We Don’t Have Enough Bees
Marco:
I have recently given up on three fights or battles, I guess, that I've been battling for a long time.
Marco:
Number one, yes, I saw the Technology Connections videos about dishwashers and dishwasher detergent.
Marco:
And I know that my dishwasher works better on powder than on the dishwasher pods.
Marco:
I've been fighting this fight.
Marco:
I've been using dishwasher powder.
Marco:
And two things have made me start buying pods.
Marco:
Number one, we now have a dishwasher that was made after the pod era.
Marco:
The new dishwasher does not have the pre-rinse cycle hole in it.
Marco:
It was designed for pods from the start.
John:
Wait, what hole are you talking about?
John:
The pre-rinse thing is just a place that's not covered up that you put stuff in, right?
Marco:
Basically, I mean, so the one at the beach, it has like, you know, the big hole and then there's like a little small, a smaller well next to it.
Marco:
But the flap covers both of them.
Marco:
But when you lift it up, like there's like little slots that like some of the powder in the pre-rinse will fall out when you close the door, like just from gravity.
Yeah.
John:
You can just put some, the prerence thing, like you should send me a photo of your thing.
John:
I'll tell you where you should put it.
John:
But the point is you want it to be someplace where when you close the door, it just falls down because that's when it's going to be used.
John:
I mean, why don't you just pour it in the bottom then?
John:
Yeah, you could do that.
John:
You could do that too, but are you afraid of squirting it on the heating element or something, you know?
Casey:
No, I believe in that same video, I haven't watched it in a long time, but Alec just said, if just dump it on the door and then close the door, which is what we do.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And the reason you don't do it in the bottom, like I said, because what if you're worried about a glob of it goes on the heating element and then like bakes on there or something?
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Well, anyway, so reason number two that I'm just buying pods now is that it's getting harder and harder to find the powder.
Marco:
Like, you know, I just have, like, a grocery store in the suburbs where I live here.
Marco:
And, like, the grocery store, you know, it's like a big chain grocery store.
Marco:
There's, like, one box left.
John:
You're going to stop thinking, like, you're on Fire Island.
John:
You can buy things on the internet and they'll deliver them to your house, you know?
John:
you don't have to get them in a wagon or anything i never thought about buying dishwasher powder on the internet like it's so cheap you buy it in bulk like it just so we don't use powder we use like the it's like essentially liquid or gel it's like powder suspended in a thing which i i'm sure you can find but if you want powder just buy a couple boxes of it from amazon and stick them in your basement
Marco:
Oh, that's interesting.
Marco:
I don't have a basement, but that's interesting.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Maybe I might relent on this.
Marco:
Well, my other two fights, I think you might have more to say.
Marco:
I know Casey will about this next one.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Marco:
I have gone back to the official Dropbox client.
John:
i never left so okay there's a better way marco there's a better way but carry on wait when you say the official one file provider or no uh what's the current one from their website as of you know three days so that's the thing i discovered this while doing a hyperspace development i'm like oh i think like i think i mentioned this ages ago in the show that like somehow i've managed to avoid upgrading dropbox to the to the new version that uses apple's file provider framework the same underlying framework that powers icloud drive
John:
Because that's the new recommended way to do it.
John:
It's like somehow Dropbox hasn't updated me.
John:
So when I was doing hyperspace development, I'm like, OK, I want to do the cloud storage support.
John:
I need to get the Dropbox version that supports file provider.
John:
But I wasn't going to put that on my computer.
John:
So I went to another computer.
John:
I'm like, all right, let me just make a new Dropbox account, download the client.
John:
I'm sure I'll have a file provider one.
John:
Not only did I not have the file provider version of the Dropbox client, but when I asked for it, it said, no, you can't have it.
John:
Like they wouldn't let you download it?
John:
No, like it's inside the app.
John:
You can say like, do you want to use file provider or not?
John:
It said this account is not eligible because it was the account I had just created.
John:
This account is not eligible for the file provider version of Dropbox.
John:
That's really weird.
John:
So I think probably because you have an older account, you are eligible.
John:
But anyway, I think in settings somewhere it says, please use the file provider version, which is weird.
John:
You think it would be a different download or something, but...
John:
Anyway, my stance is that the file provider one is worse.
John:
So I hope you don't have it.
Marco:
Thanks.
Marco:
I mean, we'll see.
Marco:
I mean, so I've been using Maestro, this open source Dropbox client that uses like their API.
Marco:
And the reason why I switched to Maestro in the first place, we talked about it on the show, I think years ago at this point.
Casey:
Yeah, it was a long time ago.
Marco:
Yeah, the reason why I switched is that the Dropbox app was getting really, like, just inefficient and bloated.
Marco:
And Maestro was just, like, it was... And this was right around the time that Dropbox switched to Electron for their app.
Marco:
And so the Dropbox app took up tons of RAM.
Marco:
It was constantly idling CPU cores, like, you know, pegging CPU cores.
Marco:
It was just massively inefficient.
Marco:
And it was also adding a bunch of, like, annoyances, which it's still full of.
Marco:
You know, just, like, pestering you for more and more permissions, pestering you whenever you do anything in your computer that Dropbox might want a piece of.
Marco:
They'll pop up a modal in the middle of your work saying, hey, you know, you can use Dropbox for part of it.
Marco:
Just nagging the crap out of you.
Marco:
And Maestro came up and was like, look, here's an open source thing.
Marco:
And it's like lightweight and very gentle in your resources and doesn't bug you at all.
Marco:
And I've used Maestro for years.
Marco:
The problem is, it works like 98% of the time.
Marco:
And that other 2% drives me nuts.
Marco:
Like, every time something doesn't sync from Dropbox, or it syncs really slowly, like, you know, I have to wait like 10 minutes for something to appear that I know that I put there on a different computer or whatever, like...
Marco:
Maestro works really well a lot of the time, but not all of the time.
Marco:
And the actual official Dropbox client, I never had those problems with.
Marco:
Now, granted, I haven't used it in years.
Marco:
So maybe the current Dropbox app is just as inconsistent, but probably not.
Marco:
It never was.
Marco:
It had a lot of other faults, but it always performed consistently in terms of actually syncing your files quickly and reliably.
John:
I still find that to be true, by the way, with the non-file provider version.
John:
Works all the time.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
I think when I gave up Dropbox as a client for Maestro, I believe I was still on Intel Max, I think.
Marco:
Me too.
Marco:
What's different now is that...
Marco:
We have all these efficiency cores, and macOS is designed for Apple Silicon.
Marco:
It's designed to put almost any background process on efficiency cores and to lock them there.
Marco:
They aren't even able to use the performance cores in most cases.
Marco:
So when Dropbox, if their client now has some kind of background process like pegging a CPU core, that's almost certainly going to spend its entire time running on an efficiency core.
Marco:
And the efficiency cores on Apple Silicon are basically free in terms of like, you know, what it does to your computing experience.
Marco:
Like you can have an efficiency core running 100% all the time.
Marco:
In fact, many system services do exactly that.
Marco:
And it's fine.
Marco:
Like nothing bad happens.
Marco:
You barely even notice any kind of power impact or heat or fan impact because the efficiency cores are really efficient.
Marco:
That's hence the name and why we keep getting a lot of them.
Marco:
So if an app like Dropbox starts spinning one of those cores now on these modern Macs,
Marco:
it has almost no noticeable impact to the user or to the system performance.
Marco:
So anyway, I'm trying that for a while.
Marco:
I guess I'll report back if I have any major problems, but I have given up on the Dropbox fight.
Marco:
I am now back to the official Dropbox client.
Marco:
And finally, my third battle.
Marco:
This one I've been fighting for a while, too.
Marco:
I think it started around the same time for similar reasons.
Marco:
I have kept, I usually keep a few browsers installed on my computer.
Marco:
You know, I used to keep them all just because I was a web developer.
Marco:
um i've pared down safari is my main browser i used to also try to keep a second browser or third browser installed for not only sites that don't work in safari but also just like i like to have separate browsers to be able to test different account logins logged in versus not logged in state one like ever since i ever since i started the restaurant i've been having a second browser for restaurant related accounts to be logged into all the time so it doesn't interfere with my main browser accounts and so what i've used for this purpose is
Marco:
For a while, I used Brave, which is one of those many browsers that's like, let's take Chrome and strip all the Google branding and certain integrations from it.
Marco:
But it's basically Chrome rebranded and kind of un-Googled.
Marco:
And Brave, over time, it's been fine.
Marco:
It's gotten a little weird over time with some of its own pushiness and weirdness.
Marco:
It's like, I don't...
Marco:
I don't need you to be pushy.
Marco:
I'm using you to be specifically anti-pushy.
Marco:
So that's kind of weird.
Marco:
I've used Firefox for this purpose in recent years.
Marco:
If you haven't used Firefox since Tay Day a million years ago, give it a shot.
Marco:
It's actually very good in a number of ways.
Marco:
It's surprisingly fast, and it's very good.
Marco:
However...
Marco:
A lot of stuff doesn't work in Firefox still.
Marco:
And that's probably never going to change given its market share.
Marco:
So there's a lot of now checking for Chrome specifically by websites and web apps.
Marco:
And some of this is just because they only want to test on Chrome because they're lazy or they're using some kind of cutting edge web API that is not well supported by other browsers.
Marco:
Some of it, though, is like they're just doing like dumb user agent checking.
Marco:
So because like, again, they don't want to they don't want to bother checking for capabilities, which is bad in lots of ways.
Marco:
But that's the reality of the web these days.
Marco:
Some of it is like, you know, like I try to pay my estimated taxes to a New York state website recently.
Marco:
I'm on another browser.
Marco:
And it's like you have to use Safari or Chrome.
Marco:
We will not allow this.
Marco:
It's hard to to not be using Safari and Chrome.
Marco:
I did try Orion because I've been using Kagi or Kaji.
Marco:
I think it's Kagi.
Marco:
I've been using Kagi in my search engine for a while.
Marco:
It's pretty good.
Marco:
Check it out.
Casey:
Yeah, same.
Marco:
It's actually very good.
Marco:
I mean, it's mentioned on the show.
Marco:
I've had good luck with it.
Marco:
I've been using it for, I think, like six months.
Marco:
It's been great.
Marco:
Anyway, Kagi has a browser called Orion.
Marco:
It's very Safari-ish in certain ways, but it advertises a lot of different features and compatibilities and everything.
Marco:
I have found Orion is promising for the future, but right now it's very beta.
Marco:
It crashes a lot.
Marco:
A lot of sites don't work on it.
Marco:
A lot of functionality doesn't work on it.
Marco:
And again, it's similar to like my maestro thing with Dropbox.
Marco:
It's like maybe 98% of stuff works on it, but that last 2% is driving me nuts.
Marco:
And when my browser crashes like once a week, that's too much, even though that's a small percentage of the time, but that's too much.
Marco:
So Orion, I've used for a while as this browser.
Marco:
I've now quit it.
Marco:
I have now just installed stupid Chrome.
Marco:
So now I have the actual Dropbox app and actual Chrome.
John:
Well, for your things that you listed of why you had alternate browsers, have you tried Safari profiles?
Marco:
No, I didn't.
Marco:
Because one of the main reasons why is that I actually do want a Chrome-based browser installed because over time, it seems like Safari's compatibility with the web is actually getting worse.
Marco:
Like, I think it peaked.
Marco:
And then as Google has pushed a lot of app-like native functionality to try to say, look, we're going to tell you what we want to undermine the App Store and App Hegemony.
Marco:
We're going to do what we want, and we're going to call it a standard.
Marco:
And then...
Marco:
people will say Apple's not following standards.
Marco:
Like, standards are such BS.
Marco:
It's always political.
Marco:
It's always what one company wants.
Marco:
Like, there's so much BS and marketing and pressuring behind, quote, standards.
Marco:
Because, like, who decides what's a standard?
Marco:
Like, it's always some, it's always weird and pressuring like that.
John:
That's a
John:
W3C, Apple is a member as well.
John:
But all the reasons you find sites that don't work in Safari has nothing to do with standards.
John:
It has everything to do with what you just said.
John:
Developers are only testing Chrome.
John:
Like they're relying on some quirk or bug or legacy behavior that only exists in Chrome and is not compliant with any particular standards.
John:
even if the standard says like this behavior is undefined but chrome behaves in a certain way if you only test in chrome your site will only work in chrome because if you rely on that on you know undefined behavior and so it's kind of that's true safari has an uphill battle here because of their smaller market share they have to figure out why doesn't this site work in safari and what weird quirk of chrome like it's not like they're doing it nefariously they're just like well we only test in chrome because it's the only browser that matters uh drives me nuts too but that's the reality
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And also, like, you know, I know Safari is doing a lot of things now with, you know, with privacy in mind to block certain behaviors or limit certain behaviors or filter certain sites or cookies or trackers or whatever.
Marco:
And that's great as my main browser when I'm just like reading the web.
Marco:
But that does mean stuff's going to break.
Marco:
I also like to use ad blocking extensions in Safari.
Marco:
But even when I disable those when certain functionality breaks, a lot of websites seem to be breaking in Safari on certain functionality now.
Marco:
And I hadn't seen this for a long time.
Marco:
I hadn't seen this for a decade.
Marco:
But just in the last year, I'm really seeing a lot of stuff break on Safari.
Marco:
And it's to the point now where it's like...
Marco:
i just my second browser should just be stupid chrome because i know like no matter what if something doesn't work in safari i know i can go over to chrome not brave not firefox not orion if it's chrome i know it will work so i'm back to stupid chrome is my second browser still not my first i it's i really don't like it uh on a number of levels but and i and i'm certainly a google skeptic in a lot of ways so i like to keep some distance from google but uh here i am i gave up
John:
Look at you, running official Dropbox, running Chrome as your second browser, so then you'll be on an Intel Mac like me.
John:
Yeah, I wouldn't hold your breath on that one.
Casey:
All right, so I have some follow-up about this.
Casey:
First of all, do you have a Synology that you use anymore or not really?
Casey:
Uh, do you have, do you have one that you're using at this time or now?
Marco:
No, I, my last analogy, I got that, that little four bay, uh, cheapo one and it was a bad experience.
Marco:
Like it was unreliable.
Marco:
It crashed and broke a lot and needed to be rebooted all the time.
Marco:
And I was just like, you know what?
Marco:
This is stupid.
Marco:
This is not.
Marco:
So right now I'm, I'm, I have a, uh, one of the new M4 Mac minis.
Marco:
I got like the base model, uh, just plus 10 gig ethernet.
Marco:
And, uh, that's now my, my home file server and runs a few accessory tasks in the house.
John:
As discussed on previous episodes, Casey.
Casey:
Yeah, well, and that's why I thought that he didn't have a synology anymore.
Casey:
But the reason I ask is I recently posted on my website about how you can excise Dropbox from your life if you do have a synology in your world, but that's not applicable to you.
Marco:
Well, and by the way, the reason I didn't do all that stuff, first of all, yeah, even when I had a Synology, I didn't do that.
Marco:
Because, like, to me, it's adding so many potential points of failure.
Marco:
It's like, we can replace the Dropbox app with this Rube Goldberg machine over here.
Marco:
If you have this thing and you install this thing on it and this other package, you know, connect this to this.
Marco:
And it's like, I could do that.
Marco:
I'm glad you do it.
Marco:
I'm glad it works for you most of the time.
Casey:
I know all the time.
Casey:
It always works.
Casey:
Eh.
John:
Occasionally, Marco will say, hey, where's your file?
Casey:
Yeah, that's because I'm an idiot and forget to upload it.
Casey:
That has nothing to – or forget to put it in the right folder.
Casey:
That has nothing to do with the Dropbox Rube Goldberg machine.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
That's okay.
Marco:
Fair.
Marco:
But yeah, maybe I blame your Rube Goldberg box for too much.
Marco:
But anyway –
Marco:
More complexity is not what I'm going for.
Marco:
To me, it's like, all right.
Casey:
And that's also fair.
Casey:
The last time I used the Dropbox app, it was such a pile of trash.
Casey:
Now, admittedly, this was years ago.
Casey:
And it was such a pile of trash that I could not stand it anymore.
Casey:
And it was turning into Electron where it was like, hey, have we told you about WorkChat or whatever?
Casey:
Not Electron, I'm sorry, Evernote.
Casey:
It was turning into Evernote where it was constantly pimping other things that it wanted you to use.
Casey:
And, oh, God, I just hated every moment of it.
Casey:
If it works for you, that's fine.
Casey:
It does not work for me anymore.
Marco:
So what I'm hoping, because you're right, it is like growth hacked out the butt.
Marco:
It is so annoying.
Marco:
Dropbox, they're just shamelessly shoving crap in your face all the time.
Marco:
Whenever you open up the window on your Mac or if you go to, God forbid, the Dropbox website,
Marco:
It just shoves crap and promos and hooks at you for just, hey, give us more.
Marco:
Give us more.
Marco:
Hey, do more with us.
Marco:
Give us more.
Marco:
Upgrade.
Marco:
And I pay for it.
Marco:
So what I need Dropbox to be is I'm going to give you some money every year and you're going to sync my files.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
That's all I want.
Marco:
That's what the money's for.
Marco:
It's a reference, Casey.
Marco:
But I'm hoping that by having installed the app and having paid them the money, if I never actually need to open the Dropbox window and I never have to actually open the Dropbox website, I'm hoping this will work the way I need it to, which is I gave you the money, you sync my files, and you don't bother me.
Casey:
We'll see.
Casey:
I mean, that's fair.
Casey:
And again, like it does not that that is not something I want in my life and I'm willing to trade some complexity to not have to deal with that.
Casey:
Your your perspective is totally reasonable.
Casey:
And in fact, probably the smarter one, if I'm honest with myself.
Casey:
The other piece of follow up just to get ahead of the 8000 emails we are going to get.
Casey:
Have you tried the ARC browser?
Casey:
Do you want to try the ARC browser?
Casey:
And if you did, why aren't you using it?
Casey:
I have tried it, although admittedly not recently.
Casey:
It wasn't for me.
Casey:
It was too different.
Casey:
And I didn't think that it was doing things that I wanted in my life.
Casey:
But the ARC people are going to come for you if you don't at least acknowledge the existence of ARC.
Marco:
I think Opera's better.
Casey:
I can't tell if you're messing with me or not.
Marco:
Does opera still exist?
Marco:
It does.
Marco:
I use that joke so many times.
Marco:
Yeah, the opera person is going to get really mad at me.
Marco:
You know, Ark, I've heard of Ark.
Marco:
I haven't checked it out because what everyone says is a version of what you just said, which is like,
Marco:
this is a really interesting idea.
Marco:
It's like, when all the reviews came out of the Palm Pre, you know, going back a ways, all the reviews of the Palm Pre were like, this is really interesting.
Marco:
No one used it.
Marco:
Like, no one bought it.
Marco:
No one said, I'm personally switching to the Palm Pre.
Marco:
Maybe Christina Warren might have, but no one else did.
Marco:
And so there's a lot of things come out in tech where it's like, this is interesting.
Marco:
This is a new, fresh take on something.
Marco:
And the reviews are all like, yeah, this is interesting.
Marco:
I've done it.
Marco:
This is an interesting new way to do something.
Marco:
But when it comes to actually real life, you're like, oh, actually, no, I want the normal way, please.
Marco:
It's too weird or it has too many downsides or quirks or edge cases.
Marco:
And there's a reason the normal way is the normal way.
John:
Wasn't the Palm Pre the one that WebOS first launched on?
John:
Yes.
John:
Well, so what the Palm Pre put out in many ways became the normal way.
John:
I think the reason people didn't use the Palm Pre is the combination of ingredients did not make for a satisfying meal, to torture that analogy a little bit.
John:
But many of the software and interface innovations on the Palm Pre eventually became the normal ways that phones work.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I think that's those kind of articles make a lot of sense.
John:
So there's like there's a lot of good ideas here.
John:
But in the end, does this coalesce into a product that I think, you know, was going to replace whatever my current phone was?
John:
And that didn't work out for Palm.
John:
But the ideas were good there.
Marco:
Yes, but it was like, you know, similar to like using a third party browser.
Marco:
It's like, well, there's a whole ecosystem around this.
Marco:
So with Palm, you know, one of the problems was the Palm Pre, you know,
Marco:
It had a bunch of good ideas, but it was like, is it better than the iPhone?
Marco:
And I think BlackBerry was still big at the time.
Marco:
Like, is it better than the iPhone and BlackBerry?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Like, there's some good ideas.
Marco:
Everyone's like, well, I hope the iPhone takes some of these ideas.
Marco:
And over time it did.
Marco:
But no one was like, these ideas are so good that I'm willing to forego the other, like, you know, the ecosystem, the inertia, the developer support.
Marco:
You know, see also like Windows Phone 8.
Marco:
Windows Phone 8 had a bunch of interesting ideas.
Marco:
Some of which were pretty good.
Marco:
And that also got a bunch of the same reviews of like, this is really interesting.
Marco:
There's some really good ideas here.
Marco:
But, you know, you check with those reviewers, like, did you actually buy Windows 8 Phone and use it full time?
Marco:
Oh, no, of course not.
John:
Yeah, well, the ARC equivalent of that is there may be good ideas in ARC, but in the end, if what you want is a browser that you know the sites will work in, that's where you end up at the browser that has the most market share, which back in the day was IE.
John:
So how do you feel about that?
John:
But today is Chrome.
Marco:
There are only so many battles I'm willing to fight at once.
Marco:
And when you go off the beaten path, when you say, I'm not going to use the biggest choice or the most popular choice or the official app for something, you're oftentimes signing up for some degree of friction by doing that.
Marco:
You're saying, well...
Marco:
Yes, it's not going to quite work all the same way or certain things might be worse in order for me to get the better behavior I'm looking for with other alternative or whatever.
Marco:
Like there's always tradeoffs and friction involved in that.
Marco:
That might be worth it for you in certain ways.
Marco:
Like I do certain things the hard way or the weird way or the off the beaten pathway, but I can't do everything that way.
Marco:
So I will have the areas that I care a lot about, like tweaking and having special certain ways, and I'm willing to tolerate the shortcomings or the missing features or the occasional friction that comes from those things.
Marco:
But the web browser, I just got tired of maintaining that battle.
Marco:
I just want a web browser that loads web pages and they work reliably.
Casey:
Man, that Dropbox thing is killing me.
Casey:
You know what has also been killing me is not having a limited time merch sale going on.
Casey:
But guess what, baby?
Casey:
Smooth transition.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
It is merch time.
Casey:
So, John, why don't you take us on a tour of the storefront and let us know what's available, please.
John:
This is our annual WWDC sale, which we usually do around the same time.
John:
We used to try to get these on sale so that they could be manufactured and delivered to you so you could wear them to WWDC where you'd see all the other nerds.
John:
But now so few people get to go to WWDC.
John:
That's not really a factor.
John:
But we still want it to be early enough that if on the off chance that you did want to wear one of these WWDC, there is a chance that you could order it, receive it, and then wear it.
John:
uh to california anyway this is the crop of products we have for you this year so to start we have two new uh m series shirts uh it occurred to me when i was making these that we never actually did a shirt for the m2 ultra i don't know if it was just not exciting enough or it fell when it was introduced fell between sales and by the time we had a sale it seemed like it was old news but you know it's not all news the m3 ultra
John:
That's very recent news.
John:
And we've got an M3 Ultra shirt.
John:
It sounds like old news.
John:
It does, but that's part of the excitement.
John:
We have an M3 Ultra shirt now.
John:
If you wear an M3 Ultra shirt, people might wonder, is he wearing that ironically?
John:
Like maybe you are, but maybe you're not because it is Apple's most powerful chip.
John:
Like there's no, like there's no one that's better than it, but the number is lower than the other chips and the M4 Max does beat it in a lot of things, including single thread, but not even, even in other situations, the M4 Max comes real close.
John:
But anyway, it is the biggest and baddest chip.
John:
So we have an m3 ultra shirt for you again No chip design in the back just a regular m3 ultra and we also have I have to fix the image on our website.
John:
I know it's wrong I'll fix it after the show.
John:
Anyway, we also have In the tradition of the m1 ultra which is the only other ultra shirt that we did we have the m3 shirt where instead of saying m3 with ultra underneath it it recognizes the fact that the m3 ultra like the m1 ultra is made of two max chips and
John:
stuck together with the silicon interposer thing right uh and last time we did that we had like instead of ultra it said max and then it had rotated uh you know 180 degrees or whatever max stuck end to end to it so the other max is upside down but this time it doesn't say max because the m3 ultra isn't really two m3 maxes stuck together it's two m3 max ish
John:
chips stuck together because they have thunderbolt 5 and who knows what other changes they have the interposer and the actual m3 max doesn't have one uh or i see i can't do it what was i already forgot the thing the die-to-die interconnect d2d anyway sorry nomenclature experts i'm i'm it's impossible for me not to say interposer in fact the name of this product is m3 ultra interposer so anyway this is the joke m3 shirt it says m3 max question mark
John:
And then flipped over Max question mark.
John:
Anyway, you can, you'll see the design.
John:
It's basically the same joke as we did with the M on ultra only now with a question mark, because it is two things stuck together, neither of which was ever sold individually.
John:
So there you go.
John:
um because this is wwc and because i'm me uh we are offering the mac pro believe shirt again this is the shirt we offered i looked i think like two years ago when we were hoping for the mac pro to come back and it came back and had an m2 alternate and it was just a gigantic mac studio with slots what's gonna happen this year probably a giant mac studio with slots that has an m3 alternate that cost seven thousand dollars or whatever like that'll be sad uh which means we have to keep wearing this shirt
John:
John still believes.
John:
I'm going to keep pushing this shirt.
John:
If I were going to WWC, which I almost certainly am not because of conflicts with my daughter's senior prom and her graduation, I would wear this shirt.
John:
When I went to WWC last year, I wore this shirt.
John:
It didn't work last year, but maybe we just need more people to wear the shirt.
John:
So if you bought this shirt already, please wear it to WWC.
John:
And if you would like to buy one of these shirts, we have it available.
John:
It's also available in long sleeve sweatshirt.
John:
Most of our things are now available in like every possible thing.
John:
So you don't want a T-shirt, but you want a long sleeve T-shirt or a crew neck sweatshirt or a tank top.
John:
Most of these products are available in all those things.
John:
So we've got the Mac Pro Believe shirt with light and dark ink with a bunch of different colors.
John:
Our returning product, because you usually like to bring like old products back from from the Disney vault, so to speak.
John:
We've got the Pro Max Triumph shirt, which I think is one of our better looking shirts for people who have no idea what the shirt is about, because it's just a bunch of like solid shapes in the Apple six colors and then accidental tech podcast underneath it.
John:
so people who have no idea what it is they can just read the words and go oh it's about a podcast i guess good job and if they don't know what all those shapes are on the top of it it just looks like a nice design from a distance it might be like oh you have a bunch of colors but in fact those are the silhouettes of a bunch of apple's most powerful macs starting with the original mac or maybe it's the se30 it's whatever you want it to be the mac 2 the g3 blue and white tower the uh the original cheese grater the trash can and today's mac pro um
John:
So those two shirts coming back, we got that in white and black.
John:
We've got our performance shirt back, which is the shirt that you sweat in.
John:
We introduced a couple of new colors for that last time.
John:
What is this made out of?
John:
It's like, Casey, you're the sweaty shirt expert.
Casey:
It's like Under Armour is like the standard issue trade brand for this.
Casey:
You know, it's the Kleenex of this.
Casey:
of this category.
Casey:
But the idea is if you get the shirt wet, if you're like sweaty or whatever, you can still pull it off of you on like a regular cotton t-shirt where it's like welded to your skin.
Casey:
This will actually come off of you.
Casey:
Um, and I, I wear one of these shirts pretty much every afternoon when I work out.
Casey:
So, uh, I really genuinely like these shirts a lot.
John:
It's workout season.
John:
So we've got our performance shirt.
John:
And then of course, we've got our regular ATP logo, monochrome shirt.
John:
Listen to our, uh, member special episode about our logo to learn the difference between our monochrome logo and our color logo.
John:
They are different.
John:
And then of course we have a classic ATP shirt with the, uh, six color ATP logo on it.
John:
Also available in long sleeve sweatshirt, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Some news about the hoodie, our beloved hoodie.
John:
Uh, so many of these hoodies have been purchased, including by my own family.
John:
Um,
John:
unfortunately the hoodie that we've been selling for years and years is no longer made so that's a bummer but the same company offers a slightly different model of hoodie and that's what we're selling the differences are that the drawstring is no longer flat like if you've got one of these hoodies you know like the drawstring was kind of like a flat like a big shoelace kind of thing which i liked but it's unusual the new one has a drawstring that is
John:
more rounded more like a i don't know like a normal hoodie drawstring and there's no longer rayon in the fabric we'll try to put links in the show notes to the old model the new model so you can compare if you care they look very similar but uh just be aware that if you have the existing hoodies it's no longer manufactured nothing we can do about it
John:
um we've got the atp polo again short sleeve uh warm weather it's our fanciest piece of clothing we have and the last time we sold this we introduced a couple new colors and those are available we've still got atp mugs we're still trying to sell through the mugs that we just ordered too much of last time uh we're hopefully with it will drain the remainder of the inventory if you want a mug you should order them soon-ish because there aren't a lot of them but it could be that we just keep selling these mugs forever because we bought too many so we'll see how that goes
John:
These are the white mugs with the like cobalt.
John:
They call it cobalt colored logo and inside.
John:
I think they look great.
John:
Maybe the world doesn't agree.
John:
If we ever sell through these mugs, we may sell mugs in a different color or we may take a long break from mugs because maybe people just don't want mugs anymore.
John:
Anyway, that's there.
John:
And finally, we've got the ATP hat.
John:
within the embroidered atp logo on it available in a couple of different colors so there you go that's the atp wwc store for this year even if you're not going to wwc check it out of course if you are an atp member you get 15 off everything in the store uh how do you do that you go to your member page at atp.fm there will be a discount code for you copy and paste it into the checkout process if you are a member and you're logged in when you go to atp.fm store we will try to
John:
autofill that discount code for you, but if the autofilling thing doesn't work, just copy and paste it from your member page.
John:
This sale ends Sunday, April 27th, so as usual, we'll have three episodes of the show to promote the sale, but just mark that date in your calendar before Casey starts nagging you about forgetting about it.
John:
That will definitely happen.
John:
Oh, absolutely.
John:
I think that covers it.
John:
Am I forgetting anything?
Marco:
I think the challenge with mugs is that
Marco:
It's not that nobody likes the mugs.
Marco:
It's that you buy a mug and then it lasts a very long time.
John:
But people break them.
John:
We see the sad people breaking it all the time.
John:
And they say, hey, I just broke my mug.
John:
Can I get another one?
John:
And they got like one of the ones with the rainbow logo.
John:
And we haven't sold those in years.
John:
It's like, no, you should buy two.
John:
They break.
Marco:
But that's the challenge is like the demand for a mug.
Marco:
It's like you have a big spike when everyone buys their mugs.
Marco:
Then you have nothing.
Marco:
It's like it's like people who buy iPads.
Marco:
It's like I bought an iPad.
Marco:
Now it's fine.
Marco:
And it's going to be fine for like seven years at least.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And so, like, eventually, you know, you break your mug, but we haven't sold them because there was no demand in the meantime.
Marco:
But when you break your mug, you have very high demand at that moment.
Marco:
Like, no one ever says, I dropped my hoodie.
Marco:
Oh, my God, I urgently need a new one.
Marco:
You know, but the mugs, that happens.
John:
Yeah, I have some different product ideas for the mug.
John:
We sold a couple of different varieties of them, and there are some interesting ideas of how we might mix it up a little bit and make them...
John:
more interesting but none of that is happening until we sell through the mugs that we already paid for so yeah sorry but i i really like this mug though i might buy more of them because i break mugs too i these these mugs are actually very popular in our house but uh we've still got them in stock so if you want them come get them
Casey:
All right, let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
I promise I'll make this super quick.
Casey:
I wanted to bring back Vision Pro Corner.
Casey:
It will not be every week, despite what it seems, but there's a little bit more news.
Casey:
First of all, a friend of mine pointed out to me the Voices of VR podcast, episode 1,557.
Casey:
I have no idea how it's that high, but I guess they've been going forever.
Marco:
Do they do two at once, like simultaneously?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I have no idea.
Casey:
But this was an interview with Ant something or other, who was the star of the Apple immersive video, the adventure immersive video on ice diving or ice swimming or whatever.
Casey:
This was a little less than an hour, and I found it fascinating because the star of the video...
Casey:
how it takes you through like, when did he know it was for the vision pro?
Casey:
When was this recorded?
Casey:
How did they record it to the degree that somebody was not a film professional, uh, understands and knows how to talk about such things.
Casey:
I, for me, it was absolutely worth my time.
Casey:
I thought it was a great episode of a podcast that I don't typically listen to.
Casey:
Um, so it's worth checking out.
Casey:
I'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
Additionally, there's a new series on, uh, Apple, you know, vision pro on Apple TV,
Casey:
plus or whatever.
Casey:
I don't even know how they classify it, but suffice to say, you know, there's adventure, there's, um, shoot, I forget what the other ones are called, but I'm drawing a blank now, but a nature I think is one of them, but there's a new one called a VIP.
Casey:
And this is where they're, I guess, going to take you through sports stadiums.
Casey:
And so there's a 10 to 15 minute, I think it's like 13 minute video on Yankee stadium.
Casey:
I'm not much of a baseball person, but again, I'm
Casey:
Really cool stuff.
Casey:
It is a content snack, which I know is what Marco is about to say, and he's right.
Casey:
But it's cool, and if you have one, it's worth your time.
Casey:
There, see?
Casey:
Quick and easy.
Casey:
We got some feedback on feedback.
Casey:
Matthew Fensilow writes, the ATP crew has often complained about the lack of communication from Apple when they file a bug report feedback.
Casey:
On the other hand, you guys correctly point out that as indie developers, you can't possibly reply to individual bug reports, but that you find the reports useful in aggregate to guide software improvement.
Casey:
iOS has like 1.5 billion users.
Casey:
Apple employees a total of 164,000 people.
Casey:
Even if 1% of Apple employees worked in iOS support, which would be a crazy amount, the customer support employee ratio would be a million to one.
Casey:
I have to assume if you guys had a million paying users, would have just bought John a non-Honda car for fun by now.
Casey:
Yes, I would have bought John a non-Honda car and he would refuse to drive it.
Casey:
Even if it was a Ferrari.
Casey:
This is just one of many Apple software products.
Casey:
At that scale, it seems amazing to me that Apple responds to any bug reports from individuals rather than just taking a statistical approach.
Casey:
I would think just screening out the people who file bugs that their iPhone is haunted or controlled by aliens is a Herculean effort.
Casey:
I never can get that out right.
Casey:
Anyways, to me, the obvious conclusion is that filing bug reports is useful because if Apple gets 100 or 1000 similar reports, it may result in a fix.
Casey:
But the expectation that you would ever hear back is just not realistic.
Casey:
Before I move on, John, any thoughts about that?
John:
Yeah, that's kind of this is kind of like the Fermi paradox type of thing for feedback in that.
John:
I'm not so sure about your assumptions there before you start doing the math.
John:
Yeah, there are like 1.5 billion iOS users.
John:
But to clarify, and this is one of the reasons I put this in here, when we're talking about this, we're not talking about feedback from customers.
John:
Maybe that's like not clear in our discussions.
John:
We're talking about feedback from developers.
John:
Apple does have mechanisms for feedback from customers.
John:
It's a different mechanism than the one we use as developers.
John:
It's like a form on the web page.
John:
You got anything to say about Apple stuff, you can put it there.
John:
I don't know how they handle that.
John:
But what we're talking about is essentially developer support.
John:
You are a developer.
John:
In most cases, I would imagine a paying developer.
John:
There are way fewer than 1.5 billion of those.
John:
Oh, gosh.
John:
There's millions, but not 1.5 billion.
John:
So suddenly your math is not as bad as it seems here.
John:
And the second thing is, of all the developers that you have, like those millions of developer accounts,
John:
How many of them are filing bugs?
John:
Now your ratio gets even lower.
John:
That's why we're saying that with the amount of money that Apple has and the number of plays or whatever, we have higher expectations for responsiveness.
John:
It doesn't mean that they're going to have personal support for every single thing, but just sort of the basics we expect of automated systems where like when you do anything, having your customer support with like your cable company or whatever.
John:
like that you get a response and you get a ticket number and you can see your your uh support requests being processed through the system and you know things happen that doesn't that even that simple thing of like getting a number or whatever you do get a ticket thing if you like uh email the developer technical support or but apple's feedback system for developers is not like that so i question the math here um and again the assumption that i think is missing in this is that
John:
We're not talking about random feedback from 1.5 billion developers.
John:
We're talking about a very much smaller group of people who already pay Apple money.
John:
And as for 1% of Apple employees working in support, which would be a crazy amount, I don't think that's a crazy amount.
John:
If 1% of the company is doing support, I wonder if they already have more than 1% of the employees doing support.
John:
If you count Apple retail employees, they almost certainly do.
John:
So anyway, math here I think is off, but I just wanted to clarify.
John:
It's not any random feedback from any Apple customer.
John:
It is feedback from usually paying Apple developers.
Casey:
Anonymous writes,
Casey:
Uh, I, I think John probably, and I don't mean this to be dismissive, probably as least users of any of us.
Casey:
I think I am in the middle and I think Marco was far and away more users than, than John or I probably combined.
Casey:
And I got to tell you, I feel like I get at least a few, at least a handful of emails a day.
Casey:
And on a busy day, I may get as many as 10.
Casey:
So yeah, I mean, I'm not saying this anonymous person's experience isn't what they claim it to be, but I feel like I get more email than they do.
John:
Games are very different.
John:
I feel like like sort of the lower stakes apps where people either like it's not something they're using for their work.
John:
And so if something goes wrong, it's like pressing or it's not complicated.
John:
Like games are for fun.
John:
And I'm not saying games don't get support.
John:
Depending on the type of game you make, you may get a lot of support.
John:
But they're a genre of application where if you make a good self-contained game without like this complicated network component or any other part, like you, it's true of any app.
John:
The app you make does in some ways dictate the support load that you get.
John:
So it's one of the things that was missed in our past conversation of this is like,
John:
Well, what kind of thing are you making and how does that influence your support burden?
John:
And I would imagine if you make a self-contained, non-server-based, non-multiplayer game with no user uploaded content, like if you make like a solitaire game or something, once your bugs are all worked out and you have a fairly obvious user interface, I bet your support load really is low.
John:
But if you're making something much more complicated, like say a podcast client that has to read arbitrary podcast feeds and people are upset when their podcast doesn't download and so on and so forth, maybe your support load is higher.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, it varies.
Marco:
Basically, support inquiries per user per day is not fixed between different app types or different apps even.
Marco:
So, yeah, it depends a lot what your app is doing.
Marco:
And this is part of why, for instance, tools that work in specialized environments for professionals, any kind of production tool or specialized business tool –
Marco:
Their ratio of like how much support is needed per customer tends to be way higher than consumer stuff that we all make.
Marco:
And, you know, and then, of course, within consumer apps, you have all these different categories, as John was just saying.
Marco:
So, like, you know, I can tell you, like, I get like on a on a slow day, I might get 15 support emails.
Marco:
On a busier day, it might be well more than that.
Marco:
Certainly after the rewrite launched last summer, I was getting over 100 a day.
Marco:
And the thing is – and by the way, it isn't just email.
Marco:
If you also – people expect support everywhere and they expect people to post in public.
Marco:
So like there's Twitter or X, whatever.
Marco:
There's Mastodon.
Marco:
There is – if you create an account on like Blue Sky or Threads.
Marco:
Anywhere that you try to create a presence, people will use that as a support channel.
Marco:
If you have any kind of, you know, forum or Discord or Slack, Reddit.
Marco:
And Reddit, by the way, Reddit, like, they'll create one for you whether you're there or not.
Marco:
So there's all these different channels you have to then add.
Marco:
And so suppose you have, you know, a few things trickling in every day from all the different channels.
Marco:
Plus your 15 to, you know, 30 to 40 to 50 whatever emails.
Yeah.
Marco:
In one good workday, maybe you can get through all those.
Marco:
Now, keep in mind, that isn't 15 emails saying you're great or you suck.
Marco:
Some of them are that way, and those are easy.
Marco:
You read them, you delete them, you move on with your life.
Marco:
Maybe if you want to send a canned text expender kind of shortcut kind of response to some of them, depending on what they are, fine.
Marco:
But they aren't all that simple.
Marco:
A lot of them are feature requests.
Marco:
So then you got to, OK, well, now you got to like maybe catalog that or note that down somewhere or add a vote somewhere to a tally if you're keeping some kind of system like that.
Marco:
Maybe they're actually reporting specific problems and specific bugs that you haven't seen before.
Marco:
You can log that in.
Marco:
That takes time.
Marco:
Maybe you have to try to work with them to troubleshoot things or walk them through something.
Marco:
Maybe it's an inquiry about some kind of business thing like wanting to buy ads, in my case, or I need some help with my podcast being listed improperly and overcast or whatever.
Marco:
Every one of those takes a different amount of time.
Marco:
And some of them, again, some of them are real quick.
Marco:
Some of them are really not.
Marco:
Some of them can...
Marco:
take away hours from your day because all of a sudden you discover, oh, this one image that this person used for their podcast artwork is breaking the resizing thing because it uses some weird JPEG tag.
Marco:
There's all these different things like that that can happen with whatever your app is.
Marco:
Or somebody has an odd behavior on their user account.
Marco:
You've got to try to figure out why is this happening to them.
Marco:
And that's on a good work day.
Marco:
So suppose that number for you is 30 emails a day or 30 inquiries or whatever per day.
Marco:
But the way that works, though, is those come in every day.
Marco:
You aren't working every day.
Marco:
There are weekends.
Marco:
There are holidays.
Marco:
Maybe you're sick.
Marco:
Maybe you're working on the app and you're not reading email all day.
Marco:
The problem is they accumulate.
Marco:
And so you might think, oh, yeah, in a good day, I can get through 30 emails.
Marco:
Okay, great.
Marco:
But every day, those are going to start building up.
Marco:
And then you can't give that amount of attention to all of them.
Marco:
Once you cross a threshold...
Marco:
of whatever you can handle being a daily or accumulating thing.
Marco:
Once you cross that threshold, it starts piling and you fall behind.
Marco:
And then what do you do?
Marco:
You have to start not responding to everything or giving things canned responses, which I hate.
Marco:
So I try to avoid doing that.
Marco:
But support is a very, very difficult burden to...
Marco:
do over time because it just never ends.
Marco:
You never get a weekend from support.
Marco:
You never get a spring break from support.
Marco:
It never stops.
Marco:
So what sounds like a small amount, it can quickly accumulate when life gets in the way.
Casey:
Yeah, it's just I do hear the argument about scale for Apple and scale even for us.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I mean, it's just I feel like the amount of time it would take me to provide the support that I wish I could provide is astronomically more than I am capable or willing to give to that task.
Casey:
And similarly, the amount of money it would take to solve this problem with money by paying somebody else to do it is astronomically more than I can afford for this task.
Marco:
I get what these people are saying, but... And by the way, on that front, by the way, the just-pay-someone-else-to-do-it idea, one of the challenges with that is everything I just mentioned about things that can take time and respond to emails, how many of those can somebody else do?
Marco:
If you are the programmer, if you're the only programmer on the app, which most indies are...
Marco:
You have to be the one to address most of those things.
Marco:
So, you know, if you had a support person filtering through emails and maybe just escalating things to you that needed your attention, like, that helps.
Marco:
You could argue that might be doable by an AI these days.
Marco:
But, you know, it helps to have that.
Marco:
But you're still getting enough stuff kicked up to you every single day that, like...
Marco:
The support person can't do that much if a problem somebody reports is non-obvious.
Marco:
They can maybe help somebody reset their password or something.
Marco:
But if it's something like, hey, there's a bug with this artwork, as I said, or my user account is behaving weirdly because of some entry in it, that's probably going to get kicked to you no matter what.
Marco:
So having any kind of filtering or person in front of you, it helps in some ways, but it doesn't really help the overwhelming buildup over time by an indie.
Casey:
Vitor writes,
Casey:
And then a different image.
Casey:
We appreciate your participation.
Casey:
You have helped contribute to the overall quality of our products.
Casey:
And many issues have been addressed as a result of your efforts.
Casey:
We realize that testing may have involved a great deal of time on your part to provide feedback, submit follow-up information, and reinstall software along with your daily work.
Casey:
Thank you for your dedication.
Casey:
That's nice.
John:
Yeah, this is actually just one big image.
John:
It was saying like, hey, new versions of the OSs are out.
John:
I'm just trying to trim out that part.
Casey:
Oh, my bad.
John:
Part of addressing this gap between what developers want out of processing feedback from Apple and what Apple does is
John:
is in fact what we're seeing here you may look at this and saying like oh apple can say all they want but their words don't mean anything and i'm still angry and blah blah blah but this little passage here at the bottom of like oh here's the new betas by the way this little paragraph of saying like we understand that it is work for you to do these things thank you
John:
That is actually part of the solution.
John:
It sounds like it's not.
John:
It sounds like I wish they wouldn't say these nice things.
John:
I wish they would just do it.
John:
But saying this, acknowledging it, communicating in a more human way with developers actually is an essential part of a solution to this problem.
John:
It's not the solution to this problem you have to do.
John:
You have to actually do stuff as well, but I'm, I'm not going to turn up my nose at this.
John:
I'm going to say, I agree.
John:
That's a good stand.
John:
And for Apple, for Apple to like acknowledge that we exist and that providing this feedback is work.
John:
And maybe even like with a little detail of like, Oh, you got to reinstall the software and it's annoying.
John:
And you got to like, like acknowledging how difficult it is for us to navigate their system or whatever.
John:
It's just one tiny baby step towards, you know, an actual sort of, uh, I don't know, like, uh,
John:
more upfront acknowledgement of the problems and then maybe even imagine this solving the problem.
John:
So I am not feeling cynical today about this and I want to congratulate whoever at Apple somehow snuck through this somewhat human paragraph of text to the developers.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Again, as Aaron said, it's not solving the entire problem, but it helps.
Marco:
The challenge that Apple has with feedback and developers is that we feel like we are unappreciated and that they are wasting our time and they don't listen to us or they don't respect the time we put into things.
John:
And there's no other like there's no person we can connect with because Apple like hides the people and just provides this sort of like impersonal face to everybody.
John:
And that is not satisfying.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And so if they're showing signs of like, OK, you know what?
Marco:
We actually care about you.
John:
actions speak louder than words but words help a little bit you know just the actions the actions will speak louder they're an essential part because we want we want them to acknowledge the reality that we see before us like with them sort of just stonewalling and just putting a happy face on everything just makes us angrier you know i mean like you feel even more ignored so this is actually an essential part of sort of healing this divide yeah well and let's see the actions next but this is a good start
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Casey:
Apple's big OS redesign.
Casey:
Mark Ehrman has said that Solarium is the code name for the iOS 19 and Mac OS 16 redesigns, which explains a lot about what's to come.
Casey:
John, you seem to have done some research on Solariums on behalf of all of us.
Casey:
Tell me about them.
John:
I mean, I don't know if everyone knows what a solarium is.
John:
So I was just, I was going to put a definition here.
John:
It's just like a sunroom.
John:
If you know what a sunroom is, if you're in the US, the definition that I got off the web was a room fitted with extensive areas of glass to emit sunlight.
John:
It's a sunroom.
Marco:
If you're on Long Island, by the way, houses seem to come with these and they are all illegal.
Marco:
Like literally every, every house that we saw contained an illegally built, like without a building permit kind of sunroom.
Marco:
Every single one.
John:
It's a thing.
John:
Anyway, there's a second definition, which I thought was fun, which is a room equipped with sun lamps or tanning beds that can be used to acquire an artificial suntan.
John:
I'm hoping that's not the definition that Apple was going with for their codename, but rather they were going with the room filled with glass, which makes some kind of sense.
John:
So there you go.
John:
A codename that backs up the discussions of the new look.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
And then we have a video from FrontPage Tech, which does a bunch of really impressive looking mock-ups of how they believe iOS 19 to look based on, I guess their team has seen or used builds of iOS 19, and then they re-implement what they've seen in order to protect their sources and whatnot.
Casey:
It's very well done.
Casey:
I mean, it's not 100% pixel for pixel perfect, but it's darn good.
John:
Yeah.
John:
This video was kind of a clapback, as the kids say, to Mark Gurman saying, oh, John Prosser and Front Page Tech, they don't know anything.
John:
The video they showed, that's not actually what it looks like.
John:
And so Front Page Tech was like, oh, yeah?
John:
Well, actually, we've seen a new build, and we've seen more parts of the OS, and here it is.
John:
And the whole Front Page Tech thing, which I think is actually fairly clever, is don't show, like...
John:
your inside information that you have look at what you either what either someone has shown you or screenshots they've sent you or something you've seen on a dev build on your own device or whatever which by the way you probably shouldn't admit that you have but anyway um don't actually show that instead look at it and then have artists essentially recreate it kind of like a courtroom sketch or something where you can't have cameras in the courtroom so that's what they've done so everything in this video is not the real ios 19 it is an artist's reproduction of
John:
build supposedly a build of iOS 19 they have and this video has way more than the old one because the old one was like here's the new camera app with the glassy stuff and everything and we talked about it a while ago this shows more of the OS and it has a couple of interesting interesting tidbits so first is
John:
The little, the glassy-like things they were showing in the camera app, this shows them in more places, for example, on the lock screen when you've got the little flashlight thing and the camera button.
John:
Those are kind of like glassy with a supposed shimmer that moves around the edges, kind of like the old... I still don't know if I was currently doing this.
John:
Remember the old...
John:
parallax thing where you tilt your phone and the desktop background would shift to try to make it look like it's it's like embedded in the screen well this has a shine that moves around the rim of the round buttons on the lock screen to make them look shiny so they look shiny and glassy with like a beveled edge or something uh but the real the real important thing here is you'll see in the video if you watch the whole thing talking about
John:
Oh, everyone, when we said it was going to look like Vision OS, everyone said, do you mean it's going to have round icons?
John:
We discussed that on the show and we discussed that original video.
John:
And they said, well, the build we saw back then didn't have rounded icons, so we didn't say that it did.
John:
But apparently this current build they're using has not circular icons.
John:
But icons where the radius, the corner radius, is increased over what it currently is.
John:
And to be clear, the current icons are not squares with quarter circles stuck on the edges.
John:
They're squircles, which is a more complicated mathematical shape that blends the curve more seamlessly into the flat parts.
John:
Anyway, in their video, they show icons that are basically more rounded but still not circular, which is like...
John:
why all right again this is we don't know if this is true we don't know if this is just a dev build with a thing that isn't going to ship we don't know anything about this but please watch the video if you would like to see how would ios look if the corners on the icons had maybe a radius that was like twice as round so they're almost circles but not quite answer bad
John:
think about how that would affect every icon that was not made by apple and had a year's notice about this how do you feel about more of the corners of your icon being cut off i don't know if this is going to ship but i i'm just like i look at this and i just shake my head and it's like this okay like i'm i'm almost at the point where i'm like you know what at least round icons would be a big fresh change and there would be this big dividing line remember before ios had round icons and after right but this is like
John:
Not doing either.
John:
It's let's cause immense disruption, but still not be distinct enough that most people will even notice.
John:
But it will just drive developers up a wall as they have to redesign all their icons to handle a little bit more of the cloners being cut off.
Marco:
There's a couple of things here to note.
Marco:
First of all, yes, this is a rumor and a mock up.
Marco:
So it's like a game of telephone based on probably already kind of sketchy and probably unreliable information to begin with.
John:
In builds of the OS where this feature is not prominent and maybe was hidden on purpose or maybe was hidden because it's not a thing that they're doing.
John:
Like if people don't know in dev builds of operating systems, there are many different features that may or may not ship that are some are enabled, some are not enabled and you can turn them on.
John:
Like it's so many layers of unreliability in here.
John:
So please take all this with huge grains of salt.
Marco:
yeah and i and i do i love the idea of like two different rumor leakers like bickering between themselves like no your unreliable information is wrong no your unreliable information is wrong they're both not super reliable but they both get their things right sometimes we'll see after it comes out who's the gloating video about all the stuff they got right
Marco:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
But as observers and fans here, you can't really judge any details.
Marco:
What seems to be very likely to be true is there is going to be updated designs of some of the system components this fall.
Marco:
But we don't know how deeply that goes.
Marco:
And so I'm actually – when I see the types of things they're reporting besides the new icon shape, which I think looks – I'm going to assume that their recreation is very wrong because that looks terrible.
John:
Well, you know –
John:
I mean, so here's the thing in their recreation.
John:
It seems like in their recreation, they just took the existing icons and cut more off of the corners.
John:
And you would imagine if the if the new outline was actually a real thing, that the icons themselves would also be changed to accommodate the new outline, because Apple has, unlike the rest of us, Apple has advanced notice about this happening.
Marco:
Right, but it's... Yeah, the way the mock-up is in the video, it's pretty bad.
Marco:
But if you look at, like, okay, what are they doing to the rest of the system?
Marco:
It looks like, you know, we're still going to have, like, you know, tab bars, but they have different style.
Marco:
We're still going to have, you know, like, certain things about it are, like, re-skinned or slightly re-styled versions of what we already know, but it's still...
Marco:
It generally looks similar.
Marco:
And maybe that's wrong.
Marco:
Again, this is based on sketchy info through many games of telephone.
Marco:
So maybe it's wrong.
Marco:
But if this is the type of thing we're seeing, that's maybe not what we think of when we think of a whole system redesign.
Marco:
We think of something like iOS 7.
Marco:
And that doesn't seem like that's what this is.
Marco:
This seems like a bunch of visual tweaks and new component layout options that you can use.
Marco:
Like, you know, that floating bottom tab bar is probably going to be like one, you know, dot style modifier on SwiftUI.
Marco:
It's like, you know, your tab bar, you know, the bottom is like dot tab bar style parentheses dot grouped or whatever.
Marco:
You know, like it'll have some kind of, that's like one style you can choose.
Marco:
Like that's the way it looks.
Marco:
Not as if we're reskinning everything forces
John:
And by the way, on that floating tab bar, what does that floating tab bar remind you of?
Marco:
Well, it's kind of visiony, but it's more iPad-y.
Marco:
I don't know.
John:
Don't you remember when they redesigned Safari on iOS years ago and there was the weird floaty bar at the bottom?
John:
Yes!
John:
Remember when they tried to do that?
John:
It was terrible.
John:
Everybody said, here's the thing about this bar.
John:
I really hope this mock-up is not a real thing.
John:
Or if it is, I hope it is a style option that people don't choose.
John:
You should watch the video to know what we're talking about.
John:
But it's like a floating tab bar at the bottom of the window.
John:
It's just like a lozenge that floats.
John:
So not only do you see the content above it,
John:
but you see a sliver of the content below it and along the sides because the content is scrolling underneath it and it's not like anchored to the bottom of the screen.
John:
I hate that on phones because that sliver of content I can see at the bottom does nothing for me except distract me.
John:
and it makes the thing take up more room that was the problem with the old ios safari redesign was like the bottom floating bar floated up and it's like give me those pixels back just shove the bar down to the bottom of the screen and let me use those those pixels for content like why are you making my screen shallower so i can see a sliver of the content as it slides behind the thing and rolls off the end of the screen hate it hate it hate it i hope that's not a real thing but it's clear that someone in apple really likes that
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I think the entire era of Johnny Ive and Alan Dye design in the software side has been obsession with, let's expand the content to every possible edge, even if that means we have to put controls on top of the content, have the content flow around the controls.
Marco:
It's like, we're going to fill everything with background info, basically.
Marco:
And in reality, that is often a bad design.
Marco:
Yeah, because you're actually getting less content because the
John:
That top part of the tab bar is where the usable content begins.
John:
And all that part on the sides and the bottom, that is useless to you, and it's just empty space that's taking away from the content.
Marco:
It has a number of other effects, too.
Marco:
It makes everything a lot more visually noisy.
Marco:
I think it's harder to visually separate the controls from the content in certain ways.
Marco:
Usually, because the content flows around the sides of it, you need more padding on the sides, which means the actual buttons in the tab bar cannot be as wide as they used to be, so you have smaller
Marco:
or touch targets they do like a drop shadow like remember like the bar casts like a shadow on the content so now you're not even seeing this content as it actually is you're seeing like the shadowed content in the bottom part yeah or or they make something translucent and you see a blurry color inspired by the content behind it which changes you scroll like that's also that also kind of sucks in a few ways so like there's a bunch of weird tricks they do to make these things that look really pretty in marketing shots but kind of have you know worse usability in the real world but so
Marco:
That's always been a tension with Apple's design.
Marco:
They try to make things very pretty.
Marco:
They try to hide controls.
Marco:
They try to expand your content to be all the way to the edges.
Marco:
It's all about you.
Marco:
We're going to get out of the way of your content and we're going to take all the controls and get them out of your way too so you can't use them.
Marco:
There is some of that that like, yes, that does end up looking very nice in marketing shots.
Marco:
So there is always this balance with Apple, you know, form versus function in their UI designs and sometimes computers.
Marco:
So we'll see how this turns out.
Marco:
It never goes quite as far into function as nerds like us want it to.
Marco:
There's always a little bit too much form prioritization in some of the UI choices and
Marco:
But that does make the system look nice overall.
Marco:
So, you know, I see why it happens.
Marco:
I just, we often go and go like a little bit too far in that direction.
Marco:
And I hope they haven't.
John:
one a couple of things to note about this that one of the screenshots uh that you'll see in the video is control center uh and this is a place where like a more rounded theme it makes reasonable sense and freshens it up like for example the big brightness and volume sliders in control center right now they're essentially rounded rectangles big rounded rectangles that you can you know like the progress bar type thing to bring the volume up and down and brightness up and down now they are semi-circular on the top of the caps are semi-circular on the top and the bottom so increase the corner radius until they meet in the middle it's
John:
If you had round icons, round top and bottom, you know, sliders for volume and brightness would make sense.
John:
The other thing is all of the translucent elements here, including like the control center things and even the icons have that sort of like beveled edge shimmer.
John:
It's as if the icon was made out of a thick material and you'd cut a 45 degree angle bevel around the entire thing and then shined a light on it.
John:
That sort of
John:
supposedly gyroscopically actuated shimmer it's not everywhere in the us but that that look of like a piece of glass that has an angled edge that the light is reflecting off of that is present in all these mock-ups and i mean i think one of the things based on the solarium name all the rumors and these mock-ups i think we can safely say that the redesigns theme is glassy stuff
John:
right maybe not the same glassy stuff as the vision pro but that it's so clear that that is a strong theme of this redesign which probably means the same glassy stuff is coming to the mac even more which i'm not really looking forward to um and we had during the show in fact some anonymous person send us an idea about i think this is just an idea not a an attempt to predict or uh explain but anyway
John:
The idea is based on a past discussion.
John:
It's like, well, Vision Pro has all these translucent windows because you have pass-through and your windows are floating in the middle of your room.
John:
And it's a very different kind of interface.
John:
So being able to see partially through things or at least to have things sort of feel integrated into your environment by showing through the background makes so much sense in the Vision Pro interface.
John:
Maybe less so on phones and Macs.
John:
But this anonymous person said, well, you know,
John:
And that's only true because right now we think of our phones as being like Mac screens where what's behind them is the wallpaper.
John:
But the phones do have cameras on the back of them.
John:
So technically, you could do iPhone pass through.
John:
And so that everything that's behind all these translucent things is literally what's behind your phone.
John:
uh to that concept i think a don't give apple any ideas and b i'm assuming that would just destroy your battery if anyone's ever left the phone out the camera app open on your phone for a while you know that just leaving that app open makes your phone get hot now granted they don't have to do the massive amount of image processing that the camera app does they can do a much more dumb one especially if they're just using it to tint windows with a blurry background but please apple don't listen to the show and don't do that
John:
It's a terrible idea.
John:
But I think about solarium and a glass look and I'm like, oh my God, if they could fit that in the battery budget, I just know someone would try to do it.
John:
So crossing my fingers, that is not a thing that comes to pass.
Casey:
All right, so over the last week or so, we've got some exciting news.
Casey:
The Nintendo Switch 2 launch has, well, launch insofar as we now know what it's going to be.
Casey:
That has happened.
Casey:
And so there was a, like, two-hour video, or maybe it was only an hour.
Casey:
It felt forever.
Casey:
I was packing for our spring break trips.
Marco:
It feels forever because, you know, as WBC watchers, these are all game demos.
Casey:
Oh.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
But anyways, there was an hour long video.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
It's probably worth at least skimming through.
Casey:
But one way or another, the Nintendo Switch 2 is here.
Casey:
Well, I keep saying here.
Casey:
That's not fair.
Casey:
It has been announced.
Casey:
I need to check my vocabulary here.
Casey:
It's been announced.
Casey:
John, as the resident Nintendo expert, how are you feeling?
John:
Uh, I think I feel good.
John:
I think most people feel good.
John:
And by the way, the Nintendo Switch 2 was already announced, but this is the reveal where you, last time they just showed the hardware flying around and said, here it is, it's the Switch 2.
John:
But now this is more like you would expect it at WWC announcement where Nintendo gets up there and says, here's the product, here's what it does, here are its features, here are the games that are going to be for it, here's the price, here's the value, like just, it's, you know, completely revealed.
John:
Um...
John:
if you were if you saw the hardware reveal there weren't a lot of surprises here like it's a bigger version of the switch with a bigger better screen and all the hardware features you could see before but they talked about a lot of the details a lot of people got hands-on so we'll link to the verge's hands-on and ars technicus hands-on which give a lot of insight into the device from people who actually got to use it one piece that uh follow-up for this program is that marco doubted that the joy cons would be used as mice in fact they are usable as mice
John:
In fact, many of the hands-on things that you'll see in reports talk about how is it to use the Joy-Cons as mice?
John:
The answer is, it's weird and not great.
John:
What I posted about it on Mastodon when it came out was Joy-Cons are now mice, controller goes sideways, which is a very old, weird, obscure reference to a tweet back when we cared about what Twitter was like and it was doing weird stuff.
John:
Um...
John:
yeah the main complaint is a like taking if you know what the switch joycon looks like putting it on its edge and using it as a mouse is not really comfortable or ergonomic or a great experience uh they were pushing it so much at the hands-on that i believe they were one of the games they were demoing was the new metroid prime thing which is the first person shooter and i believe they they made you use it in like mouse look mode essentially like they didn't have controllers you had to use the joycons either by
John:
I think like gyroscoping them in the air or using them as mice.
John:
And it's awkward, but I hope this opens the door to, if not first party, then at the very least third party, like actual mouse shape mice for the switch for people who want to do like first person games with a mouse.
John:
It's,
John:
As many of the reviews pointed out, it's kind of weird to let you use your controllers as a mouse for a device that people use on their couch.
John:
Nintendo even promoted the idea that you can use them on your pants leg, which I know if any of us have been like before the days of like if you didn't have consoles or when you tried to like hook up your gaming PC to your TV or something.
John:
Look, we've all used a mouse on our pants.
Yeah.
John:
And who hasn't done it?
John:
It's not a good experience.
John:
Your leg is not a good mouse pad, especially not for a game where you're doing things like quickly or whatever.
John:
Anyway, I thought one of the games they announced was a really interesting use of the Joy-Con mouse control, though, because both Joy-Cons can be used as mice.
John:
And it was a wheelchair basketball game.
John:
And you use the two mice to essentially like, like you're grabbing the wheels and rolling them.
John:
So to turn, you just push like the right one up a bunch of times and you swipe, swipe, swipe, just like you would turn, turn, turn the wheel.
John:
And you use the gyroscope thing to like chuck the ball into the hoop.
John:
Look really cool, but a lot of people said their arms were tired.
John:
It reminds me kind of the Wii Sports thing.
John:
People would be like, video games shouldn't be hurting my arms.
John:
What's going on?
John:
Exercise.
John:
How does it work?
John:
Anyway, be careful out there.
John:
Another thing that they announced is that it does still have an SD card slot, but it only takes micro SD Express cards, which is a standard that I wasn't even aware existed.
John:
But it basically comes down to...
John:
uh they they want more speed like the internal ssd is presumably faster that you can't use the sd the micro sd cards you use with a plain old switch because they're just too slow they want to set a minimum standard of speed it's a low minimum standard it's not like the ps5 where you need to do 5 500 megabytes per second like that's the ps5 standard and the console tests any ssd you insert to make sure it complies with that but micro sd express is faster than plain old micro sd the cards cost like twice as much um but anyway at least they're still a
John:
expansion uh this wasn't something they explained but by seeing the hardware for more angles and more of their animations i think i have a plausible explanation of what the weird chunky things are on the kickstand i asked this when we talked about the the switch hardware uh reveal a while back and it was like the kickstand is like this kind of u-shaped piece of metal that you folds out from the the back of the switch and you can put it at different angles
John:
But there were these very thick things protruding from the bottom of the kickstand.
John:
I didn't understand what they were.
John:
Maybe there was a spring-loaded thing in there or something.
John:
That still could be what they are.
John:
There still could be some spring mechanism inside there, some mechanical thing that makes the hinge springy and stay in place, kind of like the springs that powered the iMac G4's screen.
John:
That could be what's in there.
John:
But another function of these things is revealed in...
John:
The shot where they show the kickstand being put to its maximum extension, where you start off with a switch at like 90 degrees to the table and you push it down, how flat can you get it?
John:
And when you get it real flat, the kickstand goes down, down, down, down, down.
John:
At its maximum extension, I think those little nubbin things hit the table as essentially a stop for saying, this is the maximum angle you can get this thing to go.
John:
And when you go to that angle, now you have two additional points of contact.
John:
I could be wrong because I'm not actually touching the table in the photo, but that's my best guess for what those things are.
John:
Of all the things in this device, everyone's like, oh, what GPU does it have?
John:
What CPU does it have?
John:
I'm like, what's inside those hinges?
John:
That's what I want to know.
John:
They talked more about the magnets that are holding the Joy-Cons on.
John:
That seems pretty cool.
John:
They did it by making the shoulder buttons on the Joy-Cons be made of metal.
John:
So that's what the magnets connect to, which is clever.
John:
Um...
John:
they didn't say anything about the cpu or gpu like uh no info revealed there although they did say it can do 4k 120 frames per second uh they did say it uses dlss which we discussed on a past program it's just not one of those uh fancy upscaling modes to be able to get uh 4k output when the game is not actually rendered 4k resolution um
John:
The screen on the thing is 1080.
John:
It's not an OLED.
John:
The output is 4K.
John:
Again, probably upscarable DLSS.
John:
Up to 120 hertz, but I imagine most games will be like 60.
John:
The price, well, we'll talk about this in the after show.
John:
The announced price was $450 for the Switch 2.
John:
Or if you want to get the bundle that comes with Mario Kart World, it's $500.
John:
$500.
John:
And the the top end games are anywhere from 70 to 80 bucks, which people are flipping out about a little bit.
John:
There was a good chart I should have found of the show notes, but I didn't showing the inflation adjusted price of video games for home consoles.
John:
And I think just a lot of people who are gamers now just expect video games to be $60 forever.
John:
But $60 in 1993 is worth a different amount than $60 today.
John:
And if you see the chart, you'll see the games used to be way more expensive than they are now.
John:
And they've been dropping like a stone relative to inflation.
John:
This adjustment does not bring them back to their historic highs.
John:
But you can't just expect...
John:
To live decades and decades and have video games be $60 for that entire time.
John:
That's not how inflation works.
John:
So they're 70 to 80 bucks now.
John:
People are angry about it.
John:
It's like, well, welcome to the world.
John:
Some things do actually get more expensive.
John:
In fact, most things get more expensive.
John:
uh and uh this is this is an example they're not selling you when you buy the game you're not buying the uh cost of goods for the cartridge and by the way it still does use little tiny cartridges although they're selling a kind of cartridge that basically just has a decryption key on it so it's like a hardware dongle for the game because they want to be able to sell physical things in stores but they don't want to actually put the game on the thing because it's too big to fit on the cart anyway there's lots of weird stuff going on there but
John:
Suffice it to say, our all digital age is rapidly coming for all consoles, but Nintendo is still holding strong by willing to be willing to sell you a tiny little card that you can trade with people and sell when you're done with it.
John:
And, you know, all the good things you can do with physical games, even if there's not actually a physical game on it.
John:
They announced a bunch of things about trading games to other people.
John:
Like, what if I have a game and I'll let someone borrow it?
John:
They're doing some more digital DRM-powered lending library things.
John:
Basically, all good news.
John:
From my perspective, I looked at this announcement.
John:
I'm like, Switch 2 looks great.
John:
Looks like a Switch, but better.
John:
The games look good.
John:
I don't blink at the price because, you know, I just bought a $700 PS5 Pro.
John:
I don't expect things to cost the same amount forever.
John:
I didn't expect them to launch this at $199.
John:
presumably the price will go down over time um yeah i think it's just i looked at the announcement i said this is like a home run i'm totally going to get one of these and i think i'll really like it will it actually be 450 or 500 or will it be much much more uh nintendo was taking sort of pre-orders uh they did a clever thing where they're trying to stop people from like buying them up and then reselling them essentially like i don't know what you call it scalpers and ticket and uh ticket parlance
John:
They didn't want people buying up a bunch of Switches and then selling them for tons of money.
John:
So I guess you can only do this trick once, but they basically said, if you want to put your name in the hat to get in line to be able to have the privilege of pre-ordering this at some point, you have to have a Nintendo Online account with at least $50 of gameplay on the Switch.
John:
50 hours.
John:
And then two days later, they said, based on this tariff stuff, maybe we're going to hold off on those pre-order things.
John:
We'll have more to say later.
John:
So as usual, everything is completely up in the air and uncertain because of the chaos in our country.
John:
We apologize to the whole world for that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
We'll talk about that more in the after show.
Marco:
But anyway, Switch 2 looks good, right?
Marco:
I mean, if we can ever actually get one, I think this is going to be the fun that we need.
Marco:
I feel like a major heyday of the Switch 1 was 2020 with everyone being stuck at home and then Animal Crossing came out.
Marco:
And that was such kind of a hallmark of we needed that at that time.
Marco:
This kind of helpful...
Marco:
calm semi-social game like it i think that that helped the world out and for nintendo to um be releasing this this year uh which is going to have what looks like a really fun new mario car game and whatever else they're going to be doing over the next couple years with with titles i think this will be nice to to have this year
Marco:
We're all going to need it.
John:
Oh, that Mario Kart game.
John:
What a good idea.
John:
I don't know why this never occurred to me, but when they announced it, I'm like, oh, duh.
John:
What a good idea.
John:
So what they, you know, with Breath of the Wild, they basically made Zelda an open world game, which seems like it should never possibly work, but totally did.
John:
And it was amazing and everyone loved it.
John:
They made Mario Kart an open world game.
John:
You're like, what the hell?
John:
It's a game where you race karts around a track.
John:
How can that be an open world game?
John:
They said, well, guess what?
John:
Now you can drive anywhere.
John:
Now there's a mode where you and your friends can just go drive places.
John:
It's not even the race.
John:
And some of the racing modes, you drive around one course,
John:
And then you drive to the next course and then you drive around it and then you drive.
John:
It's such a good idea.
John:
Like just full credit for them to saying we, you know, open world is fun.
John:
Can we add that to a driving game?
John:
And the answer is yes.
John:
Love it.
Marco:
I was a little worried.
Marco:
Whenever I see the promotional videos or teaser images of a Mario Kart game, like a new Mario Kart game, it always looks to me like just total overload mania.
Marco:
Every new one that comes out, my first impression when I see the videos is, oh god, they added way too much crap to this.
Marco:
This doesn't look fun anymore.
Marco:
Now it's just like a coin fest.
John:
Sometimes you're right that they did add way too much crap.
Marco:
Fair.
Marco:
And when I saw the very first teaser video for this, I was like, oh, God.
Marco:
They just covered this.
Marco:
It looked to me like the feeling you get when you're walking through a casino and you're hearing all this slot machine.
Marco:
That, to me, is when I see these Mario Kart promo videos.
Marco:
But then I saw later on, some other video they did, I saw actual gameplay footage of just a race.
Marco:
And it looked a lot more normal.
Marco:
I'm like, oh, thank God.
John:
OK, so reportedly they've toned down the items like in the old games.
John:
Like, for example, if you got hit with an offensive item, it would essentially stop you dead in your tracks.
John:
You have to reaccelerate.
John:
And due to like the nature of like the various modes, they have like knockout mode where you have to be in in a certain place.
John:
Otherwise, you get knocked out of the race as you go from course to course.
John:
there's it's reportedly from the people who have tried the game fewer things that like oh i got hit with this now i'm just dead in the water i'm totally stopped it's more like things will hit you and slow you down so that seems gentler as well where the i mean i'm not sure it's saying you're not going to get frustrated because i think there's some i think i saw one item that randomly swaps the place of people in the race which i think will anger a lot of people in a fun way maybe um but i'm looking forward to
John:
longer races where getting hit with a single item doesn't feel like, well, I might as well just stop now because I've gone from 100 miles an hour to zero.
John:
They did make the maximum number of players up to 24 or something, which is probably a little bit ridiculous.
Casey:
I'm very much looking forward to it.
Casey:
I don't expect to get one for less than $1,000 in the next two years.
Marco:
Yeah, that remains to be seen.
Marco:
Like, how attainable will these actually be?
Marco:
That's a big question mark.
John:
Yeah, I mean, it's a question.
John:
Even without the current political instability in our country, just getting the original switch was difficult in much more favorable circumstances.
John:
circumstances so if you think getting the switch it was going to be easy it was never going to be easy and now it may be even harder but you know like if you can get one you can get one if you can't trust me eventually switch twos will be in stock and you'll be able to buy one nintendo will make sure of it eventually maybe next year maybe the year after that but you just stay alive no matter what occurs switch two will find you that's a reference casey
Casey:
I got nothing.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
The iPhone 17 Pro allegedly will have a new 48 megapixel telephoto lens.
Casey:
Reading from Mac rumors, according to Majin Bu, the iPhone 17 Pro will feature a new telephoto lens with a 48 megapixel sensor up from the current 12 megapixel sensor found in the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max.
Casey:
This rumor isn't new.
Casey:
In fact, it's been repeatedly claimed by several other sources.
Casey:
However, Boo goes further by claiming that the new lens will offer 3.5x optical zoom, which is an 85mm equivalent, instead of the 5x zoom, or 120mm equivalent, currently available.
Casey:
The big shift allegedly comes from the new 48MP sensor in that the X-ray resolution allows for digital cropping to simulate longer focal lengths, offering less quality loss than normal digital zoom.
Casey:
This is similar to what Apple already does with the main Fusion camera on the iPhone 16, where the 48-megapixel sensor enables a 2x digital crop marketed as telephoto that still produces a 12-megapixel image with minimal quality loss.
Casey:
I don't think... I do and I don't want this.
Casey:
I don't want to lose my 1.5x.
Casey:
I really like the 5x zoom.
Casey:
And maybe I would find in use that I would actually prefer the 3.5x, but...
Casey:
I like having the throw of the five.
Casey:
I'm glad that I have five X and I think I would miss it if I didn't have it anymore, but you're going to have it.
John:
Like, that's the thing.
John:
Remember we talked about the five X originally.
John:
And I think even when you, I think you were the first one of us to get it and you were trying out, it's like, well, it's great when you need the reach.
John:
But the thing about five X is you can always like zoom in a little bit more by using like quote unquote digital zoom that kids do.
John:
They don't know it's destroying their photos.
John:
Um,
John:
But you can't zoom out any farther.
John:
You have to switch to another camera.
John:
If you don't want 5X, you have to switch off the 5X camera.
John:
And now you're in, you know, the 1X, 2X camera or whatever, and you're doing tons of digital zoom.
John:
I think this sounds great because making it 3.5X optical
John:
But with the double pixel thing of the 48 going down to 12 megapixel to get 5X, it's basically the same.
John:
It's like with our current 1X camera, when you switch to the quote unquote 2X camera, it's still the 1X camera.
John:
They're just pixel binning and cropping and doing like they're just giving you the middle 12 megapixels out of not pixel binning.
John:
They're giving you the middle 12.
John:
It's sensor cropping.
John:
And they can get away with it because the sensor is good enough that a sensor crop still looks pretty good.
John:
They do a bunch of tricks.
John:
We talked about this when the camera first came out to make it look better than just a straight up sensor crop of the thing.
John:
Because I like the 5X thing, but when I use it, I'm like, all right, I'm trying to take pictures of my dog.
John:
She's doing something cute on her bed and I'm on the couch.
John:
This is just a me problem.
John:
5X is a little bit too zoomed in.
John:
But 2X is a little bit too far out.
John:
And then you got to do, OK, well, do I digital zoom from the 2X even more?
John:
Because I can't digital zoom out from the 5X.
John:
If I had an optical 3.5X, I could pick.
John:
I hope this rumor is true because I think it's a great compromise between the current 5X.
John:
While still giving people 5X reach, I see I'm assuming the camera is good quality, but also giving more of the in-between ranges.
Marco:
I'm looking forward to this if this is true.
Marco:
I love having the reach of the 5X sometimes, but oftentimes it is way too much reach.
Marco:
But as John said, but the 2X is not quite enough.
Marco:
And so I find myself just digitally zooming on the 2X sometimes between 2 and 5 or whatever.
Marco:
But the 5X lens,
Marco:
The telephoto lens on an iPhone, no matter what it was, back when it was 2x, when it was 2.5x, when it was 5x, I think it was 3 somewhere on some phones sometimes, that lens has always been optically a pretty big compromise.
Marco:
The pictures it takes are not great.
Marco:
It is way less detail and way more noise compared to the big main 1x camera lens.
Marco:
part of that is because of megapixels.
Marco:
A bigger part of that is because of optics and physics of how you have to fit that and everything.
Marco:
So if they change this to a 48 megapixel sensor, that will improve some of that.
Marco:
It's not going to make it as good as the 1x lens still because of the optics and the physics differences.
Marco:
But
Marco:
It will at least make it better.
Marco:
And if they switch it to a 3.5x or whatever sensor, like physically, and then you digital zoom to 5x, I think the resulting quality of the 5x images is probably not going to be that noticeably different or worse or better than the current 5x lens with its 12 megapixel sensor and its current optics.
Marco:
So I think this is only a positive change, most likely.
Marco:
And then the advantage will be that you get a much better image quality at that middle range.
Marco:
Like when you actually are shooting at 3.5 or 4 or whatever, like that will be much better quality than it is today, probably.
Marco:
So this sounds promising to me.
Marco:
I'm looking forward to it.
Casey:
Yeah, I didn't realize that it was in addition to 5X.
Casey:
I mean, well, sort of, kind of.
Casey:
I thought they were canning the 5X in favor of 3.5.
Casey:
I see totally now what you're saying.
Casey:
I totally miss the boat on this in that it's a sensor crop.
Casey:
This sounds much better than I initially thought, and yeah, I'm definitely here for it.
John:
Well, a couple more tidbits on 17 Pro that aren't in the notes here, but that happened this week or recently.
John:
We've talked in the past episodes about the
John:
sort of elongated camera mesa where they just took the existing one and they just said let's just extend that mesa all the way across the phone let's just be honest but they left all the cameras in the same place and they just put like the flash and the lidar sensor way on the right side anyway people are coming out more people are making those models like that's what we were looking at last time we talked about in the show someone had made like physical models of it and we were looking at those uh cad uh drawings and the models made from them while we were discussing it people are making models and case manufacturers are making cases the cases look hilarious with just basically the top
John:
third of the case just open for the giant camera mesa to come in i know like we're used to seeing a big hole in the back of a case but now it's just like edge to edge one top third of the camera is just entirely open in the back um some other rumors that people are now insisting that the camera mesa unlike all the mock-ups that people have been making will not be a different color than the back of the phone it'll just whatever color the back of the phone is the camera mesa will be that same color maybe that's a way to try to hide its bulk um
John:
maybe it's just a new look there's rumors about it the back of the phone being partially aluminum and partially glass with glass over the parts that need to be radio transparent but aluminum over or some other kind of metal over the other parts for sturdiness so that's kind of the state of the rumors now like the the cad drawings are so widely available that you'll find so many youtube videos where like i made it out of metal i made these out of wood i 3d printed them like
John:
people have these phones essentially in their hand case manufacturers are making cases for them like the thorough leaking of the physical design of iphones continues to just be massive and unavoidable like i almost feel bad for if like you actually care about this and you want to be like remain spoiler free about what the new iphones look like it's almost impossible if you ever use youtube but or listen to the show sorry about that but anyway those are the new phones that are coming
John:
But if like that 3.5x camera, like I'm excited about it.
John:
I'm not even getting this phone.
John:
Is anyone getting this phone?
John:
Anyway, we'll talk more in the after show.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Okay, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And Robert Battal writes, what resources do you use for reviews, whether it's for purchases or anything else?
Casey:
I use Wirecutter for purchases, but I have no idea what else would be reliable.
Casey:
I don't really have a good answer for this.
Casey:
I don't feel like, I don't even remember the last time I looked for like proper reviews of something.
Casey:
Typically, I'll page through Amazon reviews if I'm looking at something on Amazon, which are all garbage and fake, and then I'll
Casey:
You know, maybe Google for a second, but I don't have any terribly good answers to this.
Casey:
I feel like John is going to have the most comprehensive response.
Casey:
So Marco, what do you do?
John:
Actually, before you move on, Casey, I have a question for you about this.
John:
What's the last thing you can recall buying that you like that you bothered to do any kind of like research for?
Casey:
I mean, we've just replaced both of our refrigerators, our garage and indoor refrigerator.
Casey:
They both died simultaneously, which was very unfun.
Casey:
But I didn't do that much research.
Casey:
I mean, I did some cursory looking about, but...
Casey:
We knew that we wanted to get something from Costco because they were running President's Day sales at the time.
Casey:
And then for the garage fridge, I think they literally had one option, which was fine.
Casey:
And then for the indoor fridge, they had like three or four options that we cared about.
Casey:
And I just chose the one that best fit our needs.
Casey:
So there really wasn't that much comparison shopping done.
Casey:
Before then, I don't even know, like Aaron's car, but we comparison shopped ourselves and decided we wanted to stick with an XC90.
Casey:
Like, I...
Casey:
I'm not trying to dodge your question.
Casey:
It's a completely fair question.
John:
We all know people who just don't do research for their purchases because that's just not the way they live their life.
John:
Especially if you don't have hobbies that intersect with your purchases.
John:
Asking you, Casey, where did you do research for your next computer?
John:
You don't have to do that research.
John:
You're living in it.
John:
You're soaking in it all the time.
John:
You are aware of the Macs that are available and are coming.
John:
and what their resources are.
John:
You don't have to do any research for that because it's part of your hobby.
John:
But your hobby is not researching refrigerators.
John:
So when your refrigerator breaks, two things.
John:
One, as you know from listening to directives, when your refrigerator breaks, you don't really have time to leisurely research what kind of fridge you're going to get.
John:
You kind of need a place to put your food so it doesn't spoil.
John:
And then two, maybe you don't care that much about refrigerators.
John:
That's what most people are with most of their purchases.
John:
It's like, well, whatever.
John:
I just want one that's okay and that doesn't cost too much and they're having a sale and so I go for it.
John:
But...
John:
Yeah, some people care a lot about every purchase and some people care not at all about any purchase.
John:
And some people only care about the things that they're already like they don't have to do research for because it's their hobby.
John:
Like so you don't you care about which computers you get, but you do not have to actively do any research in that area.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Marco, let's talk with you and then John, let's wrap it up with you, please.
Marco:
Are they looking for the same things I'm looking for in this product?
Marco:
And those are very different questions.
Marco:
And you have to really be aware of both those things.
Marco:
So where you are looking has a certain set of built-in things to consider.
Marco:
Like on Amazon –
Marco:
Many of those reviews are fake.
Marco:
Many of those reviews have been paid for.
Marco:
Many of them were given like the Amazon Vine program where they send them the product for free in exchange for a review.
Marco:
Like there's so much gaming going on there or incentivizing going on any kind of online shop, but especially Amazon, which is so big.
Marco:
So you do have to contextualize.
Marco:
When you see a review, it's like, this looks like a three-paragraph essay written by a middle schooler about this product.
Marco:
Chances are that's not – anything that looks kind of formulaic and it's like this is probably not a real thing that you need to be paying attention to.
Marco:
similarly you have to consider like what is the crowd i am watching or what is the crowd i'm reading here like for instance if you go if you find like reddit posts about something you're buying well most reddits seem to be young men who are angry about the products they're reviewing and so it's like well that can be useful like that's very good information sometimes but you have to you have to contextualize like well
Marco:
what are young angry men saying about this?
Marco:
When this product breaks or doesn't work, how does it break and not work?
Marco:
If you don't contextualize it properly, you might think, oh, this product breaks for everybody, but what if it only breaks for young men?
Marco:
You wouldn't know that.
Marco:
You have to contextualize.
Marco:
Amazon, a lot of fake stuff.
Marco:
Other places online, they have their communities and their limitations and everything.
Marco:
What you're looking for when you see reviews...
Marco:
is overall trends, large trends.
Marco:
Like, okay, well, if this product, if all the reviews of this are citing, like, some nitpicky problem, but it has, like, 10,000 reviews on Amazon, and the average is, like, 4.5 stars...
Marco:
Odds are it works fine for most people who buy it.
Marco:
And the few people it doesn't, there's what there's what they're complaining about.
Marco:
You can read those.
Marco:
You can say, OK, well, it looks like, you know, this cheese grater, it looks like it's really good.
Marco:
But maybe the handle breaks off under heavy use after five years.
Marco:
Like, OK, well, you might still want to buy it because that might still be the best cheese grater.
Marco:
That's why everyone keeps buying it.
Marco:
So like there's – you have to kind of contextualize like, well, how will this fit my needs, not just what does one reviewer say?
Marco:
And again, you have to look at the credibility of the reviewer.
Marco:
So if you're looking at like a restaurant, my favorite is like if you're like in America and you see reviews for –
Marco:
Any kind of non-American food.
Marco:
Like you look at like reviews for like a Thai restaurant, say.
Marco:
Well, you can always tell when you look at those reviews like which of these people don't really eat Thai food.
Marco:
You can tell right there in the reviews because they'll make certain comments like, oh...
Marco:
They're judging this harshly, but somebody who likes Thai food, that sounds like they probably like it, actually.
Marco:
So you have to, you know, contextualize that kind of thing as well with reviews.
Marco:
So it's – I can't just point to one place and say this is the one – trust what this place is saying because everywhere has their problems.
Marco:
Even, yes, Wirecutter.
Marco:
Wirecutter, despite the marketing of it, does not test a huge number of products in most categories.
Marco:
They usually test – they'll usually do the same thing.
Marco:
They'll go on Amazon or whatever, and they'll kind of filter out what they don't even want to bother testing because you can't test everything because there's so many products in most categories.
Marco:
So they'll use their own kind of filtering methods to say, all right, well, we're only going to test these 10 things in this category or whatever.
Marco:
And even then, they're testing for certain qualities.
Marco:
They're optimizing for certain qualities.
Marco:
They're only having a small number of people usually do the testing.
Marco:
So even then, that's not going to be representative of what everyone is looking for.
Marco:
That's not going to be representative of every product in the market.
Marco:
They might rule things out based on price or availability details that maybe you don't care about.
Marco:
Or they might not care about some feature or some functionality or something that you very much do care about.
Marco:
You kind of have to just look around and get a vibe for like, oh, it seems like most people pick this option.
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
Or it seems like this product seems to perform poorly in cold weather.
Marco:
Well, I live in Arizona.
Marco:
No problem.
Marco:
You can find stuff out like that, but you do have to kind of just develop that habit of just like being able to absorb a lot of info that you're seeing from all these different sources, being able to pretty quickly realize what seems credible and what seems non-credible, and then what seems relevant and what seems irrelevant.
John:
John.
John:
The reason I put this in Ask ATP is because this is one of the questions we get every few years.
John:
We get all the time, but every few years, I feel like it's worth re-answering it just to see if anything has changed in our lives in terms of how we handle things.
John:
And just to reiterate the answers that we usually get to these questions for listeners who haven't listened to the program for years and years.
John:
I think you two covered most of the bases there.
John:
And I already talked about like,
John:
Not you can't do deep research on every single thing you buy.
John:
Like you probably only care about certain things and other ones you just like I feel like a lot of people have that sort of the loss aversion or like, well, I just don't I don't care about this, but I don't want to get a bad one.
John:
It's like, well, like, what are the consequences?
John:
You know, if you're looking for like, you know, a garbage can for your office.
John:
If you get a bad one, it's probably not the end of the world.
John:
Just put it and use it somewhere else in your house where it will work better and try again.
John:
Right.
John:
Versus buying a refrigerator or a car where you're like, well, I don't actually even care about cars, but it's a lot of money.
John:
So I want to make sure I do OK there.
John:
So I'm going to do some research.
John:
So always recognize that balance.
John:
Like if you find yourself doing days of research about cheese graters and you don't actually care about cheese graters, question what you're doing.
John:
Right.
John:
Only research the things that you actually, you know, either that you care a lot about or you feel like you have to care a lot about because the consequences of making a bad choice are, you know, significant.
John:
But again, the consequences of buying a trash can for your office that you don't like that much, probably not going to be fatal.
John:
So you'll probably be OK.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The resources that I use, I think it always helps for things that you do care about and you want to research.
John:
It always helps to sort of, first of all, find the place on the internet where the people who care way more about this than you hang out and talk about it.
John:
So for me, like for televisions, there are whole forums of people who just like spend all day talking about TV, like TV.
John:
talking about things like on their little, you know, PHP BB that's been up for decades and they are just obsessed with TVs and they have dedicated topics and channels for specific manufacturers and models and they share settings with each other and that are obsessively watching all the rumors about, like, those people care more.
John:
Their lives are about TV.
John:
This is the ATP listener equivalent.
John:
Like, that's the ATP for televisions.
John:
You probably want to find those people, not because you're going to agree with them or do what they say, but it's good to have that input of, like,
John:
there are some people who are on top of everything and their opinions are going to be weird and their priorities are not going to match yours, but they do know a lot.
John:
And so that really helps with like, like what Marco was saying, if you're like, well, this, you know, the wire card cares about X, but doesn't care at all about Y. And when you find the people who care a ton about the product, you will see every concern reflected somewhere in there.
John:
So if you're wondering, like,
John:
I care about how noisy this thing is, but no one ever talks about the noise.
John:
Find the forums where everyone's obsessed.
John:
There's going to be a subgenre in there of the people who care about the noise.
John:
The Wirecutter review may never even mention or measure the noise at all.
John:
But the forum for the people who are obsessed with this thing, they're going to talk about the noise, the weight, the color, the price.
John:
They're going to talk about everything.
John:
So you want, like, if I want to know how noisy is this, you need somewhere to find that information.
John:
Not from the specs page of the thing and not from some paid review on Amazon, but like the obsessive people.
John:
So find that.
John:
Find where that is, whether it's a website or whatever.
John:
Find the people who are obsessed and don't take what they say at face value.
John:
Don't look at their recommended products and buy what they say, but instead use it as a resource to figure out, oh, the thing that I care about, let me get some info on that so I can put that as an input into my thing.
John:
Second thing that I'll say is YouTube is a great resource when buying physical products
John:
because almost anything you buy, you'll probably be able to find multiple YouTube reviews of it.
John:
And the thing you're getting, I think the most important thing to get for a YouTube review, if you're not lucky enough to find a YouTube channel that you trust about this product or whatever, which is not always gonna be the case, you just wanna physically see the product in real conditions, in real lighting, in real people's hands.
John:
And boy, will you find that on YouTube.
John:
And you may not think, like, what do I care?
John:
Like, I know what it looks like.
John:
I see the pictures on the website.
John:
Like, what does it matter?
John:
Seeing the real thing, maybe if they use the thing, if it's like a vacuum, having them, like, use it and push it around and just, like, seeing it from lots of different angles and, like, the product shots are always going to show it in the most flattering light and maybe you'll get two blurry photos on the Amazon reviews with photos things.
John:
YouTube is where you need to go to see this product from all angles.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Again, to use as an input because you're wondering, like...
John:
Is that thing on the bottom pointy?
John:
Like, how does this thing rest on the table?
John:
Or where does the plug go in on this?
John:
Or what does that display look like when it lights up?
John:
Or does that thing make a noise when you turn it on?
John:
You will find the answers to those questions on YouTube because you'll search for this product and model number and you'll find 100%.
John:
100 amateur videos from random people in their houses and eventually one of them will show the thing that you're interested in.
John:
That is another important input.
John:
And finally, if you're super lucky and it's a thing that you really care about, you will eventually find channels that you like.
John:
When I was searching for speakers for my home theater setup and then later when I was searching speakers for my computer, there are channels that I like and follow that review audio equipment where I've watched like dozens of hours of reviews of audio stuff and I know those people.
John:
I know what their attitudes are and what they care about.
John:
I know where to find the objective measures that I care about for the particular speakers that I'm interested in.
John:
And boy, is that nice.
John:
Because if I just like or my my whole AV setup of when I was looking at my receiver and the television television channels, like if it's a big name thing, like lots of people into TVs, lots of people are into gaming monitors, lots of people are into building PCs.
John:
Chances are good.
John:
There are a handful of YouTube channels.
John:
where you can eventually find the people that you feel like you trust that give you that whose values kind of match yours.
John:
And that could be a shortcut to all of this because you're like, I'm just going to go to monitors, unbox them, whatever he says is the best gaming monitor that is, you know, 4K, 27 inch OLED with HDR with this number of nits.
John:
I'm just going to say whichever one he wants.
John:
He says is the best I'm just going to get because I've watched this guy for seven years and his values align with mine shortcut.
John:
I know exactly what to get.
John:
If you don't know hardware on box exists, you can't take that shortcut.
John:
But eventually, for things that you care about, you will find a channel like that.
Casey:
Anonymous writes, I'm having my first child soon.
Casey:
I want to figure out a coherent plan for managing and backing up pictures.
Casey:
Well, why are you talking to us?
Casey:
All right, next question.
Casey:
No, I kid.
Casey:
Anonymous continues, ideally, it should work automatically without me having to do anything.
Casey:
If manual steps are required, I will definitely be too lazy to do them.
Casey:
I take pictures with my iPhone and Android phone and my wife takes pictures with her iPhone.
Casey:
I'm not worried if it costs some money.
Casey:
Google photos, I guess.
Casey:
I mean, we do have a whole member special about this that I recommend you ignore everything that we talk about in that special.
John:
Well, we just explain what we do, but we're not, again, with most of our member specials.
John:
When we explain what we do in our lives, we're not necessarily recommending that you do the same thing.
John:
We're just explaining what we do.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I honestly am not sure other than maybe Google photos, like I said, I'm not sure what I would recommend.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The last bit of like, you know, it says I take pictures of my iPhone and Android phone.
John:
There you go.
John:
Well, once you say iPhone and Android, you need something cross platform because the whole point is I don't want to do anything manual.
John:
So any solution that's like, oh, well just your iPhone will be your primary phone and you use iCloud photo library and then your Android photos, you'll just transfer.
John:
Nope.
John:
Manual step.
John:
No good.
John:
So if you want it to be automated and
John:
it's slim pickings you need a photo system that works hands-off on both ios and android and the first one that comes to mind casey just said it google photos google photos is on the iphone google photos is on android and it is a fairly comprehensive photo system that cloud syncs your photos and yada yada yada and that's like that's the only literally the only thing i can think of because everything else has manual steps
John:
I'm not even aware of any other service that tries to compete at the level of Google Photos across both of these platforms.
John:
Now, if you could ditch that Android phone, I have a different answer for you.
John:
But given the constraints, you are looking at cross-platform solutions.
John:
And honestly, Google Photos is not bad.
John:
Like, it's fine.
John:
And it'll do, I think, what you need to do.
John:
But be aware that Google Photos integration in the iOS ecosystem is not as smooth as the integration of Apple's own photo system.
John:
So you will have to deal with that, but that's just, that's fact of life.
John:
There's no avoiding it.
John:
I don't think there's any other, I'm not aware of any other service that will, I guess maybe like there's an Amazon thing where they'll sync your photos.
John:
I forget if they canceled that.
John:
I'm sure people are going to write in with their third-party solutions, but honestly, but the whole like, there can't be manual steps.
John:
I would add the other caveat is I don't want to
John:
use a company that might not be there in five years like if you're trying to look for pictures of your kids like i just i wouldn't trust this to not that i'm not to denigrate any third-party things but both platforms both apple's platforms and google's platform uh and microsoft's platform for that matter don't really
John:
bend over backwards to make sure that third parties can provide as reliable a solution to photo management and sharing as the first party ones.
John:
They just don't.
John:
You're lucky you can do it at all.
John:
And so that's why there's not a proliferation of third party services that work across all these platforms as seamlessly as the first party ones.
John:
Google is really the only thing I can think of that has...
John:
pretty okay ios integration and of course you know very good android integration and is a reliable service and i know google has a reputation for abandoning all their products if they eventually abandon photos it's going to make a lot of people sad but like given the constraints of the your question anonymous i don't have any better solutions
Casey:
Yertle writes, do you guys have any strategies or philosophies around documenting complex setups that others might need to support, like Marco's wiring layout and network config for the restaurant?
Casey:
I'm mostly thinking of how much you try to support your future selves.
Casey:
Do you just bank it on it all making sense enough for you to figure out later?
Casey:
Other examples are AV receiver wiring and cloud or local backup steps.
Casey:
For me, generally speaking, I'll create like an Apple note when it's something that I think I want to refer to in the future.
Casey:
I'm trying to think of other more physical examples.
Casey:
When I redid the switches in the house, that gave me an excuse to go figure out what all the different fuses in the fuse box or breaker box, whatever you want to call it, what they correspond to.
Casey:
So I made a little ASCII table that matches the breaker box and says breaker one is the
Casey:
Bedroom, breaker two is the bathroom or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
For my website, as another silly example, when I moved to Linode, I was very diligent about documenting all the things I did in order to make sure I knew how to do it again in the future because I knew I'd never remember any of it.
Casey:
Um, although quick aside, I've been meaning to tell you to, you can finally stop yelling at me about something that is not a problem.
Casey:
You can go to bare bones, just casey list.com and it will now work.
Casey:
It used to be in the past that it would not work.
Casey:
It would hang if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
You had to go to www.casey list.com.
Casey:
Um, now you can go to just casey list.com and that will also work.
Casey:
work welcome to 2002 yeah well thank you very much it's great to be here uh at least our president sort of kind of makes a little bit of sense um actually wasn't it w then maybe that's not true anyway uh the point is that uh what made me think of this was i was looking at how i set up the let's encrypt like cron job or whatever it was i did in order to set up the um ssl cert for my website because i needed to rejigger that a little bit
Casey:
And as it turns out, that was the one thing I didn't document very well at all.
Casey:
And so as I was going through the stance of trying to figure out what the heck it was I did and how to augment it to allow for, you know, like a bare bones domain, I then documented it.
Casey:
And this happens to be a wiki entry on the GitHub repository for my website.
Casey:
But generally speaking, I use Apple Notes religiously and diligently to document these sorts of things.
Casey:
Um, that being said, it's not really helpful for anyone else.
Casey:
So God forbid, if I drop dead tomorrow, Aaron or whoever's coming after me to clean all this up is going to be, it's going to be a mess for them.
Casey:
Like they will, you know, Aaron has access to my Apple notes if she wants it, but it's still going to be difficult.
Casey:
But that being said, that's not going to be my problem.
Casey:
Um, so I don't know.
Casey:
We started with Marco last time, I believe John, what do you have any thoughts on this?
John:
One of the things I rely on for doing this is my own deterministic nature.
John:
Uh, if there is any situation where I feel like if I encountered it again in the future, I would just have to do what comes natural to me and I would, it would solve the problem.
John:
So for example, um,
John:
Let me keep track of like how I did this or what I named this thing or where I put this.
John:
I will come upon the same situation years later and just say, Oh, well, I don't know how I did this or where I put our, what I called it before, but I'll just do what I feel like doing.
John:
And lo and behold, that's exactly what I did five years ago because I am the same person and I'm very predictable in certain ways.
John:
I don't bother documenting that stuff.
John:
I just trust in myself to make the same decision if I need to.
John:
Um,
John:
I do document for things that are not, like, that I don't have any kind of strong feeling about, and therefore my deterministic nature is not going to help me here.
John:
I do have an Apple note, for example, where I keep a bunch of crap on my house.
John:
Things that really should be leaving my house, see other podcasts that I do.
John:
But I just have so much crap.
John:
I need to get rid of so much of it.
John:
But in the meantime, sometimes I need to know where something is, and so I have a notes document that tells me, like...
John:
I think the first year I really started doing this was hiding Christmas presents.
John:
I'd get early Christmas presents, but I didn't want people to find them, so I'd hide them.
John:
And then in February, I'd find something that I forgot to give someone on Christmas, buried in a drawer somewhere.
John:
Then I said, you know what?
John:
I need to write this down because I'm old and apparently I can't remember where I put this stuff.
John:
So I will do that kind of documentation for technical stuff or for like, you know, the examples here, like wiring and like my AV stuff or whatever.
John:
Most of that stuff, I assume documenting it is not useful because the next time I touch it, I'm going to be overhauling it anyway.
John:
So who cares what I did before?
John:
And that has proved to be true for most things.
John:
Like,
John:
I may have a complicated setup.
John:
My setup on my AVs thing is, I don't know, it's not complicated, but it is involved.
John:
But if I ever touch it, it's because I'm overhauling it again.
John:
And then I just want to start from scratch anyway, right?
John:
So that, I don't document that stuff.
John:
You mentioned like doing SSL stuff.
John:
That's one of the few things I do have documented in my website things, just because it was, every time I did it, it'd be like,
John:
how would this work again and what did i do because you just forget about especially when the search for like five years remember back before you had to redo it every year uh when you could have an ssl server for five years five years roll around you're like oh i have no idea what i did for this last time i should have documented it well i did document it and now i have to do it every year for multiple sites and that is convenient and by documenting it's usually just a matter of writing down instructions but then i'm like you know why don't i just make this a shell script and you know anyway um
John:
most everything else no like i'm kind of the same situation as you casey i make this joke to my family all the time like if i get hit by a bus you guys are never gonna be able to watch tv again which sounds bad it's like why do you have such a complicated setup that no one in your house can figure it out i promise you it's not that complicated but they just rely on me to deal with it like i'm like their tv concierge it's like you there man turn on my television program and i do like it's just you know
John:
If anything ever goes wrong, something's wrong with the computer, television, anything that is a remotely computer thing, they just throw up their hands and walk away.
John:
And then I solve it for them.
John:
So if I ever disappear, they're just, I don't know, they're going to be Amish or something.
John:
It's going to be a rough situation for them.
John:
Um, but yeah, uh, I guess I write down what the breakers are for inside the breaker box on the little lines where they say to write that stuff down.
John:
I'm the only one who does that because no one else ever touches the breaker box.
John:
But, uh, yeah, I guess that's the extent, like the real answer to this question is, do you have philosophies for documenting complex setups or do you do like the answer is I don't do it enough.
John:
Whatever amount I'm doing, it is clearly not enough.
Um,
John:
But I get by.
Marco:
I think that's how we all are.
Marco:
With this stuff, you do your best, but every system, you maybe forget about it a little bit or you get a little sloppy.
Marco:
The breakers are a great example.
Marco:
The breaker labeling is, in most cases, it's required by code for new construction or renovation.
Marco:
But of course, over time, the breaker labeling diverges from reality.
John:
It becomes fiction, yeah.
Marco:
Right, or rather reality diverges from the labeling usually.
Marco:
We're like, you know, that was how it was when it was first installed.
Marco:
But then like, well, you know, a few weeks later, something, some circuit had to be moved for some reason, or you added more circuits.
Marco:
And now you have like six unlabeled breakers at the bottom of the box that do who knows what, you know, there's reality always interferes with these systems.
Marco:
Like, you know, even, you know, so the, you know, the questioner asked, like, what am I doing about the wiring and network configure at the restaurant?
Marco:
Well, I started out with all the best intentions.
Marco:
When I ran all the new wires, I labeled them with Label Maker.
Marco:
I wrapped little labels around them, both ends of each one with a naming scheme that I think makes sense.
Marco:
What happens is over time, like, oh, I got to replace this wire with a longer one.
Marco:
Oh, I'll label that later this afternoon when I get back to it.
Marco:
Oh, then I forgot.
Marco:
Then it's good.
Marco:
Then now we have like three wires that aren't labeled.
Marco:
Or like, oh, let me just connect this real quick to test it.
Marco:
And then I'll put the real wire in later with the real label.
Marco:
And then that time never comes.
Marco:
Um, now I did like, you know, I made like a, a diagram of the building and like what, you know, where each wire goes.
Marco:
Like I have like the main, I call them the trunk wires, the main like big ones that go like from kind of the, the sub switches to the main switch.
Marco:
Those are labeled as, you know, trunk one, trunk two, trunk three.
Marco:
And I have a map.
Marco:
I have like a PDF that has like an overview map of the floor plan and it labels where trunk one, trunk one and trunk three, like where those go, where the switches are.
Marco:
Well, but now I have more switches than that.
Marco:
Do I go back and update that PDF?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
And, you know, now I have it.
Marco:
But like in six months or three years, when something has to be added or changed or replaced, am I going to go back and update that PDF?
Marco:
Probably not.
Marco:
If I can still even find it.
John:
Are you going to be able to find that PDF, which is another problem with documenting things?
John:
Then you have to remember where you put the documentation or whether it exists or what it was called or how it was organized.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
right and if somebody down the road has to do this without me are they going to even know to look for something like that probably not they're probably going to just look at the system the way it is and figure it out as best as they can you know and and that's that's you know one example where like it's kind of hard to run out everything new you know your example like av receiver wiring john's right the only way to ever edit av receiver wiring is to disconnect everything pull it all out and do it all again like
John:
You probably should because there's probably wires that are no longer connected to anything that have been behind your TV for years.
Marco:
Almost certainly.
Marco:
And you should at least vacuum everything back there.
Marco:
I feel like the answer really is you do your best.
Marco:
Every system kind of breaks down over time, and you figure it out.
Marco:
And if it's irritating you on a frequent basis, then you put a new system in.
Marco:
You label everything all from scratch.
Marco:
You take a day, and you test all your circuit breakers, and you figure out what goes to what, and you label them all.
John:
odds are it won't be that important to you ever like it'll odds are it that day will never come that that's a good idea for you to spend your time doing that and you'll just plow through and it'll be fine and there is an anti-pattern to watch out for here for like i think what we're representing is kind of like middle of the road a lot of people kind of live their lives this way there are people who are who care much more about this process uh and if it's not hobby if it's a hobby for you and you enjoy it fine whatever but like
John:
Some people feel like they need to laboriously, carefully document every aspect of their lives.
John:
And almost certainly, if it is not a thing that they enjoy in a hobby, they are burning time that could be better used doing something else.
John:
You have to prioritize.
John:
Not everything deserves the level of careful documentation based on its value of essentially, will I ever...
John:
have to refer to this.
John:
Will this ever be useful in the future?
John:
Again, if you're not doing it as just like a fun thing that you like to do and this is your hobby, but you're doing it because of like a concern that like, I might need this again, maybe try to keep track for a year of how many things that you spend time carefully documenting
John:
have value in the future do you ever refer back to that do you ever think to yourself boy i wish i knew how x y and z did it oh thank goodness and the thing is if that happens once you're like oh that means my entire year full of doing this was worthwhile but if you just look back at one thing you documented a hundred like
John:
Think about it like so there you can go.
John:
What I'm saying is you can go too far in the other direction to obviously not documenting anything and not having keeping track of anything and having things leave your head the second you do them.
John:
It's not ideal.
John:
But the reverse is also not ideal where you feel like you have to spend hours and hours documenting everything and you refer back to one out of those 100 things on a yearly basis.
John:
So.
John:
Somewhere in the middle is probably right.
John:
I'm not saying I'm the right amount or any of us are.
John:
I think I'm probably more on the I should probably be documenting a little bit more than I am.
John:
But be aware that that spectrum exists and sort of be aware of your place on it and see if you can find peace with that.
Marco:
We'll be right back.
Marco:
ATP.fm slash join.
Marco:
This week, Overtime is about Apple's all-glass hardware dreams.
Marco:
There's been some fun new patent filings uncovered about an all-glass iPhone and more.
Marco:
We're going to talk about that in Overtime.
Marco:
So, ATP.fm slash join if you want to hear it.
Marco:
Thanks so much.
Marco:
We'll talk to you next week.
Marco:
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 Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So here in the US and the world, we're kind of messing with the entire global economy.
Marco:
We, as Casey said earlier, we're sorry for what our country is doing.
Marco:
Forgive us as best as you can.
Marco:
So we're in the era right now of the Trump tariffs hitting the economy, and today he is delaying them for 90 days because, of course, what we need is more uncertainty from this administration.
John:
That's the whole thing about this situation is we're recording this at like –
John:
10 p.m.
Marco:
on wednesday april 9th by the time you listen to this who knows well like we're not we can't possibly say anything that is relevant to like oh here's what's happening what you should do but just uncertainty is the key word here we have no idea what's gonna happen yeah it's it's chaos is is the word it's just constant chaos and you know obviously there's a lot of political angles of this but what i wanted to cover here which is i think more directly relevant for our show is
Marco:
how do we think the tariffs are going to affect tech products and what we might do or have done as a reaction to that so my feeling is again this is going to be chaos it's not we don't know what is going to happen we don't know how it's going to all end up but what we do know is that the era of like
Marco:
I'm pretty sure – I think it's going to be very similar to early COVID when supply chains are thrown into chaos.
Marco:
Things have ripple effects.
Marco:
It might seem okay now, but then for some reason in six months, you can't get a car because there's some shortage or something.
Marco:
There's going to be stuff like that that happens because our supply chains, as we learned during COVID, our supply chains are –
Marco:
very fragile like everything has been optimized to you know to the ends of the earth and so everything is like interlinked and optimized and there's no slack anywhere in the system and so when you have like big shocks to it or big unpredictability to it you can have weird ripple effects that that are bigger than you think they'll be or that are further in the future than you think you think they would be um and so
Marco:
So what I think this affects for us as tech fans is pricing and availability of hardware.
Marco:
I think that is like the number one thing that we will see that's relevant to us as nerds besides global economic changes.
Marco:
But like how this will hit nerds specifically I think is hardware pricing and availability.
Marco:
So I'm wondering like do the two of you – like have you considered this and have you maybe made any decisions or plans as a result?
John:
I have.
John:
This was an easy one for me.
John:
I should have actually done this sooner, but being a procrastinator, I just waited until it was like, oh, yeah, I meant to do this.
John:
My daughter is a senior in high school.
John:
She'll be going off to college in the fall.
John:
um i knew i was going to get her a lap new laptop for college i knew exactly which laptop it was going to be m4 macbook air as discussed on the program uh that machine has already been released she's not going off to college until september but like what am i waiting for to buy it and i kept saying i should probably just get that i like i always plan to get it a little bit early because i'm going to use it on my long island vacation as my photo computer um but it's as these you know whatever the
John:
As it became more likely that the various random things our idiot president was saying about tariffs were actually going to result in some kind of action for some period of time, I said, you know what?
John:
There's no reason for me to wait.
John:
There's not going to be a better, different computer that comes out between now and September that I need to get.
John:
And by the way, because my son is also in college, I can just use his student discount, which actually isn't that great these days.
John:
Student discounts, let me tell you kids, college discounts on Macs used to be amazing.
John:
Now they're just like, eh.
John:
Anyway, I used his college student discount to get my daughter's M4 MacBook Air.
John:
And I bought it now just because, first of all, I knew I was going to buy custom config, like I'm getting more RAM and blah, blah, blah.
John:
It's not just like a stock one, so I can't just go to an Apple store and get it.
John:
And like...
John:
What's going to happen?
John:
Availability price.
John:
It's uncertainty is entirely up in the air.
John:
And so this wasn't even a difficult choice because sometimes it would be like like for replacing my Mac.
John:
It's like, oh, what am I even going to replace it with?
John:
I don't even know.
John:
Maybe I should wait to see what machines come out.
John:
No, this was a no brainer.
John:
M4 MacBook Air.
John:
She was getting one.
John:
I knew she was getting one before they released that machine.
John:
I'm like 100 percent.
John:
You're getting an M4 MacBook Air.
John:
So I bought one.
John:
It's going to be delivered on Monday.
John:
I bought it.
John:
I ordered it like a week or so ago.
John:
And I think it is one of those customers.
John:
When you buy custom ones, don't they all ship from China these days?
John:
I think so.
John:
They're not in stock anyway.
John:
It's custom.
John:
It's got more RAM than normal.
John:
It's silver, whatever.
Yeah.
John:
That is arriving.
John:
That is the only thing I've done so far because this year is not my phone year.
John:
I've got a 16 Pro and I buy a phone every other year.
John:
So I'm not looking to buy a phone this year, but this is my wife's phone year.
John:
And it could be that she skips this year if it turns out the phones are either not available or horrendously expensive because she's got...
John:
A15 Pro and it's perfectly fine.
John:
She's on a two year schedule as well.
John:
So there's some uncertainty about that.
John:
But the only thing I've actively done was I moved up the purchase of a computer that I was already going to buy.
John:
Not because I think necessarily anything is going to happen, but that's the whole thing.
John:
It's uncertainty.
John:
Nobody has any idea from day to day what's going to happen, which is terrible.
John:
And again, we apologize to the world.
John:
It's terrible for everybody.
John:
But that was one thing that I could do, which seems like a big thing.
John:
It's like, oh, you made this pretty expensive purchase.
John:
But again, I was going to make it anyway.
John:
But so far, that's the only thing I've done.
Casey:
Yeah, I haven't done anything yet.
Casey:
Although it did occur to me earlier today, like a few hours ago, that I'm really glad that the fridges died when they did because I have no idea if those came from China or if there will be more brought to the states.
Casey:
I mean, it would have been a total mess.
Casey:
No, I don't have too much to say about the tariffs.
Casey:
I don't properly understand...
Casey:
I don't think I really understand what the goals are, and I'm not sure that the government does either.
Casey:
It just seems like a measuring contest to me, and I'm not sure that we're winning, but that's okay, I guess.
Marco:
Does anyone ever win when that's really the dynamic?
Marco:
Everyone's losing.
Casey:
Yeah, 100%.
Casey:
But no, I haven't made any purchases.
Casey:
There's nothing that I was looking to purchase that I thought I need to accelerate.
Casey:
Like, I'm not looking to buy a car right now.
Casey:
I'm not looking for any new computer equipment.
Casey:
Presumably, I would be getting a phone this September.
Casey:
I guess, maybe, if it's not $3,000.
Casey:
I personally perceive it as part of my job to get a new phone every year so I can talk about it.
Casey:
Also, it's convenient because I really like new stuff.
Casey:
But I might take the John approach this year because I think it's well within the realm of acceptability to buy a $1,500 phone on an annual basis.
Casey:
Because I genuinely, as much as I snark, I genuinely believe that it makes a show better by...
Casey:
two thirds of us getting a new phone every year.
Casey:
But maybe I would say no this year.
Casey:
If it's really, you know, two X the cost, then I don't know what I would do.
Casey:
And we'll cross that bridge when we get there.
John:
I mean, you could, you could end up getting, for example, the non pro phone, if that saves any money, like we have no idea what's going to happen, but it is, it is something that we're thinking about.
John:
And like, I think we've seen a lot of questions about this,
John:
like ATP related questions, like, Hey, what should I do about purchasing and stuff?
John:
And the few times I've responded to people on this, I basically said like, there's no, like, we can't give any advice.
John:
Like there's no plan or thing that you should do other than like this type of thing that I did, which is like,
John:
you were going to do this anyway, just move it up.
John:
Like if it's not, if you have the money now and you were going to get this, you know exactly what computer you're going to get.
John:
Like that's, that's the only thing that's actual.
John:
Everything else is a hundred percent speculative because honestly we can't give any advice.
John:
Like, Oh, if you care about something, you should buy it now because what?
John:
Because you know what's going to happen.
John:
This whole year, we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.
John:
Like, okay, so you should definitely get a new fridge if your fridge is old, because you're not going to be able to get fridges.
John:
We don't know that.
John:
We have no idea what's going to, like, it's just, it is like COVID, the beginning of COVID.
John:
It was like, nobody has any idea what the next day will bring.
John:
So there actually is not, unfortunately, there's not any obvious advice.
John:
Like, it's not even obvious advice to say, you should buy things that you think are going to be expensive later, because
John:
Like maybe that's just causing you to make a purchase that you wouldn't have made otherwise.
John:
Right.
John:
And especially with tech products, like half of the things we talk about in the show is like, is this the time to buy product X?
John:
Right.
John:
I'm going to say, this is not the time to buy an M3 Ultramack studio for the same reason as we discussed in the show, unless you really, really know you need it.
John:
It's nothing about the uncertainty of the future changes that like, so don't be careful about like,
John:
i don't know like panicking or like doing something that you would otherwise not do because you think you know what the future will hold nobody knows uh and it could cause you to like because if it turns out like oh i was worried about which tech pro i'm going to get but it turns out i can't get potable water anymore suddenly the fact that you pre-purchased an m3 uh ultra mac studio doesn't look like such a wise decision like we don't know what the next thing is going to be oh remember when the bees invaded and like oh we don't have enough bees to invade i should pick another analogy sorry
John:
climate change anyway um like this is the this is the problem of the situation there actually isn't much actionable advice that you can give and if you see anyone saying with certainty that you should do x y and z that you weren't going to do before because they know that what the future will hold they don't nobody knows it's terrible well i chose i chose to buy a laptop i mean that's what did you buy that's marco's that's marco's solution to everything yeah it's yeah right yeah
John:
I think I have a head cold.
Marco:
I might buy a laptop.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
New underwear might be laptop time.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
So basically, yeah.
Marco:
I went to my family this past weekend.
Marco:
Like on Friday, you know, as it was becoming apparent this past weekend that like, oh, stuff's going to go bad on Monday probably.
Marco:
Like things were going that direction.
Marco:
So I went to the family and I'm like, hey –
Marco:
is there any technology that we think needs to be replaced this year?
Marco:
You know, like, let's look at it and see what we can maybe buy right now.
Marco:
Like, how's your old iPad doing?
Marco:
Like, how's the battery lasting on that?
Marco:
You know, stuff like that.
Marco:
Like, look around.
Marco:
Like, do you need a new iPad or laptop anytime soon?
Marco:
Like, this is probably going to be, like, this could be a dicey situation for pricing, availability, or both.
Marco:
So, like, hey, what do we need?
Marco:
And
Marco:
For the most part, everything... You start looking at it and you're like, well, this looks fine.
Marco:
This iPad, this ancient iPad, the battery doesn't last very long.
Marco:
But we don't use it that much, so it's probably fine.
Marco:
So for the most part, everything was pretty good.
Marco:
The one thing I decided to...
Marco:
Send my M2 MacBook Air down the line of hand-me-downs to a different role and try out the M4 MacBook Pro with the anti-glare, the nanotexture screen, which will solve some of my train and ferry usage problems in the sunlight.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
So I got a pretty low-spec M4 MacBook Pro, the 14-inch one, and the regular M4 series, not the M4 Pro and Max one.
John:
it'll be interesting for you to report on that because uh i'm not entirely sure nanotexture will actually help you with your sun situation i guess it depends on whether what you are uh being distracted by reflections versus having sun fall on the screen at an oblique angle in which case the nanotexture may make that worse by raising all the black levels but anyway you'll report back and let us know how it goes
Marco:
Yeah, I mean the reality is it'll probably be an improvement in both ways because in addition – when you compare it to the MacBook Air screen, in addition to it having nanotexture as an option, it's also way brighter at the max setting.
John:
Yeah, that is probably going to make the biggest difference.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So like right now, when I'm using my MacBook Air on the train or on the ferry, it's almost always at max brightness.
Marco:
And even then, it's like I'm kind of squinting sometimes, like, oh, I really need a little more, you know, for comfortable usage here.
Marco:
So that's why I think, like, let me give it a try.
John:
You should try those utilities that let you, like, turn, like, go above, I think the limit is, like, 700 nits now, but you can bring the whole screen up to 1600.
John:
I think you'll be able to see that pretty well, but it'll kill your battery.
Marco:
Yeah, well, it'll be really hot.
Marco:
Better will last like two hours at most.
Marco:
Small price to pay.
Marco:
And I think, as John was saying, I think for listeners, I think that is probably the right move is look at what you're going to need for the rest of the year.
Marco:
And anything where the price isn't really going to change or it's not about to be updated in some major way that you care about, consider maybe buying that right now.
John:
Yeah, you already knew what you were going to get.
Marco:
Yeah exactly like if you're like oh yeah like John your situation was a perfect example like I'm going to buy a MacBook Air this summer maybe buy it now you know like that kind of thing where I'm like oh this laptop I'm probably going to replace this laptop in the next few months you know what the next you know yeah the M5 version is coming out in the fall maybe but like
Marco:
The M4 to M5 probably isn't like it isn't rumored to be that big of a deal, whereas the M6 one is rumored to be a big deal.
Marco:
But that's a couple of years off probably still.
Marco:
So like, you know, like, OK, I'll get the M4 one now, see how it goes and figure that out later.
John:
The only caveat I'll add on this is that if you are moving a purchase up on the calendar to like do it sooner than you expected to.
John:
and you don't already have the money saved up for it well yeah think twice because that again gets back to my thing of like well what if two months from now i don't have potable water right like conservation of resources like yes if you you know you may say this is no brainer i was gonna get this laptop anyway but actually i have two more months where i'm saving money for it and i don't actually have the money now at all but i can dip into savings a little bit to get this sooner um
John:
Are you going to regret that if you need that savings later in the water wars?
John:
Just like think that's what I'm saying about the uncertainty.
John:
Like it's a no brainer for me because I already have the money set aside for it.
John:
It's like, you know, it didn't there was literally no impact.
John:
But if there's any impact, think twice about it, because even though that's like, quote unquote, a sensible thing to do from a
John:
tech purchase perspective are tech purchases going to be the most important thing to you in x number of months or years there's so much uncertainty about just the basic functioning of society that it's hard to know like it's hard to recommend people to move up tech purchases unless they're sure that they have the means to cover that and it's not impacting like their monthly budget in an adverse way and they're
John:
Like, oh, we'll make up for it later.
John:
Will you?
John:
What about when your government contracts that used to fund the company you work for go away and you don't have a job anymore?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But even in an optimistic scenario where a lot of this stuff gets never minded away as so many of these terrible government things do –
Marco:
Even then, we're still going to have chaos.
Marco:
We're still going to have unpredictability.
Marco:
We're going to have fluctuations.
Marco:
You already, because of people doing what John and I did, there's already runs on certain products.
Marco:
We're getting reports like Apple stores are really crowded.
Marco:
Everyone's rushing in to buy whatever they need right now because they know that it might not be available in a few months or whatever.
Marco:
And I think one thing to consider, too, is like Apple is actually pretty well positioned to play the tricks required to not be hit too hard by this.
Marco:
Now, one thing's for sure.
Marco:
Apple will not give up margin.
Marco:
They will not just make less money.
Marco:
We know that like that option is off the table.
Marco:
There is no way Apple is going to just suck up tariffs and just make less money.
Marco:
But they have the resources to play a lot of tricks to optimize the system, not only through just direct butt kissing and bribing our dictator, which they are happy to do and are doing, but also –
Marco:
They can do tricks like, well, we're going to take these parts that were made in China.
Marco:
We're going to first send them to India and then send them to... They can do tricks like that, like kind of arbitrage the system and work different angles so that they don't quite pay the full tariffs.
Marco:
But rest assured, like...
Marco:
If Apple's costs go up to Apple, they will absolutely pass it on to us.
Marco:
There is no way Apple is just going to sit back and accept lower margins.
Marco:
So if that system does hit Apple, we will definitely see higher prices.
Marco:
But Apple has the resources to dodge and weave and play politics in this area.
Marco:
I think this is more likely to have a bigger hit on other companies, especially smaller companies.
Marco:
So if there's something made from foreign parts, which is many things for many good reasons, but if something is made from foreign parts that you are looking to get maybe in the near future –
John:
that especially from like a smaller company or a less you know high profile company than like a big tech giant it doesn't really be a small company it's low margin products like televisions are notoriously low margin products these days huge companies make tvs but the margin on tv sets unless you're buying one of the very highest end of one of a few brands the margins are so low which is why they've been barred you with ads that low margin product is going to be impacted way more than a high margin product that potentially manufacturers could absorb some amount
John:
And by the way, on that topic, I saw at least one person saw Benedict Evans doing the math saying that, again, this was days ago, so who knows what numbers they were using, but that Apple literally can't absorb the tariffs on the iPhone.
John:
They would lose money on each one they sold if they tried to absorb them because he did the math on like price of parts and blah, blah, blah.
John:
And I don't know how accurate his math was because nobody really knows what the real number is here, but it's within the realm of possibility, especially given the ever-increasing
John:
tariffs on China that Apple could not absorb, even if they wanted to, which they don't.
John:
They could not absorb them because they would be losing hundreds of dollars in every phone sold, and that's not good business.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
Even if they can do some trick where it's like, well, we worked the system such that our 38% hardware margin is now going to be like 30%.
Marco:
no they won't accept that they will believe me they will raise prices like there's no way apple will make less money like i guarantee you that rest assured like if if these tariffs end up happening and affecting apple we will pay higher prices no question and of course i mean we're gonna have massive inflation no matter what but anyway you know look at smaller things that you that you're looking at like if you if you want to like replace you know like a kindle or something i mean
Marco:
Or some boutique electronic thing you're getting off of a smaller maker.
Marco:
Maybe place that order now.
Marco:
If you were going to wait on it a little bit, maybe do that now.
Marco:
Because the smaller the manufacturer, the more likely it is for them to have their costs go up significantly and for them not to be able to dodge and weave and play tricks to avoid them.
Marco:
And similarly, what Casey said earlier, that matters a lot.
Marco:
If you maybe have an important household appliance or a car that you think needs to be replaced in the near future, that might get harder.
Marco:
And so maybe do what you can to maybe explore some options for that like yesterday.
Marco:
That could really hurt in the future.
John:
Even if it's like, well, in a year we're thinking of getting a new car –
John:
it's rather than buying a new car now maybe buying a used car now because you don't have the money for a new car but like in two years maybe used cars will be impossible to find and cost a hojillion dollars like this there's so much uncertainty about everything not just like oh new fancy tech products but like i mean just look at the egg situation like everything is connected and you have no idea what's going to be the thing that you didn't think about that like so it's again if you if you really super duper need a car don't run out and buy the new car that you were still saving money for but like
John:
If you, you know, this is all just speculative.
John:
If you think, if you're worried, like, I don't want to be in a situation two years from now where I can't get a car for the amount of money that I saved, but I can get a used car now for the amount of money I've saved, maybe think of that as an option.
John:
But it's just so hard to give concrete advice because we just all have no idea what the next day will bring.
Marco:
And if you have something that's in pretty good shape right now but could use some kind of maintenance or repair to extend its lifetime by a lot, like a battery replacement on an older electronic device or replace the junction box in your car or whatever.
Marco:
If there's something where you can repair something that works fine otherwise and extend its lifetime for months or years in the future –
Marco:
This is probably a really good time to do that because the greatest time to have a really well-functioning car that you own outright is right now because whatever happens to that market, there's going to be ups and downs and you won't be in that market anytime soon if you're in that kind of situation.
Marco:
That's how it was during the COVID car crisis too.
Marco:
That was a really good time to own a car and not need to be shopping for one.
Marco:
This is probably going to bring that level of uncertainty or something like it.
Marco:
Start optimizing for it now and start thinking like, okay, whatever you can extend the life of, extend the life of it.
Marco:
And if you need to replace something, replace it while it's plentiful and not when everyone else needs to do it and there's nothing on the shelves.