I Shouldn’t Need to Wiggle
Casey:
All right, let's start with some follow-up and let's talk about some very interesting tweets that some super nerd posted.
Casey:
John Siracusa posted these tweets.
John:
I can't tell if you're doing like a Roderick on the line riff or are you trying to get back to Gruber with that?
Casey:
No, none of the above, actually.
John:
An indirect hit.
Casey:
No, actually, I was not trying to get back.
Casey:
In fact, if anything, I need to go on Gruber's show not to yell at him and remind him what my name is, but actually to yell at him and you, come to think of it, for your absolute, all three of you, the two of you and Gruber, now I'm all fired up, for your absolute slander of sweet tarts.
Casey:
Sweet tarts are delicious.
Casey:
Yes, they're just, you know, compacted sugar, but they're delicious.
Casey:
And all of you, oh, sweet tarts aren't very good, really.
John:
There's a big dividing line here between people who can tolerate just like, just give me sugar squished into shapes and people who understand that all forms of chocolate are superior to that.
Marco:
I don't know if I'd say that.
John:
I mean, I was thinking about it.
John:
I'm like, well, do you mean like even like the plain Hershey bars that taste like wax?
John:
And when I think about it, I'm like, no.
John:
yeah probably like when i was a kid when you know you go through the halloween candy and it's you start dwindling you can always kind of notice like towards the end of the halloween candy let's look what's left you know that that really shows you what you actually care about and i think what would be left would be sweet tarts and the stupid disgusting waxy hershey bar would be gone not that i enjoy the hershey bar but when you're down to that desperation you're like oh what's left and you're looking you see sweet tarts and to see that terrible chocolate bar you're like i guess i like the chocolate bar
Casey:
You absolute monsters.
Casey:
I cannot believe it.
Casey:
Sweet tarts are wonderful.
John:
I feel like this perfectly fits with your, let's say, I was going to say unrefined.
John:
I'm trying to think of more charitable words than unrefined.
John:
But I was going to say, your unrefined palate.
John:
How about you just give me sugar and paint it a color?
John:
I'll eat it.
Casey:
There's flavors.
Casey:
Now, are you sure you're not thinking of Smarties?
Casey:
Because Smarties are legitimately no... I know what you're... I understand.
John:
I mean, you're right.
John:
There's a hierarchy, but it's still, as we discussed in Slack today, it's a hierarchy starting from the bottom with pixie sticks, which is like, let's not disguise this at all.
John:
And then working your way up to Fun Dip, and then you've got Smarties, and then you've got Sweet Tarts, and, you know, all that.
Casey:
Now, did you enjoy the, like, white stick in Fun Dip, or were you a, like, oh, that's just a delivery system and nothing else sort of person?
John:
I mean, when I was eating Fun Dip at all, I think we'd all take a bite of the stick towards the end when you decide you're done with the thing.
John:
But like I said in the Slack, Fun Dip was kind of a project at least.
John:
Yeah, well, Fun Dip is great.
Casey:
I love Fun Dip.
Marco:
Yeah, it's an activity and a candy.
Marco:
Exactly.
John:
And as a candy, it's not great.
John:
But like when you can combine the two things, I mean...
Marco:
oh so did you two i guess you two probably missed this um but did you two have candy cigarettes yeah i i never enjoyed them but i was familiar with you get the tail end of candy cigarettes i don't think i was allowed to buy them but they were in the store ice cream man had them that's yikes it is kind of amazing how long they lasted and like now they still make things that look just like them they just like rebranded them as some other like candy sticks or something but it's it's it's definitely candy cigarettes
John:
Did they get rid of the simulated chewing tobacco, that big league chew?
John:
Remember that?
John:
You know, I never got that connection.
John:
Oh, it's good that you never got that connection.
John:
One harm of being a kid and whenever you were a kid, it was avoided by you.
John:
But yeah, that was the connection.
Casey:
I did not realize that either, to be honest with you.
John:
The picture on the cover, it's because we didn't know about chewing tobacco.
John:
If you live somewhere where more adults chew tobacco, I suppose you would maybe be familiar with seeing the cartoonish adult on the cover with a big lump in their cheek.
Marco:
Well, in all fairness, people think Ohio is like that when people hear I'm from Ohio.
Marco:
And much of Ohio was, but it started about one mile away from where I lived.
Casey:
I loved Big League Chew.
Casey:
Was it the one that the gum lasted forever, but the flavor lasted like four chews?
Casey:
Is that the right one?
Casey:
That's all gum.
Casey:
Yeah, isn't that all gum?
Casey:
Fair, fair.
John:
But especially extremely cheap gum that they sell to kids, yes.
Casey:
Oh, and it was like the little strings.
John:
Yeah, there's lots of surface area, so you're going to really deplete the whatever chemical they put on it that tastes good for two seconds, and then all you've got left is just a ball of tasteless gum.
John:
but at least it doesn't give you mouth cancer right kids right because massive amounts of sugar have no bad health effects it's not it's better that massive amounts of sugar is better than chewing tobacco for your mouth that's true it's it's a i mean it's a low bar you might all your teeth may fall out but you won't die of mouth cancer oh god
Casey:
Well, here we go.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So, John, all kidding aside, you put in a bunch of tweets.
Casey:
Where are you putting them in?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
You posted a bunch of tweets.
Casey:
I'm a mess tonight.
Casey:
You posted a bunch of tweets, and they were the graphic representations of kind of the theorizing that you were doing on the show last week about what would a very large M1 look like, or perhaps a series of M1s all kind of squished together.
Casey:
So can you talk us through this, please?
Yeah.
John:
I accepted my own challenge last week when we were talking about those rumors saying like, OK, well, you know, assuming it's on the same process size, here are the rumors.
John:
Here's how many cores of the different kinds of things have.
John:
I was like, just multiply that out.
John:
Just, you know, we know what an M1 looks like.
John:
And again, with the caveat that I put 20 times on Twitter to try to defend against people yelling at me about this.
John:
Yes, we understand that Apple's marketing diagrams of its chips are
John:
bear very little relation to the actual layout of the chip right but it's what we have to go on and ballpark wise the area of an m1 as represented by this thing is a reasonable approximation if you just say well what however big an m1 is this square equals an m1 and you know how much stuff an m1 has in it so you can get kind of a back of the envelope thing of how big this is going to be and i talked about on the show last week
John:
but shortly after the show i said you know what i have the graphic of the m1 from the shirts that we just sold i should do what i said and just multiply that out see what it looks like so first thing i did was i just made a big chip that is like the highest end mac pro when they were saying so you know the m1 has four high performance cores four high efficiency cores and an eight core gpu and the big honking mac pro rumor one
John:
is 32 high performance cores eight high efficiency cores and 128 core gpu so i made that and i called it m1 xl which is not a real name it's just a joke like look it's extra large just to see how much bigger it would be in area again ballpark because it's not as if it's a straight multiplication of the things because there's other ancillary stuff that ties all this together and it's more complexity that we'll get into just to see the size difference so the size difference as you would imagine is massive we'll put a link to the tweet you can take a look at it
John:
it's way way way way bigger right and then shortly after that i said okay yeah but they're not actually going to make a chip that looks like that because you know it's not only is it huge but it is if you look at the little diagram it really you know this if they made a chip that was like this it
John:
would only be using that high-end mac pro and it's not like they're going to make one for the high-end mac pro one for the lower level mac pro one for the macbook pro like they don't want to make custom chips for every single one of these things as evidenced by the fact that you know even though we don't know what they're going to do in the high end we do know that on low end they literally use the same chip in like tons of computers right so if you're expecting them to make a totally different custom chip for each one of its high-end computers that's not going to happen right
John:
And anyway, what the rumor said and what Marco was trying to get me to understand last show, but I wasn't quite getting, was that's not what they're going to do.
John:
They're going to make these chips with these codenames.
John:
It didn't make any sense to me.
John:
And I had some info from folks after the show telling me what the whole chop versus die thing meant.
John:
Apparently, chop is a term of art in the Silicon world where you...
John:
It's not what Marco was surmising as like binning, where you take a thing that has 32 GPU cores and you just disable 16 of them or whatever.
John:
A chop is, and this is my understanding from a small amount of feedback I got, it's when you take a design that you have for a chip and you say, well, we want to make a chip that's like that, but with less stuff.
John:
but we don't want to design a whole new chip.
John:
So is there a way we can essentially take the blueprint for that chip and just chop part of it off and sort of tie up the loose ends, right?
John:
As a cheaper way to get a smaller chip without having to design an entirely new chip.
John:
So the weird names that I couldn't make sense of last show were Jade C Die and Jade C Chop.
John:
Jade C Die was rumored to have eight high-performance cores, two high-efficiency cores, and 32 GPU cores.
John:
And then Jade C chop is exactly like Jade C die, but with half the GPU cores chopped off.
John:
As in they wouldn't, you know, it's not like they make it big and cut it off.
John:
They cut it off in the blueprint.
John:
And then what they print is a thing with 16 GPU cores, right?
John:
And hopefully all of them work, right?
John:
So it's not as if you make the bigger chip and cut off the end of it.
John:
The whole point is you want to make a smaller chip.
John:
You don't have to design an entirely new chip.
John:
You're able to take an existing design and chop part of it off.
John:
That's my understanding.
John:
If I'm still wrong about this, someone in the industry, please let me know.
John:
But either way, with those codenames in hand, now we have what I think is a reasonable graphic representation of what that rumor was saying.
John:
Again, we don't know if these things are true or not, right?
John:
So here we've got the M1.
John:
We'll try to put this in the market.
John:
We'll try to put this as chapter art.
John:
But I do have a link in the show notes to a high res ping version of this.
Marco:
Yeah, it's going to be very small to be chapter art.
Marco:
Also, thanks for making it a tall rectangle.
John:
Well, I don't know.
John:
It's difficult to get all these things in.
John:
But anyway, we will put a link in the show notes to the tweets and also a link to the high-res version if you want to see all the stupid little lines and stuff, right?
John:
Anyway, here is a reiteration of the rumor, right?
John:
And this gets back to what Marco was saying in the last show, that Apple's going to have essentially two designs.
John:
One is the M1.
John:
We know what it is now, right?
John:
It's out there, right?
John:
And the other one is this Jade C dye thing.
John:
And the Jade C dye is...
John:
Like I said, eight high-performance cores, two high-efficiency cores, and 32 GPU cores.
John:
And that is a new chip design.
John:
It doesn't look like an M1.
John:
It looks like an M1 with different numbers of stuff in it, right?
John:
But it's bigger.
John:
It's bigger than an M1.
John:
And that Jade C die is the building block for all of their Pro chips.
John:
That would be the one that's in the high-end MacBook Pro.
John:
And for the low-end MacBook Pro, you get a chopped version of that.
John:
It's exactly Jade C. Dye, but they take the blueprints for that, they chop off half the GPU cores, and you get a little bit smaller chip.
John:
It's actually not that much bigger than an M1.
John:
And that you put in your low-end MacBook Pro, and maybe your low-end iMac Pro or something like that, right?
John:
And then for the Mac Pro rumored chips, Jade 2C die is just two Jade C dies, right?
John:
And in probably a chiplet type arrangement.
John:
I don't think they would actually print these on a single die.
John:
The whole point is they just have this one design and they have to have some kind of, you know,
John:
interconnect fabric for them we talked about this many many shows back like would apple do chiplets like amd does chiplets because they it's cheaper to print a bunch of smaller chips and then put them on a on a fabric type thing in a single package or whatever versus just making one big die um and some of the feedback we got was like well amd has to do that because they can't afford to have the fancy expensive process that apple can have but apple wouldn't do that because it's worse in lots of ways um
John:
And I think that's mostly true for things like the M1 and Jade C die, which will be, in fact, a single die.
John:
But once you start getting up into the higher end ones, I think Apple will end up not wanting to make a new custom single die for this, but rather end up doing something like chiplets or some other way where you take multiple, multiple dies and put them in the same package.
John:
and connect them together.
John:
So, uh, Jade 2C die is two Jade C dies and Jade 4C die is four Jade C dies.
John:
So that's the way Apple can get away with making just two chips, the M1 and whatever they're going to end up calling Jade C die.
John:
And then they just either chop Jade C die or multiply out by twos or fours.
John:
for their high-end computers and that covers their entire range so i'm so tell me again walk me through what each of these is so jade c die is the baseline and you expect that to go into which devices right so jade c die is is the building block and that is the other die that apple has designed they've got all the little traces they're going to print that they can that's the other design they do because that is its own design it's got four high performance cores two high efficiency cores 32 gpu cores and
John:
who knows what other things, and it probably supports more Thunderbolt lanes, you know, supports more memory, like all the things that you'd want out of a high-end design.
John:
That's the thing they designed.
John:
That's the other thing they designed.
John:
From that design, they have to get chips for all of their high-end computers.
John:
So the first one is a step down from that, because that one has 32 GPU cores.
John:
You get the chopped version that has 16, and that would go in the low-end MacBook Pro, right?
John:
Gotcha, okay.
John:
Right, and the high-end MacBook Pro would, you know, I don't know how they're going to divvy it up, but you've got two MacBook Pro-ish chips, as you can see from the sizes, and you'll see in the picture.
John:
Those are both MacBook Pro-ish size chips, depending on how important GPU is to you, right?
John:
And then what do you do for the Mac Pro?
John:
Well, you take multiples of those, either two of them or four of them,
John:
And you put them together in the same package or, you know, with some kind of, you know, using chiplets or something like that.
John:
I suppose they could try to make them on one die.
John:
But if you look at the size of the dies, that seems highly unlikely to me.
John:
But either way, the whole idea is that rather than being like we said in the last show, like the idea that these would be like four actual chips separated by several inches on the motherboard, extremely unlikely.
John:
But they could be chiplets inside the same package for sure.
John:
So Jade 2C die, I imagine, would only be in like the low-end Mac Pro, probably the one that I would buy.
John:
right the quote-unquote low-end macro right um and then the 4c1 would be the top of the line 40 core giant monster thing that nobody would buy right i'd buy it of course yeah i suppose maybe like here's the problem because the gpu is tied up in this maybe i would end up getting the 4c die thing i'm the opposite i'm like can i just have four of the c chops please and because i don't need all those gpu cores
John:
They're tied together, though, right?
John:
Because, again, if you want GPU power rivaling NVIDIA 3090, you have to get the 4C because the next step down is half the GPU cores.
John:
If you don't care about GPU cores like Marco, but you just want 4D CPU cores, you have no choice.
John:
They come together because, again, they're on the same die.
John:
And same thing with these things, like where would the RAM be?
John:
Probably high bandwidth memory stacked all around it.
John:
There's lots of nuances of this, how Apple can save money.
John:
Like one way they're saving money is by not making a custom chip for the Mac Pro, by just making essentially a chip for the MacBook Pro and being able to do chiplets or something similar to stamp that out to the other devices.
John:
uh higher end max but then you also have to you know say what is the maximum amount of ram and how is that tied to the other things um you can use a cheaper process for things like the memory controllers um like not everything has to be printed at five nanometers like the main jdc die would be
John:
You can stack the high bandwidth memory because memory gets less hot than the rest of the chip.
John:
So you can't really stack those, you know, your actual CPU and GPU dies because I'm not sure how you'd get cooling there.
John:
But you can potentially stack RAM to get higher RAM amounts.
John:
Anyway, this is all based on rumors.
John:
We don't know if it's true, but this is a graphical representation of the rumor we just talked about.
John:
And I think it is eminently plausible.
John:
And then we'll put some more links in the show notes about chiplets and multi-chip modules and stacking things with a bunch of nice diagrams of showing how you can sort of use your expensive parts to make a bunch of, you know, CPU GPU dies, stick them in chiplets inside a single package, stack the RAM all around it.
John:
It starts to look a lot like something that is conceivable to be in the next Mac Pro.
Marco:
Once we learned what a chop was, I feel like that was the final piece in the puzzle of reading into these code names.
Marco:
It's right there in the names what these are going to be, and it's pretty obvious how they're going to use these or how they're going to sell them and what products and everything.
Marco:
And to me, really, the only questions are, you know, the last half of which I was talking about it, like, how are these packaged?
Marco:
Are, you know, are the 2C and 4C, are those actually single dies that are just really big and really expensive?
Marco:
Which I think from our previous research into, like, feasible die sizes that exist in the industry, it does seem like...
Marco:
It is possible and reasonable to make the Jade 4C die as one giant die if it's for a high-end, expensive, low-volume product like the top-of-the-line Mac Pro.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The good thing is they're coming from Xeons, which through no fault or thanks to Apple is horrendously expensive because that's how much Intel charges for them.
John:
So as long as Apple undercuts Intel's giant profit margin on these Xeons, they could conceivably...
John:
you know excuse the incredible expense of trying to put this on a single die i'm not sure that they'll do that though but we'll see oh apple will pass the expense along to us don't worry that's what i'm saying like they can they can undercut the price of the current mac pro and still get huge profits right but it may be more like they may not i don't this is a good test how much do they care about the mac pro because it's surely cheaper to do them as chiplets and i don't think it would be
John:
that much worse that apple would care about it but we'll see what they do i mean they are called die jade 2c die and jade 4c die so you can't tell does that mean it's just two jade c dies or does that mean it's a die called jade 2c which is like two jade c's these codenames i still don't like but anyway i drew them as like single blocks again these are not realistic anything i'm just trying to sort of show uh square millimeters i guess relative size and if you squint at them you can kind of see how many components are in them
Marco:
So I'm curious, just as a quick bet that we can revisit later when we're all hilariously wrong, what do you think is the cheapest Mac Pro price that you can get the 4C die in?
John:
The 4C die?
John:
Oh, that's hard.
John:
I've been thinking about whether the base price for the Mac Pro will go down or not.
Marco:
I'm going to say the cheapest 4C die config you can get is $12,000.
Casey:
What's the base price of the Intel Mac Pro 5?
John:
Yeah, I think I'd have to do that to compare.
John:
If you get the 28 core Xeon, what does that cost?
John:
It's a lot.
Marco:
I think it's like a $6,000 upgrade.
Casey:
So this is one of those times where I feel confident, which means I'm definitely wrong.
Casey:
I really think it's...
Casey:
If they chart, well, see, here's the thing.
Casey:
I was going to say it's not going to be expensive.
Casey:
Then I was like, well, Apple loves their margins.
Casey:
Maybe it will be expensive just because it can be, not because it has to be.
Casey:
But we'll never know one way or the other.
Casey:
So, I don't know.
Casey:
I wouldn't be surprised if they put the 2C die...
John:
as like the base configuration and only a little bit more money as the 4c dot i think it'll be less expensive than any of us expect and you can you can yell at me when i'm wrong about this but that's my guess it should be because here's the thing like when you when you go i just went to the configurator when you go and you spec you say i you know it comes with an eight core uh xeon right and it's like okay what if i want to upgrade again this is not how much it costs for the cpu this is how much more it costs because they take away
John:
the default cpu and in its place they give you the better one and apple charges seven thousand additional dollars to swap out to swap out the eight core for the 28 core right now i can guarantee you that nothing no way that apple makes the jade 4c will cost apple anywhere in the neighborhood of seven thousand dollars these chips are relatively speaking like the you know the arm chips the apple's arm chips so much cheaper
John:
for apple than getting something from intel it's not even funny like not not even just like half i mean you ever see like the the like the parts breakdown of like how much does it cost for the stuff on the iphone the screen is usually the most expensive component not the system on the chip right the system on a chip they estimate it like i forget it's like 15 or 30 like it's and that's the iphone chip that was like faster than all of our macs for a long time or my mac anyway
John:
um so how much does the jade 4c actually cost apple to make i'm going to say it's in the hundreds of dollars right which is not nothing compared to like a 15 chip but it's not seven thousand dollars so in theory apple that's why i keep thinking apple could make the mac pro cheaper than it is now by passing along some of the savings to us
John:
I don't think they will pass on many of the savings, but I think they will be able to undercut.
John:
So the 28-core Xeon, if you just take the Mac Pro and the only change you make to the configurator is you click on 28-core Xeon, that's $13,000.
John:
Marco said he doesn't think you'll be able to get a Jade 4C under, what did you say, 12?
Marco:
I said 12.
Marco:
Although now, see, I'm rethinking that.
Marco:
I think that might be too low because the $13,000 base price of the current Mac Pro with its best CPU is still with its worst GPU.
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
Now, if you bump up the GPU to maybe the second highest option, then it becomes $18,000 because these are now bound together.
John:
The thing is, Apple is reaping the savings on the GPU as well because they don't have to buy one from AMD.
John:
It's part of their thing.
Marco:
I'm going to go up to $15,000 for my estimate, just for the record.
John:
I think it's conceivable that you get a Jade 4C for $10,000.
John:
Conceivable.
John:
I think $12,000 is closer to what the reality will be.
Casey:
See, what I keep wrestling with is...
Casey:
I could see Apple deciding, you know what, we're just going to absolutely shame Intel and PCs and say that for a not egregious amount of money, say, I don't know, $7,000 or $8,000 or something like that, look at the performance you can get.
Casey:
And that's because we're so freaking awesome at what we do.
Casey:
And so I could totally see them going that route.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
Apple really likes money, like a lot.
Casey:
And so because of that, I'm convincing myself that's not what they would do because as much as they like to flex, they really like money.
Casey:
And so I think 10-ish is where I'm going to go.
Casey:
You guys are probably right, but I will wager 10-ish is how much it will cost to get a Mac Pro with a 4C die.
John:
I mean, I guess I think 10 is plausible.
John:
I think 12 is more likely.
John:
This is getting back to my base Mac Pro discussion.
John:
I think Apple will try to undercut the Intel Mac Pro on cost.
John:
I think they will say, here's the new Mac Pro, and shocker of shockers, in general, the prices, if you try to compare them to the previous one, have gone down a little bit.
John:
because Apple's costs are going to go way down, especially if they don't have a discrete GPU.
John:
That means they don't have to buy a ridiculously overpriced Xeon from Intel, and they don't have to buy a graphics card from AMD and pay their margins.
John:
So that's huge savings that I think they can't help but pass some of onto us, right?
John:
Especially if they also make the case smaller, you know, if it's a half-size thing or whatever, they have to cut out fewer of those little golf ball holes, like...
John:
It's going to be a cheaper machine.
John:
And I think what will happen in the chat room is talking about this.
John:
Apple's margins will go up on this Mac at the same time that I think the price can go down.
John:
That's how much headroom there is.
John:
That's the magic of ARM, is that the cost to Apple to build these computers is so much lower than it was when they were paying big, especially on the high end, because the higher end you get, the bigger the margins are.
John:
The margins on the 28-core Xeon are way higher than they are on the Intel chip that was in the MacBook Air, right?
John:
And Apple passes them on to us
Marco:
passes those costs on to us and then some yeah and you know and once you factor in like you know when intel is making a chip that that's a very different ballgame and you know when they're making a giant zeon you know that sells to a certain market but like apple can amortize a lot of that r&d stuff across everything they make including the iphone because the iphone cpus are the same high performance low performance cores much of the same stuff in the chip like
Marco:
much of that R&D cost is shared across their entire product line.
Marco:
And so I feel like they could, you know, obviously there's always going to be the inherent high costs of manufacturing large chips because they're always going to have lower yields and cost more money to make just at the silicon level.
Marco:
But like the R&D costs and everything are going to be much lower for Apple, I think, compared to somebody like Intel because they're just able to spread it across the entire smartphone market in addition to their entire PC business.
John:
Yeah, and Apple is building exactly what they need, not whatever stuff Intel wants to put in them for the server market, because Intel is not really building Xeons for Apple.
John:
They're building Xeons for, you know, the enterprise server market or whatever, and Apple has to just take what they have.
John:
Like, well, here you go.
John:
You want a high-end chip with a lot of cores.
John:
This is what we have to offer, and Apple probably looks at it and says, a bunch of that stuff we don't need, a bunch of that stuff we wish was slightly different.
John:
They can make exactly what they want here.
John:
And speaking of spreading the cost around, they've already made the M1.
John:
And so those are the same cores probably in there.
John:
And the big amount of work that went in was like the big hit was the M1.
John:
And they're getting some of that back by using it in the iPad.
John:
So they don't have to even do that work again.
John:
And it's all based on iPhone chips in the end, too.
John:
So there's a lot of cost savings.
John:
In general, Apple's tech stack is...
John:
Doing pretty well in terms of not wasting effort.
John:
We've talked before in the past that how, you know, it's easy to forget that Apple uses essentially a single core operating system from their watches to their giant Mac Pros and everything in between.
John:
And, you know, that's the software version of that.
John:
The hardware version of that is totally true now that they're off of Intel.
John:
They do some very difficult core design work once, and that pays dividends for years and years.
John:
So we'll see how much of that savings get passed on to us, but I really hope it's some, especially at the high end.
Marco:
Yeah, so my concern is because they have...
Marco:
Because according to this rumor, it's most likely that they have combined the number of CPU cores and the number of GPU cores together into two presets or four presets.
Marco:
If you want a high amount of GPU power or a high amount of CPU power, you might have to take both and take the costs of both.
Marco:
So I think we're going to have...
Marco:
fewer options than ever on this new crop of machines that that use the jade series of chips including you know even down to the macbook pro but you know like i think we're gonna have very few options and that's not a great thing for cost management or future upgradability but that's a whole separate thing
Casey:
All right, can we move on from the Mac Pro?
Casey:
I know that's a pipe dream with you, too, but let's try.
Casey:
Let's talk about something else I really don't care about.
Casey:
Hey, how many fans does the iMac have?
John:
This is one of the revelations from the iFixit teardown.
John:
Apparently, the base model iMac, the new, you know, candy-colored iMac, the base model one has only one fan.
Casey:
But the more powerful ones have two.
John:
Yep.
John:
And, you know, they were surmising, like, oh, what does this mean?
John:
Because the only difference is one GPU core, and this is actual binning, right?
John:
But the other thing is the high-end one has more I.O., and maybe those I.O.
John:
chips cause more heat.
John:
Like, I don't think there's a lot of heat going on in there anyway.
John:
You know, they have two fans may even be overkill.
John:
One fan is probably plenty.
John:
These are not noisy machines.
John:
I don't think it's a big deal, but it is interesting to me that Apple made that difference.
John:
Why not just have two fans in both of them?
John:
um they're really trying to make them as quiet as possible and i you know the combination of what maybe whatever extra chips they had to have in there for the extra usbc ports and the one fewer gpu core put it below the threshold in the low end one and so the low end one i mean might be quieter might be noisier if that fan has to go on more
John:
and go up to a higher rpm but it's a strange difference that you know it's kind of you would think for uniformity purposes they you know they would differentiate the machines maybe just not putting the ports in and then in the end they were the same thing under the covers but that's a pretty big difference um and no one has mentioned that who's gotten review units i don't know if everyone got the high-end ones or everyone with the low-end ones mostly because in general you can't hear these things anyway so it's mostly academic but i thought it was interesting
Marco:
I was kind of curious why they didn't try a more passive design with the iMac.
Marco:
Because if you look at how the M1 MacBook Air is physically designed, how it is fanless, it basically uses the air around the chip's heatsink.
Marco:
as kind of like a thermal buffer because for like various like ergonomic safety reasons laptops can't be above a certain external temperature so they they didn't just like bond the heat sink to the exterior casing and transmit all the heat to the casing
Marco:
They kind of like use the air inside as like a thermal cushion slash insulator slash thermal mass, whatever it is.
Marco:
So the heat sink is not directly touching the outside of the case.
Marco:
So it's the performance of the MacBook Air is limited by basically like how much heat they can dissipate with a very small heat sink really in a pretty small enclosed space.
Marco:
The iMac is a much bigger space, and I know they don't have a ton of room in that thickness behind the display, but I'm surprised they didn't attempt a totally fanless iMac as well and basically use part of that massive display area, which is mostly an empty cavity, I think mostly for speaker reverberation or whatever, to have just a giant heatsink with a giant air pocket and have that be totally fanless for a much longer time than the MacBook Air can do it.
John:
I mean, well, the iMac is thin, and also that giant screen does produce its own heat.
John:
So it's not like the only thing in there producing heat is the system on the chips.
John:
Like, it's just so thin.
John:
Is it thinner than the MacBook Air?
John:
It might be.
John:
If you include the feet, probably.
John:
It's tight in there, and that screen has got to be producing a lot of heat.
John:
And I think a lot of the stuff behind the screen might also be for dissipating heat from the monitor, but...
John:
i think if they made the right call like you know especially if it's super duper quiet uh give the desktop some fans you don't want it thermal throttling it should be one of the benefits to having it's plugged in all the time is you don't have to deal with any thermal throttling and you know i think you think about the ipad with the m1 like there's no air gaps in there for that thing to be a thermal buffer is the ipad clocked lower and same thing with the ipad it's not like they're gonna you know heat weld that system on a chip to the case either because you don't want your ipad to be hot in your hands either so that's true you know
John:
I mean, bottom line is the M1 just doesn't produce a lot of heat.
John:
So you have a lot of options and it's generally quiet and kind of cool.
Casey:
So speaking of the MacBook Air, let's talk about the ski feet.
Casey:
Alex Elkins writes, the MacBook Air ski grips could also be so that the grips actually work when the laptop is on your lap.
Casey:
With grips at the corners, they don't really do much when the laptop is sitting on top of your lap.
John:
I mean, I guess it depends how far apart your legs are.
John:
The rumored picture showed the little rubber skis on the bottom sort of at the far edges of the laptop.
John:
So if your knees are together, those rubber strips might be still floating in the air.
John:
But it's a theory.
Casey:
Lord Matthew also writes that the ski feet lines under the new MacBook Air are probably so it's super grippy on the table to help mags say function correctly.
John:
Bigger contact patch for higher Gs.
John:
I mean, again, plausible.
John:
But I mean, like, it could just be a style thing, as people have pointed out.
John:
Like, if you look under the horrendously expensive Pro stand, it also has two rubber strips like that.
John:
um the iMac i think also the new iMacs also have two strips it might just be a style thing i'm i'm trying to think of like a functional reason why you know why having two strips is better than having like a u-shape or you know i don't know on a laptop i think it's going to be weird but we'll see if that rumor is even true
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
So we have some more news with regard to Apple's lossless audio in Apple Music.
Casey:
Does somebody like Marco want to tell me about this?
Casey:
Because I really don't care that much.
Marco:
I didn't see this follow-up.
Marco:
Hold on.
John:
Do you want me to take this voice?
John:
Yeah, go ahead.
John:
Yes, please.
John:
So there was an Apple support article put out explaining some of the nuances of lossless stuff, right?
Yeah.
John:
So a bunch of them is in there, but we'll pull out a few highlights.
John:
One is regarding the Lightning 3.5mm cable for AirPods Max.
John:
In other words, when you connect a wire to your AirPods Max, the support document says, the Lightning 3.5mm audio cable was designed to allow AirPods Max to connect to analog sources for listening to movies and music.
John:
AirPods Max can be connected to devices playing lossless and high-res lossless recordings with exceptional audio quality.
John:
however given the analog to digital conversion in the cable the playback will not be completely lossless so the in the cable part is the thing i think either i didn't know or i've forgotten about is there a DAC in that cable is that what it's doing so it's there so you can listen to analog audio sources but apparently it's taking the analog audio and converting it to digital for i don't i don't understand this marco can you try to explain what the hell's going on
Marco:
Sure.
Marco:
My best guess is that the cable itself does... I'm not sure if inside the cable actually has a DAC, which would be at the lightning end.
Marco:
They do fit.
Marco:
That's how the little lightning to USB or lightning to headphone adapters work.
John:
Exactly.
John:
That's what I was thinking.
Marco:
So you could put a really tiny little crappy DAC in there and it would be fine.
Marco:
But the main reason it has to become digital in the first place...
Marco:
on the way from analog source to your analog ears is most likely because the entire signal path inside the AirPods Max is digital to do things like the noise processing.
Marco:
So that's probably why it has to then resample any analog input as digital and just do a very low latency conversion and processing of that.
Marco:
So that's probably what they're doing.
Marco:
And that is common in the industry to do stuff like that in certain areas.
Marco:
Even most microphone interfaces these days
Marco:
Most of the good ones have digital processing, which is actually one of the reasons why I still prefer my old Sound Devices USB Pre 2, which as far as I can tell is all analog processing stream, compared to the new Sound Devices Mix Pre series, which I think...
Marco:
does digital processing because i sound very slightly different and worse in my own ears on a mix pre than i do on a usb pre 2 and i think what i'm detecting is a little tiny bit of latency with the digital signal path anyway so making that very low latency is hard and i don't know quite how low it could reasonably get and still do any level of processing um but anyway that's probably what they're doing in these headphones for all that um so
Marco:
What they're basically saying is it's not going to be lossless.
Marco:
There will be some loss of quality because on the way from your analog source through the analog cable into the headphones, it's being converted back to digital one more time before it's processed and then converted back to analog for your ears.
John:
Yeah, and basically this is just their technical explanation of what we said in the last show, which is you think you're going to lost a ski-connected cable, and you're not, in this case with the AirPods Max, right?
John:
So that's their explanation, and it's a little bit confusing because they don't go into too much technical detail, but what you said, Marco, sounds plausible.
John:
Uh, they also say in the document that Apple's lightning to 3.5 millimeter adapter, uh, that you use to connect wired headphones only supports up to 24 bit to 48 kilohertz.
John:
Uh, and if you need something higher, you need a dedicated, uh, DAC for that.
John:
Um, and we knew that like we would just last show that it seems like that all of the DACs that are built into the stuff that Apple has, including the tiny cruddy one that's inside this little adapter don't support, uh, 192 kilohertz, right?
John:
So if you want that, you got to use something else.
Marco:
Yeah, and a few other points to add to this.
Marco:
Number one, people tend to think that the quality of the DACs matters a lot between whether it was the built-in headphone port on older devices or whether it's the little stupid little headphone dongle that we were just talking about.
Marco:
And I think when people can detect differences in quality in the new Lightning to 3.5mm adapter versus old jacks, I think they're actually detecting a difference in amp power.
Marco:
because the little tiny little amp that would be in that little adapter is going to probably be weaker than whatever amp was built into the phone before.
Marco:
And where that manifests itself in like noticeable way is you're probably not going to hear like noise differences, but you will probably hear like if that little amp doesn't have enough power to,
Marco:
to like hit a strong bass note or something that that's like a big power spike when you're amplifying something and usually like depending on what kind of headphones you're plugging that into if you're plugging into like larger nicer maybe headphones that are not entirely meant for portable use and maybe meant for like studio use or or high-end listening like with powerful amps you would notice like oh this this sounds kind of muddy at the low end because it's not getting enough power to actually deliver that big thump for the bass note um
Marco:
a couple other things to mention here before we move on um the reason why bluetooth headphones don't support these lossless codecs i didn't realize that the bluetooth data transfer speeds were not as high as i thought they were especially if you want to stick to bluetooth low energy which i would imagine apple probably does whenever possible for battery life reasons um they actually don't have the bandwidth to
Marco:
to transmit a lossless stream above basic CD quality, basically.
Marco:
I think even CD quality would be pushing it.
Marco:
So yeah, Bluetooth does not have a ton of data transfer bandwidth if you're keeping it within a low power envelope.
Marco:
So that's possibly one more reason why AirPods don't support the higher range of things.
Marco:
In addition to them just probably not even having...
Marco:
built-in DACs that go higher than 2448.
Marco:
But at least with lossless in particular, they probably can't stream lossless just for bandwidth reasons alone.
Marco:
And we'll see how Apple works on that in the future.
Marco:
Apple can compress losslessly, but lossless compression, as I mentioned last week,
Marco:
tends to max out at around 50 efficiency and you can't guarantee that it will hit that efficiency like there will be bursts in certain complex passages where it won't hit that efficiency and so you have to accommodate for the full bandwidth of the signal like the full uncompressed bandwidth you have to accommodate for that when you're figuring like whether something has enough bandwidth or not to transfer so there's that to deal with and then finally
Marco:
We actually didn't really spend much time last week talking about the difference between lossless and lossy coding.
Marco:
I spent a lot of time and we debated a lot about high sample rate and high bit depth, so basically higher than CD quality sampling of audio.
Marco:
But we didn't really talk at all about like compressed formats, lossy compressed formats like MP3 and AAC versus lossless formats like FLAC and ALAC and just uncompressed.
Marco:
And I did want to touch on that briefly this week, but I don't have that much to say about it because this has been talked to death for so long for
Marco:
the last like 30 years um we all have heard bad mp3s you know like the 128k mp3s that we all pirated from napster in the late 90s like yeah we we heard bad mp3s like my first mp3 was bullet with butterfly wings it was 128k and it sounded like garbage i couldn't even play it at full fidelity because i still had a 486 based pc at the time and so i had to only play it at half quality because a 486 was not fast enough to play an mp3 in real time at full quality yeah
Marco:
But anyway, that's sad times.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
And it's all right.
Marco:
My 400 megabyte hard drive couldn't hold many of them anyway.
Marco:
I only had like four or five songs before I had to fill it up.
Marco:
Anyway, so the point is MP3 and especially the more modern formats like AAC and especially if you go into like the new stuff like Opus, these compression algorithms are so good.
Marco:
almost no one can hear a difference between lossy and lossless.
Marco:
If you take the exact same input and compress it well at reasonable bit rates, like 256K, almost no one can hear it.
Marco:
The only people who can hear the difference typically are people who are trained specifically in identifying an exact certain type of situation in the audio that that compression codec is not super good at encoding.
Marco:
And you can kind of picture like...
Marco:
The problem with the HBO static logo in video, where you can test how bad a video codec is by playing the HBO static intro from an old HBO show, and you see it just macro blocks up like crazy, and it looks terrible.
Marco:
There are audio equivalents of that, that if you're a super compression nerd, you can do some research and you can train yourself to figure out like, okay, this kind of pattern in the sound, the compression algorithms are not good at reproducing this, especially if it's like, you know, below certain dynamics or whatever.
Marco:
And so people have trained themselves to try to hear those differences.
Marco:
Even those people have trouble doing it reliably when the input is well encoded and encoded at a high enough bit rate.
Marco:
And even then, it's like you would have to be paying such close attention and know exactly what you're listening for, like exactly the flaw you're listening for, to be able to detect that difference.
Marco:
I'm not going to say that nobody can hear the difference.
Marco:
I will say almost nobody can hear the difference, and the people who can can't do it a lot of the time.
Marco:
So the difference between a lossy codec and a lossless codec is yet one more reason why lossless generally is not worth it for almost anybody.
Marco:
As we mentioned last week, the files get way bigger, and it's less practical in a lot of different ways.
Marco:
But the difference...
Marco:
I think the difference is sold to people as a way to have them upgrade to higher-end plans and buy higher-end gear and everything else.
Marco:
In practice, I'm telling you, as a self-professed audiophile, it's not something I can hear.
Marco:
I've tried.
Marco:
I've tried teaching myself how to do it.
Marco:
I can't hear it.
Marco:
Granted, I'm almost 40.
Marco:
Maybe it's just my ears, but I couldn't hear it when I was 20 either.
Marco:
Maybe I'm too much of a plebe to hear that, I guess, but I can't hear the difference.
Marco:
It's
Marco:
In actual blind or ABX-style testing, most people can't hear the difference.
Marco:
Almost nobody can hear the difference.
Marco:
So enjoy your lossy format if you want to save all your disk space because that's what we all do for a good reason.
Marco:
And if you really think you can hear that difference and you can really spare a massive amount of disk space and bandwidth and everything else, fine.
Marco:
Enjoy your lossless file.
Marco:
No one's going to stop you, but most people are not going to need that.
John:
Another thing I'll add to that is, and a bunch of people wanted us to mention this in case people listening don't know, how is this possible?
John:
How is it that a lossy compressed file that it's encoded well, 256 kilobit AEC, well encoded, is indistinguishable in most people's ears from a much, much bigger lossless file, right?
John:
How does that even work?
John:
It's exactly the same way that image compression algorithms work, which people may be more familiar with because we probably all see like JPEGs on the web all the time.
John:
The way these algorithms work is they throw away information that our brains don't consider important.
John:
So for images, our visual system is a mess.
John:
You think it works just like a camera where it just gathers all the RGB values of all the pixels?
John:
No, it's not how our visual system works at all.
John:
Our visual system is massively broken.
John:
See every optical illusion you've ever seen.
John:
But anyway, there are quirks to our visual system that let us throw away huge amounts of information from images and our eyes say, I don't see anything missing.
John:
Looks fine to me.
John:
That's why if you get a JPEG and you crank up the quality of a JPEG to a reasonable level,
John:
it looks almost identical to the original ping image, despite being like 1 18th the size.
John:
But audio is the same way.
John:
There are certain things in audio that our brains don't consider important and don't really detect.
John:
And if you throw out that information, it makes the file smaller.
John:
But then when we listen, the reason we can't hear a difference is because it threw out stuff that we weren't hearing anyway.
John:
It's more complicated than that.
John:
But that's what these things, they call it perceptual algorithms.
John:
They use...
John:
you know, how we perceive sound or vision or whatever to figure out what they should throw away.
John:
Because in the end, if you want to make it smaller, you, and you know, if it's a lossy codec, what lossy means is they're throwing away information.
John:
And if you just threw away half the information, it would be terrible.
John:
But if you throw away the half that we weren't hearing or seeing anyway, you,
John:
Yeah, it's not that bad, right?
John:
And again, we throw with 10% and so on and so forth, right?
John:
Which makes me think like, you know, if you have different perceptions, say you're a different kind of animal like cats and dogs or bats or whatever, an algorithm that is indistinguishable from lossless to us
John:
is not necessarily instinguishable to another being that has a totally different sensory, you know, set.
John:
Like you can imagine, this is a great sci-fi, this is the world's most boring sci-fi short story.
John:
We land on an alien planet and we look at their images on their webpages and they all look like garbage because their version of compression throws away information that their alien eyes don't consider important.
John:
But it throws you all the information that our eyes consider important so we can't read their ad banners on their websites.
John:
Anyway, that's free.
John:
If you can turn that into a tweet link sci-fi story and post it to that.
John:
What is that Twitter account?
John:
It's like mini sci-fi fantasy stories.
John:
They post sci-fi fantasy stories that fit in a single tweet.
John:
This one will be tough because it's kind of high concept with the whole lossy compression algorithms and alien web.
John:
But I think someone can make it work.
John:
Oh, my gosh.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I am happy to report that HomePod and HomePod Mini will support Apple Music lossless.
Casey:
Apple says that they currently use AAC to ensure excellent audio quality.
Casey:
Support for lossless is coming in a future software update.
John:
Yeah, that was nice.
John:
We were asking that question last time.
John:
What is it about the HomePod that would not allow it to do lossless?
John:
Because it's got plenty of bandwidth.
John:
They're all on Wi-Fi.
John:
It's not like we could...
John:
they're all networked together if we could somehow tell i mean the home pod is a little computer itself just you play the music from apple music and then why can't you get the losses and play it and the answer seems to be the software team's responsible for the home pod didn't get that done yet so so they get ac until until they you know because what it does now is it just plays the ac but anyway
John:
It's nice to see that support coming.
John:
It probably doesn't really make a difference if you're listening on the HomePod Mini.
John:
I feel like, to Marco's point last show, your speaker is your problem there, not really the lossiness of the music you're playing, but whatever.
Marco:
Even on the full-blown, big discontinued HomePod, even in a wonderful stereo pair,
Marco:
First of all, it's doing so much processing to that audio that there's no real benefit in feeding it something like super pure, like pure signal uncompressed 24-182 because it's going to do the same thing that the headphones are doing.
Marco:
It's going to sample it as digital and process it in a certain pipeline and everything.
John:
That's another point we should point out, though, before we move on from that, is one of the other pieces of feedback we got, which is not really relevant to our discussion, but now it suddenly is because you're talking about reprocessing audio.
John:
One of the contexts where high bit rate, you know, 24-bit, 192 kHz,
John:
audio files where that is actually useful is in the audio production pipeline, not the finished product, but in the audio production pipeline, because if you're running it through a series of steps and grinding it up, you really want to have a little bit of excess quality because every time you do some processing, you shave off some edges or whatever.
John:
So, um,
John:
um it's not as if we're saying these formats are pointless we were talking about for end consumers like when you download a song this is the final product that you're going to listen to that point it's pointless for you to get 24 182 kilohertz right but for processing maybe not so to your point marco about well the whole pod's going to chop up that audio anyway
John:
I still don't think this is true given the quality of the speakers that are in the HomePod, but theoretically, if you fed it a higher fidelity file and it chopped it up through its machinery, maybe it would come out slightly better if it was a little bit of excess quality that you couldn't hear on the way in.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I'm glad you made the distinction because we did hear from a couple of people who were like, you know, I work in a recording studio and we record it, you know, 24 bit.
Marco:
It's like, well, yes, you should record a 24 bit.
Marco:
I'm recording this podcast right now at 24 bit lossless because I'm going to do stuff.
Marco:
with the files that's very we don't deliver it that way it is funny i actually as a joke i wanted to deliver last week's episode as lossless as an option but the the 24 bit 192 kilohertz stereo lossless file was four gigs and i didn't think it was worth putting that up anywhere for nobody to be able to download it and if anybody did it would cost a fortune
Marco:
but yeah that was a fun joke um anyway yeah so there is like there is definitely reason for these formats to exist it but it's not in like delivering them to consumers after they've already been mastered and mixed and everything at that point yeah there's there's not much point um i will say on on the home pod from we got this i don't think we ever talked about this on the show yet there the home pod the full-size home pod and the new with the new apple tv now supports this e-arc thing was this on our list anywhere
Casey:
No, I don't think it was.
Marco:
So this is kind of amazing.
Marco:
So HDMI ARC is, I think, an audio return channel is what it's called, right?
John:
eARC is not new, is it?
Marco:
Well, I think eARC is like ARC 2.0 or something.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
It doesn't matter.
John:
But it's not new.
John:
It's new to the Apple TV.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So there is a protocol that TVs can use to send whatever audio the TV is playing back down an HDMI cable to a receiver or something, something to play audio.
Marco:
Apparently, the new Apple TV, I think it's the hardware that requires it.
Marco:
I don't think it's just a software change.
Marco:
I think you need the new Apple TV to do it.
Marco:
But if you have the new Apple TV and one or two original big discontinued HomePods,
Marco:
It now supports the thing where the TV can, through eARC, connected to the Apple TV, can play any TV audio, including stuff that is not playing from the Apple TV, like a game console or something.
Marco:
It can play any TV audio through those HomePods as your TV speakers.
Marco:
Now, there's a massive disclaimer here.
Marco:
We don't know how well this works yet.
Marco:
We don't know how much latency it might introduce, which could be bad for things like games.
Marco:
But I do think, A, this is a great feature.
Marco:
B, I think this is the most ridiculous, convoluted way Apple could have possibly added a line into a product.
Marco:
And that's funny.
Marco:
And C...
Marco:
Why is it only on the old HomePods that aren't being sold anymore?
Marco:
Something happened to the HomePod product line.
Marco:
I don't know what happened here.
Marco:
I hope.
Marco:
I assume that the reason the big HomePod was discontinued, while it's seemingly still getting new features...
Marco:
The small one doesn't have.
Marco:
I assume this is possibly COVID-induced supply chain disruption combined with poor sales of that model while they hopefully are preparing some kind of new big HomePod, but it just isn't ready yet.
Marco:
That's what I'm hoping is going on here.
Marco:
Because, I mean, the HomePod Mini is a fine product.
Marco:
I have a bunch around the house now.
Marco:
I like them.
Marco:
But the big HomePod sounds so much better.
Marco:
It's such a nicer experience listening to stuff on the big HomePod.
Marco:
I hope that that line is not done yet, as we said before.
Marco:
And what we're seeing now from how the big one keeps getting new features mysteriously, especially when the small one doesn't have them or gets them much later...
Marco:
I think that supports that theory that Apple's probably not done making new HomePod models yet.
Marco:
They probably just got some kind of disruption or ended the big one early because it was selling so poorly or whatever.
Marco:
But hopefully, hopefully, there will be more large HomePods in the future.
John:
I mean, the simpler explanation is who the heck wants to listen to their TV over their HomePod Mini.
John:
It's probably worse than the speakers that are built into your TV, so don't do that.
Casey:
All right, then final piece of follow-up, I promise.
Casey:
We had an email from David Steer, and maybe the two of you already understood this, but I just could not wrap my mind around what people were saying with regard to this, and this was the first time it really clicked for me.
Casey:
So the question that David was answering was,
Casey:
Why is it that the original AirPods, the non-pro AirPods, support spatial audio but don't support it in the context of video or whatever it's called when it's with video?
Casey:
So you can't do the thing where if you twist your head while watching a show on your iPad, it'll change the soundscape.
Casey:
But you can use spatial audio with Apple Music when that's a thing.
Casey:
And David writes, the reason first-generation AirPods will work with spatial audio is because it won't be proximity-based for music.
Casey:
It kind of makes sense for video where you have a fixed position in relation to the screen.
Casey:
However, with music, the listener is likely to be moving around, so it would be extremely disconcerting to have the sound continue to emanate from a single point in space.
Casey:
So what David's saying is, if you think about it, when you're watching a video, there's a clear origin of the, well, there's a clear theoretical origin of the sound, which is the iPad.
Casey:
But if you're just listening to music, there's no real origin of the sound.
Casey:
And so you don't have to worry about mutating and changing that sound as you move your head, necessarily, because there's no, like, spot that it's supposed to be coming from.
Casey:
And again, maybe the two of you are way ahead of me on this, but it just did not click in my mind until I read David's comments I wanted to share.
John:
Yeah, that's why we were talking about the lack of gyroscope last time to tell orientation versus just accelerometers and all that good stuff.
John:
The only thing I add here is that a lot of people wanted us to tie this in in case this wasn't clear.
John:
The spatial audio stuff obviously ties into the AR VR stuff, right?
John:
So many things that Apple does tie into the AR VR stuff.
John:
In fact, we've talked a lot about this when spatial audio was first introduced and when the AirPods Pro came out with their transparency mode and how that was kind of audio AR.
John:
Yeah, obviously, if and when Apple ever fields an AR VR product, this technology will surely be heavily featured because it is essential for lots of cool stuff to work when you're wearing AR VR glasses and or goggles and or whatever.
Marco:
I'll see you next time.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right, let's talk about Apple TV 4K.
Casey:
All three of us have received at least one of them.
Casey:
And by received, I mean pay for it.
Casey:
We've all got one.
Casey:
We've got new remotes.
Casey:
I don't know where we want to start on this other than this delightful tweet from Matt Craig.
Casey:
And the tweet reads, the box leaves little doubt what the selling point is this time around.
Casey:
And there's a picture of the previous Apple TV 4K and a picture of the box of the new Apple TV 4K.
Casey:
And the difference between the two, other than a little bit of size difference, is that if you look at the previous Apple TV 4K, you see this black box, the Apple TV box.
Casey:
If you look at the Apple TV 4K box, you see the black Apple TV box and the remote is shown right there on the box because we're really excited about it.
Casey:
So I thought that was really delightful and quite funny.
John:
It's one of the couple of things that's a little bit strange and un-Apple-like about the new Apple TV 4K box, like the packaging that it comes in.
John:
Look at the, you know, again, see this picture in the chapter.
John:
Look at the previous Apple TV 4K.
John:
that looks like an apple box dead center is a top view of the apple tv it is very sort of elemental and spare and then look at the new box it's kind of tight like the two elements that the picture of the remote and the box are kind of jammed in there and it's not symmetrical it's not a particularly pleasing composition but it's like it's so important that you understand that this thing does not come with the old remote like
John:
Hey, I mean, I wonder if they even considered, like, let's just put the remote on the cover.
John:
Like, let's not even have, because the Apple TV just looks like a black void anyway.
John:
It's a black rounded rectangle, right?
John:
You can barely see the Apple TV, you know, the Apple logo and the letters T and V on the top of it.
John:
How about we just put the remote?
John:
Because honestly, that's the only thing people touch.
John:
You don't see the little box.
John:
It's under your TV somewhere.
John:
It's black.
John:
It's got one little light on it, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Uh, so yeah, this is all about the remote.
John:
And also the other thing is I think the box had to be physically bigger because the remote is bigger.
John:
So once you had the box is physically bigger, maybe putting the Apple TV in it started to look a little lonely with all that white space, but yeah, it's all about the remote.
Yep.
Casey:
All right, so I figure we can just kind of go through what we have here in the show notes and talk about the experience.
Casey:
For setup, again, I was coming from the first, I don't remember the formal name for this, but the first generation of Apple TV that actually let you install apps.
Casey:
And I'd never upgraded since, as we talked about quite a bit over the last few weeks.
Casey:
It's still 1080.
Casey:
It's 100 megabit Ethernet port, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
And before I installed my new Apple TV in its place, I remembered that there was a thing, and I forget exactly where it is.
Casey:
I'll put it in the show notes, but I won't remember off the top of my head.
Casey:
But there's a thing, and it's something like use a shared home screen.
Casey:
Again, that's not actually what it's called, but something like that.
Casey:
And I thought to myself, you know what, I should verify I have this on.
Casey:
And I did find it.
Casey:
It is buried in the menu system.
Casey:
Again, I'll put the steps in the show notes.
Casey:
But basically, I verified it was on on the old Apple TV, and then I disconnected it, and I put the new Apple TV in its place.
Casey:
committing the same sin I did before of using the same power cord that was already there, the same sin I committed with the arrow.
John:
Well, that's the difference because that is literally a power wire.
John:
There is no, you know, wall wart brick.
John:
So you're actually safe in doing that, Casey.
John:
You have power operation.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure I've done that every time I've upgraded an Apple TV.
John:
Yeah, because who wants to get behind their TV, right?
Casey:
Oh, well, I did, and we'll get to that later on.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I plug it in and, you know, I reuse all the same cabling and all that that's there.
Casey:
And the setup process was pretty darn good.
Casey:
You are asked to put your phone near the Apple TV in order to get, I guess, iCloud information and stuff like that.
Casey:
And I did that and it all came up on the home screen and it looked like the default home screen for a few seconds.
Casey:
And all of a sudden it started filling itself in and downloading apps and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And it all worked pretty well.
Casey:
I do have a couple of test flight apps that it didn't even consider installing, which was a bummer.
Casey:
And the only other thing I'd like to briefly complain about is I don't think any non-Apple app persisted login information.
Casey:
So like Plex, I needed to repair.
Casey:
Netflix, I needed to repair.
Casey:
We actually pay for SiriusXM for reasons, and I needed to repair that.
Casey:
I needed to repair Spotify, which I actually think that wouldn't work until I turned my pie hole off
John:
It's not repair.
John:
You mean re-login.
John:
Well, yes and no.
John:
Sometimes you have to go to companyname.com slash activate.
John:
Sometimes they make you enter a username and password.
John:
But the bottom line is it doesn't know who you are.
John:
It says, please, you know, authenticate with some system that lets us know that you are a person who pays for a thing.
Casey:
Exactly right.
Casey:
And that was kind of annoying because it has gotten way better over the years because, among other things, when you're on the same network in the same iCloud ID or whatever the requirements are as an iPhone, you can actually do that text entry via your iPhone.
Casey:
And in fact, I use 1Password everywhere, and so it would prompt me on my phone, hey, do you want to enter your password for Netflix?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And then I could use the 1Password integration with the iPhone's password manager such that it would automatically load my Netflix password out of 1Password, paste it in the field on my phone, and then transmit it over the air to the Apple TV and paste it in there.
Casey:
So it wasn't nearly as egregious as it used to be, but it's just a bummer, man.
Casey:
Like there should be a better way to do this.
Casey:
And I would assume that there's APIs for this.
Casey:
Maybe I'm wrong, but nevertheless, that really bummed me out.
John:
There totally is an API for this.
John:
Apple has a salute because Apple identified this as a problem back when they had their first Apple TV with apps.
John:
Hey, isn't it super annoying that you have to re-log into HBO and re-log into Hulu and re-log into Netflix?
John:
And, you know, I subscribe to a million things, so I get this like the maximum version of this.
John:
So they made an API for like, hey, if you're making an Apple TV app, use this thing so people don't have to re-login to your thing.
John:
And everyone said, yeah, no thanks.
Marco:
Well, there's a number of things in here.
Marco:
So one of them is like the single sign-on thing, which I don't think that ever went anywhere with your cable provider.
Marco:
exactly that's what i'm talking about that that's part of that's like that's only like things that require cable logins to do and that's not many of the certain like you know that doesn't include things like netflix or disney or whatever but no i think like the rest of apple stuff has a way to do this it's keychain and key and icloud keychain and and the reason why i think that this is not available on apple tv uh is that
Marco:
Apple TV has no concept of a local passcode, at least not by default.
Marco:
And the way iCloud keychain works on other devices is... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Apple tells developers, don't store login credentials in iCloud.
Marco:
Don't use the regular iCloud key value store or whatever else.
Marco:
Don't use that.
John:
Yeah, that's...
John:
That's not the way to do it.
Marco:
Please don't do that.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But they have Keychain, which is like the local device secure storage thing that's encrypted and everything else.
Marco:
And then they have iCloud Keychain.
Marco:
And the way iCloud Keychain works in a secure way at a high level is it's not storing all those credentials and stuff that you put in Keychain directly in iCloud.
Marco:
It's storing them encrypted.
Marco:
That's why when you set up a new device with iCloud Keychain, you don't have to just log into your Apple ID.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
It prompts you to enter the password or passcode from some other device that's in your iCloud keychain.
Marco:
Because then it uses that encryption key from that local device to decrypt a new copy of it for itself or something like that.
Marco:
But anyway, Apple TV doesn't really have a concept of a local passcode or local user authentication beyond purchases.
Marco:
So that's probably why they don't do that.
Marco:
that's a good point that being said with the exception of the password stuff I've replaced a number of Apple TVs over the last you know five or ten years and I do that single home screen sync thing and it works fantastically for me with that one exception it never saves my passwords for things but with that one exception it works perfectly and I really enjoy that feature and like
Marco:
I did the upgrade for mine where I was basically moving to Apple TVs.
Marco:
I did that upgrade in like 10 minutes.
Marco:
It was one of the smoothest upgrade experiences I've ever had for any product.
Marco:
Again, with that sole exception of entering passwords.
Marco:
But even the password thing was improved by a couple of factors.
Marco:
Number one, I don't think I have as many video-watching apps as either of you.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Some of them, like Disney has this thing, and I think Amazon did the same thing.
Marco:
Disney had a thing where if you have the Disney Plus app installed on your phone, you just open it up on your phone on the same network, and it says, hey, do you want to authenticate this new TV?
Marco:
You say yes, and that's it.
Marco:
So it's like two taps, right?
Marco:
And then Amazon had a thing where I could just use the phone camera to scan a QR code on the TV, and it did a URL scheme trick to authenticate.
Marco:
So there were a few others.
Marco:
The only one I actually had to type my password in was Netflix.
Casey:
See, but the problem with the Disney Plus thing, which I agree with you and is nice in principle, is that for almost all of these apps, when they ask me for local network access, it's typically citing a Chromecast as the reason for local network access.
Casey:
So I turned them all off because I don't have a Chromecast.
Casey:
So for a minute there, I was like, why is the Disney app not letting me log in?
Casey:
What is the...
Casey:
Oh, right.
Casey:
Because it doesn't have local network access, so it can't even see the Apple TV.
Casey:
That's the problem.
Casey:
So other than that, I do agree with you.
Casey:
By the way, while I'm talking real-time follow-up, it is called One Home Screen, and it is in Settings, Users and Accounts,
Casey:
Then you have to click on your user.
Casey:
So for me, it would say Casey List or whatever.
Casey:
Then in there is one home screen.
Casey:
So it is one, two, three, four screens into settings, but it is there.
Casey:
And if you keep, I don't know how long it needs to be on on the old Apple TV.
Casey:
I would guess, you know, a few minutes.
Casey:
But yeah, if you leave that on and then it will sync everything up when you install the new one.
John:
That should totally be the default.
John:
I remember when I first found that feature.
John:
I'm not sure if it is anymore, but I remember when the feature first came out, I'm like, oh, thank God, because I was so tired of setting up the home screens because, you know, I want them to be all the same.
John:
It's nice because I think most of us don't have a lot of Apple TV apps, certainly as compared to our iPhone apps, probably.
John:
And so it is actually fairly quick to get everything set up.
John:
In terms of, you know, the local authentication, all the things you just described, hey, the Disney app does this thing where you can launch it like this.
John:
One uses scan to QR codes and that's type in a password.
John:
Sometimes a lot of you logged in.
John:
That's exactly the problem Apple is supposed to be solving.
John:
Right.
John:
And the single sign on thing with cable companies was at the time it came out.
John:
A good solution because, you know, most of our TV was through cable stuff then that, you know, and there weren't as many streaming services.
John:
Right.
John:
And I think they've made a couple of efforts at similar things in this to try to get everybody on board.
John:
But of course, we know Netflix isn't going to be on board.
John:
They won't even be in the TV app.
John:
And it's just it's too fragmented.
John:
So this problem persists like this should be something that Apple should continue to work on solving.
John:
If they want to just go with iCloud Keychain, which I think is a reasonable solution, they have all the tech to do that.
John:
And it's not like these Apple TV boxes are, you know, too cheap for them to include this.
John:
Hey, let's just put Touch ID in the center of the little pad on the remote, right?
John:
And there is your passcode.
John:
Make me enter a four or five or six digit code.
John:
Hell, make me enter an alphanumeric passcode, right?
John:
It's not like we don't have the technology to put a passcode on the Apple TV.
John:
Just do it.
John:
I'll use my phone to enter the passcode once instead of entering my password five times and scanning a QR code three times and going to website.com slash activate two times and using a Disney Plus app.
John:
It's too much.
John:
It's too different.
John:
And granted, I'm an extreme case because I subscribe to every video service in the world.
John:
But it's, it kind of really undercuts the, you know, one home screen experience because you think you're done.
John:
You're like, oh, everything's back to the way it was.
John:
And then you sit down.
John:
I mean, this even happened to us.
John:
Even I knew this was going to be the case.
John:
I just, you know, it slipped my mind after I had set the thing up because I had to go, you know, set up some other stuff upstairs or whatever.
John:
And then we go down to watch a show and it's like, oh, what's the Netflix password?
John:
No one knows what the Netflix password is.
John:
You got to get out your phone and you got to do the thing.
John:
And it's just, and then you forget about it again.
John:
You go to watch something on Hulu the next day.
John:
Like, oh, I didn't sign into Hulu.
John:
It's just this death by a thousand cuts.
John:
Um, some of the things that even the Apple controls, they didn't manage to sync, right?
John:
The accessibility setting, the one accessibility setting that I use on my Apple TV, which I highly recommend that everybody use.
John:
Again, maybe in case we will look up where this is, but somewhere under accessibility, I think under like increased contrast or something under accessibility, there is a setting that lets you change the selection contrast.
John:
What that means is, and I'm sure there are some people who don't think it's an issue, but other people will know exactly what I'm talking about.
John:
If you ever look at your Apple TV, you know, the television when your Apple TV is in use, and you can't tell what the hell is supposed to be selected, this feature is for you.
John:
the what apple tv what tv os does is it makes the selected thing bigger than the non-selected things slightly and also depending on what remote you have if you move your finger around on the touchpad or wiggle the remote or whatever you can see the little tile that is selected slanting and reflecting the light you know this used to be a demo they would do look at this it's kind of slanty and reflecty so yes you can figure out what is selected but imagine if the screen visually told you what was selected in an unambiguous way
John:
That's what this accessibility feature does.
John:
It draws a white outline around the selected square.
John:
Imagine that.
John:
So then you can look at the screen and say, I know which one is selected.
John:
It's the one with the white outline.
John:
I think we call that highlighting.
John:
And it's been a technology used in graphical user interfaces for many, many decades.
John:
And it is extremely effective at letting you know what is.
John:
Oh, God, it drives me nuts that they just use that zooming thing.
John:
I don't know why there's not more complaints about it.
John:
I guess everyone else is.
Casey:
That never bothered me.
John:
You can always tell the one thing is 7% bigger than the things next to it.
Casey:
Even if I can't, if I just think about touching the touchpad, trackpad, whatever it's called.
John:
You find the thing that wiggles.
John:
I feel like I shouldn't need to wiggle.
John:
That's a sign that this is a bad interface.
John:
I shouldn't need to induce a wiggle to say, I can't tell what's selected, but let me make it, ah, the thing that moved.
John:
My eyes moved to the motion.
John:
That's a selected one.
John:
And the worst is, like, you never know where the selection is, like, when an app launches.
John:
You're like, if I want to go to search, say there's, like, a search at the top of the thing.
John:
How many rows up do we need to go?
John:
Where is the selection now?
John:
Am I already in the search bar?
John:
You can't tell unless you move the selection out of it.
John:
Oh, it went dimmer, so I must have already been in the top bar, so I should have just moved to the right two spaces to get to the magnifying glass.
John:
But the only way I can know that is if I swipe down and realize that the top bar now gets dimmer, which means the previous selection was in the top bar.
John:
Selection state in tvOS is a problem.
John:
So please go to accessibility and try this setting.
John:
I think you'll like it.
John:
But anyway, that setting...
John:
Hey, draw a white outline around the selected things.
John:
Didn't carry over from my one home screen thing.
John:
It's on all of my Apple TVs and has been since the feature was rolled out.
John:
Everything else synced, but not that setting.
John:
And the second thing that didn't sync was the function of the little button that has like a picture of a TV on it.
Casey:
Oh, yep, yep, yep, yep.
John:
I couldn't figure out what the heck was going on.
John:
TV app versus home screen?
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
I hit the button.
John:
I'm like, where am I?
John:
I'm in the TV app.
John:
What the hell is this?
John:
No, I want that button to go to the home screen.
John:
That is my preference on every single Apple TV.
John:
It didn't sync.
John:
So I had to manually set those two functions back to their correct things.
John:
so yeah setup in general easy uh but i feel like migration assistant on the mac does a better job of actually i mean granted there are advantages here we went over the icloud keychain will bring all of my login information with me but the mac doesn't drop settings like this the mac doesn't forget oh did you allow uh you know right click on your mouse it's like it doesn't forget things like that it remembers everything down to like my keyboard repeat rate right so i feel like the few preferences that i set on apple tv should also be synced yeah i can totally understand that
Marco:
There's a reason why I haven't mentioned anything about TVOS.
Marco:
Because if we're talking about TVOS, I have many problems that will probably never be solved.
Marco:
And some of which seem to be getting worse.
Marco:
But this Apple TV hardware and the new remote, that's a different thing.
Casey:
So before we get to the remote, I would just like to say that I was unaware before tonight that John Syracuse's superpower is being able to spot his mouse cursor on his screen the size of a house without jiggling his mouse.
Casey:
That is absolutely incredible that you can spot it without ever jiggling your mouse.
John:
That's like saying, how can you spot where your pointer finger is?
John:
Don't you always know where your pointer finger is?
John:
It's just an extension of my arm.
John:
It's like, where's my pointer finger?
John:
I have to wiggle it to follow.
John:
There it is at the end of my arm.
John:
It's always in the same place.
Casey:
Your mouse cursor, you've never jiggled your mouse ever in order to find your cursor.
John:
No, I don't even have that feature on the drives.
John:
Lots of people use this feature.
John:
I don't like it at all.
John:
If you need it, more power to you, but I cannot stand this feature.
John:
I guess because I moved the mouse too quickly.
John:
macOS has an accessibility feature where if you shake the mouse cursor, the cursor will suddenly get larger to let you see where it is.
John:
which is a useful feature if you have trouble finding your tiny, very tiny mouse cursor.
John:
But for me, when I turn that feature on, it's like every once in a while suddenly my cursor gets big for no reason because I guess I just move my mouse naturally very quickly and it interprets that as a shake.
John:
So no, I don't use that feature.
John:
Maybe if my vision gets worse, eventually I'll start using it.
John:
But for now, I don't use it.
Casey:
You know, here it was.
Casey:
I thought I'd backed you into a corner and I was really, really proud of myself.
Casey:
But no, apparently that legitimately is your superpower.
John:
Do you use that shaky feature?
Casey:
You're darn right I do.
Casey:
I always use my damn mouse cursor.
John:
Well, your vision is really bad, Casey.
John:
So you probably need that feature.
Casey:
Well, no, not with contacts.
Casey:
With contacts, my vision is pretty good.
Casey:
If I take them out, I'm basically blind.
Casey:
But with my contacts in, I'm good.
Casey:
Anyway, all right, let's talk about this remote.
Casey:
I should have brought it upstairs with me.
Casey:
I didn't think about that, so I can mess with it while I'm talking to you guys.
Casey:
But I really like it.
Casey:
It is not the panacea that I thought it would be, but it is definitely way better.
Casey:
And I am not a prior remote hater.
Casey:
I just thought the prior remote was fantastic.
Casey:
fine it was annoying in ways it was good in ways it was fine this is just my opinion i know a lot of people disagree but this new one i really like and i'm jumping ahead ever so slightly however i still am unconvinced i i feel like the whole world is trolling me because this whole jog dial click wheel thing does not exist as far as i can tell
John:
Did you see the demo video I put in the notes?
Casey:
I didn't until just a moment ago, and so I wasn't listening to it.
Casey:
And Mike Hurley from Upgraded and Connected was telling me, no, no, no, no, you got to hold your finger on it or something.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Have you made this work?
Casey:
Because I've never made this work.
John:
It didn't even occur to me to try that feature when I was actually using the Apple TV to, you know, watch TV.
John:
So the first time I saw the feature in action was in this tweet that someone has a video of them doing it.
John:
And the interface is exactly what I thought it would be.
John:
If you just told me, what do you think it's going to look like?
John:
Exactly what it looks like.
John:
I'm not sure of the procedure, but my guess would have been pause the show, put your finger on the jog dial, and then in the timeline, in the little scrubby timeline on your TV screen, where you have the little dot showing your current position in the timeline, suddenly a little circle will appear around that with a dot in it, like a jog dial, around the part where you are.
John:
And then as you move your finger on the remote in a circle, you will see that circle roll like a wheel as the timeline scrubber thing moves back and forth.
Casey:
Now, I think part of the problem is, and this was, again, discussed privately between Mike and me and a few other people.
Casey:
I think I had tried this.
Casey:
I feel like I tried this in a couple of apps, but Plex was definitely one of them.
Casey:
And I am fairly confident that Plex does not use the out of the box video player.
Casey:
So in that case, I think it's a combination of me not really knowing how to activate the feature and
Casey:
And the app I was using didn't support it.
Casey:
But I could swear I tried it in the Apple TV app because I've been rewatching Ted Lasso in preparation for it coming back next month or two months from now.
Casey:
And I swear I tried it in the Apple TV app and I didn't get it to work then.
Casey:
So I'm sure it's at least in part user error, maybe it's entirely user error.
Casey:
But I really want to see this and try it.
Casey:
And for the life of me, I just can't get it to work right.
John:
Did you remember if you paused first or not?
Casey:
I thought so, but again, I'm not confident I did.
Casey:
And since I had this conversation with Mike, I haven't had a chance to go down and try it.
Casey:
But I will definitely try it, and maybe we can do a very brief follow-up next week.
John:
I'm not sure how much I'm going – I mean, I'll try it just now because I'm curious.
John:
But it's not a feature that I was looking for.
John:
It's like I really –
John:
I really need a way to scrub around timelines more quickly because that's one of the few things that the swipey touchpad was actually okay at, right?
John:
And the thing is, I don't think the jog dial gives... In theory, the jog dial can give you more precision than swiping, but I'm not sure it really does because if it did give you that much more precision, it would take forever to jog your way any appreciable distance because you'd be drawing tons and tons of tiny little circles with your thumb, right?
John:
So I'll try it and see what it's like.
John:
But I think...
John:
With this remote, we talked about it a lot when it was introduced, but none of us had one in our hands.
John:
And I think pretty much everything that I said about my expectations to the remote in that episode is the truth.
John:
Like, if you look at a picture of it...
John:
you have a good assessment of its strengths and weaknesses versus its predecessor and versus other remotes.
John:
Having it in hand now and having used it on two different TVs, it remains too small for my hands.
John:
It's bigger than it was.
John:
It's thicker than it was.
John:
All good, better, but still generally too small.
John:
The buttons are still...
John:
i don't know how to say it too slight too shallow too uh too timid uh they're shy these buttons are shy they're they're they're small and elegant right they're they're kind of closely packed they're not really different sizes or shapes from each other other than the volume rocker they're not really great remote buttons not terrible buttons but not really oh whoa whoa slow down the click feel on these buttons is absolutely delightful though oh what oh i think it's delightful it's okay
John:
lots of remotes what casey i think is getting at is if you if you just get a cheap crappy remote you know the rubbery button feel that's not a good button feel in general like you want something that feels like you're pressing something and a really cheap remote will just feel mushy but you can have what i'm describing as a button that has a positive click where you're sure when you clicked it and you're sure when you didn't and it's also not like one eighteenth of a millimeter off of the surface
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
That part I agree with.
Casey:
I don't personally find it a problem, but I don't think it would be bad for them to be raised higher off the surface of the remote.
John:
And separated more widely on a larger remote.
John:
It is what it looks like.
John:
It's nothing you're in for a surprise here.
John:
The touchpad in the center of the jog thing, I'm kind of of two minds on that.
John:
Now, one thing I did immediately find when going through the preferences is there is a setting in there that if you don't want to use touchpad at all, you can turn it off.
John:
And then it just becomes a five way up, down, left, right, press the button in the middle.
John:
Right.
John:
And it will just ignore all touch input.
John:
And I think that is a great feature to add for people who have motor difficulty dealing with the touch interface, which at various times is me.
John:
Right.
John:
And, you know, again, we talked about this last time.
John:
One of the great things about this remote.
John:
is that the entire top of it is not a touch surface.
John:
So you can confidently lift it off the table by its tiny little sides, which still should be bigger, but you can confidently lift it off the table knowing I'm not accidentally doing something to the touchpad because it's so clear that you're gripping the metal edge of the remote and you're not touching that one little touch-sensitive area in the middle.
John:
Granted, the jog dial is also touch-sensitive, but if you brush up against that, I don't think it does anything.
John:
It's that center thing that if you have the touch thing on...
John:
you know, is the danger zone.
John:
But it's very easy to tell that you're not touching that danger zone versus the other remote where literally half the remote was a danger zone and you could never tell which half it was because they were looked identical in the dark, right?
John:
So that's good about this remote.
John:
But I didn't disable the touch surface because I found through years and years of using the stupid diving board, you do eventually get used to swiping because it is faster than going down, down, down, right?
John:
And suddenly with the danger of me accidentally hitting the touchpad gone...
John:
I'm left with only the benefits of, well, when you do want to go, you know, before I bothered to get off the couch and get my phone, sometimes I actually are trying to enter like my email address with the little swipey thing on the little, you know, alphabet number line thing where you're trying to go from A to Q to whatever.
John:
Swiping is good for that.
John:
And even just going around on the home screen, just looking around for something.
John:
swiping is good for that too so i don't know if i'm going to keep the swipe function on but for now i'm still seeing some benefits of having that little swipe here and you would think the area is too small to be useful for swiping but it's not because in general you just you know flick flick flick you're not it's not like it's not like a trackpad where you're dragging your fingers around it's more of a gesture pad right so that i think works maybe slightly better than i expected
John:
um the one good feature that i didn't anticipate about this remote is the fact that the back button is like more concave i guess i don't know do any of you have the remotes none of us thought to bring it with us nope anyway the back button
John:
feels different than the home button that's right next to us.
John:
Imagine that, making buttons feel different.
John:
It's the same size, it's the same shape, but its indentation is different than the home button.
John:
So when it's dark and you've got the remote in your hand, which is no longer symmetrical, and you're moving your finger...
John:
off of the touchpad onto the back button it's very clear to your finger that you are on the back button because it feels different i'm pretty sure it's more concave than the others right maybe the other ones are totally flat and this is the only concave one it doesn't have a big white outline around like the menu button did the this this difference in feel is merely the top surface of the button feels different and that tiny little thing it's like like an ice water in hell as steve jobs would say
John:
ah imagine that different things feeling different on a remote in a tiny way in the smallest possible way it doesn't because again for looking at the photos been everywhere to pick this up but it makes such a big difference that's what you want out of a remote you want different things to feel different so that you can you know that's one of the great things about the tivo remote you pick that thing up in your hand and you can feel where the buttons are with just your finger without looking at them and you will be sure that you're on the one that you expect because
John:
it's it's like a you know i don't know how you describe it like it's like it's like a map everything is a different shape and there's no ambiguity right when you're on that pause button or on the button to the right or the left of it or you move up to the the five-way pad everything feels different on this remote one thing feels different and that's the back button and it's a super important button so i'm glad that they did that and you know the five-way feels different as well so that is an advantage that i didn't expect
John:
I've seen some complaints about the play, pause, and mute.
Casey:
Oh, that's me.
Casey:
That's me right here.
Casey:
Oh, it's driving me bananas.
Casey:
So to back up, just to establish context here, on the prior remote, there were three buttons kind of below the fold, if you will.
Casey:
And of those, the upper left was the Siri button.
Casey:
The bottom left was play, pause.
Casey:
And then the entire right side was volume up and volume down.
Casey:
Now, where the Siri button was, which is the button that I never hit, is now play pause, which is the button I hit more than any other.
Casey:
In the bottom left, which is where the play pause button used to be, is mute, which is a button that I do want to hit from time to time, but like
Casey:
a tenth as much as play pause and then the right hand side is still volume up down so in effect they've taken the play pause button moved it up to a different spot and then taken an entirely new to the remote button the mute button and put it where play pause used to be so every time I play pause I hit the friggin mute button every single time and it's driving me nuts and I'm sure I will eventually retrain myself but it's driving me absolutely batty and I don't understand why they did it that way I just don't
John:
I mean, I think I understand it a little bit in that it's kind of like on, you know, we talk about our iPhone home screens and people wonder why my apps are the way they are.
John:
Some parts of the remote are easier to hit with your thumb than others.
John:
And the far lower left bottom, I think is harder to reach, especially if your thumb is mostly on the five way and then occasionally on the back when you're navigating.
John:
I feel like the
John:
To the extent that this remote acknowledges a hierarchy of controls, which is just what you're describing, Casey, which things do you use most often?
John:
Second most often?
John:
Third most often?
John:
To the extent that this remote acknowledges that that hierarchy exists, it expresses that through the positioning of the buttons.
John:
Because they're all the same size, they're all the same shape, and they're all in this one little skinny remote, and there's not that many of them.
John:
So it doesn't really...
John:
You know, you would imagine that if you were designing a good remote, for example, you'd realize that play-pause is probably the most important playback control in the entire thing.
John:
Five-way is probably more important for navigation, but in terms of while you're watching DVD, play-pause is probably number one with the bullet, right?
John:
So maybe make that central and huge and feel different.
John:
Nope, Apple says no, no, no.
John:
But they did give it a position that I think is easier to get to than the mute button.
John:
And yes, it's the reverse of the previous arrangement, but...
John:
which is messing with all of our muscle memory because the remotes are similar enough.
John:
If you ignore the five way, right?
John:
The buttons in the middle, it's like three circles down the left side and then a circle and a lozenge.
John:
It's exactly the same, right?
John:
And so we've spent years with that terrible Siri remote reaching for the middle button of the three buttons that are on the left or the bottom button of the three buttons that are left and having that be play pause.
John:
And now the bottom button of the three buttons left isn't play pause anymore.
John:
and again they're all the same size all the same shape you just have a tiny symbol that you can't read on it because it's dark and when you're watching tv right so i think our muscle memory will remap but this just highlights another instance of this remote refusing to do the good thing which is put an actual hierarchy in the buttons and by the way i understand why they do is it looks nice and everything game controllers suffer from the same sin see my long episode of hypercritical about this right
John:
in most video game controllers there's a button that gets hit more often than any other button and then there's a second most often button right there's a primary button you know ask anyone who has both a playstation and a switch how much how much they can't stand the fact that the primary action button is bottom of the four buttons on the playstation but is the right of the four buttons on the switch it really makes navigating menus very difficult if you have try to have muscle minor both those things
John:
But either way, the correct solution was what the GameCube came up with, which is if there's a button that you hit most commonly, make that one the biggest button.
John:
And then the button you hit the second amount, make that the second biggest button.
John:
And maybe the tertiary button should even be a different shape.
John:
The Tivo remote does that.
John:
This remote doesn't.
John:
Right now, we're all suffering from bad muscle memory.
John:
I think we'll mostly get over it.
John:
I mostly just sit here...
John:
Trying to enjoy the one good thing about the remote, which, again, is the concave back button that actually feels a tiny bit different.
John:
I just celebrate that every time I hit back.
John:
But play, pause, yeah, we'll get used to it, I guess.
Casey:
No, but you say that, but I challenge you on that because, for me, I am still going to use the Siri remote and the now upstairs Apple TV because I could –
Casey:
why would you do that to yourself why would i spend sixty dollars for this new remote if i don't have to oh it's sixty dollars well spent well because this this right here this is the reason that your muscle memory for play pause is going to be totally broken until you consolidate on one of these remotes and that's exactly what i was thinking to myself five minutes ago was oh my god i am going to buy one of these stupid remotes for that stupid apple tv because it's going to drive me nuts it's like it's like a soft closed toilet seat you can't have just one of those in your house if you just have one of them you're constantly slamming it yeah right
Marco:
Yeah, like you got to convert the whole house or none.
Casey:
Yep, you're not wrong.
Marco:
No, my only complaint about this is that I agree with some of the Twitter people who have been complaining about the button click feel and sound kind of feels and sounds cheap.
Casey:
Oh, hard disagree.
Casey:
Very hard disagree.
Marco:
I think it sounds great.
Marco:
You also like the butterfly keyboard.
Marco:
Honestly, it kind of feels and sounds like a butterfly keyboard.
John:
But it doesn't feel rubbery, which is one kind of cheapness for remote.
John:
So for sure, it doesn't feel rubbery.
John:
But I think the cheapness comes from it is smaller and lighter weight.
John:
And it is kind of like you're not going to get a solid ka-chunk from a plastic button of this size and thickness in a remote this size.
John:
You're just not going to.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Marco:
But if you look at the Siri remote that preceded this, it had the exact same size buttons and they feel and sound better.
John:
They are less clicky, I think.
John:
And it depends on if you really want that positive, like you have clicked the button versus you have just pressed down and felt something go down.
John:
I feel like the Siri remotes are more damped.
Marco:
they are but i think i think that makes them feel a little bit nicer and more luxurious like the last thing you want in in like your tv environment is to hear loud clicks from your buttons on your remote and it just it doesn't it doesn't feel high quality yeah i feel like we're getting with the volume control like because you might be adjusting the volume while you're watching and you don't want to hear click click click click click so i see what you're getting out there it's just that i never use the volume on this thing anyway so i don't have that problem
Marco:
Oh, then you're not even qualified.
Marco:
I'm using it exactly as Apple says.
Marco:
It's my only remote the vast majority of the time.
Marco:
The old one was too.
Marco:
A lot of people didn't realize that the old one had the ability to turn your TV off as well.
Marco:
You just held down the home button for a few seconds and it would say sleep all devices.
John:
If you wanted to buy into HDMI CEC, sure.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Marco and I are unicorns.
John:
It works for everybody except you.
Casey:
Yes, exactly.
Casey:
Exactly.
John:
Speaking of that, though, the power button they added to the top of this.
John:
So there's a power button on this, which is nice.
John:
But I was confused by it because I thought, oh, this is great.
John:
This remote has an IR emitter on the front of it, I assume, because there's a big black thing up there, right?
John:
So I'll just be able to let this thing know what kind of TV I have.
John:
And then when I press that power button, it will send the IR signal that my TV needs to turn off.
John:
As far as I can tell, it doesn't do that.
John:
Apple TV does supposedly understand what kind of TV I have, but as far as I've been able to tell, there's no way for me to get the new Apple TV remote to send out an IR signal to turn off my TV.
John:
have you dug around the settings because the old one could actually learn an IR remote for volume control and stuff you can so you can what you can do is you can tell the Apple TV to learn like any other remote like I use the TiVo remote with my Apple TV for years right so you can say hey Apple TV forget about your old remote this is your new remote learn this right you can do that
John:
but when i looked for the thing that said can i tell you apple tv what kind of tv i have so that the power button on the apple tv remote will do stuff basically what i found in documentation was like don't you worry about that apple tv knows what kind of tv you have and it will support stuff and it does support things like the volume like the volume buttons work i just don't use my tv's volume i use my receiver's volume right that's a different remote right
John:
but i don't think there's any way like it knows what kind of tv i have and in theory it knows what kind of ir signal it should emit to turn my television off but it's not going to do it and if you look at the support document it says hey you want apple tv to turn tv off use hdmi cec and that's where i say nope
Casey:
It's your own fault.
Casey:
You should try it.
John:
Maybe in my next TV setup, I'll try it again.
John:
But my current setup, I have tried HDMI CEC, and it is very bad with my current setup.
Casey:
Well, for what it's worth, my TV is turned on and off via the Apple TV, via CEC.
Casey:
But I am, like you, controlling the volume of a receiver that is completely and utterly unrelated from the television.
Casey:
And that all works.
Casey:
No problem.
Casey:
It did with my prior Apple TV.
Casey:
It does with this TV.
Casey:
I guess I just have a better TV than you is what it boils down to because it actually works with CEC.
John:
I mean, you do.
John:
Remember, I don't even have a 4K TV.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
I forgot.
Casey:
I knew it was plasma.
Casey:
I forgot it wasn't 4K.
Casey:
Don't worry.
Casey:
I'll make you feel a lot better about my TV situation.
John:
There's no 4K plasmas, Casey.
Casey:
Well, fair.
Casey:
I don't keep up with it as much as you.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Who wants to talk about calibration, which is something I haven't done yet but should probably do?
John:
Yeah, we talked about this a few times in past episodes.
John:
My main objection being that it doesn't actually calibrate your TV.
John:
It calibrates the output of your Apple TV, which has many limits.
John:
Calibrates your brain, man.
John:
Yeah, which has many limitations to it.
John:
But a lot of people did a bunch of tests on this.
John:
Uh, my, my favorite HD, uh, my favorite television techie YouTube channel, HDTV test, despite the fact that the host of that channel tries to make a sexual innuendo joke in every single one of his videos.
John:
And every single time I'm like, I'm begging you stop doing this.
John:
Stop doing anyway.
John:
Other than that, the TV content is really good.
John:
And he did a test of the Apple TV calibration.
John:
We'll put a link in the show notes if you want to see this video.
John:
It gets very techie into the details of calibration.
John:
He basically says the same things like, hey, there's a bunch of settings in your TV that Apple TV can't change.
John:
So if you actually want to calibrate your TV, you actually have to calibrate your TV.
John:
But if you're not a professional TV calibrator, like the person who runs this channel, and you just want to use this feature to make your TV better, especially if your TV is on some horrendous preset that really mangles the colors, it can get you closer to being calibrated.
John:
So I figured I should try this on my TV too, just to see how it works.
John:
Maybe it's because my TV is super duper old, as we just established.
John:
It is a non-4K plasma television.
John:
This Apple TV calibration feature is extremely confused by my plasma television.
John:
So I'm not sure if you've ever seen like a slow-mo video.
John:
of what a plasma tv does to put its picture on the screen especially older plasma tvs it is not what you expect it is not as if there's a line scanning from top to bottom it's not as if there it changes the image on the screen and then waits and changes the image to something else it basically builds the image from a series of colored dots that are put up on the screen sequentially
John:
And if you see it in slow motion, it looks like nothing.
John:
But if you see it in full motion, it looks like a picture because, again, see our human visual system being messed up.
John:
So I tried to use the feature.
John:
It said, oh, look at these sparkly things.
John:
Hold your phone one inch from the screen and inside this thing.
John:
I did that for a surprising amount of time.
John:
uh and it would just be like are you sure you're holding it within an inch hold it within an inch make sure the top edge of your phone is within the rectangle i'm like it is i'm here this is an inch should i do it farther should i do it you know closer i tried every possible distance sometimes it would start showing hey i'm going to show you red i'm going to show you green it would say up where's your phone did you take your phone away put your phone in the rectangle
John:
i spent a long time it was like poltergeist episode i spent a long time my arm was getting tired holding holding my phone yeah is this the right distance how far away should i be closer farther oh my god i think it just doesn't know what to make of like the cameras in my iphone and again i'm using an iphone 12 pro the latest apple tv the only thing that's ancient in this setup is my stupid tv eventually i got it to go through a calibration cycle what was different about the you know five minutes into this the 90th time i tried this and the other times
John:
I have no idea, but it was super finicky for me.
John:
I don't blame the device, I blame my ancient TV.
John:
But anyway, after it did everything, it gives you a screen that lets you swipe back and forth from like, I forget what it says, like original or calibrated?
John:
You know, basically like A-B test.
John:
Like it shows you a video of an aerial view, probably like a drone footage of like a beach with water, and it lets you switch back and forth.
John:
Here's what you were like before, and here's what we calibrated you to.
John:
And kind of like the 256-kilobit AAC and the lossless version of the same file, I switch back and forth.
John:
I'm like, is anything changing?
John:
Did you change anything?
John:
Because in some televisions, like if you use Dolby Vision, if your television supports Dolby Vision at all or something, it just says, oh, we refuse to try to calibrate.
John:
Your TV is probably fine, which A is not true, but B is its way of saying, look, we're not going to be able to make any improvements here because we can't make heads or tails of this.
John:
But anyway, my TV, as previously established, is, I think, reasonably well calibrated.
John:
And the fact that the Apple TV calibration thing couldn't make... Like, I spent a while going back and forth and staring at certain sections of the image like...
John:
Does it look a little different there?
John:
Let me turn the lights off.
John:
Is that sand a little bit browner?
John:
Oh, it's hard to tell.
John:
A, B, A, B, A, B. So, you know, I guess that means that, you know, my television was close enough in the areas that it was trying to calibrate.
John:
There was a difference.
John:
Eventually I could tell if you could look at certain structures or certain sections of the wave because it's just a video loop and eventually you've seen the same video loop a hundred times.
John:
I think it did take a little bit of blue out of my picture.
John:
The problem is, is that the right thing to do or not?
John:
I don't know what this beach footage is supposed to look like.
John:
If it pulled down a little
John:
tiny imperceptible amount of blue out of the picture is that making my picture closer to being accurate or farther from being accurate i don't know either way it only affects the apple tv so it's kind of a moot point so i just you know ignored it and left my television the way it was but for if you use the apple tv calibration picture and the the you know before and after are radically different
John:
One thing you could choose to do is say, oh, I'll take what Apple TV did because that's probably better, which is probably true.
John:
It probably is better than what you're on.
John:
But the other thing you could do is take that as a very strong signal that your TV is super screwed up, calibrate your television set somehow, and then redo the Apple TV calibration and see if the difference is smaller.
John:
Because if you have a huge difference there, it shows something is messed up.
John:
And you don't want to just fix it for the Apple TV.
John:
You want to fix it for everything, right?
John:
Unless you literally only ever watch stuff through the Apple TV.
John:
But even then, please, everyone, consider calibrating your TV.
John:
you can actually pay people to come to the house and do it i don't know who to recommend except for this one guy who has a youtube channel he lives in the uk so unless you live in the uk you're probably not gonna get him to your house but there are options i always recommend the thx tune-up app but it is super old by this point and i'm surprised if it's even still supported or downloadable there are other options on the you know the apple tv store whatever it's called most of them are terrible
John:
uh that's why i always recommend thx tune-up and you know it's hard because there's not a lot of great options to recommend you can you can buy uh calibration dvds and blu-rays and use them to try to calibrate things you can go to artings.com and look for a bunch of presets for your specific television which might be better than nothing but maybe not um but i guess failing all of that try the apple tv calibration feature uh you know it's probably better than nothing
Marco:
A glowing recommendation.
Marco:
It's probably better than nothing.
Casey:
Did either of you try it on your TVs?
Casey:
I did not, but I was fighting many other problems, which we'll get to here in a moment.
Casey:
Marco, you didn't try it?
Marco:
No, I don't care.
Marco:
I also don't care that much.
Marco:
When I get a new TV, which is not a common occurrence, I do a rough calibration.
Marco:
I did it this time.
Marco:
I based it on Arting's starting point, and then I did a few minor tweaks for my own taste.
Marco:
But then I just leave it.
John:
Well, at least one of you should try it because I'm what I'm curious to know is, hey, did it actually work for you?
John:
Could you hold your phone up in front of your TV screen?
John:
And then it said, oh, we see your phone.
John:
Let me cycle through a bunch of colors.
John:
Or did you have to sit there like I did for five minutes wondering why it's not doing its thing?
John:
I'm not going to do that.
John:
That's up to you, Casey.
Casey:
Well, I may or may not be using Dolby Vision anyway because I do not have an ancient TV.
Casey:
So apparently there's nothing I can do according to the Apple TV.
John:
Well, that will be a result too.
John:
You'll see.
John:
Speaking of Dolby Vision, yeah.
John:
Another thing that you will see as a second video from HDTVTest is apparently the – so this is the confusing thing because this is not an Apple YouTube channel.
John:
It's a television reviewer YouTube channel, right?
Yeah.
John:
So according to the person who hosts this channel, the old Apple TV, whatever that means, had a problem with raised blacks in Dolby Vision, which means that you'd go on a screen that's supposed to be black, and instead of it being black, it would be super, super dark gray.
John:
And that's not good.
John:
And this was a problem with the Apple TV device, not something wrong with the television.
John:
You'd calibrate the television exactly, but then you'd play a movie through the Apple TV, and everything would be a little bit brighter than it was supposed to be, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And he says, okay, with the new one, that's fixed.
John:
The problem is, was that fix done in the new version of tvOS?
John:
Or is that a fix done in the new Apple TV 4K hardware?
John:
He didn't differentiate.
John:
For all we know, this was a software fix, and it affects all the Apple TVs, and it's fixed everywhere.
John:
Or it could be, I can't imagine it could be a hardware thing, but the way he presented it is like, hey, if you get a new Apple TV 4K, you won't have raised blacks in Dolby Vision anymore.
John:
I find it hard to believe that that is a feature of the hardware and not the software.
John:
So I don't have a conclusive answer to this, but it's good to know that one of the major visual deficits of watching anything in Dolby Vision on the Apple TV in the past, raised blacks, is now fixed somewhere in the new stack, I'm assuming in the software.
Casey:
All right, so let me take you on a journey of my Apple TV upgrade experience.
Casey:
And this is probably going to take just a few minutes.
Casey:
So I plug in my fancy pants new Apple TV 4K.
Casey:
And I have an LG C9, which is a 4K OLED TV that I bought in late 2019.
Casey:
And my setup, and you need a little bit of context to understand why I made the decisions I made and what's going on here.
Casey:
My setup is a little bit weird, which is probably story of my life.
Casey:
unnecessarily kind of eluded maybe yes as always so marco will make the image that i am sharing in the chat right now the um the chapter art for this chapter and so this is what's in my wall or this this is what the the two gang plate your handwriting is terrible i know you slaved over this image and you decided to hand write the labels and no one can read them oh speckers what's a specker
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
I hate you, too.
Casey:
What's a homey port?
John:
S-P-E-C-K-E-R-S.
Casey:
Did I really?
Casey:
Oh, it says it.
Casey:
I just have weird A's.
John:
Like, you're using a program to make this.
John:
You didn't draw these lines by hand.
John:
Use text.
John:
This is a text tool.
John:
Is that circle on the top saying oatmeal?
John:
oh yes my gosh you guys oh t oh feel that's the bowl of oatmeal right below the outdoor speckers and next to the homie port it's like an oatmeal cookie it's round and brown and also these hdmi ports have you ever seen an hdmi port do they have some approximation does each one have a different width and a different angle of the slanted sides
Casey:
I knew I was going to get so much grief for this.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
I knew I was going to get so much grief.
Casey:
Can we please just try to move on to this?
Casey:
I'd like to stop recording sometime today.
Marco:
Do you really have something where the HDMI ports are not all aligned to the same alignment?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
One's 90 degrees rotated?
Casey:
This is what it looks like.
Casey:
Yeah, I didn't take a picture in part because there's so many cables and I don't want to remove them all that it would take me forever to actually take a picture.
Casey:
But I assure you, this is what it looks like on the wall or in the wall, depending on how you want to look at it, behind my like AV receiver area.
Casey:
So I've got three HDMI, in case you're not looking, I have three HDMI ports, an optical port, and then four... Oh, optical.
Casey:
That's what that says.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And then, you know, SPDIF or whatever it's called.
Marco:
I think I'd prefer oatmeal.
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, and then four... Oh, and SPDIF is only when it's coaxial.
Marco:
That's Toslink.
Casey:
Oh, sorry.
Casey:
Toslink.
Casey:
Okay, there you go.
Marco:
It's the same protocol, but just different media.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
So I have Toslink, I have three HDMI ports, and then four speaker jacks for outdoor speakers.
Casey:
And so the reason I have this is my, again, admittedly convoluted setup.
Casey:
I understand it's convoluted.
Casey:
I understand I'm making problems for myself.
Casey:
My setup is because my receiver is freaking ancient.
Casey:
It's so ancient that it has zero HDMI ports on it because I don't think HDMI was a thing at the time.
Casey:
And it has two component inputs, which even for the time it was new was not that many.
Casey:
So it's not a terrible receiver, but it should probably be upgraded.
Casey:
So I understand that.
Casey:
I'm well aware that I'm making problems for myself by using this old receiver, but it wasn't broken.
Casey:
So I didn't want to fix it.
Casey:
All right, so the way this works is I have optical going from the TV through the wall and then coming out of this port and into the receiver.
Casey:
And so whatever the TV is playing audio-wise is coming back out of the TV through optical.
Casey:
And this is actually what eARC is sort of kind of trying to do as well.
Casey:
It's coming out of the TV via this TOS link through the wall, out of the wall, and then into the receiver.
Casey:
So whatever the TV is seeing, the receiver can play.
Casey:
Then I have three HDMI ports.
Casey:
I have one for the Apple TV, one for a cable box, and one for the Switch.
Casey:
Because those are the only three devices I ever, ever, ever use.
Casey:
We do have a Blu-ray player, but we used it so infrequently that I actually put it in the attic because we basically never use it.
Casey:
So I don't have a Nintendo, excuse me, I don't have a PlayStation, I don't have an Xbox.
Casey:
I've only ever really needed three HDMI ports.
Casey:
And so in that sense, everything's fine.
Casey:
All right, so I take my Apple TV, you know, my 1080 Apple TV, I remove it, leaving all the cabling and everything there, and I plug in the Apple TV 4K.
Casey:
And immediately I realize I have a major problem because what I didn't draw in this picture is that I also have, and I'll put a link in the show notes,
Casey:
I forget the official name for it, but it's an HDMI audio extractor.
Casey:
And I started using this when I got the Apple TV 1080 because it no longer had its own optical output, its own Toslink output.
Casey:
And what I do like to do on occasion is I want to have a concert playing off of Plex.
Casey:
Which means I'm playing it on the Apple TV, but I don't necessarily want to have the TV on because maybe the kids are staring at it or maybe I just don't need to look at the concert.
Casey:
I just want to hear it.
Casey:
And so I needed a way to get audio only out of the Apple TV.
Casey:
and into a second Toslink input into the receiver.
Casey:
So what I had was, strictly speaking, Apple TV, little teeny tiny HDMI cable to this HDMI audio extractor, and then on the other side of the audio extractor, an HDMI cable to the wall.
Casey:
There's an HDMI cable in the wall, and then an HDMI cable coming out of the wall and into the TV.
Casey:
So I immediately realized my audio extractor is too old and it doesn't support 4K.
Casey:
Fine.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
That's my own fault.
Casey:
That's my own fault.
Casey:
So I pull that out and I eschew it entirely.
Casey:
So now I'm going from Apple TV to the wall, through the wall, then to the TV.
Casey:
And I try to place, or I'm looking at it and it just doesn't look right to me.
Casey:
And then I start doing the like calibration or not calibration, but like what video mode am I on?
Casey:
And I should have taken better notes, but I was in such a hurry to try to figure this out that I didn't take good notes.
Casey:
But I think I was on 1080.
Casey:
And so I'm like, well, that's weird.
Casey:
That doesn't seem right at all.
Casey:
And somewhere in the Apple TV settings, there's a mechanism by which you can say, hold on, redetect the TV and see what the issue is or see what video modes you support.
Casey:
And eventually comes back and it says, well, I think all I really got is 4K.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
Oh, yes, I'm good.
Casey:
Oh, here we are.
Casey:
It's 4K Dolby Vision.
Casey:
And everything seems fine.
Casey:
4K, 60 hertz, Dolby Vision, we're all good.
Casey:
And I go to play some stuff.
Casey:
I play some stuff off Apple TV.
Casey:
I play one of the couple of things I have in 4K on Plex.
Casey:
And what I'm finding is even in 1080 content,
Casey:
every like 30 seconds and this is where the problem comes in every like 30 seconds the tv loses all signal i hear nothing i see nothing waits for two or three seconds and then everything comes back so this is happening every 30 seconds to a minute i'm just periodically losing everything on the tv i can't hear anything i can't see anything what's the problem
Marco:
Can I guess?
Marco:
Yes, please.
Marco:
Bad HDMI cable or HDMI cable that can't handle the full bandwidth of the full resolution that you're sending.
Casey:
Your guess is noted.
Casey:
Let me continue telling more of the story.
Casey:
So I eventually think to myself, hmm, the cable inside the wall was put there in the aughts, so like 10 plus years ago.
Casey:
I bet you this ain't right, and it's just not supporting the bandwidth that I need.
Casey:
So I go into the Apple TV settings, and I think...
Casey:
OK, let me see if I crank it down from 4K Dolby Vision at 60 hertz.
Casey:
The best bang for my buck.
Casey:
The thing I will miss the least is if I drop it down to 30 hertz.
Casey:
So I'm still 4K.
Casey:
I'm still Dolby Vision, but 30 hertz.
John:
You're killing me with all these things.
John:
You watch a lot of 60 frames per second content on your television, do you?
Casey:
Here's the thing.
Casey:
I don't.
Casey:
But let me tell you, let me tell you what looks like garbage.
Casey:
What looks like garbage is the animations on the Apple TV, like home screen and anything Apple TV related, like just the animations, like zooming in and out and moving around.
Casey:
I, I swear to you, they look like garbage.
Casey:
They look so crappy at 30 Hertz.
John:
Right.
John:
But there is a setting that I'm surprised this isn't the default, but maybe imported these settings.
John:
The setting that you want is, Hey, when I'm on the menus, Apple TV,
John:
use 60 hertz because i want 60 frames per second animation but when i'm watching an actual tv show use the frame rate that the television show or movie was shot in and please do that no that that wasn't that wouldn't solve this problem though but it wouldn't solve the problem because even in the home screen then i would periodically i would assume get these blackouts dropouts yeah no you have you have some other problem going on but i'm saying like the solution is probably not to let's let's pin my tv to 60 hertz per second everywhere because that's going to make everything look really bad except for the except for the home screen
Casey:
So nonetheless, so nonetheless, I eventually come to this conclusion that I can do 4K at 30 hertz with Dolby Vision.
Casey:
Everything's fine.
Casey:
And I thought I had at least gotten a stopgap for now.
Casey:
And I have already ordered through Monoprice a supposedly 8K capable cable, because I think what I have to do is go back in the wall and string a new like 15 foot cable through the wall.
Casey:
So in other words, Marco, I think your conclusion was or I can tell you your conclusion is my conclusion that the cable in the wall was no good.
Casey:
However, I've already solved the problem.
Casey:
What had happened was, unrelated to all of this work, one of the final steps on the screened-in porch, which is now pretty much done, was installing outdoor speakers.
Casey:
And for the first time in years, I've had a need to plug stuff in to the four speaker ports that are below one of the HDMI ports and the TossLink port that's in this diagram.
Casey:
In the process of doing that, I removed the upper-left HDMI cable, which just so happens to be the Verizon Fios cable box.
Casey:
In placing that cable back in the wall, once I was done with the outdoor speakers, I accidentally pushed the HDMI receptacle inside the wall further into the wall so I can't plug in the HDMI.
John:
It's quality craftsmanship in this box that you've drawn here.
John:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
It's really frustrating.
Casey:
So now I've got to take everything.
Casey:
I've got to remove the faceplate.
Casey:
I've got to take it.
Casey:
I think it was I only had to remove the left hand gang or whatever it's called, the left hand box and pull it out so I can shove the HDMI receptacle back to where it's supposed to be.
Casey:
Blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
So then when I was reconnecting, what I've diagrammed in this picture is blue and pink or whatever, but they're really not color-coded.
Casey:
When I was reconnecting the two HDMI ports or the two HDMI cables for the Switch and the Apple TV, because I was in such a rush to finish this, I accidentally swapped them.
Casey:
And I know this because all of a sudden my TV was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, there's something new here.
Casey:
And then it occurred to me, well, holy shit.
Casey:
I wonder if this cable happens to be better.
Casey:
And sure enough, I accidentally solved my problem because whatever 15-foot HDMI cable the switch was on seems to be good enough to carry 4K Dolby Vision at 60 hertz.
Casey:
And now everything's good and I don't have to worry about anything.
Yeah.
Marco:
So you did swap it to a better cable.
Marco:
It just happened to be one that was already in your wall.
Casey:
Exactly.
John:
I was going to say it was kind of weird that your previous Apple TV was working, but then I again remembered your previous Apple TV was not 4K.
Casey:
Exactly right.
Casey:
So all of this to say, either for bootleg people or regular show people, all of this to say, as it turns out, if you're having very wonky and intermittent problems with video dropping out or something like that,
Casey:
And it's worth, first of all, doing the HDMI test in the Apple TV, because that was my first hint.
Casey:
I don't remember if I said this in my dissertation just now, but there is an HDMI test in the Apple TV.
Casey:
In addition to the thing that tells you what resolutions the TV supports, there is a separate HDMI test.
Casey:
And when I was on the original HDMI port cable, what have you, it was like, nope, this ain't going to work.
Casey:
And so that was my first clue that something was not good here.
Casey:
But then, again, when I accidentally swapped them and ended up accidentally solving my problem, I did the HDMI test again.
Casey:
It was like, oh, yeah, you're good.
Casey:
You're good to go.
Casey:
So this not-too-cheap 8K, theoretically 8K-capable HDMI cable that's on its way from California to me, it will probably eventually have to go in the wall.
Casey:
And I will do it one day.
Casey:
But the good news is I don't have to do it today.
Casey:
So all told, I'm mostly good to go.
Casey:
That being said, I have a request for the listeners.
Casey:
Now I'm in a situation where I think I need a second amplifier.
Casey:
But what I really want to do is the following.
Casey:
I want to be able to have maybe the kids, for example, watching something on TV indoors using the receiver that does the indoor TV and all that.
Casey:
And currently that same receiver is actually doing the outdoor speakers as well.
Casey:
I just choose whether or not I want it to play on both sets of speakers or one or the other.
Casey:
But I don't like that because A, if the kids want to go in and watch TV and I want to listen to something outside, we can't do both of those things at the same time.
Casey:
And B, the way I have things set up right now is that I don't have any remote volume control.
Casey:
For example, if I'm playing something on Plex, like a concert or what have you, and I'm broadcasting it outside.
Casey:
So I feel like what I might want is a second amplifier to drive the outdoor speakers.
Casey:
And I'm not sure.
Casey:
Say that again.
John:
Sonos amp.
John:
If you just get a new receiver, all modern receivers have multiple zones or all sort of medium to high end ones have multiple zones.
John:
And that will solve this problem.
Casey:
Well, so that's the thing is I don't know if I want a new amp.
Casey:
And the reason I say that is because one of the things I do like about this amp is that it's very stupid.
Casey:
It just plays whatever comes in over Toslink and doesn't have to like extract it out of HDMI.
Casey:
I don't have to worry about if in 10 years if I...
John:
They're receivers that aren't amps, Casey, first of all.
John:
And second of all, they're all extremely dumb.
John:
And by the way, I'll put a link in the show notes to this TechHive article that has a nice chart showing the difference between Toslink and HDMI ARC and HDMI eARC.
John:
The summary is Toslink is 384 kilobits per second, and HDMI eARC is 37 megabits per second.
John:
Toslink is good for, like, stereo CD quality sound, maybe?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
No, yes, that's what it was designed for.
Marco:
It's the optical version of SPDIF, which is designed exactly for CD quality sound.
John:
So, but if you're watching movies on your television that have like Adobe Atmos 7.1 tracks, don't use Toslink.
Casey:
Yeah, that's fair.
John:
So anyway, you need a new receiver.
John:
Regardless of this situation you're describing, you need a new receiver.
John:
Now, maybe you want two receivers or a Sonos amp like Marco's saying or whatever, but you need a new receiver for your TV.
John:
And when you get that new receiver for your TV, it might solve this problem for you by having multiple zones.
John:
And if it doesn't, then you have other options.
Casey:
Well, and so the thing is, I mean, maybe the Sonos amp is the right answer, but I mean, $650, hell no, it's not the right answer.
Casey:
Holy God.
John:
You can get a decent receiver for that much.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
No, the reason why I suggested that is because it is kind of beautifully dumb the way I use it, which is probably not the way you'd want to use it.
Marco:
But the way I use it is it is my TV receiver.
Marco:
I power only two speakers.
Marco:
I will never want surround.
Marco:
So it's great at powering only two speakers plus optionally a subwoofer.
John:
You will want surround someday.
Marco:
Just wait.
Marco:
I haven't yet.
Casey:
You say that, but I've been in this house for 13 years, 14 years, and I haven't had surround sound that entire time.
Marco:
Yeah, and what I like about it is that as input, it either has regular analog RCA jacks
Marco:
Or it has an HDMI port, which supports ARC as input.
Marco:
And you actually can buy a little adapter to convert that into an optical in if you need to for your setup, but you probably wouldn't.
Marco:
I would recommend running HDMI directly into it.
Marco:
And what's nice about it, this is the part that made me think of it for you, is that you said remote volume control.
Marco:
And what's nice about the Sonos amp is that there is no remote control to it.
Marco:
You control it via digital things, via network.
Marco:
And it is an AirPlay 2 native device.
Marco:
And so what this means is you can AirPlay something to it from your phone.
Marco:
So can anybody else on your Wi-Fi network?
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
then you just control it from the AirPlay 2 interface and control center on your phone.
Marco:
And you never have to use the terrible Sonos app.
Marco:
I never do.
Marco:
You literally just control it as an AirPlay device or as a TV input device.
Marco:
And it correctly switches between them.
Marco:
If it receives...
Marco:
an audio signal over the HDMI port, that takes priority over anything else.
Marco:
So if you're playing AirPlay and then somebody wants to watch TV, it'll take over with the TV.
Marco:
It's a very well-implemented device for a very narrow set of requirements that I happen to fit.
Marco:
And I absolutely love the Sonos amp for this purpose because then I don't need a separate amp.
Marco:
I don't need a separate receiver because I don't – the other features that receivers tend to offer are all things I don't really need or want.
Marco:
And the Sonos amp is a really nice product for exactly like if you want a optionally TV-connected two-channel speaker amp that is also AirPlay 2 and has no other requirements, it's fantastic.
Marco:
And I don't know of anything else in the market that is like that.
Casey:
Well, and so that's actually, it's funny you bring that up because people have been making, have been excited about this thing, the Belkin Soundform Connect, which appears to be basically an AirPlay 2 receiver, not an amp, but an AirPlay 2 receiver with, you know, digital optical out that you would still have to plug into something.
Casey:
So I wonder if what I, and this is a hundred bucks, which is kind of expensive for what it is, but it's within reason.
Marco:
Oh, no, trust me, that's fantastic because that product has not existed until this point.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I'm so happy this product has finally launched because it's been, I think they announced it like a year ago, and it finally has officially launched.
Marco:
I really could have used a couple of these over the last year.
Casey:
So, so my question is, you know, do I use this?
Casey:
I actually do have an airport express that I haven't used in like 10 years sitting around somewhere.
Casey:
Like, do I use that?
Casey:
And, and, and the question then becomes, what do I plug either an airport express or the Belkin sound form connect?
Casey:
What do I plug it into?
Casey:
I need some sort of amplifier to drive presumably the outdoor speakers, but here's the kicker.
Casey:
And this is where I really don't want a $650 amp that Sonos makes, but your point is fair.
Casey:
how do I control the volume remotely?
Casey:
Cause I really, really, really want to do that.
Casey:
The whole point of half the stuff I've done in the screened in porch, we actually have an update about that for the after show, but half the stuff I did in the screened in porch, I really wanted to be able to control via my phone.
Casey:
And it's already been a bear, even though we've only had the outdoor speakers connected for like a week.
Casey:
It's already deeply frustrating me that I have to get up off my butt and go and walk inside the house to adjust the volume.
Casey:
It's really frustrating me.
Casey:
So if you, the listener, know of a preferably cheap, because sound fidelity doesn't matter.
Casey:
I don't care.
Marco:
No, honestly, the Belkin Sound Inform Connect thing, this might be your answer.
Marco:
If you feed that into any cheap amp,
Marco:
That will give you what you want.
Marco:
And you can get an amp to drive two speakers.
Marco:
I mean, what kind of power output do you really need here?
Marco:
I think 50 watts would be fine for what you're doing with it.
Casey:
Probably.
Casey:
But how do I get the sound control or the volume control?
Marco:
Through AirPlay.
Marco:
That's your volume control.
Casey:
Oh, that's a good point.
Casey:
That's a good point.
Casey:
See, this is why I have you around.
Marco:
The nice solution to this is the Sonos Am for $650.
Marco:
The cheap solution to this is probably a Soundform Connect and whatever cheap 50-watt two-channel speaker amp you want to plug it into.
Marco:
You can get those for like $50, $60 on Amazon, the little desktop ones or whatever.
Marco:
Those are easy to find.
Marco:
Keep the amp at a fixed volume, a high fixed volume, and then just use the line output from the Belkin thing and control it via airplay.
Marco:
It's not an incredibly elegant solution, and if it's a terrible enough amp or if the Soundform Connect has terrible enough output, you might hear hiss noise at low volumes because the amp will be fixed at a high volume.
Marco:
But it would have to be pretty terrible for you to hear that.
Marco:
but that is, that is the cheap solution.
Marco:
And that could be like 160 bucks.
Casey:
Yeah, so I like this idea.
Casey:
I think that's a very reasonable thing.
Casey:
And again, for my priorities, I'm not saying you, Marco, or you, the royal you.
Casey:
Your priorities may be very, very different.
Casey:
But for me, I don't need flawless audio fidelity.
Casey:
These are outdoor speakers.
Casey:
This is the worst possible place to get good audio fidelity.
Casey:
I just want to be able to hear stuff that I'm beaming from somewhere and
Casey:
And I would like to be able to hear it with a volume control that I can do via like a phone.
Casey:
And I think you're right, Marco.
Casey:
I think this paired with some sort of amplifier that's not a complete and utter piece of crap would probably do the trick.
John:
Sounds like you need a big HomePod.
Casey:
Well, I've already got the speakers.
Casey:
Solve your problem.
Casey:
It just plugs in with one cable.
John:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
You have to control the volume from anywhere.
John:
It's independent of your television.
John:
It's got an amplifier.
Casey:
Yeah, but I can't mount the HomePod up at the ceiling, which is where I've mounted these.
John:
You don't have to mount it anywhere.
John:
Just stick it anywhere in your screened-in porch, and you're all done.
Marco:
They aren't exactly outdoor-rated either.
Casey:
Well, that's very true as well.
John:
It'll be fine.
Casey:
Sure.
John:
Just put it in the middle of the porch, away from the sides.
Casey:
Yeah, there you go.
Casey:
All right, so anyway, so listeners, all kidding.
Casey:
I like what Marco's got going here, but if you have a solution that, and I think I'd like to spend like no more than 200 bucks on this.
Casey:
If you have a solution that you think would work, please, you know, send me an email or tweet at me because I'd love to hear.
Casey:
This is one of those times where I really do want to hear input.
Casey:
If you think that you have a different way of handling this, I'd love to.
Casey:
Or if you have an amplifier that you recommend or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
Please let me know.
Casey:
I'd be interested to hear.
Casey:
I agree with you, Marco, that the Sonos is probably the right-est answer.
Marco:
No, no, it's not, because I don't want to hear you complaining about the price for the next six months.
Casey:
Exactly right.
Marco:
Do my cheap solution, and then if it sucks, you can just return the things to Amazon.
Casey:
That's true.
Marco:
I mean, what many people would do is just use a Bluetooth receiver instead.
Marco:
But I don't like Bluetooth for this purpose, not for sound quality reasons.
Marco:
I couldn't care less about that in this kind of context.
Marco:
But because Bluetooth is annoying to pair to.
Marco:
And if you want to have more than one device that can send it audio, AirPlay is so much nicer for that.
Marco:
If you have multiple people in your house or if you want to send it from multiple devices, what if you want to play something from your iPad once and then the next day you want to play it from your spouse's phone?
Marco:
Bluetooth sucks for that.
Marco:
And AirPlay is fantastic for that.
Marco:
So that's why I would highly suggest using AirPlay as your protocol here and just figuring out then what the hardware has to be to do that.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode and Memberful.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who can support us directly at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thanks, everybody.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
So I have a brief bit of a follow-up with regard to the porch and my fans.
Casey:
So if you recall, I was trying to figure out a way to get...
Casey:
two ceiling fans, two Kickler ceiling fans to work with HomeKit.
Casey:
And they use this like proprietary RF thing to go from the wall to the fan.
Casey:
So obviously the wall is connected to the fan, but in terms of control, they use radio frequency to control between the wall, the thing that you're touching on the wall and something internal, well, not internal, but like sitting right above the fan.
Casey:
And my theory, after a lot of talking with many different people on the internet, I mean, it was genuinely extremely helpful.
Casey:
So thank you to everyone who reached out.
Casey:
But my theory was, and several people suggested this, what if you just remove the RF receiver from the equation?
Casey:
So instead of the wiring being from the fuse box to the wall unit...
Casey:
to the RF receiver, to the fan, just take out the receiver.
Casey:
So it goes from fuse box to the wall, to the fan, and that's it.
Casey:
And then put my beloved Lutron Caseta fan controls as the switches.
Casey:
And this, I think it was this past weekend, we finally got around to remounting the fans.
Casey:
My dad and I did.
Casey:
We removed the little RF controller boxes.
Casey:
And sure enough,
Casey:
no problem because they're ac fans it works no sweat so my beloved lutron caseta switches can control fan speed i can do that from my butt when i'm sitting on the porch and it all works lickety split and i didn't have to do anything like the bond um like rf repeater thing which we had talked about where it will receive something from home kit and then repeat that as an rf signal i didn't have to bother with any of that and i'm really really excited about it so
Casey:
If you're in a situation where you have a fan that you want to make HomeKit capable, I can't guarantee this will work.
Casey:
Your mileage will vary.
Casey:
I'm not a lawyer, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
But what we did was pulling the RF receiver from the fan, and it was an external thing.
Casey:
It's not like I'm removing the internals of the fan.
Casey:
It was this box on the outside.
Casey:
We pulled it from the fan, and now I can control the fan via the Lutron Caseta switches, and I'm super happy about that.
Casey:
Cool.
John:
Are your fans still in danger of giving you a haircut?
Yeah.
Casey:
No, actually.
Casey:
So if you recall, the fans were way, way, way too low.
Casey:
And I don't remember how much of this I actually talked about on the show.
Casey:
But we were talking and we had we had a heck of an experience with an electrician for all this work.
Casey:
Our builder to do the physical construction was amazing.
Casey:
I love this guy.
Casey:
He was so great.
Casey:
The electrician was kind of awful.
Marco:
Can I give a quick aside here?
Marco:
Yes, please.
Marco:
Just a very quick aside.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
To any of you out there, if you or someone you know is looking for a career change, become an electrician or a plumber.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
You will never be out of work again.
Casey:
If you're good.
Casey:
If you're good.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
And if you charge.
Marco:
If you're just certified and available.
Yeah.
Marco:
no that's true there are so many like in in you know both places i've lived recently there's been a massive like over demand and and short supply of electricians and especially plumbers but both trades really like and and those jobs like you can charge pretty much whatever you want because people need you so badly and there's not enough of them
Marco:
And really, if you're looking for a job that can never be easily outsourced to other places or that's always going to be in demand, that's always going to be needed in the economy, become an electrician or a plumber.
Marco:
I'm telling you, we are so short on those in so many areas.
Marco:
And so that's like job security for life right there.
Casey:
Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more.
Casey:
And in fact, I think part of the reason my experience with this electrician, who, by the way, came extremely highly recommended from the same individual that recommended the builder that did the job.
Casey:
And again, I loved the builder.
Casey:
The electrician, I think that his company was just spread way too thin.
Casey:
And so what I think ended up happening is we got the JV squad.
Casey:
for doing most of the build.
Casey:
And it was like two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, five steps back, two steps forward, three steps back.
Casey:
And it was just awful.
Casey:
And eventually we were like, look, whoever, this JV squad ain't working for us anymore.
Casey:
And I hate, God, I hate being this guy so much, but we can't have the JV squad anymore.
Casey:
Can you send somebody who like,
Casey:
actually knows what they're doing and that's what ended up happening and this guy this other guy was amazing he was great he got everything squared away look he split um but when he was here at one point he looks at these fans and says wow those are low well yeah yeah i know they're they're really low i forget exactly what the measurement was but they were probably six and a
Casey:
And, you know, oh, those are really low.
Casey:
That's not great.
Casey:
We're not sure.
Casey:
No, it's not great.
Casey:
I don't know what we're going to do about it, but for right now, like, we're just going to live with it.
Casey:
And he says, no, no, no, no, no, you don't understand.
Casey:
Those are too low.
Casey:
Like, yes, I do understand.
Casey:
I'm looking right at it.
Casey:
Yes, I get it.
Casey:
No, you don't understand.
Casey:
Those won't pass inspection.
Casey:
oh so as it turns out i think in the county in which we live uh it the fan blades need to be something like seven foot six inches off the floor of the um of the of the dwell of the thing of the room and when we measured these things like i said like six six or seven foot off the floor or something like that so they were easily a six inches to a foot lower than they could be to pass inspection
Casey:
And so Aaron and I, being the goody two-shoes we are, we're like, whoa, what do we do?
Casey:
Can we raise them up?
Casey:
Oh my God, what do we do?
Casey:
And the guy was like, all right, look, I'm going to be here all day.
Casey:
So first of all, let me just kind of think about what to do about this in the first place.
Casey:
And let me see if I can find any sort of solution to bring these up.
Casey:
Because these fans were not flush mount.
Casey:
I had actually emailed Kickler, the company that makes them, was like, hey, can I flush mount these?
Casey:
Is there anything I can buy to do that?
Casey:
And they were like, ha ha, no.
Casey:
And so I went looking for like a smaller down rod, which is the thing that the fan is hanging on.
Casey:
And we got one that was marginally smaller, but it really didn't make a noticeable difference.
Casey:
And so we were like, I don't know what to do.
Casey:
Long story, well, already long story, slightly shortened.
Casey:
What the guy ended up doing, the electrician ended up doing, was he had like some piping, like metal piping that I think was supposed to be used for plumbing or something like that.
Casey:
I don't even know why it was in his truck.
Casey:
But he had this tubing that was really, really, really short, and he could fashion as basically a downrod.
Casey:
And so he put one of those in each of the fans, and that brought it way up.
Casey:
So it's still lower than I would like in the grand scheme of things, but it's not like you step into the porch and go, oh!
Casey:
What the hell's going on there?
Casey:
So now it's just like, oh, those are low, aren't they?
Casey:
Rather than, oh my God, am I going to lose my hair?
Casey:
All in all, it's all good.
Casey:
We have speakers, we have fans.
Casey:
I can control the fans via my phone, which of course I almost never do because the only speed that's worthwhile in Richmond, Virginia in the summer is high.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I can turn them on and off and I could adjust the speed if I so cared.
Casey:
And so I'm really, really happy about that.
John:
I can't wait to hear the conclusion of the story of when this quote-unquote 8K HDMI cable arrives.
Casey:
Well, I agreed.
Casey:
It's going to be spray-painted gold.
Casey:
You're probably right.
Casey:
I should see what it is and get a link for it.
John:
Buying HDMI cables, to be fair, is not particularly easy.
John:
yeah they don't they don't make it easy for like they don't let you you know you can't say that an hdmi cable is an hdmi 2.1 cable you have to use their read code words and they have these apps various manufacturers make apps that let you scan like the barcode of an hdmi cable and try to tell you what it's actually rated for because it's really complicated now unfortunately but anyway uh newer cable is probably better than 10 year old cable
Casey:
Oh, it's more than 10, I think.
Casey:
I don't remember exactly when all this was done, but it was shortly after we moved in, if I remember right, that we had put all this stuff in the walls.
Casey:
And then my dad and I had rejiggered it slightly, I think a couple of years later.
Casey:
So I would guess this was literally 2010 or thereabouts that these cables came from.
Casey:
So it's a miracle that any of them worked.
John:
i put a link to in the in the chat room and it's in the show notes uh for 8k certified uh-huh yeah agree agree hdmi 2.1 oh is that i completely agree that look it's got the little qr code so you should get the app and scan the little qr code and it will tell you something all right well too late now because it's already on its way i'm sure it's fine you don't have an 8k television like you just need literally any any reasonably modern hdmi cable your problem is that the cables are long though you said it's like 15 feet or something
Casey:
Well, I don't remember exactly how long I need, but my TV is obnoxiously high to the point that John would burn down my house if he... Oh, I know.
John:
We've all seen it.
John:
Everyone knows your TV is too high.
John:
It's basically on the ceiling.
Casey:
You know, it is.
Casey:
We have to lay on the floor.
Marco:
He has to lay down on a bed to watch TV.
Marco:
How much space is there between the top of the TV and the ceiling?
Casey:
I would guess six to 12 inches, something like that.
Casey:
And it's, but now it's, it's a fairly low, it's like a, I have a normal person house.
Casey:
I don't have like a 30 foot ceiling like, like you do.
Casey:
But, uh, so I think I've, I think we have eight foot ceilings, I think.
Casey:
Uh, so it's probably, I think it's a 55 inch TV and I think it's six to 12, somewhere between six to 12 inches off the ceiling.
Casey:
every time you watch tv you can see up all the actors noses again i i concede and concur that it is not the perfect placement for a television but given that my room is situated the way it is and i don't know if marco remembers but he's been there no i remember i couldn't do really anything else without just completely turning the room into a television room rather than a like
Casey:
living room.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
John:
But it is a television room.
Marco:
Are you kidding?
Marco:
That's what living rooms are.
Marco:
Welcome to modern society.
Marco:
Your living room is a television room.
John:
He doesn't want to block that fireplace that he uses so often.
John:
Lots of times in Virginia he needs to start a fire and keep his house warm.
Casey:
I hate you so much.
Casey:
You're fired and I quit.
Casey:
Alright, it's been great everyone.
Casey:
Thanks a bunch.
Casey:
Don't worry about canceling your rememberships.
Casey:
You never know when it will come back.
Casey:
i'm saying that bootleg people are gonna get scared nobody canceled if anyone cancels because of casey no i'm kidding for the love of god i'm kidding don't put the children in the middle of this hard to say the listeners the children are we the children uh yeah i need i never done nobody cancel i need nobody to cancel because i need to afford this sonos to pay for that gold hdmi cable he just bought
Marco:
And then down the road, pay for the renovation to pull the fireplace out and just mount the TV on a regular spot in the wall.
John:
And then the head injury from the fan.
John:
Nearly.
John:
You're going to jump up from your chair one day and surprise.
Casey:
I kid you not.
Casey:
I guarantee there will come a time before we move out of this house that we're going to be playing cards or something outside.
Casey:
And I'm going to have a really good hand of like, and I'm not talking like poker or something like that.
Casey:
I'm talking like something old man like, you know, like Aaron and I used to play 500 Rummy a lot out there, you know, when we were just the two of us.
Casey:
And I'll get like a really good hand in 500 Rummy or something like that.
Casey:
Next thing you know, I'll jump up.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
And oh, God, I don't have hands anymore.
Marco:
I think as long as the blade doesn't hit your eye, you're probably okay.
Marco:
It's not going to be comfortable, but I don't think it's going to cut your hand off.
John:
I dislike fans strongly.
John:
Wait, what's wrong with fans, John?
John:
I don't like fans, period.
John:
My wife grew up in a house where every single room had a fan.
John:
What is wrong with you?
John:
Because I don't want someone constantly blowing on me.
John:
Ha ha ha!
Marco:
What I like about ceiling fans is that they extend much further upwards the comfortable temperature rings that you can sleep in a room without using the air conditioning.
John:
People are just addicted to fans.
John:
They just need to have the noise.
John:
They need to have the wind constantly blowing on them.
John:
Probably people also who are often hot.
John:
People who really run hot or run cold.
John:
If you run hot, you probably want air constantly blowing past you to take all your body heat away so you don't get overheated.
John:
Yeah, I run hot.
John:
Yep, same.
John:
I do not.
John:
I do not want fans.
John:
I don't want the noise.
John:
I don't want the breeze.
John:
I don't want any of it.
Marco:
Yeah, that's because you're always cold.
Marco:
What I love about fans is that if you're in a place that doesn't have a lot of wind, which my other...
John:
You are not in a place that doesn't have a lot of wind, Marco.
Marco:
No, but I was for the last 10 years.
Marco:
And it's so nice to have a constant slight breeze if it's artificially created, if you can't get a natural one.
Marco:
Because otherwise, if it's like 74 degrees, it's so hard to sleep.
Marco:
And that's stupid.
Marco:
And I hate having to use air conditioning if I don't have to.
Marco:
I would so much rather prefer not using air conditioning.
John:
well so you're saying you only need it in the bedroom is that is the only place you want a fan is in the bedroom i like a ceiling fan in the bedroom and in the office because those are the two places where i have to like sit for a long like stay for a long time so you get a fanless mac and you saw a gigantic fan in the room with your back
Marco:
Yeah, it's quieter.
Marco:
In the summertime, I don't like using the air conditioning in my office more than I have to.
Marco:
I can be in my office comfortably up to about 80 degrees with the ceiling fan before I want to switch over to air conditioning.
Marco:
Because they're effective.
Marco:
They're very good.
Marco:
And it saves a lot of energy.
Marco:
I think it's nicer.
Marco:
I'd rather be in a room with a fan that's a little bit warmer rather than having to switch over to air conditioning and then have like the weird cold hot transitions as I come in and out of the room or in and out of the house.
Marco:
Like I hate all that.
Marco:
If I don't have to do that, I'd rather not.
Marco:
So I greatly prefer like if a fan can keep me cool enough and I don't need to use the air, I'd rather not use the air.
Casey:
See, I have nothing.
Casey:
I love air conditioning more than almost anything.
Casey:
I just really feel like for my comfort, I need two things.
Casey:
And this may make me very weird, and I'm okay with that.
Casey:
I need moving air almost always.
Casey:
It's very rare that I'm okay in still air.
Casey:
Wow, that was way too much rhyming.
Casey:
Oh, my gosh.
Casey:
Secondly, I really, I get uncomfortable if there isn't some sort of audio somewhere nearby.
Casey:
And I think this is where John and I would never be able to be roommates.
John:
No, no, this is terrible.
John:
You're just combining all the things that I don't like.
Marco:
You have an easy solution, Casey.
Marco:
Get a Mac Pro and put it on your desk.
Marco:
And live inside it.
Marco:
Just turn it around.
Marco:
Face the back towards you.
John:
Do you have the television on?
John:
Casey's going to have the television on constantly at maximum volume with seven ceiling fans in each room all at full blast all the time.
Marco:
But all the TVs are going to be up on the ceiling.
Marco:
That's right.
Casey:
No, generally speaking, like when I'm around the house, whatever room I'm in, we'll have the fan running usually, but not always.
Casey:
And pretty much always there will either be ambient music playing or I will be privately listening to a podcast.
Casey:
One of those two things is almost always happening.
Marco:
Do the other members of your family want this or is it just you mostly?
Casey:
Aaron has learned to live with it, I think.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
It's a rain endorsement.
Casey:
No, I don't know.
Casey:
That's not entirely true.
Casey:
Like, Aaron, her family grew up with, they were big into white noise when sleeping, typically fans.
Casey:
Oh, my goodness.
Casey:
So this definitely qualifies John as the people who need the noise.
Casey:
So, like, Aaron cannot do silence.
Casey:
And I used to be able to do silence just fine in terms of sleeping, that is.
Casey:
I used to be able to do silent sleeping just fine.
Casey:
But now, after years and years and years of very faintly hearing the white noise machine in the kids' rooms because it's being piped through the monitor, now when there's silence, like, it was right after New Year's, I think, my parents took the kids for the first time in months and months and months and months and months.
Casey:
and we had a night just the two of us here at home and we didn't have the monitor on because there were no kids and there was no white noise machine on because no kids and it was actually somewhat hard for me to sleep because i'm so used to now this stupid white noise and i've had arguments with aaron where i've said i don't want them addicted to this white noise like you freaking are because she cannot sleep without some sort of fan and now i've now i've done it to myself so
John:
Well, I mean, it sounds like Casey should move to the beach because that's got white noise and wind all the time.
John:
That's true.