Too Much Apple in My Apple
Marco:
Pretend like I'm holding a $100 bill.
Casey:
I'm out.
Casey:
You're out of 100 bucks?
Marco:
I got the stupid ultra.
John:
Why?
John:
What brought you over the line?
John:
Is it everyone else has one and you don't?
John:
What happened was...
Casey:
Did it happen to you, Marco?
Casey:
Did it just happen to you?
Marco:
So I was running some errands.
Casey:
And then you found yourself in an Apple store somehow.
Casey:
You have no idea how.
Marco:
I literally had to kill time and I was in a mall.
Marco:
I was getting the tow...
Marco:
what is it the hook what what's the square hole that you can put stuff into on the back of a car like is it the toe hook it's not a hook what what is that thing called the hitch isn't it no the hitch is the ball thing that you put into the square hole what's the square hole called i should know this i understand the question you're asking and i don't know the answer anyway i was getting a square hole installed on my car and it took a few hours and so i had why were you doing that what are you putting into that square hole
Marco:
a shackle thing so I can pull or be pulled if I get stuck.
Casey:
You are so worried about this.
Casey:
This is huge Casey energy.
Casey:
You are so worried about this thing that you've spent inordinate amounts of money to prevent from ever happening.
Casey:
And now you're spending money
Marco:
more money no actually i negotiated as part of the deal when i bought it anyway what if he's really far down the beach and he's he needs a watch that can survive the rugged conditions two and a half miles from home so what happened was while they were installing the hole in my car i had like a few hours to kill in the area they gave me a loaner of some some much worse small thing i went to the mall because i had a couple errands to run and i went to the apple store and it was the first time i had seen the ultra in person
Marco:
Now, I did not think, oh my god, I have to have that.
Marco:
I also did not think, oh my god, that looks awesome.
Marco:
Then when I tried it on, I absolutely did not think, oh, this fits me great.
Marco:
Because none of those things are actually true, in my opinion.
Casey:
Yeah, just to very briefly interject, I was in an Apple store doing one of the returns we spoke about a few weeks ago.
Casey:
And I put an Ultra on my wrist for literally 10 seconds.
Casey:
And I immediately looked down.
Casey:
Maybe I did tell the story.
Casey:
I don't know if I did.
Casey:
But I immediately looked down and thought, oh, that's way too big.
Casey:
Now, Aaron was standing next to me at this point.
Casey:
She was like, I think you could pull it off if you wanted.
Casey:
And this is the conversation that I think you had had a few weeks before that in saying, if you believe it's not too big, it's fine.
Casey:
Because everyone else will think it's fine regardless.
Casey:
But I looked down and I was like, nope.
Casey:
Nope, nope, nope, nope.
Casey:
Not for me.
Casey:
So I totally hear you.
Casey:
And you and I are both on the teeny tiny wrist committee, right?
Casey:
Because you also have the smaller of the Apple Watch sizes.
Marco:
Yeah, I wear the 40 or 41, and I'm very happy with it.
Marco:
Like before the Series 4 redesign, I wore the bigger one, the 42, and it was fine, but I'm a little happier with the 40 and 41.
Marco:
Anyway, oh, and by the way, some real fan follow-up, everybody in the chat is pointing out that apparently the square hole that you put in the back of a car to tow things is called the receiver or the tow receiver or the hitch receiver.
Casey:
I'll give myself partial credit on that.
Marco:
Which makes sense.
Marco:
Receiver makes sense because it's a hole.
Marco:
So it receives whatever square object you're inserting into there.
Marco:
Anyway, so I'm at the Apple Store, and I try this thing on just out of curiosity's sake, and it is massive.
Marco:
And I don't really think it, you know, the look didn't do anything for me, and it definitely didn't fit me.
Marco:
However, I started using it.
Marco:
And, of course, I'm instantly pushing the action button alongside the crown every single time I push it because it's very difficult not to push those at the same time when you're first getting used to this thing.
Marco:
But what I noticed instantly was everything looks and feels extremely different compared to other Apple Watches because of a number of factors.
Marco:
Mainly that the screen is so large.
Marco:
Secondarily, because the screen is totally flat and doesn't have the little curved edges.
Marco:
And then, you know, tertiary that there's just, you know, the extra button and a little bit different ergonomics and everything.
Marco:
And so it's such a size difference that it's not quite it's not it isn't as severe as going from the iPhone to the iPad.
Marco:
But it's that kind of change where, like, it's a bigger enough size that you have to kind of rethink how you lay things out with.
Marco:
how you use the space what how big things should be where things should be on the device just poking around the os and the setting screens i realized oh i have to have one of these for my app design oh sure you do because and and i it didn't help that like the day before i had seen a screenshot of overcast running on it and i i'd seen it in the simulator and it was you know it looked weird but it was fine but i saw a screenshot of somebody actually doing it in use i'm like oh that looks bad
Marco:
Like, I can't just leave the layout the way it is.
Marco:
I have to actually customize it for the bigger screen because it just looks stupid.
Casey:
If only there was a simulator you could use to do this sort of work.
Marco:
Yes, but when you're doing design work on the Apple Watch, I know from previous... Like, I'll be coding up something, I'll do it in the simulator first, and then I'll run it on a device.
Marco:
I'm like, oh, that's not how I thought it would be.
Marco:
And you always have to do... So, anyway...
Marco:
it is so the screen is just so different it's such a different size it is not just the same thing but a little bit bigger like it's radically different and i knew first of all i knew from poking around the os apple has a lot more work to do to make the os work and feel right on this device and the watch face situation is is dire i would say on this on this device
Marco:
I'm not a huge fan of the general watch face situation on the Apple Watch as a whole, but on the Ultra in particular, it's dire.
Marco:
It's bad.
Marco:
But all this is to say, I knew instantly as soon as I handled it, oh, I have to do real design work on this thing.
Marco:
And so I ordered one that day.
Casey:
of course you did this surprises nobody and as much as i'm giving you a hard time like i do understand what you're saying and yes it is unquestionably again as much as i'm pulling your leg it's it's much better to have a physical device to do this sort of work on but uh yeah this is not surprising and uh i'm sorry i guess or congrats i'm not even sure what i'm supposed to say in this context what are you
John:
going to do with it?
John:
Besides it being a dev thing, do you think you're going to end up wearing it at all?
John:
Do you think someone else in your house is going to wear it?
John:
Is it going to be a very small iPad mini for Adam?
Marco:
I don't think we have much use for it in the house.
Marco:
All three of us wear the 41 size, so I don't think we have a ton of use for it within the house, but I'm going to wear it for a few days while I figure out the app design because I have to be familiar with the size to know what feels right.
Marco:
um but i don't like the way this looks on me um it is also long sleeve season uh starting up now and you know my my sleeve situation is such that they exist and therefore this is not good because as soon as you try to tuck this under a sleeve like you know it when you have a watch under a sleeve it's it's always awkward especially when you have those like the ribbed sleeves on the bottom of sweatshirts and stuff you never want a big watch in that situation it's it's it's awkward and
Marco:
And so, and this just makes everything like a thousand times worse.
Marco:
Maybe your Tesla could wear it.
John:
Yeah, there you go.
John:
The Defender's already got a watch.
John:
Your Tesla's jealous, you know.
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
It's high tech.
Marco:
Yeah, so even though I said I wasn't buying a watch this fall, I bought a G-Shock, this ridiculous thing, and a refurbished Series 6 for Adam.
Marco:
So here we are.
Marco:
your prince of tides g-shock still didn't get that reference no still didn't it is awesome though like i've been doing a lot of sand driving i love that g-shock it's fantastic for that purpose like i tried wearing it and it looks ridiculous uh but but i'm extremely happy with like the actual functionality of why i bought it to be this thing in the car it's it's awesome
Casey:
So as much as I'm, again, pulling your leg and giving you a hard time, have you found that that the truck is sufficient for sand driving?
Casey:
Like, is this hitch because you're genuinely worried that you're going to get stuck or maybe that you expect to get stuck?
Casey:
Or is it just like you're trying to do everything in your power to make sure this is never going to be a problem ever, ever, ever, ever?
Marco:
Mostly the latter, because I am not good at asking for help.
Marco:
And the idea that... Yes, I can confirm.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And the idea that I would be like one of the newbies who just got a permit and get stuck and have to call somebody for help...
Marco:
I know many people who would come help me.
Marco:
I'd be mortified, though.
Marco:
I want to avoid that, especially because if those people were not able to come out at that moment or help me, then what you're supposed to do is call 911 and explain to the Suffolk County Police where you are and the situation you're in, and they arrange for a $700 tow truck.
Marco:
oh i really don't want to do that for multiple reasons like that just sounds awful to me so um it's mainly because i have been told by everybody out here everyone gets stuck sometimes like every every single person who's driven out here for years they all say that everyone gets stuck sometimes
Marco:
And so not only do I kind of want to try to prove them wrong, like, maybe I won't get stuck.
Marco:
Let's see.
Marco:
But also, I want to be able to help other people if I pass somebody who is stuck.
Marco:
But ultimately, I have found, I think, since I have gone through the trouble of installing a tow hull in my car and have all these recovery boards...
Marco:
that's probably going to mean, kind of like when I bought a new snowblower and then it didn't snow for two years, it's probably going to mean I'm never going to use this stuff.
Marco:
And that'd be fine with me.
Marco:
I would gladly have made that trade-off to have not ever getting stuck.
Marco:
But I also think that, hmm, how do I put this?
Marco:
Some people are, they get bad information.
Marco:
And Long Islanders are really good at it.
Marco:
And so, the tips I have heard for driving on the sand here...
Marco:
oftentimes are very different from the from the tips that i hear from the community of australian sand driving off-roaders and they seem to know what they're doing a lot yeah i would trust the aussies yeah like it seems like driving on sand is a big thing down there
John:
But their sand is upside down.
John:
It's totally different.
Marco:
Yeah, it swirls the opposite direction.
Marco:
But anyway, it seems like the advice that they all give basically comes down to what you need really is ground clearance and low tire pressure.
Marco:
That's the secret to everything, according to them.
Marco:
So I lower my tire down to like 20, 22 PSI for most driving around here.
Marco:
And I know I could go lower if I really had to, if I got stuck.
Marco:
And
Marco:
it's been great no one else here lowers their tires that reliably or that far everyone's like driving around on 30 psi like yeah it's low no it's that's for off-roading that really is not very low from what i understand uh even 20 is not that low for off-roading from what i understand but anyway i think just having low tires plus good ground clearance plus a pretty seemingly great all-wheel drive system on the defender
Marco:
it's been amazing like i'm able to hop in and out of the deep tracks no problem like it's it's been glorious it's so easy the chances of me actually ever getting stuck i think might be lower than average simply because not only do i have a decent vehicle for it but i think more because i'm actually bringing my tire pressure down and no one else seems to do that they also tell me things here like oh yeah to get out just accelerate it's
Marco:
That's oftentimes the opposite of what you want to be doing.
Marco:
So, yeah, there's been a lot of information passed to me.
Marco:
And some of it's been very good, but far from all of it.
John:
If you ever do get stuck, just to remind you, you are obligated to take pictures and video of it because that's going to be awesome.
John:
You have plenty of time waiting around for someone to come and save you anyway, so you should just go around the car with the phone and show the situation that we need to see it.
John:
It needs to be documented.
Casey:
Honestly, to build on this, I don't know that I've ever FaceTimed with John or Marco, but I can tell you right now, if you don't get a
Casey:
three-way FaceTime going at this moment.
Casey:
I will never speak to you again.
Casey:
I will quit the show and you're all fired.
Casey:
We must have this happen.
Casey:
And listeners, I'm sorry, this is a perk of being on the show.
Casey:
You may never get to see this, but I want to see it.
Casey:
I want to be there virtually and watch this as it happens.
Casey:
But it probably won't, which is too bad.
Casey:
I mean, which is excellent.
Casey:
You know, none of us are particularly active on Reddit, but there is an ATP subreddit, which I don't even remember what it's called anymore.
Casey:
I should have thought this through.
Casey:
Wait, there is?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
I didn't create it, but I forget what it is, actually.
Casey:
I don't know if I've ever been there.
Casey:
I cruise it.
Casey:
Like, I'm subscribed.
Casey:
I'm such a noob Redditor.
Casey:
But anyways, there is an ATP Reddit that I look at.
Casey:
Is it ATP-FM, I think?
Yeah.
Casey:
I think that's it.
Casey:
ATPFM.
Casey:
I'm pretty sure that's right.
Casey:
Well, anyways, somebody set up a robot to post when shows go up.
Casey:
I had nothing to do with any of this, but I'll occasionally look at it.
Casey:
This is not an officially sanctioned thing.
Casey:
It's just occasionally I'll take a look.
Casey:
Well, anyways.
Casey:
Somebody commented on Reddit after the last episode, this is Yalom on Reddit, who said, this is with regard, I'm sorry, to AI images and AI image creation and stuff like that.
Casey:
And whether or not that's like, you know, stealing and whether that's art or not, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
So Yalom writes...
Casey:
I'm surprised I made it through the whole AI image generation segment without mentioning the last time technology completely bulldozed the art world.
Casey:
The bread and butter of the industry used to be portraiture.
Casey:
And those painters certainly realized what they were looking at the first time they saw a photograph.
Casey:
And maybe the first time that three of them have ever passed up the opportunity to talk about cameras, which is accurate.
Casey:
But that was a good point.
Casey:
And I don't remember any of us bringing that up.
Casey:
But yeah, portraits, I got to imagine, obviously, we weren't there.
Casey:
But I got to imagine portraits were a big deal way back when.
Casey:
And then suddenly photographs were a thing.
Casey:
And sorry, portrait artists, you were basically told tough noogies.
John:
They still paint portraits, just like they still have horses.
John:
A couple of people wrote in with similar points about photography.
John:
One of them was noting that after the invention of the camera and spreading throughout the world, you saw art go in different directions, less representative.
John:
I'm not sure if the timelines line up exactly, but certainly there was kind of an explosion in non-representative art.
John:
around about the time that photography started to come into development.
John:
So maybe there are some analogs there for AI art versus human-made art, as we'll call it, I guess.
Marco:
By the way, real-time follow-up, I used one of the AI art generators to generate an icon for the little tiny app I'm making for the sand drivers here.
Casey:
Oh, I was wondering what that was about.
Casey:
I didn't want to ask you publicly in case it was just kept close to the vest or anything.
Marco:
It's really simple.
Marco:
It's just like showing the Tide info and letting people report what the conditions are.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
I used the AI generator to generate an icon for this.
Marco:
And not only was I laughing my butt off the whole time.
Marco:
Here, I'll show you.
Marco:
So this was the first one that...
Marco:
that i generated i'll have to put these in the chapter art which made me laugh that looks like a wrangler my friend it's a it's a it's a wrangler driving into a wave that's not a good situation i would not recommend this it's that's why it's funny john that's the point of it's humor um and then what i eventually landed on so it's this is a white jeep i made it white oh that's that's pretty good driving like on the edge of the sand in the water so like one tire is in the water and they're definitely getting stuck
John:
i love how the ai image generators have i mean you don't have any text but they do have a big problem with text because they don't know what text is but also they have a problem with like understanding symmetry so look at the wheel on the jeep on the top and look at the headlight the right headlight or the headlight on the right hand side of the second one or the the mirrors are also wrong like the second one doesn't have a driver's side mirror
John:
Yeah, like it doesn't know or care that a wheel should be like radially symmetrical.
John:
And same thing with the headlights.
John:
There should be two circles that are the same.
John:
It's decided one of the headlights is going to have a big blob in the middle of it.
John:
And that wheel is going to be melted.
John:
And I feel like this, you know, people talk about machine learning as like ethics laundering or morality laundering.
John:
You can say, I didn't do it.
John:
The computer did it.
John:
This is kind of like artistic laundering where it's like, yeah, it's ugly, but I didn't do it.
John:
The computer did it.
John:
Because I feel like you could draw a better icon than both of these.
John:
It would take you longer than the 30 seconds it took to generate these, but they certainly need some help here.
Marco:
Yeah, but what was great about this was within a couple of minutes, I had gone through 20 or 30 different proposals that the AI had generated, and I found what I wanted the icon to basically be conceptually.
Marco:
And so now what I can do is take this one I like, the second one here, take this one and then go to an icon designer and say, hey, here's a concept.
Marco:
Can we make something based on this concept?
Marco:
And it saved – it gave me so many concepts to work with with no effort and no cost.
Marco:
That has tremendous value.
Marco:
And in the meantime now, while I wait to actually arrange that with an actual icon designer –
Marco:
I have a placeholder that I can at least like develop the app and have this on my screen, not have like, you know, the, just like the Apple crisscross, you know, default thing.
Marco:
Like it's, it's very, this, this technology I think has a huge amount of, of use for,
Marco:
That doesn't involve destroying artists.
Marco:
It's much more about being a part of the artistic process.
Marco:
And it might replace some work that is happening.
Marco:
But I think ultimately this is just going to be another tool in our lineup that artists use as part of their process of being human artists.
John:
You're going to keep that Jeep tilted so much?
John:
It looks like it's going to fall into the ocean.
John:
That's the point.
Marco:
That's why it's funny.
Casey:
No, the Jeep can absolutely handle that angle.
Casey:
I guarantee a Jeep can handle that angle.
John:
This is what your app is going to prevent, right?
John:
It's going to prevent you from not realizing it's high tide in a Jeep that's tilting over into the ocean.
Marco:
Yeah, but that's why it's funny.
Marco:
In both cases, it's like, wow, something has gone horribly wrong.
Marco:
That is pretty good stuff.
Casey:
All right, John, tell me about how awesome it is when you have to use a screen to open your glove box.
John:
I don't know what it is that has caused the entire internet to send, at least me, but probably all three of us, links to the Cadillac Lyric reviews showing that you opened the glove box with a touchscreen.
John:
But Marco can confirm to me, I'm pretty sure that's been the case on Tesla's, for the history of Tesla's.
John:
Is that right?
Marco:
I don't know about the Model 3, but on the Model S, there's a button.
Marco:
There's like three buttons in the whole car, and that's one of them.
Marco:
All right.
John:
Well, anyway, the model Tesla did it first, like so many things.
John:
And so I mean, I guess Cadillac is on their big PR campaign for their EV, but they are not the first car company to open the glove box via the touch screen.
John:
And they're, you know, in terms of the controls inside the Cadillac, is that
John:
It's called the Lyric, L-Y-R-I-C, maybe?
John:
Someone should look it up.
John:
Anyway, as for the controls inside that catalog, the Model 3 still is the champ in terms of not having physical controls anywhere.
John:
So, yeah, Tesla did it first.
John:
Thanks to everyone sending it.
John:
And just to reiterate, no, opening the glove box on touchscreen is not a good idea.
John:
Put a button or a handle on the glove box, please.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
So an internet friend of mine just sent me his video review of his brand new Model Y. And one of the things he points out, I'll put a link to it in the show notes, one of the things he points out is that you have to go into the screen and, you know, bloop, bloop, bloop in order to open the glove box.
Casey:
which I think is bananas.
Casey:
And that's Tesla for you.
Casey:
Aaron's car does not have a physical latch that you can operate, but it does have a physical button, which I also think is a bit ridiculous, but that's neither here nor there.
Casey:
And also, since we're talking about ridiculous things, I would just like to point out that whenever I get on my high horse, which is all too often, about how dumb Celsius is for ambient air temperature, because it is dumb, I'm always telling people, oh, you know, if you have to use a decimal point,
Casey:
then I think you've already kind of failed.
Casey:
And every Celsius aficionado, which is the entire world except America, is quick to point out, oh, no, we never use decimals.
Casey:
Maybe we'll use half degrees once in a while, maybe, but you never, ever, ever see that.
Casey:
Me, me, me.
Casey:
Well, you know what I'm looking at on this Tesla Model I video?
Casey:
This is an Australian, and you know what it says on his screen?
Casey:
20.0 degrees Celsius.
Casey:
0.0, people.
Casey:
I'm telling you.
Marco:
And it probably goes up in 0.5 increments, right?
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
I would assume so.
Casey:
I don't know, but I would assume so.
Casey:
Celsius people, come on.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Hey, we accidentally glossed over something last week in Ask ATP.
Casey:
David Comey had written, and I had kind of lumped this in with another question, and I think we glossed over it by accident.
Casey:
So David wrote, given John has a new TV and clearly has a number of input sources connected, what advice beyond his past blog posts would he suggest in 2022 about settings for color, et cetera?
Casey:
Here's the key.
Casey:
In particular, we have an Apple TV 4K and are curious about the match content option in the late tvOS and what's best to be set or unset on both ends of the HDMI cable.
John:
Yeah, I know we talked about this before, but I did want to actually answer the question since it was part of Ask ATP and we didn't get to it.
John:
I went off on a tangent about color calibration.
John:
But to reiterate, the match content setting, it's a weird name, but you do want that to be turned on on your Apple TV.
John:
What that's telling your Apple TV is to do a feature that Apple TV didn't always have.
John:
Send the content to the television and...
John:
in the format that the program is in.
John:
So if you're watching a movie and the movie is 24 frames per second, you're telling the Apple TV, send 24 frames per second to the television.
John:
And you may think, how could it ever do anything different?
John:
If the movie is 24 frames per second, of course the Apple TV is going to send 24 frames per second to my television.
John:
But it didn't do that for years and years.
John:
For years and years, the Apple TV worked like a little computer, like your Mac does or whatever.
John:
It had a fixed refresh rate.
John:
Whatever the refresh rate is on, you know, ignoring the
John:
What do they call it on the MacBook Pros?
John:
Do they call it Promotion?
John:
Anyway, ignoring Promotion, before the advent of Promotion and before the advent of different refresh rates for screens, computers would just pick a refresh rate.
John:
Like on your CRTs, you could pick whichever one you wanted.
John:
LCDs mostly are 60 hertz.
John:
And it just shows everything at 60 hertz.
John:
and that's what the apple tv was like it was a little computer that had video output running at 60 hertz all the time so if you watch a 24 frame per second movie it would output that as 60 hertz so it would show i don't know if the the math i can't do the math off my head but if the number of frames per second did not it was not an even multiple of or couldn't divide evenly into 60 frames per second sometimes it would show one frame for longer the other it was bad right it was the reason the apple tv wasn't a good video device for years
John:
Then eventually they added this feature called match content.
John:
And that says, we won't do that anymore.
John:
We will send whatever the video dictates.
John:
We'll send that to the television.
John:
You're watching a 30 frames per second television program.
John:
We'll send that to the TV.
John:
If you're watching 29.97, we'll send that whatever it is.
John:
what is it and pal it was like 25 frames per second or something i forget anyway that's called pal not pal pal pal i don't know i've never had to say it before but i've always assumed it was pal just like ours is i don't think well it's pal is not a mispronunciation it is just a reading of the letters in the in the abbreviation i pronounced the letters individually correctly anyway i don't know which one of those two things it is but yeah they have uh different uh frame rates for their television over there
John:
apparently it stands for a phase alternating line and is pronounced pal totally yeah anyway uh so you want that to be turned on
John:
The downside of that though, there is a downside, and I'm telling you to turn on even despite this downside, is that when you enable that, the Apple TV chooses to run its interface, like the little thing with all the little rectangles, it runs its interface at whatever refresh rate it decides to run it at.
John:
And then when you play something, it has to switch from whatever it was running the interface at to whatever the thing you're watching is.
John:
And they're probably not gonna be the same, because I think the interface always runs at like 60 Hertz.
John:
But pretty much nothing you're going to watch on Apple TV is 60 frames per second.
John:
And even if it was 30, it doesn't just like frame double it up to 60.
John:
It switches to 30 frames per second or 24 frames per second or whatever, which means there's like this blackout interval when you launch an app or when you start playing something or whatever.
John:
depending on how quickly your television setup responds to that change it can be kind of annoying you're like instead of having such a race where you just go bloop bloop bloop play and it starts playing it's bloop bloop bloop play black screen maybe your tilt your television pops up an overlay native to the television because it's like a lost signal on hdmi one oh wait no here it is and then it comes back that can be annoying
John:
The best way to fix that would be for television manufacturers and streaming box manufacturers to get together to make that switching way, way, way, way faster than it is now.
John:
Kind of like how when we got the ARM Max, like changing screen resolution or attaching external monitors were suddenly a bazillion times faster and we didn't realize how slow it was before until we saw how fast it could be.
John:
We need that moment to happen for televisions.
John:
But in the meantime...
John:
I'm going to recommend endure the stupid screen blackout thing, because what you want to see is each frame of the video you're watching displayed for an equal amount of time on your television.
John:
If your television supports, and most of the modern ones do, actually running at 24 frames per second or some multiple thereof, some even multiple thereof, and you're watching a 24 frames per second movie, that's what you want to happen.
John:
So turn on match content.
John:
And the same thing with the match HDR, SDR thing.
John:
Turn that on as well.
John:
I think it's two separate settings.
John:
Basically, what you're trying to tell the Apple TV is, hey, Apple TV, look at the video you're trying to send, find out what the properties of that video is, and then send that to the television.
John:
From that point, it's up to the television to correctly receive that and display it.
John:
Some televisions can be annoying about this, and in particular some receivers, my receiver, can be annoying about this where you have to convince them, oh, HDMI 1, turn on enhanced HDMI.
John:
They have these weird words that basically say, should I support 4K?
John:
Should I support 120 frames per second?
John:
Should I support HDR?
John:
And they come by default often turned off.
John:
And so you may be wondering why the Apple TV can't go into Dolby Vision mode or, you know, can't show something at the right frame rate and you don't understand why.
John:
Go to your television and or your receiver and make sure they are set up to use all the features that you just paid for.
John:
Like it boggles my mind that you pay for this fancy, you know, television or receiver with all these features and they default to like a really safe SDR, non-4K, usually not non-4K, but...
John:
They default to dumb settings sometimes.
John:
So that's what you want on both ends.
John:
You want Apple TV to match content in both frame rate and HDR, SDR.
John:
And you want on the television and receiver end to have all the bells and whistles turned on.
Casey:
Tell me about Mac window management and stage manager, please.
John:
We talked a lot about Mac window management on the last episode, and I wanted to make a point about stage manager that we've talked about a few times before.
John:
I think when we originally covered stage manager, I noted that on the Mac, it makes a lot more sense to me than it does on the iPad.
John:
And related to Mac window management, even though Ventura is not out yet, I think stage manager,
John:
will appeal to a lot of people, in particular people who like the idea of spaces, but need a better visual representation.
John:
Because Stage Manager is kind of like spaces on a single screen where you've got these icons along the side, although you can't turn them off if you don't want them there, that are groups of windows, and you can switch between those groups of windows.
John:
And unlike on the iPad, setting aside the stability things, unlike on the iPad, there's not a lot of weird limitations.
John:
You can't just have, you know, it's not like, oh, you can only have four windows in each thing and you can't position the windows.
John:
It just works like regular Mac windows.
John:
You can move them anywhere you want.
John:
You can move them, drag them easily between groups because you have like a mouse cursor and everything.
John:
It's just very sensible.
John:
And if this appeals to you, if you think in terms of groups of windows but don't want to think in terms of spaces where you're swishing from side to side from one set of things to another...
John:
uh try stage manager when it comes out immature it may appeal to you there's still the weirdness of like well what happens when i make a new window what happens when i unminimize from the dock does it go back to the space it came from or does it unminimize into the space i'm looking at right now not space whatever the hell they're called in stage manager i have no idea what i'm glad i don't have to write a review of this because clumps yeah what the heck is what do you call that what is the nomenclature for
John:
a blob of stage manager thingies that's it someone writing their venture review will have to figure this out when they describe it but um try it even it's it's a it's a nice hybrid of a bunch of different things that we had of course it's yet another way to manage windows on the mac as if we didn't already have enough uh but hey they threw another one in and assuming it doesn't crash your mac or do weird buggy stuff i think a lot of people will find it very appealing so give it a try
Casey:
And you have a new iPhone case, John?
John:
I do.
John:
Finally got this.
John:
The, uh, the tyranny of the squeaky clear case is over.
John:
The saga.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I got, uh, my first of two black leather bare bottom iPhone cases that I order.
John:
This is the Ryan London one.
John:
They won the shipping race.
John:
They came here first and,
John:
uh i was kind of half afraid that when i would put it on it would squeak because i would like it's it's the black uh you know the black dlc coating on the stainless steel that's what's causing the squeaking error but no no it just it's a normal case you put it on does not move does not squeak does not creak fits perfectly it's fine
John:
um the john syracuse review yeah it's the case itself it has one little stamping thing on the on like the lower left when i'm looking at it edge uh but it's not a place that i really feel the back is entirely unmarked so that's nice no logos no anything like that they did a really good job with the
John:
volcano, blister, mound, I don't know, thing around the camera mesa, right?
John:
Because the Apple clear case has just a wall, right?
John:
And this has kind of a gradual, smooth thing, and they did a good job of, it's like, it's black, so it's slimming, and the little mound or taper also minimizes the gargantuan thing.
John:
But I have to say, I think I mentioned this when I was talking about the clear case, I was surprised that I was using the wall around the camera mesa, right?
John:
to rest my finger on kind of like a very tiny pop socket thing.
John:
Now it's not there anymore.
John:
Now it's a little slanty leather thing and I can't use it to rest my finger on it anymore.
John:
I'm sure I'll get over it, but it's like, it's amazing how I formed that habit in only a few short weeks and now I have to change it up.
John:
But the good thing is the whole rest of the case is leather and will get grippier over time and is already pretty grippy.
John:
Um,
John:
It doesn't do the thing that I wanted to do with the buttons.
John:
I know this.
John:
The bull strap case is exactly the same.
John:
The buttons are not recessed and a little divot.
John:
They are instead poking out of a giant mound.
John:
So not only are they not, you know, sunken in, but they're actually they start coming out from a lump that's already there.
John:
They feel good.
John:
They work well, but they are sticking out more than I wanted.
John:
I mean, you can't have everything.
John:
The case itself is also a little bit thicker than I expected.
John:
I mean, it's just plastic wrapped in leather, so it's not like it's thick thick.
John:
There's no other stuff in there.
John:
There's no other additional padding.
John:
But maybe the leather is thicker or whatever, but it feels a little bit thicker than my extremely cheap Olex R iPhone 12 Pro case, which is currently on sale for $5.50.
John:
And it's also ostensibly leather.
John:
But yeah, I'm happy to have a leather case on my phone.
John:
I'm getting used to the little mound volcano thing.
John:
It is, you know, the thickness does have ramifications.
John:
Like, it looks a little bit like...
John:
i don't know how to describe it it looks like it's wrapped in leather i know it is wrapped in leather but it looks like it's wrapped in leather rather than like being the apple cases often look like they're just made of leather this looks like a case that is wrapped in leather if that makes any sense so it is a little bit thicker and chunkier but it also feels better and it's cushier and is definitely nicer than the olexar case in terms of leather quality so
John:
Uh, I'll let you know when the bull strap case gets here.
John:
Uh, I probably won't even swap it on if it is not significantly different because I'm perfectly happy with this one the way it is.
John:
Um, but I'm just happy to get that clear case off there on the mag safe ring seems to work fine.
John:
So I give the Ryan London case, uh, tentative thumbs up.
Casey:
John, remind me, do you use MagSafe anywhere?
Casey:
You said you do in your car.
Casey:
Is there anywhere else that you'd use MagSafe?
Casey:
Like, for example, the battery pack, which is, as we've discussed many times, hilariously overpriced, but actually quite nice.
Casey:
Do you use that or MagSafe charging or anything like that?
John:
I do have a MagSafe puck on my nightstand, but I don't put my phone on it.
John:
I put my AirPods on it.
John:
Okay.
John:
Because I'm just so used to plugging in my phone.
John:
We do have the little Apple battery pack thing, but my wife uses that.
John:
I don't use it.
John:
And like I said before, because I have the MagSafe charger in my car,
John:
Like I was starting to feel bad for my phone.
John:
Like I felt like I was abusing the battery because it would never go down below like 95% during the course of the entire day.
John:
And I feel like I should, I'm intentionally not charging my phone times when I used to.
John:
Like when I'm making dinner, I would listen to podcasts while I'm making dinner or whatever.
John:
And I would plug in my phone.
John:
My phone would be in the other room plugged in and I just have my AirPods in, right?
John:
Bluetooth range is fine.
John:
And I would plug it in so it would charge.
John:
Now I'm intentionally not doing that because I want my phone to go below 50%.
John:
because i want it's better for the battery for it to go below 50 so i don't use the battery pack um i don't use any other magsafe charging it's just the cars because now we have the little magsafe mounts in both cars so no matter which car i'm driving i just slap it on there and they both charge while we're driving so that's it for me and magsafe that's another thing i'm interested in seeing if i'm going to get like a circle worn into the back of the phone because obviously with the clear plastic one you it's not really it's already got a circle you can see anyway and it's pretty durable both leather i imagine i will slowly wear in kind of a circle from uh
John:
slapping it on the thing but we'll see
Casey:
And then we should briefly mention, Marco, if you need a repair on one of your army of original HomePods, listener Timo Bruck wrote in, since you mentioned original HomePod failures on the show recently, I wanted to let you know about Nick's Fix, who will fix them for $60 plus shipping.
Casey:
If you want to watch, he live streams the repair on YouTube.
Casey:
For my HomePod, the issue was a shorted diode, but he lists other common failures on his website.
Casey:
And if you click through to look at this...
Casey:
Oh, there's a lot of common failures.
Casey:
There's a lot of options there, which is kind of sad.
Casey:
But anyways, Timo writes, if you want to do it yourself, he's got a tutorial on YouTube, which is like 30, 40 minutes long or something like that.
Casey:
But we'll link both of these in the show notes.
Casey:
The common issues list, man, it's something else.
John:
That's weird.
John:
Don't you think it's weird?
John:
It's not as if Apple doesn't have a lot of experience building electronics, right?
John:
You would expect something like this if Apple made, say, a car.
John:
They don't have a lot of experience making it, but they make literal millions of electronic devices, and for some reason, this stupid big HomePod that apparently didn't sell very well, so how many of them they even made?
John:
It's not a complicated device.
John:
It's not expected to go underwater.
John:
People don't put it in their backpacks.
John:
And yet they can't survive more than like five years without what you would think would be like rookie mistake things of, you know, diodes burning out or, you know, amplifiers being driven to like whatever these problems are.
John:
They seem like problems that Apple in particular should not be making with a product.
John:
And I don't quite understand how it happened.
John:
I mean, maybe the type of things that happen all the time and they just fix them in revision two and revision three.
John:
And just because there was no revision two or three, they never got fixed.
John:
It's really an anomaly in the history of Apple stuff.
John:
I can't remember any other device they've made that has sort of such a seemingly low degree of difficulty in terms of electronics, like, you know, the basic electronics stuff.
John:
You know, it's not super high wattage CPU.
John:
It's not super fast.
John:
It's not cutting edge.
John:
Again, it sits on a counter in an air conditioned space.
John:
It doesn't, you know, it doesn't go out into the world.
John:
It's not an Apple watch.
John:
It doesn't go into backpacks and they just can't stay alive.
Marco:
Back when the HomePod was being developed, we heard that it was just a whole bunch of changes and the project kept getting restarted or changed around or refocused and restaffed.
Marco:
It seemed like the HomePod project was a mess to get out the door.
Marco:
It makes me so sad because, again, it's a great product in many ways, not in all ways, but it's a great product in many ways.
Marco:
And yeah, it does seem really unfortunate that there are so many actual physical flaws with its design.
Marco:
That being said, my bigger surprise, this came across my radar last time we talked about them months ago.
Marco:
My biggest surprise is that
Marco:
there is anybody out there who actually loves HomePods enough to do these repairs.
Marco:
And there's people out there willing to go have these done.
Marco:
That was a happy surprise to learn about.
Marco:
But unfortunately, my problems with the HomePods, I don't think fit into any of these categories of the common physical failures.
Marco:
I suspect mine are just both software-related and also them just kind of generally flaking out, which is hard to pin down.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
We are hearing a lot of rumblings these days on and off, but this has flared up again recently about how Apple is really cranking up their interest in doing advertising all over the place.
Casey:
And most recently, this has come up with regards to TV, but we'll get there in a minute.
Casey:
But over the summer...
Casey:
There was a post on 9to5Mac about how the App Store will be adding more search ads.
Casey:
So reading from this post, the new advertising placements in the App Store will allow developers to place ads outside of the search tab and search results.
Casey:
First and foremost, there's a new advertising slot coming to the Today homepage of the App Store.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
This spot is located at the very bottom of the product page beneath the banner section that shows the other apps by that developer.
Casey:
Developers won't be able to target a specific application when bidding for product page ad placement.
Casey:
For instance, Twitter wouldn't be able to target tweet bots specifically.
Casey:
The ads, however, would be relevant for each of the product pages.
Casey:
This means you could and probably will see ads for direct competitors on app pages.
Casey:
I, ew, I don't like it.
Marco:
So this, oh, I have so many thoughts about this.
Marco:
I mean, so first of all, I have bought a lot of search ads over the last, what has been about three or four years they've existed.
Marco:
Something like that.
Marco:
Whatever it's been, I mean, I have bought a lot of them.
Marco:
I have spent a really disgusting amount of money on search ads.
Marco:
And it's for the simple fact that
Marco:
All of the low-hanging fruit of easy-to-get people, well, I got them already.
Marco:
So now I have to get the harder-to-get people if I want my business to maintain and grow its user base.
Marco:
And so I started buying search ads when they came out, and I've at various times paid...
Marco:
reasonable amounts and various times when i wasn't paying attention paid unreasonable amounts um and a number of i think i have a number of takeaways overall like number one i unfortunately see search ads as a necessary thing in in today's app store environment like if you if you want people to find your app if you want to grow your user base even for free apps you got to do search ads um
Marco:
And whatever Apple says about the value of the App Store in terms of discoverability that they are providing, that was more true in the very distant past.
Marco:
Recently, the App Store is just a giant search engine, and if you want to rank highly, you have to play games.
Marco:
And those games range from, you know, just being good, which is that helps.
Marco:
But also you got to play games like buying search ads or keyword spamming or doing unscrupulous things that I don't that I don't and won't do.
Marco:
And so I view a lot of this stuff as the necessary evil that it is.
Marco:
A lot of this is within Apple's control to make better, though, and they just don't.
Marco:
The product page thing that you just mentioned, Casey, this is the new thing.
Marco:
They've been adding new ad units over the last few months.
Marco:
They first, a while back, maybe six months ago now, they added a unit where if you go to the search box, before you've even typed anything in, there's an ad unit that shows right below it.
Marco:
And Apple tries to use their ranking system or intelligence or whatever they call it to appropriately place personalized ads in that spot.
Marco:
So I thought, well, let me try it.
Marco:
So I created a campaign to use that spot.
Marco:
I gave it, I forget what, maybe a few hundred dollars, just to try it out, to see what can I get for this.
Marco:
It burned through the money so comically fast, and I got almost no installs from it.
Marco:
It was terribly targeted.
Marco:
Whatever they were doing to target that, and they gave you very little control over it, it was awful.
Marco:
It was just setting money on fire.
Marco:
So that was fun.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
In the regular search ads that I've been using for years, the relevance algorithms are still comically bad.
Marco:
And you don't have to trust developers to know that Apple's App Store relevance algorithms are terrible.
Marco:
Just search for any keyword in the app store, and you'll see for yourself that half the results are really poorly matched to that keyword, that the rankings of things that you think should be higher are not, and they're beaten out by apps that kind of play the scam system better.
Marco:
And, you know, see for yourself, you'll see like the App Store search and relevance and ranking algorithms are still extremely like web 1.0, rudimentary, very simplistic, not having learned any lessons from the web, basically.
Marco:
It's like searching Yahoo in 1997.
Marco:
It's that level of sophistication.
Marco:
When Google came around and made everything better with PageRank and all these fraud detection algorithms and they stopped using keyword stuffing as a thing, Apple seems to have learned none of those lessons and the App Store search and relevance algorithms are really rudimentary.
Marco:
It's like CompSci 101.
Marco:
I've written search engines that are better than the App Store search engine and that's not saying much because it's never been my full-time job.
Marco:
So the ranking algorithms are terrible when they do things like show something on the product page, but you can't buy a certain product page specifically.
Marco:
You can just say, put my app on relevant product pages.
Marco:
What that tells me is that's also going to probably be setting money on fire.
Marco:
Now, am I going to try it?
Marco:
Of course.
Marco:
That's what we have to do as developers.
Marco:
Sure, I'm going to try it.
Marco:
I'll probably set a few hundred dollars to a thousand dollars on fire just trying that out.
Marco:
That's part of the business.
Marco:
You try buying ads.
Marco:
I have burned more money on less effective ads before, so I'm going to try it, but I have little hope for it.
Marco:
And it seems like what Apple is doing is just gradually increasing the ad load in many places around the App Store and the iPhone.
Marco:
And it's not hard to see why they're doing this.
Marco:
the heavily growing part of the company, when the hardware seems to be mostly, you know, kind of mature slash stagnant, the growing parts of the company largely are, quote, services.
Marco:
Services is a wonderful euphemism for what's actually going on.
Marco:
What services seems to be largely comprised of, composed of, I always get those wrong, is app store revenue.
Marco:
That's a huge chunk of it.
Marco:
App store revenue is itself a huge chunk of the 30% cut and everything, but also search ads.
Marco:
And this is a massive business.
Marco:
This is Facebook has made a ton of money in app install ads over the years.
Marco:
Twitter has made some money, whatever they were capable of figuring out through all their crappy leadership with app install ads.
Marco:
App install ads are a really big deal and they make a ton of money for whoever's doing them.
Marco:
And Apple has put themselves in the position to make the most money doing it while also kneecapping everybody else who was doing it.
Marco:
So yeah, good for Apple.
Marco:
So what this means is that app installers, they're a huge deal, but Apple has huge incentives to keep tightening the screws on the App Store, to not give up a dime that actually matters, and to not only not lighten up on the fees and stuff, but to keep adding more ways in which we as developers need to be paying them more money.
Marco:
Because that's a huge growth area of their business when they're running out of huge growth areas in their business.
Marco:
So this is only going to continue.
Marco:
There is no doubt in my mind, this is going to keep happening.
Marco:
They're going to keep adding more and more ads around the phone and more and more ads specifically around the app store.
Marco:
whether it's in-product pages.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
Maybe when you launch an app, they'll put up a little sheet sometimes saying, hey, maybe you want to try XYZ TweetBot instead.
Marco:
They're going to keep doing this crap because this is the business they are now in.
Marco:
Apple is now an ad company, and they make a ton of money in a very important growth area via extraction from app developers.
Marco:
So that's what this is.
Marco:
I hate this is what it's become.
Marco:
However, this is the reality of the business.
Marco:
This is what it has become.
Marco:
And they're going to keep making really crappy ad units that have really crappy search relevance algorithms.
Marco:
And I'm going to keep spending a whole bunch of money on them because I have to.
Casey:
How do you really feel?
Casey:
You know, I recently read, after Steve, the, what was it, Trip Binkle?
Casey:
I forget the guy's name.
Casey:
It was a great name.
Casey:
Anyway, the book I had mixed feelings about.
Casey:
I really encourage you, if you are an Upgrade Plus member, I'm pretty sure that it was discussed on the October 3rd episode in the Upgrade Plus segment, and I think I landed between Mike and Jason.
Casey:
Jason seemed to really dislike it, and Mike seemed to really like it, and I was kind of in the middle of it.
Casey:
But one of the theses of the book was that all Tim Cook cares about is money and business-y things, and he ruins everything.
Casey:
And I think that that's not necessarily accurate.
Casey:
But if you are to take it as accurate, I think this is one of those ways where, you know, Apple needs to show growth, like you were saying, Marco, and it seems that this is an easy way for them to get growth without putting a whole heck of a lot of effort in.
Casey:
And
Casey:
from a business perspective i think this makes a ton of sense and i think it's smart from a user perspective i think it's super gross and i don't like it at all because in a in a world where you know so much of our lives are inundated by ads including this very program if you don't happen to be an atp uh member by the way atp.fm slash join uh but you know we are sponsored this week by atp membership
Casey:
Right?
Casey:
No, I mean, obviously, we try, genuinely, we try to do our best to make sure that we only present ads that we think will be genuinely relevant to the people that listen to the show.
Marco:
Have you tried listening to Upgrade?
Marco:
Cortex?
Casey:
Connected?
Casey:
So, in any case, it's just, it's not a great look for Apple, which is this thing that seems to be resisting, you know, just cranking out dollar bills by way of advertising.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And instead is trying to crank out dollar bills by making good products.
Casey:
And now it seems to be falling and allowing itself to be overcome by the lure of the almighty ad dollar.
Casey:
It's just a bummer.
Casey:
I feel like one of the things that I love about Apple TV+, as an example, is that I'm not getting interrupted after the very beginning.
Casey:
And this is what's been great about Netflix until soon when it starts having an ad tier.
Casey:
But it's one of the great things about a lot of these services.
Casey:
And now we're coming back around to let's put ads everywhere.
Casey:
And it just stinks.
Casey:
And I feel like I've always perceived Apple as being better than this, which is probably, I don't know if ignorant is the right word, but probably wishful thinking on my part.
Casey:
But I completely concur, Marco.
Casey:
Like, there's no way that this faucet is going to be turned back off.
Casey:
And if anything, it's going to be opened even wider with time.
Casey:
And it's just, I don't care for it.
Casey:
I wish it was different.
Marco:
And to be clear also, like,
Marco:
There is value in App Store search ads.
Marco:
Like I was just saying basically, yeah, it sucks that we have to do it.
Marco:
But the reality is, there is so many apps out there that again, as developers, you kind of do have to do stuff like this.
Marco:
Like, you know, if you're lucky, you can get away with not having, you know, paid promotion of your app.
Marco:
But even then, that only lasts for maybe if you have a good launch, great.
Marco:
Then you'll have – if the blogs write you up and you get press or you get some little bit of traction, that's great.
Marco:
But you're still at some point going to have to go to paid promotion if you want growth.
Marco:
That's just what happens.
Marco:
Trust me.
Marco:
I've been on this ride before.
Marco:
This is what happens to everybody at some point.
Marco:
Whether it's worth it or not, that's a different story.
Marco:
It's hard to make work, really.
Marco:
And again, I've done a lot of different paid promotion, and it definitely has not all been worth it.
Marco:
In fact, I would say only a very minuscule part of it has been worth it.
Marco:
But again, you don't know, the famous saying, you don't know which half of your ad dollars are working until you've spent them, and even then, not always.
Marco:
But anyway, if the search ad system was better, like if it actually had like better ranking, better relevance matching, just in general, if it was less dumb about about what ads it chose to show and when and how I would actually like it.
Marco:
As a developer and theoretically even as a user, it could occasionally help.
Marco:
But the way it is now, it just reeks of Apple's crappy mediocrity when they don't have to compete because of the way the App Store is.
Marco:
And of all the issues and attitudes that come up therein,
Marco:
App Store search ads suck because they're really half-assed.
Marco:
That's why, like, Apple does a terrible job of search ranking and relevancy, and all of us are burning money unnecessarily.
Marco:
Like, God, you wouldn't believe, like, what they think Overcast is sometimes.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
it's not hard okay but because it's such a like you know sealed box you can't see what they're doing with their relevancy and you only have like very little control like you know there's this whole interface i do the advanced login there's this whole thing where you can like set certain keywords you can set them as exact or not exact you can set the negative keywords they don't match this don't match broad broadly this or exactly this and there's all sorts of things you can do there but
Marco:
the like the basic relevance you're you end up just cleaning up after their mistakes so often with like all right no even though the llc name is overcast radio llc okay don't match me against radio apps okay fine well then why why are you matching me against free music downloader apps i'm
Marco:
I can kind of see, you know, it's a podcast.
Marco:
Okay, well, let's turn that off.
Marco:
Oh, wait, now here's all these apps that literally just like exist to rip off Spotify to like download Spotify songs past the DRM or whatever.
Marco:
Why am I being rant against those?
Marco:
Oh, it's considered a news app.
Marco:
So I'm being rant against police scanners.
Marco:
What?
Marco:
And this is what using search ads is.
Marco:
It's a constant battle of going through what they think your app is and what they think it's relevant to and just saying, not that, not that, not that, not that.
Marco:
Any of these crazy things that Google's relevance algorithms that are actually good would never in a million years guess that you were relevant to XYZ, but Apple's algorithms are crap.
Marco:
And so what that results in is...
Marco:
Not only is the experience crappy for users because they're getting ads that don't make sense, but then the experience for developers is we're not finding customers we could find and we're paying too much for it.
Marco:
Because the worse ads are targeted, the more you pay as the advertiser to eventually reach the right people.
Marco:
So it's just the whole system.
Marco:
It's a crappy system poorly implemented to do something that benefits mostly just Apple.
Marco:
And if they did a better job of it, it could be a lot better and could benefit a lot more people.
Marco:
But it's just such a crappy, mediocre system the way they've done it.
Marco:
And they have seemingly neither the will nor, frankly, the ability to make it any better.
Casey:
John, you collected some quotes.
John:
Yeah, this is the sort of snarky, cynical take from a few people in our community that I thought was good.
John:
This is from Paul Haddad.
John:
He's the TweetBot person, right?
John:
Mm-hmm.
John:
He says, coming next year, download ads.
John:
Instead of downloading the app that you want, the App Store will randomly download the highest bidding app.
LAUGHTER
John:
So that's the cynical take there of like, what will Apple not take money for?
John:
Because in some respects, taking money for advertising, search advertising is trading off on the user experience.
John:
Now, like Morgan said, sometimes not always because advertising can be useful to people.
John:
You may be looking for an app and you don't know what you're looking for.
John:
So you search for something and then one of the ads is actually relevant.
John:
If the algorithm actually works for once, you're like, oh,
John:
maybe i'll look at that app so there is some user benefit that's basically what instagram is it's a giant shopping app that occasionally you can see pictures of your friends in right and so there is some upside to that to users but there's an awful lot of downside which is why so many things including our podcast allow people to pay more money to not see ads because at a certain point it just gets annoying so how far will they go well you know they're putting ads for other
John:
supposedly relevant products on the actual product page you drill all the way down to the overcast page and then there's other things advertised there so maybe would they allow a different app to be downloaded randomly because you know again this the way they make money this is let's have an auction who wants their app to be downloaded one out of every a thousand times that twitter is downloaded right so bid against that tweet bot maybe you'll get downloaded by accident and the user will hate you
John:
All right.
John:
Sebastian DeWitt says, Apple shouldn't get into the ad business.
John:
Pushing ads in their platform opposes their goals and core values and will only erode user trust.
John:
Are the relatively minor profits worth the price of bad experience and lost goodwill?
John:
I don't think the profits are minor.
Marco:
I mean, that's one problem with this statement here.
Marco:
Yeah, that's the thing.
Marco:
It's a lot of money.
John:
yeah i mean we don't know exactly because they don't break it down to that way but there is large potential upside and they're already potentially making a lot of money on that so it's not minor but this gets to what a lot of people feel like they're like i this doesn't feel like a premium experience that it goes against apple's quote unquote core values like the user experience above everything else a premium experience that you pay more money for a premium experience doesn't tend to have as many ads or any ads right uh
John:
So I definitely feel that.
John:
And here's what MJ Sai said.
John:
Your core values are what you do on an ongoing basis, not the talking points that you broadcast or what you did 20 years ago under different leadership.
John:
This is the cynical take of saying Apple constantly get up on stage saying here are our values and we value this and we value user experience and we respect the user and we have the whole privacy angle and all these core values.
John:
And it's like you can say that all you want.
John:
But your actual values are what you do, right?
John:
And not what you did 20 years ago under different leadership is implying that, you know, different leadership, maybe Steve Jobs.
John:
Steve Jobs was kind of annoyed by the same things that the users that we just read the quotes from are annoyed by and would not want his company to do something that annoys him.
John:
Whereas Tim Cook either has a higher tolerance for annoyance or his...
John:
desire to be a successful company and be a success as a CEO overrides the annoyance that he might feel dealing with this.
John:
And that gets to the larger point about search ads and advertising and stuff like that.
John:
The reason it is inescapable is unfortunate for people like the people I just quoted and us on this program who don't like ads.
John:
Most people have determined over years and years and years
John:
that they will gladly watch ads in exchange for paying less money.
John:
It's not like they're suffering under the yoke of ads.
John:
When given the choice to do something free with ads, people will take that choice.
John:
Most people will take that choice.
John:
And it's not even because they don't have the money or couldn't pay for it.
John:
They just can't be bothered to pay the $1.99 to get rid of the ad banner at the bottom of their solitaire game.
John:
They'll have that stupid ad banner there rotating and burning their phone's battery for a literal decade and never pay the $1.99 to get rid of the ad.
John:
That's the choice people make.
John:
It's been made in every medium, radio, television.
John:
Yes, there's always been things that you can pay for that have less or no ads or fewer ads.
John:
But the vast majority of people go, I'll just take the cheap one with the ads.
John:
It's one of the reasons like Amazon made the Kindle with special offers, right?
John:
With ads in it.
John:
If people can pay less for a Kindle, like, whatever, I'll just ignore the ads.
John:
It's not a big deal.
John:
I'm not saying everybody loves ads or that they're the ultimate evil, but I'm just saying like they have utility for, you know, people with products reaching customers and customers writ large have decided, yeah,
John:
We'll tolerate ads.
John:
I'll tolerate ads if they help me pay for the newspaper.
John:
My newspaper will only be 25 cents because the advertisers pay for everything.
John:
And sometimes when I want the classifieds, it's nice that the ads are in there, right?
John:
The human population will accept ads.
John:
in exchange for hopefully some amount of money not being, you know, some amount of cost not being passed on to them.
John:
That's why it's basically unavoidable, especially as Apple slowly removes the ability of other people to do effective, you know, install-based ads where they can determine with 100% certainty that you ran this ad and this number of people installed your app because of it and we're charging you this much.
John:
And, you know, like this sort of,
John:
direct connection between you pay for advertising and you can see exactly how effective it is apple has been slowly breaking that uh and so it's leaving them as the not the only advertiser for app vendors but the best one the most powerful one because they they own the platform they have access to all the information and they can choose how much they want to expose to people how much privacy they want to preserve so on and so forth but it means also that
John:
As they edge other people out, they have to fulfill the role of advertiser.
John:
Because if they edged everybody out and said, yeah, but we're also not going to do any ads, that wouldn't benefit the market for apps on the phone.
John:
Because some users, again, not that they want to see ads, but some users want to make that tradeoff of seeing ads in exchange for not paying for things.
John:
And also...
John:
People with products want to get them in front of customers, potential customers.
John:
And if Apple refused their money and said, no, no, no, we're not going to run an ad platform.
John:
You can't run any ads in the app store at all.
John:
Oh, and by the way, Facebook, we're not letting you run effective ads anymore for app installs.
John:
Like, that would be not good for the overall market.
John:
So...
John:
We think of it as a quote unquote necessary evil, but I think it's just a natural part of any market that advertising is a thing that has value to the extent that the market is weirdly shaped because the platform owner has a stranglehold on it.
John:
That causes ads to be more expensive than they should be because Marco talking about how his ads, you know, how the relevance algorithms are crappy or whatever in a more efficient market.
John:
those ads would become cheaper because they're crappy.
John:
But when the only game in town is Apple, they don't become that much cheaper.
John:
I mean, I suppose all the people buying the ads say, I'm not going to bother buying the ads.
John:
But when it's the only game in town, people just keep end up coming back to us.
John:
Well, maybe I'll try this.
John:
And so people end up, you know, throwing money at it to say, maybe I do this, maybe do that.
John:
Maybe I'll try this ad slot.
John:
Maybe I'll put this keyword.
John:
Maybe we'll do this.
John:
and it's probably not a particularly efficient market in terms of pricing those ads at what their actual value is especially if they don't do the complete connection of like uh you know telling you exactly how effective your ad is in each slot and all that stuff um so i think it's not particularly healthy but it's unavoidable that there will be ads and the final point related to like the inevitability of advertising and what it does to companies and you know whether
John:
any individual likes that or not.
John:
It was on the September 30th episode of Dithering, John Gruber and Ben Thompson's podcast.
John:
It was around eight minutes and 40 seconds into the podcast.
John:
Ben said they were talking about something related to advertising.
John:
Ben said, I wonder if an advertising-based company is constitutionally incapable of really excelling or putting the necessary investment into any other sort of business model.
John:
They were talking about Stadia and Google and everything and how Google seems to have a hard time making products that you sell to consumers, but they're really great at advertising.
John:
And so that's the question here, the open question.
John:
Is it possible for an ad-driven business to make good products?
John:
And on the flip side, is it possible for a product company to do ads well?
John:
Despite Marco saying Apple is a services company and they're an advertising company, they're still a product company.
John:
That is what they're best at.
John:
Apple's attempts to get into the ad business have not been smashing successes.
John:
iAd wasn't great.
John:
Even the search ads show that they're not really good at being at selling ads.
John:
They're good at controlling their platform such that they have less competition.
John:
And then it's like, well, what are you going to do?
John:
We're practically the only game in town or the best game in town.
John:
But
John:
you know looking at them compared to let's say facebook or google both of those two companies are much better at selling ads and making ad marketplaces than apple is and then the google stadia example was what about these companies like google and facebook that make all their money basically from ads but they also suddenly want to make products oh google wants to you know sell stadia which was a little you know video game controller and a cloud gaming theory they want to sell you know
John:
pixel phones or tablets or the weird sphere shaped speaker that never shipped or whatever like in facebook tried to make a phone too and facebook's bought oculus and they've got the headset things if your company is built around advertising can you make good products and this making this question is setting up at sort of like two extremes where if you're really really good at making products it means you care about the user experience
John:
experience you're very focused on building physical things that you sell to individual people who have to give you money to the for them it's not like an indirect market where people throw money over a wall and see if they get some result back you have to appeal to actual consumers you have to support the products you know as opposed to advertising where it's all about gathering data and making an efficient market and giving a small number of quote-unquote customers being the people who buy ads from you
John:
giving them access to enough information to feel like they're making an effective use of their marketing dollars.
John:
Two very different markets, and historically speaking, the companies that are good at one have not been good at the other.
John:
It's not like, you know, Google's good at making phones.
John:
The Pixel phones are good, and they've made some good hardware products, but...
John:
It definitely is not their strength, and certainly they haven't turned it into a huge moneymaker.
John:
You would think Google, they make Android.
John:
Shouldn't they be the biggest seller of Android phones?
John:
But they are not.
John:
Google Pixel and Nexus before it are not the biggest seller of Android phones.
John:
And on the flip side, Apple, they've got all this money and they've got all this technology.
John:
They should do great in the ad business, and historically they have not.
John:
And to the extent they're doing great now, it's because they're fencing out everybody else with a thing they are good at, which is controlling their platform.
John:
So I do wonder...
John:
That's what the commenters are worried about.
John:
If Apple suddenly becomes good at ads, will that change the company that they are?
John:
Will they become worse at making MacBooks and iPhones if they become better at being ads?
John:
Are those two core strengths and sets of values that are required to excel in both of those areas?
John:
opposed to each other.
John:
It's almost like you need to split off into a separate company that is ruthless and cutthroat and runs its ad business like a real ad business.
John:
On the other side, it's the product company that makes things that appeal to users.
John:
And I do worry about that.
John:
That I feel like is underlying lots of our fretting about Apple and services.
John:
We talked about this before, like not just ads, but just services, how being a service company, you pay me money, I give you some network-based service that you get to use, is different than selling someone a product and making the profit from that.
John:
And I think Apple, I'm not going to say they're in the middle of a transition, but they're definitely...
John:
off on their what is it like the finding yourself trip where they go off to europe and go backpacking to see what kind of company do we want to be you know services that's where the that's where the the money and the growth is so we really need to investigate that but at the same time if you ask anybody in their product organization they still really care about making good products and are trying with big home pot aside are trying really hard to make really good products and for the most part still succeeding and i would say if they're trying really hard to be a great advertising company
John:
they're still not doing great like i don't i don't they don't seem to be excelling in that area so my my hope is that apple is kind of constitutionally incapable of being a really good advertising company uh and that's to their credit because in the end they are first and foremost a product company and they will always necessarily sort of kneecap their advertising business uh because they can't do what it takes or can't can't organize their entire business around that uh
Marco:
uh around that type of market because it will screw up their products and they're never going to do that see i don't i don't have as much faith in them i think as you do uh it seems like tim cook's apple and i don't know if this is him people below him i don't know you know but apple under tim cook
Marco:
It prioritizes profits over product quality.
Marco:
And it's not to say that they always will take the most cynical route to get there.
Marco:
They try to blend as much as they can, but the insidious thing about putting ads and promos all over your platform for all your new services and everything...
Marco:
is that once you say it's okay to, for instance, degrade the experience of using the music app on the phone to constantly, incessantly promote Apple Music to people who don't subscribe to it until they subscribe, or to degrade the experience of the app store until people get Apple Arcade or whatever.
Marco:
Once you say it's okay to send promotional push notifications to make sure people have Apple News or to promote the new tier of iCloud storage or whatever,
Marco:
Once you break that line and then you see the numbers go up, it becomes much easier to then justify, you know what, we're having a bit of a soft quarter.
Marco:
Let's break that line a couple more times and get those numbers up because we have to.
Marco:
And then eventually it just becomes, this is just what we do.
Marco:
What are you talking about?
Marco:
What do you mean we don't send promotional push notifications?
Marco:
What do you mean we don't have ads and people setting screens for other products?
Marco:
What do you mean?
Marco:
Of course we do that.
Marco:
Look, we've been doing it for years.
Marco:
Apple has not only, you know, fallen down a slippery slope, but has jumped off of a slippery cliff with a lot of these things in the last five years, maybe more.
Marco:
They have decided that this is acceptable now, that the iPhone is no longer purely about serving their customers.
Marco:
it is really about serving apple and hoping the customers come along for the ride but it's turning the customers more into like a resource to be squeezed right so instead of just squeezing us on the purchase price of the iphone which is something that we do willingly now they are squeezing us as you know let's get get those um what's that profitability per user number that everyone's always talking about in the industry arpu that's it yeah
Marco:
Yeah, we're just like ARPU blobs.
Marco:
They just want to squeeze us for even more because we are now an ongoing resource for ongoing revenue.
Marco:
And there's always new and exciting ways that we can be annoyed into getting squeezed.
Marco:
That's what happens here.
Marco:
That's what all the people making these smart comments, that's what they're all worried about.
Marco:
That's what I'm worried about.
Marco:
That Apple has decided that it is okay to degrade the user experience in order to promote something that helps them.
Marco:
And they just keep doing that more and more and more.
Marco:
They're converting from a company that makes money by pleasing customers with really great products into a company that makes money by badgering their customers until we give in.
John:
The distinction I was making, like the thing that is keeping Apple from being an effective advertising driven business, is that they're only willing to do all that stuff for Apple.
John:
But they're not going to sell an ad in the music app to Spotify.
John:
And if you're an advertising business, of course you would sell that ad Spotify.
John:
It's an incredibly valuable ad spot.
John:
Why would you not allow everybody to put advertisements in your notifications, in the settings screen, in the Apple Music app?
John:
Why wouldn't you do that?
John:
That's what an advertising-driven company does.
John:
And as you said, Apple is serving Apple.
John:
It's the joke hierarchy that we've been passing around our little community for probably multiple decades of Apple's order of priorities in terms of what's important to them.
John:
Number one is Apple.
John:
Number two is users.
John:
Number three is developers.
John:
But Apple is number one.
John:
And so, yeah, Apple gets to tell you that you can buy more iCloud stories.
John:
Apple gets to remind you for the umpteenth time that you can subscribe to Apple Music, right?
John:
Apple gets to put an ad in your setting screen.
John:
But an advertising company would sell all those ad spots to the highest bidder.
John:
And that I think Apple is not going to do because they still have that...
John:
I mean, it may seem like if it was really a slippery slope, they would have just gone all down and there'd be ads everywhere.
John:
They still don't want to be that company.
John:
They still want to sell a premium experience.
John:
It's just that very often I feel like Apple drinks its own Kool-Aid to the extent that they think, oh, we're sending you those aren't ads.
John:
We're just telling you about our great products.
John:
Right.
John:
And that sounds so insane to us.
John:
Like that doesn't make any sense.
John:
But there is a little bit of that, you know, internal thinking right now.
John:
If you if you really press people like, oh, yeah.
John:
OK, so I guess it is ads and we try to do it less.
John:
And I bet they would say, but see, it's only us doing that.
John:
And that means, and there is something to this, that means they will necessarily always be a limited number of things because Apple just doesn't have that much stuff to advertise and they're only one company.
John:
So you're not going to see 10,000 times more of those ads if Apple is the only one who can place them.
John:
We're all annoyed because we liked it when there was zero of those things.
John:
that Apple didn't do it at all because, you know, again, under the fantasy of Steve Jobs would never do something like that.
John:
But wasn't Steve Jobs around for iAd?
John:
I don't know if that's the title.
Marco:
Yeah, I think the first one, yeah.
John:
Right, right.
John:
So, but anyway, we would like there to be less of it.
John:
But to my earlier point,
John:
And most of the people on the planet have shown that they're okay with some amount of advertising.
John:
That said, the people who buy Apple products are not most of the people on the planet.
John:
And I have heard complaints about those Apple ads inside Apple products because that is a relatively new thing for people who have been using Apple products for years.
John:
But mostly people get over it.
John:
And it boggles my mind when people get annoyed.
John:
Like, oh, I hate that thing telling me to buy more iCloud storage.
John:
Let me go back to my Solitaire app with a flashing ad banner on it that I've been using for five years.
John:
Pay the $1.99.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
Sometimes the apps don't even let you pay the $1.99, which is really sad.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
By the way, Crafty Craft.
Marco:
This is the app that Adam uses to mod Minecraft on the iPad, like to make Minecraft mods.
John:
Does it have an ad banner on it?
Marco:
Oh, you don't know.
John:
You get to watch a 30-second movie to continue using that.
Marco:
Yeah, so let me just be clear.
Marco:
We pay for this.
Marco:
I think it's like $4 a week.
Marco:
What?
Marco:
It's one of those weekly subscription scams.
Marco:
We pay for this because it's like a major creative outlet for him, and we want to support that and everything.
Marco:
But this is the most abusive, manipulative garbage I've ever seen.
Marco:
I can't believe Apple lets this in the store.
Marco:
So you pay for it to get rid of ads, but then it's still full of ads, just a few of them.
Marco:
And then they have this in-game gems currency that you have to spend to use things like the save button.
Marco:
You have to spend gems every time you save something.
Marco:
Are you kidding?
Marco:
So you run out of saves for the day.
Marco:
Oh my.
Marco:
It makes me so angry that like this horrific app is the only and best option to do this on the iPad.
Marco:
And it is just downright abusive to children.
Marco:
And Apple is making 30% of all that money.
Marco:
Good for you, Apple.
Marco:
I'm so happy for you.
John:
casino games for children yeah it's another place that apple has decided they're okay with things oh and the but it's a good thing that you know the app store is protecting us yeah uh the the other the final thing that casey alluded to before is like uh there's rumors today that we'll put a link in the show it's the story i haven't had time to read because it just came out today about uh they're going to have a ad product that they're selling in the tv space this again is a kind of a no-brainer uh the netflix doing streaming services ads television
John:
Being sponsored by companies that buy ads is not a new technology.
John:
It is a thing that the entire world accepts.
John:
And yes, people will pay a premium to get a network that doesn't have ads like HBO or whatever.
John:
But most television is not HBO.
John:
Most television is television with ads.
John:
And if you give people the choice between Netflix without ads for more money and Netflix with ads for less money, a lot of people are going to take Netflix with ads.
John:
And Apple has a TV streaming product, and it seems like they're investigating, you know, having ads.
John:
Now, as someone who doesn't like ads and is willing to pay to get rid of them, I'm annoyed that Apple TV always tells me about the other Apple TV shows before I watch an Apple TV show.
Casey:
Yeah, agreed.
John:
right people who are very sensitive to ads and are willing to pay money to get rid of them it's like there's nothing i can pay to stop apple from telling me about the apple in the apple there's too much apple in my apple yo dog right and every streaming service is like this hbo you want to watch a show on hbo let's let's watch house of the dragon oh there's another show on hbo
John:
oh season two of white lotus coming out a i already knew that b i'm already gonna watch it c get off my tv i want to watch the show i already pay for hbo why are you advertising this to me i can't pay again do you i mean you're afraid i'm gonna cancel because i'm gonna get done with house of dragon and i'm not gonna know that the new season of white lotus come out i'm gonna cancel hbo that's just me but i am not like most people
John:
And so it's the same situation with Apple.
John:
If you buy an Apple device, increasingly you will get ads for Apple Things.
John:
If you buy the Apple streaming service, Apple TV+, you will get ads for Apple Things.
John:
And now, just like its competitors, Apple seems to be investigating the idea that perhaps there will be other ad slots that people can buy in Apple TV+.
John:
Will there be a different tier for people to subscribe with more ads?
John:
Will there only be certain shows?
John:
We'll see.
John:
But...
John:
It's kind of not possible to avoid that.
John:
If you were in charge of Apple TV Plus or streaming at Apple, you would not be doing your job if you didn't investigate this avenue because your competitors are doing it and it's a proven business model, right?
John:
You could say, oh, you should be the premium one or whatever.
John:
You should, you know, be the company that doesn't have ads.
John:
Well, A, that ship has already sailed because Apple advertises with its own stuff as we establish.
John:
And B...
John:
Apple knows what that means in terms of market share.
John:
If you try to take the high road and not do any advertising and only appeal to the people who really dislike advertising and have lots of money or whatever, it will limit your market share.
John:
It will limit your reach.
John:
It will, in the end...
John:
in a debate use a big highfalutin steve job ism it will limit the size of the dent that you can put in the world because fewer people will use your products because there aren't as many people who care that much about ads right so if you want to go to the largest number of people you have to entertain this business model and so they are so
John:
That's what it's like when your tastes and preferences are a little bit outside the norm.
John:
You are inevitably going to be disappointed by the largest company in the world's moves in business.
John:
Because for the most part, they're going to try to appeal to the masses.
John:
Still, to Apple's credit, they try to appeal to the masses in a way that is a little bit nicer than their competitors.
John:
And I think they continue to do that.
John:
But it's the magnitude of the little bit in that phrase that may change from year to year.
Marco:
I'll see you next time.
Marco:
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Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And Brian writes, on a recent episode, y'all discussed future improvements to the Apple Watch, mentioning new sensors, longer battery life, and so on.
Casey:
But the most obvious improvement to me would be the complete elimination of the bezel, or perhaps Bezel.
Casey:
I would love a watch face that isn't black to appear continuous with the case.
Casey:
As it is, the stupid black border ruins every other color watch face.
Casey:
When do you think we will get a bezel-less Apple Watch?
Casey:
Do we need micro-LED tech or something?
Marco:
isn't this sort of the ultra it doesn't the ultra have very little bezel or my bananas no the ultra well no there is a bezel um and it seems you know it's relatively like the same thickness you'd expect it to be based on other apple watches um where the ultra um is weird though is that uh most of the faces still don't look right on it like they they really are not like optimized for the size even the stock face that comes with it the wayfinder face which oh i have i have complaints about but that's fine um it's
Marco:
they can't they can't make an analog face to save their lives uh but anyway um even the wayfinder face like you can see a pretty thick bezel around it but um what's weird about the ultra again it has a very it has a perfectly flat screen i'm actually not a huge fan of totally flat crystal watches usually a slight dome um is preferable because totally flat not only looks kind of cheap but also um causes some glare issues that if you have a slight curve you get way less glare um and it looks a
Marco:
Something to consider for ultra buyers.
Marco:
But anyway, to answer the actual question, when we will get like totally bezel-less, I'm not sure.
Marco:
I mean, the Apple Watch from the beginning was designed to have black around everything in part to hide the bezels and in part to save power on the OLED screen.
Marco:
Because everything about the Apple Watch is designed to save as much power as possible because it's such a constrained power envelope device.
Marco:
Because black has been worked into the design of all the faces,
Marco:
I don't know that they would necessarily want to get away from that, even if they could.
Marco:
Even if they could make whatever kind of screen could go all the way to the bezel, which would be, I think, a significant challenge.
Marco:
Not knowing much about screen tech.
Marco:
I mean, look at the iPhone.
Marco:
We're nowhere near that there.
Marco:
But anyway, even if they could do it, again, I don't think they would want to do it.
Marco:
it would require a lot of different decisions around the whole OS that would mostly end up being more power hungry.
Marco:
And I don't see them ever doing that for the Apple Watch.
John:
We don't need a different screen tech.
John:
You could do it with OLED just as easily as you could do it with some hypothetical micro LED thing.
John:
But it's interesting that how the word bezel has changed meaning in this context.
John:
What we're talking about is like the glass.
John:
That's like an iPhone, the screen of an iPhone.
John:
It's like a piece of glass that is, you know, it's part of the thing that lights up with pixels in different colors.
John:
Right.
John:
When we say how big is the bezel on the iPhone, we mean go to the edge of the iPhone and eventually you run out of things that light up.
John:
This is the last pixel that's going to light up.
John:
But there's still more glass.
John:
So there's glass that doesn't light up.
John:
There's no pixels in this area.
John:
All around the edge of the phone, top, bottom, left, and right.
John:
If you look at the phone, there's this black border, and it's because there's no pixels there.
John:
And people call that the bezel.
John:
But in sort of television set parlance in the CRT days...
John:
The bezel was a piece of plastic that you shoved on the TV that covered part of the cathode ray tube, part of the glass cathode ray tube.
John:
It covered often the parts that didn't light up, right?
John:
That was the bezel, that plastic thing.
John:
You could do that on a watch today.
John:
Just make the metal, titanium, whatever, aluminum case have little things that come up and overlap the screen and butt right up against where the pixels light up, right?
John:
hey, it's a quote-unquote bezel-less iPhone.
John:
Well, no, it's not.
John:
You just actually made the bezel bigger.
John:
But now when I say bezel, I don't mean the black part of the screen that doesn't light up around the edges.
John:
I mean the old definition of bezel, which is the plastic or whatever, part of the case that overlaps the thing that does light up, right?
John:
They could do that.
John:
And I think that's what this Brian is asking about.
John:
It's like, I want a watch face that goes all the way to the edge.
John:
I don't want some black part of the screen thing to be, you know, interrupting me.
John:
So I'll have I'll have a white watch face and then all this black border around it because that part of the screen doesn't light up.
John:
And then there is the actual watch case made of aluminum or titanium or whatever.
John:
if apple wanted that look they could do it today by making like for example on the uh the ultra they can make the titanium little thing like hook over the front of the case and cover up those black pixels and then you would have what you want but they're not doing that i don't know for fashion reasons or because like marco said the design aesthetic of all the watch faces has always been uh
John:
if you don't light up pixels that they're completely black and also where there are no pixels is also completely black so it's it's seamless in that way but that said apple has been slowly quote unquote shrinking the bezel by which we mean shrinking the area of the screen that doesn't light up with pixels over the course of what the watch four five seven it's been getting smaller and smaller it's still there you can still see it but it's been getting smaller so i think they probably will
John:
get all the way to the edge if they ever can but i'm not sure they'll ever actually use the old style bezel as in make the case creep over and cover the part of the glass that doesn't light up because that doesn't seem part of their design aesthetic like the edges of the phone have either been non-existent and seamless in the regular one and on the ultra they look basically like they're i mean market you have it you can look at it it's like they're kind of vertical walls and then the glass is inside that they don't like reach over and overlap onto the screen do they
John:
no not at all at least i mean i don't know how the sapphire is mounted in there um but but yeah it doesn't look that way yeah so we'll see they could do it i mean they've been trying to shrink it as much as they can't same thing on the phones they've been shrinking that part of the phone they could have made a phone design they did that but they didn't the current one has flat sides they go up and down they do not reach over and overlap any part of the screen uh even though that's the design direction that could have gone and they chose not to so you know hang in there we'll probably get it about the same time as we get third-party watch faces
Marco:
by the way nothing makes me want third-party watch faces more than using the ultra because again like they almost every existing watch face looks stupid on it they look stupid underscore was messing with it and apparently it's not a super ellipse like it's not the shape of the app icons oh really a rounded rectangle
John:
Yeah.
John:
He had a Twitter thread where he was trying to make like watch faces that fit inside the ultra.
John:
And he realized that it's not the super lips shape.
John:
It's actually like flat sides with a radius in the corners.
John:
So if you want to put an image on the screen that fits correctly with even borders around it and you do a super lips, it looks wrong.
Casey:
Of course.
John:
Of course, he's making watch faces, because why wouldn't he be?
Casey:
Also, of course.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
John Inger writes, I am surely going to be disappointed by your response to this, John, but I've been excited to ask you this.
Casey:
John Inger writes, assuming you can cover the price difference, why would you want an M1 Max Max Studio over the same spec M1 Max MacBook Pro?
Casey:
Set another way, spec for spec, does John's desktop desktop have any meaningful advantages over Marco's desktop-laptop approach?
Casey:
As far as I can tell, the advantages of the Mac Studio over the MacBook Pro are one additional Thunderbolt 4 port, two additional USB-A ports, and a 10-gigabit Ethernet port, which in this case John doesn't plan to use.
Casey:
Meanwhile, the advantages of the MacBook Pro over the studio are an XDR screen with ProMotion, much better speakers, a webcam, a mic array, Touch ID, Ask Siri, effectively an integrated UPS, and of course it's portable, so I can go anywhere and still use it.
Casey:
So why would anyone ever buy an M1 Max Max Studio over a same-spec M1 Max MacBook Pro?
Casey:
Am I missing something?
John:
Well, if you want a desktop computer and it's never going to go anywhere, the screen doesn't do you any good.
John:
So you just paid for that and you're not using it.
John:
The speakers don't do any good because if you're going to keep it in clamshell mode, the speakers aren't going to help you.
John:
The webcam doesn't do any good because if it's closed, the webcam isn't looking at you.
John:
The mic erasing deal is closed.
John:
Touch ID, the Mac Studio has that.
John:
Ask Siri, same thing.
John:
The display has a microphone or whatever.
John:
And an integrated UPS, I suppose, but you can buy an external one of those.
John:
It's like if you want a desktop computer, don't pay for all that stuff on a laptop.
John:
And it used to be it'll be, like, noisier and slower.
John:
Now it's not really slower.
John:
Is it noisier than the Mac Studio?
John:
Debatable.
John:
It's quieter.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Under some situations, although under heavy load... All situations.
John:
No, I have to imagine under heavy load that...
John:
The thing about the Mac Studio is whatever annoying noise it makes, it's very difficult to make it make much louder noise where it is possible, although difficult, to make the MacBook Pro make noise, especially if it's in clamshell and especially if it's in clamshell in a situation that, you know, so like our Mac Studio is bolted under the desk here.
John:
I don't think you'd want to bolt your...
John:
your macbook pro under the desk you wouldn't need to hard to get at yeah it wouldn't it wouldn't be a great place for it to be and then finally the things you listed you get more ports and you get faster ethernet right so if you don't want a desktop computer don't buy a desktop computer but if you do want one it doesn't make sense to buy a laptop and then try to use it as desktop even though apple's laptops are amazing as desktop computers
John:
it's still kind of a waste of hardware and it's not, it's not the best, best suited.
John:
And it would honestly be extreme shame to not use that screen.
John:
And you can have it on your desk and have the screen open, but I always found that the ergonomics of that, where you kind of like make a little high chair for your, for your laptop and it's got the keyboard open, but you're not using that keyboard because you want the screen to be up high, but it has to be open.
John:
So you're constantly seeing this keyboard and this trackpad that you're not using.
John:
So you, this, this awesome screen could be at the right height and,
John:
I know it's each thing should, you know, fulfill the need that it does.
John:
It would be more of a slang dump a dunk if Apple hadn't done whatever the heck it did with the Mac studio fans that make them so weird and so strangely noisy at never going above their base speed, but still being noisy at their base speed.
John:
Uh, so we'll see, uh, the next version of the Mac studio looks like.
John:
maybe they'll solve this cooling thing or maybe we'll have to wait until they make another case.
John:
And I want to reiterate that the fact that mine is bolted on the desk, it is inaudible in that position under any normal circumstance.
John:
So it is a solvable problem.
Casey:
I think perhaps John's point is that
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
John Inger's point is that, yes, in this in the circumstance that you literally never use this laptop as a laptop, then, yeah, OK, I guess that makes more sense what you're saying, John Syracuse.
Casey:
But if you even once want to move this computer somewhere else temporarily, then I think John Inger makes a really good point that you're getting all of that stuff.
Casey:
sort of kind of for free not literally for free but sort of kind of for free and and i think that makes a lot of sense so if you're if you're just if you really are getting a desktop desktop then yes syracuse is right but if you're getting a mostly desktop laptop then still get the laptop man i still feel like it's like if you get a laptop and you only use it just once someplace else it's such a waste of a laptop like it's not
Marco:
that keyboard that you're not using the trackpad you're not using the screen you're not looking at like that's just you paid for that they built it and you're just closing it up and hiding it away it just seems wasteful it is really great though i mean that's the thing like i i agree with what you're saying academically but i think right now we're in this weird state where because of various what seemed like possibly flukes where where the mac studio has this weird fan problem but for noise where
Marco:
And the MacBook Pro is weirdly way too good right now that in the current versions of these products, the MacBook Pro is, I think, better in so many ways.
Marco:
And yeah, there is going to be a cost difference there because you are paying for a lot of this stuff.
Marco:
But
Marco:
you know i've i've believe me i've rationalized every kind of purchase there is to rationalize especially with computers and true and the reality is like there has never been a time where i've said to myself like i'm gonna make i'm gonna get this amazing desktop and then i won't need a laptop anymore i probably maybe attempted that maybe with ipads at some point forever ago a million years ago maybe but like the reality is i always also want a laptop and
Marco:
And if you can have one computer serving both of those roles, and you need both of those roles filled, then any value argument you try to make about, well, you're paying for the stuff you're not using by having a desktop laptop, well, that only applies if you're also going to have a separate laptop.
Marco:
But if you can get away with just having that one be both your desktop and your laptop, which is what most people do, then...
Marco:
you are saving an entire other computer worth of cost.
Marco:
So let's set aside the price difference for now because for people listening to this show, you probably want a laptop at some point in your life.
Marco:
And therefore, if you can have one device instead of two, you are saving a ton of money.
Marco:
So that being said...
Marco:
Again, like right now, we have this weird fluke situation where the desktop laptop is better than the desktop desktop.
Marco:
But you will occasionally run into a weird thing if you do this.
Marco:
And most of these weird things are solved if you don't use clamshell mode, if you actually have the laptop open as a second screen.
Marco:
Most of these problems go away.
Marco:
But if you use clamshell mode full time, you will very occasionally run into a weird thing that's assuming things that shouldn't be assumed.
Marco:
So for instance, the other day I was trying to, I was signing up for a new developer account and the developer app, the Apple developer app lets you sign up for a developer account right in the app for at least for personal accounts.
Marco:
And they had this thing where to prove who you are, you can use the built-in camera to scan your driver's license.
Marco:
Well, the built-in camera on my MacBook Pro is closed and facing a piece of metal.
Marco:
I have another camera.
Marco:
I have the Logitech thing stuck to the top of the XDR, but this didn't allow me a way to choose which camera I use.
Marco:
And so I just couldn't do that without opening up the laptop.
Marco:
If you're in clamshell mode, that's a very disruptive process of, all right, lift it out of its little foldy stand I have it in.
Marco:
Unfold the laptop with all the cable still plugged in.
Marco:
I don't want to lose all my stuff.
Marco:
Have it hovering in my hand over on the edge of the desk.
Marco:
That same thing, by the way, is what you have to do if you ever need to hard power it off.
Marco:
Because the power button is on the inside.
Marco:
So if you ever need to access the power button, which is not common, but occasionally you have to do it.
Marco:
You have to pick it up, unfold it, hit that, etc.
Marco:
So there are occasionally little weird things like that.
Marco:
But that's, I mean, maybe every couple of months I run into a thing like that.
Marco:
Once, like once every couple of months.
Marco:
And so I'm willing to tolerate that for all the other advantages of the setup.
Marco:
And I still, now it's been almost a year, I think, I still am a huge fan of the setup.
Marco:
Whatever, no part of the Mac Studio has made me envy that setup or want one.
Marco:
If they improve the Mac Studio down the road to be
Marco:
first of all, way quieter at idle.
Marco:
So to be as quiet as my MacBook Pro at idle, and if the power difference between the two gets larger, if the Mac Studio can be way more powerful than the MacBook Pro,
Marco:
then I'd be more interested.
Marco:
And maybe the Mac Pro, whatever that story ends up being, maybe that is that story.
Marco:
And we'll see whenever that comes out.
Marco:
But until then, this is an amazing setup.
Marco:
Frankly, it has no business being as good as it is.
Marco:
And I'm incredibly happy with it.
John:
the m2 macbook pro may change things because it may be hotter and make things noisier um the other thing i would say for the having a dedicated desktop and if you don't want to have just one computer you can make different trade-offs right so say you wanted to have a desktop desktop uh but then your laptop you wanted to pick like the reincarnation of the macbook adorable that somehow comes right super light super thin weight and size is your ultimate thing you don't need it to be your full-fledged desktop you just want the lightest thing you can have uh
John:
probably still more expensive than buying just one but it lets you make that choice lets you make the ultimate portability choice and then power at your desktop it's the trade-off of modularity of having dedicated devices dedicated special purpose devices this is the computer that never leaves my desk this is the computer that i'm on the go with as opposed to making one that has to fulfill both and if you do have the one that fills both it can't be a macbook adorable size thing probably because that's just you know if you want the lightest possible thing it's not going to be
John:
probably powerful enough to satisfy high-end needs so yeah the m1s are uh you know great machines that definitely uh smeared this entire thing and then the weirdness of the mac studio did that but the m2s made on a similar process that are a little bit faster and a little bit more power hungry maybe the fans will go a little bit harder who knows what the m2 mac studio will look like if apple has an october event maybe we'll see m2 macbook pros and people can test them and see how it turns out but the m1 may be a moment in time that is not repeated we'll see
Marco:
Also to answer, my name is T in the chat asks, any regrets on having the 16 inch for all of this as opposed to the 14 inch?
Marco:
They say they got a 16 inch for work recently, have a 14 inch personal, and wow, the 16 inch is bad to travel with.
Marco:
I would say I love the 16 inch for this purpose because when I do use it as a laptop,
Marco:
in almost every case i want as much screen space as i can get i don't travel that often when i do travel it is much more frequently by car the only place i really am not super comfortable with the 16 inch is on a plane in a coach seat because we all know that person in front of you leans back and that's it then you're not using your laptop anymore
Marco:
so game over on that um but that's also mostly true of the 14 inch even so my my trick is you know get exit row or business class or whatever you can get to get a little bit more room if you have if you have to have like a laptop working flight if you're like going cross country get the exit row or something so you can have a little bit more space on the tray table because in that case even the 14 inch is a bit uncomfortable um but with that exception of like tight airline seats
Marco:
I don't regret the 16.
Marco:
I love, again, I love having all the screen space and using something smaller, I miss that screen space.
Marco:
And the 16 also has a little bit better speakers, you know, significantly better battery life, you know, things like that.
Marco:
So it's great for that.
Marco:
But yeah, I love it for that purpose and I don't regret it at all.
Marco:
The actual size and weight of like carrying it,
Marco:
It only feels big relative to the other machines.
Marco:
But in absolute terms, this is not a huge amount of weight for an adult in good health to carry.
Marco:
And if you're putting it in a bag, the difference between a 14-inch and a 16-inch in actual weight in that bag or bulk in that bag...
Marco:
You're talking maybe like, what, 5%?
Marco:
Maybe more weight in the bag?
Marco:
Or 10%?
Marco:
Like, it's not a ton to the point where it's going to radically affect your ability whether you can carry it or not.
Marco:
Now, it's nicer to have something smaller and lighter if you're carrying it in a bag every single day.
Marco:
Like, when I was working in the city, I would take the train to the city every day.
Marco:
That's, you know, with a bag, sometimes standing up the whole time if there was no seats.
Marco:
Then walking from Grand Central down to the office, that was, you know, a 15-block walk.
Marco:
In that kind of context where I'm carrying it a whole lot every single day, yeah, go a little bit lighter, it's nice.
Marco:
But if that's not what your life looks like, if you're mostly living on a desk most of the time and maybe bringing it in a backpack on trips sometimes or bringing it in a car when you do go somewhere...
Marco:
the difference really is not that big.
Marco:
Relative to the way computers used to be, these are all super lightweight, and we're all very lucky.
Marco:
So anyway, I'm very happy when I'm using it as a laptop.
Marco:
I'm very happy that it's a 16-inch because I really do appreciate having infinite battery life and a giant screen.
John:
One more thing on the getting to the power button when you're in clamshell.
John:
Obviously, bolting the Mac Studio under the desk makes it awkward to get to the power button, too.
John:
But the reason I needed to do this recently was, and I was reminded of this as I was about to do it the old way, booting into recovery mode.
John:
I had to do it because I was trying to uninstall a Wacom tablet kext that SIP was protecting or something.
John:
So I basically needed to reboot into single-user mode.
John:
I'm like, oh, no problem.
John:
I'll just restart and hold down Command R. That's not how it works anymore.
John:
All of the ARM-based Macs to boot into recovery mode, you have to hold down the physical power button until a little thing comes up and says options and lets you boot into different stuff, right?
John:
You can't just go to the Apple menu, hit restart, and then hold down Command R or whatever of the umpteen different key combinations that you would use to enter recovery, single user mode, all that stuff.
John:
All of that is behind holding the power button.
John:
So...
John:
No matter what kind of computer you have, even if it didn't crash, even if you're not hard rebooting, if you ever need to do something that requires booting into recovery and it could be something as simple as uninstalling a piece of software that was probably installed so long ago that system integrity protection didn't even exist and somehow it got like shoved into a place where I can't delete it even as root, you're going to be finding that power button.
Casey:
Finally, Andy Hyde writes, why does router range matter?
Casey:
Many models of router advertise varying coverage areas.
Casey:
Shouldn't the limiting factor for Wi-Fi range be the power-sipping client radio's upload range, not the router itself?
Casey:
I don't feel like I've ever paid any attention to this.
Casey:
Is this a thing these days, is range for routers?
John:
They mean like a Wi-Fi router.
John:
They mean like, you know.
Casey:
No, I know.
Casey:
I know.
John:
Yeah, I know.
John:
They tell you how like how big of a place, like how many square feet it covers.
John:
Like Euro will tell you if you have a home this big, get this thing or whatever.
Casey:
I just thought that was like a thumb in the wind, like order of magnitude thing just to get you in the right direction.
Casey:
I didn't think it was any sort of scientific anything.
John:
Well, I mean, it's not scientific because they don't know where your walls are.
John:
They don't know where you're putting it, but they're basically more range is better on a Wi-Fi router.
John:
And what Andy's asking is like, why does what is the product I buy from Eero?
John:
How can that influence the range?
John:
Isn't the limiting factor of the transmit power of my phone or whatever, you know, or my laptop?
John:
Isn't that the limiting factor in how big honking router I get?
John:
It's not going to help if my phone is so wimpy it can't transmit or whatever.
John:
And what I would say to that is when routers advertise as having good range, yes, part of it is how much power they have to transmit.
John:
But the other part of it is how fancy and effective their antennas are.
John:
That may be because they're large, because there's multiple ones or whatever.
John:
And those fancy, more better antennas are better at picking up
John:
the potentially weak signal from your phone or your laptop or whatever.
John:
So when they advertise range, don't just think as this is how hard that my router can send the Wi-Fi signals out.
John:
Also think of it as how big the ears are and how it can hear the whisper of my phone when it's in the basement.
John:
Both of those things contribute to range, and that's why it does make sense for routers to advertise and work on having better range over time.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Trade Coffee, Collide, and Memberful.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M
Casey:
All right, so this is not a sponsorship and advertisement, whatever, but it's going to sound a heck of a lot like one.
Casey:
So I had the opportunity recently through various events to get a little bit of Sonos hardware at a pretty good discount.
Casey:
And I had really wanted...
Casey:
a Sonos Arc, which is their soundbar for a long time, because it seemed like it was a cheap... Well, it's not cheap at all.
Casey:
It was an easy... Nothing they make is cheap.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
I should have said easy, not cheap.
Casey:
An easy way to get something that is vaguely like surround sound into my house without doing a whole lot of work.
Casey:
And I have had various price-watching things, watching for the price of the Sonos Arc to drop...
Casey:
at all, and I've been doing this for like six months, and they don't appear to believe in sales.
Casey:
They're like Apple.
Casey:
There's no sale, no soup for you, please move along.
Casey:
I was resisting, resisting, resisting, spending almost, I think it's almost a thousand bucks for an ARC.
Casey:
I was resisting it, resisting, resisting it, and then I had, like I said, the opportunity to get some stuff at a pretty good discount.
Casey:
And so suddenly, instead of just getting the ARC, I wound it up with a whole surround sound system and a portable speaker.
Casey:
Because if you're going to save money, you might as well spend a ton, right?
Casey:
That's how it works?
Casey:
Something like that?
John:
The more you spend, the more you save.
John:
That's right, baby.
Casey:
That's right.
John:
I'm not sure that math works out, but it is a saying.
Casey:
Hey, it makes sense, right?
Casey:
So anyway, so I ended up buying a whole bunch of stuff.
Casey:
Now, really quickly, the situation previously was I had a center channel and a left and right channel sitting on the mantel below my television, because as we all know, my television is up at the second story of my house, even though I sit at the first story.
Casey:
Not really, but that's what John would tell you, and he's kind of right.
Casey:
I know the television is above the mantle, and so on the mantle was a left channel, a center channel, a right channel.
Casey:
I also had an external subwoofer.
Casey:
All this was plugged into a receiver that was literally 15-ish years old.
Casey:
The receiver, I think it was barely new enough at the time to understand Dolby Digital.
Casey:
Dolby Digital was the new hot thing when this receiver was brand new.
Casey:
This receiver predates HDMI, so it was not new at all.
Casey:
And I wanted to get rid of it.
Casey:
I wanted to do something different.
Casey:
I wanted to get an arc.
Casey:
So I end up, oh, and I'm sorry, this receiver obviously supports rear speakers.
Casey:
And I had rear speakers, but I hadn't installed them because I didn't want to run wires like under the floor, through the floor, under.
Casey:
We have hardwood in the downstairs.
Casey:
And so, you know, I didn't want to like put something on top of the floor.
Casey:
So I'd have to go into like the crawl space or something or like up and around over the ceiling.
Casey:
I didn't want to, I have no interest in doing any of those things.
Casey:
So I wanted to try this ARC.
Casey:
It seemed like the fancy lad's way to get pretty decent sound in all one unit.
Casey:
And so I wanted to get the ARC.
Casey:
I was too cheap to get it.
Casey:
Then suddenly I spent like two and a half ARCs worth of money in setting up my fancy new setup.
Casey:
And I didn't really have a whole lot of interest in the Sonos ecosystem either.
Casey:
I didn't know a lot about it, but it seemed that it was...
Casey:
maybe not competition, but I don't know of a better word to describe it, but in competition with like AirPlay, which I use all the time.
Casey:
You know, I have this Belkin Soundform Connect that I use as an AirPlay receiver to get AirPlay to the screened-in porch.
Casey:
And then I use the Apple TV connected to the receiver when I was, you know, AirPlaying music or anything like that.
Casey:
And I didn't really see the point in...
Casey:
trying to buy into the whole new ecosystem.
Casey:
So really what I wanted was a surround sound setup for the living room.
Casey:
And then I ended up getting a couple other things as well.
Casey:
So I ended up getting an ARC.
Casey:
I ended up getting a Sub Gen 3, which is their big subwoofer.
Casey:
They've also just recently come out with a Sub Mini, which is their little subwoofer, of course.
Casey:
And then two Sonos One SLs, I think.
Casey:
And I don't know what SL actually stands for, but it basically means the non-smart version of the speaker.
Casey:
as rear speakers.
Casey:
So I have the ARC, a soundbar, a subwoofer, two rear speakers.
Casey:
And so now I have surround sound for the first time in 15 years or something like that.
Casey:
And then I also got a Sonos port to handle term table and porch duties, which we'll talk about in a moment, and a Sonos Roam, which is their like Jambox-esque speaker.
Casey:
This set me back a
Casey:
But let me tell you, you know how everyone says that Sonos is really, really good and it's really awesome and super reliable and you should try it?
Casey:
I'm here to tell you, and I'm not being paid to say this.
Casey:
Boy, do I wish I was.
Casey:
Sonos is really good, really reliable, and you should try it because I freaking love this stuff.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
It's so great.
Casey:
I am so mad that I waited as long as – well, not really because I saved a bunch of money.
Casey:
But I am –
Casey:
you know, spiritually mad, if you will, that I waited so long because this stuff is so good.
Casey:
And it starts with even just the box.
Casey:
So it comes in like nondescript cardboard boxes because you know it would walk, you know, even though porch pirates aren't much of a thing here in Richmond, it would walk if you had a bunch of Sonos boxes sitting on the front porch.
Casey:
And
Casey:
So you take the box out of the shipping box.
Casey:
And the ARC in particular, I was so amused by this.
Casey:
And this is the first time that I've ever actually wanted somebody to watch an unboxing.
Casey:
And I will put an unboxing video into the show notes, which I cannot believe I'm saying this.
Casey:
This is how you know I'm so out of my gourd, excited about all this.
Casey:
So the way the Sonos ARC, the soundbar box works, is there's literal lock switches on either side of the box.
Casey:
And then, so you have to slide these plastic lock switches aside.
Casey:
And this is at about 15 to 20 seconds in the video.
Casey:
I'll link in the show notes.
Casey:
You slide the lock switches, one on each side to the other, you know, from lock to unlock.
Casey:
And then you lift up the box.
Casey:
It's so dumb and kind of over-engineered.
Casey:
And I am so here for it.
Casey:
It was so cool.
Casey:
It's so dumb.
Casey:
And I'm so, I loved it.
Casey:
So you open it up and every Sonos item that I've bought, all whatever, five or six of them or whatever it was, every single one of them comes in like this very neat, like cloth, black cloth sleeve with a sticker perfectly placed over the seam of the sleeve telling you which device it is.
Casey:
You can see this at about, what is this, like 45-ish seconds in the video.
Casey:
And you open it up and it's got, you know, you take it out of its little blankie and then you set everything up.
Casey:
And it sets up super easily, and I'm so in love.
Casey:
So all of these devices, almost all of them, actually everything except the Jambox-esque Roam, all of them have both Wi-Fi capability and Ethernet.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I didn't bother setting any of them up with Ethernet, except I tried to set up the subwoofer via Ethernet, and I couldn't get it to work.
Casey:
That was like the only time I had a problem.
Casey:
But then as soon as I reset it and tried doing it over Wi-Fi, it worked no sweat.
John:
Are you sure you used 10 base T?
Casey:
No, I mean, I think it was against... Come on, dad joke!
Casey:
Oh, bass.
Casey:
I get it.
Casey:
You're kicked out of the dad club.
Casey:
Seriously, that was a bad one, John.
John:
I tried to make it sound so dumb when I said it.
Casey:
I'm a little disappointed in myself, if I'm honest.
John:
Take his dad card.
Casey:
temporary dad card penalty i know i'm sorry i got one demerit so um so yeah so basically what ends up happening is you set up the sub and i ended up doing it via wi-fi and not 10 base t i set up the two rears obviously via wi-fi because if i if i was willing to run an ethernet cable then why wouldn't i run the speaker cable 15 years ago um
Casey:
And so the ARC, the soundbar, gets connected via HDMI, what is it, eARC, Enhanced Audio Return Channel, I think is what it's called.
Casey:
So basically the way this works is there's a bespoke HDMI connection on my TV, which is an LG C9, and you connect HDMI from the TV to the ARC,
Casey:
And the TV and the ARC negotiator do whatever in order to understand, OK, I'm not going to be using this for video really, although it does show a little pattern if you tune to it.
Casey:
What I'm really going to do is pipe everything through this HDMI cable to the sound system.
Casey:
This is very similar to the way a SPDIF and optical would oftentimes work, where it would just dump whatever the TV saw to SPDIF.
Casey:
It's now doing this with HDMI.
Casey:
The arc on my mantle has power.
Casey:
It has HDMI, and that's it.
Casey:
The subwoofer has power, and it could have Ethernet, but it instead works via Wi-Fi.
Casey:
The two rears, power, and nothing else.
Casey:
And then we'll talk about the port in a minute.
Casey:
And finally, I have Dolby Atmos.
Casey:
I have 5.1.
Casey:
I have all surround sound.
Casey:
And I know that every other person probably listening to this has been here for 15 years.
Casey:
And back when we had an apartment, and it was easier to run all this stuff, and I didn't care as much,
Casey:
I did have the surround sound set up with the old system and so on and so forth, but I literally never bothered in the 15 years we've been in this house.
Casey:
And so having it all back, it's really cool, you guys.
Casey:
Did you know that surround sound is pretty awesome?
Casey:
Who would have thunk it?
Casey:
And this was particularly relevant, and I tweeted about this earlier today.
Casey:
I've been re-watching, or not re-watching, excuse me, I've been watching this semi-old Canadian TV show called 19.2, and the first episode of the second season was...
Casey:
Both extremely depressing, but incredibly done.
Casey:
And it's about a—the whole show is a cop show, and this particular episode is about a school shooting.
Casey:
And it was wild sitting there and hearing, like, you know, shots coming from over my shoulder and hearing the police radio over my other shoulder.
Casey:
Again, none of this is remarkable.
Casey:
I know this has been technology for literally 20 years, but more than that even—
Casey:
But it's just cool to experience it again.
Casey:
It's like, you know, the first time you experience HD or 4K even in certain circumstances.
Casey:
It's just, it's cool.
Casey:
And 5.1 is really great.
Casey:
The system sounds phenomenal.
Casey:
I am not a connoisseur, but as I've said many, many times, I have good sound systems in my life.
Casey:
The BMW, actually, the Harman Kardon BMW was incredible, believe it or not.
Casey:
My dad has a ridiculously expensive and fancy stereo at his house.
Casey:
Just a preposterously expensive stereo.
Marco:
Oh, by the way, the sound of the Defender sucks.
Casey:
Oh, really?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I'm surprised by that.
Marco:
It's like one of the main downsides.
Marco:
Yeah, it's a s*** sound system.
Marco:
It's a crappy sound system.
Casey:
Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.
Casey:
That really bums me out because I would have expected that.
Casey:
Of all the things I would have expected to be the Achilles heel, that would not have been it.
Casey:
yeah um but anyways uh so yeah so i set this off it sounds great uh you can do this um i think they call it like true tone thing or something like that where you literally walk around the room waving an ipad look or an iphone and you look like an idiot doing it but it's allegedly will tune the speakers for your specific room which is pretty neat um
Casey:
Then I needed a solution for the turntable because the turntable was sitting literally above the old receiver.
Casey:
And the turntable has RCA jacks, like analog jacks, in order to emit sound.
Casey:
And you have to plug that into something.
Casey:
So I needed to fix that problem.
Casey:
And I wanted to at least consider doing something different for the porch, which, again, had a sound form connect, which was basically an AirPlay 2 receiver and nothing else.
Casey:
And what I ended up doing was getting this thing called a Sonos port, which operates both on the input and output side.
Casey:
So it has a couple inputs.
Casey:
It has an RCA input, and it has an RCA output.
Casey:
And so the turntable gets plugged into the input, and then the output gets plugged into the amplifier for the port speakers.
Casey:
And so now this one box, which is also connected via Ethernet, can operate as the turntable-like translator, if you will, and also operate as the port speakers.
Casey:
And so that worked out pretty well.
Casey:
It took me a little bit of tweaking and trying to figure out how to get it to recognize the turntable just right.
Casey:
But I think it was a Casey problem.
Casey:
Eventually I got it.
Casey:
What's really trippy though, if you've never heard a turntable,
Casey:
The way it works is there's a needle that touches the top of the record and the needle vibrates.
Casey:
And then basically that sound just gets amplified in like five different stages and that's what you hear.
Casey:
So if you have the sound off on your stereo and you play a record and you stick your ear up near the needle, you can actually hear the music.
Casey:
Granted, it sounds like garbage, it's quiet, it's tinny as crap, but you can hear the music.
Casey:
And keep that in mind as I tell you that one of the things that you set up when you're setting up a Sonos port is how much of a time delay you would like as you're listening to music.
Casey:
Because if you think about it, it has to broadcast, or it may have to broadcast this to other things.
Casey:
Well, it absolutely has to pump it to some speaker somewhere, and then it could pump it to multiple speakers.
Casey:
So it needs to build, it's like a freaking Discman, an anti-skip all of a sudden.
Casey:
And so next thing you know, you're playing a record and you hear the needle for a moment or two, for a second or two, and then you hear the music coming through the speakers.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
It occurred to me, I would argue that one of the benefits of listening to vinyl is how everything is analog.
Casey:
And yet here I am.
Casey:
I have now turned my turntable into a complete, almost completely digital setup, which may be defeating kind of the point, accepting the whole tea ceremony thing that you guys have beaten me up about for years and years.
Casey:
But nevertheless, it is pretty cool to be able to listen to my turntable anywhere because it's just another input to the Sonos.
Casey:
And so I can pump that to the porch.
Casey:
I can pump that to my little quasi-jam box thing, the Sonos Roam.
Casey:
That is pretty neat.
Casey:
And so with that in mind, their app is not stupid.
Casey:
But it's not bad.
Casey:
And it'll integrate with Apple Music.
Casey:
It'll integrate with Spotify.
Casey:
It'll integrate with SiriusXM.
Casey:
And so what's nice about it is I can go into the app without messing with the television at all.
Casey:
I can go into the app and say, okay, I would like to listen to SiriusXM in these two places.
Casey:
Or I would like to listen to Apple Music in this place or all of the places and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And you can adjust the volume on the app independently.
Casey:
Also, all of these devices support AirPlay, too.
Casey:
I can't pump the turntable into AirPlay.
Casey:
That has to stay within the Sonos ecosystem.
Casey:
But anything coming into the Sonos ecosystem can come in via AirPlay.
Casey:
So I can AirPlay directly to the porch speakers.
Casey:
I can AirPlay to the porch and the living room.
Casey:
I can AirPlay to the porch, the living room, and the Roam.
Casey:
And it all works incredibly.
Casey:
I am so in love with this system, and I am so annoyed that all these devices
Casey:
dinguses that are always, oh, you should get a Sonos.
Casey:
It works really well.
Casey:
It's so great.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, sure, whatever.
Casey:
I don't have $85,000 sitting around to buy Sonos stuff.
Casey:
Well, you should try Sonos.
Casey:
It integrates so well and works really great because, oh, my God, it's so good.
Casey:
And here's the icing on the cake.
Casey:
So I get everything set up, and I could still tweak it some more, but I've found that not infrequently, I want to make these little fine adjustments to the volume on the porch as compared to the living room, because the living room has a sliding door that opens onto the screened-in porch, and occasionally I'll find that if I'm just using the macro-level volume slider that's kind of relatively adjusting any of the speakers that are playing right now,
Casey:
sometimes I'll feel like the porch is just a little too quiet or a little too loud.
Casey:
I want to adjust just the porch.
Casey:
And I can do that via the app, but it's ever so slightly clunky.
Casey:
You've got to tap and hold on the volume knob or the thumb, the volume thumb, and then it'll expand into a different view where you get individual volume controls instead of the one macro control that you were just looking at.
Casey:
I was getting a little annoyed by this, and I thought to myself, well, Sonos, I think, has an API.
Casey:
I wonder if I could write some sort of app and stick it on, I don't know, maybe a Raspberry Pi or something like that, and make something where I can put a light dimmer sort of control on the wall of the porch.
Casey:
And maybe I could do something like that, and the Raspberry Pi would detect the relative position of this quote-unquote dimmer and would make an adjustment to the Sonos volume or something like that.
Casey:
I wonder if I could do this.
Casey:
And at the same time I was thinking about this, I somehow stumbled on that past sponsor Lutron Caseta...
Casey:
They have already solved this problem.
Casey:
So Lutron Caseta has these things they call Pika remotes.
Casey:
And they're these little portable remotes that work via their proprietary radio control.
Casey:
And you can use those to control lights.
Casey:
And so they have, what is it, one, two, three, four, five buttons on them.
Casey:
There's a big button at the top to turn the light on and up down to dim.
Casey:
A little circle in the center that you use to like jump to the particular dim that is your favorite.
Casey:
And then you turn the light off button.
Casey:
And I thought to myself, well, oh my gosh, I think that they do this.
Casey:
They actually have a Pico thing, a Pico switch, specifically designed to control a Sonos system.
Casey:
The Pico smart remote for audio.
Casey:
I can't link to this easily in the show notes because it doesn't really have its own URL.
Casey:
But it's a play pause button at the top, which would normally be the volume up button.
Casey:
I'm sorry, the light bulb on button.
Casey:
Then it has up down, which would be the dimmer on a light.
Casey:
But in this case, it's obviously volume.
Casey:
The center one we'll get back to in a minute.
Casey:
The kind of dim to the favorite spot one we'll get back to in a minute.
Casey:
And then the light off button is skipped to the next song.
Casey:
So, oh my gosh, I can just spend 40 bucks and get one of these.
Casey:
Problem solved.
Casey:
Well, then I'm thinking to myself, I wonder, you know, does this really work?
Casey:
Let me find a review.
Casey:
And I stumbled on my real-life friend Eric Wielander's YouTube channel, which he's somewhat put aside now, but it is a really good YouTube channel about smart home stuff.
Casey:
And I'll put a link to this in the show notes.
Casey:
But he pointed out
Casey:
This Pico remote, this Pico smart remote for audio, the only real difference between it and any of the other Pico remotes is that instead of a light bulb icon at the top, there's a play pause icon.
Casey:
And instead of a light bulb icon on the bottom, there's a fast forward icon.
Casey:
Other than that, it's the same.
Casey:
It's the exact same stuff.
Casey:
And so sure enough, I go into the Lutron app and I say, hey, I have a Sonos system.
Casey:
Integrate with that.
Casey:
And then I say, okay, I would like to add to my system a smart remote for audio.
Casey:
And I happen to have an extra Pico remote, a light bulb one sitting around.
Casey:
And so within literally a minute and a half, I now have a little remote control that does play, pause, volume up, down, and skip forward for my Sonos system on the porch.
Casey:
How friggin' awesome is this?
Casey:
That's awesome.
Casey:
This is so cool.
Casey:
So now I can be sitting on the porch, and I already had a Pico remote on the porch for the lights previously, so I can turn the lights up and down, I can adjust it so that the dim is just right, and then I can get the music going...
Casey:
and I can adjust the volume.
Casey:
So it's just right.
Casey:
I don't have to mess about with my phone.
Casey:
Not that it's hard, but I don't have to do any of that.
Casey:
And Erin doesn't have to have the Sonosense app installed on her phone or anything like that.
Casey:
This is so freaking cool.
Casey:
The only problem I have with it is I don't have a reason to use it with the Raspberry Pi anymore, but that's okay.
Marco:
You'll find others.
Marco:
Don't worry.
Casey:
I'm sure I will.
Casey:
Somehow I need to get the Synology in on this, and then I'll be all set.
Casey:
I'll hit the Casey trifecta.
Casey:
But nevertheless, then I thought to myself, well, this is kind of confusing because I have two of these Pico remotes.
Casey:
Both look like light switches, but only one of them actually controls the lights.
Casey:
And I was talking to Erin about it.
Casey:
She said, well, just take nail polish remover to it.
Casey:
I bet it'll take the icons off.
Yeah.
Casey:
oh my God, oh my God, you're right.
Casey:
And so I took a little nail polish remover that she had just on the light bulb icons and now they're gone.
Casey:
And so now you can tell which one's which and then it gets better still.
Casey:
So I have two playlists that I tend to play if I'm outside.
Casey:
I don't only play those things, but especially when people are over, I tend to use one of the two.
Casey:
One of them is my, I call it my funk it up playlist.
Casey:
It's just a bunch of like old,
Casey:
It's a bunch of like soul and funk music from like the 60s.
John:
You can have your dad card back now, Casey.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Thank you very much.
Casey:
If I remember, I'll put a link in the show notes, but I'll probably forget.
Casey:
But it is, without hyperbole, this is the best playlist that has ever been made.
Casey:
And so it's all, you know, like Stevie Wonder and Commodores and things like that.
Casey:
So anyways, I have that and I have the playlist that we use when we tailgate because that's just a bunch of random music, much more modern music that...
Casey:
That myself and Aaron and our mutual friend Brian that we tailgate with that the three of us have been adding to for probably five or ten years now.
Casey:
Well, it turns out if you add these playlists to quote-unquote my Sonos, which I guess is basically favoriting them, so to speak, within the Sonos ecosystem –
Casey:
Then, when you hit the little, like, jump to the correct dim button on the center of the Pico remote, it'll just cycle through those playlists.
Casey:
So I could be listening to nothing.
Casey:
My phone could be in another room, and I could step out on the porch, hit the little circle in the center of the smart remote, and boom, now I'm listening to funk.
Casey:
Now you're funking it up.
Casey:
I'm funking it up, baby.
Casey:
And then I hit it again.
Casey:
Now it's like I'm at a tailgate.
Casey:
And then I can turn the volume up and down.
Casey:
I can play pause.
Casey:
I don't like this song because Brian added a bunch of country.
Casey:
That's not really my thing.
Casey:
Hey, guess what?
Casey:
I just skipped to the next song, baby.
Casey:
Oh, this is so cool.
Casey:
This is so cool.
Casey:
And I love it so much.
Casey:
And I wish it wasn't 85 gazillion dollars because I want everyone to experience this.
Casey:
It is so awesome.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
If you're on the fence about any of this stuff, I swear to God, they have not paid me anything.
Casey:
I did get a discount, but they did not pay me anything.
Casey:
This was completely organic.
Casey:
They didn't ask for any of this.
Casey:
They don't even know I'm talking to you about this.
Casey:
It is so good.
Casey:
You've got to check it out.
Casey:
I cannot say enough good things about this stuff.
Casey:
Genuinely, it is just so cool to have something that with the exception of the small hiccup when I was setting up the subwoofer, which again may have been a Casey problem, everything has just worked.
Casey:
Do you remember when we used Apple products and they just worked?
Casey:
Do you remember that?
Casey:
I remember that.
Casey:
Now I bought some stuff and I spent a lot of money on it.
Casey:
Does this sounding familiar?
Casey:
I spent a lot of money on stuff that I probably don't need.
Casey:
Again, sounding familiar.
Casey:
And it just worked.
Casey:
And it was so awesome.
Casey:
And I really, really, really have been incredibly impressed by it.
Casey:
And the other nice thing is...
Casey:
It is cool to be able to just go into the Sonos app and say, play such and such on the main stereo system, the living room stereo system, and not have to have the TV on.
Casey:
Is that a big deal?
Casey:
No, of course not.
Casey:
And that's how I was doing it for the last year or so.
Casey:
Ever since we went to the 4K Apple TV...
Casey:
I had to change out some stuff in the way the stereo works.
Casey:
It's not important.
Casey:
But basically, once we went to the 4K Apple TV, if we were listening to anything in the living room except the turntable, we had to have the TV on because it was the Apple TV that was driving it.
Casey:
And now I can just go into the Sonos app and just have it play Sirius XM or Playlist or Apple Music or what have you.
Casey:
And play it to any one of the speakers that I have set up.
Casey:
And it just does it.
Casey:
And the TV can remain off.
Casey:
And it's fine.
Casey:
And it's so nice not to have to have the TV on.
Casey:
Even though I love the Apple TV screensavers and all that.
Casey:
It's just nice not to have to have that on and worrying about any of that.
Casey:
And again, if I choose to AirPlay, that works flawlessly.
Casey:
That's not a problem.
Casey:
But now...
Casey:
Here it was when I didn't know much about how the Sonos stuff worked.
Casey:
I thought to myself, I don't want to have another freaking ecosystem in my life.
Casey:
That's the last thing I want right now.
Casey:
But now that I have it here, I find that I'm almost never air playing and I'm actually jumping in the Sonos app and just saying, you know, go play this on such and such a speaker.
Casey:
And it's been working out so well and I'm so pleased with it.
Casey:
And now...
Casey:
I'm going to turn into like the average Tesla fan or really the average Sonos fan.
Casey:
Oh, have you heard about Sonos?
Casey:
Let me tell you about Sonos.
Casey:
Did you know how great it is?
Casey:
Did you know you can integrate with Lutron Caseta?
Casey:
Did you know you could do this?
Casey:
Did you know?
Casey:
Did you know?
Casey:
Did you know?
Casey:
I'm now that guy, and I'm sorry.
Casey:
But it is so good, and I'm blown away by how good it is, and I am so overjoyed and happy with it.
Casey:
Now I just want to buy all the things.
Casey:
I don't have anywhere else I need speakers.
Casey:
I want to find a reason to get more of these stupid things and put them places because it's so great.
Casey:
Now, Marco, you had tried it in the past, right?
Casey:
And you were not as impressed.
Casey:
Am I right about that?
Marco:
I'm very impressed with some of their products and less with others.
Marco:
So first of all, I am not a soundbar person.
Marco:
I've learned that about myself.
Marco:
You know, you have to know yourself and I've learned about myself.
Marco:
I'm not a soundbar person.
Marco:
And so...
Casey:
I will say the arc without the subwoofer, I was not particularly impressed with.
Casey:
Once I added the subwoofer, then it made a world of difference.
Casey:
But without the subwoofer, it was okay.
Marco:
Yeah, I will say the Sonos sub, like the big subwoofer they have...
Marco:
is probably the nicest home theater subwoofer I've ever used and ever heard.
Marco:
It is one of the very, very few on the market that are force-canceling, which means it basically does not generate vibration because it's using two drivers at opposite angles.
Marco:
It's a whole thing.
Marco:
Apple does it in all their recent woofers for the MacBook Pro and everything.
Marco:
But anyway, it's a great subwoofer, and my preferred setup is the Sonos Amp,
Marco:
which is a speaker amp that only drives two speakers, like a left and a right, but has the HDMI arc input and everything.
Marco:
So I use it as a non-surround stereo plus subwoofer setup.
Marco:
And I love that setup because it allows me to use my nice KEF, however that's pronounced, those speakers, my Q350s,
Marco:
those with the sonos sub are an amazing i've never been happier with a with a speaker setup than that simple pair of q350s and and the sonos sub and the sonos amp i i love it so much it sounds incredible for both music and tv and movies and everything but especially music um and it's just it's it's awesome um
Marco:
But I have tried some of their smaller products.
Marco:
I've tried.
Marco:
Let me see.
Marco:
Let me just get the names right on.
Marco:
So I've tried the one, the move and the room.
Marco:
None of those have impressed me.
Marco:
And other people swear by these things.
Marco:
So maybe it's just my taste is not lining up with what they make in this smaller category here.
Marco:
I have never been impressed with those three products and everyone else seems like you like them a lot.
Marco:
So good for you.
Marco:
But yeah, I haven't had, I haven't had a great experience with those in terms of like value for the money.
Marco:
I do agree that the, you know, as you said, like the setup process is great and that I, I have no complaints about, you know, setup integration, the, the tech side of things with the exception that the app is, you know, fairly clunky.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
I wouldn't say it's fairly clunky.
Casey:
I would say it's clunky.
Casey:
It's not perfect.
Casey:
I'd probably say it's not even great, but I don't think it's actively bad either, especially because I freaking hate everything that Apple Music is in terms of their apps and every platform.
Casey:
But I would agree it's not like an exemplary app by any stretch of the imagination, but I wouldn't say it's actively bad either.
Marco:
Yeah, it's in the middle.
Marco:
The bar is low for iOS music playing apps.
Marco:
They're all awful, and it's kind of a shame.
Marco:
Anyway, so I love them for TV sound and for AirPlay 2.
Marco:
And for those two purposes, you only use the apps to set them up.
Marco:
You're not actually going through the app to play stuff.
Marco:
So it doesn't matter how much I like the app because I never use the app.
Marco:
And so I'm extremely happy with them.
Marco:
As AirPlay 2 devices, the amps have been rock solid.
Marco:
When I had the One and the Move, I did the same thing.
Marco:
I did AirPlay with those two, and they were also rock solid for AirPlay.
Marco:
It's faster and more reliable to AirPlay something to play through the amp on my TV speakers than it is to a HomePod.
Marco:
like it is like you pick it out i know right but like you pick it out of the out of the airplane picker you hit you know you hit hit the name of the speaker in my case in the living room a second later boom it's on home pods not even close to that fast or that reliable um so anyway i'm a huge fan of some of their products uh and and you know the rest you know maybe not maybe not quite for me but i at least respect them
Casey:
I totally get that.
Casey:
Oh, and I forgot to mention that they do have some seemingly rudimentary voice recognition that is off by default, mind you.
Casey:
You have to go in and add the voice recognition in order to get it to be enabled at all, which I really like.
Casey:
You know, by default, you can say, hey, Sonos, and it's just going to ignore you.
Casey:
But then you can choose to add the voice recognition.
Casey:
And if I understand this correctly...
Casey:
All of the voice recognition processing is happening on device.
Casey:
There is no cloud component.
Casey:
But that also means you can't just ask it arbitrary queries.
Casey:
You can ask it like the time, for example, but you can't ask it anything complicated like you would any of the other tubes.
Casey:
I don't want to say their call names or whatever.
John:
But you can add them as well.
John:
Not as well, but instead you can add Google Assistant or you can add…
Casey:
the amazon one yep yep that's true i haven't tried that but i know i am aware that that is something one could do um so yeah so what's really great about this is that it's all on device so it's pretty quick it seems pretty reliable because the problem set is so small uh what's his name is it gus spring what was the guy from breaking bad i forget the actor's name but he's the one who talks to you which is kind of funny um really that's awesome yeah it's kind of threatening
Casey:
It does sound a little bit threatening, but nevertheless, it's a very distinguished, very recognizable voice.
Casey:
But that seems to work well.
Casey:
And it does handle semi-complicated requests pretty well.
Casey:
Like I've said to it, you know, hey, dingus, stop playback on porch.
Casey:
And I've said that in the living room.
Casey:
And it's been smart enough to say, okay, I'm going to continue the playback in the living room, but stop it on the porch.
Casey:
And that's just a silly example, but it's stuff like that.
Casey:
And that seems to work really, really well.
Casey:
And I've been really impressed with that, too.
Casey:
The Roam is, again, the Jambox-like thing.
Casey:
I like it a lot.
Casey:
It sounds really good to my ear, given what it is.
Casey:
So I am unquestionably grading on a curve.
Casey:
But given what it is, I get a lot of volume and a really impressive amount of bass out of something that is approximately the size of the original Jambox.
Casey:
Rest in peace to the OG.
Casey:
But anyway, I've been impressed by it.
Casey:
And it comes, or you can get one that has, it's almost a triangular shape.
Casey:
And you can get like a base that you can stick it on so it's always charged.
Casey:
As it turns out, I didn't realize until later, that's just a triangularly shaped Qi charging base.
Casey:
Yeah, it charges by a Qi.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
So it would sit on any Qi charger.
Casey:
It's just this is, you know, bespoke and so on and so forth.
Casey:
But
Casey:
Again, all of these people who are so annoying about how great Sonos is.
Casey:
Now you have to try Sonos.
Casey:
It's so good.
Casey:
It's so much better than everything.
Casey:
Well, you know what?
Casey:
You have to try it.
Casey:
It's so good.
Casey:
It's so much better than everything else.
Marco:
Yeah, Sonos is what Apple should have been.
Marco:
Apple's speaker efforts should be like Sonos.
Marco:
And frankly, I'm shocked Apple didn't buy Sonos at some point in the past because they've had a number of down times financially.
Marco:
I think before they really leaned heavily into sound bars, they were in a bad state.
Marco:
And it turns out soundbars are just cash cows for everybody.
Marco:
So that's kind of saved their butts, I think.
Marco:
But they were in a bad state for a while.
Marco:
And they could have been bought for a song, I bet.
Marco:
And Apple didn't.
Marco:
And on one level, I'm happy Apple didn't because now we have an alternative.
Marco:
If the HomePod lineup keeps getting crappy or staying crappy or being buggy, then this is where to go, basically.
Marco:
This is your alternative to it.
Marco:
And it's not as good in certain ways.
Marco:
It's better in other ways.
Marco:
But at least it's a good alternative.
Marco:
And I don't see Apple getting this good.
Marco:
Which is a shame because I think if Apple brought their audio engineering expertise, like the actual speakers, the drivers, the enclosures, they kick Sonos' butt seriously.
Marco:
But Sonos slaughters them on performance, physical quality metrics, reliability, speed, inputs, and handling, and versatility.
Marco:
Sonos destroys them on all those things.
Marco:
Apple just makes better sounding speakers.
Marco:
And I wish there was something on the market that combined that, whether it was Apple, Sonos, or something else.
Marco:
But in the absence of that imaginary solution that combines all the best things of all these things, yeah, they're pretty good.
John:
fair enough john have you ever played with any of this i don't recall don't you have a rome or something i got two romes now actually so my wife wanted one or she was using mine and i said i'll just get your own they can you can actually hook them up in a stereo pair which i thought was funny i'm in a stereo pair of two little that's awesome yeah um but i still use mine as my shower podcast thing she uses it as her little office radio essentially you know just to play music in her basement office um what else do i have anything else i don't think i have anything else from them
John:
And it's weird because the roams are basically off all the time.
John:
They're not in use.
John:
So launching the app shows you don't have a Sona system.
John:
I can't connect to your things.
John:
And you have to turn them on or whatever.
John:
So I'm really not using it the way it's intended.
John:
But I was hoping your glowing review would convince Marco that watching television and movies in stereo is barbaric in this day and age.
John:
But apparently not.
Marco:
There is no chance.
Marco:
I love my setup way too much.
Marco:
you can have an awesome setup but just need more of those speakers that you love in different positions and voila surround sound yeah but then i have to like then i then it becomes a much more complex situation because like i know the sonos amp is a really really great alternative to a receiver if you only want two channels plus sub
John:
but but you you think you only want two channels but uh apparently casey and i cannot convince you that having more than two channels can be fun and every modern television but i've had it before i had it when it was new in like the late in the 90s or whatever the early 2000s yeah but like you know look 3d tvs existed for a little while then they stopped because nobody cared this is surround sound is not a fad
John:
Every television show and every movie is mastered for more than two stereo speakers.
John:
And if you got them... How is surround sound different from 3D TV?
John:
Because it's a thing that people like and it's not going away.
John:
I mean, that's fair.
Casey:
So my experience with surround sound was...
Casey:
Way, way, way back in like the mid 90s, my dad, again, super audiophile for all the good and bad that comes with it.
Casey:
He not only spent a Brazilian dollars on the stereo, but also put together a surround sound system for our main television.
Casey:
We were the only people I knew with a Laserdisc player, like the whole rigmarole.
Casey:
early, early, early surround.
Casey:
I don't know if this is true, but it seemed to me that the original surround sound was just, let me guess what's coming from the back.
Casey:
Like there was, it didn't seem like anything was mastered such that this sound needs to come out of that speaker.
Casey:
It was just, let's take a guess.
Casey:
Oh, just ambient noise that sounds like a crowd.
Casey:
We'll just pump that through everywhere.
Casey:
That must work, right?
Casey:
And occasionally it would guess right.
Casey:
And like in Top Gun, you would hear a
Casey:
hear a plane go from behind you to in front of you as the same thing is happening on the television.
Casey:
When it did click, it was amazing, but it was very rare.
Casey:
Now, it is clear that, depending on what content you're feeding all of this, stuff is mastered for 5.1.
Casey:
So it is mastered such that I want, and this is what I was saying earlier, I want the sound from this walkie-talkie in this cop show to come from the left rear speaker.
Casey:
I want the scream from somebody getting shot at
Casey:
This is a terrible analogy.
Casey:
I'm so sorry.
Casey:
It's just the most recent example.
Casey:
It's coming from the front right speaker and so on and so forth.
Casey:
So it is a very different experience than it was years ago.
Casey:
And I don't even remember, I'm probably wrong, but I don't remember Dolby Digital being this good.
Casey:
And maybe it was, or maybe it's just that mastering has gotten better over the years.
Casey:
Both.
Marco:
So mastering has gotten better over the years, but also the original surround sound formats, like the actual audio formats, were less able to represent perfectly discrete things.
Marco:
They were like simpler, lower bandwidth and everything.
Marco:
Modern formats now, they individually represent all the different channels and separately encoded and they can have...
Marco:
They can encode positional information so that way your system can adapt to how your speakers are actually positioned versus how the sounds were intended in a giant sound scale.
Marco:
Now they're really advanced.
Marco:
Back then they were simpler.
Casey:
I totally buy that.
Casey:
In the defense of Marco, again, I spent the last 15 years listening to stuff in stereo with a center channel that probably wasn't even used half the time.
Casey:
I don't think it is absolutely compulsory, but I will say without question, it is a much better experience to have a full 5.1 setup than it is to have just stereo.
Casey:
Again, not required, but way, way, way better.