
John:
yeah yeah so for television that has simply become the thing where like everybody there's like an annual crop of televisions and everybody just shows with an asterisk that i'll get to in a second shows their tvs at cs they also show stuff that isn't a tv here's something we're thinking of here's something stupid like the concept car equivalent that crap is you know whatever right but the tvs they show they ship them
John:
later that year unless some something catastrophic happens they ship them pretty reliably so there's it's annoying that ces comes and you don't get prices and availability but you basically know look this happens every single year they show them in january they're not yet ready to ship sometime during the year probably around the middle they're going to ship them we're going to find out the pricing and availability and we do it all over the next year so that is very reliable so it's not like you know they give you the names the model numbers and everything right so these are real products not
John:
You know, ignore the concept car stuff.
John:
Although I'll talk a little bit about the concept car stuff here too.
John:
So this year, the starting news is you can finally get Quantum Dot QD OLED screens in larger than 65 inch sizes.
John:
All the fancy TV people who have bigger houses than me wanted to buy my recommended TV last year, the Sony A95K.
John:
But like, oh, it only goes in 65 inch.
John:
That's the biggest size you can get, which is fine for me.
John:
My last TV was 55 inches and I upgraded to 65 and that's about as big as I can fit.
John:
But there was nothing bigger.
John:
So this year, finally, you can get a 77-inch size.
John:
Samsung Display makes QD OLED screens.
John:
They are the only manufacturer that does.
John:
Every television that has a QD OLED screen comes from Samsung.
John:
Samsung announced a 77-inch television.
John:
Their naming scheme is not as good as LG's.
John:
Last year was the S95B that came in 55 and 65.
John:
Now you can get the S95C.
John:
I get it.
John:
You're incrementing the number.
John:
What is the S?
John:
What is the 95?
John:
I don't get it.
John:
Now there's also the S90C series, which is sort of their lower end model.
John:
So they've bifurcated their entire line.
John:
The S95C comes with what Samsung calls a one connect box that they've had on their TVs for many years.
John:
Do you have that in your frame as well, Marco?
Marco:
um is that where so the frame has you run one like skinny cable to the tv and it goes down into this giant box that has all the other ports on it that you hide like in your entertainment center and that is the one connect box and that is exactly the idea idea to just sort of it makes it easier to mount the tv or you don't have to like it's i think it's actually a fiber optic on the modern ones
John:
One little skinny cable goes to the TV and there's a breakout box with everything else in it.
John:
The power plug, the HDMI parts.
John:
It's a good idea.
John:
But Samsung puts on another fancy TV.
John:
So the S95C has the one connect box.
Marco:
I mean, I don't know how good.
Marco:
Mine's buggy as hell.
Marco:
We have two frame TVs.
Marco:
They're both buggy as hell.
Marco:
I would never in a million years buy another one.
Marco:
And I don't know if it's because of the electronics being separated.
Marco:
Probably not.
Marco:
It's probably just because Samsung sucks.
Marco:
But man, is it buggy as hell.
Marco:
I would never do this again.
John:
Yeah, I can't speak to the reliability of the One Connect box because obviously that's some proprietary thing that they're doing with the fiber-operated cable, right?
John:
But in theory, the electronics that are in that box is the same as they would stick on the back of the TV.
John:
So if they suck, they probably would also suck on the back of the TV.
John:
But anyway, their fancy line, S95C, has the One Connect box.
John:
And it also has bigger and better speakers in the TV because now there's room for them.
John:
They basically have speakers taking up the whole back of the TV with, like, you know, openings on the back and everything for a better base, you know.
John:
So...
John:
That's the S95C, and the S90C doesn't have the One Connect box, and it's more of the lower-end model.
John:
So they've split up their QD OLED line to the good ones that have features you might not want, like the One Connect.
John:
That's a good one.
John:
All right.
John:
Speaking of One Connect box, LG has a product they call the Signature Series OLED TVs.
John:
It's just a WRGB OLED, not a QD OLED.
John:
and theirs are wireless.
John:
There's a power plug that goes to the back of the television, and then there's a breakout box, but the breakout box communicates wirelessly.
John:
They call theirs a zero-connect box.
John:
Isn't that clever?
John:
But it still has power.
John:
I mean, so what's the point?
John:
Well, the point is, it's a lot easier to sort of mount the TV.
John:
Like, if you have to, like, be like Casey and mount it way too high over your fireplace or whatever, you just have to have power.
John:
You don't have to fish HDMI cables through.
John:
Or, like, televisions have lots of ports in the back of them that you might not want to connect.
Marco:
But I'm saying, like, when you have the one cable that goes to the breakout box, the way my stupid buggy Samsung ones do, what's the difference if you have to run a power cable to the TV or this cable to the TV?
John:
Right.
John:
Well, lots of people have a power plug near their television or behind where they're going to wall mount it.
John:
But not a lot of people have the special one connect fiber optic cables fish through their wall to the box that they're going to buy with TV.
John:
Not a lot of people have HDMI or if they do have HDMI, it's not the right standard for HDMI 2.1 and whatever.
John:
this is a silly rich person tv right it's not a serious tv but it is a real product it's 97 inches it's probably horrendously expensive i just think it's interesting because they're sending real full-fledged not compressed like full fidelity 4k 120 hertz video signal
John:
to the television wirelessly up to 30 feet away.
John:
I don't recommend this television.
John:
I just think it's interesting that we've gotten to the point where they can do that on a silly rich person TV for people who, you know, if you look at the pictures, see how it's like the television itself is on one of those awkward stands that no normal person would have in their house, right?
John:
It's just kind of like freestanding and alone.
John:
That would make fun of the fact that they never show any power cables or anything else.
John:
Well, you can see the cable in this picture.
John:
It's just the power cable.
John:
It goes down one of the legs and that's the only cable you need to attach.
John:
So finally,
John:
It's a realistic picture, and you just got to find some place to hide this box.
John:
So there's that.
John:
I just thought it was silly.
John:
It's like the TVs.
John:
They have a TV that rolls up, and all the silly rich people TVs are just fun to look at, but they are real products they do sell to real silly rich people.
John:
More seriously from LG, their competition for QD OLED, because they kind of got trounced last year by having... They didn't have a QD OLED TV.
John:
They still don't have a QD OLED TV.
John:
What they have now is...
John:
the micro lens array they took their wrgb oleds which are which are oled tvs that have a red a green and a blue sub pixel and then also a big hong and a white sub pixel next to it they took that tv and on top of each pixel they put tiny little microscopic lenses so on a 77 inch tv every pixel has 5 117 lenses on top of it
John:
every single pixel every single pixel there's a lot of pixels on a 4k tv what yep they're micro lenses it's a junior mint it's refreshing right um you can look at some of the pictures so what's the point of these little lenses the point of the lenses is to take light that would otherwise be lost to internal reflection as light passes through the various glass layers because when you send light through you know anything there you lose some of it due to internal reflections reflections of light that doesn't make it out to people's eyeballs
John:
the micro lens array makes more of the light make it through without losing less of it to internal reflection so you don't need to run your backlight you know or not backlight you don't need to run your pixels brighter you just get more of the light that you're producing out to people's eyeballs and
John:
And that is their competition for QD OLED.
John:
You also get better viewing angles because again, more light is leaving the display going to eyeballs and less of it is getting stuck inside the display.
John:
Less off axis, you know, color tinting, all of the things that were problems with WRGB OLEDs that weren't problems with QD OLEDs.
John:
They're combating that with the micro lens array.
John:
so it is brighter uh the estimates are it'll be about 1500 nits uh 1500 calibrated nits on a 10 window when we say that we mean make a 16 by 9 box that is 10 the size of the tv that can be probably around 1500 nits full screen 200 nits this is what tvs have been like for years by the way if you don't know like if you make the entire screen white you get 200 nits right if you make a 10 window white 1500 nits
John:
This is relying on the fact that most real television content is not like 100% white, but that scene in the Matrix is pretty close.
John:
So just keep that in mind.
John:
This is an increase from last year's model.
John:
Last year's best LG model was a 933 nits on a 10% window and 172 full field.
John:
So this is a big jump in brightness thanks to all those little tiny lenses.
John:
Obviously, you'll have to wait for reviewers to get these TVs to compare them.
John:
Samsung's QD OLEDs are also brighter this year.
John:
So it'll be quite a competition.
John:
Obviously the things QD OLED still have going for them is they don't need a bunch of little microlenses because they're just naturally better at putting out light because they have fewer layers to go through and the part that produces the light is literally physically closer to the surface.
John:
They have naturally good viewing angles
John:
And their brightness doesn't rely on the white subpixel.
John:
So while you can get a 10% window at 1500 nits that's pure white, you cannot get a 10% window at 1500 nits that's pure red.
John:
Because that white subpixel is doing a huge amount of the work.
John:
If you add up the brightness of the R, G, and B subpixels in a QD OLED, you get the white, the full brightness.
John:
If you add up the R, the G, and the B subpixels on a WRGB OLED, you get like 10% of the brightness.
John:
Most of it is that white subpixel, which tends to wash out colors, so...
John:
I still feel like QD OLED is the future and is the better technology, but kudos to LG for finding a way to get way more brightness out of their TVs and, you know, come up with a technology that should make, I feel like, their top-end TVs competitive with QD OLEDs this year.
John:
We'll see.
John:
Second to last, Samsung's
John:
i'm not going to say like silly concept car thing because these are real products but they're real products for fabulously rich people micro led every year you see micro led at ces because it is the best technology this is non-organic leds for every single pixel has a little red led a little white led a little green not red red green and blue right rgb
John:
which is unlike the current ones which just use a single LED that they pass through either color filters or quantum dots or whatever.
John:
No burn-in problems, instant response, no white sub-pixel, amazing viewing angles.
John:
This is the promised land of television technology.
John:
It also costs like 30 grand, right?
John:
And the big problem with micro-LED TVs has been we can't make the little LEDs micro enough.
John:
So you see them in stadiums all the time, like those big screens like a basketball game.
John:
Those are not really particularly micro, but those are LED screens.
John:
They have red, green, and blue LEDs for each pixel.
John:
Making them small is really, really hard because we can't make we can't economically make a bunch of tiny little LEDs.
John:
So the way manufacturers should be making these for years and years is they make sort of like a sub board that, you know, is a micro LED thing with a certain number of pixels.
John:
And then they checkerboard those things together to make a complete TV.
John:
Right.
John:
Because they can't make one board.
John:
the size of a tv they could just make a bunch of sub boards and put them together so you can't see the seams right and the problem has been the smallest one you get is 300 inches and then the next year the smallest one you get was 200 inches and the next year the smallest one you get was 100 inches and by the way they always cost like 10 grand 30 grand or whatever right but you just couldn't make them small enough
John:
Well, this year, Samsung was showing micro LED TVs in sizes from 50 inches up to 140 inches.
John:
Those are real TV sizes.
John:
So from a tech perspective, we can now make micro LED TVs in the sizes humans can fit in their homes.
John:
Just not at the prices humans can afford to buy them.
John:
I don't even think there are prices attached to these.
John:
It's one of those kind of, if you have to ask, you can't afford it.
John:
But anyway, the sizes that come in are weird.
John:
It's 50, 63, 76, 89, 101, 114, and 140 inches.
John:
And those sizes are a result of basically the size of the little unit, the little checkerboard thing.
John:
When you stick a bunch of those together to make a 16 by 9 display, these are the inch sizes you end up with.
John:
But they're 240 hertz, they're low power, they have amazing color, phenomenal brightness, no image retention ever.
John:
I can't wait for this technology to arrive.
John:
Hopefully we will have affordable micro LED TVs before my eyes get so bad that I can't appreciate them.
John:
hey wasn't there a rumor just this just a few days ago that the next or that an upcoming apple watch will probably use micro led yeah there's been micro led apple watch rumors for about five years micro led i mean it's not like all the technology is never going to come because every year at ces the micro led tvs get better and better but yeah the rumor that apple is going to use them in some device someday they will eventually but they don't even have oleds on their laptops yet so let's you know
Marco:
Wait, wasn't the factory that they did, like they bought a factory in Arizona and then the whole deal fell apart?
Marco:
Wasn't that for micro LED?
John:
I think one of those was for quartz for something, like the display quartz or whatever.
John:
But they did make a big investment in micro.
John:
Everyone's investing in micro LED.
John:
Everyone knows this is the next step.
John:
Like all the different things that I talk about of these TVs doing stuff so they don't suck as much.
John:
QD OLED was the most recent big step.
John:
Look at all the crap we don't have to do.
John:
No white subpixel.
John:
We don't lose light by connecting through color filters.
John:
Amazing viewing angle.
John:
Low power.
John:
Thin.
John:
But you still have image retention and you can't get as bright as an LED backlight, right?
John:
So there's always caveats.
John:
Micro LED...
John:
The only caveats were we have to make a bunch of small ones and stick them together so you might see the seams and we can't make them that small.
John:
And they're working on those.
John:
So the size, we've got it.
John:
50 inch micro LED 4K televisions at 240 hertz.
John:
It's going to happen.
John:
Maybe in the next five years.
John:
Stay tuned.
John:
And the final item that I thought was interesting, second to last actually, Roku is making TVs.
John:
Roku makes those little set top boxes and if you have a TCL TV, it probably has Roku built in.
John:
You got a little Roku remote.
John:
Uh, Roku is making TVs, but the TVs will be manufactured by TCL.
John:
But currently a lot of the TVs that TCL makes that have Roku built into them are designed by Roku and Roku just basically hands TCL a design for a TV and then TCL makes it.
John:
So now Roku is making its own TVs, which have Roku built in.
John:
But they're being manufactured by a TCL.
John:
It's confusing.
John:
But, you know, it's kind of like if Netflix started making TVs.
John:
Well, maybe not Netflix.
John:
It's our streaming service.
John:
But Roku is one of the few sort of competitors remaining standing in the, you know, software that runs your TV.
John:
You've got WebOS, Google TV, Apple TV, Roku.
John:
What am I missing?
John:
Amazon.
Casey:
fire tv yeah but amazon is kind of losing steam and nothing didn't amazon also make a tv like an alexa tv type i believe that's right i recently bought a new tailgate tv so this is a tv that basically has to be not impressive it just needs to be relatively light and cheap this might be by the way the most southern thing you've ever said i just bought a tailgate tv
Casey:
I'm flummoxed because I don't have a good retort for this because you're probably right.
Casey:
Anyway, the one we bought, I think it was like $110.
Casey:
It's like a 32-inch.
Casey:
I don't remember if it's 720 or 1080 because, again, it doesn't matter.
Casey:
We're going to be looking at it outdoors.
Casey:
But anyways, it's an Amazon Fire TV.
Casey:
I think it was...
Casey:
It's whatever the insignia, maybe, which is, I think the Best Buy store brand.
Casey:
And the only reason I went to Best Buy was because it was dirt cheap.
Casey:
But yeah, so that one is an Amazon Fire TV and it is not great.
John:
Yeah, I feel like Amazon is kind of losing the interest in that market.
John:
And Amazon's kind of consolidating a lot of stuff.
John:
So I'm not sure how long they're going to be there.
John:
But yeah, they do have a tvOS.
John:
And the final thing is Sony.
John:
Sony is at CES, but they're mostly showing PlayStation stuff and their stupid car that we'll talk about someday on the show because it's been in the show notes forever.
John:
They weren't showing TVs.
John:
I will put a link in the show notes to a YouTube video from someone who tries to explain why this is.
John:
They have new TVs that are coming.
John:
the theory of this person is and probably an informed theory is they just didn't feel like talking about them at ces because they're they fancy themselves being in the apple position apple famously does not go to ces hasn't for decades at this point uh because apple doesn't have to apple doesn't need to be at a place where media attention is focused they just make their own events and tell people to show up and that's all sony apparently doesn't feel like they have to show their televisions here
John:
Because they'll just show them in a couple weeks, and then when that happens, they'll be the only story.
John:
Instead of just being slotted in with 50 other stories about what's going on at CES, it'll be, oh, the new Sony TVs are out now.
John:
I think this is the first year Sony has tried that move, so we'll see how it works out.
John:
The bad news is that I don't get to know what new TVs Sony has, but the good news is that, you know, they don't make their own panels.
John:
They sell QD OLED TVs.
John:
They're going to have one of the new QD OLED panels.
John:
Panasonic already has TVs announced with the new QD OLED panels and people are testing those and Sony's going to get the same exact panels.
John:
It's such a shame that Panasonic doesn't sell TVs in the US anymore because they make such good TVs.
John:
I might have bought a Panasonic if they still sold here because their tastes tend to align with mine.
John:
But yeah, Sony is just trying to, you know, be its own story at some point in a few weeks rather than announcing at the show, which is kind of weird.
John:
And it's also weird that they showed a car.
John:
But again, we'll talk about that in a future program.
Yeah.
Casey:
So does this make you regret your semi-recent TV purchase?
Casey:
Is there something that you see here that you think you could feasibly, that you would feasibly purchase if it was available today?
John:
No, it actually makes me glad because in particular, Samsung splitting its line into like the best stuff is only on the thing with the One Connect box with the weird, you know, like I don't like that they split the line like that because last year,
John:
The TVs, the best TVs were just like normal person TVs.
John:
No weird breakout box, no weird super thin design, you know, not the one that sold without a stand, right?
John:
They were just regular TVs with regular TV features.
John:
And this year, Samsung splitting the line would make it hard for me to choose among them.
John:
And maybe Sony will do the same thing.
John:
Whereas last year, it was easy.
John:
Sony A95K, if you have my set of values of what you want out of a TV,
John:
that was the one to get um i'm sure when sony comes out with new tvs they'll have one that is better than my tv but not enough for me to want to upgrade like i'll you know considering how long i get my plasma i'm gonna be riding this a95k probably until something goes terribly wrong with it
John:
And then maybe I'll replace it with a micro LED.
John:
But no, I'm interested in the market because display technology is super important and it will affect all of our devices eventually.
John:
I just feel like Apple is not that they're lagging behind because the displays on the laptops in particular are phenomenal.
John:
Like those mini LED screens have amazing specs and look great and I think are the right choice.
John:
especially for a computer screen where i just think oled you know oled is not great because you got image retention and in particular qd oled with its uh the subpixels are arranged in a triangle it screws with like text display even if you don't do subpixel idealizing which apple doesn't it just doesn't quite look right on a computer display it looks a little bit weird so i don't i don't know what the answer is but all this all this television technology will eventually affect all of our devices
John:
Already we've got OLED screens on our phones, and that's been pretty great, I think.
John:
I want an OLED screen on my iPad.
John:
Someday we'll have micro-LED screens on all our Apple devices.
John:
The TV world is kind of a preview of that in terms of manufacturability pricing and what they can do.
John:
So even though I'm not in the market for a TV, and none of these TVs particularly tempt me, I do like keeping up on it.
Marco:
We are brought to you this week by Memberful, the easiest way to sell memberships to your audience.
Marco:
Memberful is used by some of the biggest creators on the web, and there's so many reasons you might choose to use them.
Marco:
So maybe you already have a membership setup and it's getting too complicated to manage and you want to simplify it.
Marco:
Believe me, I can relate.
Marco:
So you can get back to focusing on what you're best at by using Memberful.
Marco:
Memberful handles all the hard stuff so you can focus on what you do best and what you enjoy most while earning revenue quickly through membership.
Marco:
They offer everything you need to run a membership program, including optimized checkout, Apple Pay support, free trial support, gift subscriptions, easy member management, dashboard analytics, and so much more.
Marco:
And what's great about Memberful, among many other things,
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
They ultimately are passionate about your success, so they always give you access to a real human.
Marco:
And they care so much about your success that they do what I think is kind of like the pro-confident move, which is they don't stick their branding all over everything.
Marco:
With Memberful, you always have full control and ownership of your audience, your branding, and your membership.
Marco:
Payments even go directly to your own Stripe account, and that to me is huge.
Marco:
You can see for yourself by getting started for free with no credit card required at memberful.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Once again, that's memberful.com slash ATP to start your free trial with no credit card required.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Memberful for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, there's been some new news over the last few days that apparently Qi 2 is being worked on.
Casey:
And I guess it's just MagSafe?
Casey:
That's what everyone seems to be saying from an article from The Verge.
Casey:
With the blessing of competitors, Apple is about to change the Qi wireless standard itself.
Casey:
It's contributing a new version of Qi that works much like MagSafe, magnets, authentication, and all.
Casey:
It's called Qi2, and yes, it effectively means that MagSafe is coming to Android for better or for worse.
Casey:
Samsung and Apple are both expected to put Qi2-certified products on the market, Wireless Power Consortium spokesperson Paul Golden tells The Verge.
Casey:
And he says there's no reason to think future Qi2-certified chargers wouldn't work with both.
Casey:
There's also no reason to think a future Qi 2 charger wouldn't work seamlessly and identically with both Android and iPhones, he says when I ask.
Casey:
That's because Apple, a WPC, quote, steering member, quote, and a chair of the board of directors, is contributing essentially the same magnetic power profile as MagSafe to the new Qi 2 standard.
Casey:
I also read somewhere in here, though, that the magnets, apparently the arrangement is ever so slightly different.
Casey:
I don't have a pull quote for you right off the top of my head, but...
Casey:
I guess the magnet array arrangement is slightly different on Qi 2, which makes me and the Verge wonder, does that mean it won't be compatible with the iPhone that we have today?
Casey:
Like, how is that going to work?
Casey:
Nobody knows.
John:
I think it might be an improvement, like a 2.0.
John:
Like, if you look at – one of the points that is made in this article is that kind of unlike – well, maybe it's not unlike.
John:
You know, the made-for-iPhone thing where you'd have lighting connectors and stuff where you had to, like –
John:
Do it the right way.
John:
You had to sort of get the lightning connectors through Apple or certified Apple or whatever.
John:
But you could also say, we don't care about that.
John:
We can figure it out.
John:
Let's just make something that works in the lightning port.
John:
Right.
John:
Here we're making a charger.
John:
We don't want to pay whatever Apple is charging to use the the official lightning thing.
John:
um with magsafe that has happened even more it's a ring of magnets cheap case manufacturers like look i don't whatever you have to do to like certify that you're magsafe compatible and use the like let's not do any of those let's just put a ring of magnets and it you can find it does it work it more or less works like the car mount that i have i don't think that's magsafe certified it was like a 20 car mount it's a circle with magnets in it that's roughly the size that it has to be like
John:
I think if they make changes to the magnet arrangement, it's going to be like that where, yeah, it is different, but it's close enough and it'll work and your thing will stick to it.
John:
Right.
John:
And we know from like the battery packs and stuff that you buy for phones, some of them attach more strongly than others because they use maybe bigger magnets, thicker magnets, stronger magnets.
John:
Right.
John:
additional magnets layers of magnets it's not the type of thing where you know like like a wire protocol where you either it works or it doesn't you just kind of have to have the magnets in the in the neighborhood so i think whatever chi 2 ends up being i would expect it to work well enough with all of our existing mag safe stuff
Marco:
I mean, it can't be that much worse than Qi won, right?
Marco:
I mean, you know, I think this is good news in the sense that MagSafe really was and is an improvement over Qi.
Marco:
You know, Qi charging has a lot of upsides, but it has a couple of really big annoyances.
Marco:
You know, number one is that it's super slow, and I guess number one, B, that it's also super inefficient, which maybe should be a number two.
Marco:
This is why we've run a show called Top 4 that never has four entries.
Marco:
LAUGHTER
Marco:
so anyway yeah so it's super slow it's super inefficient and we've all had that experience of having like a chi charging mat next to our bed or something and have and thinking our phone is charging on it overnight and you wake up and your eyes oh it wasn't quite aligned right and my phone didn't charge overnight and and magsafe improves that it it improves it by a decent amount
Marco:
All of those problems are still there, though.
Marco:
It is still slow.
Marco:
MagSafe just makes it less slow.
Marco:
Part of the reason it makes it less slow is that the magnets align it correctly much more of the time, and it has that kind of communication mechanism where it can verify.
Marco:
I don't know if you've ever had the experience of placing a metal object on a chi-mat accidentally coming back a little while later, and it's maybe a little warmer than you would like for comfort.
Marco:
I have.
Marco:
That's not fun.
Marco:
And MagSafe, you know, I think part of the reason why it doesn't deliver its 15 watts of max power to everything is that there is some kind of like authentication mechanism where it communicates and makes sure that what's on the other end of that thing is a device and not like a Yeti cup.
Marco:
So I speak from experience.
Yeah.
John:
Cheat chargers are not coasters.
Marco:
No, although they are cup warmers if your cup is a Yeti cup.
Marco:
Not recommended.
Marco:
Don't put your Yeti cup on your induction stove either.
Marco:
This is all the same thing.
John:
Yes.
John:
Like electricity and magnetism.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Yeah, anyway.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
You know, having MagSafe be incorporated into the cheese, you know, we already know what this does.
Marco:
The automatic alignment of the magnets does enable more efficient charging because you don't have to worry like, well, we can still send power to this even though it's only, you know, 70% in the target zone.
Marco:
We'll just kind of fudge it with induction and we'll lose more to heat and it'll charge more slowly, but oh well.
Marco:
MagSafe takes care of that to a degree.
Marco:
It also...
Marco:
by having the alignment, reduces the error rate of, I think my phone charged overnight, and then it actually didn't.
Marco:
Now, it doesn't actually eliminate that error rate.
Marco:
I know this from using a MagSafe glued to my end table or, you know, double-sided taped to my end table every night for the last, like, three years.
Marco:
I know that I still occasionally have times where I think I feel it clip on, but then I wake up the next morning and, oh, it was actually not all the way on and it didn't charge.
Marco:
But it happens way less often with MagSafe than it did with the flat Qi thing I had before.
Marco:
So MagSafe is better than Qi.
Marco:
And so it does make sense to modify Qi to incorporate magnets in basically the same way.
Marco:
And this is not the only time this has ever happened.
Marco:
USB-C itself was heavily contributed to by Apple.
Marco:
Because the PC world, we see what they do when they make a port without Apple's input.
Marco:
That's how you get the USB 3 micro B plug.
John:
Or USB-A, the connector everyone loves to hate.
John:
Externally symmetrical, internally asymmetrical.
John:
It's like a cruel joke.
John:
Right.
Yeah.
Marco:
So anyway, this is a good thing.
Marco:
And you're right that it does effectively kind of formalize what the industry was already unofficially doing.
Marco:
There's so many third-party things that are like, it's magnetic charging.
Marco:
They don't say MagSafe.
Marco:
It's magnetic charging compatible with your iPhone, but it'll only be 7.5 watts.
Marco:
Those are all just imitation MagSafe things.
Marco:
So it makes sense to have this be part of the ecosystem.
Marco:
The only thing that I would...
Marco:
pour a little bit of water on is this is not this is still not going to be better than wired charging in certain ways you know we we know first of all wired charging can still be higher power it's still more efficient and it's still you know in some ways safer it still allows data transfer which this doesn't really so you know wired charging is still going to exist and still be popular it's also cheaper so you know it's still going to exist for a while but
Marco:
This is a good thing to formalize and unify what is a fairly obvious improvement to the Qi standard and hopefully unify iOS and Android devices into using the same thing and all the benefits that brings.
John:
And look, it happened without government intervention.
John:
And I say that both to blame the government and to blame Apple.
John:
Because see, Apple, if you just get off your butt and do what's good for the industry, you avoid government regulation, I would say.
John:
And see, government, eventually, even pig-headed companies like Apple will see the light and unify on a standard.
John:
And on the USBC front, like, as you said, this doesn't, you know, is this how Apple's going to comply with the USBC?
John:
They're just going to do MagSafe?
John:
They could, but they would have to add substantial data transfer.
John:
to magsafe probably or have some other way to do data transfer wirelessly it would be a big complication if they went totally portless i mean there's been rumors of that for ages i don't think chichu factors into it any more so than just to say that apple is clearly very dedicated to the magsafe connector and it will continue to exist on phones and maybe even other devices in the future because it's not going anywhere um but yeah standardizing on it for everybody and
John:
you know it it already was standardized like usbc was everywhere except apple it's kind of like uh electric car connectors it's standardized everywhere except tesla and kind of nissan still but but you know it's like so we're so close like and so that's why all these laws are essentially apple laws or if there's ever a law about it for chargers in the us it'll be the tesla law right because we don't need any law to force standardization it happened on its own except for one pretty darn important player uh whether that be apple or tesla so
John:
at least on on the uh wireless charging front uh we didn't have to wait for that apparently everyone got their acts together and it's kind of a shame like i said like apple was heavily involved in usbc it's just they did lightning first and i think they should have done lightning first we enjoyed the benefits of lightning for years before the rest of the industry went usbc but now it's time
Marco:
The other thing about Qi 2, too, is that it presents the possibility, although they're vague on the details, and of course Apple's not saying anything, that maybe in the future the Apple Watch and other smartwatches that have non-flat or smaller contact areas than what we currently use for Qi could possibly be charged by some kind of part of the Qi 2 standard.
Marco:
I really hope that plays out because right now, like, you know, the ideal case would be if you want, if you're traveling or something, you could have basically one type of charger with you.
Marco:
Again, they see the USB-C versus lightning debate for years, right?
Marco:
Ideally, you have one type of charger and you can use as many devices with it as possible.
Marco:
Smart watches throw a whole wrench in that because they don't have any ports, and they're so small.
Marco:
Whether it's an Apple Watch or the other ones, they all have these, usually they have custom induction-based charger techniques or something, or maybe little pins on the side.
Marco:
You have a little flat custom plug that mag saves onto them or whatever.
Marco:
So there's all these different charging techniques for these super small devices that are too small to have Qi or even oftentimes USB.
Marco:
So if Qi 2 has good provisions in it to allow smaller devices to maybe unify in something, whether it's an Apple Watch or a Fitbit or Garmin things or whatever else, that would be fantastic.
Marco:
I really, really hope that's part of it.
Marco:
And I really hope Apple's on board with that and moves in that direction.
Marco:
But I know better than to get my hopes up too far on that.
Marco:
We are brought to you this week by Collide.
Marco:
You know the old saying, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail?
Marco:
Well, the traditional approach to device security is that hammer, a blunt instrument that can't solve nuanced problems.
Marco:
Even after installing clunky agents that users hate, IT teams still have to deal with mountains of support tickets over the same old issues, and they have no way to address things like unencrypted SSH keys, OS updates, or pretty much anything going on with a Linux device.
Marco:
Collide is an endpoint security solution that's more like a Swiss Army knife.
Marco:
It gives IT teams a single dashboard for all devices, Mac, Windows, and yes, even Linux.
Marco:
You can query your entire fleet to check for common compliance issues or write your own custom checks.
Marco:
Plus, instead of installing intrusive software that creates more work for IT, Collide's lightweight agent shows end users how to fix issues themselves.
Marco:
You can achieve endpoint compliance by adding a new tool to your toolbox.
Marco:
Visit collide.com slash ATP to find out how.
Marco:
That's Collide spelled K-O-L-I-D-E.
Marco:
Collide with a K. Collide.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Collide for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, we got an email a few days back, maybe a week or two back, I forget exactly when this was, from Kevin Chen, who has spent some time looking at how Rewind.ai works.
Casey:
To remind you, Rewind.ai is John's favorite thing, Lifestream!
Casey:
And it's the thing that will record everything that happens on your Mac, and it will...
Casey:
Let you search for it and so on and so forth.
Casey:
So Kevin spent some time going through and figuring out how it works.
Casey:
Now, I can't confirm or deny anything that Kevin said, but it rings true to me based on what I know about these sorts of things.
Casey:
It sounds like this is accurate.
Casey:
So we're not going to read Kevin's post.
Casey:
It is worth reading for the record, but I'm just going to kind of quickly hit the highlights.
Casey:
What ends up happening is Rewind uses accessibility APIs to identify the frontmost window, and it stores the timestamps of, I guess, when the window changes in a SQLite database in the user's library folder.
Casey:
I wonder if they're using Blackbird.
Casey:
You never know.
Casey:
Doubt it.
Casey:
It takes a screenshot of the screen that contains the frontmost window, and if there are multiple screens, only the currently focused screen will be captured.
Casey:
A new screenshot is created every two seconds.
Casey:
And then it uses Screen Capture Kit, which we'll put a link in the show notes, to hide disallowed windows, including private browser windows and a user-defined exclusion list.
Casey:
Then it will OCR the screenshot on device using Apple's Vision Framework, the same pipeline that powers live text, and Masquerade as well.
Casey:
And then it'll store the inference results to a SQLite database.
Casey:
It then periodically compresses the screenshot sequence into an H.264 video with what, gentlemen?
John:
They have incredibly, well, I'm going to say incredibly inefficient.
John:
Yeah.
John:
FFmpeg.
John:
And I was surprised to see that because Apple has tons of libraries to compress video.
John:
Maybe they don't have ones that take images as input.
John:
There was a question, I think, in the blog post from some people.
Marco:
uh does ffmpeg use the h264 hardware in all of apple's computers i thought it did i'm not certain about that but i thought i think i probably i think it probably does too or at the very least it has an option that you don't remember yeah there are there are various like modules and options i mean because ffmpeg is not just one set of things it's like there's a whole bunch of different optional things that could be bundled into it or whatever else and some of those things do use the hardware acceleration
John:
Yeah, I mean, this is, you know, it's not an MVP, but this is the first version of a product.
John:
And using I mean, I don't I don't know how else you do it.
John:
It just seems like they're using screen capture kit and Apple's vision framework.
John:
I would have expected to see them using whatever whatever the appropriate it was at AV foundation, whatever the appropriate Apple library is to do this work rather than FFmpeg.
John:
But either way, they're probably it's probably pretty efficient.
Casey:
And then additionally, if the user joins a Zoom call and enables transcription through Rewind, it will transcribe the audio on device using the OpenAI Whisper model.
Casey:
Then it stores the transcripts and speaker information into a SQLite database.
Casey:
And so then Kevin did some benchmarks and whatnot.
Casey:
So CPU usage, when recording on his 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro processor,
Casey:
rewind uses about 20 percent of the cpu continuously and then rewind helper which is i think the thing that does the transcoding or manages the transcoding whatnot spikes over 200 cpu every time the temporary png images are compressed into an h264 video that's really not good now wait hold on do we know whether that's efficiency cores or the or the high power cores
Casey:
Oh, that's an interesting question, and I don't think we know.
John:
I mean, that's the problem with CPU percentages, because remember, 100% CPU is not all of your CPU.
John:
It's all of one core, according to the way Apple's activity monitor does stuff.
John:
So 20% sounds like a lot, but on a laptop, when it's idle, you want it to be idle.
John:
And if it's using 20% of even just one core continuously, that's not good.
John:
great for battery life but again you know what are you getting for it you're getting live streams right so i think it is being as efficient as it can be modulo a few things like it later in in the uh the article kevin goes into some uh suggestions for how this could be improved like not writing out pings but instead of going straight to the h264 or i would say like if they're if they're shelling out the ffmpeg versus statically linking with the library that would be something to look into but again it's version one
Marco:
I would say, too, though, just for CPU load-wise, when you're running an M1 or M2-based Mac, if you run something like iStatMenus, like Casey and I, and definitely not John, do, you will see your efficiency cores are running at what, on Intel machines, would be an alarmingly high percentage.
Marco:
Mine, right now, the efficiency cores are hovering around 75% use, and that's kind of...
Marco:
constant and one of those things is zoom but oh well um the other thing is just windows server though which again zoom um but like it's it's fairly common for me in fairly idle use to look up at my menu and see my two efficiency cores being used very heavily by kind of just regular systemativity or background things like photo indexing and everything and from what i understand and i think this matches my end total experience so far
Marco:
From what I understand, the kind of real noticeable battery life cost to one of the efficiency cores being maxed out is basically nothing.
Marco:
It's very different from the high power cores.
Marco:
If you're maxing out your high power cores, that's a different scenario.
Marco:
But the efficiency cores with a battery the size of a modern laptop battery, I get the impression that you're basically using those for free.
Casey:
Interesting.
Casey:
Continuing on with the rewind stuff from Kevin Chen, the storage usage.
Casey:
So the screen recordings are chunks of about 180 megs an hour.
Casey:
The metadata OCR results and call transcripts, which are, again, the SQLite database are about 26 megs an hour.
Casey:
Console logs about four megs an hour.
Casey:
With regard to security, Rewind currently doesn't encrypt data at rest.
Casey:
Any app with full disk access and any attacker who encounters an unlocked computer has the ability to read recordings from all time, including soft deleted clips.
Casey:
That's also not stupendous.
Casey:
And then other notable things, resources slash favicons.
Casey:
There's a directory of 912 favicons or favicons.
Casey:
I don't know how you're supposed to pronounce that.
Casey:
For popular websites stored as PNG images, examples include Amazon, Dropbox, YouTube, etc.
Casey:
These are used in the timeline view when the frontmost app is a web browser instead of showing the browser's app icon, which is kind of cool.
John:
That's such like a 1.0 thing.
John:
It's like, we just need to ship this.
John:
Don't worry about it.
John:
What do we do about the icons for the things?
John:
We'll just ship a thousand of them.
John:
like i mean obviously you would think why don't you just go to the web and get them oh then you got to make a network request and it's all complicated they love that they just just just ship them all like just our app our app bundle will be bigger marco would never do this no we're just gonna ship 912 of what we think are the most popular websites png images of all their i would say fav icons uh i thought just that was funny um
John:
So it's implemented in a pretty straightforward way, in an explicable way, with a lot of 1.0 stuff.
John:
The data not being encrypted at rest is not great, because it's bad enough when someone gets access to your computer, but that is a treasure trove.
John:
It's already OCRed text, and you've got all the screen images.
John:
This is the problem of, well, if it never leaves my device, and it's not using cloud transcription, and so on and so forth, everything's done locally.
John:
It's nice and secure.
John:
It's like, yeah, but now you've just made...
John:
I don't know, like the equivalent of collecting evidence against yourself and putting it in a little box and wrapping it up with a bow.
John:
Not that you're doing any bad things, but in terms of privacy, you probably don't want anyone getting at that because they could just sort of go through that and see what you've done for the past day, two days, week, month, year.
John:
Uh, it's up to you to kind of be studious about like, well, I want to exclude, you know, private windows.
John:
Don't show it when I go to my bank website, like whatever you want to do.
John:
But you know, with great power comes great responsibility.
John:
But anyway, it's, it's implemented in what I think is a fairly straightforward way.
John:
And I thought this was a really interesting, uh,
John:
examination of how it works and what it takes and your point marco about the efficiency course is important because that's kind of what they're there for it's not like when you write a program you can well you can specifically target things but there's scheduling on mac os is really weird but there are suffice to say there are apis when you run code in a mac application that you can tell the os and the you know the the threading job service that you're using through whatever api you're using what priority you want and
John:
If you say something like low background, like all different words for the priorities, you'll end up running on the efficiency course pretty much exclusively.
John:
There's also some other details about core affinity, of whether your job stays in the same core, bounces around, and how that impacts cash or whatever.
John:
But I think everything this is doing
John:
is sort of below the level of notice of a modern m class processor because it's not you know the stuff that it's doing that's complicated like the uh the text kit thing the vision framework of parsing text that's got to be optimized to hell and back like the apple did that work for you already that's already efficient it's already going to be fast you don't need the results in real time right so it can be it's asynchronous in the background and you're not in a big hurry so
John:
I bet that it does pretty well.
John:
Screen capture kit, again, Apple optimized that to be able to capture your screen without destroying your Mac and making it slow and unresponsive.
John:
So that's great.
John:
F of MPEG, I feel like is a weak point here because as optimized as it may be, I have to think that any Apple framework would be even more optimized.
John:
Even if the FFMPEG thing is just calling into the Apple framework, it still seems like... I believe that is exactly what it's doing.
Casey:
If you configure it properly, like Marco was saying, and its video toolbox is the... I don't know why it's called video toolbox.
Casey:
Maybe that's an Apple thing.
Casey:
Maybe it's an FFMPEG thing.
Casey:
But that's what FFMPEG calls the front-end Apple APIs.
Casey:
And I actually did, just for grins and giggles, look through the video toolbox code a year or two back.
Casey:
And it looks like, if memory serves, and again, this is a year or two ago...
Casey:
I'm pretty sure it's just calling into AV Foundation.
Casey:
Like, I don't think it's doing anything you wouldn't expect.
John:
Yeah, but I understand, like, the sort of, you know, the marshalling of the jobs, however it's dealing with threading or background tasks or whatever, in an Apple framework, you could give it a batch of work and let it do that in a way that is most efficient on your M-whatever processor, whereas at FFMPEG, you're kind of doing that manually, deciding...
John:
how many jobs you want to run, how many cores you want them to use, even if each individual one is just using AV Foundation behind the scenes.
John:
Same thing for the OpenAI thing.
John:
I don't know if Apple has a solution to that, of the transcribing speech into text.
John:
I think there's an Apple solution, but OpenAI is a popular...
John:
Open source one, I think when someone was digging into this, they found the OpenAI, maybe it was Kevin, found the OpenAI model file in the executable one, like the speech model file there.
John:
I'm not sure if they're using the OpenAI library, which I think is written in C++, to do it.
John:
But as the advertising material said, this is actually a good demonstration of...
John:
leveraging apple's platform apis to build an application that you otherwise would not be able to build without apple's help or other you know these libraries they're using make the application right if you had to write all these libraries yourself from scratch it would take you many more years and many more millions of dollars but because apple offers these frameworks a you know a company can make this product in way less time with far fewer people and i think that's pretty cool
Casey:
Video Toolbox is apparently an Apple thing, a real-time follow-up, and we'll put a link to it in the show.
John:
People will be familiar with it because you see it in the menu in Handbrake and you know it as the thing that makes my encodes go faster.
Casey:
Gosh, I haven't used Handbrake in forever, but you are not wrong.
Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
We got a really fascinating one from Stefan Jacobs about a month ago, I'd say.
Casey:
It's been a while, but we were trying to find some room to fit it in because this might be the only Ask ATP we do for the day.
Casey:
So Stefan writes, during the recent discussion about Twitter, you briefly discussed the analogy of leaving Apple platforms if someone at Apple made decisions of similar nature to those being made at Twitter.
Casey:
The options are obviously not great.
Casey:
Neither Windows nor any of the various Linux distros offer anywhere near the attention to detail and polish that Apple has put into its platforms over the years.
Casey:
So here's my question.
Casey:
If someone were to build a third alternative mainstream OS that could host a hypothetical wave of Apple refugees, what are the key things they would need to get right?
Casey:
PS, optional clarifying parameters if needed.
Casey:
And since I'm talking to John Syracuse, I'm sure they are.
Casey:
Let's assume that Apple has a less stark advantage in processor hardware by the time this happens.
Casey:
And to begin with, the OS would probably need to be able to run on third-party hardware, although tight integration a la System76 would presumably be possible over time.
Casey:
John, tell me about System76.
Casey:
What's the context here?
John:
I don't even know what that is.
John:
It has to click on the link.
Casey:
I've seen it before.
Casey:
Oh, it's a Linux laptop vendor.
Casey:
I see.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So it's Linux laptops that are supposed to be like MacBooks.
John:
Got it.
John:
Just like every other laptop.
Casey:
Yeah, fair.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So here's my question.
Casey:
I'm repeating.
Casey:
Stefan writes, here's my question.
Casey:
If someone were to build a third alternative mainstream OS that could host a hypothetical wave of Apple refugees, what are the key things they would need to get right?
Casey:
Would anyone like to start?
John:
One thing I want to say right off the bat about this is because Twitter is the context of the thing.
John:
A key factor in this hypothetical is that if Apple ever went the way of Twitter, and there are many things preventing that, not the least of which is that it is not a private company owned or controlled by a single person.
John:
If Apple did go in that direction, the self-destruction, the implosion of Apple makes it possible for there to be an alternative.
John:
Like I think Mastodon, for example,
John:
getting so much more activity and becoming more popular happens because Twitter is self-destructing.
John:
Right.
John:
And so if you look at this question, every time we talk about it, it's like, yeah, but like it's basically impossible to make a competing phone platform, desktop operating system, what, you know, tablet, whatever you want to say, it's basically impossible.
John:
Right.
John:
But if Apple self-destructed,
John:
that's a power vacuum.
John:
Something would fill that vacuum.
John:
So I don't think it's entirely ridiculous to think if Apple did implode and just sort of, you know, if Apple pulled Twitter, let's say, it would make an opportunity for someone to fill that void.
John:
And I think that someone, if someone did succeed to fill that void, they would probably be vaguely Apple-ish, kind of like Mastodon is vaguely Twitter-ish, but also learning from the mistakes of Twitter.
John:
But
John:
you know, kind of trying to appeal in the same way to sort of a small group of early adopters like Mastodon did or like Apple did, right?
John:
So, you know, usually I complain that people's hypotheticals are not realistic.
John:
I have to say that the implosion of Apple itself makes this somewhat more realistic.
Casey:
Alright, so what's important?
Marco:
I mean, I think number one would be we know, you know, there are some similar challenges as with social networks of, you know, chicken and egg problems or getting network effects going.
Marco:
And, you know, in an operating system, one of the biggest challenges is software compatibility.
Marco:
Like, what's going to run on this?
Marco:
And so,
Marco:
I think the best way to bootstrap this would either be to base a new operating system on Linux or on Android.
Marco:
And I don't love either of those options for lots of reasons.
Marco:
But, you know, what we see with the Mastodon explosion, you know, as John was saying, just in the wake of the Twitter implosion.
Marco:
Part of the reason why Mastodon is so much more appealing to many of us nerds who care about these kind of distinctions compared to something like Hive or Post or whatever is, as I was saying a few episodes ago, now that we've been burned by the big closed ecosystem of Twitter –
Marco:
The idea of something being open and protocol-based and not being in the hands of just one big company, it's like, okay, well, now we learn that lesson that one centralized big company is bad, so we're going to now apply that lesson and not let that same mistake happen again.
Marco:
Well, we have that same problem with Apple.
Marco:
They've just been a good enough steward most of the time that we haven't jumped ship.
Marco:
But if Apple did go bad and cause us all to jump ship in some way,
Marco:
I would want to then make sure that same mistake of that big centralization couldn't happen again.
Marco:
And I would rather set up shop on Linux than on Windows.
Marco:
Also, I mean, it helps also.
Marco:
I might have said Windows a couple of years ago, but in that intervening time, I've had more experience with Windows.
John:
You've used Windows.
John:
You should have had more experience with Linux and that might change your mind.
Marco:
Fair enough.
Marco:
But Linux, as I said many years ago, it's almost like going to live in the woods.
Marco:
But I think I'd rather go start my own civilization in the woods based on the foundation of Linux than to live in the hellhole that is Windows any more than I have to.
Marco:
And over the years, whenever we'd insult Windows on the show, we'd hear from people who are like, you know, it's better now.
Marco:
You should try it.
Marco:
They've really made it a lot better now.
Marco:
And I was starting to believe these people.
Marco:
But now I've actually used it firsthand.
Marco:
Modern versions on modern hardware.
Marco:
And I can say without a doubt, it's not that much better.
Marco:
It is a little bit better.
Marco:
It's not that much better.
Marco:
And it is not something I want to use still.
Marco:
So whatever the new OS would be that I would want to invest my time and resources in...
Marco:
would hopefully be a Linux-based thing.
Marco:
Android would be a little bit better in the sense that Android would provide that app compatibility, but it's not... Like, Android would provide crappy app compatibility.
Marco:
And not to say that Android apps are crappy.
Marco:
They are, but for this point, it's more about... It's like the cross-platform nature of Android apps, of running on a general PC operating system...
Marco:
it makes it a pretty crappy experience.
Marco:
Like, if anyone's ever used... There are already ways to run Android apps on PC operating systems, and they're terrible.
Marco:
Like, they're very clunky.
Marco:
I mean, heck, look at Catalyst on macOS.
Marco:
It isn't that much better.
Marco:
You know, it's not a great experience.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Linux, I think, would be the best long-term place to invest.
Marco:
And so I think what a third-party alternative OS would have to be, I think, would just be a really good Linux distribution.
Marco:
That invests heavily in the desktop and laptop user experience, which we've seen smaller efforts of this over time with Linux.
Marco:
None of them have ever really gone anywhere, but I think that's what it would have to be.
Marco:
And if there really was a big Apple implosion and there were all these talented, opinionated people who wanted somewhere to go...
Marco:
That, I think, would be way more likely to succeed than either Windows becoming appealing to this crowd, which it never will because, I mean, God, just try it.
Marco:
Trust me.
Marco:
So either that, that's not going to happen, or a whole new OS starting from scratch.
Marco:
that wouldn't be able to run any of the software from any of the other os's we have now i think that's a no-go because software compatibility is just too important and the fact is linux actually has pretty decent software compatibility with a lot of stuff that a lot of people want to use these days it's not amazing it's not as much as windows or mac or android but it's not as bad as you would think um if you haven't tried it recently so
Marco:
That's where I would go with it is like start with Linux and just make a really good distribution that has a really significantly improved experience around key areas for desktop and laptop use.
Casey:
See, but I think you're majoring on the implementation details, and I don't think that's the spirit of what Stefan was asking.
Casey:
I think what Stefan was asking is what would you look for in an operating system that would make it feel like home or like somewhere you could pitch your tent, so to speak, and
Casey:
And so when I read this question, what I was thinking of is like, what would appeal to me?
Casey:
What are some of the core things about macOS that I wouldn't want to give up?
Casey:
So some of that is, you know, kind of hand-wavy things like, well, attention to detail, which it's hard to get specific about that unless you're talking about like something, you know, at a micro level.
Casey:
But in general, like a good attention to detail, a good visual design.
Casey:
But then I started thinking, okay, well, what about...
Casey:
One of the things that I love about macOS that I never really experienced on Windows, and maybe that's because I never took the time to learn, but macOS has incredibly robust keyboard shortcuts and keyboard support throughout the entire operating system and every app within it.
Casey:
And you can do so much with the keyboard, particularly when you're using the keyboard in combination with the mouse.
Casey:
And so I think robust keyboard shortcuts and keyboard support is also important to me.
Casey:
I wonder if now I'm starting to get into the implementation details, kind of like you were, Marco, but I think a good developer story is powerful.
Casey:
I would argue that part of the reason that Macs got so darn popular in the early to mid-aughts was because the developer story was so good.
Casey:
It was a Linux computer, not too dissimilar than a lot of the web servers that we were all writing code for.
Casey:
But it was a Linux computer right there on your desk, and you didn't have to do a VM or anything.
Casey:
It was right there.
John:
What are you talking about as a Linux computer?
Casey:
Well, okay, Unix.
Casey:
Sorry, sorry.
Casey:
Excuse me.
John:
That saved you a lot of feedback.
John:
You said it twice, and it wasn't just a Spico.
John:
It was not a Linux computer.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
I'm already getting blown up in the chat room, too.
Casey:
Anyways, so it was a Unix computer.
Casey:
It's a Unix system.
Casey:
I know this.
Casey:
It's a Unix computer right there on your desk.
Marco:
Wait, is BSD, like, there's going to be somebody who writes in and is like,
John:
actually no don't you remember you this was before your time apple got real official all caps unix certification for mac os 10 yeah yeah yeah there was a great there's a great story on the internet about the person the person who led that effort i'll see if i can find it for now
Casey:
Oh, I remember that.
Casey:
That was a good story.
Casey:
I don't know if I'll be able to find it, but that was a very good story.
Casey:
But anyway, to finish kind of the thoughts I had, having a good developer story, I think, is important, although maybe I'm too much indexing on what's important to me and not what's generically important.
Casey:
But speaking of generically important, I think what's pretty great about macOS in a way that, say, Swift wants to be but kind of isn't, is that macOS does do a pretty good job with progressive disclosure.
Casey:
So to do basic stuff is fairly straightforward.
Casey:
To do intermediate-level stuff is...
Casey:
kind of hard, but not terribly hard.
Casey:
And to do hard stuff is hard, but it's possible.
Casey:
And that's, I think, a really important thing that I would want to see in whatever this new operating system I would potentially be using.
Casey:
So I don't know if you guys have anything along those lines, or if you'd rather go back into the nerdy stuff, that's fine too.
Casey:
But that was the sort of thing that I was thinking about that when I was reading Stefan's question.
John:
I think they're kind of connected.
John:
When Margaret was talking about bootstrapping and how you've got the problem of, well, for a platform, you need people to make apps and everything.
John:
I thought where you were going, and Casey kind of glanced off this as well, is the developer story, not in terms of what does the platform offer for developers, but in terms of what developers are drawn to this platform.
John:
The only reason the Mac even still exists is because Apple bought Next and
John:
And part of that was the developers who had been developing for Next, an obscure platform that nobody cared about that sold computers to colleges, right, for $10,000 each, was because those developers, they came with the platform.
John:
It's like, where the hell is they going to go?
John:
You're going to write Objective-C for somebody else, right?
John:
They came with the platform, and those are the ones that made the great Mac apps that defined the Mac for the new generation.
Yeah.
John:
There was also the classic macOS apps that were great.
John:
I mean, some of them are still around and then we bring like Microsoft Office and Photoshop for sure.
John:
But sort of the, you know, the renaissance of the Mac in the early days of macOS 10 was because Apple had essentially purchased a developer community filled with...
John:
really good interesting developers that share values that we have so for a platform that's going to appeal to us i think it would have to come with or be attractive to the kinds of developers who make the apps that appeal to us
John:
So we got the Next and the Objective-C developers before, you know, if it was some other platform, it would have to be like, well, what is the platform that those type of developers, either literally those people, because some of those people have been moved from platform to platform again because they're not writing Next apps anymore, right?
John:
Or people like that, whatever the current equivalent of that is.
John:
If they're attracted to the platform and they want to make apps for it,
John:
we would be attracted there as users and in some respects as developers because those are the type of people.
John:
Apps don't come from nowhere.
John:
It's like, oh, you just have a platform and it should have good apps.
John:
Where do they come from?
John:
People make them.
John:
The kind of people who made classic Mac apps when no one had heard of the Mac and they were really expensive.
John:
The kind of people who are making Next apps when nobody heard about Next.
John:
The things that appealed about Next and the Mac, and it's not just that Steve Jobs involved making both of them,
John:
those qualities, even though they were so very different, next to BSD Unix-based system for schools, no color, grayscale screens initially, right?
John:
Objective-C, weird programming language, just the user interface didn't really look anything like the Mac, but the things that appealed to AppKit developers are the same type of things that appealed to Mac developers, and it was kind of a natural marriage of those things for the current Mac platform.
John:
So I think any platform that I would go to after the Mac
John:
I would basically be following that muse.
John:
Where are those people going?
John:
Where are people like that?
John:
Where do they want to be developing stuff?
John:
Because that's where I'm going to live because they're going to make that a nice place for me to live.
John:
In terms of the Twitter Mastodon,
John:
Don't go to a place owned and controlled by one company, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Don't think we have a viable model for that, for computing platforms that involve hardware.
John:
Obviously, there is the web, the platform no one owns.
John:
And I think the web is awesome.
John:
I spent my entire career programming for the web.
John:
I think it's great.
John:
But the web relies on the existence of devices that you use to view the web, whether that's your phone, your laptop, whatever, your television.
John:
Those hardware devices are made by companies that probably also have some kind of platform thing going on there.
John:
The web does not provide a solution to that.
John:
And talking about the qualities of the platform, I would like one of the things that always attracted me to Apple is the marriage of hardware and software.
John:
The same company controls both of those things enough to make them married together to make a single device that is pleasing.
John:
So even if we're just talking about like, oh, you know, let's just say it's the web, the platform, no one knows.
John:
Even, you know, you're just going to have a Chromebook equivalent type of thing.
John:
All it does is browse the web.
John:
That solves the platform problem.
John:
You don't need to have an API.
John:
It's all web apps, whatever.
John:
Someone still needs to make that hardware.
John:
Someone still needs to deal with power management and little the neural engine and live text on the web.
John:
Like everything that Apple does now, you need some company to do that.
John:
And that company is going to be one single private company.
John:
I don't think there is a model for...
John:
you know a federation of small equally competitive companies working on an open platform someone's got to own and control it enough to be able to make hardware that appeals to me so it would have to be a single company right and they could build on an open source you know mac os 10 is built on bsd you know which and darwin open source like this open source stuff underneath all this right
John:
We're all standing on the shoulders of all the giants that came before.
John:
But in the end, the Mac operating system, iOS, iPadOS, those are proprietary operating systems made and controlled by a single company that marries them directly to hardware that it also controls and with chips that it designs and all the way up the stack.
John:
So that is a quality of the...
John:
thing that I would go to that I think it has to exist Microsoft is out not because I dislike Microsoft or think everything is bad but they just have so much legacy burden they will never get out from under that unless they literally burn to the ground right so they are held back by their legacy which is also a thing that makes them billions of dollars right and in some respects that's true of Apple as well right I don't think Microsoft would ever make something great they don't have it in them they don't have the right priorities Xbox is close no I mean I mean operating system wise
John:
Yeah, well, Xbox has an operating system.
John:
It does, but it's debatable, right?
John:
There's been some great things.
John:
Everything in Microsoft is held back.
John:
The strategy tax at Microsoft is off the charts, even under new leadership.
John:
And, you know, nowadays, Microsoft is like, oh, it's just the best place to run Linux.
John:
Yeah.
John:
because you know the windows operating system has a linux subsystem and like i don't count microsoft out and they're doing much better but the legacy like the thing that makes them money the thing that runs that company will always necessarily make that operating system not appeal to me because they they can't just say we don't care about our existing customers new thing they even apple couldn't do that even apple had to do carbon it's just that apple was starting from a place i like better so that's why i'm counting out microsoft google
John:
hmm google's good at the web google's not particularly great i mean they make good phones like the the you know the the pixel phones do a pretty good job there chromebooks is not a great laptop as far as i'm concerned i like the idea the implementation is not great uh so i don't think this is the existing company i think it would have to be a new company filling that power vacuum and
John:
attracting whatever the modern equivalent of the Mac or next developer community, or maybe like the BOS development community is kind of similar.
John:
Although in hindsight, the next developer community had more forward thinking technical ideas, right?
John:
You know, doing everything C++ was cool and fast in the nineties, whatever the hell B was.
John:
But boy, am I glad that we're not all living on a platform that was built on a foundation of C++ at this point.
John:
Objective C was in hindsight, a way better choice.
John:
And then Swift, hopefully even better going forward, right?
John:
So I think the pieces are there for someone to pick up those pieces and build an operating system that I would like.
John:
And I think that's how it would have to be.
John:
It would have to be marriage hardware and software, the kinds of developers that made the Mac what it is and all the errors of the Mac being attracted to that platform, only controlled by a single company with leadership that has taste.
John:
That's the final thing I would throw in there.
John:
And when we say has taste, we mean has the same taste as us.
John:
That's why we like Apple things.
John:
It's like, we like all the things we like.
John:
There is a particular, that's why the developers are drawn to there.
John:
Like why were developers interested in writing Mac software?
John:
A lot of them wanted to write it because the screen looked really nice and you had proportional fonts and a bitmap display with tiny little pixels.
John:
Who cares how big the pixels are?
John:
I cared.
John:
I cared how big the pixels were.
John:
I didn't even know how to program.
John:
But even other Apple platforms, it's like, look, the Apple IIgs has a mouse.
John:
I'm like, the pixels are the size of boulders.
John:
Oh, but it's got color.
John:
Have you seen the size of the pixels?
John:
I cared so much about that.
John:
And I couldn't understand why everybody else would look at like a CGA screen and they'd be so excited because theirs had color and mine didn't.
John:
I was like, I'll look at Dark Castle all day long before I look at your CGI game, even though your game is quote unquote in color.
John:
Are you kidding?
John:
That's the type of values and quote unquote taste that I'm bringing with me.
John:
And I'm going to go where those developers with that same taste go.
Casey:
That's a pretty good answer.
Casey:
Marco, any final thoughts?
Marco:
No, he's frustratingly correct as usual.
Casey:
Ah, a story of the last 10 years, am I right?
Casey:
All right, let's see how many more we can squeeze in real quick.
Casey:
Andy Clark writes, there seems to have been a lot more talk about RSS recently, probably given Twitter's troubles.
Casey:
Do you use RSS and which reader apps do you use for iOS and or Mac OS?
Casey:
Mac OS, excuse me.
Casey:
For me, I stopped using RSS a few years ago, which just kind of faded out of my life.
Casey:
And I was using Twitter both in terms of what are people talking about and a list I specifically had for news.
Casey:
And I was using Twitter for that.
Casey:
Now I am feeling a little bit of a void in that department.
Casey:
So on my to-do list of something I want to explore is, you know, rebuilding an RSS list and start using RSS apps, reader apps again.
Casey:
I really enjoyed the app Reeder, R-E-E-D-E-R.
Casey:
Last, I was an RSS person, which was, again, a long time ago.
Casey:
But I think I would probably start with NetNewsWire, to be honest with you, which is written by a few friends of ours.
Casey:
and I haven't used it in years and years and years and years, but I see some chatter about what they're working on in a Slack that the three of us are in, and it sounds like it's pretty slick these days.
Casey:
So I'd probably take a look at either of those.
Casey:
Marco, are you using RSS?
Casey:
I never stopped using RSS.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Marco:
And I'm not just in the technical sense of like, well, you know, podcasts are based on RSS.
Marco:
I mean, you're right.
Marco:
That's correct.
Marco:
But that's not what anybody means when they say this.
Marco:
But yeah, no, I've never stopped using an RSS reader.
Marco:
For the sync backend, I like using...
Marco:
what's the hamburger one is it feed bin yeah hamburger hamburger icon yeah so feed bin is my sync backend and you can use any any of a whole huge list of clients with with some of these sync backends and um on the iphone i use an app called unread which um it's one of those that years ago too
Marco:
It's kind of like if you ever use like the clear app for your to do's or shopping lists where it's like very opinionated, very limited and very gesture based.
Marco:
It's kind of like that for RSS readers.
Marco:
And I like that a lot on the phone.
Marco:
I have a lot of muscle memory there and I enjoy the design of it quite a bit.
Marco:
On the Mac side of things, I've bounced around a lot.
Marco:
NetNewsWire is what I should be using.
Marco:
I'm currently still – so for a while before NetNewsWire was back, I used an app called ReadKit, which is very much in the spirit of old NetNewsWire.
Marco:
and read kit is they they had a new version come out that i think is now based on catalyst or something and it's it doesn't fit me as well like the new version doesn't so i'm i'm i'm still on the old version on my max for now um and then at some point i have a to-do list item to move to net newswire because net newswire is the one that is um but i think by far under the most active development
Marco:
on the mac they also i'm pretty sure they they have also an ios version now um i haven't looked at it yet i'm so happy on ios with unread um but certainly i would i would if you know if you're starting fresh i would start on it newswire and and you know only branch out if you really have to from there because that that's the one getting the most active development um as for rss content itself i continue to give the same advice i've given for uh
Marco:
geez 15 years whatever it's been that i've been using longer than that that i've been using rss readers um don't just go and subscribe to like the giant high volume feeds from whatever the big blogs are that that i used to say like in gadget and stuff but that's most of those don't even exist anymore but you know don't go add just like you know the new york times front page the very front like don't just add a whole bunch of high volume stuff
Marco:
RSS is ideal in the standard RSS reader paradigm.
Marco:
And there are lots of ways to consume it.
Marco:
You don't have to do it this way.
Marco:
But the way most of them work as kind of like this big kind of inbox style thing, it is ideal for subscribing to any number you want of infrequently updated things like John's blog or my blog or Casey's blog.
Marco:
All of us, I mean, Casey updates more than John and I combined by a good margin.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
it's really good at that because like there's no cost to following an infrequently followed or an infrequently posted blog so all the blogs people have that have been kind of mostly abandoned or become low volume in the last decade um go subscribe to all those from anybody that you know um and then uh when it comes to the high volume stuff
Marco:
subscribe to a very small number of those because you what you don't want to happen is the rss reader to all of a sudden be this thing where there's thousands of items piling up unread and you're just not seeing them i mean and you could if you wanted to you could switch to like the river approach where you don't even try to like quote keep up and you just dip in whatever you want and just browse what's on top and then you know come back some other come back later to see more
Marco:
That method doesn't really work for me.
Marco:
For me, I do like the inbox slash keeping up model, but I shrink everything down.
Marco:
So for instance, I don't subscribe on my RSS reader to 9to5Mac and Bloomberg and all this stuff.
Marco:
Instead, I subscribe to MacRumors.
Marco:
And Mac Rumors will link out to anything in that broader ecosystem that I really need to see.
Marco:
And then otherwise, it's smaller volume sites like, of course, Daring Fireball, Michael Sai's blog, which is awesome, Pixel Envy, Six Colors, 512 Pixels.
Marco:
That's the stuff I read in the Mac world in my RSS reader.
Marco:
And that's all fantastic stuff.
Marco:
And then a whole bunch of small blogs and stuff.
Marco:
But it's great for that.
Marco:
And if you need any help finding feeds, I know NetNewsWire actually comes with a stock default set that you can adopt if you want to.
Marco:
So that's a good place to start.
Casey:
John?
John:
I'm letting the default set, though.
John:
I'm a little sore about that.
John:
um i mean to leverage my personal connections to get that in there uh so i'm a net newswire user from way back the first time i saw a net newswire um i took to it like a duck to water because it used the same key bindings as tin t-i-n uh which was my preferred usenet reader um
John:
when I was in college.
Marco:
Wow.
John:
And it looked kind of like Tin in terms of the arrangement because Tin was a character-based application that you used in a terminal window.
John:
It used curses, right?
John:
So it's not, it wasn't a GUI app, right?
John:
Oh my God.
John:
But it had the same type of thing where you'd go through the groups and then you'd see the message list and then you'd see a detail pane with the message you're looking at.
John:
And NetNewsWire used the same key bindings.
John:
And they're like VI key bindings, where you just literally hit a key, NT space bar, like, you know, no command strokes, because it was like VI, right?
John:
So I was like, wow, here's this, you know, shiny aqua Mac OS X application for reading RSS feeds, which are becoming really popular.
John:
And all the key bindings are like tin.
John:
And it's awesome.
John:
And I used that for so long until it kind of got bought out and found new ownership or whatever.
John:
And now this new thing is kind of like when a Twitter for the Mac went away and then had a resurgence as the Phoenix project.
John:
Net Newswire, the original author of Net Newswire, our friend Brett Simmons, eventually got back the rights to Net Newswire and rewrote Net Newswire.
John:
Like it rose again from the ashes.
John:
Here is Net Newswire written again in a modern language with modern APIs by the original author after many years in the wilderness.
John:
And it is a phenomenal newsreader for the Mac.
John:
It is a phenomenal Mac applications.
John:
If you use Mac applications and, well, I'm going to say if you use Mac applications, they feel sluggish.
John:
They don't feel sluggish because you don't know any better.
John:
Until you launch and use that news bar and you realize, oh, so this is how fast a Mac application could be if it wasn't written using WebKit or whatever, you know, Electron.
John:
Everything is so fast and responsive.
John:
It is simple, straightforward.
John:
It is very understandable to me, at least, because I've been using NetNewsWire forever.
John:
It still kind of has 10 key bindings, but they've changed the UI to be less 10-like or whatever.
John:
But anyway, I use that on the desktop.
John:
I used to use Feedbin for years and years when I was using various different readers and syncing services, so I'd be all in sync.
John:
But since NetNewsWire has iCloud support, I finally stopped paying for Feedbin.
John:
I think I still paid for this year.
John:
Maybe it actually just expired.
John:
I don't know.
John:
But NetNewsWire will use your iCloud account.
John:
with cloud kit i'm assuming uh and i don't have iCloud drive disabled so it works for me so i don't pay for feebin anymore but back back when i paid for feebin i also use reader r-e-d-e-r like you mentioned before on the phone but there's also net newswire for the phone and in general on the phone i don't use rss it's more of a desktop experience for me i used to use reader on my ipad a lot but you know i don't know i feel like twitter has again twitter has not replaced rss for me twitter
John:
uh supplanted as the majority uh you know stream that i use to consume stuff and now i'm you know i'm not all on mastodon i'm like half on twitter i'm both on twitter and mastodon so the combination at this point of twitter and mastodon is still ahead of rss in terms of prioritization of where i find things but net newswire is my preferred rss reader on the mac where
John:
And I'm kind of a completionist, but not really.
John:
Like I, I subscribed, I, you know, Marco wouldn't like it.
John:
I subscribe to tons of things that I know I have too much volume.
John:
And sometimes I just, I'm not a completionist.
John:
I just mark them all as red.
John:
I say, well, I'm too behind on that.
John:
I don't care.
John:
The way I would organize my feeds and I have tons of feeds.
John:
I used to have folders for things like I had a folder called infrequent.
John:
which was things like, this is a folder full of things that I do actually want to keep up with because it's blogs that post twice a year, right?
John:
So I'm never going to just mark all them as read.
John:
Whereas these other sites that post 50 things a day, ah, just mark them all as read.
John:
And they're in subfolders and you can mark an entire folder as read with a single keystroke and it happens instantly.
John:
So I kind of, you know, I use RSS like that where...
John:
I don't go through the river of stuff.
John:
I just look at things that might be interesting.
John:
And then there are certain feeds that I read literally every single thing that comes out of them because they're so infrequent or because I care about them so much.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Memberful, Collide, and Sanity.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at ATP.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arman, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
They did it.
Casey:
So, John, you've been wanting to talk about Mercedes brake pedals for a while, specifically the EQS, which apparently can be either the sedan or the SUV.
Casey:
But let me tell you, the Mercedes electric sedans, the EQE sedan, EQS sedan, not good looking cars.
Marco:
Why are there so few good-looking electric cars?
Marco:
Like, this should be easier, shouldn't it?
John:
Everybody wants to, you know, look futuristic, and that leads them in interesting directions.
John:
And, of course, the BMWs don't look weird.
John:
They look like normal BMWs, but the normal BMWs now look ugly.
Yeah.
John:
I was going to say, if you want an electric car that doesn't look odd, BMW just takes their regular cars and makes them electric because they built a platform that they can do that with, but they look like BMWs.
Casey:
Oh, wait.
Casey:
Time out.
Casey:
Breaking news.
Casey:
Breaking news from all in the chat room.
Casey:
Model S slash X steering wheel retrofit.
Casey:
$700 available March 2023.
Casey:
Travel in luxury.
Casey:
Enjoy the warmth of a heated wheel and the touch of a premium vegan leather in a traditional form factor.
Casey:
No stalks or shifters.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
This retrofit is only compatible with Model S and Model X vehicles configured with a yoke steering wheel.
Casey:
Purchase price includes installation through Tesla service.
John:
Imagine if they just put those on the car when they sold them.
John:
Imagine that.
Casey:
Wouldn't that be novel?
John:
Flat bottom.
John:
Oh, it is a very slightly flat bottom.
John:
You're right.
John:
You cannot have a round steering wheel anymore, and I hate it so much.
Casey:
Oh, quit your whining.
Casey:
Flat bottom's not that big a deal.
Marco:
That's huge.
Marco:
So you'll be able to order the full steering wheel again.
John:
Well, it says March 2023, so probably in 2025 you'll be able to get it.
Marco:
Yeah, never trust a date from Tesla.
Marco:
That's incredible.
Marco:
You can give them your money now, probably, though.
Casey:
No, I bet you can.
Casey:
Well, no, it says email me when the item's available to order.
Marco:
What's comforting about this is that
Marco:
The fact that they have to offer this option shows that just no one liked it.
Marco:
And enough people didn't like it that they actually were forced to offer this.
John:
Tesla's having demand problems, as they say.
John:
They're not selling as many cars as they wanted.
John:
And I'm sure in the discussion of how can we sell more cars, one of the items that had to come up is I do hear a lot of people saying they don't like the Yoke steering wheel.
John:
imagine that and and we already did design a steering wheel for this because i remember the the pictures of it you know before the yoke came out there were there were official images from tesla that showed around steering wheel that's why everyone thought it would be an option but then you know elon decided no it's yoke for everybody well i thought it wasn't weren't there some regions where the yoke was totally illegal and so they had to sell it like this maybe i mean but just because it's illegal doesn't mean i guess it's true yeah what do laws matter
Marco:
Honestly, I'm actually not tempted at all by the new Teslas, in part because of Elon Musk being a jerk, but also in part because now that I've had a car for the last few months that is designed to be used instead of a car that's designed to look good, I'm actually kind of spoiled by a lot of the utility of it.
Marco:
You're spoiled by buttons.
Marco:
And, like, there's buttons, there's handles, there's compartments everywhere.
Marco:
The cup holders have little rubber inserts so stuff doesn't slide around.
Marco:
Like, there's just... Oh, my God.
Marco:
Like, it's just so designed to be used by humans.
Marco:
And, I mean, you know, of course, as an off-roader, you know, the Defender's also, like, very, very well designed for that.
Marco:
But just, like...
Marco:
there's just stuff everywhere that helps me use it as a vehicle and and this is why like i'm actually not super tempted by the rivians right now because rivians are also designed kind of with the tesla mindset of like let's make the most minimal interior possible i don't think they're in the same mindset they're they're more electronic than you might think but i think they do have a different vibe than tesla you should go sit in one
Marco:
I think the overall features of the car do, but the actual dashboard and controls are very, very Tesla-like.
John:
No, they've got stocks and stuff.
Marco:
Not many.
John:
Just try it out.
John:
Go to a dealership and look at one in Citadel and you'll see it's not as far from around.
John:
There are no dealerships.
Casey:
There's a dealership in Richmond, for God's sakes.
Casey:
If Richmond has one, then almost every other city should.
Casey:
Anyway, all right, let's go back to this Mercedes stuff.
Casey:
Sorry for interrupting, but I think this is hilarious.
Casey:
And yeah, imagine people want an actual frigging steering wheel.
Casey:
But no, Elon's a genius.
Casey:
Elon knows best.
Casey:
Anyway, Mercedes EQS SUV brake pedals.
Casey:
Tell me about this, John.
John:
Yeah, so this is related to when we were talking about how any control in a car or any other thing that is manipulated through a touchscreen or other electronic means, it's difficult to also have a physical control for it because then the physical control can get out of sync with the electronic control and you have to figure out how to deal with that.
John:
and we started talking about how you know like the faders on a audio board sometimes the faders are hardware things that slide up and down but they will move on their own so if you change a level through a software interface to make sure that the hardware always matches the software the hardware will literally move and there was it was also some car that did that where if you turn the volume up on the steering wheel control the volume dial would turn or whatever and we talked about
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So Mercedes had an interesting solution here on their EQS SUV where they've got, like many cars, they have a regenerative braking function, which basically means to slow the car down rather than squeezing discs inside the wheel wells to make heat and friction and slow the car down.
John:
Instead, they use electricity and magnetism to essentially charge the battery.
John:
Use the momentum of the car to charge the battery by regenerating energy.
John:
And, you know, and as you charge the battery, that will slow the car down because the energy to charge the battery has to come from somewhere.
John:
It's coming from your kinetic energy of the car moving, right?
John:
That's called regenerative braking.
John:
Cars have ways to adjust that.
John:
How much regenerative braking do you want?
John:
And you would think, well, I don't want all the regenerative braking.
John:
But what they mean is how much regenerative braking do you want when you lift up on the gas pedal, right?
John:
So in a regular car, I don't know a regular car, an internal combustion car, if you lift up on the gas pedal,
John:
The only thing slowing you down is wind resistance, rolling resistance, friction, right?
John:
The car doesn't start... It doesn't, you know, slow down due to the brakes, right?
John:
With regenerative braking on its maximum setting on Teslas and other cars, as you lift up on the brake pedal, it starts regenerative braking.
John:
So it doesn't just, like...
John:
give less power to the wheels, it actually starts robbing the kinetic energy of the car and using it to charge the battery.
John:
So your car slows down.
John:
I think maybe the thing people might be familiar with like this is maybe the golf carts work this way, I think.
John:
I don't golf, so I don't know.
John:
But I think there are some other electric vehicles you might be familiar with, maybe bumper cars, where they work the same way, that as you lift up on the go pedal, it becomes the slow pedal, right?
John:
Regenerative braking off means it works like an internal combustion car.
John:
You lifting up on the gas pedal does not slow the car in any way.
John:
The only thing slowing the car are friction and wind, right?
John:
And so if you're used to an internal combustion engine, you might want regenerative braking totally off.
John:
But if you're used to what they call one-pedal driving, you can just drive mostly entirely with the gas pedal.
John:
Because as you lift up on the gas pedal, it essentially applies the brakes, the regenerative brakes, in proportion to how much you're lifting up the gas pedal.
John:
now mercedes has the same settings do you want super duper regenerative braking for one pedal driving where you basically never need to touch the the brake pedal unless you're doing emergency braking or something or do you want it to behave like internal combustion engine but what mercedes has decided to do is reflect the braking state in the brake pedal so in normal regenerative braking as you lift up on the gas pedal and applies the regenerative brakes
John:
the brake pedal doesn't do anything.
John:
Now your car is braking, but the brake pedal is in its fully up position.
John:
So Mercedes says, well, if we're applying the brakes at all, we should move the brake pedal down to reflect the amount of braking that we're applying.
John:
So that if you were to take your foot off of the gas pedal and put it onto the brake, it will reflect the fact that, hey, you know what?
John:
The brakes are actually applied like 50% already because of how you let up on the gas pedal.
John:
So the brake pedal will be 50% depressed when you put your foot over there.
John:
Now, I've never driven one of these cars, so I can't say, but this, you know, MKBHD did a review of it and he found it extremely disconcerting to take his foot off of the gas, the accelerator, and reach for the brake pedal with that same foot and not quite know where that brake pedal might be.
John:
Because how low will it be?
John:
Like there's even like this intelligent braking thing where it will apply regenerative brakes based on like how far the car is in front of you or how fast you're going and what the conditions are.
John:
And in turn reflect that in the brake pedal, which may be in any position between completely up and maybe not completely down, but halfway down.
John:
And I think this attempt to make the physical control reflect what the car is doing
John:
I understand the motivation, but I think braking the muscle memory of always being able to find the brake pedal, especially in an emergency situation where you take your foot off the gas accelerator real quick and go for the brake pedal, I want that brake pedal to be in the same expected spot every single time.
John:
I don't mind that the first two inches of travel doesn't do anything because that much braking was already being applied, because in that situation, you're probably slamming on the brakes anyway, so...
John:
I think this is a pretty bad idea.
John:
I give them points for trying to do it, and it's relevant to our past discussion, but I think the muscle memory of being able to always find the brake pedal is so much more important than correctly reflecting what the car is doing.
Marco:
Yeah, before I address that real-time follow-up, new Model S's and X's give you the option to order the steering wheel or the yoke, no cost difference.
Marco:
So before everybody writes in.
Marco:
But yeah, I think...
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Do you ever have one of the old cars that had early versions of cruise control where it would do this with the gas pedal?
Marco:
Because I had that before.
John:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
I've driven a U-Haul moving van that did that.
John:
Because when you'd hit the governor, it had like a governor at like 55 miles an hour.
John:
And when you hit 55, the gas pedal would push back on your foot.
John:
That's something that Mark has said on the video about this too.
John:
The brake pedal will sometimes push back on you in this automated weird mode too.
Marco:
do not like yeah like it made a little bit of sense or rather it wasn't too disruptive on the gas pedal on those old cruise control vehicles because that that was kind of fixed in place it wasn't a dynamically responding thing and i feel like the gas pedal it's okay to not quite be where you expect it to be because you know you just lift your foot off or whatever you know it's less damaging whereas like the brake pedal i feel like
Marco:
There should never be any moment, even a split second of, oh my God, where's the pedal on the brake pedal?
Marco:
Like it should always be where you expect it to be.
Marco:
It should always feel how you expect it to feel.
Marco:
There should never be any variation or any doubt in your mind that the brake pedal is where it's supposed to be and about to do what you need it to do.
Marco:
Anything that kind of plays with it and makes it dynamic is just ultimately a bad idea.
Casey:
This is one of those things that when I read about it or listen to someone talk about it, I think to myself, okay, yeah, that makes sense.
Casey:
I can get behind that.
Casey:
But I suspect that once I got behind the wheel and experienced it, that I would quickly sour on it and sour on it real, real hard.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
I'd be curious to try this for sure.
Casey:
Again, sitting here now, like, yeah, that makes sense.
Casey:
Why not reflect the state of the world?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But golly, I have a feeling that not knowing exactly where the brake pedal is, which is the thing I need urgently, like you both were saying, that I need urgently.
Casey:
I need it immediately.
Casey:
And I cannot be surprised about where it is.
Casey:
I don't know if that's really going to work.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And I think when you're going for the brake pedal, what you want is to get in contact with that control ASAP.
John:
Because until your foot is touching it, you can't do anything braking-wise.
John:
You have to get in contact with it.
John:
So that argues for both it always being in the same place and also for it being at the top of its travel before you activate it because that's the closest to you.
John:
And you always just want that sort of, oh, I'm going to go to the brakes.
John:
You want to get in that contact as fast as possible.
John:
If it is in some position other than all the way up,
John:
a it's going to be farther away and b you're you've got to like start hunting for it and depending on how you move your foot you could miss it entirely like if it was depressed three quarters of the way and your heel was like you're the type of person who goes to the brake without like moving your heel that much because your car is set up that way and you just press your foot down with your heel hinging in a certain spot and your toe goes all the way to the floor because you like missed it entirely
John:
That's potentially not a great situation.
John:
Now this, this discussion brought up, uh, I think it was, uh, Quinn Nelson said somewhere, uh, that he was, he's like, I hate the people who buy electric cars and, and don't put regenerative braking on a max.
John:
Tesla's one pedal driving is the only way you should do it.
John:
You should always have, you should always be one pedal driving.
John:
The old way is for internal combustion.
John:
The only reason we're used to it is because that's how cars used to work.
John:
Everyone should one pedal drive.
John:
Regen should be on max.
John:
Uh,
John:
And he said, also, you're just wasting energy if you don't do that, because if you're not one pedal driving, you're being less efficient.
John:
And I was going to reply to him, but I'm like, first I said, is there something I don't understand about?
John:
Because it doesn't make any sense to me.
John:
I'm like, how would it be any less efficient?
John:
The way I thought it worked, and apparently I was wrong about this in Teslas anyway, is like, whether you are applying braking power by lifting up on the gas pedal or applying braking pedal by pressing on the gas, the brake thing,
TODAY.
John:
you're applying braking, right?
John:
It shouldn't make a difference.
John:
It's not as if in a non-regen mode, applying the braking doesn't do regen.
John:
That would be ridiculous.
John:
So I was like, maybe he means that when people drive the old way, they're more likely to dip into the friction brakes.
John:
And what I mean by that is most electric cars, when you press the brake pedal, it will do regen, but regen can't stop the car as quickly as friction brakes.
John:
When we say friction brakes, we mean the little things squeezing the discs or pressing against the drums in your wheel wells.
John:
So they have to blend regenerative braking with the actual old fashioned hydraulic brake fluid powered brakes.
John:
Right.
John:
And I was thinking maybe he means when people don't do one pedal driving, they tend to push the brake pedal and they get past the regen part where they push the brake pedal far enough where the car says, OK, I've given you all the regen you want and you still want more braking.
John:
Now I have to start pinching.
John:
the friction brakes and anytime you use the friction brakes you are burning energy because that's not that's just going off as heat you're losing that it's not going back into your battery at all right so maybe he was saying like you should use one pedal driving because with one pedal driving you will never engage the friction brakes because that's a different pedal over there and the people who don't do that dip into the friction brakes too much but what it turns out that apparently he was talking about is that in teslas now you can correct me if i'm wrong but this is my understanding from reading the thread in teslas
John:
the brake pedals only do the friction brakes.
Marco:
That can't possibly be true.
Marco:
Can it?
Marco:
I always got the impression driving it that when you push the brake pedal, you are controlling the friction brakes period.
Marco:
And that the car would decide when to regen.
Marco:
If you like, if you're like decelerating, but you don't actually push the brake yet, you know, that's when I think it's actually using the regen, but you know, you can turn it down in the settings.
Marco:
Now,
Marco:
I prefer it all the way up.
Marco:
The thing is, in the context of when Teslas came out, when they were designing these cars, when they were making all these options, they put in options.
Marco:
There's the creep mode where with an automatic transmission, when you take your foot off the brake from a stop, the car starts slowly creeping forward.
Marco:
Electric cars have no reason to do that.
Marco:
So electric cars, when you take your foot off the brake by default, nothing happens.
Marco:
Like, you know, I mean, you might start falling down a hill or something, but, you know, if your hill hold's not on.
Marco:
But, you know, electric cars, there is no automatic creeping forward when you stop braking.
Marco:
But Tesla, when they, you know, when they first released the Model S and trying to get people to drive electric cars...
Marco:
they added this option called you know creep mode or something which sounds hilarious and fits elon well um but you know and and they added this mode to basically emulate how automatic transmissions drive so that people would be less uh disoriented when they first tried an electric car and i think having the regen option be adjustable is that same kind of thing of like okay we're still kind of
Marco:
Bringing people along from the gas world to the electric world, and we need affordances for people to be comfortable with transition.
Marco:
And so turning down regen as an option is one of those affordances.
John:
but that's not that's not the affordance we're talking about here though the affordance is people don't understand one pedal driving so we have to make it that when you lift off the gas the car doesn't start decelerating due to any kind of braking right that's the affordance to make people comfortable with it but the thing we're talking about is here is okay but what happens what decelerates the car and in a tesla it's like well if you do read if you turn regen on max you
John:
And you lift up on the gas pedal, we will use regen to slow the car.
John:
And if you press the brake pedal, we use friction brakes to slow the car.
John:
And what they could have done and what every other car manufacturer has done and what I assume Tesla was doing, but apparently they're not, is how about for the affordance mode?
John:
You make the gas pedal to work just like it does in a regular car where you lift up and the car just coasts, right?
John:
You know, it slows down due to friction and air, but no braking is being applied.
John:
And then you make the brake pedal do a combination of regenerative and friction braking according to whatever weird ass algorithm you have to do.
John:
Like the beginning of the brake pedal is all regen.
John:
And then as you keep pressing it and it needs more and more braking power, it starts to add the friction brakes.
John:
That would be perfectly understandable to internal combustion engine driver.
John:
They don't have to know what portion of the braking that is being put in response to their brake pedal action is regen and what portion is friction.
John:
And any decent car will blend those two together so you don't notice.
John:
The first round of electric cars from new manufacturers is like, oh, I can feel when it goes from regen to friction.
John:
But the more modern ones make that mostly transparent, probably because they're brake by wire at this point.
John:
Anyway,
John:
And so that's how I just assumed they all worked.
John:
But a car that only applies to friction brakes with the brake pedal is forcing you to do one pedal driving if you care at all about your battery life or your range, as they call it in cars rather than laptops.
John:
Because you want to do regen.
John:
You want every ounce of that electricity that you use to make this multi-thousand pound car start rolling down the road.
John:
As you brake, you want that energy back as much as you can possibly get.
John:
friction brakes throw that energy away as heat right regen braking gives you some of it back so it is insane to me that when you press the gas pedal on a tesla it does not do regen braking it should and presumably it will eventually you said gas pedal and i think you mean brake pedal i i keep saying gas pedal just just substitute accelerator every time i say
Casey:
Well, no, no, no.
Casey:
In this case, I think you mean it doesn't.
Casey:
So in this Mastodon thread, which is, I think, what John was referring to, Quinn had some interesting thoughts.
Casey:
But then Technology Connections entered the chat.
Casey:
And that's our YouTuber that we all really enjoy that does really genuinely fascinating and excellent YouTube videos about all manner of interesting engineering stuff.
Casey:
So Technology Connections, whose name I honestly don't know, wrote... Alec.
Casey:
Alec, okay, thank you.
Casey:
Alec writes, I think you need to remember that this only makes sense in the context of Teslas, which don't do blended braking.
Casey:
Most other EVs will still regenerate more when you use the brake pedal, no matter what the liftoff regen is set to.
Casey:
Tesla's not doing that is, to me, bonkers.
Casey:
Also, when the conditions are appropriate to coast, that is more efficient because you avoid the losses from charging and discharging.
Casey:
Alec continues, like it truly boggles my mind that Tesla decided, no, the brake pedal only does the friction brakes and you need to get used to what regen is like.
Casey:
And people actually defend this position.
Casey:
Hybrids have had blended braking since always, allowing people to coast when they want, regen when they need to slow down, and thus maximize efficiency without even thinking about it.
John:
I'm assuming he's right because he usually knows what he's talking about.
Casey:
Exactly.
John:
He was my only source for this reality, and I just still find it hard to believe because it seems so bad, so inefficient.
John:
And now here, let me make my pitch for why one-pedal driving is bad.
John:
I know people love it, and it's fun, and it's more relaxing to not have to go between gas and brake.
John:
These are the same people who think you shouldn't have a third pedal because how annoying is that?
John:
You've got to compress it.
John:
Obviously.
John:
So I get the appeal of one-pedal driving, right?
John:
I think it is worse.
John:
Again, moving on a little safety, I think it's worse and also slightly less safe because here's the deal.
John:
Regen braking.
John:
Like, well, forget about regen braking.
John:
The gas pedal that could actually apply all of the braking that your car is able to apply is
John:
would be too annoying for anybody to use.
John:
What I'm basically saying is you're pressing the gas pedal.
John:
When you lift up on the gas pedal, it's as if you were standing on the brakes.
John:
You can't drive that car.
John:
That's too much, right?
John:
That's not how any car works.
John:
No one wants it to work that way.
John:
Imagine you sneeze and your foot lifts off the gas pedal for a second and it's as if you are applying maximum braking.
John:
You'd be causing accidents left and right.
John:
So what actually happens in these one-pedal driving, when it's set to one-pedal driving, is when you lift up on the gas pedal, it applies regen braking to a point.
John:
Even if it applies 100% of its possible regen braking, it doesn't apply the maximum braking that the car is capable of applying.
John:
Again, if there's some fantasy scenario where a car was able to do its full braking fully through regen, it doesn't matter for the purpose of the story.
John:
But I think right now, cars that do regen braking, it's not the full braking of the car, right?
John:
So inevitably, there will be situations where you need more braking than you can get by lifting up on the gas pedal.
John:
You've lifted all the way up on the gas pedal.
John:
You're not even pressing the gas pedal anymore.
John:
You still need more braking.
John:
At that point, you need to A, realize this has happened, and B, switch over to the brake pedal.
John:
I don't like the idea that I'm doing one pedal driving and I'm, you know, I'm in traffic and I'm coming up on a car and I feel like I'm going to be able to come to a stop behind that car by lifting up on the gas pedal and it will be fine.
John:
I lift up on the gas pedal and I just realized when I hit the end of the travel that that's actually not enough braking.
John:
At that point, at the last second, I need to go to the brake pedal and apply a little bit more braking.
John:
I'd feel much better about knowing I'm going to need to come to a stop here.
John:
Let me stop being in the accelerator mode and put my foot over on the brake pedal and modulate the brake pedal to come to a nice stop where I intend or slow to the degree that I intend.
John:
I don't like the idea that...
John:
The whole idea of like one pedal driving, you can't drive with one pedal because sometimes you always need more braking.
John:
And in fact, the times when you might need more braking are the most biggest emergency situations.
John:
And if you get in the mindset that I just drive with my right foot on the one pedal, it's one pedal driving.
John:
You have to snap out of that at the right moment to go over to the brake pedal.
John:
It seems to me it'd be a more dangerous and more complicated situation than the much simpler one of when I'm in go mode, I use the go pedal.
John:
And when I'm in no go mode, I use the no go pedal.
John:
It's very clear what mode you're in.
John:
And especially in situations where you're like, I've been decelerating for hundreds of feet.
John:
The whole time my foot has been on the brake pedal, pressing it to varying degrees.
John:
I'm already in no go mode.
John:
I'm in the slowing down mode.
John:
And if something unexpected happens during the slowing down thing, your foot's already in the right spot, right?
Marco:
Like having driven an electric car with the behavior you think is the worst for many, many years now.
John:
It's not the worst.
John:
I just think it's slightly less safe.
Marco:
Well, I can tell you that.
Marco:
And so obviously, like I had a bit of context in the sense that the car I had before the Model S.
Marco:
was the m5 and the m5 i i i had little you know little flappy paddle shifters and i would being a stick driver before i would downshift a lot to slow down like that was my main method slowing down was downshifting and so and it had that giant engine and so it had a lot of engine suction also whenever you decelerate and so it was actually it felt not that different going from that with all that engine suction and all the downshifting to the tesla with its aggressive regen it actually felt very similar and so
John:
Were you using your engine as your main braking thing so you could do one pedal driving in the M5?
John:
Because I know we talked about this in the past, but I would suggest that in most cars, maybe not in the M5, but in most cars, brake pads are cheaper than clutches.
Marco:
Not when you're leasing.
Marco:
that's a good point no i i don't i am i am a i am an engine braking uh apologist even though i know that i do engine braking too but i like i would never use it as a way to do one pedal driving so i don't have to use the brakes well regardless so i'm saying like when i came to the tesla like it just it felt natural to have aggressive regen and i just got it got used to it very very quickly and i never the getting used to it is the dangerous part though because you get into the mode where like i just need this one pedal to drive the car that's it
Marco:
No, but I think your concern that you would rely 100% on the gas pedal is, I think, unfounded.
Marco:
There was never a time when I felt like I was using the gas pedal exclusively.
Marco:
Because the engine braking, or rather the regen provided by the gas pedal by letting off of it...
John:
would usually not be enough to bring the car to a complete stop in most circumstances sometimes you could i'm not even talking about the last the last two seconds of the complete stop i'm like and you're right that like i said i didn't want to characterize what the regen is like what percentage of the full power of braking is available to regen but my assumption is that the percentage of braking power that a car possesses that will be possible by regen will just increase with time because for efficiency purposes because you want actually the most you want regen to be extremely powerful you want that energy back
John:
So the fact that you can't come to a complete stop or that it's only 20% of the full braking power of the car, that may be an accident of history today.
John:
I feel like in a golf cart, for example, you can come to a complete stop because they go five miles an hour or whatever.
Marco:
Well, the other trick, though, that might keep this from ever becoming too much stronger than it is today is that you can't always take the regen power.
Marco:
So if the batteries are too full, for instance, like if you're about to go on a really long trip and you charge to 100%, you don't have regen for the first few miles of the trip.
John:
You just put that power right back on the grid and the other cars get it.
John:
Your odometer goes backwards when you do that.
Yeah.
John:
And there's also like different thermal conditions that the battery might be in where I mean, that's there's lots of physics based reasons why regen is not 100 percent of the power of the car.
John:
I just said like the trend is going to be the more regen power possible.
John:
And this this whole thing of the variability of like sometimes you can't take it and so on argues even more for there should be a go pedal and a stop pedal.
John:
And what the hell that stop pedal is doing depends on all sorts of variables that you don't care about.
John:
How much power can I regen?
John:
How much power am I able to regen?
John:
How charge is my battery?
John:
What temperature is it?
John:
But you don't care because it's entirely seamless.
John:
The stop pedal does some combination of crap to slow your car down in a way that responds linearly to your pressing.
John:
It's like there's a braking curve and the brake pedal implements that.
John:
And there's a going curve and the go pedal implements that.
John:
And it's...
John:
simple and they have their jobs and the car manufacturers are free to vary all that within whereas with quote unquote one pedal driving i feel like you're building bad habits and it's just going to change too much from car to car based on all the regen stuff unless you're going to start adding friction brakes as you lift up the gas pedal which i suppose they could but like i said i don't think that's viable because i don't think you want 100 braking when you lift off the gas
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I have not spent a lot of time in Teslas, but I've spent a fair bit, especially as someone who's never owned one.
Casey:
And I think there's aspects of what both of you are saying that are true.
Casey:
In my experience, I don't personally see why one pedal driving is so amazing as so many EV drivers seem to think, but maybe that's my own ignorance talking.
Casey:
But I pretty reasonably quickly acclimated to regenerative braking and kind of got used to basically one pedal driving.
Casey:
And I don't think it's too different than like going between a car, a three pedal car where the clutch catches really low.
Casey:
And then immediately after driving that, jumping into a three pedal car where the clutch catches really high and
Casey:
And so you just have to reacclimate yourself.
Casey:
And within the span of a few driving miles, usually you've got yourself reacclimated and it's fine.
Casey:
And I feel like my experience with one pedal driving was basically like that.
Casey:
Now, I understand your argument, John, that maybe you could make an argument that it's not as safe.
Casey:
But ultimately...
Casey:
For anyone that's been driving for any amount of time, unless you've learned to drive on a one-pedal car, which that time is happening and will happen, unless you're learning to drive on a car like that, your natural reaction from the past 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 years of driving is to reach for that break when there's an emergency.
Casey:
You're not even going to think about it.
Casey:
And so I don't think that we're, like, reprogramming our brains for emergency evasion.
Casey:
Now, we are maybe reprogramming our brains for traffic—
John:
It's not so much the programming is that your foot would already be on the brake.
John:
So you don't pay the travel cost, right?
John:
Because in non-one pedal driving, you'd already be riding the brake to some degree at the point when the emergency occurs.
John:
Whereas with one pedal driving, you're not even on the brake yet because you're doing the one pedal driving thing and the emergency occurs, you have to pay the cost to switch.
John:
There's always going to be situations where you'd be surprised and you have to hit the brake, right?
John:
But there's so many situations where normally you would be on the brake.
John:
I think this whole thing of like getting used to it and not being a big deal,
John:
relies on the current strength of regen braking, which is, again, some small portion of the total braking power of the car.
John:
If regen gets more powerful and more of the full braking power of the car is done by regen, and that, you know, accumulates to the one pedal, it will be... Because I think in this situation, you're saying like, you're one pedal driving, but really...
John:
you're one pedal drive for a little bit, but you always have to eventually go on to the brake.
John:
So it's really just like a slight delay in what would have normally been a switch to the brake.
John:
But if the regen becomes more powerful, more and more situations, you never need to leave the gas.
John:
And that's where I feel like you're building the habit that you feel like I can drive this entire car with the gas, which is not true, although you're building that habit.
John:
Like imagine if you didn't need to use the brake pedal except in emergencies, which is not true in any regen braking car now.
John:
But if that was true and people learned on that,
John:
they wouldn't have the habit to go over to the brake in an emergency and it would be much less safe, right?
John:
And then, you know, with the current cars where you're leaving and going over to the brake a little bit later than you would, you're probably fine.
John:
It's probably not that big of a deal, but it just, I feel like, you know, the benefit is there.
John:
I see it, which is the same benefit as not having a third pedal.
John:
I don't want to keep moving my foot back and forth.
John:
It's annoying.
John:
You know, stop and go traffic.
John:
It's annoying to do that.
John:
It's more comfortable in stop and go traffic to not have to move my foot back and forth, right?
John:
That's the argument.
John:
That's why people find it appealing.
John:
I just feel like,
John:
You know, a brake pedal and gas pedal is not too much to ask until we get self-driving.