Sell a Third Box
Marco:
This is not going on this show.
Marco:
We can't.
John:
No, it's really not.
John:
I thought it was going to, but I really can't.
John:
You can spend your birthday going through the email of the book.
John:
Just sort through them one by one.
Marco:
Happy birthday.
Marco:
Here's a scandal.
Casey:
I really thought I was going to be able to ride the line, but I definitely did not.
John:
No, you didn't think it through.
John:
Yeah, not even close.
Casey:
No, no.
Casey:
It sounded good in my head.
Casey:
All right, let's start with some follow-up.
Marco:
Jane Manchin Wong writes... Wait, I have some car pre-show stuff because we have to cut your retire pre-show.
John:
Oh, yeah, no.
John:
That's true.
John:
Marco, can you... I saw on your Instagram story you had a photo of the Wheel of Shame and I was super excited, but can you get that picture and make it the show art, please?
John:
I sure can.
John:
Because I find that endlessly hilarious.
John:
Let me just briefly explain one that says... Marco, do you want to describe the Wheel of Shame?
John:
I think you get it more accurate than I do.
Marco:
Okay, so when Tesla Roadside Assistance has to give you a temporary wheel with a temporary tire that they loan you when you have a flat tire and then you can drive on it as long as you need to until you can get to like a service center appointment and get yourself a new tire.
Marco:
When they give you this loaner wheel, apparently they had a problem.
Marco:
that you know many cars have roadside assistance that will or many you know insurance things like triple a like they'll offer you roadside assistance where they will they will bring you a loaner wheel but it's not something you really want to drive on for very long usually it's like you know some like really basic you know steel rim with you know just some cheap you know low low needs tire on it that maybe just barely fits your car well and
Marco:
uh tesla doesn't do that because they're tesla and for various pragmatic reasons like the fact that most wheels won't fit over their giant brake calipers um so there's only only a few sizes of rim that will even fit and tire and so they send you an entire tire mounted on a on a real tesla rim and
Marco:
And apparently, people who would get this installed on their car by roadside service would often just never return it because it's a Tesla rim.
Marco:
It looks like they're other ones.
Marco:
And why bring it back to the service center ever and have to buy a new tire when you could just keep the loaner tire?
Marco:
people just weren't returning so to solve this problem uh tesla roadside assistance apparently started um spray painting the loaner rims that they would use with ugly red spray paint sloppily applied so they can tell those are those are owned by tesla and not by the owner of this vehicle and it apparently deters people from stealing them for too long
Marco:
Um, so I got one when I got a flat tire about a year and a half ago.
Marco:
That's my first time I'd ever seen one.
Marco:
Uh, first time I ever had a flat tire incidentally.
Marco:
Uh, and then recently I also got another flat tire.
Marco:
Uh, well, a flat tire was gotten for me by someone hitting it when it was parked.
Marco:
And, uh, so anyway, um, I brought it to the service center and here's the fun part.
Marco:
So I have my winter tires on still.
Marco:
The service center that was loaning me the tire until I can get back to my main place where I have the summer wheels and therefore don't need to replace this tire quite yet.
Marco:
They didn't have any winter tire loaner rims.
Marco:
They did, however, have two summer tire ones.
Marco:
So they actually gave me two of these for both wheels on the front axle so they will match and not be lopsided because the winter and summers are like one inch different or something.
Marco:
So they had to match.
Marco:
They are not lopsided.
Marco:
They are two loaner rims.
Marco:
Both of them spray painted.
Marco:
So it looks like my car has been vandalized.
Marco:
The best part is that one of them is silver and one of them is black.
Marco:
So I have two different loaner rims, both of which look totally hideous on my car.
John:
I was thinking about this when I saw your picture, though.
John:
And I have, I mean, it's not really a question because I have explanations for the answers, but it does really make me, I mean, many things make me reconsider how Tesla runs its business.
John:
And this is one of them, right?
John:
So first of all, the problem of people keeping the wheel, because it's like it's a legit wheel.
John:
It's just like the wheel that comes with your car and then it's whatever tire is on it, right?
Right.
John:
I understand why Tesla doesn't want that to happen, because like you said, it's an older wheel and it doesn't match your other older tire.
John:
It doesn't match your other tire.
John:
It's probably a safety concern.
John:
Maybe it's a liability thing like I totally understand that.
John:
But it seems that Tesla roadside assistance can arrive or in some reasonable amount of time and give you a genuine Tesla wheel with a tire on it.
John:
why don't they just give you a new tire and a new rim at that time and then you can keep it because the problem would be solved why do they have to take it back to santa's workshop like the grinch and do something with the tire and the wheel and then bring it back later now i know the answer is probably well they don't know what tires i have on and i've got my winter tires and they don't have a new tire available they just have this old one but it does seem weird to me that they're trying to keep you from using and keeping essentially the solution to your problem albeit a you know
Marco:
a used one or whatever like i kind of get it but it does seem a little bit weird to me i mean i probably the most direct reason which this might not be a very good reason but when you have roadside assistance come it's just like some like towing company like tesla contracts with all these different companies all the different places i guess like whoever's closest that is like a towing or roadside assistance company they just you know dispatch them out and then they pay the bill like in my case the first time i got it a
Marco:
It was actually like a mobile service van that was like just some van that showed up and a guy takes a Tesla tire out of the back that I guess he, you know, he carries a supply of them from Tesla and just stuck it on and was in and out in like a half hour.
Marco:
This time, there were none of those in the area.
Marco:
And so they had to actually flatbed tow my car to a service center.
Marco:
Oh my word.
John:
yeah i mean like all i'm saying is like i understand why they don't want you to use the use wheel like it makes sense but they're so close to basically solving your problem like they just they just need to go a little bit farther like because those towing companies need to have this random tesla wheel of shame hanging around and the second thing is for people who haven't looked at the show art that marco has hopefully put in showing the picture of this wheel if you're picturing a wheel that has been like spray painted red like you know just sort of
John:
rattle can spray painted like a kind of a drippy paint job no it's not that's not what it is imagine a nice tesla wheel haphazardly randomly sprayed not to cover the entire wheel it is not spray painted a color it's just like and that's it like just literally looks like it's been vandalized yes and with the first time i saw this i'm like oh they they had this problem and they just came up with a solution on the fly
John:
But now, multiple years separated, in two different geographies, we see the same quote-unquote technique, which is, yeah, just randomly spray the wheel with red spray paint.
John:
I feel like the corporate angle on this would be to have a sort of standardized wheel of shame that is ugly and that people don't want in their car, but isn't literally, let's randomly, haphazardly spray a few red lines on this wheel, right?
John:
Like maybe you could say test wheel or...
John:
Maybe you could have like, you know, I don't know, temporary spare or must return, like something like a decal or like you can make it even uglier than red spray paint because actually kind of matches Marco's car.
John:
So it just boggles my mind that this is the standard way of doing business, that you have this nice fancy car and they give you a wheel that looks like it's been vandalized.
John:
And now you've got two of them.
Marco:
Yeah, it's it's kind of amazing.
Marco:
But I mean, it makes sense if you think about, you know, like so as I mentioned, like the tires have to be a certain size to fit over the brake caliper.
Marco:
And so there aren't going to be a lot of like cheap off the shelf stock rims they could just stock their service people with.
Marco:
At the same time, they do probably have a supply of, like, reject rims from manufacturing that, you know, they made them to sell them.
Marco:
And for whatever reason, some of them, you know, they're messed up or they're scratched or whatever.
Marco:
So they probably do have, like, some extras that otherwise would just have to be disposed of or somehow otherwise, like...
Marco:
written off.
John:
I'm not saying use a different rim.
John:
I'm saying do a nicer, ugly paint job on the genuine Tesla rims, right?
John:
You could make it look like the crash test dummy thing with the orange and white checkerboard pattern or whatever.
John:
You could make it look very unsettling and something that someone wouldn't want in their car, but in a nice way, in a way that looks like it wasn't an accident or like it was done on the fly by the guy who drove the tow truck over.
What?
Marco:
Well, and that's the thing.
Marco:
The way that I think Tesla is run is a phrase that I've heard Casey use before.
Marco:
It seems very grab-ass.
Marco:
It seems like everything's just kind of done haphazardly, kind of like...
Marco:
Oh, crap.
Marco:
We got to do this.
Marco:
Hurry up.
John:
Somebody grab this thing.
John:
It's not like someone was rewarded for coming up with the brilliant idea of like, I got it.
John:
I'm just going to go to the hardware store and get some red spray paint.
John:
And that somehow becomes corporate policy.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And then no one in the company has the taste to say, OK, that was good for you doing on the fly.
John:
But let's come up with a formalized version of that that is not quite as embarrassing, but fulfills the same purpose.
John:
Like, you know, a very fancy decal that looks like, you know, a test pattern or some other thing that makes it clear that this is a temporary rim.
Marco:
It does seem.
Marco:
Yeah, it does seem like it was just like the some service center did this because they needed they need to solve this problem.
Marco:
They didn't have time to work out an official policy with corporate or whatever.
Marco:
Some other service center like heard about it or saw it and they did it too.
Marco:
And maybe it's just the ones around New York do this.
Marco:
I don't know.
John:
yeah i know maybe you have to get a flat out of state we really need to know like is the red haphazard red spray paint a national policy international policy please someone get a flat tire in another country and tell us on their tesla and tell us if you get the wheel of shame and what it looks like wheel of shames from across the world yeah californians drive over your non-existent potholes tell us what sound ducks make in france
Casey:
Oh man, this show has already been well off the rails.
John:
The wheel of shame is ridiculous and hilarious.
Marco:
I do have a bit more car follow-up.
Marco:
As I was driving around doing all these errands with my vandalized car rims, I also had some chance to sit in the car and wait for a while as I was waiting for the tow truck to come and everything.
Marco:
So I installed my new ProClip USA, previous sponsor, my new ProClip USA MagSafe mount.
Marco:
And I have experience using MagSafe in the car with my iPhone 12 mini.
Marco:
And overall, there are a couple of snags, but overall, it is fantastic.
Marco:
Now, snag number one,
Marco:
The MagSafe brick has to or the MagSafe puck is USB-C, not USB-A.
Marco:
So I had to like change the whole thing.
Marco:
I had to change the the extension cable that runs like kind of under the console in a semi clean fashion all the way to the 12 volt plug thing.
Marco:
And I had to change the 12 volt plug thing to a adapter that has a USB-C output port of 15 watts.
Marco:
fortunately the um the pro clip usa magsafe mount comes with that so you supply the apple cable the magsafe mount is just kind of like this regular pro clip compatible mount that you then like kind of wedge the cable into and screw it in with tension screw to hold it in place um so total cost of this setup is quite high because pro clip usa stuff is already on the higher end of pricing compared to most like cheap garbage car mounts people usually buy
Marco:
Although, again, it is totally worth it.
Marco:
Again, they were a former sponsor.
Marco:
I don't know if they might still sponsor in the future, but they're awesome.
Marco:
And so, anyway, total cost of this thing, once you factor in the Apple MagSafe puck, is probably over $100.
Marco:
But it's a pretty great overall outcome once you have it.
Marco:
The other limiting factor, can you guess what might be a problem with a MagSafe mount in a car?
Marco:
This is something I did not foresee.
Casey:
I mean, I would assume that jostling it would be the problem, but since you said you didn't foresee it, then I'm not sure now.
John:
Do you have other magnetic things in the car sticking to the MagSafe clip?
John:
Do you have metal filings flying around the cabin?
John:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
You surprise me.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah, all the time.
Marco:
No, so I did expect jostling to be a problem.
Marco:
I expected, like, if I hit a speed bump, it would fall off.
Marco:
And so far, it hasn't.
Marco:
So far, it has stayed perfectly in place throughout all of my drives over all of our bumpy New York roads.
Marco:
It has been totally fine.
Marco:
Maybe time will tell.
Marco:
Maybe I'll find some situation in the future where it falls off.
Marco:
But so far, I haven't found it.
Marco:
So that's great.
Marco:
No, the problem is I was driving back from one of the things on this really nice, great weather day we were having.
Marco:
And I noticed the screen was pretty dim on my phone.
Marco:
And I'm like, that's weird.
Marco:
Normally I can see ways a little bit better than this.
Marco:
I'm like, oh, it's not my sunglasses.
Marco:
I put on control center and pushed the brightness.
Marco:
Well, it was already all the way up.
Marco:
And I'm like, well, that's weird.
Marco:
Maybe it's a bug.
Marco:
Sometimes iOS has weird bugs with the ambient light sensor.
Marco:
So put the phone to sleep, wake it back up, turn the brightness down, turn the brightness up.
Marco:
It wasn't getting very bright.
Marco:
Figure out the problem yet?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I mean, the ambient light sensor is on the front.
Casey:
It shouldn't matter, should it?
Casey:
Heat.
Casey:
What?
Marco:
The phone was over thermal limiting.
Marco:
Oh, my word.
Marco:
When iPhones get too hot, one of the first things they do before they go into shutdown mode is reduce the screen brightness.
Casey:
I didn't know they did that.
Marco:
Yeah, I think it's a fairly recent thing.
John:
I don't know if older models did it, but... That's one of the advantages of car clips, usually, is if you clip them to your vent or near your vent, you actually have coolish air blowing on the back of them, cooling off your phone a little bit.
Marco:
Right, and I do clip it on the vent.
Marco:
However, it was a really nice day, and I had all the AC off, and I just had all the windows open.
Marco:
And so it was getting a lot of sun, but not any cooling, and...
Marco:
And I didn't have a great charge level from earlier that day when I was sitting in like a waiting room for a long time.
Marco:
And so at that point in the day, the MagSafe charger was actually charging it pretty substantially.
Marco:
So it was, it was receiving a good deal of charge and it was in the sun and it was not getting the AC blown on it.
Marco:
So even though it was only like, you know, 65 degrees, that was enough heat that the phone was actually fairly warm to the touch.
Marco:
And that was enough to reduce the maximum screen brightness.
John:
you just got to get a lightning cable and connect it to the lighting port and then just use the magnet part not to charge but to just hold the phone because i guess i mean i guess that eliminates some of the convenience now it's attached with a wire right but that should prevent because i'm assuming the heat is because it's a you know it's the inductive heating or inductive charging and not uh with the lightning cable do you think have you ever had any overheating problems with your phone and your car plugged into a lightning cable to charge
Marco:
never but i also haven't had the iphone 12 mini in very hot weather before because it came out in the fall so although this wasn't very hot weather either but anyway so that is that actually john that isn't a bad idea to also have a lightning cable that it can plug into instead um but that would ruin a lot of the appeal because if it plugged in the lightning it won't do inductive charging but anyway uh
Marco:
Other than the heat issue, which I'll report back as the summer goes on, other than that, it actually worked very, very well.
Marco:
And I loved not having to slide it into a lightning connection.
Marco:
And the lightning connection...
Marco:
probably due to some fault of the lightning cable or the port or whatever would not work a 10th of the time.
Marco:
I would be like halfway through a drive.
Marco:
Oh no, I haven't been charging this whole time.
Marco:
And you know, the screen's been on and ways has been on a GPS.
John:
So the lightning connection wouldn't work.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
That's weird.
Marco:
It started happening when Apple started getting picky about USB security and whether USB-connected devices were allowed to even start using the phone if it was locked in certain conditions or whatever else.
Marco:
So around that time, that started becoming a problem.
Marco:
I never quite figured out the pattern to it, but I'm sure it was something like maybe it was locked when I slid it into the charger and then I unlocked it once it was in there or something.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But MagSafe gets rid of all that because it's much simpler.
Marco:
It seems to be always permitted no matter what the lock state of the phone is.
Marco:
So anyway, overall, this is great with the potential issue of heat might become a problem.
Marco:
can you get a lower power thing to hook up to your mag safe thingamabobber so it just charges slower at lower wattage that's not a bad idea either i could but even see the thing is like chi charging is so inefficient that i think even if i just put put like a five watt charger on there which would be honestly possibly not enough to keep up with ways and the screen being on full brightness like that that actually might slowly lose charge but
Marco:
i'm not sure that would actually uh be enough of a savings like because it's it gets pretty warm even even just under five lots of charging i mean maybe even if you don't have the ac on maybe just turn the fan speed up because even just regular temperature air blowing on the back will probably help cool it yeah and i had the fan totally off because it was a really nice day and i'm like i don't i don't need climate control i'm in the climate it's controlling itself it's great
Casey:
I actually have a teaser for next week.
Casey:
I received an early birthday present from my parents, which is one of the CarPlay wireless adapters.
Casey:
And I have only used it for literally five minutes stationary in my garage.
Casey:
And in those five minutes, it worked pretty well.
Casey:
But similar to what you're saying, imagine how... Well, first of all, Marco, can you imagine having CarPlay in your car?
Marco:
That sounds amazing.
Casey:
Wouldn't that be neat?
Casey:
Wouldn't that be neat?
Marco:
I would love that.
Casey:
Imagine...
Casey:
I mean, my car, which probably costs less than half of yours, has CarPlay, and it's pretty awesome.
Casey:
But remember, guys, Tesla's perfect.
Casey:
Anyway, so my car is wired CarPlay, as most cars do.
Casey:
And they sell these little boxes.
Casey:
I definitely tweeted about it a while ago, and I thought we talked about it on the show.
Casey:
They have these boxes that are basically like bridges.
Casey:
And so you plug the box into the USB port, and then it connects to the phone via, I think, Bluetooth.
Casey:
I'm not confident I'm correct about that.
Casey:
And it basically gives you wireless CarPlay.
Casey:
And so in my two minutes of testing, it seemed to work pretty well, but I plan to be in the car several times over the next several days.
Casey:
And so I hope to have some more feedback about this next week.
Casey:
So we'll talk about it then.
Marco:
Oh, I did forget to mention too, when I was in the waiting room at the dealer thing, I saw the Model Y for the first time.
Marco:
I didn't drive it because I was just in the showroom.
Marco:
But it, I think, is going to be a really big hit.
Marco:
If it isn't already, it probably is.
Marco:
But it seems like exactly... You look around the car market today, in America at least.
Marco:
The rest of the world has generally better taste.
Marco:
But in America, you look around the car market and...
Marco:
It's pretty much dominated by a whole bunch of cars that are exactly the same car.
Marco:
And it's this kind of like weird, like short length wise, kind of tall, kind of crossover, kind of SUV, kind of thing.
Marco:
Every car in America is that right now.
Marco:
That's not a coincidence.
Marco:
That's what people buy.
Marco:
Like, that's what everyone in America seems to want right now.
Marco:
Again, I'm not entirely sure why, but that's that's what happens.
Marco:
The Model Y seems to fit that exactly.
Marco:
The Model 3 has already been a huge hit.
Marco:
The Model Y basically takes the Model 3 and pulls it upwards slightly and gives it way more trunk space because it gives it a hatchback like the Model S. It looks like it's going to be a huge hit.
Marco:
I have a feeling like, you know, as I'm riding around my S, which feels like a dinosaur by comparison, although a dinosaur they absolutely love still,
Marco:
I can look at this and say, yeah, they're going to be busy for a while.
Marco:
If you're hoping for something from Tesla, like the Cybertruck or the Semi or whatever else, something in the future that is not really scheduled for production yet, I don't know how they're going to have time to make anything else instead of spending all of their manufacturing capacity on the Model 3 and Model Y because they're going to sell an absolute ton of the Ys in addition to the absolute ton of the 3s they've already been selling.
Marco:
So I think this is going to do very well for them.
John:
I guess you didn't see my link I put in our little neutral slack channel showing the Ford quote unquote Mustang Mach-E beating a Model Y in a range test.
John:
The EPA rating for the Model Y is 326 miles and the EPA rating for the Mach-E is 270.
John:
But they just ran the cars next to each other on like a 250 mile trip and the Model Y ran out of juice before completing it and the Mach-E did not.
John:
they're both incredibly ugly disgusting suv cars that i don't like but i think uh the model y might actually have some legit competition because that ford is just as ugly which people love uh gets better range apparently in real life and i think it's also cheaper because uh unlike uh tesla i think ford hasn't uh it's it's like subsidies from the government haven't expired so you get the 7 500 tax credit on the on the i can't even say it with a stripe but
John:
the mustang maki it's terrible anyway um we'll have a link in the show notes to this video and you can watch it looks like it's pretty well done obviously there are many variables with the range um but i think the um if you watch the video they go over lots of little nuances of the different charging networks and the and the various uh pros and cons but i think the model y at this point might actually have some competition if you like this kind of car which i don't
John:
And neither does Marco.
John:
And Casey kind of drives one of these cars, but he drives the gigantic sneaker version.
John:
So I guess it's a little bit different.
Casey:
Did you hear that?
Casey:
Did you hear my eyes rolling right out of my head?
Casey:
Because that's what just happened.
Casey:
I can't continue the show.
Casey:
I can't see anything.
John:
I don't like, I mean, Marco's right.
John:
This is, this is what everybody buys.
John:
This is basically the default car, which it makes lots and lots of people happy, but not me.
John:
And so like, I have to look harder and harder to find a car that is even the remotely like the right, you know, type of car, you know, like in terms of number of doors, shape, everything.
John:
Cause just everyone wants a little crossover SUV things.
John:
And I don't like them at all.
John:
I don't.
Marco:
I think I also I'm pretty sure like I kind of decided as I was driving around my car a lot this last week or two for reasons I kind of decided I think I'm going to buy it out at the end of the lease because looking at what Tesla is doing.
John:
You're afraid of the steering wheel.
John:
You can get a round one, I bet.
John:
It'll be fine.
Marco:
But they messed up the gear shifter.
Marco:
They kind of messed up the center console in a way I don't love.
Marco:
It just seems like the Model S that I have is the last car Tesla designed to be driven by the driver.
Marco:
Everything they've designed since then, including from the 3 forward, including the current S, the current 10, and the 3 and the Y, all of those cars seem to have been designed primarily to drive themselves.
Marco:
But the thing is, they don't primarily drive themselves yet.
Marco:
And they might never do that.
Marco:
I know full self-driving is in beta and the beta is amazing and all this stuff.
Marco:
Yeah, I know.
Marco:
I've seen the videos too.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
But in actual day-to-day use of actually owning these cars, they're still mostly driven by you.
Marco:
And the Model S that I have seems to be the last car Tesla made that was designed to actually accommodate that and be designed for that primarily.
Yeah.
Marco:
And I just like that better.
Marco:
It's a car that is a really... It's my favorite car I've ever had.
Marco:
It's so incredibly nice to drive.
Marco:
And at no point do I feel like I am fighting against the design of the car.
Marco:
Whereas the new ones, I don't like the center screen only on the 3 and the Y.
Marco:
And I don't like the stock removals on the new S and 10.
Marco:
And I don't like that they removed the sunroof also on the new S and 10, which I used this entire time.
Marco:
It just, it seems like they're going in a direction that I think they'll course correct at some point, but that hasn't happened yet.
Marco:
And so I'm very happy to keep the one I have, I think.
John:
and now you got it all dented and scratched up and everything i know i gotta i still don't have an estimate on the on the body work we're gonna see how that goes yeah i mean well i don't know how financially whether it makes more sense for you to buy this car out and fix it yourself either way you have a it's really yours now because now you've damaged it or someone has damaged it for you as you said yes
Marco:
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Marco:
I love Mack Weldon clothes.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right, shall we start with follow-up?
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
All right, Jane Manchin Wong writes, Clubhouse no longer requires contacts access for sending invites.
Casey:
In the latest update, you can now directly enter the phone number or use the iOS contact picture, which does not require contacts access in order to send an invite.
Casey:
I have not yet tried this, but I've heard several people reporting this.
Casey:
So that's good news.
Casey:
I dig that you can do this by hand.
Casey:
I'm still a little iffy on the fact that it's using phone numbers, but here we are.
Casey:
But at least you can do it in a less gross way.
John:
It's interesting because like apps like Clubhouse, especially Clubhouse specifically appealing to like the sort of, you know,
John:
silicon valley vc startup whatever like the the subset of people who are using the app are exactly the type of people who might be disproportionately annoyed by giving access to their contacts i think in general in the mass population it that would probably go without most people you know worrying if it was if this was the hot app and everyone was on it like they would just you know say yeah yeah okay and tap their way through it
John:
But because it's a bunch of nerds who are probably like me simply refusing to give access to their contacts, they weren't getting as much, you know, social engagement as they would have expected because I never invited anybody because I couldn't without giving access to my contacts.
John:
And so it makes some kind of sense that they would actually notice this and say, what are we trying to do here?
John:
Like we're trying to get access to their contacts to try to bootstrap our network.
John:
But if they're refusing to do it because it seems too, you know, too onerous and over the top,
John:
these sensitive nerds who care about giving access to their contacts it's not working so why don't we just do what we should do in the first place which is let people invite who they want to invite let them use the ios contact picker which lets them pick a contact from their list without us seeing what they are and we only get the one phone number that we're being sent the invite to so
John:
Good job, Clubhouse, doing a fairly fast reaction to a poor design choice.
John:
You can follow the link in the show notes to the tweet that shows, Jane's tweet that shows the screenshots of what the interface looks like.
John:
I think it even looks better than the old interface.
John:
No more scary dialogue saying give access to your contacts or go away.
Casey:
Moving right along, Apple Arm and TSMC.
Casey:
I think that, John, you probably have some thoughts about this, but somebody, I think it was Mark Kagan, pointed to a good but very long write-up, unfortunately on Medium, but nevertheless, a write-up on why, or some theories as to why the M1 is so darn fast.
Casey:
And it gets into a lot of technical details.
Casey:
However...
Casey:
it does a pretty good job of giving an appropriate amount of explanation as to what Eric Engheim is the author.
Casey:
It was talking about without spending three hours on tangents explaining, you know, here's the fundamental knowledge you need to understand every nuance of what I just said.
Casey:
So I breezed through this and it was a pretty good article.
Casey:
So we're going to put that in the show notes.
Casey:
But John, I think you have other thoughts as well.
John:
slight disagree on that article which i'll get to in a second um this was about last it was ask atp last episode about like uh who is the sprinkles is is it arm with apple sprinkles is it apple with arm sprinkles i don't remember what the sprinkles were good or not uh the idea was trying to apportion uh credit for apple's amazing uh chips in their phones and now in their macs who gets most of the credit for that uh and uh our conclusion i think collectively it was apple gets most of the credit um
John:
Apple is the most important part of that formula.
John:
And a couple of people pointed out that one other ingredient that we should talk about that we didn't mention last time is fabbing, right?
John:
TSMC is doing the fabbing for Apple.
John:
Intel used to be the king of fabs.
John:
They are not anymore, right?
John:
They haven't been for a long time.
John:
It's been a sad decline for them.
John:
Fabbing is short for fabrication.
John:
It is how your chips get made and each new process size corresponds to how small they can make the little things on the chips.
John:
And in general, the smaller they can make the little transistors, the better that is overall.
John:
and TSMC is currently in the lead.
John:
And Apple has a lot of money, and they use that money to pay TSMC to make their chips using the best process technology that TSMC has to offer.
John:
In fact, Apple has so much money that they often buy up as much of TSMC's capacity as they possibly can to say, here is a huge bucket of money.
John:
Make our chips with your best stuff, and whatever you have left, you can sell to other people.
John:
But if you have no more capacity left, as in the factory is entirely engaged making chips for iPhones, iPads, and Macs,
John:
Well, you know, Apple doesn't care.
John:
In fact, that's great for Apple because its competitors can't use the latest process size for their chips, right?
John:
Now, TSMC, just like ARM, are things that are in theory accessible to everybody.
John:
Anyone can make an ARM chip.
John:
The whole ARM's whole business is we will license you the CPU architecture or CPU designs and so on and so forth.
John:
TSMC's whole business is we'll make your chips for you.
John:
We don't have our own chips.
John:
We just make people's chips.
John:
You pay us money, we make your chip.
John:
That's the whole business that they're in.
John:
So you would think TSMC, like ARM,
John:
would be would cancel out right because everyone has access to arm that was the whole point with apple being great everyone has access to arm qualcomm has access to arm qualcomm chips stink apples are great they're both arm chips so arm is not the special sauce here it's apple or the sprinkles or whatever the hell it is um
John:
tsmc is similar in that they will fab anything for everybody but like i said uh unlike arm which arm will just give you licenses you know there's an unlimited amount of arm licenses that they can they can make a new copy of that arm license and you know without any cost to them tsmc has limited capacity and when apple hogs it that doesn't leave as much for everybody else that said most of apple's good arm competitors are
John:
are either on the same process size, maybe not done by TSMC, maybe done by another fab, or close.
John:
So the fab advantage that Apple may have is a factor, but I don't think it is the deciding factor.
John:
So if you had to rank these, I would say Apple is the most important factor because they're really good at making chips and the people who are doing that at Apple are doing a great job.
John:
The second most important factor is probably the fab access in that if Apple didn't have access to the best process, its chips wouldn't be as good.
John:
They would only be
John:
170% better instead of 200% better, right?
John:
And then a distant third is ARM.
John:
And as for that article, it reminded me of the sort of risk versus CISC wars from the early 2000s on the Ars Technica website.
John:
Put a link in the show notes, which is a 10-year retrospective on risk versus CISC.
John:
If you read the article, it falls into some of the same traps.
John:
I don't know if most people aren't going to do this.
John:
If you went back and read all the...
John:
the risk versus CISC articles on Ars Technica for that 10 year span, you would see them sort of laboriously going through all sort of the proposed advantages of risks and how that works out in the real world, right?
John:
So lots of the things about risk, it's clearly better than CISC because reasons X, Y, and Z, and then you look at how real world chips performed and how the distinction between risk and CISC is not as clear cut as you think it is when it comes to actual chips.
John:
I think that article is a little bit of a naive view of what makes ARM or Apple's chips good.
John:
It has some good fundamentals that you can learn about it and has some interesting points, but it leans a little bit too heavily on the magic of risk is just better because X. We have decades of experience showing that risk is not just better.
John:
right it's it's the individual chip that makes it right so you know power pc chips are risk and intel chips persist and intel was crushing them yes they had a fab advantage but their instruction set was terrible by any technical uh you know view but that was mitigated and as the number of transistors in chips go up the mitigation that you have to do for ugly x86 instruction set becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of the overall chip it becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of your power budget
John:
And therefore a smaller and smaller factor in your designs.
John:
And so all the supposed advantages that you have in RISC versus CISC can be overwhelmed by other advantages like a fab size advantage or better or just having smarter designers.
John:
So I would take what you read in that article with a grain of salt.
John:
But if you've never read anything like that before, it's good to get a sort of a lay of the land.
John:
Just don't buy into the RISC hype too much.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, it was an article worth reading, even if you disagreed with it, I think.
Casey:
And yeah, I remember the risk and assist debate, especially when PowerPC was a big thing.
Casey:
And it was interesting, even way back then.
Casey:
All right, so a lot of people had a lot of feedback with regard to our lamentations about family sharing with regard to photos.
Casey:
And a lot of people said in varying degrees of politeness, what is wrong with you idiots?
Casey:
This is what shared photo albums is for.
Casey:
And I can understand why people were saying that, but that is not at all what I want.
Casey:
And I'm pretty sure it's not at all what John wants.
Casey:
And I don't know if Marco really has a horse in this race.
Casey:
So John, would you like to explain perhaps differently, maybe better what it is you would like?
Casey:
What is it you want, John?
John:
Yeah, I didn't do a good enough job explaining the complaint.
John:
The whole premise was that we get this complaint all the time.
John:
And so it's easy for me to think that everyone knows what I'm talking about because there are all the people writing in saying, hey, I've got this problem.
John:
How do I solve it?
John:
And we don't have a good answer.
John:
But there are lots of people who don't have the problem.
John:
So I should have explained a little bit better.
John:
But first, iCloud shared photo albums.
John:
This is a feature I use.
John:
And this is a feature I think mostly does a good job at what it's meant to do.
John:
if you make a shared album in iCloud Photos or whatever, you can put photos into it.
John:
And in fact, you can make it so that other people can also put photos into it.
John:
And it's a great way to share photos with other people.
John:
I mean, usually you're sharing with people who are sort of outside your family or outside your immediate family, but it doesn't matter.
John:
There's no family relationship, you know, implied or required.
John:
It's independent of Apple's family support.
John:
In fact, it predates it.
John:
um and so in the general thing of like hey we went on a family vacation grandma wants to see pictures of the kids at disney world right assuming grandma has an iphone or a web browser because there's a web interface too but the web interface is kind of cruddy um but anyway especially if grandma has an ipad or an iphone it's really easy and convenient to just make a shared album of like our disney trip and then everyone who went on the disney trip puts their the five or six photos they thought were good from the disney trip into the shared album
John:
and then on grandma's phone a little notification goes up and says oh new pictures have been added to your first little thing that will come up and says you're invited to a shared album and you click accept and then anytime photos are added a little notification comes and you just tap on it and you see the pictures it's great this is what i use shared albums for for exactly for similar things when we go on vacations or see pictures of the kids or whatever we have a shared album that all the grandparents and interested aunts and uncles and everybody and cousins are all in and you throw photos into it and they can see them
John:
I know it's confusing because that's an example of sharing photos, right?
John:
And they're called shared photo albums.
John:
So like, what's the problem?
John:
You're sharing, right?
John:
What I was talking about and what the problem everybody has with their, you know, Apple's photo is not understanding families,
John:
is sharing in the sense of shared photo libraries within the family, within the immediate family, usually mom and dad or whoever the parents are, right?
John:
Or maybe the kids as well, but just like within the immediate family.
John:
And what they're not doing is sharing photos with each other to say...
John:
Oh, here, you know, here's pictures of our Disney vacation.
John:
Check these out.
John:
Right.
John:
What they're trying to do instead is have all of their inputs go into a shared photo library.
John:
Now, what's the difference between a library and an album?
John:
Right.
John:
This is the distinction that I think, you know, I think Casey doesn't yet fully grok, which is why he has a system that he has.
Right.
John:
A photo library in Apple's sense in their implementation is a place where your pictures go.
John:
You take pictures and you put them in there.
John:
You either go in there from your phone or whatever or you take pictures with your big camera and you import them, right?
John:
And what you've got in there is the original picture,
John:
Plus any edits you have made to it, you've cropped it, you resized it, you rotated it, you made adjustments to it, right?
John:
Plus all of the face recognition data, plus any tags that you have added to, which is a feature maybe nobody uses, but they exist, you can tag it with whatever.
John:
Plus, of course, all the EXIF data and the geotagging and the lens and the camera and the date and all that other information.
John:
And then whatever album you file it in, if you file it into a little folder or whatever, right?
John:
All of that is what makes a photo library.
John:
When you share that into a shared album, most of that is left behind, right?
John:
I'll get into the limits of shared photo albums and albums implementation, but in general, you're just trying to share the picture, but you're not sharing your photo library.
John:
They don't have access to your edits.
John:
They can't tweak your exposure adjustment.
John:
They can't change the crop.
John:
They can't see the face recognition.
John:
They can't adjust the tags.
John:
They can't refile it into a different thing because you're not sharing your photo library.
John:
You're just sharing the picture with them.
John:
Hey, check out this picture from our vacation.
John:
sharing the library lets the entire family cooperate to manage the presumably hundreds of thousands of photos that make up a photo library doing the edits picking the favorites cropping them making sure the faces get recognized assembling them to you know making a smart folder or whatever to make a bunch of pictures that you're eventually going to upload to shutterfly to make the the yearly album like
John:
Photo library stuff.
John:
When only one person can own the quote unquote family library, that is the problem we're trying to solve here.
John:
That now everyone has to funnel everything into that and you have to log in as the person who owns the library.
John:
And that's where you have to do all of that work.
John:
And other people have their own little islands of libraries, but you can't do the work there because all the photos are in the library that's owned by whoever is a designated library family owner.
John:
So it's the distinction between sharing and sharing as in sharing outside the family or sharing within or whatever, sharing in the small circle and sharing in the wider circle.
John:
And then album, which is just here's some pictures and a library, which is your photos plus all of the metadata and all the edits and the original and all of the organization you're doing to it.
John:
Now, some more things you should know about iCloud shared photo albums.
John:
They are fairly limited, right?
John:
So even if you don't care about any of the stuff I mentioned, you're just like, I'm just going to use the family shared photo album.
John:
That will solve my problem.
John:
I don't think you will, at least not for very long.
John:
First of all, shared albums have a limit of 5,000 items per album.
John:
So if you think you're ever going to have more than 5,000 photos, a family shared album is not going to work.
John:
And if you don't think you're going to have more than 5,000 photos, you might not have been alive very long because you will.
John:
in general in general you tend not to delete your pictures most people don't delete that pictures i don't need to see my 16th birthday anymore i'll just delete that when i turn 18 you probably won't or you probably shouldn't anyway and then when you have kids forget it so all bets are off with the pictures yeah 5 000 is like a month of your first born right exactly nothing um the the maximum number of shared albums you can have is you can have 200 of them and you can only subscribe to 200 of them
John:
Max video quality in an album is 720p.
John:
Max photo size in an album is 248 pixels in the largest dimension.
John:
So you are getting lesser quality, recompressed, limited number of pictures.
John:
And of course, you lose all of the edits plus the originals and everything.
John:
You lose all of the metadata that you may have, like tags and keywords and faces and whether it's your favorite.
John:
You lose all of that, right?
John:
So it is a lossy, limited.
John:
And again, this is probably appropriate if you're just trying to share photos with your wider circle of people who are interested in them.
John:
They don't need the original.
John:
They don't need the full res.
John:
Maybe 720p video is a little bit rough.
John:
Maybe they would like to have a little higher res video than that.
John:
And, you know, obviously Apple can adjust these things.
John:
But you will eventually run into the 5000 limit.
John:
To give an example, my brother has had a shared album.
John:
He was sharing pictures of his kids.
John:
But his problem was he just kept having kids.
John:
And he hit the 5000 limit.
John:
He hit the 5,000 photo limit.
John:
So instead of being like, here's pictures of, you know, the boys, the boys shared photo album.
John:
Now they had to be like every year there'd be the boys, you know, 2015, the boys, 2016, the boys, 2017, because you'd fill up the album eventually if you just, you know, anyway.
John:
So shared photo albums are a good feature for what they do, but they are not what I'm asking for and they are not the solution to the problem of having an entire family collaborate to work on their shared photo library together rather than designating a single member of that family to own the shared photo library and then having everyone have to somehow funnel their photos from their devices and their cameras and their private libraries into the shared one.
Casey:
It's really, really tough, and I understand, especially after a bunch of people wrote in, how hard this can be, because I think I fell into the trap that a lot of seemingly Apple people fall into, which is, oh, well, you know, you have you and your wife and your, you know, 2.3 kids, and that's the way it works.
Casey:
And people quickly pointed out, okay, well, great, well, what if you get a divorce?
Casey:
Or what if, you know, something else—
John:
dramatic in your family happens how do you know who controls what and where does this all go and write your names and all your books exactly and someday you're gonna go 10 rounds i'm sure this is a reference i'm missing i don't know that i don't know the rest of that line chat room help me out
Casey:
John wrote in the show notes, family photo libraries are hard.
Casey:
And that's very true.
Casey:
I mean, there are a lot more complexities here than I think I had initially thought about at first glance.
Casey:
But nevertheless, it seems like this should be, if not completely conquerable, it should be better than it is today.
Casey:
And I didn't bring it up last week, and a couple people called us out on it, and I regret not having brought it up, but
Casey:
Even though it's not an apples to apples comparison, like 1Password for families is really, really good and does this really, really well.
Casey:
Again, I acknowledge it's not apples to apples, but with 1Password for families, and I don't think they've sponsored, but they might have in the past.
Casey:
They haven't.
Casey:
Okay, there you go.
Casey:
Well, they should, but nevertheless.
Casey:
I could not say enough good things about 1Password.
Casey:
And 1Password for Families is a subscription service where basically everyone has their own 1Password.
Casey:
You know, this is a repository to hold all of your passwords and so on.
Casey:
Everyone has their own 1Password vault, but then you can have shared vaults, which is to say you can have
Casey:
shared passwords.
Casey:
So I'm trying to think of good examples.
Casey:
So like logins for like doctors and things like that, Aaron and I have in our shared vault.
Casey:
So either one of us can log into the pediatrician's website and see what's, you know, the latest thing is for one of the kids or what have you, or schools, you know, what Declan's grades are these days.
John:
Or even to give another example, I don't even use one password, but to give another example, say you're a household and you have a Netflix subscription.
John:
Somebody signed up for Netflix.
John:
Maybe it was you.
John:
Maybe it was your spouse, right?
John:
But whoever it was, there's just one email address and password, right?
John:
And so say it's 2007 or whatever Netflix came out.
John:
I'm like, oh, Netflix is a great service.
John:
I'm going to sign up for it.
John:
I enter my email address.
John:
I make an account.
John:
I give them my credit card.
John:
Great.
John:
Now we have Netflix.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Now my wife wants to sign into Netflix on her laptop upstairs.
John:
She's got to say, what was the Netflix password?
John:
And if you use good passwords, you don't have it off the top of your head.
John:
Oh, it's in my password keychain.
John:
Well, it's not in mine.
John:
Like every service is like that.
John:
It's another family type thing of like, yeah, probably only one person in the household is going to sign up for Netflix.
John:
The two people, two adults aren't going to each have their own accounts, which means as soon as one person signs up for Netflix, what you want is that Netflix login information to be available to all adults in the household so everyone can sign in.
John:
And that's exactly the problem that 1Password is solving.
John:
And you're right, that it's easier and it's just a username and a password and not thousands of photos.
John:
But it's exactly the same situation, that there are things in a household that one person does, like I took the picture with my camera, but that become owned, which would be properly owned by default by everyone in the household.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So this is a solvable problem to at least some degree.
Casey:
And I haven't played with Google Photos implementation of this in a long, long, long time.
Casey:
But I believe that there are affordances for this sort of thing, both when you're temporarily in the same place, like a party or something like that, or if you're just members of the same family.
Casey:
But take that with a grain of salt.
Casey:
I haven't looked at it in a while.
Casey:
So nevertheless, it just seems like there should be more than nothing here.
Casey:
And what we're getting from Apple is nothing.
Casey:
And it's very, very frustrating.
John:
Yeah, people complain that we're not actually getting nothing, but we've got to share albums.
John:
But I honestly think that shared albums are solving a different problem and doing a pretty good job of it.
John:
Like they are the, you know, I keep saying like immediate family and extended family, but it's just like smaller circle and bigger circle.
John:
You want your sort of inner circle perhaps to share a photo library, but you want a much wider circle with which you can share select photos.
John:
And those people don't need library access.
John:
They just want to see the pictures, right?
John:
So I think that they're for two different purposes.
John:
And I put this item in here, photo libraries are hard because a lot of people wrote in about that.
John:
I tried to make that point last episode, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
This is not an easy problem.
John:
Photos are big, lots of weird policy decisions, family structures change, ownership is difficult to control.
John:
How do you make a UI for this?
John:
How do you make it sensible, right?
John:
Two things I'll add about that.
John:
One, in the degenerate case, it works exactly like it does now.
John:
If you don't care about any of this stuff, you don't have to.
John:
Totally independent Apple IDs, totally independent iCloud photo libraries, no loss in functionality, no loss in simplicity.
John:
It's exactly the way it is now, right?
John:
That's how this should be implemented is...
John:
If you don't care about this stuff, don't do it.
John:
Works just like it does now.
John:
No problem, right?
John:
Second thing I'll add is what I said last week.
John:
I wasn't expecting this overnight.
John:
This is a really hard problem.
John:
It takes a long time to work on.
John:
It has a lot of foundational components that need to be laid down, and you have to really think about it and do well.
John:
But I think my feelings about this are best expressed by a clip from the movie Gross Point Blank that will be in the show notes.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Our thanks to Flatfile for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
We also had some feedback with regard to getting your data out of iCloud Photos.
Casey:
We had talked about how you can ask for Apple to ship all of your data to Google Photos.
Casey:
Ezekiel Ellen writes, you can download your iCloud Photos with the same privacy.apple.com as a zip.
Casey:
It will break it up into file sizes that you choose, 1, 2, 5, 10, or 25 gigs, which is pretty cool.
Casey:
I didn't know that.
Casey:
So you can check that out if you so desire.
Casey:
Igor Makarov writes, the photo transfer feature discussed in the last episode is part of the Data Transfer Project, which is at datatransferproject.dev, which is an open source protocol maintained by the member companies with multiple adapters.
Casey:
And we'll put some links in the show notes.
Casey:
The members are Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter.
Casey:
Igor writes, I've transferred a Facebook photo library to Google recently, and the only things that I had a problem with were the lack of proper progress indication and missing timestamps on videos.
Casey:
But the photo timestamps were okay.
John:
a brief real time follow-up just so i don't do this next week max photo size and shared photo libraries is 2048 pixels in the widest dimension 5400 pixels for panoramas i think i said 248 last time they're not that bad good deal we're sorry for the error
Casey:
Hung Nguyen writes, the easiest way to back up your Gmail account is to use gotyourback or GYB, which will back up your entire Gmail or G Suite slash workspace email account into a directory hierarchy of inbox files, which you can then use to restore.
Casey:
It gets me every time, which you can use to restore to the same or a different Gmail or G Suite slash workspace mailbox or group.
Casey:
GUIB can also upload any inbox file, including from Google Takeout to your Gmail.
Casey:
And then Hung continues to write, in my day job, I use it all the time to archive off emails of employees who leave the company, etc.
Casey:
I've also had occasion to use it to re-upload an entire email account when employees come back.
Casey:
In G Suite or Workspace, I keep trying to say Workspace.
Casey:
In G Suite or Workspace, I can create and use a service account so I don't even need the user's credentials.
Casey:
This is the companion to GAM, which lets you manage G Suite or Workspace from the command line.
Casey:
And these two utilities are extremely useful if you do any amount of work around Google accounts.
Casey:
And you can also see something similar at thehorcrux.com.
Casey:
And we will put all these links in the show notes.
John:
Yeah, lots of suggestions.
John:
Those are just two of them of like tools that will pull down your email to get a local copy.
John:
I looked at a whole bunch of them.
John:
Obviously, most of these tools want you to enter your credentials to get your email, which is kind of scary.
John:
Anytime you take a third party application and enter your mail credentials just because your email is so essential to it's like the linchpin of security on the Internet is whatever your official email address is.
Yeah.
John:
That's one of the reasons I tend to use mail clients as my backups.
John:
I looked at all these things and I usually just wimp out.
John:
I'd rather just run Apple Mail and use Pop to pull my Gmail down through Apple Mail and just never use it as a mail client.
John:
I just launch Apple Mail, download the mail, and then I quit it.
John:
That's essentially doing a local backup of my mail.
John:
And plus I do use Google Takeout, right?
John:
But I feel a little bit better about using a few well-known mail clients like Apple Mail or the Google's own takeout service than I do about third-party ones.
John:
That said, a lot of people use these third-party ones and really like them.
John:
So if you're interested in that, there's lots of GUI apps that do this.
John:
There's lots of collections of Python scripts that do it.
John:
Like if you search GitHub, you'll find all sorts of things because these are mostly open protocols.
John:
Just it may take a while to download all your mail.
Casey:
Yeah, I just recently realized that my Google Apps email address, which is my primary email address, I'm like not that far away from my one terabyte limit because it's all getting lumped together with Google Photos and my email and so on and so forth.
Casey:
You can buy more.
Casey:
I know, but I don't know what I'm going to do.
Casey:
I might just cancel Google Photos since I only have iPhone pictures in there.
Casey:
And even though I like having 17 levels of redundancy, John Syracuse's style,
Casey:
I just, I don't know.
Casey:
I don't feel like since their uploader is such trash last I looked anyway, I feel like maybe I should just retire it.
John:
Yeah, that was another one of the tips.
John:
Lots of other people had ideas of things you can use besides Google Backup and Sync to upload photos to Google Photos.
John:
There were lots of suggestions that were in theory better because, I mean, it's not hard to be better because that app is really garbage.
John:
There were ones that even run on your phone if you don't mind burning your phone battery.
John:
Like if you have iCloud Photo Library and the photos eventually get on your phone, then they're available for these apps on your phone to upload to Google Photos.
John:
Anyway, Google Photo backup and sync has been bad for a really long time.
John:
Bad as in it performs poorly and I think it doesn't get all the photos.
John:
There are utilities out there.
John:
It's kind of important.
John:
Yep.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Two major points in the program, right?
John:
There are utilities out there that understand Apple's photo library structure.
John:
Google's Backup and Sync does not.
John:
It just finds JPEGs, right?
John:
And it does an okay job of not uploading the thumbnails and deduplicating and all that stuff, right?
John:
But there are like third-party commercial utilities that purport to, anyway, understand the Apple photo library format and can do a better job of pulling...
John:
all of your photos out and sticking them into Google Photos if that's the thing you're interested in.
Casey:
We also had some feedback from Soren with regard to why the iMac Pro was discontinued.
Casey:
Marco, you had said recently, I guess last episode, that Intel will sell Xeons forever, and it probably wasn't the Xeon that was the problem.
Casey:
And according to Soren, the narrator then said it was a Xeon.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So Intel has officially announced the discontinuation of the entire Skylake X-HEDT and Xeon W2000 CPU families.
Casey:
The move is primary due to the fact that said chips have been replaced by new parts, which include the Cascade Lake X-HEDT and Xeon W3000 series family, which has been on the retail market for a while now.
Casey:
The last shipments will be made on July 9th, 2021.
John:
so in other words they updated the cpu intel updated the cpus a while ago apple never used them and they're stopping making the old ones yeah they're not even yeah so july like the date is pretty coincidental the apple making this announcement and intel saying the last shipment is july so there may have been other parts and other reasons but the xeon discontinuation alone is enough reason for them to can it early indeed sad times but it's understandable
Casey:
And I think that's it for follow up.
Casey:
We made it.
Casey:
All right.
John:
I feel like I need a nap.
John:
Speaking of sad times.
Casey:
Oh, you know, it's not sad for me.
Casey:
I never ball.
Casey:
I still haven't even heard one.
John:
You got to get one while supplies last.
John:
This is the this is the this past two episodes have been the get one while supplies last episode.
Marco:
Hey, Casey, good news.
Marco:
They're only available in white now.
Casey:
Hooray!
Casey:
Actually, to be honest, I'd probably get a black one if I were to get one, but that's all right.
Marco:
Honestly, I only have white ones there.
Marco:
I think the white looks better.
Casey:
Oh, fair enough.
Casey:
All right, so what we're dancing around is that the full-size HomePod, the OG HomePod, has been discontinued.
Casey:
Apple writes, HomePod mini has been a hit since its debut last fall, offering customers amazing sound and intelligent assistant and smart home control, all for just $99.
Casey:
We're focusing our efforts on the HomePod mini.
Casey:
We are discontinuing the original HomePod.
Casey:
It will continue to be available while supplies last through the Apple online store, Apple retail stores, and Apple authorized resellers.
Casey:
Apple will provide HomePod customers with software updates and support through AppleCare.
John:
and you couldn't hear it when casey read it but this this is an official statement from apple i pulled from this tech crunch article that we'll link in the show notes i'm i'm pretty sure they copied and pasted it into this so this is apple apple wrote this text and it contains a comma splice yeah i noticed that we are discontinuing the original home pod comma it will continue to be available while supplies last yada yada yada no those are two sentences you can't just take them and stick a comma between them and say i've made a new sentence out of two sentences by putting a comma between them
John:
That's called a comma splice.
John:
Don't do that.
John:
And you almost never see grammar or spelling mistakes from Apple, like official statements.
John:
Really weird.
John:
I don't know what's going on over there.
John:
Everyone's sad that they're discontinuing their iMac Pro and now the big HomePod.
Marco:
But I think the big HomePod had so little effort put into it that they couldn't even bother to proofread its discontinuation notice.
John:
Well, so that's the thing about the big HomePod, the regular HomePod, the original HomePod, the normal size HomePod?
John:
HomePod Max.
John:
Oh, gosh.
John:
Right.
John:
And it's not.
John:
As many people pointed out, they're going to have a product called Blank Mini, but there will be no blank.
John:
So it's a mini version of a product that doesn't exist.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Um, the rumors about the HomePod, uh, the big, the big HomePod were that it was part of the effort that was involved with like the Apple making its own television, right?
John:
You know, some, some of the research going into like home audio video equipment, sort of medium to high end, like if Apple ever actually made a television set, um,
John:
that in theory some of the work done to make a compact, good-sounding speaker that didn't take up a lot of room could have, you know, eventually got folded into the HomePod.
John:
So goes the rumor, right, that Apple decided we're not going to make a TV, but we did a bunch of research on this speaker stuff, so maybe we can make this little thing.
John:
Oh, and it also looks like these, you know, cylindrical voice assistants are a thing now, so why don't we take some of that work we did for the TV set that never shipped,
John:
and then smoosh it together into something and now we've got our own cylinder that we can sell and it's really expensive and big and you know whatever right and that would explain some of the muddled history of this product and why it sounds better than it really needs to but what it doesn't what this rumor doesn't explain assuming it's true at all is okay but then why did the thing just have a power cord hanging out of it because if you're going to sell any kind of av equipment
John:
for a theatrical television set or whatever, wouldn't it have some kind of I.O.
John:
Like in general, if you're trying to to sell people audio visual equipment of any kind, it's important that you either sell the whole set up.
John:
In which case, you can kind of do whatever you want if you want to say, like, just buy all the stuff from us and it will all work together.
John:
Sony used to do that.
John:
Like, DeMarco, didn't you have one of those sets?
John:
It was like the Sony, like, surround sound TV entertainment center thing that came with, like, all the speakers and the subwoofer and the amplifier and one big box.
Marco:
Yeah, well, sort of.
Marco:
It's actually in the speakers, but yeah, it's close enough.
John:
Yeah, and still, that would hook up to a TV, but generally that approach is frowned upon, but it's a thing that some people find convenient, and it's a product that you can make.
John:
So you either sell the whole thing, or you sell components, in which case they have to connect with standard things.
John:
Now, you could argue Bluetooth is standard, but...
John:
especially when they made the HomePod, and I would argue even now, if you're trying to do a home theater setup, you probably want to buy, unless you're talking about the back surround speakers, if you're buying something that's connected to the television, you probably want it to be connected with wires if you can.
John:
The idea of AV equipment...
John:
that only plugs in with a power cord and that's it is hanging a lot on software eternal software support to make that thing work as jason snell pointed out he's got an ipod hi-fi which young listeners won't won't even know what the heck that is but picture a boom box with a place for an ipod to stick in the top and it sticks there with a giant what is it 16 pin i don't remember how many pins were on it 10 12
John:
No.
John:
We're all so old.
John:
Chat room, shame us by telling a 30 pin.
John:
Thank you.
John:
Golly.
John:
Man, we're a bunch of idiots.
John:
I was the closest without going over.
Casey:
Well done.
John:
The iPod Hi-Fi had an amplifier and two speakers and a place to connect your iPod.
John:
But importantly, it also had a place for standard audio input.
John:
So Jason Snow continues to use his iPod Hi-Fi because it just acts as a powered speaker.
John:
It's a pair of stereo-powered speakers.
John:
And the interfaces for analog audio to AV equipment doesn't change that often.
John:
And so the iPod Hi-Fi may end up outliving his full-size HomePod because the full-size HomePod has no way to get audio into it except for these various wireless protocols combined with the software that runs on the HomePod.
John:
And if any of that becomes unsupported or changes in some way, the HomePod, you may be left with like a very heavy $300 and something dollar plastic and rubber paperweight with a power cord coming out of it.
Marco:
And a ring under it on the table.
John:
Yeah, it is a very... It is an ill-advised piece of audio-video equipment.
John:
And obviously it was a very ill-advised voice assistant because its value as a voice assistant defends heavily on the voice assistant part, which is independent of the audio quality.
John:
And if you really care about audio quality, you probably want something that works together with a cohesive system.
John:
Like, I mean, Sonos is the obvious competitor.
John:
Sona says a whole bunch of things that will integrate both with each other and also they will integrate with audio video equipment.
John:
Like if you buy a television set or even if you have a receiver, like you can, it can all sort of work together.
John:
And the HomePod was just this little island with a power cord that was not a very good voice assistant, not its fault.
John:
That's Siri's fault, but it's part of the package was a pretty good speaker for its size.
John:
But what can you use that pretty good speaker with?
John:
I just was listening to a podcast where Mike Hurley was complaining that he likes to use his HomePod with his television, but it's so unreliable that the audio would cut out or pause or something that it's just not viable for that.
John:
If it just connected with a regular audio cable and was simply a powered speaker with maybe some DSPs built into it or something, it would be more reliable.
John:
Long after Apple abandons it, you can just continue to use it as a powered speaker.
John:
But I think the HomePod is going to have a very sad death in that once Apple finally abandons it or the wireless protocols move on or it stops getting software updates, it just becomes a paperweight.
John:
Unlike the iPod Hi-Fi, which was ridiculous and expensive and Steve Jobs loved it.
John:
No one else did.
John:
That will continue to work long after we're all dead because it uses standard audio interfaces.
Marco:
I mean, when the HomePod was announced, and then when it was released later, we all kind of called this.
Marco:
We all kind of said, like, hey, this is entering a market where people expect certain things, and they have certain prices that they want things to be, and this thing...
Marco:
isn't as good in critical areas as things like the Amazon Echo and the Google whatever or Sonos' gear.
Marco:
The HomePod was great in some areas, but competed very poorly in some very critical areas, namely Siri and Price.
Marco:
Those are the two big areas where it just was...
Marco:
I have HomePods.
Marco:
I have, I think, four of the big ones and four of the little ones, actually.
Marco:
We use them all the time.
Marco:
As I mentioned in a recent episode, because of the unreliability of the latest Amazon Echo, we recently got fed up with it and unplugged it and put it into a closet, and now our home is 100% HomePods.
Marco:
They're not as good as the Echo at certain things, but they're pretty good products overall now when you have the Mini and when the big HomePod no longer costs $350.
Marco:
For most of ours, I think I paid $200 or $230 or something for them.
Marco:
The thing is, this product is... John said it's a pretty good speaker.
Marco:
I think for its size and for what it contains, it's a great speaker.
Marco:
The big one I'm talking about.
Marco:
The little one isn't.
Marco:
And this is kind of a problem.
Marco:
But anyway, the big one is a really good speaker for what it is.
John:
And when you say that, you mean it sounds good, but it's not a really good speaker because one of the features of a really good speaker is you can connect things to it so that they can output sound that you could then hear through your really good speaker.
John:
And the HomePod utterly fails in that area.
John:
Fair enough.
Marco:
But it is...
John:
for for what it is of like a a standalone plug-in smart speaker especially when you get a stereo pair of them which cost for a mere 700 which costs at msrp 700 and doesn't plug into any of your other expensive equipment so if you're the type of person who wants to buy two speakers for 700 but also does not have any other av equipment that you want to plug into them boy we got the product for you
Marco:
yeah so apple made really good hardware that was completely let down by their services team and their marketing team and so the services team that one's obvious siri still isn't good enough it is slowly getting better but it is it definitely lags behind alexa in terms of reliability speed ability to pull knowledge out of web pages stuff like that it it's just not as good
John:
And Google, I'll add.
John:
They're also behind Google.
John:
I mean, there was another – the most recent flare-up was someone that was showing examples of trying to ask – it wasn't on the HomePod, but it's the same – I think it's the same Siri everywhere.
John:
It's hard to tell.
John:
But they were asking Siri when the Grammys were on, and Siri's answer was to give the date and time of last year's Grammys.
John:
Come on.
John:
Come on.
John:
It's the night of the Grammys.
John:
Of course, every other voice doesn't get it because they have teams that just say, look, you know, on the day of the Super Bowl, I bet a lot of people are going to ask when the Super Bowl is on.
John:
So we should probably make sure our thing does that.
John:
And the series team, like, we're not going to do special case code for that.
John:
It either works or it doesn't.
John:
And guess what?
John:
It doesn't.
Marco:
I think what we discovered is that Eddie Q does not watch the Grammys.
Marco:
But anyway, the other half of the HomePod failure there was marketing.
Marco:
And I don't mean the fact that they didn't advertise it enough once it was released.
Marco:
What Apple considers marketing is integrated into product development and helps determine what products they even make, how they need to be priced, what kind of features they have, what things are priorities and what things aren't.
Marco:
Product marketing does that at Apple.
Marco:
And I think the original HomePod was just massively let down by the direction that should have come from product marketing that either didn't or they got bad direction.
Marco:
The HomePod should never have been released in the state and at the price that it was.
Marco:
It was missing critical features from the beginning.
Marco:
Some of them were later added via software.
Marco:
Many of them couldn't be, like the input, any kind of input.
John:
Well, that's the thing about the product design, product marketing, whatever you want to say it.
John:
They could have solved some of these problems by making it more expensive.
John:
Picture this.
John:
This is something that some high-end stuff does.
John:
Say you buy your two HomePods and they're $700 in the original price.
John:
You're like, oh, the product...
John:
You know, the designers say, well, we're not going to put an ugly audio input on this thing.
John:
It will ruin the design.
John:
You know, look how elegant it is.
John:
It's just got the power cord coming out of it.
John:
Wireless speakers of the future.
John:
No one wants wires.
John:
You don't want us to put a bunch of like RCA jacks or speaker wires or optical.
John:
You don't want wires in this.
John:
It's a bad idea, right?
John:
Sell a third box.
John:
that connects to av equipment and sends a low latency wireless signal to your apple speakers and that box accepts all of the audio standard inputs from your av receiver your television or whatever and then sends the signal right you're basically slowly reinventing sonos or whatever and then that box you can sell for extra and then suddenly people who would never consider this product say
John:
Oh, but if I buy the extra $200 box, now I can have a stereo pair and it will work with my home theater setup.
John:
And my home theater setup just sees it as a normal speakers because they're just plugged into it like with standard connections.
John:
And then Apple handles the wireless connection.
John:
Now you have a very expensive, fairly good sounding, hopefully low latency wireless speaker setup.
John:
Hell, you could sell five of them and have people do full surround setups, right?
John:
But without that box, without that middle component, without understanding who you're selling to and that those people want to use it as their home theater system but can't because it's like, oh, I got to get Apple TV and get it to connect to the stereo pair and the software is flaky and it doesn't work.
John:
it's totally fumbled the ball not because you know oh you made it too expensive yeah they did make it too expensive and the cheaper one is the solution to that but if you wanted to make it this expensive you could have by making it even more expensive just add the features those people want and they just i don't know who they were trying to sell this to besides i guess marco i bought one too i mean i bought one and i i used this 300 i paid full price and i bought this thing and i use it to turn my lights on and off
Marco:
that's good no and and the thing is like so much so many things about it are the best like it hears you better than any alexa thing i've ever seen it takes a little while to respond but it does hear you really well
John:
Sometimes it tells you to chill.
John:
It's like, what is it, just a moment or whatever it says?
John:
Working on it.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
The sound quality is better than all the other smart speakers I've ever heard at any price point.
Marco:
It is better than everything I've heard from Sonos.
Marco:
It's better than certainly anything I've ever heard from Amazon, but that's not saying a lot.
Marco:
It sounds really, really good for a smart speaker, and it sounds pretty good for speakers, period, in its size class, at least.
Marco:
I also love...
Marco:
that it's just an AirPlay 2 terminal at the end of the day.
Marco:
One thing that I absolutely love is when something is playing on the HomePod, it just shows up as an entry in Control Center under the playback thing.
Marco:
And you can open that session in the music app on your phone, and you can control it there.
Marco:
You don't have to ask what's playing.
Marco:
You can just see it right there on Control Center.
Marco:
You can add whatever's playing to your Apple Music Collection if you want to right from there.
Marco:
You can control the volume right there with your finger.
Marco:
You don't have to like...
Marco:
tell it up volume volume 25 volume 30 volume 40 like you don't have to go through all that you can just do it on your phone without saying anything anybody in your house on your wi-fi network with an iphone can do the same thing they can control it like so it's it's very like family uh compatible in that way um it automatically recognizes me and tiff without us having to create profiles it just recognizes us both separately and can play our separate collections of music so if if tiff
Marco:
asks for one of her playlists, it has it.
Marco:
If I ask for one of my playlists, it has it.
Marco:
She can ask for a personal request set, like, have things added to her reminders or whatever.
Marco:
I can ask for the same thing, and it just gets it right.
Marco:
Like, there are so many things that it does really well, and that's why I'm disappointed that Apple...
Marco:
flubbed the marketing and pricing and and market targeting of it so badly and that they seem to probably be killing it off with apparently no higher end model that seems to be in sight because i think if they were going to do a higher end one i think they would have kept this one around until the high end replacement was ready and then just replaced it
Marco:
But it sounds from their statement and from the discontinuation of the highest one, it sounds like they're just going to do the Mini indefinitely and not any other ones, probably.
John:
And speaking of the Mini, like everything you just said that you liked, the Mini also does with the exception of it not sounding good, right?
John:
And so, like, because literally everything, like it does all those things.
John:
It can recognize you.
John:
It does all the things.
John:
It's like it is exactly equivalent.
John:
It's just a crappy speaker, right?
John:
So you can imagine having the Mini, right?
John:
And then what if Apple just sold?
John:
let's say a pair of really nice sounding powered speakers that connected and then you could have the mini controlling those speakers and broadcasting sound to them.
John:
Like you don't need, if Apple's thing is like, we were doing this work on home theater and we found out a way to make a fairly small, you know, fairly compact, smart speaker that figures out the room and makes everything sound good or whatever.
John:
Uh,
John:
then do that, right?
John:
But you don't need to tie that up with the voice assistant thing.
John:
The voice assistant is all the problem you've got to solve, but all the features that you said that you liked, those are all embodied in the $99 mini.
John:
And for people who don't care about sound quality, because let's say they're primarily not going to play music through it, right?
John:
the mini is so much a better deal like it takes up less room in your house it's explicable for it to just have a power cord dangling from it like it is a well-established product category it charges the apple premium because it's a little bit more expensive than equivalent uh you know products from other companies it answers your questions less well than the the whole the google home minis that i keep getting sent for free that are you know apparently like 20 bucks right but but
John:
Like that functionality, that is a product that is a established product category.
John:
Apple now has an entrant in it and you're fine.
John:
What Apple no longer has is a bunch of nice speakers.
John:
And it's like, as with so many things, Apple, if you have good technology that can make a product that especially like a product that is a little bit more expensive that people will buy.
John:
You can sell that just like you got to figure out how to package it.
John:
Like if you just sold the whole pod mini and then transform the big HomePods into just, I don't know, like HomePod speakers and all they were were speakers and you needed a mini to work with them, you would probably sell just as many of those things.
John:
You probably sell just many to Marco.
John:
because you don't care that necessarily that there are help leave the microphones in them right you don't necessarily care that uh the mini is the is the thing like controlling the show or whatever right you just like that they sounded good right and they were fairly compact and nice looking and stuff like that like they had a winner on their hands they just didn't know they just didn't know what they were making right and now they're just going to give up and say well it's just minis forever like like you said i agree with you margo that if they if they were going to replace them with some sort of high-end speakers they probably would have done at the same time but it's just such a shame to see apple
John:
make a move in this in this direction and because they don't get it right just retreat entirely and say no it's just mini like they just don't show sort of like stick-to-itiveness it's okay to get it wrong when you start but you really should you know realize what parts you had right and i think one of the things they had right was everyone more or less agrees that for a compact fairly unobtrusive speaker that works in many different environments
John:
That was the impressive part of the HomePod, and there is a viable product in there waiting to get out.
John:
They just need to take another run at it.
Marco:
Yeah, and actually fully assed it this time instead of the half-assed job they did with the first one.
Marco:
I worry that Apple will learn the wrong lesson from this.
Marco:
They put out their first HomePod offering, and I worry that the lesson they're going to learn is, well, I guess the market doesn't want a really good smart speaker.
Marco:
I can totally see Apple's executive culture leading to that conclusion, but that's not what happened here.
Marco:
The actual lesson they should learn is, we didn't nail it on our first try, but the market does want smart
Marco:
a good smart speaker like the market has room for that they just didn't do a good enough job nailing it the first time with a whole bunch of factors but if they took a second try at it I think they could do well it just either can't be $350 or
Marco:
Or it has to really earn its $350 price tag.
Marco:
And the first HomePod did neither of those things.
Marco:
It was too expensive for the mass market, but wasn't good enough with the features and the expectations of the high end.
Marco:
So I hope that they keep making or at some point soon, I hope they make a larger HomePod again that is better than the first one.
Marco:
I would love for it to have like a faster processor so it can respond faster.
Marco:
It can support more advanced software updates and everything.
Marco:
I would love for it to have the cool half-woofer design that it had that allowed it to have really pretty good bass response to a pretty low frequency without being super large.
Marco:
I love the microphones in it.
Marco:
Certain things we don't need.
Marco:
We probably don't need it to fire all the way around 360 degrees.
Marco:
Because most people don't put speakers in the middle of a room.
Marco:
They put them against something.
Marco:
Maybe that's one area they can economize.
Marco:
Maybe some of the processing stuff that it does to detect when it's been moved and reset its EQ and stuff like that.
Marco:
Some of that stuff, maybe that can go in the name of value.
Marco:
Certainly, if they wanted to make the materials a little bit simpler on the outside, that's a way to save some money on the bill of materials and stuff like that.
Marco:
If they want to rethink that weird LED screen thing on top that starts playing music every time you try to dust it, that could use some rethinking as well.
Marco:
There are ways to make an amazing HomePod that is larger and more expensive than the HomePod Mini and also a successful product.
Marco:
The fact that they didn't do it the first time doesn't mean the market's not there.
Marco:
It just means they didn't do a good job.
Marco:
And I hope the lesson they learned from this is not, well, I guess there's no market.
Marco:
I hope the lesson is we didn't hit it right that first time, but we can do it.
Marco:
If we really focus and really follow through, we can make another run at it that can be better.
Casey:
When they came out, the thought of having one or maybe two really fantastic speakers that basically I could plug in anywhere, in and of itself that sounded really appealing.
Casey:
And I was all in, especially because we know how I am with missing out on things and we know how much I love to buy new Apple toys.
Casey:
And so I was all in, and then I saw the price tag, and I was like, ooh, maybe not.
Casey:
And then at the time, and I don't think this is true anymore, but at the time, you certainly couldn't use Spotify with the HomePod.
Casey:
And I don't know if this is true anymore or not, and I don't think it is, but one of my favorite features of the Amazon Tube is that we can call out to it, hey, add such and such to the grocery list, and then that integrates with any list, which is a particular app we like for doing that sort of thing.
Casey:
And it'll add something to our shared grocery list within any list.
Casey:
And neither of those things were possible when the HomePod came out.
Casey:
And those are the two things that we do most with our Echo is play things on Spotify and add things to grocery or other shopping lists.
Casey:
And so you combine no Spotify, no real third-party integration for apps or things like that.
Casey:
And a $350 price tag, and there's no way for me to use this with anything but the Apple ecosystem?
Casey:
Get out of here with that nonsense.
Casey:
There's no freaking way I'm paying that money for it.
Casey:
And then it would go on sale periodically at, like, Best Buy or whatever, and I would think about it, but I still came back to, like, I don't think this fills a need I have in my life.
Casey:
And yes, I can go on myself about how...
Casey:
potentially, I don't know if dangerous is a bit overblown, but I can't think of a better word.
Casey:
Dangerous it is to have an echo in my house.
Casey:
But golly, if I want to be able to just shout into the ether and have something and have what I want to happen happen, I don't think, certainly not at the time of launch, a HomePod would be that thing.
Casey:
And maybe it is now, but I don't know if I want a crappy, I don't want to trade one crappy speaker for another when I know this one works.
Casey:
Why would I mix that up?
Casey:
And I think a lot of other people are probably in a similar position.
John:
Yeah.
John:
If it doubled as a normal speaker or had a breakout box or had any kind of standard connection, it would be clear to everybody that if you buy this thing, yeah, yeah, you can talk to it and it does stuff or whatever.
John:
And maybe it doesn't support Spotify.
John:
But, you know, I'm just going to use it as my TV setup because most people don't have any nice.
John:
They just use the speakers that come with their TVs.
John:
And so part of the pitch of this is, like you said, Casey, it's fairly compact.
John:
It's small.
John:
It's simple.
John:
And you can put it anywhere.
John:
And boy, wouldn't it be?
John:
It would be a big upgrade to the sound system on my television to use the HomePod instead of the built-in speakers.
John:
But there was no story for that.
John:
It was like a customer would look at it and say, but it's just got a power cord.
John:
How do I do it?
John:
Oh, well, if you have an Apple TV and the right software, it's like, well, I don't have an Apple TV and I don't want an Apple TV.
John:
I've got a television set.
John:
Can I use this speaker with my television?
John:
And it's like, well, it just, you know...
John:
It didn't have a good story.
John:
And still, I feel like it still doesn't have a good story with that.
John:
If I have to be selecting inputs and trying to get it to recognize stereo pairs and it's like, that's not how people buy speakers and they hook them up and you put it into place and you connect it to your TV and maybe at worst you have to like switch inputs or turn on something or whatever.
John:
But in general, people just want that stuff to work.
John:
If there's any futzing involved,
John:
oh there's no sound coming out of the tv or it's coming out of the built-in speakers again no one wants that it's just it's death in the av market so like i think casey if you could have gotten this on day one and use it as your television speaker without thinking about it it would just work as your television speaker i bet you would have done it because you don't have any kind of tv speaker setup do you
Casey:
Well, the simple answer to your question is no, but it's actually more convoluted than that.
Casey:
But the problem that I have, though, with using this as my television speaker is that my television does not exclusively play the Apple TV.
Casey:
We still have a cable box.
Casey:
Well, that's what I'm saying.
John:
When you have a story working up to your television, no one sells you by a speaker surround sound thing for your TV.
John:
They say, oh, but this will only work when you watch things through the Chromecast.
John:
No one sells speakers like that.
John:
It doesn't make any sense.
John:
If I'm buying speakers for my TV, anything I play through my TV has to work with those speakers.
John:
It can't be like only when you're watching Hulu will it go through the speakers, which is a bad example because they don't even have surround support on the Apple TV, which I'm still mad about.
John:
But yeah, like – and that's what I say where they didn't have a good story for it.
John:
It should have just been obvious to anyone looking at the product that, yep, you can just – you can use these as your TV speakers.
John:
No ifs, ands, or buts, right?
John:
And anytime you have to have an explanation and like – and especially I think the stereo pairing didn't come – support even for Apple TV.
John:
The stereo pairing support didn't come for a while.
John:
It was just such a mess.
John:
No inputs.
John:
Doesn't work with your TV.
John:
And so so many people who might have bought it were exactly like Casey saying –
John:
It might be neat to have audio, but it doesn't support Spotify.
John:
I can't use it as a TV speaker.
John:
And then as time went on, people learned, oh, I've got one I want to use it for.
John:
Well, I turn the lights off or ask it to play songs, but it doesn't work with Spotify.
John:
Do you use it as a TV speaker?
John:
No, because I can't or can't figure out how or it doesn't work well.
God.
John:
what what a fumbled ball and like marco said it's it's not because there wasn't promise in this product right you have a product that has qualities that people who bought them like it shows that there's something you can do there and you know i'm just missing the mini the mini is a great thing that they should do which is like well we missed this market which is the cheap small things that are voice assistants and so let's make a product in that category great good you should do that because 350 is just the wrong price for that whole category right
John:
especially for a thing with no screen right because that's the other thing of like if you want to do this you can have a screen on and go all sorts of fancy stuff but on the other end is this nice consumer prosumer speaker thing and that the raw materials are there for you to make a couple of different cool products if you actually care about that market at all which so far it seems like apple doesn't and that by that market i mean audio visual equipment things that apple doesn't want to make like
John:
wi-fi routers and av receivers and television sets and speakers i think apple could do well in all those markets if it wanted to witness sonos but just seems like they tried the home pod and quickly retreated to essentially making a 99 echo dot yeah which is actually kind of expensive for what it is yeah i mean it should sound absurd a 99 dot right darn those 15 dollars
Marco:
Any real honest look at the speaker market would reveal like, okay, we're going in two different directions here.
Marco:
There is a huge market for these little smart speakers people put in their kitchens, and the market for that needs to really want them to be as cheap as possible.
Marco:
And it can be small and cheap, and people don't really care about garbage sound quality because most of the entrants there have garbage sound quality, but they don't care because they were small and cheap.
Marco:
And then you also have good speakers.
Marco:
And where people almost always want to put good speakers is their TV setup.
Marco:
Even when they're listening with them, even when they're using them for music, they're so often also used for TV and they're in the same spot that if there's no way to play the TV sound out of the good speakers, most people don't really have a justification for that in their homes or a place to put them.
Marco:
The other thing that you mentioned is Apple doesn't make things that feed it.
Marco:
Oh, they totally do.
Marco:
You know where I would love to have HomePod input support?
Marco:
On Macs.
Marco:
There is no way to use a pair of HomePods for all of your system output on the Mac.
Marco:
why i thought they just added stereo pair support for that or is that only did they finally maybe music music supports it in a really hacky and inconsistent way it's i think it's similar to like when you when you try to use the apple tv to output to home pods where like you kind of have to reset it up a lot i do it occasionally where like i'll i'll play something from my laptop while i'm sitting on the couch to the uh to you know the home pods that are around or to the airplay to um sonos amp thing that i have at the tv but like
Marco:
The HomePods are great as desk speakers because they are small and they sound good and they look nice.
Marco:
Why was that never even prioritized?
Marco:
Again, there are so many missed opportunities here.
Marco:
And again, it's not that the market doesn't want these things.
Marco:
The market just wants Apple to deliver something that fits them better.
Marco:
And the HomePod Mini does some of that, but the HomePod Mini is not a good enough speaker to be the entire product range.
Marco:
If they're going to keep having a product range of HomePods, whatever that means to them, if that product range is going to keep existing, there has to sometime be a higher-end one that is for higher-end needs, bigger rooms, higher audio quality, etc.
Marco:
And I really hope
Marco:
that they actually go back to the drawing board and make that happen as opposed to just leaving this product line to wither away with just one product forever.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite place to run servers.
Marco:
And man, was this a week to run servers.
Marco:
I've done a lot of server stuff these last couple of weeks.
Marco:
I've been migrating a bunch of older servers over to new Linux distros and stuff.
Marco:
And even ran into a couple of problems along the way.
Marco:
And Linode helped me out with their amazing support.
Marco:
But for the most part, it's been wonderful.
Marco:
Super flawless and super smooth.
Marco:
And all this is thanks to just how incredibly easy it is to use Linode.
Marco:
You know, I have these scripts that set up and destroy things.
Marco:
I have APIs that integrate with the Linode API to do certain server setup and maintenance tasks.
Marco:
It is just an awesome place to run servers.
Marco:
It's an amazing value.
Marco:
They have amazing performance.
Marco:
No matter what you are setting up, if you need servers, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that let you take your project to the next level the same way Linode has done for me for so many years.
Marco:
I've been one of their customers.
Marco:
You can get started today on Linode with $100 in free credit at linode.com slash ATP or by texting ATP to 474747.
Marco:
That'll get you instant access to $100 in free credit.
Marco:
I could use that.
Marco:
That could be five servers for a month.
Marco:
I mean, it's really – Linode, they have amazing service, amazing pricing.
Marco:
They have 11 global data centers, 24-7, 365 human support.
Marco:
And again, I used that a lot this past week, and they were wonderful.
Marco:
You can do all sorts of other stuff on Linode too.
Marco:
Things like dedicated CPU compute instances, GPU specialty instances, their new S3 compatible object storage, managed Kubernetes support, and so much more.
Marco:
So once again, linode.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Click on that create free account button to get started or text ATP.
Marco:
to 474747.
Marco:
Get started on Linode today.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my servers, helping me through this huge migration I just did, and for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Nathaniel Mall writes, why does macOS not support background notifications for more first- and third-party apps?
Casey:
The only apps I've found that have background notifications are Messages, Calendar, and Safari site notifications.
Casey:
It makes it hard to use certain apps that I want to get notifications from, but not have running.
Casey:
For example, Apple Mail.
Casey:
Is this not a thing developers can implement, or do they just choose not to?
Casey:
So this took me a couple of reads before I understood what was being asked about.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
If certain apps, like Messages, even if Messages isn't running at all, you can still receive an iMessage or a text message, and it will show the little notification in the Notification Center.
Casey:
That's not true for Mail.
Casey:
As Nathaniel had written, in order to get a notification with regard to Mail, Mail has to be running.
Casey:
And I understand to a degree the complaint, but given, and we just talked about this a few weeks ago, given that you can close all the windows of, say, mail, and yet it is still running, I don't really understand why that's a problem.
Casey:
Like, why not just close mail, which is what I do when I'm done working with email.
John:
That's mean to close all the windows.
Yeah.
John:
I mean, you can just hide it.
John:
What do you mean it's mean?
John:
No, I mean, I put this question in here because I think it's an interesting situation because the Mac is technically capable of doing exactly what is described in this question, right?
John:
There are no, just to be clear about that, there are no technical limitations.
John:
Literally any Mac application can do that.
John:
This, like the Mac has facilities where you can run things in the background, faceless background processes through launch through launch D that can constantly be checking for whatever it is, whether it's Slack messages or new email or, you know, whatever, whatever your app does, you can run stuff in the background on Mac OS.
John:
In fact, it is way easier to do it than it is on iOS, right?
John:
So why, from a user's perspective, does it seem like Mac apps don't have...
John:
don't support background notifications like they do on iOS.
John:
And the reason is because there is a well-defined facility for background operations on iOS that it used to be, but eventually there was.
John:
It was very well-defined, very limited, very controlled.
John:
And if you want to do something in the background on iOS, this is the one and only way to do it, right?
John:
You can't just make up your own thing and say, I'm just going to run arbitrarily whenever I want and run for as long.
John:
Like it's not possible on iOS.
John:
So it funneled everybody on iOS into this one channel, this one well-supported API.
John:
On the Mac, that doesn't exist.
John:
There's a whole bunch of different APIs and a whole bunch of different facilities.
John:
And you can in fact write your whole own thing from scratch.
John:
Like you have so many options.
John:
It is a complete green field where you can do anything you want.
John:
And that means individual app developers have to sort of roll their own solution.
John:
How do I want to hook into my thing?
John:
How do I want to cause my thing to run?
John:
Which facility, which of the umpteen facilities that are offered by macOS that could be used for this do I want to use?
John:
And then I have to write my own thing and control how I run and make sure my process doesn't spin out of control and make sure it comes up and goes down at the right times.
John:
And how do I handle debugging?
John:
And how do I interface that for my app?
John:
And there's so many choices for you to make that because the Mac is more flexible, fewer developers do it because there's no one obvious, well-paved path for you to go down.
John:
And that's true, this is a microcosm of the entire iOS versus macOS experience.
John:
The Mac is so much more capable, but in many respects, iOS has more mature sort of paved roads for certain things that all apps wanna do.
John:
And it just so happens because the iPhone and the iOS platforms started life not having this facility at all, and people wanted it, that when background processing finally came,
John:
It came as a singular feature that everyone jumped on, whereas the Mac has always been capable, almost always has been capable of doing random stuff in addition to the programs that you're quote unquote really running.
John:
Even in classic Mac OS, you could do weird stuff and have memory resident processes running and all sorts of, you know, hacky stuff like that.
John:
They never really evolved into the singular thing on the Mac with a basic API to do this thing.
John:
In fact, I think the individual Apple apps, whether it's messages or whatever other things that are throwing notifications when they're quote unquote not running, I bet they all use different technologies because the history of macOS is filled with different technologies and frameworks that can be used to accomplish this exact task.
John:
So that's the answer that because the Mac is too capable and has always been too capable.
John:
Apple has never come out with a sort of one standard, normal, constrained, very easy, obvious path to do this.
John:
And so it's up to individual Mac developers to do it.
John:
And most of them don't or they do it in weird ways.
Casey:
Wait, can we go back a step?
Casey:
Why is it mean to close the mail window when you're done using it?
Casey:
Why do I have to hide it?
John:
Because you're just like, I want you to be running so you can check new mail, but you're not allowed to have any windows open.
John:
Why not just hide it?
John:
Just option click away from it, right?
John:
Don't close the window.
John:
That's mean.
Casey:
I'm blue screening as I'm sitting here.
Casey:
Why is hiding it better?
John:
It's like snipping the flowers off, snipping buds off of a flower.
John:
It's like snip, snip, snip, snip.
John:
Now you're just a bare branch because I don't want to see those flowers.
Casey:
Yes, that's exactly correct.
Casey:
Why would I hide it, especially since it involves more action than just clicking the nice little red?
John:
You just hold on the option key when you click away from it, and now the window is open, but you just can't see it anymore.
Casey:
Well, first of all, I didn't even know you could do that.
Casey:
Second of all, I knew you could hide it.
Casey:
I didn't know that that was a mechanism to hide it.
Casey:
But there's a nice red circle in the corner of the window.
Casey:
Why would I not click?
John:
I'm mostly joking, but the practical answer of why you wouldn't close the windows is because you don't have faith that when you try to bring a new equivalent window back that it will be anything like the window that you just closed.
John:
So say you had your mail window positioned in size the way you wanted it.
John:
Do you have faith?
John:
The next time you want that window back, it will come back in the same place.
John:
Mail's pretty good about that, but things like web browsers are not.
John:
I don't know how many users actually have the correct mental model that matches the program model of how web browsers decide the position and size of a new web browser window.
John:
Do you two have that in your head?
John:
And does it match your browsers?
John:
Yeah.
John:
like if you hit command n pick a pick your web browser any web browser switch to it hit command n but before you do predict how big the window is going to be what shape it's going to be and where it's going to be in your screen nailed it yeah same and do you know what influences that like if i say okay change that make the window like skinnier or fatter or in a different position do you know how to do that got it
John:
i i think most people have no idea where it's going to appear or how it changes and are surprised when they hit command then and a giant window appears and they're like it's just one of those things they just live with right and so uh closing windows is a potentially potentially destructive operation in that some of your setup of how you had arranged things may now be destroyed and you may not be sure that you can get it back depending on the application i think i think mail actually is well behaved in this regard but not all applications are
Casey:
Listeners, this is for you.
Casey:
This isn't for the two of them.
Casey:
This is for you.
Casey:
The same people who bust my cojones over all of my tea ceremony for my records and you have to get everything set up just right and it doesn't make a difference.
Casey:
These are the same people, mostly John, that are saying that his windows must be just right.
Casey:
And if they're even the slightest bit off, even just a few pixels off, everything is ruined.
Casey:
But I'm the one that's too particular.
Casey:
If only they were.
John:
You think they're going to appear and be a few pixels off?
John:
No.
John:
They're going to be wildly off.
John:
And the final thing is mostly about the fact that you have all the ceremony and in the end you get worse audio quality.
John:
So that's not applicable to the situation.
John:
Your mail window will be the same quality.
John:
Move on, move on.
John:
The equivalent would be you have to go through some long ceremony and what you get is a child's drawing of the mail window instead of the actual mail window.
Marco:
Oh my God.
Marco:
Just talk about Tesla or something safer.
Casey:
Michael Helwig.
Casey:
That's a great surname.
Casey:
Michael Helwig writes, triggered by Marco's recent tweets about database issues, a question I meant to ask for a long time.
Casey:
What is the reason for doing any processing or storage server-side for Overcast?
Casey:
The Android podcast app I've used so far stored data exclusively on my device, and all the processing of feeds and whatnot also happens there.
Casey:
What is the benefit either to you or your users for doing stuff, and what stuff exactly on servers owned by you?
Casey:
Didn't Castro used to do everything locally?
Casey:
I don't know if it still does, but I thought it used to be locally.
John:
I think Marco asks himself the same question a lot.
John:
What is the point?
John:
In fact, recently, he may have found himself asking this question a lot.
John:
Why am I doing all this stuff on servers?
John:
Marco, please enlighten us.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So, I mean, part of it is there actually are legitimate, significant gains from doing that.
Marco:
One of the biggest is the gains for the users of the app.
Marco:
Every single time they want to check for whether they have any new episodes of their podcasts, they don't have to download, like, 50 RSS feeds all to their phone from their origin servers.
Marco:
And those RSS feeds could be, like, well over a megabyte each, depending on how many episodes are in them.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
there's a huge amount of bandwidth and power savings from knowing when new episodes are out.
Marco:
And you also know about new episodes sooner because my servers are the ones hammering all those feeds every few minutes.
Marco:
And then when they get an episode, they send notifications to everybody that, and then everyone's devices can download only the changes and everything.
Marco:
So there, there is a significant like efficiency and speed of updates, speed of getting new episodes advantage to server side stuff.
Marco:
It's also just some practical stuff.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
If I discover some way in which my parsing of an RSS feed is wrong or needs to be changed in some way or there's something about like some podcast is messing up in Overcast, there are fixes I can do server-side that fix it instantly for everybody as opposed to –
Marco:
if it was app-only, I would have to figure out the bug in the app and then fix it, put it into beta testing through Apple's process, and then submit it up to AppReview.
Marco:
And it might not be in my customer's hands for days or possibly a week or more, depending on how long that takes.
Marco:
So there are certainly...
Marco:
areas like that that are just like, it's just practical.
Marco:
It's better to have stuff on the server just for the result of how the app works and how to maintain it.
Marco:
There's also certain features that require some kind of service backend.
Marco:
One of them I wanted from the beginning was sync.
Marco:
and i wanted a way to be able to have overcast run on any number of iphones ipads whatever and have it work and have it sync and then also if your phone fell on a lake and you had to like restore it or whatever that your stuff would be there there would there would be some kind of sync account behind it that you wouldn't have you wouldn't like lose all your podcast subscriptions and data stuff like that
Marco:
So there are ways to do it, which I'll get to in a second, that don't involve you running servers, but it's a lot easier if you run servers.
Marco:
The biggest reason, though, that I run the servers is that I built this entire system.
Marco:
I designed the app.
Marco:
I designed its architecture.
Marco:
I built the infrastructure in 2013 and 2014.
Marco:
And that was a long time ago.
Marco:
And things were different back then.
Marco:
I had more of a tolerance for running servers.
Marco:
And CloudKit didn't exist yet.
Marco:
And now, if I was starting over from scratch today, I think I would try to do it entirely with CloudKit.
Marco:
Now, there are some limitations there.
Marco:
I would probably end up still running my own servers to do feed polling and to notify the apps when there were changes in the feeds.
Marco:
But maybe I wouldn't use my servers to store user data necessarily, to store your list of subscriptions.
Marco:
And I might migrate to that over time.
Marco:
I could move to a setup like that over time where I reduce the need to run my own servers and I reduce what they're doing down to basically no user data features and just doing like...
Marco:
feed parsing normalization and notifications and actually and to answer your question casey i think that's what castor does but i that might be outdated now um but anyway uh that's the main reason is like a there are pretty compelling reasons to build server stuff and b i designed this like eight years ago basically when when uh
Marco:
alternatives like CloudKit didn't exist.
Marco:
And the reason I run my own servers as opposed to some kind of higher level abstraction or managed service, there's all sorts of managed database services that I could be using that would abstract away a lot of the problems that I have to sometimes deal with.
Marco:
The main reason I don't do that is cost.
Marco:
That right now, I spend something like $5,000 a month on servers.
Marco:
Oh my god.
Marco:
To do the kind of query and data volume that I do...
Marco:
on a manic service would cost tens of thousands of dollars a month and i'm getting it for five thousand dollars a month and that's the main reason i do it that even though it is you know it's it's a lot of headache and hassle sometimes but
Marco:
But the vast majority of time, everything just runs and takes almost no interaction from me at all.
Marco:
Like servers mostly run themselves when you set them up right.
Marco:
And occasionally you have to deal with something, but it's not the common case.
Marco:
If it was the common case, I would get myself out of the server business.
Marco:
But because the trouble is relatively unusual and most of the time it runs just fine and saves a ton of money and gives me some really nice abilities and really nice features, that's why I do it.
Marco:
But if I were designing stuff from scratch today, I would use less of a server component.
Casey:
Makes sense.
Casey:
And finally, Saurabh Kulkarni writes, back in 2007, Steve Jobs proudly announced on stage that the iPhone runs OS X. How much of that is still true today?
Casey:
How many core components of iOS do you think are still present or dependent on macOS?
Casey:
John, tell us what you think.
John:
so i mean the public face of this of how steve jobs said iphone runs os 10 and what the heck is os 10 because at that point they hadn't you know they hadn't dropped the mac from it and it's just there's a lot of confusing naming but under the covers uh apple has never really had a split os strategy underneath ipad os ios watch os whatever the heck what is it audio os what it runs on the home pods
John:
All those OSs are based on the same underpinnings, which is the Darwin sort of underlying low-level operating system, which is an evolution of the BSD underpinnings from Next, which they bought in 1997.
John:
Their core OS is...
John:
That foundation is the same under all of their platforms, not just the iPhone, all of them.
John:
Now, granted, lots of things have changed, but the underpinnings are modular enough that say when they wanted to field the iPhone, they could make a variant of those underpinnings and let's say turn off swap file.
John:
Still had virtual memory, but they said, well, on the phone, we can't afford to swap.
John:
So the part of the operating system that takes memory pages and writes them out to quote unquote disk and reads them back in,
John:
We're not going to include that component or we'll turn that component off.
John:
Various other things that you can change.
John:
If you have good modular underpinnings, you can take that same OS, which is just like a Unix variant with the mock microkernel and a BSD layer and all that stuff.
John:
It's flexible enough that you can run it on a watch.
John:
You can run it on a discontinued home pod.
John:
You can run it on your phone.
John:
You can run it on your Mac.
John:
And that, as far as like, you know, if you take a computer science course, that is the operating system.
John:
Now, I know people see the Finder and Springboard and funny graphics on the top of their discontinued HomePod, and they think, oh, these are totally different operating systems.
John:
But that is a much higher level component that really isn't part of the operating system operating system, right?
John:
And technically speaking, the operating system is the thing that mediates access to the hardware.
John:
But even if you go up a few levels above that, that shared foundation is across all of Apple's products.
John:
So how much is still true today?
John:
The same amount as before.
John:
Both of those operating systems have evolved.
John:
They've gotten new features.
John:
Features that were designed for the iPhone have come to the Mac and vice versa.
John:
I mean, now the Mac is using a thing that I think is still called mobile update to do its operating system updates because it's basically the iPhone update system.
John:
But that is all like sort of things above the layer of the operating system.
John:
under the covers it's all the same os that is you know i think steve jobs said it was going to be our next os for the next 15 years and it has gone well past that because it turns out unix is really flexible and apple has just continued to tweak it and develop it and improve it and they've done many many things to improve it including up to and including things like rolling out a new file system right and you know they haven't needed to change it fundamentally because
John:
It is a flexible system that it underpins everything.
John:
And so that's one of the reasons that Apple has been able to do what it's done.
John:
Every time they want to come up with one of these new products, they haven't had to say, oh, well, then we need a whole new platform strategy and we need a whole new this.
John:
They've done a really good job of saying we have...
John:
One tool chain, one IDE, you know, we write our own compiler, we make our own operating system, and it underpins everything.
John:
And even though, you know, from the watch to a Mac Pro, they look so different, but there's so much that's shared, it allows Apple to continue to support these platforms without feeling like they're doing 20 different things.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Mack Weldon, Linode, and Flatfile.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join and become one of those wonderful members at ATP.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thanks, everybody.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental, it was accidental, and you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Can we talk briefly about the iMac color rumors?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Well, can we?
John:
Yes.
John:
Will we?
John:
Probably not.
John:
So the rumor is simple, and we've talked about this before.
John:
It's going to be a new iMac.
John:
It's going to have an ARM processor.
John:
The iMac dashboard needs to be redesigned.
John:
Wouldn't it be neat if you could get the iMac in colors?
John:
Yes, I mean more than just gray and slightly darker gray.
John:
And so there's this little mock-up picture in this 9to5Mac article from many weeks ago showing what looked like a bunch of kind of squared-off big iPads, but instead are iMacs, in a bunch of pastel colors, like similar colors to the iPads, where it's anodized aluminum, but there's a pink one, a blue one, a green one, a dark gray one, a white one.
John:
Or whatever.
John:
And I don't want to dig too much in this specific rumor, but basically the idea is desktop Macs that are colored.
John:
Not just like a little splash of color, but the whole thing comes in a color.
John:
What do we think of that?
Casey:
I think this mock-up looks good.
Casey:
I mean, it's hard to say, you know, since it's clearly a mock-up, but...
Casey:
I think I like it having an entire case full of color.
Casey:
I don't know that I would choose it.
Casey:
I tend to choose very boring-looking devices, iOS devices.
Casey:
I tend to choose black for the most part, although my last couple iPhones have been like that year's special color.
Casey:
Looking at this particular mock-up, which I know you're not really trying to perseverate on it, but looking at this particular mock-up, I don't think I would choose the pinkish or the bluish or the greenish.
Casey:
I would probably choose the thing that looks most like my iMac Pro that I have now.
Casey:
But I like the idea of having the option, and certainly if I had a more fancy or trendy-looking office area in my house, having a pastel color would potentially work better.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
That's not my taste, but I like the idea of it existing.
Marco:
I've advocated for a while that I think Apple needs to have more fun in its, in its product designs, especially at the higher end of things.
Marco:
Um, they, they seem to be okay making like colorful iPhones for the, like the quote cheap iPhone, like, you know, like whatever the entry level base model is.
Marco:
They're fine to make, you know, colorful versions of that.
Marco:
Um, you know, and they make, they make colorful iPad airs now.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
They made colorful MacBooks for a while, but then as soon as you get above the cheapest model, no more colors for you or at most silver or dark silver.
Marco:
That's it, right?
Marco:
And so I would love to have more color brought back into the product line across larger parts of it.
Marco:
One of the criticisms I have of the late Johnny Ive era, which you've said before, is that the products got stripped of a lot of their humanity.
Marco:
They became a lot more like serious designs by very cold, precise kind of metal, and that's it.
Marco:
To have more of the humanity brought back into it, to have more personality and more fun brought into the physical design of the products is a welcome change.
Marco:
And so I really hope that they do introduce more colors over time.
Marco:
Like I remember there was a rumor like a year and a half ago that they were going to possibly bring back the rainbow Apple logo or some other kind of rainbow design in something.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
And I think that would have been awesome.
Marco:
I think it would be amazing to have like the redesigned M1 MacBook whatevers that had a rainbow Apple logo.
Marco:
Like that would be so cool.
Marco:
And I was hoping they would take the M1 transition as an opportunity to do that.
Marco:
They didn't yet, at least, but just that kind of thing.
Marco:
I would love to see that kind of thing.
Marco:
I love my stupid red iPhone mini.
Marco:
Every time I see my red iPhone, I like it, and I'm glad I got it in red, even though the back of it is totally not red.
Marco:
I never see the back.
Marco:
I see the sides, and they look great.
Marco:
I love that my MacBook Air is its weird goldish-pinkish-orange-ish color, even though in certain light, I don't even like the color.
Marco:
But I love that it is a different color and then it looks fresh and new.
Marco:
And like, I think if they're going to keep putting the amount of effort into the Mac that they have been putting into it, I think it deserves to look fresh and new because it is fresh and new.
Marco:
The insides, like the changes with Apple Silicon, like these are such amazing Macs coming out of this era now.
Marco:
they will probably continue to be more amazing Macs coming out of this era.
Marco:
I think they should reflect that in their design.
Marco:
It shouldn't just look like the same boring computers we've had for many years now.
Marco:
And colors are a really easy way to do that.
Marco:
They're a really big splash way to show this thing is new, this is different, it's the hot new thing, you want it.
Marco:
And a lot of people buy tech gear based on factors like that.
Marco:
There are lots of people who will make decisions on what computer to buy or what phone to buy based on how it looks.
Marco:
And there's nothing wrong with that.
Marco:
That's a factor.
Marco:
It's one of many factors people might use to choose things.
Marco:
And so for Apple to make a splash and to put out new designs of hardware that actually look fresh and new and actually have fun colors again...
Marco:
I would love that.
Marco:
So I hope these rumors are slash were true.
Marco:
I hope Apple does introduce more color into their product lines.
Marco:
And I hope they release some bold choices, like not just the really safe choices,
Marco:
very pale colors they've used like on the ipad air you know if that's all it is okay fine that's a good step one but i hope they also release products that have bold choices that aren't just like here's a slightly bluish tint on space gray
Marco:
here's a slightly pinkish tint on silver like let's go a little further than that let's make it a little more bold show a little bit more personality which i mean you know might not be the strong suit of a lot of apple leadership right now but i'd like to see that brought back i'd like to see like personality brought into the hardware uh where we haven't really seen a lot of that recently and and the little bits we've gotten here and there have been very welcome
John:
Yeah, the iPhone, Apple's been better about the iPhone in terms of like making it in colors at various times.
John:
Like the 5C had lots of very bold colors.
John:
And in the current era, the pro ones tend to be boring.
John:
But the slight step down models have more interesting colors, even if it's just like even if the product red is like the most bold one.
John:
But still, some of the other ones, you know, make a statement.
John:
But on phones, there's a couple of factors.
John:
One is that most people put a case on them, and the cases are incredibly brightly colored.
John:
You see people's phones out in the real world.
John:
People pick cases that they like, and some of them, they're not shy.
John:
They're very vibrant, interesting, extremely varied cases on people's phones, any phones.
John:
And for something as large as an iMac, especially now that the screens are so big, that's a little bit of a different kettle of fish.
John:
If you have a very bright purple case for your phone with leopard spots on it, so what, right?
John:
But if you did that same pattern on a 27-inch iMac, some people would be like, whoa, that's just too much.
John:
I don't want that.
John:
And so I understand why Apple might be shy of that.
John:
but i you know i'm totally with marco i'm reminded of a time in apple's past when apple itself was not afraid to do exactly what i described like a you know a bright purple huge thing like so i will put in a link in the show notes to uh jason snell's 20 max for 2020 uh podcast series where talked to a bunch of people including me about old max and there was a couple episodes on the max i'm about to describe and in fact jason's been recently releasing the sort of
John:
unedited longer conversations with all of his different people so if you want to hear hours of me talking about uh old max in a format that i didn't think was going to be released so it's kind of uh it's kind of casual or whatever anyway uh there's plenty of that but one of the things that came up was um
John:
was whatever i'm so bad with yours but um after the imac came out everyone remembers the imac the original imac even if you weren't alive for it you probably know what it like it looks like the kind of teal gumdrop looking computer right bold colors brought to computers right apple had pro computers then too and they were big right that they were big towers and they even had big they weren't
John:
you know, LCDs, but they had big CRTs.
John:
Apple sold a 21 inch CRT, which if you've never had one of those is way bigger than you think it is and way heavier, right?
John:
So full size tower computer and a 21 inch CRT.
John:
And after the iMac came out, when they, when Apple fielded its updated line of those products, it made them bright and candy colored like the iMac.
John:
You can get a 21 inch gigantic whale size monitor.
John:
There was bright teal.
John:
way bigger than any iMac there in terms of like total surface area than they're going to put out now.
John:
And the tower computer matched it.
John:
The blue and white Power Mac G3, it was white and teal.
John:
It looked like a tower computer, an iMac that was suddenly a tower computer with a matching monitor that was also teal.
John:
They were not shy about the colors of their computers, even the really big ones, right?
John:
And that phase eventually ended and eventually the Power Mac G4 started to get all silver and gray and boring again.
John:
But it just goes to show that when they did that, first of all, people didn't refuse to buy those computers because of the colors.
John:
Even if you didn't like them, you were buying them because they were cool, right?
John:
And they were good computers, and maybe you didn't like that color teal, but then wait a year, you could get the slightly darker blue the next year or whatever, right?
John:
Just like buying phones.
John:
It's not that big of a deal.
John:
And second...
John:
It was so much fun.
John:
It matched the iMac.
John:
The operating system matched because the Aqua interface had stripes that were reflected on the outside of the iMac and also reflected on your blue and white G3 and also on your monitor.
John:
It was just so much fun.
John:
Like such an aesthetic, such, you know, a fun aesthetic design.
John:
And then of course we know the iMacs went on to have
John:
The fall colors and all sorts of different things.
John:
Grape, sage, snow, which was white but was kind of cool looking.
John:
Then, of course, flower power and dalmatian.
John:
The end of the iMac, the CRT iMac line where they really went out and literally did basically leopard spots.
John:
Although it was flower power, not leopard spots.
John:
But...
John:
You know, those computers existed, and people have fond memories of those.
John:
Even if you never bought a Flower Power iMac, you're just happy to know that it was out there.
John:
And some people bought it and liked it.
John:
And maybe you never had a grape iMac, but the idea that there was a purple computer that you could buy was cool.
John:
And if you saw one in a school or a cafe, it would make you smile.
John:
Same deal with these iMacs.
John:
Yes, they're bigger than phones.
John:
Yes, it seems weird to have a saturated purple gigantic 27-inch display.
John:
Yes, you only ever see the front of it most of the time anyway, so what's the big deal?
John:
Just do it.
John:
It's fun.
John:
I really hope they do it.
John:
I really hope they get out of this sort of pale pastel anodized funk because as the sides of Marco's phone show, it is possible to anodize aluminum with a little bit more saturation and a little bit more boldness.
John:
Even if you were just doing like a black iMac that had a similar finish, like a really deep black iMac, that would be less timid than the slightly darker gray of the iMac Pro, which was cool and I liked and everything.
John:
my advice to apple is a totally do this and b be bold right and you know i know i'm sitting next to a giant silver computer with a bunch of weird holes in the front of it i would buy one of these in a bright color too maybe not bright yellow maybe not bright purple would be to my taste
John:
jet black that would be super cool midnight blue super cool and if you want to make one of these that's bright yellow and put an arm cp unit someone out there will probably want it make it like bumblebee colored black and yellow right like apple needs to not be afraid to do that because i feel like
John:
They think either people won't take it seriously or will turn people off.
John:
And past evidence shows that neither of those things are true.
John:
Even when Apple's taste was questionable, like even even like the Dalmatian iMac, I'm going to say that's the flower power iMac.
John:
That's some questionable taste, but it did not sink the company.
John:
And it is not thought of in hindsight as like this terrible mistake that Apple made.
John:
Instead, it's a fun thing Apple did once and no one blames them for it.
John:
And many people have fond memories of it.
Marco:
I'm just so tired of gray and black.
Casey:
Even as someone who buys gray and black, I love the thought of having the option not to.
Casey:
And again, my phone for the last couple of years has been whatever the quote-unquote colorful Pro 1 was.
Casey:
And you're both right that it typically is not a very loud color.
Casey:
And that's okay.
Casey:
That actually fits me better.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But I couldn't agree more.
Casey:
And we've said this many times, all three of us, that the quote unquote cheap phones seem to have all the better colors.
Casey:
And that's really a bummer.
Casey:
And I wish that wasn't the case.
Casey:
And it's easy for us to say all these things because we don't have to manage all these different SKUs and so on and so forth.
Casey:
But I really think that adding a little more pop into the line would be nothing but a good thing.