Deconstructed iMac
Marco:
Windows on your car?
Marco:
No, oh, I can't wash any part of a car.
Marco:
That got added to the list long ago.
John:
Yeah, I can't confirm.
John:
Because that is a challenge that I've been tackling for many years and I still have not mastered.
Casey:
I can confirm that Marco, for all of his many perks, is completely useless at washing a car.
Casey:
I've seen it with my own eyes.
Casey:
All of his good qualities, all of the great things about Marco, which there are many, I can tell you that being able to wash a car is not on that list.
Marco:
No, not even a little bit.
John:
So what windows are you washing then?
Marco:
So we have like our main like sliders to the deck.
Marco:
You know, normally in the summertime, we can hire a window washer to come out, you know, whenever it gets really terrible, and you can barely see through it anymore, we can hire a window washer and they do a good job.
Marco:
They don't work in the winter.
Marco:
um so like at least here because you know normally it's freezing um so so i i have i have like you know a few basic things i have one of those like big squeegee things with the brush on the other side of it like whatever those like you know the window washing brushes do you have one of those like planks held up by pulleys on ropes and you lower yourself down from the roof
John:
no the good thing is this is all just at at like floor level so i can just walk up to it and do it and what and just to be clear what are you washing off the windows it does i've never lived at the beach do you actually get salt on them it's it's you know rain and dirt and you know salty grimy dirt from rain and the ocean well so but you is it mostly i'm wondering it was like is it a different kind of grime than you get at non-beach houses
Marco:
yeah it's it's very like it's like sticky it's not it's not like dry dirt it's like constantly damp slightly sticky salty sandy dirt sounds delicious and and it's like and you know the rest of the house i don't care about but like these windows are they face south so they face where the sun comes in all day so you really see when they're dirty and like all right i can either you know have them be dirty for the next four months until the window washer can be here um or you know do it myself and
John:
Yeah, what is this, your car?
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I cannot find a car wash.
Marco:
That's a whole other thing.
Casey:
You make Casey cry every time you take your car to a car wash.
Casey:
Well, no, I would be happy if you even took it to a car wash.
Casey:
Oh my gosh.
Casey:
I'm that desperate at this point.
Casey:
I just want Marco to look at me.
Marco:
I would take it to a car wash every time I left the island if there was one anywhere nearby where I go.
Marco:
And as far as I can tell, there isn't one.
Casey:
I'm surprised that, John, you don't have some hole in the wall from when you were a kid that you're suggesting Marco go to.
Marco:
Well, because that's nowhere near where I usually go.
Marco:
I did not have a favorite car wash.
John:
Sorry.
Marco:
And I would be fine to just go to one of those, like, you know, just self-serve ones where it's just like the hose and the thing that takes quarters and you just, you know, dial in whatever.
Marco:
That'd be fine.
Marco:
I don't need the perfect job.
Marco:
I get you to, like, blast all the sand and crap off my car.
Marco:
But nope.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
These are all areas that are not my expertise.
Marco:
But anyway, yeah, so I've watched so many YouTube videos on the technique you're supposed to use with the squeegee on a window to try to have no lines left after you have squeegeed.
Marco:
I cannot for the life of me perform this action.
John:
Well, if I can use my knowledge of car window washing, if you're having trouble with it.
John:
It's not all the same thing.
John:
Well, and it is in this sense, in that, like, you know, obviously washing any kind of window streaks are a problem.
John:
I don't think it's your squeegee technique.
John:
I think you haven't gotten all the crap off your window yet, so there's nothing you can do with the squeegee that's not going to leave streaks.
John:
You need to get the crap off your window.
John:
And then the question is, can I get the remaining water off the window and
John:
in such a way that I don't get like a little line between, you know, so I think basically you're not removing the bad stuff from the window sufficiently before you move.
John:
You want to jump right to the step where you're like, oh, I'm going to use a little squeegee and it'll be clean.
John:
No, you got to actually get all the crap off first.
John:
Oh, maybe I'll try that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like, so like continue to wash, like wash that, whatever it is in the salt, dirt, sand, whatever it is, get it off your window.
John:
And that may take many, several passes.
John:
And then finally, when you have a clean window with just maybe a little bit of mildly dirty water on it, then your squeegeeing will work better.
Marco:
hmm maybe that's my problem yeah because because like you know like when the window washers come i mean they they do it in like three seconds and it's perfect but they're experts like they they really know what they're doing they're very good at their jobs and they and you know they have they do the whole house in like two hours i don't know how they do it it took me like it took me a good two hours to do three sliders today oh my word
John:
You're calling them sliders?
John:
Like little hamburgers?
John:
Yeah, they're sliders.
John:
They're sliding door window units.
John:
You're talking about sliding glass doors?
John:
Yes.
John:
You call them sliders?
John:
Everyone calls them sliders.
John:
This might be an Ohio thing.
John:
I'm going to look this up now.
John:
What would you call them?
John:
I would not call them sliders.
John:
Yeah, so what would you call them?
Casey:
Sliding glass doors.
Casey:
That's a bit long.
Casey:
Ow.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, why use three syllables when 17 would do?
Marco:
I'm just telling you what they are.
Marco:
Sliders are tiny hamburgers.
Marco:
In the context of talking about windows.
Marco:
Well, anyway, those are probably easier to clean.
John:
The hamburgers?
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Clean them right off your plate.
John:
Yum, yum, yum.
John:
although they do not clean your insides that's for sure well you clean your own insides out after eating too many of those oh gosh listen to this guy that's just white castle i haven't had white castle in probably five years there's no one none of them anywhere near me yeah so i did a google search for it and i came up with uh slider services professional sliding door maintenance right but this is the midwest most experienced specialty contractor so i'm wondering if sliders is a midwestern thing i'll have to ask my wife about it when the show's over
Marco:
i don't know i only ever had one sliding glass door growing up and it was i was too young in that house to really talk about it by by that name so i don't know what we said there oh my goodness uh so out of curiosity i thought to myself you know i should look and see if there is a white castle anywhere near me and there isn't but as i'm looking at the
Casey:
It says, you know, it's no castles found.
Casey:
And then there's a checkbox that reads, only show castles accepting Valentine's Day reservations.
Casey:
So when I think, even I, I mean, I have the world's worst taste in everything, allegedly.
John:
Maybe it's somebody's favorite restaurant.
Marco:
oh i'm not judging it's just it's so wow i'm more surprised that they take reservations like even for the even for the people for whom that is their favorite restaurant like i would never think to even check to see if they take reservations i don't know do you need reservations at white castle you want to get the good seat by the dirty window i don't know right well no they probably have professional window washers right yeah they don't have marco clean in their crap
Casey:
John, you want to tell me about what you've put in the show notes as the chicken hat dregs, please?
John:
Yeah, I should have looked this up.
John:
I kept trying to think of the phrase that they say on the Apple earnings calls when they're trying to say that there is sufficient supply to meet the demand.
John:
Like supply and demand are in balance or something.
John:
There's some little phrase that they use all the time that I can't remember.
John:
But anyway, I think that finally the chicken hat supply and demand are in balance.
John:
We got the final, final, final, final shipment.
John:
of chicken hats like before the last episode but i didn't mention it on the show because i just wanted them to sort of drain out of the system naturally and they more or less have we have a handful of them left i think everybody who has any interest in a chicken hat now has one so congratulations to everybody but if you are super duper desperate we do have a handful of them left
John:
They're probably just going to honestly sit there for like the next year, kind of like ATP pins, where everybody who wanted an ATP pin got one.
John:
And then we had like 50 pins in our stock inventory for like a year and a half.
John:
So that may happen with the chicken hats, which if it does, fine.
John:
But if not, just letting everybody know, if you want a chicken hat, go to atp.fm slash store.
John:
There is a handful left.
Marco:
And frankly, I don't know how this happened, that with all the ordering we were doing, that somehow we weren't left with a thousand chicken hats.
Marco:
Like all of a sudden, oh, the demand stops, and then we have a thousand left.
John:
So a little bit behind the scenes stuff.
John:
One of the many multiple orders that we made, like a box of hats got lost.
John:
I think it was a box of like 150 or 300.
John:
No, it was 150 hats or something.
John:
Like, oh, we were supposed to have a box of these and it went missing.
John:
And so the manufacturer just, you know, manufactured another box of 150 hats for free and then sent it.
John:
And then they found the missing box.
John:
And so we had actually an extra 150 hats on top of the amount that we wanted to have.
John:
And all of that sort of fumbling around in multiple shipments put us in a position where we have, you know,
John:
a small number of hats left for anybody who wants them i assume they'll be gone by this time next year but who knows we'll see if this section even makes it in the release show because the bootleg people might get to it and decide everyone who's the bootleg has already got a hat if they want it
Casey:
All right, we'll see.
Casey:
Speaking of bootlegs and members, now would be a pretty good time, if you haven't already gone to ATP.fm slash join, to do so.
Casey:
We are righting a wrong that we as a collective unit made, or at least that's the story I'm sticking with.
John:
I think it was just you, yeah.
Casey:
Was it just me?
John:
All right.
Casey:
I really was trying to pawn this off on all three of us.
Casey:
I thought we could take this fall together, but seems not.
Casey:
I will dive on my sword.
Casey:
I will commit seppuku.
Casey:
No, John was particularly embittered at my selection for the trilogy that we had done of movie reviews or whatever you want to call them.
John:
ATB Movie Club, come on.
Casey:
Thank you, ATB Movie Club.
Casey:
atp movie club is what i meant to say uh john was very upset at me for my selection for atp movie club even though the rundown for multiple reasons the rundown is an unquestionably good movie we all agreed just listen to the episode i thought it made for a very good episode of our show thank you uh but anyway but none of us were were culturally enriched by it oh gosh you know can you just let me get through this one piece please and thank you no uh apparently not
Casey:
I'm new here.
Casey:
Anyway.
Casey:
Have you heard the show?
Casey:
We're going to right my wrongs.
Casey:
And we're going to, tomorrow night, as we're recording this episode, obviously, right now, tonight.
Casey:
But tomorrow night, as I sit here, which is Thursday night in the One Shoe Time Zone, we are going to record an episode of ATP Movie Club about The Hunt for Red October, which I will spoil only to say it is one of my favorite films of all time.
Casey:
And, John, I think we'll have not altogether negative things to say about it.
Casey:
And, Marco, let's verify you have not or had not seen it or have not seen it at the time we are recording right now.
Marco:
I'm going to watch it tomorrow so it's fresh in my mind when we record.
Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
And I actually plan to do the same, even though I think I could probably recite the entire movie by heart.
Casey:
But nevertheless, we don't know when this episode will be released.
Casey:
I would say sometime no later than the end of next week.
Casey:
It's up to whenever, you know, Marco has time to edit it.
Casey:
But in the next week or so, we are going to do ATP Movie Club, The Hunt for October.
Casey:
And again, if you go to atp.fm slash join, then you can get not only this forthcoming episode, but also the three episodes prior and also the bootleg and discounts on our limited time store offering.
Casey:
So that's not available right now, but it will be probably...
Casey:
shortly before wwdc so uh check it out i'm really really looking forward to recording this i i am extremely excited to talk to these two fine gentlemen slash my mortal enemies about one of my favorite movies so uh so wish me luck and again that'll be out sometime in the next week week and a half or thereabouts and we do have some other ideas for members special content but we couldn't nail them down in time and i just wanted to get some member special content out because we felt like it was it was due so we're doing the easy one which is fixing casey's earlier mistake
Casey:
Thanks, Dad.
Casey:
And honestly, this is a little inside baseball, but we have many, many, many ideas.
Casey:
We don't have any particular timeline about when we're going to execute on any of these ideas.
Casey:
We don't know which one we're going to do next.
Casey:
It may be several months before we do more member-exclusive stuff.
Casey:
And we're going to continue to try to do things that we don't feel like would fit in the main show.
Casey:
We don't want to take away... They're not all going to be movie reviews, just definitely.
Casey:
yeah yeah yeah definitely but we don't want to take away from things that we think we would feature in the main show and we're just trying to like you know squirrel them off to the side and make you pay to get them you know where this is stuff that hey if you don't listen that's fine we'd prefer you did but if you don't it's not gonna hurt our feelings but someday cooking with john oh i don't know how we're gonna do it but someday we're gonna figure out a way to do it cooking works so great in podcast form
John:
Are there any cooking podcasts?
John:
I should look that up.
Casey:
I'm sure there are.
John:
Just the sound of pots clanging around.
John:
It's just a bunch of Foley artists.
Casey:
It would be amazing, I'm telling you.
Casey:
It would be phenomenal.
Casey:
What we should do is we should have John watch, as I describe to Marco, how to cook or vice versa.
Casey:
Actually, probably better, vice versa.
Marco:
Casey, you have to be the one trying to follow John's directions.
Marco:
That's the formula here.
Casey:
I don't want the show to end.
Marco:
John writes down something that is his perfect formula for sauce or whatever, and then you have to actually do it with him watching.
John:
It'd be like that episode where I had to describe a picture to Tiff and Julian, right?
John:
And the whole time you're like waiting to see what they're doing at the end.
John:
It would be like that.
John:
So I'd be describing what Casey's supposed to do.
John:
And at the very end, he would like put on his camera and show me what he's done.
John:
It would just be...
John:
Not what I described.
Casey:
I would like the show to continue.
Casey:
I don't want the show to end.
Casey:
And so because of that, I might veto this entire plan, even though it would be a very funny end to this program.
John:
But I think the chat room points out that Adam Ragusea has a cooking podcast.
John:
I watch his YouTube channel and he puts his podcast up on YouTube.
John:
Those are the videos that I never click through because I don't want to watch a YouTube video of a podcast.
John:
But I guess it does exist.
Marco:
I actually listened to the audio version of that podcast, and I can tell you, while it is a podcast by a YouTube cooking person... He's not cooking on the podcast.
Marco:
It's not really a cooking... He's just talking about food.
Marco:
Yeah, if you're thinking about what a cooking podcast would be in the sense of a cooking show, it's not that.
Marco:
It's good, though.
Marco:
I do enjoy it, actually, but it's not a cooking show.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So one way or another, we're going to work on member stuff.
Casey:
But again, no promises on timeline, on content, on what it is, et cetera.
Casey:
But we are promising that sometime in the next week and a half, you will hear another member special, if you are a member, about the hunt for Red October.
Casey:
Again, ATP.fm slash join.
Casey:
Let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
Getty Images is suing the creators of AI art tool Stable Diffusion for scraping its content.
Casey:
Ruh-roh, Shaggy.
Casey:
What's going on here, John?
John:
That's exactly what you would think from the article.
John:
Getty Images said it believes that stability AI unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright to train its software and that Getty Images has commenced legal proceedings in the High Court of Justice of London.
John:
So, you know, we talked about this when we talked about AI stuff.
John:
There's going to be court cases.
John:
There's going to be lawsuits.
John:
They have begun.
John:
This seems like a pretty big one.
John:
Getty Images is a, you know, like the outcome of these cases might be determined by how big...
John:
The people involved are Getty Images is pretty big.
John:
They have a lot of images.
John:
They were surely scraped.
John:
That's what this lawsuit alleges.
John:
And there's a second one, which is a little bit different.
John:
This is on behalf of a few artists.
John:
Sarah Anderson.
John:
I don't know if you know Sarah Anderson from Sarah Scribbles.
John:
If you click through on the URL that will be in the show notes, the URL is StableDiffusionLitigation.com.
John:
I think you can see some of Sarah Anderson's work.
John:
You've probably seen her comics online.
John:
You're like, oh, yeah, that one.
John:
I've seen those.
John:
Anyway, she's one of three litigants.
John:
Kelly McKiernan and Carla Ortiz have filed a class action lawsuit against Stability AI, DeviantArt, and Midjourney for the use of stable diffusion, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Same type deals is, hey, you're using our stuff without our permission and your things.
John:
And, you know, we're suing you over it.
John:
So I don't think this is the best way to come up with a reasonable way to deal with this technology.
John:
But in practice, you know, it takes a long time for lawmakers to grapple with an issue.
John:
It takes less time for people to decide to sue.
John:
And very often the courts get the first crack at this.
John:
different jurisdictions, different courts, different cases, different results, which may be appealed to higher courts and so on and so forth.
John:
But just to let you all know, the ball is rolling.
John:
And I'm sure we were we are in for years and years of these things until and unless, you know, the various laws of the lands get a grip on this.
Marco:
Yeah, I think it's going to be a really kind of messy and ever moving thing, you know, and for probably the next decade, at least, you know, just how the legality around using copyrighted material for training and AI and, you know, whether that counts as
Marco:
as violating those copyrights without permission or whether it's the same as a human just viewing things and then being able to create things in that style.
Marco:
Again, I kind of lean towards the latter, but we'll see how it all works out both legally and culturally.
Marco:
Those are such unknowns right now.
Marco:
And I think whatever we say now, again, I think we're going to look back in five or ten years and be like, wow, we were so wrong in either direction.
Marco:
And I can't really say where it's going to go.
John:
The Getty image one was fun because one of the images related to it, I don't know if it was in this article that we'll link or elsewhere, but it was like a generated image from stable diffusion or whatever.
John:
And it had the big Getty images.
John:
Oh, it's in the article.
John:
It had the big Getty images like watermark logo over the thing.
John:
Of course, slightly mangled or whatever.
John:
That's amazing.
Yeah.
John:
yeah i mean that's where you get into existing law like you know trade dress and trademark or it's like no you can't sell an image that says getty images on it because you know we have a trademark on getty images and blah blah blah blah and so like that's you know we'll see how these these court cases end up going but you get the right judge and they can say well i don't need to make up any kind of new law or new decisions our existing laws already cover this and the fact that this is even possible even though it's like we didn't do it on purpose we didn't mean for it to show getty images it just did we can't control it and the judge is going to be
John:
be like no you can't you can't sell things with the disney logo on them you can't sell things that say getty images across them if you're not getting images but you know stranger things have happened in court cases so we'll see how this goes indeed and then you are coming to us again live from the ces show floor with one last tidbit
John:
This is like the back room type thing.
John:
This is like a YouTube video that I saw of like something off to the side somewhere.
John:
I just thought it was fascinating.
John:
And maybe it's like an existing thing that is just, you know, been around for years.
John:
But this is the first I had heard of it.
John:
Solid state cooling.
John:
It's relevant to our lives because we're going to talk about some products soon that have, you know, microprocessors and stuff in them that produce heat and they're very thin.
John:
Solid state cooling.
John:
Solid state active cooling is exactly what it sounds like.
John:
Active cooling means instead of just having, you know, a piece of metal stuck to something with fins on it or whatever, and you just allows the ambient air to cool it.
John:
Active cooling means something is...
John:
actively cooling it usually by moving that air across those fins with the use of a fan or if it's active water cooling by pumping water to and from it that's active cooling it's a distinct from passive cooling solid state active cooling is active cooling with quote-unquote solid state technology as in like microchips and stuff it's like well how do you
John:
How do you actively cool something with like silicon microchip technology?
John:
Well, this company whose name I have difficulty pronouncing, it is Frore Systems, F-R-O-R-E.
John:
It's a YouTube video where you see somebody also try to pronounce the thing.
John:
Anyway, this is what it looks like.
John:
Picture an SSD.
John:
Only it's not an SSD, but it's maybe like 2.8 millimeters thick and the same dimensions as an SSD and it's hollow inside.
John:
And inside are a bunch of these little tiny MEMS, microelectric mechanical systems, M-E-M-S.
John:
I'll put a link to the Wikipedia page on that.
John:
Tiny little silicon-based, like, microscopic machines that vibrate.
John:
shoving air downward at up to 120 miles an hour and it's like little tiny it's kind of like what we're talking about there's 5 000 micro micro lenses on the micro lens on each pixel these are tiny microscopic little moving things on a piece of silicon that shove air downward onto the surface of a thing they want to cool
John:
And so it's basically, it's, you know, it looks like an SSD, but when you plug it in and apply power to it, air comes rushing out of it.
John:
It moves air without fans.
Marco:
I mean, is it really solid state if it has moving parts though?
John:
I, you know, it's solid state in the, in the sense that it uses like Silicon, you know, tech, you know,
John:
Same kind of technology used to print circuits or whatever, but they're actual machines, actual physical moving machines.
John:
They're just very, very, very tiny.
John:
They're microscopic.
John:
So you can quibble with it, but it's definitely not a fan.
Marco:
I mean, I feel like the actual like the real solid state active cooler is a thermoelectric plate or the, you know, the Peltier.
Marco:
Yeah, like those.
Marco:
I mean, they're they're hilariously inefficient.
Marco:
But they do actively cool.
Marco:
I mean, you can even get like little tiny desk fridges to kind of cool a few cans of soda like on your desk with one of those.
Marco:
You know, they do work.
Marco:
But you're not moving the air then.
Marco:
You're just moving.
John:
That's more like a heat pipe kind of.
John:
I know it's not the same thing as you're applying electricity, but.
Marco:
No, I think it's it's I think there's no question that a thermoelectric plate is active cooling.
Marco:
It's just doing it in a really kind of weird and hilariously inefficient way.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So the, the deal with these things and why we might care about them is obviously you can make these pretty darn thin, right?
John:
Cause I'm like a fan that has to be a certain thickness to, you know, hit the air and move it.
John:
These little guys work, uh, you know, with very little room.
John:
Like I said, it's less than three millimeters high.
John:
Um,
John:
still probably kind of thick to put on top of an soc but you what you can do what they recommended in the in the video the thing is the ceo or founder of the company was saying you'd have a heat pipe going from your hot chip and then you'd put this solid state cooler on top of the heat pipe so this thing would be alongside the thing you're cooling and it would just be a thin heat pipe connecting the things you know vapor chamber whatever um
John:
The specs in it are interesting.
John:
It produces more what they call back pressure, more of a vacuum than a fan of equivalent size.
John:
It's not even close.
John:
It's like 10 times more pressure than a fan that is much larger than this.
John:
noise wise which i care about they call it completely silent and it's like 21 decibels or something it's basically silent right quiet it's quiet well it does move air so if the air hits something and makes noise that could happen but it's going to be more quiet than a fan for sure just because of the the nature of how it works all those tiny little things instead of a thing that's you know spinning and all that stuff um
John:
They claim that it is able to move air so powerfully that is one of their their big product claims that you can dust seal the laptop.
John:
So you don't have to have completely open areas for air to get sucked in and air to get pushed out.
John:
You can actually have like, you know, filters there.
John:
Normally you can't do that because the fan isn't powerful enough to shove air through the filter.
John:
And so you end up with dust getting inside your laptop and gumming up the fan and everything like that.
Marco:
Now, obviously, how like we've tried this before in the PC building worlds.
Marco:
And, you know, the answer is like you can suck air in through filters, but then the filters just get full of dust.
Marco:
Like dust has to go somewhere.
John:
You may be moving the problem from one place to the other, but it's possible to have, you know, if it moves air forcefully enough, it's possible to have dust filters that are not self-cleaning, but that you can, you know, they're placed in such a way that you can keep them reasonably clear.
John:
I mean, it's not going to be like the lint filter on your dryer that you have to like scrape a bunch of stuff off.
John:
I think it'll last a pretty long time.
John:
And I have had computers in the past that have had dust filter things.
John:
And they do get clogged, but I've had them.
John:
I've had dust filters on computers that I haven't cleaned for the life of the computer.
John:
And just, you know, when I was done with it, I put it away into the attic and it served for five years and never got cleaned.
John:
If you have a cat in your house, maybe that doesn't work.
Marco:
But, you know, after that, you're going to pull a whole cat off of that thing.
Yeah.
John:
Anyway.
Marco:
By the way, remind me at some point to tell you how I destroyed Tiff's office with a hilarious shop vac problem.
Marco:
But yeah.
John:
If they're directional, you got to make sure that switch is in the right direction.
Marco:
No, that wasn't the problem.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
The problem was at some point I emptied her shop vac and did not put a new bag or filter in it.
Casey:
Oh, whoopsies.
Marco:
And then she used it to suck up really fine glass grinding dust and basically filled her office very quickly with this cloud of fine white hazardous powder.
Marco:
It was horrendous.
Marco:
Anyway, I had to get her a new shop back that day.
Marco:
It was so bad.
John:
you need one of these uh my mistake what are they called uh yeah they're called air jet not a great name anyway this this company has um partners that they would there's partners on the website that are listed until qualcomm i forget the other company but they're all mysterious about who the partners might be i look at this and i really hope apple
John:
He's one of the partners because this would be great in a thin laptop.
John:
Now, the only thing I have questions about that wasn't addressed in the video that we'll link in the show notes is obviously this thing, like a fan, it takes power to remove power.
John:
And so this thing can, you know, removes 10.5 watts of heat by taking a maximum of 1.75 watts of power.
John:
He never said how that compares to how much power a fan takes.
John:
Like, what is the ratio of like you give a fan this many watts and it removes this many watts of heat?
John:
I do wonder if this is less efficient than a fan in terms of power consumption.
John:
And I wonder about longevity.
John:
Obviously, this is a brand new technology.
John:
Are these things going to get gummed up?
John:
Are they going to break after a while?
John:
You know.
John:
It's a it's an unknown to me, at least.
John:
Maybe this is the type of technology that's been around for ages in some other industry.
John:
And it's just now coming to personal computers, in which case there's some background on it.
John:
And somebody who works in an industry will undoubtedly tell us later.
John:
But I was excited by seeing this, you know.
John:
sort of off to the side at ces not a big booth not a flashy company a startup that will probably be bought by somebody if their product is any good anyway uh but you know me and uh the idea of cooling things without noise and in this case it's fanless but it still makes airflow through it i think that's cool
Marco:
Yeah, it's a really cool concept.
Marco:
I do have some doubts about its use in computers in particular, because if they're only showing off this 10.5 watt heat removal capacity on this one, that's not a lot for a computer chip.
John:
Oh, it's for laptops.
John:
They were clear about that in the interview, because the interviewer was like, what about doing GPUs or whatever?
John:
And the guy was like, no, we can't.
John:
Like that's too much.
John:
They're very, very thingy.
John:
The one you see here is the big one.
John:
The smaller one only removes like five watts.
Marco:
That's the thing.
Marco:
But even a big one, like even if the big one is 10 watt heat capacity.
Marco:
Yeah, these are all for like laptops, very thin laptops.
Marco:
That's not even for most laptops.
John:
that's like it's for like you know the old macbook uh adorable well remember it's it's remove it's removing that many watts and heat it's not saying the soc has to consume that many so it's basically if you take if you take like the for example if you put one of the small one of these in a macbook air would never throttle right because right now the macbook air is fanless and it throttles put the smallest one of these in there no more throttling there
John:
You could also probably clock up the MacBook Pro a little bit higher if you put one of these on in place of the fan because it would be quiet and you could run it and move more air across it and now you can clock the thing up and make it a little bit hotter.
John:
That's the application of these.
John:
They're very, very tiny.
Marco:
Honestly, I think even the M1 fan-based systems or the M2 now, maybe the base M2 you could, but even the M2 Pro is way above 10 watts.
Marco:
I think you cross that threshold pretty soon.
John:
The small one of these moves 10 times as much air as the fan that's in the 16-inch MacBook Pro.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
So you could replace both of the fans.
John:
No way.
Yeah.
Marco:
I guarantee you the cooling capacity of the MacBook Pro's cooling system is way more than even two of these.
Marco:
You should look it up.
Marco:
I bet the SoC in there is over 50 watts at full load.
John:
Right, but that's how many watts of power the SoC takes.
John:
It's not how many watts of power the cooling system removes from it.
John:
That's what you're seeing here is a measurement of how many watts of heat are removed from the thing by the cooling system.
Marco:
Well, okay, I think those numbers are more closely related than you think, but that's fine.
Marco:
You could be right, but I think, at any rate, I think this is going to be for low-power devices.
Marco:
This is not going to be for even mid-range laptops.
John:
I think it could definitely help on a mid-range laptop, especially if you put more than one of these things.
John:
Again, the number we need to know is power consumption, right?
John:
They told you how many Pascals of back pressure, and you can probably get that number for fans.
John:
Like, what is the back pressure of the fan system?
John:
But what we don't know is how much power
John:
do the fans take do the fans take 0.1 watts do they take five watts like because that's part of the equation is how much power do i have to put into the cooling system to take heat out of the rest of the system so anyway they're you know they don't look like they're particularly close to coming to market but we'll see i'm sure they'll be in a pc first unless apple buys them
Casey:
no it was a fascinating technology and uh you know the the pc world discussion was pretty good and they have a couple of videos on their website that i thought were very interesting and yeah to say that they shoot out air at 120 miles an hour or whatever is just bananas they don't shoot it out of the side they shoot it downward at the thing they're cooling at 120 at which point it smacks into it breaks through the boundary layer and then just tumbles out at a leisurely pace you know it's
John:
It's not an air laser that's going to cut your finger off, but it does shove the air downward in that tiny one millimeter cavity at the thing they're cooling very quickly.
Marco:
It's like one of those Dyson hand blade things.
Marco:
It's like the most awkward to use hand dryer ever in a bathroom.
John:
You ever seen those?
John:
The germ spreaders?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's like playing Operation.
Marco:
You almost have to touch everything on the way up and down.
Marco:
But if you get a few of these together, maybe it could be a really weird hand dryer.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Sofa.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
If you think about it, the tools we use for managing our downtime are designed for work.
Marco:
You know, things like to-do lists, notes, calendars.
Marco:
We use these tools for our personal lives too, but our work stuff is right there next to it, which should make it much more difficult to disconnect and relax when you actually have downtime.
Marco:
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Marco:
Once again, that is SofaHQ, S-O-F-A, H-Q.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Our thanks to Sofa for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Twitter decided to kill off all of the good third-party Twitter clients.
Casey:
A few days ago, I don't remember exactly when it was, but a few days ago, all of a sudden, Tweetbot was showing authentication errors.
Casey:
Twitterific was showing errors, at least on iOS, if not on the desktop.
Casey:
and a few other clients, I don't remember which one's offhand, and it seemed pretty clear pretty quickly that this was likely to be a deliberate act, but nobody really knew.
Casey:
And then, I think it was yesterday, the Twitter developer account tweeted the following, Twitter is enforcing its long-standing API rules that may result in some apps not working.
Casey:
Oh, cool.
Casey:
Thanks.
Casey:
Thanks, guys.
Casey:
That's real helpful.
Casey:
Awesome.
Casey:
Well done.
Casey:
I really appreciate your hard work on that, really clearing things up for us.
Casey:
But yeah, it seems like, and allegedly Space Karen has made the call on this, it seems like Twitter's cut off all the good third-party clients.
Casey:
And, uh, pour one out for Twitter because, uh, I'm, I mean, I'm, I don't plan to use the official client because I know there are fans, fans amongst people I know and respect, but I find their first party client to be frigging terrible.
Casey:
So, uh, yeah, uh, this sucks.
Casey:
This sucks.
Marco:
There's been a lot of podcasts that came out earlier in the week that have already covered this pretty well in certain angles.
Marco:
And I think I agree with some of the large themes.
Marco:
Ben Thompson has been on the record for years basically saying Twitter probably should have killed third-party clients a long time ago.
Marco:
And I think you could make a case for that.
Marco:
You could make a case for this being a reasonable decision to have been made.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And on the topic before you move on from it, I don't actually agree with that.
John:
Like the, the, the, the idea that, uh, it's good to cut off third party clients.
John:
It makes sense only at the, like the first level of, of logic and thinking about it.
John:
And the idea there is, um, once, once, once Twitter decided to go to an ad based model, um, since third party apps didn't show ads and since Twitter never added apps, uh, added ads to the third party API, which they could have done by the way.
John:
Um,
John:
It's like, oh, we need to control the client because if we're going to have an ad based business, people can skip ads if they can do third party clients or whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
So it's like, oh, well, see, once they chose that as their business model, it makes perfect sense to get rid of third party clients.
John:
Only if you think the only two factors here are third party clients don't show ads.
John:
We want to show ads, therefore bad third party clients.
John:
But third party clients, as they existed on Twitter, there's more to them than just their clients that you people use and they don't see ads.
John:
Right.
John:
First of all, so few people in terms of like percentage wise of Twitter's customers use third party clients.
John:
And you could say, well, that's because they killed the API or whatever.
John:
But either way, even in their heyday, I feel like the first party client was massively dominant.
John:
So the third party client Twitter users, I mean, just, you know, for the people listening to the show, I bet like how many people use third party Twitter clients?
John:
We have probably one of the nerdier audience and I'm sure most people use the official client.
John:
There's such a small number that they're not really hurting your ad sales that much.
John:
And the people who are using those third party clients are probably more likely to be the most engaged Twitter users.
John:
Maybe they produce the most content or whatever.
John:
Now I'm saying this for a fact.
John:
But it is potentially the case that the people who are using the third-party clients provide more value than they're removing by not seeing ads because they're already opting out of it.
John:
They aren't going to click on your ads anyway.
John:
And they may be providing value to the platform by adding content.
John:
That's why I think that just the blanket idea that
John:
They should have killed them because they're going ad based.
John:
Doesn't take into account that this was a tiny minority that was weird.
John:
It was a weird minority.
John:
And I said, I guess I don't know for a fact that they're a weird minority that is particularly lucrative or not, but it's possible.
John:
And obviously only Twitter would know or Twitter back when they were competent and actually understood anything about their business and could look this up.
John:
When was that?
John:
i've been in the past they had people when they had employees i mean they had that but when did they ever understand their business i mean that's that's i think asking a lot of the previous administration anyway like like because the third party things are just such a sideshow like it's taken this long for twitter to even bother doing anything about them they're just such a tiny sliver but that tiny sliver had attributes about it like it
John:
had a history behind it they were enthusiastic users they were people who were doing complicated things with twitter maybe they produce more content you know and and as ben thompson has also pointed out in his trajectory they were also the tiny little sliver that was probably the easiest to monetize because they were the most in back in the day they were the most invested in the platform so you could have started charging them money and made the api good and charge for api usage and twitter didn't do any of that but you know setting that aside i just feel like
John:
So the accepted wisdom that they should have just got rid of all third party clients when they went to advertising, I don't think it's entirely a slam dunk.
John:
There's more nuance to it than that.
John:
And only the past more competent Twitter knows the answer to that because we don't get to see, you know, the information on the inside.
Marco:
Well, but I think, you know, you could make a case.
Marco:
I mean, look, I run a web service that has a private API that my app uses to talk to the web service.
Marco:
I frequently get requests from people who are like, hey, when are you going to make an Overcast API?
Marco:
I want to play with it or make my own alternative stuff or whatever.
Marco:
and my answer is sorry no i'm not doing that like i you know i want to control what this does and i could see the argument for that and and you could also you know look you could also say lots of other things like hey how about leaving the third-party api where it was but just making it only available to paid subscription members like so if i wanted to use a twitter app like to monetize the api they're the easiest to monetize because they're already invested
Marco:
Assuming I was still using Twitter for other reasons, I would have gladly paid the $10 or $20 a month per account to access it via API.
John:
You have to worry about the development cost to develop the functionality, but you're never going to make tons of money off them because they're such a small sliver, but it also means that you can zero them out.
John:
Whatever harm you think they're doing to your ad business, you can cancel that out pretty easily with lots of different techniques to just say, well...
John:
These users were taking 1% of our ad revenue away.
John:
Can we get that back?
John:
Yeah, I can get 1.2% of the ad revenue they would have made back by charging for API.
John:
And now they're just off to the side and that sits there.
John:
And even if you just ignore them and neglect them, they're not hurting your balance sheet anymore and you could allow it to exist.
John:
And it would, you know, produce goodwill.
John:
And it's all the historical baggage of API use with Twitter because it's not just arbitrary like, hey, I want an overcast API.
John:
Twitter grew up with the API.
John:
That API and those apps are an important part of Twitter's history and the development of the platform itself.
John:
And the people who are using it are the most enthusiastic and engaged users because of that history.
John:
So it's not in a vacuum like a business case.
John:
Should we have an API?
John:
Should we charge for it?
John:
In the specific case of Twitter, the API and the apps built around it really helped build the platform.
John:
I'm not saying they're owed anything, but I'm saying the historical baggage of that means that those API users are not the same as the regular Twitter users in terms of
John:
influence engagement ability to be monetized they are kind of a special case and it was in some ways right for them to be treated as a special case for a long time it's just they were treated as a special case of neglect and now they're treated as a special case of getting over yeah and and wow did they i mean you know talk about mishandling a situation i mean this is again classic elon musk
John:
classic toddler let's say because i can't think of another like can you think of like like i think try to think of it like an indie business like a one person app like a literal one person app who has been who has handled something this badly like who is who has cut off some service that people were using for a decade with zero notice and zero communication i can't think of one
John:
Zero notice, I could probably think of like, oh, some person, you know, got into a car accident and they had to stop developing an app and they just cut it off and said, yeah, I'm sorry, you're not getting your money back.
John:
I can't develop this app anymore.
John:
Sorry, I'm a one person thing.
John:
Tough luck.
John:
But they would still communicate that.
John:
They would write a post on their blog and say, sorry, I can't work on my cool app anymore.
John:
I also can't give you the money back because I needed to pay my rent.
John:
later right no and and this is like this is this is worse than that yeah multi-billion dollar company where they literally didn't say anything they didn't even send a form email that said yeah we're cutting off your app just literally nothing until that for for a week at least like when the app store dicks you over they tell you
Marco:
yeah they send you a form email that says section 3.1.2 you're violating blah blah no they don't explain but like you get something and even when it's total bs yeah you at least because like you know no one knew for those first you know first couple of days no one really knew whether the api just had like some downtime like because that's also plausible how many you know twitter has been breaking in weird subtle ways so it's like you know it could have been just like oh something was messed up and no one knew i mean
Marco:
Again, the way they did this... I like how Jason Snell put it.
Marco:
He said not only was it badly done, but it was also just cowardly.
Marco:
Dishonorable, cowardly, just terrible.
Marco:
I mean, look, just from my point of view as a user, Twitter, to me, has always been the third-party app I'm using.
Marco:
For a while, I used Twitterific for a while, I used Tweety for a while, and for most of the recent last few years, I've been using TweetBot.
Marco:
To me...
Marco:
Twitter is tweet bot.
Marco:
If I would ever have to use the website, it almost felt like I was using a whole different like foreign thing because it was so different.
Marco:
And so on some level, I can kind of see if Twitter wants to have ultimate control over what their product is.
Marco:
I can kind of see, well, if they look at an app, that's a pretty different experience.
Marco:
I've never seen a Twitter ad, ever.
Marco:
All the new products they would launch and things they would try, all the trends and the followed, you know, the hot hashtags or whatever, I never saw any of that crap.
Marco:
I had a very different experience of Twitter as a service.
Marco:
My experience of Twitter was TweetBot.
Marco:
And so as a user...
Marco:
to have all of us who were having that experience, or all the people who were using Twitterific, or whatever, any other apps that were cut off, to have us all of a sudden just say, oh, you know what, screw that, now just use the Twitter app, like, to me, I mean, I was already gone, really, but if I wasn't already gone, that would have been the last straw, like, I'm sorry, like,
Marco:
I'm not going to just jump from this nice experience that I've been having for like a decade and all of a sudden jump into this total crap show of whatever their first party stuff is, which is so radically different.
Marco:
And so, again, not only was this poorly done, not only was this like the most cowardly chicken poop way to do this, it was like, you know, talk about like the quality of person you're dealing with here.
Marco:
I mean, this shows the worst character ever.
John:
It's like a little kid when they do something and don't want to talk about it.
Marco:
Why would anybody ever build anything against Twitter again?
Marco:
Why would anybody ever invest in Twitter again?
Marco:
Hell, why would anybody ever advertise on Twitter again?
Marco:
You're seeing the character of the person who now runs it.
Marco:
Every week that goes by, he's revealing himself to be a worse and worse person.
Marco:
It's like when Trump was president and, you know, we knew it was going to be bad even at the beginning, but it just seemed like every single day there was some new scandal and some new lows that we were reaching every day.
Marco:
And it was like...
Marco:
I can't even believe how bad – every day you're like, it can't possibly get worse than yesterday.
Marco:
And then something would happen and it would get worse.
Marco:
That's what he is.
Marco:
Now that we have an Elon Twitter, he is revealing himself to be that same level of terrible, incompetent, rash, cowardly, chicken shit person.
John:
He is so bad.
John:
Some common moves.
John:
There was a story a couple of weeks ago of just like Trump didn't like to pay his bills, Elon's way of saving money is we're just not going to pay rent and we're not going to pay bills anymore.
John:
Aside from firing everybody and doing all this stuff, he's just like, well, let's just not pay rent because it's going to take a while for... It's a calculation.
John:
It's going to take a while for
John:
this stuff to wind its way through the court and we'll battle them and blah, blah, blah.
John:
We can save a lot of money right now by just not paying bills, you know, and Trump was famously, we're just, you know, not pay vendors for things and say, Oh, if you don't like it, come sue me.
John:
It's just, you know, it's so terrible.
John:
Like it's,
John:
that's why i keep trying to compare it to like the smallest possible thing forget about a multi-billion dollar company has any individual human maybe that's not fair because individual humans might feel like shame or guilt or something but like even like a medium business like just no matter how badly you know how bad somebody handles something at least they own like like at least they communicate the fact they're doing something this is
John:
This is like... Because to this day, we still don't actually have any clear communication to any of these individual developers that the thing that happened to them was intentional.
John:
Because that tweet doesn't reference anybody specifically.
Marco:
Oh, and that tweet also mischaracterizes it.
Marco:
Like, they actually... Like, the tweet basically... Yeah, it said something along the lines of, like, oh, we're enforcing our rules.
Marco:
Some apps might not work.
John:
Right, but it doesn't name any apps, and it doesn't say what rules.
Marco:
And also...
Marco:
And they weren't breaking any rules.
Marco:
Twitter has changed the API rules over the years, and these high-quality apps that were using them had, first of all, relationships with people in Twitter, and they would go back and forth.
Marco:
They're all fired.
Marco:
But they would make sure they were following, as the rules would change, these apps would work with Twitter and follow them.
Marco:
They were following all the rules.
Marco:
They were not breaking any rules.
Marco:
So not only was this poorly communicated,
John:
So the thing is, the current employees at Twitter probably don't know what the rules are.
John:
That was one of the plausible theories is that many of these apps had specific special deals because of, again, the history that I was talking about before.
John:
And the people who knew about those deals or knew where they were written down have long since been fired.
John:
But again, so pretend all that's true.
John:
And it's just a bunch of new employees who don't know any of this information.
John:
They're like, oh, this rule says you're only supposed to have 10 of these and you have 20.
John:
I'm going to cut off your app.
John:
Okay, then do that and be incompetent.
John:
And then send out a form email that says we cut off your app because you had 20 of these things and you're supposed to have 10.
John:
Like communicate.
John:
Tell people what you're doing.
John:
Don't just like secretly turn off a light switch and then run out of the room.
John:
And then put your fingers in your ears and go, la, la, la, la, I can't hear you.
John:
La, la, la, la, la.
John:
Like we literally don't know anything about this other than this one tweet that doesn't address any individual app.
John:
So we just all have to assume you're a bunch of jerks.
John:
You're too scared to say to the people that you did a thing and you're just hoping it will go away.
John:
It's like ghosting someone on text.
John:
That's the closest thing I can come up with.
John:
This is like, I don't want to deal with you anymore.
John:
I'm just never going to respond to your text.
John:
I'm going to block your number.
Marco:
Yeah, but with some implied slander as well.
John:
Yeah, and it's your fault because you did something wrong, right?
Marco:
Right, yeah.
Marco:
Not only am I not going to talk to you, but I'm going to say in public that you broke the rules.
Marco:
Yeah, but without naming you.
Marco:
They could sue.
Marco:
I mean, they're not going to, of course, but the way, I mean, my God.
Marco:
He's such a terrible person.
Marco:
It just keeps digging and digging.
Marco:
My God.
Marco:
I just can't believe...
Marco:
how like this is gonna go down i mean look couldn't happen to a worse person right i mean maybe he and zuckerberg can get coffee sometime but like i i am so happy to see how much not only how much money he's losing but how much his reputation is just going down the toilet reputation is going up with sociopaths though
Marco:
They love him.
Marco:
And I say this as previously a very big Tesla fan.
Marco:
I want to see him fail.
Marco:
And normally I'm not that much of a vindictive person, but he's just such a shithead.
Marco:
And he just keeps showing it more and more and more.
Marco:
I will enjoy continuing to see him fail.
Marco:
And I feel bad for the people who are affected along the way, but he deserves this, just like Zuck.
Marco:
The amount of value that he has either lost, destroyed, or both, depending on how you characterize it, in such a short time is astounding.
Marco:
And if he goes down in history as the person who lost the most money the fastest, oh, that would be such sweet.
Marco:
It's like sweet revenge.
John:
I think probably he still has too much money to face any consequences for his actions because that's the kind of place we live.
Marco:
Well, I mean, I think Tesla's other shareholders might have different opinions on that, but we'll see.
Marco:
We'll see.
Marco:
I'm not a financial person, but part of Tesla's fall over the last few months has been because of other factors, global factors, industry factors and everything.
Marco:
But there's also no doubt that a large part of it has been him.
Marco:
And, and what he personally has done and the reputation that he personally is destroying of himself and his brand.
Marco:
And like, so, you know, there is no, no doubt that a large part of the decline is his fault.
Marco:
And, you know, it sucks for the other Tesla investors, but, but again,
Marco:
There are very few people in the world who deserve to lose as much as he does right now.
Marco:
And so I'm looking forward to his continuing unnecessary proving to the world that he is a terrible person and also that he is super incompetent.
Marco:
We'll keep watching, but I'm watching from increasing distance.
Marco:
And yeah, I'm totally gone from Twitter now.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, I don't plan on looking at Twitter unless for some, I have a compelling reason to do so.
Casey:
You know, I used to pop open TweetBot from time to time, just make sure nothing was really going on.
Casey:
And now, you know, if I open a link to Twitter on my phone and thus the official app opens, then maybe I'll pop into my notifications or something.
Casey:
But I am not going to Twitter actively at all anymore.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
I deleted it the other day because I'm like, you know, I'm never going to follow him.
Marco:
Who cares?
Marco:
If it opens up the webpage, fine, whatever.
Marco:
That's not a bad idea.
Marco:
Anyway, but what I'm saying, because of what I was saying earlier about how my experience of Twitter the service has always really been tweetbot the app.
Marco:
when i switched over to ivory yes i'm bragging about being in the ivory beta and oh god i'm dying for a mac version but oh amen to that i'll tell you what i have tried every mac client that everyone says is like oh this is a good mac mastodon app and i i have yet to find one where that's the case uh anyway um that's that's a separate day if anybody has any recommendations that for some reason i haven't tried yet please let me know um but i want to be able to manage multiple accounts and
Marco:
And have a tab that can show mentions and not all combined mention and notifications.
Marco:
And it seems like none of the apps are really good at that or offer it at all.
Marco:
Some of them don't offer it at all.
Marco:
Anyway, because my experience of Twitter was always TweetBot, really...
Marco:
once i got onto ivory which is just tweet bot for for mastodon basically it was like a drop-in replacement like because almost everyone who i followed on twitter was over on mastodon already and like seriously for me it's like a very large percentage of the people i followed on twitter like using a tool like moved it on a very large percentage of them aren't i was able to just find and follow mastodon very very easily um
Marco:
And so it was just a drop-in replacement.
Marco:
And so it doesn't actually feel any different to me now that I'm using Mastodon instead of Twitter.
Marco:
I was able to replace it very easily.
Marco:
And, you know, this is part of the reason why companies like Twitter don't like having third-party clients because they don't want someone else to be able to build an alternative network and have everyone just kind of scoot right over there super easily.
Marco:
You know, they want to build more of a moat or whatever.
Marco:
But because I really wasn't using Twitter, the client,
Marco:
I was using Twitter the back end.
Marco:
I was able to just move over, and it's fine.
Marco:
And the only hole in my formerly Twitter-occupied user life is the Mac app.
Casey:
It's driving me nuts, though.
Marco:
Oh, it's bad.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I'm just not even checking it until I'm on my phone at night or whatever.
Marco:
Honestly, it's being great for my productivity.
Marco:
I've been getting so much work done on my computer because I'm not constantly browsing Twitter on the side.
Marco:
Once we have a decent Mac Mastodon app,
Marco:
I won't feel like I'm missing anything.
Marco:
I'm already not missing Twitter itself.
Marco:
I'm kind of just missing the way things were.
Marco:
But once you have your app situation settled out, you won't miss it at all.
Marco:
And that's where I am now.
Marco:
I don't miss Twitter at all.
Marco:
And, you know, we'll see what happens whenever there's, like, the next big world news event that's breaking and, you know, you want to get up-to-date now, now, now.
Marco:
You know, it might be a little bit different then.
Marco:
And, again, we don't know how Mastodon is going to scale, you know, community-wise and, you know, certain things.
Marco:
There's certain challenges and potential pitfalls there.
Marco:
But as of now, it's great.
Marco:
Most of the community I want to follow is already on Mastodon.
Marco:
And it's fine.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
To me, I'm just like, all right, peace out, Twitter.
Marco:
I don't need Twitter for anything anymore.
John:
So part of this non-action, non-announced BS, passive-aggressive grade school nonsense that's going on is the fact that not all third-party Twitter clients were killed.
John:
just some of them it seems like it was probably the most popular but who can say when the company doesn't say a damn word about it but anyway what this means is that for me because i still do use twitter because not everyone i follow is over on mastodon i tried using the first party client i i honestly i i can't do it it's it's it's it's too bad it's i can't do it um
John:
So there's a bunch of other third-party clients that are smaller third-party clients that now I'm using them instead.
John:
And then we alluded to this earlier.
John:
Tori's been not down, but differently functional, let's say, over the past several weeks.
John:
Gruber mentioned this.
John:
I thought it was just me until he mentioned it as well.
John:
I look at my mentions, right?
John:
I'm a Twitter completionist.
John:
Twitter doesn't seem to be showing me my mentions anymore.
John:
Forget about the official client.
John:
Forget about the website.
John:
Third-party clients that, you know, that don't do any algorithmic anything.
John:
It's just, when I look at my mentions, there's like nothing there.
John:
Gruber was getting in the situation where...
John:
He was seeing like five mentions in the official first party app and 200 in a third party app and 100 in a different third party app.
John:
It's like broken.
John:
Like you can't, there's no place you can go anymore to, if you, and obviously it's just me, who cares?
John:
But my weird Twitter completionist thing is,
John:
If I want to know that I'm seeing all the tweets in my timeline, it's just literally not possible anymore because of Twitter's semi-brokenness.
John:
But to the extent that I'm looking at Twitter at all, I'm doing it through different third-party applications.
John:
And the final FU thing on this whole Twitter third-party app is, aside from destroying the livelihood of all these developers who have popular third-party Twitter applications,
John:
Yeah.
John:
And that, you know, again, too, if it's like an individual developer or a small group of developers, that can be a big financial hit.
John:
Hey, I thought I had all this money, but guess what?
John:
You got to give back, you know, this much of the revenue that you already thought you got because Twitter killed your app and all the users who are using it now can't who paid for a year of your service can't get it.
John:
So they want their money back or they want half their money back or something.
John:
It just sucks all around.
John:
So it's not, you know, this is not a victimless crime.
John:
It's like, oh, boo-hoo, you can't use a Twitter client you like?
John:
The developers have their business killed, and the developers may owe money, have to return money they thought they had as income.
John:
And it's not like these developers are rolling around with, you know, Bugattis or whatever.
John:
They're getting by selling a third-party Twitter app, which is not, you know, the big bucks.
John:
It's not, you know, Candy Crush or whatever.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, that's the thing is like it's like this is one of the reasons why the way they did it was so crappy, because like in a regular operating environment with a business run by adults and decent people, you would give people warning and, you know, something as major as we're going to kill the entire basis for which your app is allowed to exist.
Marco:
You might give them a warning of like a year.
Marco:
You might say like, all right.
Marco:
On this date next year, the API is turning off for apps like yours.
Marco:
Sorry, that's it.
Marco:
Because what they were doing, despite the horrible passive-aggressive message on the Twitter dev account, what these apps were doing was totally allowed.
Marco:
It was within the rules.
Marco:
It was permitted.
Marco:
It was explicitly permitted by Twitter.
Marco:
They were totally allowed to do what they were doing and monetize it and everything.
Marco:
So they were doing nothing wrong or unexpected to the Twitter company.
John:
And they had this really complicated system from back from the last time Twitter screwed with the API where they're only allowed to have a maximum number of X customers.
John:
After that, they can't have any more.
John:
It was like this very draconian system that they had to work within with where they would dole out a fixed number of tokens that you could sell.
John:
So it's not even like it was a free for all like it was back in the old days.
John:
That's why app.net launched.
Marco:
It was in response to that.
John:
yeah is that what it was yes the last time twitter tried to screw over third-party developers it did it in a less crappy way than this and yeah and you remember like the four quadrant thing it was a whole thing and it was a big scandal back then but but they at least even then even when they were being crappy back then you know they did it in a much you know more reasonable way they gave dates they gave they communicated their crappiness yeah exactly you didn't have to guess they didn't just break one day and then they just said we're not saying anything nope we don't have a communications department don't bother asking us any questions
Marco:
Anyway, I'm glad we have happier news to talk about this week because the Twitter thing.
Marco:
But again, I can't urge this enough.
Marco:
Switch to Mastodon.
Marco:
If you're on Twitter, get off of it.
Marco:
I know there are certain communities and certain people who haven't moved off of it yet.
Marco:
So you all, first of all, I'll ask our audience two things on this topic.
Marco:
Number one, please move off of Twitter.
Marco:
Like this is not a company you want to support.
Marco:
And especially, oh God, this person running it.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
And number two, I would ask you, please, if you have a subscription to TweetBot or Twitterific or any other Twitter apps that were just killed,
Marco:
Please don't ask Apple for a refund on it.
Marco:
You know, look, these are these are small developers like that.
Marco:
No one could have foreseen this really.
Marco:
So, I mean, yeah, obviously cancel your subscription, but but like don't ask for a refund for the for the unused portion that now can't work because you're going to really you know, that's going to really possibly hurt.
Marco:
And, you know, consider it consider it your risk that was taken also.
Marco:
And, you know, hopefully we'll move on to better pastures.
Casey:
All right, so we have one more piece of slightly unhappy follow-up, and then I'll end on a happy piece of follow-up.
Casey:
The unhappy-ish follow-up is actually follow-out to this week's upgrade, actually specifically Upgrade Plus, episode 442, Zombie Arms and Toaster Fridge.
Casey:
In the very, very end, in the members-only portion, Jason and Mike went on a test.
Casey:
hair about filing a feedback and oh baby i was here for it oh it was good it was great and so uh i'm not i'm not gonna get myself riled up about this i'm just gonna move right along but if you want to hear the two of them just go off on uh how how awful fire filing a feedback is how obnoxious it is to to hear that from apple and how it's kind of victim blaming oh it was so good it was so good
Casey:
So incredibly good.
Casey:
Upgrade Plus, which is the members only stuff, 442 zombie arms and toaster fridge, please.
Casey:
And thank you.
Casey:
And thank you, Mike and Jason, for your service.
Casey:
I mean that non-sarcastically.
Casey:
The only thing that bothers me is that Apple's never going to hear this because I don't know if any Apple people are members of Upgrade.
Casey:
I hope they are.
Casey:
They should be.
Casey:
They really should be because it's such a great program.
Casey:
But anyways, check it out.
Casey:
And then finally, the happy news from the Listener in Cool Places file.
Casey:
We got this, which I don't know if it was intended to be anonymous or not, but I will just assume it was intended to be anonymous.
Casey:
We got the following letter.
Casey:
I deployed last year aboard America's fastest, deepest diving submarine and before leaving the pier downloaded some older episodes to listen to offline underwater.
Casey:
Now that I'm back, I'm happy to say that ATP has now been played some unspecified deep depth somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.
Casey:
Most of my listening time was spent as I exercised between the main steam piping just behind the reactor compartment, which is heavily shielded from radiation, so no health worries there.
Casey:
When I returned to shore, it was good to catch up on the episodes I missed since there's zero connectivity with the outside world on a deployment.
Casey:
I just think this is so freaking cool and very timely since we're talking about Hunt for October.
Casey:
Again, hp.fm slash join.
Casey:
So if you listen to the show in a weird, odd, unusual, or cool place, I feel like I'm channeling a little bit of Hello Internet here, but I don't care.
Casey:
Let us know.
Casey:
I'd love to hear it.
Casey:
And I appreciate this anonymous listener for writing it.
John:
Yeah, if Hello Internet wants to stop us, they can come back on the air.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by the Lunch Pail VC podcast.
Marco:
Are you curious about the nuts and bolts of venture capital?
Marco:
Want to hear how leaders like Keith Raboy of Founders Fund and Semel Shaw of Haystack approach decision making?
Marco:
The Lunch Pail VC podcast is a no BS look at the inner workings of the venture capital ecosystem.
Marco:
Hosts Paul Martino of Bullpen Capital and Randy Comisar of Kleiner Perkins interview today's leaders in VC about topics fundamental to any venture capitalist job.
Marco:
We'll see you next time.
Marco:
If you want to know more about who invests in the companies that are changing our world and how deals are made, the LunchPail VC podcast is for you.
Marco:
That's the LunchPail VC podcast.
Marco:
You can listen to it wherever you get your podcasts.
Marco:
Thank you so much to LunchPail VC podcast for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
apple has announced the new m2 pro and m2 max uh macbook pro and then even before that the new m2 pro and i don't is there a max i don't even remember i don't think there is uh but anyway and a new m2 pro and m2 mac mini so all sorts of new treats for everyone and we can start with the mac mini um it is a little bit bigger than the old one but and it's silver only no space gray and
John:
And when you say a little bit, you mean a little bit.
John:
I didn't look up these numbers.
John:
I'm mistrusting Dan Moore and his six colors, but 7.75 inches instead of 7.7.
John:
So weird.
John:
1.41 inches high instead of 1.4.
John:
Like I thought these Mac minis had been the same size for years now.
John:
It's like, Oh, the Intel one, then they switched to the M one and it was the same case and blah, blah, blah.
John:
And then they make a new case and it's,
John:
slightly differently so wow i mean unless you unless you're like making some really tightly fitting mac mini jeans like i don't think you're gonna notice this maybe the rack mount people but like it's the reason it's weird is because it's not like it was cramped in there like the m1 mac mini was hilariously spacious like you'd open it up and it was just this little tiny motherboard and this giant cooler and power supply and it was just and the m2 one is a
John:
But it's not like it was tight in there.
John:
I would love to know what in the world happened to this computer that it needed to get .01 inches bigger on its side.
John:
Like, what?
John:
I can't wait to see the teardown.
John:
I was like, did they buy a third-party thing that needed that extra .01 inch?
John:
So weird.
John:
Anyway, it looks the same on the outside.
John:
And these products are pretty straightforward.
John:
But of all the things...
John:
this is the one that baffles me the most.
John:
The Mac mini changing size in a tiny, tiny way.
Casey:
Well, spoiler alert, but the same thing happened to the home pod for what it's worth.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Well, the home pods are totally new design and the laptops, when they get a little bit thicker, like, you know, I understand that.
John:
Like things are so tight in a laptop, like every little fraction of a millimeter counts or whatever the Mac mini, it's like the Mac pro getting 0.01 inches bigger or something like in the, in the current case, like what did you not have room for in there?
John:
It's just a little, anyway, well,
Casey:
all right regardless so silver only no space gray uh there is an optional uh 10 gig ethernet for that's not new i thought it was new but apparently that was already on i was gonna say that that's not the new but it's the same uh the m2 starts at 600 bones uh eight gigs ram 256 gig ssd and that's a hundred dollars less than before right for the old m1 one
Casey:
think that's right i actually have an m1 one but i don't remember what i paid and i think i got it refurbed anyway uh two thunderbolt 4 ports the m2 pro in the mac mini which is exciting 1300 you get a 10 core cpu 16 core gpu 16 gigs ram 5 12 gig ssd you can upgrade it from 10 to 12 core cpu for 300 bucks
Casey:
You get anywhere between 6 and 8 performance cores, 4 efficiency cores, anywhere between 16 and 19 GPU cores, the 16 core neural engine, 200 gigs a second memory bandwidth versus 100 gigs a second in the regular M2.
Casey:
You get 16 or 32 gigs RAM.
Casey:
And then the M1 Pro, by comparison, was same amount of performance cores and efficiency cores, same cores on the neural engine, but 14 to 16 GPU cores instead of 16 to 19, same RAM profile.
Casey:
And again, in this case, you get four Thunderbolt 4 ports, which is exciting.
Casey:
And perhaps more interesting than anything else, no more Intel Mac Mini, which is very, very exciting as well.
Marco:
Yeah, this is great.
Marco:
This is the one... When people would look at the Apple Silicon transition, everyone knows we haven't done the Mac Pro yet, but most people quickly forgot that there was actually still an Intel Mac Mini also in the lineup because the Mac Mini, it covered... From the 2018 update, it went from being an only low-end product prior to that to, in 2018, becoming a...
Marco:
A product that had some low-end options, but also went pretty solid into the mid-range performance territory and had some really great higher-end chip options and things like that.
Marco:
And that was not replaced when the M1 Mac Mini came out.
Marco:
They only had the lower-end configuration with the M1.
Marco:
And it took until now, now that we have in the M2 generation, now that we have the M2 Pro variant, that was the first time they actually really replaced what was still the only Intel one in the lineup, which was kind of the higher end CPU options and more ports and more Thunderbolt bandwidth and stuff like that.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Now we have that role filled, leaving only the Mac Pro unfilled.
Marco:
But this is great.
Marco:
I mean, you know, when they first made the Mac Mini, that kind of mid-range performance level in 2018, that was a pretty big move.
Marco:
And that really gave that product a lot of life and really, you know,
Marco:
was able to be a lot of people's desktops and you know servers and accessory roles things like that it was a great product and so to have that finally be like really fulfilled in the apple silicon era is really nice so i'm really happy to see this and in fact you know if you look at you know like what would it take suppose you want it to have you know a bunch of apple silicon compute power you know in like in a data center or a server situation or whatever and
Marco:
you know, you look at the Mac studio, you look at the other Mac minis, like this is actually a pretty great deal for the amount of processing and GPU power that you're getting, uh, in, you know, per, per dollar in a, in that kind of environment.
Marco:
Um, so it's, it looks great.
Marco:
You know, the, the, the bigger version with the, with the pro has four USB C Thunderbolt four ports instead of two.
Marco:
Um, so you have like more, more bandwidth, more ports, uh, higher Ram ceiling, obviously, you know, more processor power, um,
Marco:
Thermals are going to be a question mark until we actually get these devices.
Marco:
I do worry maybe it's going to be loud with the fan or maybe it will throttle.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
It probably won't throttle, but it might be loud under heavy load like the Mac Studio.
Marco:
I don't know, but we'll find out.
Marco:
I have high hopes and I'm really happy to see the Mac Mini and where it's going and what they've been able to do with Apple Silicon.
Marco:
I'm very, very happy with this.
John:
And to be clear, the M2 Pro is not on a new process size.
John:
It's the same as the M2 as far as we can tell.
John:
It's 5 nanometer.
John:
I know they have variants of the 5 nanometer processor or whatever, but it's not 3 nanometers is what I'm getting at.
John:
So the power consumption would be what you would expect from an M2 Pro, which has more of the M2 stuff in it, more cores, more GPU cores, so on and so forth.
John:
I don't think the thermal conditions inside of Mac Mini are too rough unless they totally screwed up the cooler like they did on the Mac Studio.
John:
It should be fine, probably.
John:
These are good machines.
John:
They're straightforward.
John:
I like the fact that it's M2 Pro.
John:
I guess they didn't put an M2 Max in there, maybe because of cooling and maybe because it would be you'd start sort of going into the Mac Studio territory.
John:
You just want to separate the lines a little bit, which is fine.
John:
The price drop on the low-end M2 one is nice, but the problem with these Mac Minis is, as always, like, I feel like this... I don't know why I feel like this more on the Mac Mini than other things.
John:
Maybe because they don't come with a screen or a keyboard or anything else.
John:
Like, it's just the computer.
John:
But it always highlights to me just how...
John:
how disconnected from cost of materials the upgrades on these are, right?
John:
So if you don't want a base config, everything you can add to this costs money.
John:
It's just all pure profit, right?
John:
Like if you want to go from eight gigabytes of memory to 24, it's an extra $400.
John:
What?
John:
planet oh it's special memories on the on the soc so whatever if you want to go if you want to add 256 gigabytes of storage so it comes with 256 but if you want to go to 512 the additional 256 gigs of ssc storage is 200 bucks no that's not how these things like and you know it's profit it's like it's what the market will bear i understand that but specking one of these up to the way you actually want it especially when it comes to storage like oh you want a two terabyte drive at eight hundred dollars to the price and
John:
A two terabyte SSD does not cost $800.
John:
It's actually a 1.75 terabyte SSD because the 256 comes for free.
John:
This is $800 above.
John:
It's just the pricing is brutal.
John:
And we just like suck it up because it's like, hey, it's a cool computer.
John:
It's a Mac mini.
John:
That's how much they cost or whatever.
John:
I do feel like I'm the Mac mini.
John:
because there is nothing else in the equation and it's just a box that you're not going to touch or manipulate it's just like an elemental slab a container for apple's like 75 margins on its upgrades right which is just brutal right and that's not the fault of this generation or this chip it's just the way things are on the mac and it kind of burns me up a little bit
Casey:
How do you really feel?
Casey:
No, I'm excited about this.
Casey:
I have an M1 Mac Mini that's running Plex and channels in some of my Docker containers.
Casey:
I am excited that this exists.
Casey:
I have been extremely satisfied with my M1 Mac Mini, which is a 2020 model that I bought.
Casey:
What is the mid to late last year?
Casey:
I am not presently looking to upgrade.
Casey:
John, do you have any M1 or any Mac minis of any sort, actually?
John:
I don't have any.
John:
I've never had a reason to use a Mac mini.
John:
I think they're cool machines.
John:
And, you know, especially with the arm ones being so fast and, you know, so quiet and cool.
John:
Like, it's a great machine if I ever had a use of one.
John:
I suppose maybe if I didn't have a Synology, but I had like rolled my own Synology type thing, I would probably have a Mac mini hooked up to a bunch of something.
John:
But I do have a Synology.
John:
So, you know, no Mac minis in my life.
John:
Or maybe if there was no Apple TV, I'd have one hooked up to my TV at this point, but you know.
Casey:
And then Marco, I don't recall, do you have one still?
Casey:
I know you have and then have and then have and then have and if memory serves.
Casey:
What is your current situation?
Marco:
I still technically own the one that was being the iSCSI host to my Synology for many, many years.
Marco:
I have since retired that role, but it's still just like sitting in my TV cabinet in Westchester.
Marco:
You know, it's like the old, I think it's like a 2013
Marco:
15 or 2016 model it's it's quite old by today's standards uh and you know runs a very ancient version of mac os um and then and then i did briefly use the m1 mac mini as my desktop uh for a while when during that transition yes yes yes yes and it was great uh and then it lived in the water closet and then i traded it into apple
Marco:
Nice.
John:
Okay.
John:
And that's the, that's the other role this fulfills.
John:
Like now that there is an M2 pro one of these, but there's still no big fast iMac.
John:
And in fact, the iMac is still on the M1, let alone any variant of the M2.
John:
You get an M2 pro one of these and you hook it up to an Apple studio display and you have a, you know, a, what do you call it?
John:
Deconstructed iMac essentially.
John:
Yeah.
John:
for probably a little bit more money because you know like i said the mac mini is pretty expensive once you spec it up and that monitor is not cheap but you get a full well not a full mac system you still have to buy a mouse and a keyboard i suppose but anyway that's a pretty good system because an m2 pro mac mini is going to be no slouch this the apple studio display is nice if you ignore the camera and it's all apple stuff and so they i feel like they're filling
John:
This is, you know, the hole in the market that we were talking about back when they didn't have the big iMac.
John:
Now they have something there.
John:
The M2 Pro Mini fills that pretty well until they can get off their butt and deal with the iMac, which it seems like they're, you know, is the iMac going to skip a generation and the next iMac we're going to see has an M3 in it?
John:
Maybe, but like the, you know, and those iMacs are great.
John:
I see them in the Apple store all the time and the M1 is no slouch.
John:
Like it's not a bad computer by any stretch, but as the rest of the line sort of leaves it behind, it'd be nice if they looked back at that iMac line and came out.
John:
Because when that line came out, it was like, wow, these are great machines.
John:
Like, for the price and the features and the size, like, it's, you know, no complaints about them.
John:
But as they age and, of course, stay the same price because that's the Apple way, they're starting to get left behind now.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
well and frankly i mean i think the the studio display i think is too expensive to have studio display and mac mini be an imac replacement for a lot of people it's just it's it's not it's not going to replace the 24 inch for sure but like the 27 like a 5k imac a spec'd out 5k let's do the math so like if you get a decent m2 pro mac mini with like a one terabyte ssd and like 32 gigs of ram that's 2200 and 1600 dollars
John:
That's about the territory.
John:
It's a little bit more maybe than like a good 5K iMac with similar specs.
John:
And plus you have two separate boxes, right?
John:
So it's not horrendous, but the people who are buying a 24-inch iMac are not in the market for a $3,700 computer or whatever.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Anyway, Mac Mini, thumbs up.
Casey:
so marco also not ordering anything at this time but i'm sorry with regard to the mac mini i know you're ordering some stuff but with regard to the mac mini no orders at this time i did not order a mac mini okay all right now let's talk laptops uh the time has finally come you know i had ordered uh the laptop that i'm using to speak to you fine gentlemen uh right now i'd order this laptop you know whenever it was announced in like october november of 2021 is that right yes 2021 and
Casey:
And it has been probably the best Mac I've ever used ever since.
Casey:
I had been living well over a year in bliss with nothing better that had come out and made this thing look like a piece of garbage.
Casey:
Until today, it is now a piece of garbage.
Casey:
No, not really.
Casey:
But this is...
Casey:
This is the replacement for my M1 Max 14-inch MacBook Pro.
Casey:
We have the 14-16-inch M2 Pro and M2 Max MacBook Pros.
Casey:
The 14-inch MacBook Pro is a touch thinner at 0.06 inches instead of 0.061 inches.
Casey:
And the 14-inch M2 Max adds 0.1 pounds.
Casey:
Interestingly, and I really want to find an excuse to spend the money on these, even though it's completely wasteful because I don't need it.
Casey:
But interestingly, they have color-matched MagSafe charging cables now, which is really awesome.
Casey:
And that is not something that I should be bothered by.
Casey:
And I wouldn't say I'm bothered by the fact that I don't have a color-matched MagSafe cable, but I would have preferred a color-matched one.
Casey:
Really?
John:
they metal matched as well by color match they mean like the braided cable itself is is colored to match your thing but the other complaint was that uh the metal part of the mag safe connector was always silver even if you got that's true yeah i believe they fixed that after the airs launched because like the new when the new airs launched um they they finally made color matched mag safe cables for the different metal colors and then they swapped those for
John:
the pros as well.
Marco:
I don't know if they even did it for the old pros, but because these pros came out after those cables began to exist, that's why the new pros have it.
Casey:
So in any case, the M2 Max, 8 performance cores, 4 efficiency cores.
John:
So this is a weird thing about this.
John:
The M1 Max...
John:
had eight performance cores and two efficiency cores and the m2 max has more stuff than the obviously the cores are different it's got the m2 cores or whatever right but it has two more efficiency cores instead of adding power cores like this is this is the max chip it's like for performance or whatever they had more transistors to spend and the way they decided to spend them was keep the number of performance cores the same but add two more efficiency cores
Marco:
No, honestly, again, John, you don't know.
Marco:
I know.
John:
I'm sitting right here at the Mac Studio right there.
John:
I know all about efficiency cores.
Marco:
No, but you don't know for two reasons.
Marco:
Number one, you're still using a Mac Pro.
Marco:
Number two, you don't run iStat menus.
Marco:
So you don't know.
Ha ha ha!
John:
you don't know that on on apple silicon max a lot of tasks are delegated to those efficiency cores i understand what the efficiency cores do but i'm saying it's on the m2 max when you've got transistors to spend like it was it was it hurting for efficiency cores did it need more of them i mean you could say it's a battery saving thing because like oh i don't want anything to be running on the power course unless i'm doing serious work so i need more efficiency cores
John:
makes some vague sense but i'm the reason i'm saying this is because that m2 max i look at it and i don't see just the chip that's going to be in this laptop but i also see the chip that's going to eventually be shoved head to head with another m2 max to make the m2 ultra in the studio and whatever the hell they're going to do in the mac pro and then i think you're going to be over subscribed on efficiency cores as you start tacking these things together so
John:
Maybe for a laptop makes sense, but it's an interesting choice.
John:
One of the theories I'd heard about this that makes some sense is I think all the M chips entirely, with the exception of maybe all the M2 ones, I think they're all going to have four efficiency cores per unit, right?
John:
And maybe that makes it easier in terms of scheduling to just say, oh, we're always going to have four efficiency cores in the whole M2 things.
John:
For each building block, there's four efficiency cores.
John:
shouldn't make that much of a difference the scheduler will work it out as it is but it's an interesting choice and it really i feel like shows how apple is thinking about it silicon they're not thinking about the mac studio they're certainly not thinking about the mac pro because that's just too many damn efficiency cores like if they ever did make that quad thing that we just said in a past show that they basically the rumor was they canceled it
John:
you know how many freaking efficiency cores there would just be too many you'd have to just be running background jobs to occupy them right because when you do any serious work it's going to wander all of them on the power course and there's going to be like you know 30 of those or whatever however many there are going to be but you'd have all these efficiency cores just milling around looking at each other with twirling their thumbs going you got anything to do no i'm just i'm just doing nothing maybe maybe a cron job will run sometime i don't know it's like me and 15 of my friends here it's
John:
And it's because it's a cookie cutter thing.
John:
You get each building block has X performance cores and Y efficiency cores.
John:
And it's just a lot of damn efficiency cores.
John:
And to be clear, the efficiency cores are good.
John:
They're not crappy.
John:
They're really amazing.
John:
They're also really very efficient.
John:
But at a certain point, you just get too many of them.
John:
So anyway.
John:
I thought that was interesting, an interesting choice with the M2 Max.
John:
We'll have to wait until people do the benchmarking and everything because, like they showed in the little diagram, the M2 Max is bigger than the M1 Max, but not horrendously bigger.
John:
It's the same process.
John:
It's got a little bit more stuff in it.
John:
The M2 performance cores are a little bit bigger than the M1 performance cores.
John:
There's a little bit more stuff.
John:
I think they cut back on the, I didn't write this down in the notes, but I think they, for the video processing, it doesn't have, like, the M1 Max had, like, double the number of video encode, decode things, and the M2 Max doesn't have double.
John:
It just has one of each, but I think the one of each that it has are better.
John:
I'm sure this will all shake out in the benchmarks.
John:
It's just interesting to see how they shuffle the blocks on the floor plan to make slightly different choices than the M1 Max.
John:
Presumably,
John:
these choices were made informed by by the m1 max and the experience with that but it's a really nice apples to apples comparison because it's the same process so the only thing that they had in mind is let's take another bite of that apple we have a similar footprint and a similar power envelope to try to make a better chip than the m1 max and what they chose to do was add efficiency cores make all their cores a little bit better uh i think this does not remember the rumor i don't know if we talked about on the show of like
John:
There was supposed to be a new GPU architecture for the A16 that got canned.
John:
And it was like a rare miss for the Apple Silicon team.
John:
Like it was going to have this all new GPU cores are really amazing.
John:
And they just couldn't do it because it was taking too much power.
John:
So the A16 just got the regular GPU cores.
John:
As far as I know, these M2 Macs and Pro also don't have any radical new GPU cores.
John:
So it's really straightforward apples to apples.
John:
let's just massage the very similar guts to the m1 max to try to make a better chip apple's claims are all in the ballpark of like 20 faster at this you know 30 faster is that um but we'll wait until people start getting these and start doing the hardcore benchmarks to see like in real world applications depending on what you're doing how much better is the m2 max than the m1 max
John:
And how does it do on battery life?
John:
Um, and that's, did we mention that already?
John:
I forget where the Apple made the claim, but for one of these machines, Apple made the claim that it was like the longest battery life of any Mac they'd ever made.
John:
Do you remember?
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
For, for the, that was for the 16 inch.
Marco:
Um, and it's, it's basically, it went from like 21 hours of whatever test they're, they're basing this on to 22.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
So it's a little bit longer than the one I have, the M1 Max or Pro, whatever, the M1 16-inch.
Marco:
It's a little bit longer than that.
John:
And they didn't make that battery bigger because they can't.
John:
It's as big as I believe it is right up against the 100 whatever watt hours.
Marco:
Yeah, it's like 99.5 watt hours, I believe.
John:
And the chip is the same process, a 5 nanometer, again, maybe a tweaked version of it.
John:
So any savings they're getting, any power savings that they're getting with this setup, it's not by removing stuff, because the M2 Max has more stuff in it.
John:
It has more transistors, it has more cores, it has mostly more stuff in it than the M1 Max.
John:
It's all just about efficiency gains of like, maybe the cores are a little bit more efficient.
John:
Maybe the video encode decode blocks are a little bit more power efficient at doing the same job as the old ones are.
John:
It's just, you know, so the claim of like, wow, amazing battery life.
John:
It probably is better than the old one, but don't expect it to be radically different.
John:
The other one was already great.
John:
This one is also great.
John:
I feel like they just, you know, added...
Casey:
0.05 percent of the battery life and it's the new champion right but it's not it's not anything it's not like a you know a huge leap like the m1 was over the intel things so just real quick the m2 max like we were starting to say uh four efficiency cores instead of two uh 30 to 38 gpu cores and instead of the m1 max is 24 to 32 um
Casey:
But I think perhaps most interestingly on these machines, other than the standard spec bumps, is that it now has – John, help me out.
Casey:
It's like HDMI 2.1.
Casey:
Do I have that right?
John:
No, you skipped over one other important thing.
John:
96 gigs of RAM.
John:
Oh, I'm sorry.
John:
You're right.
John:
I totally missed that.
John:
On the 16-inch only.
John:
The 16-inch – but I'm sure they could have – whatever.
John:
They're segmenting the line.
John:
The 16-inch, you can get 96 gigs of RAM.
John:
Oh, not on the 14-inch.
John:
not on the 14 as far as i could tell um and which is kind of weird whatever um and i think this is all just done through increasing the density of the chips like it's not like it has additional ram chips if you look at the soc with the little ram chips around the side like little ears it's just higher density ram chips right so the the speeds are the same there's just more of it right and again looking at this and thinking about the 14 offers it by the way 14 is 96 as well you need the m2 max but oh there you go maybe i just picked that that's also true on the 16 all right there you go anyway so 96 is a ram
John:
Look at this and you think, well, this is what the M2, you know, what's the max RAM on the M2 Ultra going to be, right?
John:
What is it going to be on the Mac Pro?
John:
The 96 gig sort of telegraphs where things are going in that direction.
John:
And I was happy about that.
John:
Like, I didn't mention on the Mac Mini as well, on the M2.
John:
Well, the M2 already had 24 gigs of RAM, so that's not big.
John:
But, like, bumping up the RAM ceilings, even though these are otherwise, quote-unquote, boring upgrades.
John:
Oh, you have slightly better cores and a little bit more of them, whatever.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But bumping up the RAM ceiling, I think, is important because it shows they're not going to say, oh, you know, 16 gigs will be enough for anybody forever.
John:
And the pro machines can have 64.
John:
No one wants more than that.
John:
It's like, no, please, more.
John:
Give more.
John:
And so the M2 Max on their top-end laptops, you can get 96 gigs.
John:
I give that a huge thumbs up.
John:
Despite the fact that I'm now afraid to go to the configurator and see how much it's going to cost, it's probably ridiculous.
Marco:
But it's just, again, this is just one more continuation of the M1 Pro and Max versions that came out, whatever it was, 18 months ago, whatever that was.
Marco:
It's amazing that not only is this computer amazing, but that the 14-inch and the 16-inch have the same options and the same performance.
Marco:
The only differences are bigger screen, bigger battery, and bigger cooling capacity of the 16-inch.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
But you can get... I mean, you look at the size of a 14-inch MacBook Pro, and that machine is available with the highest CPU, 96 gigs of RAM, 8 terabytes storage.
Marco:
That's incredible.
Marco:
And I'll tell you, look...
Marco:
i i've i've had both of these laptops now for whatever it's been when did these come out 18 months ago whatever it was these are incredible machines i am so happy with them oh the 16 inch also was slightly better acoustics just you know larger speakers um but it's even the fortune speakers are pretty incredible for what for what size they are um
Marco:
like these are these are incredible machines i have been so happy i still am incredibly happy with my 16 inch as my desktop laptop and then when i you know when i travel i usually do bring it so i can have you know all my work stuff with me i love this computer so much i've still now you know even now almost a year and a half in i've still never heard a peep from the fan except for that one time i was training an ml model
Marco:
other than that like i've never heard the fan in any other usage it is an amazing machine it's been rock solid for me living most of its life in clamshell mode um it has just been an incredible machine i am i i don't have any envy of the mac studio i don't have any envy of anything else in the lineup right now like
Marco:
And so what they have done is taken these two amazing computers and now made them a little bit better.
Marco:
And so the result is it's still amazing.
Marco:
They did a speed bump update.
Marco:
That's all we've asked them to do for most of the time for most of their products.
Marco:
They did an amazing performance.
Marco:
an amazing job with these machines in the first place a year and a half ago, and now they're a little bit better with improvements with time.
Marco:
That's great.
Marco:
I'm so, so happy that they are doing such an amazing job at what I think is probably their most important Mac.
John:
And because this is their highest-end laptop product, like I said, with the Mac Mini, the upgrade prices feel more egregious, but they've got the 96-gig RAM option.
John:
That is, to be clear, it is adding 64 gigs of RAM, and if you want an additional 64 gigs of RAM, that's $800 extra.
John:
I know it's special RAM, but on no planet does 64 gigs of RAM cost $800.
John:
Similarly, the 8-terabyte SSD is, please add $2,200 for...
John:
Big Martians.
John:
That used to be a lot more.
John:
Yeah, this is the full complete machine.
John:
And also, despite the fact that Marco uses this in clamshell, these screens are pretty amazing on these laptops.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Up to 1600 nits, like just totally tiny, thin little things that have amazing color and amazing HDR.
John:
It helps that they're small so they can do the brightness across the entire screen, blah, blah.
John:
But it's...
John:
they're very impressive and like we'll have to see how the heat goes on these because the macbook airs with the m2 were a little bit sweatier than the m1 ones but we'll wait to see people uh you know exercise these i think they'll be similar because again if you look at the you know how big is the m2 max and m2 pro compared to the m1 counterparts they're similar in size i don't think it will be radically different i do think that if you know if
John:
If they are a little bit hotter, that kind of adds value to Marco's computer.
John:
Because the M1s, that's not going to happen anytime soon, again, with that kind of leap from the Intel to the M1.
John:
And because the M1 was so amazing, and because they were so low power, and because they were put into enclosures that were so overmatched for the amount of heat they produced, it was just...
John:
It was just ridiculous.
John:
Whereas now I think over time, I feel like Apple is going to start creeping back up to the idea of like, we have so much thermal headroom.
John:
Can we push the performance a little bit more, which I think is appropriate on the highest end laptop.
John:
But I feel like, you know, on the M4 16 inch MacBook Pro, you may be able to make the fans audible more than Marco Cannon and his M1, you know, MacBook Pro right now.
Marco:
I'm telling you, though, there's so much headroom in this design that I already have.
Marco:
I'd be shocked if... For the M1, though.
Marco:
I know, but I'm saying there's so much headroom.
Marco:
When I was doing the ML training, now that I know what it takes to get the fan to be audible, it took me maxing out the CPU and GPU for like four hours before I could hear the fan.
Yeah.
Marco:
It takes a lot to even make.
Marco:
And it wasn't loud.
Marco:
It just became audible at that point.
Marco:
So there's a lot of headroom in this design.
Marco:
So even if the M2 version runs like 15% hotter, that's not going to be enough to make it that different, I don't think.
Casey:
So, John, tell me about the HDMI differences in these machines.
John:
It's so confusing.
John:
I was trying to figure out, like, do they upgrade HDMI 2.1?
Casey:
I don't see that term used.
Casey:
I thought, but maybe I'm making that up.
John:
So as we discussed on past shows, HDMI 2.1, whatever consortium defines that thing, recently changed it so that you can essentially claim HDMI 2.1 compliance, even if you only use the HDMI 2.0 subset of the features.
John:
like hdmi 2.1 is like a cafeteria thing you do you want to support this this is everything is optional support that that you know it's just so you can't just look at something and say hdmi 2.1 i know what that is you have to look at all the fine prints and see all the different things apple doesn't even seem to claim hdmi 2.1 but what they do say in extremely confusingly worded passages on their web pages which i will now read
John:
That if you get an M2 Pro in your MacBook Pro, you can power, quote, up to two external displays with up to 6K resolution at 60 hertz over Thunderbolt, or one external display with up to 6K resolution at 60 hertz over Thunderbolt, and one external display with up to 4K resolution at 144 hertz over HDMI.
John:
So again, the reason they're giving these combinations is like it's just one SOC with a bunch of video stuff in there.
John:
So you have to basically decide how many things do you plug into your Mac and through what connectors, and then what can their maximum resolutions be.
John:
It can also drive one external display at 8K resolution at 60 Hertz,
John:
or one external display at 4k resolution at 240 hertz over hdmi 240 hertz over hdmi is not part of the hdmi 2.0 spec i believe uh but they don't claim hdmi 2.1 anyway these are the specs right so the point is you couldn't i don't think you could drive 8k at all before and now you can drive 4k at really high refresh rates apple doesn't sell a 240 hertz monitor but other people do
John:
So, you know, if you want to buy that and run the three games that run on the Mac, run well on the Mac, you could do that.
John:
And then on the M2 Max, you could do up to four external displays, up to three external displays with 6K resolution at 60 hertz over Thunderbolt and one external display with up to 4K resolution at 144 hertz over HDMI.
John:
or up to three external displays up to two external displays with 6k resolution at 60 hertz over thunder world and one external display with up to 8k resolution at 60 hertz or one external display at 4k resolution at 240 hertz over hdmi we need parentheses clear as day
John:
We need parentheses to disambigate because the precedence rules of English are not that clear, and it's not entirely clear.
John:
Anyway, the whole point is all these machines can power monitors at higher resolutions, at higher refresh rates than the past.
John:
So another good thing to see because, like I said, the guts of this is not a radically new GPU or anything like that, but they can do more better than the M1 variants when it comes to video driving.
John:
So I'm glad to see the specs are being pushed in all...
John:
all directions because they didn't have to change like how many displays they could drive it's not like the past one was like oh i can't drive enough displays from my 16 inch macbook pro it was fine it was fine for a laptop like you're not expecting 12 displays out of it whatever but they pushed it did 8k higher refresh rates again even though apple does not sell any monitors that do that yet please apple um pretty pretty impressive update all around the only question mark on these entire machines is
Casey:
what are the thermals and noise like compared to the m1 ones because they have some big shoes to fill but the performance looks like it's going to be a nice speed bump and a nice spec bump all around yeah yeah so i have not ordered one i sitting here now i don't plan to i know a lot of times i say that but it's very unusual that i decide to change my mind on like five thousand dollar computer um i i don't i plan to sit this one out but marco what's your intention
Marco:
Well, they said in the video... There it is.
Marco:
There it is.
Marco:
They specifically called out Xcode and they said up to 25% faster than the previous ones.
Marco:
Right now, my productivity is limited by my brain not compiles right now.
Marco:
And there are different times in my developer life where those factors are different.
Marco:
um but yeah right now 25 is a decent uh amount but there's an up to before it and it's for large projects and you know my project i'm not you know building photoshop or anything so i'm gonna sit this one out um but it's only because i am just so damn happy with my m1 max 16 inch macbook pro that i you know the difference going from the m1 to the m2 is not significant enough for my needs to justify all that expense and hassle and everything but
Marco:
If for some reason I needed a new desktop laptop today, I would 100% jump on this.
Marco:
But yeah, what I have now is so close and so good.
John:
Like I said, I feel like the M1 line of computers is going to go down in history as like those are the good ones.
John:
Because I don't think, you know, not only the leap from the previous generation, but just...
John:
Because they're so overpowered for the electricity they consume, and I do believe that Apple will start pushing the envelope with the M2, M3, M4, and on upwards, that holding on to an M1 may be a good idea if you don't desperately need the performance bump.
John:
And in terms of compiling 25% faster or whatever, if you're not a developer, you might think, oh, Marco says he has a small program, so he doesn't care about that a little extra time.
John:
But you may not really appreciate...
John:
The scale, like how big do programs get and how long do they take to compile?
John:
Marco's thing takes a minute or two to compile.
John:
Who cares if I shave 25% off that?
John:
Maybe a big program will take five minutes, right?
John:
No, big programs don't take five minutes as opposed to one minute.
John:
Big programs take 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour for a clean build, right?
John:
When you're giving numbers like that, and if your build takes a half an hour and we say we can save you 25%, yeah.
John:
you're upgrading from the m2 to the from the m1 to the m2 to get that because 25 of a half an hour we're starting to talk about real time right and people aren't doing clean builds obviously doing incremental builds but the range of how long it might take to do a task has wide it's bigger than you think it is right it's orders of magnitude not just compiling but whatever your task is encoding video or whatever
John:
Doing small things can be done in a minute or two, and those percentages seem meaningless.
John:
But once you get into taking, you know, half an hour, two hours, multiple hours, even a 1% gain is worth it.
John:
That's what the high-end market is like.
John:
People who are willing to, you know, replace, not throw out.
John:
But trade in a perfectly good computer for one that is a few percent faster.
John:
You will do that if that few percent literally saves you hours a day.
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Casey:
I think I know why, Marco, you haven't bought any of these machines.
Casey:
And it's because it's finally happened.
Casey:
You finally run out of money.
Casey:
Because how many of the new HomePod have you bought?
Casey:
50?
Casey:
100?
Casey:
1,000?
Casey:
Are there any left for any of us?
Casey:
He's going to stockpile them in the basement like cheese graters.
Marco:
You know, I was patting myself on the back for not buying a MacBook Pro.
Marco:
Yep, yep.
Casey:
And then you bought, did you buy a baker's dozen?
Casey:
A half dozen?
Casey:
How many HomePods have you bought?
Marco:
Can you, first of all, can we just pause for a minute?
Marco:
Can you believe this happened?
Marco:
Can you believe we got our new full-size HomePod?
John:
I can, because we talked about the rumor on a past episode.
Marco:
Yeah, but look, there's rumors about a whole bunch of stuff that doesn't actually come out.
Marco:
Once we talk about them in this show, they're going to happen.
John:
Oh, is that how it is?
John:
Once the rumors bubble up to the point where we're willing to talk about it on this show, it's probably going to happen.
John:
All right, so let's pause.
John:
It's a dirty secret for everybody.
Casey:
So there is a new HomePod, a big HomePod.
Casey:
It's $300, which is $50 cheaper.
Casey:
It's still a lot of money.
Marco:
And also, to be clear, the old Big HomePod, while it was officially $350, for most of its life was kind of backdoor discounted to $300 through Best Buy and other retailers who work closely with Apple.
Marco:
So the old one was basically $300 for most of its life.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
So this new one, two millimeters shorter, two millimeters wider, two tenths of a kilogram lighter.
Casey:
But more interestingly, it has five tweeters instead of seven.
Casey:
It has four microphones instead of six.
Casey:
The IO, it's 802.11n.
Casey:
I can't even keep up with what's most modern these days.
Marco:
There's a reason for that.
Marco:
um oh okay so yeah everyone's complaining that it doesn't have like 8211 ac at least or whatever you know ax or wi-fi 666x whatever you know the the reason for this is because the old home pod was based on an a8 processor from i mean what the hell is that the iphone 3gs like it's some ancient i know it's not that but it's you know some like ancient phone model um and it was very very slow and
Marco:
For a device that has no screen, really, there is some deal of GPU power that's being wasted there.
Marco:
The CPUs are super old and slow.
Marco:
So when the HomePod Mini came out, the HomePod Mini used an Apple Watch SoC.
Marco:
I believe the Mini uses the S5 or S6 SoC.
Marco:
I think the S5.
Marco:
It's the S5.
Marco:
yeah and which makes a lot more sense because you figure like okay it's a it's a you know kind of higher spec processor smaller cheaper and less gpu power than a phone chip would have um because you don't need those things in in a speaker chip but you do need something like a little bit more modern you know a little bit faster cores a little bit more like you know
Marco:
siri compatible you know processing power and so they with with the homepod mini they move the watch to or they move they move the homepod to the watch's tech stack on the hardware end basically and they're they're continuing this now with the new big homepod it's very similar in in many of those like tech spec capabilities to the homepod mini and that's a very good thing because the old homepod had horrendously slow processor performance
Marco:
I know this because I still use them every day.
Marco:
I've gone through a few, you know, since they keep flaking out and dying.
Marco:
But I still use them every day in my kitchen.
Marco:
He's a stereo pair.
Marco:
And the bugginess is just comical.
Marco:
The performance is just comical.
Marco:
Like, they're so slow to respond to anything.
Marco:
They're so buggy.
Marco:
They're so unreliable.
Marco:
And a lot of that is just because it's old buggy hardware.
Marco:
The old HomePods had a few physical design flaws.
Marco:
There was a bad capacitor or something like people who know more than I do about electronics have spotted.
Marco:
There's a few hardware flaws that slowly killed them over time.
Marco:
But the biggest thing for me as a HomePod user has been they're just ungodly slow.
Marco:
Also, Siri sucks, but that's a separate discussion.
Marco:
So they're just so slow.
Marco:
And I also have some HomePod Minis in the smaller rooms of my house.
Marco:
And the HomePod Minis are way more responsive.
Marco:
not even close it's night and day difference like they sound way worse because they're much smaller they only have you know one speaker in them basically and it's a much simpler cheaper device but you deal with the homepod mini and you deal with the big homepod and the difference in responsiveness is night and day
Marco:
So no question, the Apple Watch SoCs for this use are way faster than using a really old phone chip.
Marco:
And so the new HomePod, the new big HomePod, is actually faster.
Marco:
In the Watch SoC land, the S6, 7, and 8 are all basically the same processor.
Marco:
The HomePod mini uses the S5 right before those, and the S6 is faster, and the S7, and this new HomePod uses the S7.
Marco:
So it's basically one processor step faster than the HomePod Mini.
Marco:
And the reason it only has 802.11 Wi-Fi is that the Apple Watch only has 802.11 Wi-Fi.
Marco:
All of them, even the currently, even the nicest Apple Watches today only have 802.11n Wi-Fi.
Marco:
Because 802.11ac, I think, requires larger antennas and has higher power and everything.
Marco:
And everything about the Apple Watch is all about saving power.
Marco:
And the Apple Watch hardly ever uses its Wi-Fi capability.
Marco:
Which, by the way, it's so funny.
Marco:
Literally...
Marco:
48 hours ago, I was drafting a blog post.
Marco:
I was going to make my first post on my blog in whatever it's been, a year, I don't know.
Marco:
And what it was going to be about is a few small software changes that I wish Apple would make to some of its product lines to make them dramatically better.
Marco:
And one of them was about the Apple Watch.
Marco:
I was about to say...
Marco:
I wish they would give them a preference or a setting somewhere on the Apple Watch where you could say, prefer Wi-Fi over Bluetooth to my phone for internet connectivity.
Marco:
Because if you've ever used an Apple Watch when it could not reach its phone via Bluetooth, but it was still on Wi-Fi...
Marco:
It's a radically different experience.
Marco:
It's way faster to do anything over the network.
Marco:
But Apple Watches, because they're so power constrained, radically so, everything with the Apple Watch design is all about saving power.
Marco:
Because of that, the Apple Watch still to this day, it makes a network request.
Marco:
If your phone is within Bluetooth range, it will communicate the network request through your phone via Bluetooth and have your phone use its Wi-Fi with its bigger battery to actually go to the network.
Marco:
And Bluetooth is way slower than Wi-Fi.
Marco:
And in my experience with the Apple Watch, way less reliable as well.
Marco:
And so that's why things like syncing music or podcasts directly to your Apple Watch, if you want to listen to them away from your phone, syncing them over takes forever unless you turn off Bluetooth on your phone.
Marco:
And then the transfers go way faster because the watch is then forced to use Wi-Fi instead of Bluetooth.
Marco:
Anyway, the other day, like I was doing some Siri stuff on my watch.
Marco:
I sent some timers and my phone was way out of range.
Marco:
I forget why.
Marco:
I think it was like rebooting for a software update or something.
Marco:
But my phone was unavailable and Siri on the watch was remarkably fast when it was using Wi-Fi.
Marco:
So the watch has the processing power to do it when it's using Wi-Fi, but the watch usually does not use Wi-Fi to conserve battery power.
Marco:
Anyway, this new HomePod, which is restricted only to 802.11n because it only has the watch hardware...
Marco:
It will be plugged into the wall.
Marco:
It will always have power.
Marco:
And it, as far as I know, doesn't have Bluetooth or at least won't be using that part of the chip if it's, you know, if for some reason it's built into the SOC or whatever.
John:
It does have Bluetooth.
John:
That's Bluetooth 5.0.
Marco:
Oh, crap.
Marco:
Anyway, so but it's at least it's plugged into the wall.
Marco:
So presumably it will be always connected to Wi-Fi and will always use that for network requests.
Marco:
And so if you've ever used an Apple Watch that actually is using the Wi-Fi for the network request, you can see like, wow, for Siri, it actually is extremely responsive.
Marco:
So that's why this device only has 802.11n, I think, is because it's using the watch hardware.
Marco:
It's also, look, for this kind of device, the difference in bandwidth and things between 802.11n and 802.11ac or later, I don't think you're really going to notice this difference in most situations in most people's homes.
Marco:
So I don't think that's a thing that matters, really.
John:
I mean, the only thing is ever going to have to be doing streaming music, which is never going to take up.
John:
You know, it's a finite amount of bandwidth, even at lossless.
John:
You can you can do the math and say maximum, even the silly audio file, highest bit rate, lossless, you know, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Like, that's the worst case scenario.
John:
And downloading software updates, which is, you know, asynchronous and no one is ever waiting for it, right?
John:
That's it.
John:
It's not like the Apple TV, which, you know, people who don't have Ethernet to their TV are relying on that to stream video.
John:
And the quality of video is just going up over time as services get more and more daring in terms of the highest bit rate they're willing to vend.
John:
So...
John:
Wanting your HomePod to have the best Wi-Fi standard doesn't make any sense unless there's something your HomePod is doing that requires more bandwidth or lower latency or both than 802.11n, and I can't think of a single thing.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So, yeah.
Marco:
So that's, you know, that's the thing people are nitpicking on about the specs, but that doesn't matter at all in practice for this kind of product.
Marco:
So it'll be fine.
Marco:
But anyway, what I am, what I am most excited about is that faster chip.
Marco:
And for two reasons.
Marco:
Number one is just because it's way, way faster.
Marco:
And that's the biggest thing.
Marco:
And I think that's, that is what we are most likely to notice most often, because again, trying to do anything with the old first gen home pod is
Marco:
is so slow.
Marco:
Not even just Siri, but even dealing with AirPlay.
Marco:
When you're trying to send music to it, oh my god.
Marco:
It could be 15 seconds before you get anything to play, and even then it might fail.
Marco:
It's so slow to do anything...
Marco:
It does hear you remarkably well and then takes forever to execute the command that you told it to do and fails a lot.
Marco:
So that's going to be the number one thing that I'm looking forward to is the speed.
Marco:
I am slightly concerned about the decontenting of the audio gear inside.
Marco:
It has fewer tweeters, fewer microphones.
Marco:
That being said, the old one was, I think, over-specced in those areas.
Marco:
And given what Apple was able to achieve...
Marco:
audio quality and microphone quality wise with the home pod mini, which has way less hardware inside of it.
Marco:
I'm confident that they're probably, they probably did a pretty good job with this.
Marco:
Um, the woofer looks like it's probably the same.
Marco:
Like they don't,
Marco:
They don't come out and say it's the same, but it looks like it's the same size.
Marco:
It's the same placement inside.
Marco:
If you look at the PR photo of the X-ray view of the guts inside of it, how things are laid out, you can look at that same view from the previous HomePod from old blog posts and everything.
Marco:
And it's a very, very similar internal structure, very similar layout, just a few fewer parts inside, a couple fewer tweeters and things like that.
Marco:
it's probably going to sound really good.
Marco:
It's probably going to be way more responsive.
Marco:
And the second reason I'm excited about it basically being like a juiced up HomePod mini is that the HomePod mini kind of runs a different software stack too.
Marco:
Like when the first HomePod came out, I believe internally it was running something called Audio OS or Audio OS or something like that.
Marco:
And I think when the HomePod mini came out,
Marco:
It was actually running different software.
Marco:
And then I think over time they've slightly merged a little bit.
Marco:
But the HomePod mini always had better and more reliable features and implementations than the big HomePod did.
Marco:
Now this will unify them.
Marco:
Now they're going to be running basically the same guts.
Marco:
and have basically the same hardware capabilities, and especially other things, you know, like there's the thread radio, excuse me, matter radio, the temperature sensor, like it's going to be running all the same stuff.
Marco:
And so that's more likely also to make the software more reliable over time.
Marco:
You know, Apple is only going to have one hardware platform to target here, you know, running similar processor, otherwise same hardware, you know.
Marco:
So it's more likely to be more reliable over time because the other problem with the HomePod is that
Marco:
It's not an area of significant focus for Apple.
Marco:
They're going to neglect it.
Marco:
They're going to put the B team on parts of it.
Marco:
It's going to be a low priority.
Marco:
It's going to have a lot of bugs that don't get fixed for a long time.
Marco:
And so the less work you give them, the better.
Marco:
So to have a unified hardware ecosystem and software ecosystem around this product, like they did a pretty bad job managing the first HomePod software ecosystem.
Marco:
The HomePod mini, they've been doing a better job.
Marco:
So this will be lumped in with the HomePod mini in terms of what it will take Apple to maintain it and keep it updated over time.
Marco:
And so that is more likely to result in good outcomes for owners.
Marco:
And again, look, I wish their hardware lasted longer.
Marco:
I wish the first generation one didn't have as many problems as it did.
Marco:
I wish they didn't have this premium price product that they put a slow processor in, even at the time it was slow.
Marco:
But hey, the first gen HomePod is in many ways like the first gen Apple Watch.
Marco:
where it proved to have some good ideas, but you saw significant benefits from the first couple of hardware revisions after it, right?
Marco:
So hopefully this is going to be really good.
Marco:
It remains to be seen, you know, whether it still sounds as good with the fewer speakers or whatever.
Marco:
I think it's going to be pretty good.
Marco:
So I ordered a pair of them.
Marco:
White, of course.
Marco:
White is clearly the better color.
Marco:
I will take... Oh, is it, Marco?
Marco:
I will hear no alternatives.
Oh, is it?
Marco:
No dissenting opinions on that because if you think black HomePods are better, you're just wrong.
Marco:
The white ones are so much better.
Marco:
But anyway, so I got a pair of white ones and if they're good, you know, maybe I'll replace one more pair that I have still in operation that's barely working.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
But I started with one pair.
Marco:
We'll see how it goes.
Marco:
But I'm so excited that this product is being updated.
Marco:
When the first HomePod launched at 350, we all made fun of a few pretty big flaws about it.
Marco:
Number one, it was too expensive for the market.
Marco:
And number two, it didn't have a line in.
Marco:
And it lacked a lot of kind of enthusiast features.
Marco:
Siri was super slow and unreliable and stupid compared to Alexa or Google Assistant.
Marco:
Um, and you look at the competitive market today, you know, they brought the price down a little, but what makes the price easier to take is that there's the HomePod mini and it's doing fine.
Marco:
It's a hundred bucks.
Marco:
It's, I think one of the best values in Apple's lineup.
Marco:
It's a pretty good small speaker.
Marco:
It sounds way better than any other small speakers from all the other companies.
Marco:
Like, you know, the other companies have better sounding, bigger speakers, but they're small ones that didn't even come close.
Marco:
Um, but
Marco:
And I think the HomePod Mini, I think, is a success.
Marco:
You know, it's not taking over the world, but I think it's an overall successful product that they're doing a pretty good job with.
Marco:
It comes in a bunch of fun colors, good for them, you know.
Marco:
Now that the HomePod Mini exists and is doing fine, I think the pricing pressure for the bigger one is greatly relieved because it is not the only option.
Marco:
So they can actually make it a premium one, and in that premium market,
Marco:
Not only is there very little competition, but the competition that's there is more expensive by a good amount.
Marco:
If you actually want something that is small-ish, tastefully designed, but has the audio performance of this big HomePod...
Marco:
you're not going to find much.
Marco:
And the little that you will find is going to be, you know, from like the boutique brands like B&O or is it Naim?
Marco:
Naim?
Marco:
I don't know how it's pronounced.
Marco:
And they're all way more expensive.
Marco:
So what they deliver here, assuming that it's as good as the first one in terms of audio quality and
Marco:
assuming that it has the performance of the HomePod mini, at least in its responsiveness, should be a pretty great product.
Marco:
It's not going to be for everyone because not everybody wants a $300 smart speaker, let alone a stereo pair of them, which I think is still going to prove to be awesome.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Again, I would challenge you to spend $600 for the stereo pair.
Marco:
Try to spend anywhere near that money on anything that sounds better at this size.
Marco:
You won't find it.
Marco:
Even possibly at any size.
Marco:
They're that good if you're in that market.
Casey:
um they still retain the capabilities of being used as speakers for apple tvs um i've never tried that but i know people have and it seems to work well for people from what i've heard oh yeah can we can we talk a little bit more about that i i did not realize apparently i was supposed to know maybe we talked about it on this very program and i forgot but apparently even the homepod mini and i think the
Casey:
to receive eARC from the TV and then broadcast that to the HomePod.
Casey:
So let me translate that into English.
Casey:
You could be watching or playing a video game, like playing your PlayStation on your TV or watching your cable box on your TV.
Casey:
And if your TV supports eARC, it would send the audio to the Apple TV...
Casey:
Even if you're not doing anything else to the Apple TV, the Apple TV is otherwise idle.
Casey:
It will send the audio to the Apple TV and the Apple TV will rebroadcast to your HomePods such that your HomePods can be your TV speakers.
Casey:
I knew that you could have the Apple TV for Apple TV stuff broadcast everything to the HomePods.
Casey:
I had no idea that you could do this in the same style that my Sonos setup does, where whatever it is you're watching on the TV will be broadcast to the HomePods.
Casey:
And I was talking about this on Mastodon today.
Casey:
And as with all things, about half the feedback I got was, yes, it works pretty consistently, but not perfectly.
Casey:
And the latency is great.
Casey:
And half the feedback I got was, yes, this is something you can do, but the latency is awful.
Yeah.
John:
Well, in this scenario, your Apple TV is acting as like a little like software powered receiver, essentially.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Right.
John:
But unlike an actual receiver, Apple does not have all the weird controls for messing with the delay and everything.
John:
And, you know, yes, we talked as we talked about in the past.
John:
the thing we're talking about syncing stuff up, the HDMI spec itself has some synchronization stuff in it, but setups can be wonky.
John:
And so I feel like the people, the reason you get that disparity is sometimes the automatic synchronization latency, blah, blah, blah, HDMI stuff works fine with people's setup.
John:
And other times it doesn't.
John:
And when it doesn't, Apple has not yet.
John:
added all the little picky features to fix it and go through that whole thing that i described on a past episode so i kind of understand that and i think the reason you don't remember it is because we just talked about it in the context of i'm just going to use my like when apple apple the home pod first came out i'm just going to use my home pods as my tv speakers and you didn't think about what that meant but what that meant was like no whatever i watch on my tv the sound comes out of the home pods and the only way that work is with that feature that they introduced like a year or so ago that
John:
basically uses your Apple TV as a little miniature software-powered receiver to do eARC, blah, blah, blah.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
That's why, Casey, this is why you didn't know about this feature, because it wasn't there at launch with the previous ones.
Marco:
It was added later in software.
Casey:
Gotcha.
Casey:
We should also mention very quickly that these things support spatial audio.
Casey:
They also added sound recognition for smoke alarms or carbon monoxide alarms, and it can send a notification to your devices, which is pretty cool, although that's coming apparently in the spring.
Marco:
Yeah, that's a great feature if it works well, but again, it isn't out yet, so we won't know yet.
Casey:
Yeah, that's coming out in the spring.
Casey:
Stereo pairs require the same generation of HomePod.
Casey:
You can't take an old one and a new one and pair them, which, I mean, that's not surprising.
John:
Because I've just got the old one, and I might even consider a new one if I could pair them, but I can't, and now it's like, you know.
John:
And I understand why.
John:
I mean, there's software reasons why.
John:
There's also hardware reasons if you're going to have a pair of speakers if one of them has a different number of drivers than the other.
John:
It's a little bit weird.
John:
I get it, but it's kind of a shame.
John:
Looking at this product, the thing that strikes me about it is how Apple has not really rethought
John:
The HomePod?
John:
Not at all.
John:
It's kind of like you mentioned the Series Zero watch.
John:
Imagine if the follow-up to the Series Zero watch came, like, years later.
John:
Like, they just didn't do anything.
John:
People wondered if they were ever going to make another watch again, and they came out with a new one, and it looked like the Series One.
John:
What was the one after the Series Zero?
John:
Was it just called Series One, or was it called Series Two?
Marco:
no this ever this confused everybody there was there was the apple watch with no name with no number which we called the series zero then the next year they released two models called series one and series two which had the same processor as each other but so so there's there's one called the series one but it was really part of the second generation family of apple watch like it's like it's like xbox naming you know yeah yeah
John:
But similarly, when those watches came out, they didn't rethink the Apple Watch.
John:
They were very much like the Series Zero, and this is the same way.
John:
This product is not like the current generation of MacBook Pros.
John:
We're like, oh, we screwed up.
John:
We're going to put a good keyboard and an SD card slot and HDMI port.
John:
No, this thing does not have audio input.
John:
You cannot use these as speaker.
John:
The power cord is not removable.
John:
None of that stuff.
John:
They didn't do any of that.
Casey:
The power cord is removable.
Casey:
We don't know yet, I don't think.
John:
It's removable.
John:
All right, so on the original generation HomePod, the power cord is also removable.
John:
It's just hard to remove.
Marco:
Yeah, it's like you're not really supposed to remove it.
John:
Yeah, because if they used a standard plug, you would have to pass the, you know, UL Labs, whatever, in the United States.
John:
And so they didn't do that, so it's not user removable.
John:
And then that allows them to sidestep having to put an ugly, like, standards-compliant, safety-compliant plug.
John:
Right, so that's why it's technically not removable.
John:
But anyway, the point is like this product is not, does not have a bunch of ports on the back.
John:
People aren't going to buy this to just use it to Marco's point.
John:
Like what if I just want a really good sounding spear?
John:
Can I use these as just good sounding speakers?
John:
No, like you need, there's a software component.
John:
It needs to be airplay.
John:
It needs to go through your Apple TV, blah, blah, blah.
John:
They're not just stereo components.
John:
They're not, so they didn't rethink that.
John:
The other way they didn't rethink it, although they're kind of leaning in that direction is they didn't do the thing that we've always wanted them to do for ages is like, Hey, can you make something that's like my whole home hub?
John:
Make it my Wi-Fi hub.
John:
Make it my HomeKit thing.
John:
Make it my Siri thing.
John:
Make it play music.
John:
Blah, blah, blah.
John:
They didn't do that, but they kind of like, okay, well, what if we put temperature and humidity sensors on there?
John:
No, it's not a home device.
John:
It's still just a speaker, but they're small.
John:
We can put them in there.
John:
And then if it hears your smoke detector go off, it'll do something.
John:
And it is plugged in all the time, so it probably will be your HomeKit hub unless the Apple TV steals it from it.
John:
Like...
John:
they're not ready to say this is the new hub for your house because first of all as we all know if it was going to be the hub for your house it would have to be a wi-fi mesh network thing apple left that space a long time ago and seems not interested in going back into it but they do still do a home kit thing and this is looking slightly more home kitty thread radio temperature sensor it's a you can talk to it to control stuff in your home
John:
but predominantly it is still the product it was which is basically a you know a wireless speaker that integrates with apple stuff that sounds really good but i feel like they're leaving money on the table by not doing a little bit to make this a a potential purchase of people who aren't super duper bought into the apple ecosystem but just want a good speaker and also to give it longevity assuming this thing doesn't burn out like the other one does with a bad you know whatever i was like a bad diode a bad like
John:
Yeah, something.
John:
That amplifier.
John:
There's some fatal flaw, some weird uncharacteristic from Apple fatal flaw in the HomePods that makes them the original generation of HomePods.
John:
Hopefully this one is better there.
John:
But if this is the rate of development of the HomePod, it's going to be a long time before this thing goes in any direction.
John:
Yeah.
John:
If it's leaning in one direction or the other, it is not leaning in the direction of this is a good speaker for people to buy who are into audio, like in terms of like outside the Apple ecosystem, but it is leaning a little bit into this is like your home hub, which I think is fine.
John:
Like I don't expect this thing to sprout a screen anytime soon or anything, but...
John:
It is plugged in all the time, and it's probably in a nice location in your home, and it's just sitting there, and so why not have it keep track of temperature and humidity, right?
John:
Why not have it, you know, speak to it to turn the lights on and off or whatever?
John:
I know, Marco, you're excited that the S7 is way faster than the old chip, but I look at this and I say it's $300, and the best we could get was a watch chip.
John:
I'm sure it'll be great.
John:
I'm sure it'll be fine, but if this thing is going to sort of grow into being...
John:
an actual home hub when the apple tv what does the apple tv have now a15 or something in it the apple tv is like so massively overpowered compared to this thing and it's so tiny you know like i think if you had to elect something in your house to be your home hub which i don't actually know if you can do that i think it just picks on its own or there's some way yeah you as far as i can tell you have no control over that like it'll tell you which device is the current home hub but you can't you can't pick it as far as i can tell
John:
But if I had to elect one, I'd elect the thing with an A15 in it.
John:
But it would be kind of cool if Apple eventually figured out where what the HomePod is going to be when it grows up.
John:
Right now, what it is, is the second generation of the exact product that they made before.
John:
It's just they took a long vacation in between to like, I don't know, think about stuff for
John:
a while and they get because if this had come out like a year after the home pod we'd be like oh the next home pod out and it's better than the first one and marco probably wouldn't even had time to have all of his fail because he just would have replaced him with the new one anyway and then you know we would move down but this is there was this weird time in the wilderness where they didn't know what they were going to do and they came out of the wilderness and they said let's just do what we did before and so they did what they did before presumably slightly better um and i you know i'm kind of disappointed in the
John:
And the fact that they didn't sort of take the lessons other than the reliability ones we hope.
John:
In the same way that the laptops took the lessons of the previous line of laptops that people had complaints about.
John:
I mean, one of the lessons, as you said, Marco, was like, maybe the lesson was we should have a cheap one.
John:
And they do now, so great.
John:
And then we don't have to worry so much about the price.
John:
But then they decontented this one to save 50 bucks.
John:
you know if it sounds just as good then good you know you made it cheaper and it sounds just as good you know so that's fine but we'll see it's just i don't feel like they they took there are lots of lessons they could have taken from the original home pod in terms of again picking two directions to go more into the generic audio device direction
John:
or to go more in the Home Hub direction.
John:
And it seems like they leaned a tiny little bit in the Home Hub direction, but then just stopped and said, it's just another HomePod, it's a big one, and it replaces the previous big one.
John:
And presumably because of the synergies of the platform with the Mini, they're more committed to this big one than they were to the other one, but...
John:
like this this may be the new mac mini in terms of like the product that never gets updated set inside the mac pro the mac mini used to be of like you know the product that was like oh we got a new mac mini probably won't be another more three years maybe that's the home pod now we'll see yeah i mean at this point like i'm just happy that they are still continuing this product line at all you know i yes my wish list resumed i wouldn't say they're continuing they resumed it they they they stopped i feel like they stopped and then they resumed right it's not there's there's definitely a gap there there's a gap
Marco:
Well, yes, and we don't necessarily know the reasons why they stopped it.
John:
If they're all breaking, that might have had something to do with it.
Marco:
Yeah, and they also stopped it in kind of early COVID days, and so it could have had to do with supply chain, because maybe the A8 they were manufacturing, maybe they couldn't get any more of those made.
Marco:
If you look at what chips Apple ships in their current product line, over the last 18 months or so, they have dramatically eliminated
Marco:
products that were using older chips.
Marco:
Most of their product line now is using the same very small set of very modern chips.
Marco:
Different levels of them, for sure.
Marco:
But if you look around, all the old stuff that was using old A12s or whatever, those are all gone from the lineup.
Marco:
They have systematically replaced all of that old stuff over the last 18 months or so.
Marco:
It could have had to do with chip supply issues.
Marco:
It could have had to do with the hardware failures.
Marco:
Whatever it was,
Marco:
We can't really necessarily know that when they killed the old HomePod that they were saying, well, that didn't work.
Marco:
Maybe it was really just like, we can't replace this yet, but we can't keep selling this one because of reason XYZ, so we'll just go without it for a little while.
John:
But even before they killed it, they weren't updating it.
John:
Like, it just kind of sat there.
John:
It sat there long enough for the ones in the field to start to fail due to, like, heat issues or components burning out, right?
John:
And then they stopped selling it.
John:
And so it was just – it definitely doesn't seem like – like, even when they came out with the mini, they weren't – you know, they didn't have a new version of it ready then.
John:
Like, it wasn't – it obviously wasn't part of their –
John:
grand plan for this product line until I feel like the mini was like, look, if the mini doesn't go anywhere, then we're just bailing on this whole thing.
John:
But I guess the mini was successful enough.
John:
They said, yeah, we should probably do the big one.
John:
It's so hard to tell from the outside with the timelines and these things, but it definitely doesn't look like a coordinated effort to say, well, you did the big one.
John:
We learned some lessons.
John:
Now we're going to try again.
John:
And what they tried again was with the mini.
John:
And then it seems like that was enough for them to go for the big one again.
John:
But there was definitely a period of time where they were not committed to the idea that the big HomePod would remain a product in a lineup and get updates on some regular interval.
John:
So I'm glad they have come back to it.
John:
But like I said, I'm a little bit disappointed that they've come back to it with basically the same thinking as before.
Marco:
Yeah, but again, I think, again, this is not a high-priority product line for Apple.
Marco:
So we don't want them to be too ambitious if they can't keep up.
Marco:
And again, this is setting the bar pretty low.
Marco:
This is going in with pretty low expectations, but it's also realistic.
Marco:
Apple is not very good at multitasking.
Marco:
Even as the company has gotten so much bigger over the last decade, they're still not good at multitasking and managing many different product lines sufficiently.
Marco:
So if this is what they can give us, I'll take this over abandonment.
Marco:
This is much better.
Marco:
And yeah, down the road, there are still some pretty significant holes in the HomePod lineup.
Marco:
What I would most like to see, some kind of HomePod port or HomePod amp kind of thing where you could have the HomePod functionality with maybe a microphone unit and then some kind of line output
Marco:
to be able to drive any speakers you want with a home pod like functionality leading the way that would be great and then secondly i would love some kind of portable battery powered home pods you could bring it out onto your deck or something that would be great too or you know and i understand you know those are relatively specialized use cases but like you know already like products exist to kind of hack that on now
John:
That's why you need to get a Rivian.
John:
It comes with one of those.
John:
I know.
Marco:
I currently have.
Marco:
There's some $30 Amazon battery base thing from some no-name company.
John:
Those party speakers.
John:
Someone on Twitter was talking about party speakers.
John:
That's a whole thing now.
John:
Yeah.
John:
They're not like the RGB festooned gaming PCs, but it's a similar vibe where they just take basically a big battery-powered speaker, but they make it look ridiculous with like chrome and shiny things and colors and vents and wings.
John:
It's just...
John:
It's a party speaker.
Marco:
That is actually a surprisingly big market, and I think Sony's doing really well there.
Marco:
Anyway, but if you look at the Amazon Echo series of products, they learned pretty early on that this was a thing people do.
Marco:
And so the Echo that I bought two years ago, the little ball one, which otherwise has been total garbage, and they kept failing, and it's a totally garbage product.
Marco:
But that product...
Marco:
comes with on the bottom of it a little tripod screw screw mount hole and little pogo pins and and other companies can make battery and they have made battery bases for it the product directly supports it with no hacks it literally screws into the tripod mount so it mounts itself to the bottom it powers it through those pogo pins like amazon designed the echo with this use case in mind for people to make these accessories and
Marco:
I have a similar thing for the HomePod Mini.
Marco:
You know, the HomePod Mini makes no effort to enable this.
Marco:
And so you have to like run the cable of the HomePod out the back into this thing and then loop it around, bunch it all up because it's like this fixed length cable.
Marco:
And then you have and then like it has to like wrap around the HomePod Mini with these big plastic like clamp things.
Marco:
And it dramatically reduces the sound quality because some part of how it's designed to resonate doesn't work well with this.
Marco:
And so it makes it sound like garbage, but it does work.
Marco:
And actually the HomePod mini is way better at this than the Amazon Alexa thing because the Alexa thing, when you pick it up and move it, it does not do well with like transitioning to a different Wi-Fi node.
Marco:
If you have like a multi-point Wi-Fi setup, the Echo just drops it and fails.
Marco:
And so you bring it like as soon as you bring it outside, if it switches to a new AP, you got to like reboot the Echo for it to work.
Marco:
Whereas the HomePod works perfectly.
Marco:
It, like, transitions between the Wi-Fi access points perfectly.
Marco:
It's fast.
Marco:
It's responsive.
Marco:
Like the HomePod Mini, I'm saying.
Marco:
Like, so the HomePod Mini is a great product for this.
Marco:
And Apple just makes no effort to enable it whatsoever.
Marco:
So, like, this is the kind of thing, like, if Apple wants to keep making the HomePod product line, keep developing it further, I would, again, I would love to have those two products.
Marco:
A battery-powered portable option that you could bring out onto your deck or whatever, your front yard, whatever it is.
Marco:
And also some kind of, like,
Marco:
home pod with a line out that you can connect your own speakers to because that way you know if you already have speakers that are good use them or if apple's you know if apple starts to make speakers that suck or you know if they if they have some part of their product line they're not filling very well that product helps helps fill those gaps kind of like the mac mini it's like you can fill in the gaps that you're not thinking of because they're they're not you know mass market enough but everyone has something like that you know
Marco:
So I would love to see those down the road.
Marco:
But for now, I am very, very happy that we have a new HomePod big.
Marco:
And I can't wait to get it.
Marco:
I'm not getting it until the first deliveries are February 3rd.
Marco:
So I'm not getting it for a few weeks.
Marco:
But, oh, man, I'm looking forward to it.
John:
I know this doesn't matter to you, but is the Echo actually waterproof?
John:
It doesn't matter to you.
John:
I don't use it in the rain.
John:
You know what I'm saying?
John:
For outdoor, those party speakers, not that all the party speakers are waterproof, but I feel like a battery-powered portable thing would probably have to be significantly more water-resistant, let's say, than any of the HomePods.
Marco:
frankly i'll tell you i've been using the home pod mini that way for you know maybe half a year see i told you it didn't matter it's been so right but i don't leave it out all the time like it's different from you know a camera's out there all the time a home pod mini i bring it out if we're like gonna be hanging out there and then i bring it inside afterwards um but but yeah it's the home and i'm telling the home pod mini in its stupid little battery thing
Marco:
It's so... Even in this terrible contraption from this cheapo Amazon brand that actually makes it sound worse than when it's not in it, it still sounds better than every portable sonar thing.
Marco:
Trust me, I've tried them all.
Marco:
It sounds better than all of those.
Marco:
It sounds better than every JBL thing I've seen.
Marco:
It sounds better than that little B&O thing that has a little leather handle on top.
Marco:
I've heard all these things, but...
Marco:
The HomePod Mini can beat them all if Apple chooses to address this market.
Marco:
They can literally just make a HomePod Mini with a battery base, and they would destroy this market.
Marco:
And I don't think they're going to do it.
Marco:
That's not really their style of thing to do, but I wish they would.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
I'm happy with what I have so far.
Marco:
I hope they continue to expand this line.
Marco:
And ultimately, I really, really hope that this new HomePod is as much more responsive with Siri as I think it'll be with this new chip.
Marco:
And look, we can get into Siri another day.
Marco:
Siri is still...
Marco:
comically bad compared to its competitors and that's a whole different thing but you know that's probably that's probably a whole different part of the company as well so i'll pick on them some other day but for now super happy with the home pod update uh i don't have it yet so you know but i don't think it's going to be bad in person i i think i think i'm going to be really happy with it when i get it
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Sofa, and the Lunchpail VC podcast.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at adp.fm slash join, and we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Casey:
Cause it was accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
John didn't do any research.
Casey:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Casey:
Cause it was accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-D-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A
Casey:
so uh just very quickly i wanted to give an update for something that i don't think anyone even realized because i don't think i talked about it but i ordered one of those belkin i don't even know the name of this thing and i'm gonna have to dig up the name and the link for the show notes but suffice to say the belkin doodad that you put on top of your studio display so the camera isn't garbage
Marco:
Oh, cool.
Marco:
Yeah, your phone sticks to it, and you can use your phone.
Casey:
Yep, that's exactly right.
Casey:
And I would do a demo.
Casey:
I have all the lights off because it's been forbidden for me to have the ceiling fan on while we record, and I'm too lazy to do the little yanking on the chain thing to turn the fan off and the light on.
Casey:
So the lights are off.
Casey:
So otherwise, I would give you two a demo of what I look like with the fancy new continuity camera setup.
Casey:
but this Belkin thing was like 30 or 40 bucks from Apple, something like that.
Casey:
There is a version for notebooks.
Casey:
That's not the one I'm talking about.
Casey:
The one I'm talking about is the version that goes on displays.
Casey:
The version for notebooks is $30.
Casey:
I don't have the link in front of me for the full version, but I think it was 40 bucks, which is kind of ridiculous.
Marco:
Yeah, it's at the bottom in the you might also like thing on that page.
Marco:
Oh, thank you.
Marco:
There you go.
Casey:
So yeah, it's okay.
Casey:
The instructions it came with were kind of useless, and when I plopped it on top of my display, it just wanted to fall over as soon as I put any weight on it, like had the phone on it.
Casey:
Eventually, I was able to deduce what they wanted me to do, but it's not one of those things where it clamps to the top of the display, which kind of makes sense, right?
Casey:
Because you don't want a lot of pressure up there, but it wasn't immediately obvious to me what it is I was supposed to do to get this thing to not flop around, but I was able to figure it out.
Casey:
And I now am using my studio display as a hub insofar as I have my last year's iPhone 13 Pro up there, and then it's connected via, you know, lightning to USB-C to the back of the studio display, really just for the purpose of power, because I think the video is transmitted over Wi-Fi or whatever anyway.
Casey:
But coincidentally, over the last 48 hours, I had a FaceTime call this morning with front of the show James Thompson and yesterday with Underscore, and I used the continuity camera and this Belkin doodad both times.
Casey:
And when you put it in normal mode,
Casey:
it works really, really well.
Casey:
So not center stage, not any of the portrait background blurring.
Casey:
The studio light or whatever they call it, that actually works pretty well.
Casey:
But I will say, as soon as you put on center stage, which I am a center stage apologist, I really like the feature in general, but the second you put on center stage, even with a one-year-old top-of-the-line iPhone, the image quality goes to garbage.
Casey:
It's just awful.
Casey:
And so, but if you leave it on, you know, the standard version, then it really does look quite good and way better than the studio display camera.
Casey:
Way, way, way better, which I know surprises nobody.
Casey:
But this is your apology camera, just like there was an apology mouse way back when.
Casey:
And I do like it.
Casey:
It kind of sucks that I have, you know, this one-year-old probably worth $800 or whatever iPhone up there that's now just going to live up there.
Casey:
and I had to buy this $40 doodad to do it, but it does work out really well.
Casey:
The only problem I do have, and maybe this is user error, but I very briefly tried to turn on desk view, and it was easily like eight inches above the surface of my desk.
Casey:
Now, as you recall, I do have a glass-topped desk, which I know everyone thinks is very weird, and honestly, I'd like to get a new desk at some point, but
Casey:
For whatever it is, you know, whatever the difference that may or may not make, maybe it wasn't detecting the desk surface because it's glass.
Casey:
I have no idea.
Casey:
I didn't think it was that smart.
Casey:
But one way or another, I tried to use desk mode and it was basically, you know, the area in front of my chest mode instead rather than the desktop.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
In general, I do like it.
Casey:
I would say if you have a need for this sort of thing, which if you're a studio display owner, you probably do, I give it one thumb up.
Casey:
It's not great.
Casey:
It's a little too expensive, but it's better than nothing, and it works.
Casey:
So there you go.
Marco:
A glowing review.
Casey:
Glowing, glowing review.