They’re All Rectangles
John:
have either of you been told the good news yet or do you preach the good news about knob-based microwaves what i've heard the good news which is the phrase you're looking for have you heard the good news i have heard the good news based microwaves uh i am not convinced at all i don't have one i have my ancient microwave that doesn't really work but i am not convinced
Casey:
I'm sorry, hold on.
Casey:
Are we talking about, so my recollection is one of my grandparents, I don't remember which side it was, had a truly ancient microwave wherein you would spin a dial to get a gross approximation of how much time you would like to cook the thing in the microwave.
Casey:
And you could set it to five, that could mean anything between three and a half and seven, but it said five, so sure, we'll go with that.
Casey:
Is that what we're talking about?
Marco:
the original like old microwaves from you know before digital stuff was super commonplace they were they all just had knobs and it was it was like you know like like a like a kitchen timer you turn it and we go and you know ding when it was done right yeah yeah yeah and then you know everything got digital keypads throughout like the 80s and 90s and and uh you know that's what we knew and that's what all microwaves are for the most part and then i think only recently i started hearing people say like oh you got to try one with knobs
John:
Well, I think you missed the middle period.
John:
After the digital, where you had a bunch of numbers and you would type in the time, there was this fairly dark time that extended until very recently, which was, yeah, okay, maybe there's number pads, but also there's 17 other buttons with obscure pictures of things on them.
John:
chicken popcorn uh frozen food meat like just random pictures of stuff and then the real best one is the the the corporate microwave this isn't really a trend but just a thing that exists that companies buy i think two or three companies that i work for have these microwaves where there is no number pad so you can't type in the time there is no dial what is there
John:
a set of numbered buttons from like one to nine just vertically and like i think like a space to the right of each number where i suppose you could write something and i think the idea is you could program nine preset times into each of the buttons and so what you would do is you'd put your food in the microwave and you'd press the you know the number three which you had programmed to be two minutes and 50 seconds or something is this like for food service or for like corporate offices
John:
this yeah i'm guessing it's like there's some context but i saw them in offices they were in our kitchenette type things but i'm guessing it's like like that space to the right was like if you're if it's kind of a food service thing or an industrial setting where you're only ever going to cook for these you know five preset times you don't have to type them in and it's faster but why they were put in like the the kitchenette areas of offices i have no idea but anyway yes now that now the dial has come but it's not the dial that you described which is a mechanical dial that goes tick tick tick tick and goes back to zero but of course it's a uh
John:
What are they called?
John:
The things that spin forever.
John:
Knobs.
John:
Not a potentiometer.
John:
There's a word for it.
John:
Someone in the chat room will have it.
John:
What is the name of those dials that spin forever?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Anyway, for most people, I don't know how many microwaves we get to buy in our entire lives.
Marco:
They tend to be pretty long-lasting appliances.
Marco:
And so I think in my entire life, I have purchased something like two ever.
John:
I'm sold and strong at zero.
John:
Yeah, because you inherited yours, right?
John:
I inherited one with a broken screen.
John:
The screen has never worked.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
Wait, so can you not tell how much time is left?
Marco:
Nope.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
So every time you cook food, it's a little surprise.
Casey:
It's a little gift every time.
John:
Well, I mean, I type in the number, so it's not really a mystery.
Marco:
Does it at least beep every key press so you at least know, like, did it recognize the key press?
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
I've never had a situation where, like, it's still clear that it's actually working and you can type the things, beep, beep, beep.
John:
It's fine.
John:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
John, how many icons are on your computer's desktop?
Casey:
Just ballpark?
John:
It's a little bit messy now.
John:
I've got a little cluster to the right, a little cluster to the left.
Casey:
I've been in your house, but it's been a long time since I've been there, which is a problem we should solve, but that's a discussion for another time.
Casey:
I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around you being this okay with non-functional things.
Casey:
I know this is not new news.
Casey:
Can't beat the price.
Casey:
I know you are frugal, and that's coming from a frugal person.
John:
It was inherited from my grandparents, and it really is a very good microwave.
John:
We thought that the door opening thingy might be broken, and so I did do a little search for new microwaves, but the door opening thingy cured itself.
John:
But I'm on the lookout, so I'm interested in hearing Marco's experience about the knob microwaves because I did see them in my research.
Marco:
I've actually never used one before because they don't seem that common anymore.
Marco:
Certainly, you know, the modern knob based ones I don't think are very common.
Marco:
I've never seen one.
Marco:
I've never used one.
Marco:
But sometimes, like, you know, you read something on, you know, a social network or an online review or a blog post and kind of sticks in your head.
Marco:
I remember that I had heard like, oh, you got to try knob microwaves.
Marco:
They're so much better.
Marco:
Well, I had an opportunity to buy a microwave because the house we're selling, it came with like a, not quite built in, but like a microwave that kind of like they built a cabinet around it.
Marco:
So it like fits perfectly in there.
Marco:
So it felt only right to then sell it to the people who are buying the house.
Marco:
Also, like to leave it with the house because it fits so perfectly.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
For the new house, I need a microwave.
Marco:
At the beach, I had to buy one a few years ago.
Marco:
And at the time, I had read that Wirecutter article about how every microwave is the same microwave made by Medea.
Marco:
There's this one company called Medea that makes the guts of almost every microwave on the market.
Marco:
And they're all almost the same.
Marco:
And that's why you can get a pretty decent microwave for like $75, basically.
Marco:
That is very similar to every other microwave on the market pretty much.
Marco:
And that there's not that much variation in quality between them because they're all using the same small, very small number of guts made by like one or two companies at most.
Marco:
In the article, they pointed out, oh, except for the Panasonic converter microwave, that's that's its own different thing.
Marco:
I had to buy a microwave for the beach back then and I bought the Panasonic converter microwave.
Marco:
The gist of it, I believe, is to achieve different power levels rather than just pulsing it on and off at full volume in different segments.
Marco:
On for a second, off for a second, on for a second, off for a second.
Marco:
Instead of doing that, the inverter microwaves are able to just like literally just lower the power output directly.
Marco:
And so it's a continuous stream of lower power output instead of bursting high off, high off.
Marco:
that's i think the gist of it forgive me again if i if i you know if there's other details that i don't know or if that's not quite right but that's that seems to be the gist of the difference between inverter and non-inverter microwaves and so i thought well the panasonic inverter one was only like a couple hundred bucks like let me try it this is supposedly really good i again i thought back then how many microwaves do we buy in a lifetime i might as well try to get a good one when i do and we use microwave a lot because you know as as much as i respect people who do things like
Marco:
steam vegetables on the stove for some reason i am not that person i love steam and bag vegetables and i steam mine on the stove it's really not that hard why just don't put you just don't put you put a tiny little bit of water in and you put another thing it's fine but then you have to wash the steamer and the pot and it takes longer like you put it in the microwave for like five minutes it's done
John:
My vegetables don't come in plastic bags that are microwavable.
John:
Sorry.
Marco:
Even if you have other ones, you put them in a glass thing with a lid and you put it in the microwave for five minutes with a little drop of water.
Marco:
That's it.
John:
I don't have enough control.
John:
Five minutes?
John:
That seems like a lot.
Casey:
You don't have enough control because you have a screwed up microwave.
John:
That's why.
John:
it's the same microwave.
John:
I just got done going through it.
John:
It's all the same microwave.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
They're all, well, I don't know back then they might've been different, but now they're all the same.
Marco:
Um, anyway, so I got the, I got the inverter microwave for the beach a few years ago.
Marco:
It performs decently in the sense that I like the way it microwaves things, but it was the buggiest piece of crap I've ever used.
Marco:
The, the control panel was buggy.
Marco:
It would occasionally like you'd have to like hit the off button to reset it because it wouldn't reset on its own after a cycle.
Marco:
It would frequently trip its breaker.
Marco:
And that sent me on a goose chase for months.
Marco:
Like, okay, why does the breaker always trip when I run the microwave?
Marco:
Is it overloaded?
Marco:
Is there something weird on it?
Marco:
What else is plugged into that circuit?
Marco:
It drove me nuts for months.
Marco:
And I read a couple online reviews like, yeah, a bad microwave can do that.
Marco:
I don't know how.
Marco:
I don't care.
Marco:
And all the other online reviews of the Panasonic Inverter Microwaves all cite similar buggy problems with them.
Marco:
So it seems like they're all that way, not just like I didn't just get a lemon.
Casey:
So wait, let me play this back.
Casey:
You decide instead of getting the same piece of garbage microwave that every other human has, you need to get the fancy lads bespoke microwave and end up regretting it because it's a piece of trash, even though it's four times the cost.
Casey:
Just want to make sure we're all on the same page here.
John:
Well, and I do want to push back on the they're all the same.
John:
Yeah, the microwave producing thing is the same.
John:
But the things you care about are some of the things that you're complaining about, which is, is the UI gross?
John:
Do the buttons feel good?
John:
Does the door opening close nicely?
John:
Is it going to break?
John:
Does the little, you know, turntable thing turn or does that break?
John:
Like there's those type of things that sort of make the product, even if the microwave guts are the same in all of them.
Marco:
right and and it's you know simple things also like aesthetics like we wanted we wanted a white one because it was going on the counter next to other white appliances so like that can happen to you i yeah it does nice uh anyway panasonic one i'm like i drive me nuts and meanwhile we're getting this new house and that needs a microwave i'm like let me try a different one um and i i found somehow that breville the company that makes john's beloved toaster oven he found one that's even more expensive than the panasonic good job
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Breville makes inverter microwaves now.
Marco:
Almost no one makes them, but Panasonic makes them and Breville makes them.
Marco:
I don't know if anyone else does.
Marco:
I wasn't able to find any other ones.
Marco:
And I knew they made generally well-regarded appliances.
Marco:
They seem to be only knob-based ones, though.
Marco:
And they advertised a couple features that sounded nice, like a soft closed door.
Marco:
I'm a sucker for that kind of thing.
Marco:
So I thought, you know what?
Marco:
What the heck?
Marco:
Let me try it.
Marco:
Let me actually just try this weird, totally different microwave that has knobs.
Marco:
And by a company I didn't even knew made microwaves until two seconds earlier.
Marco:
Let me give it a shot.
Marco:
And I've been living with this knob microwave for about three weeks, four weeks now, something like that.
Marco:
And I got to say, not just vegetables.
Marco:
I cook a lot of stuff in the microwave.
Marco:
Lunches, we usually have these frozen meal things from this company called Daily Harvest.
Marco:
Yes, I know.
Marco:
I don't care.
Marco:
Just let me enjoy it.
Marco:
So I microwave lunch almost every day.
Marco:
I usually microwave some component of dinner, like a frozen vegetable or something like that.
Marco:
At the beach, we have a lot of frozen food because there's no grocery stores all winter long.
Marco:
So we have a lot of frozen vegetables and frozen meatballs and stuff like that.
Marco:
So we do a lot of microwaving.
Marco:
This thing is amazing.
Marco:
I have been totally converted to the knob lifestyle.
Marco:
First, I thought there is no way I'm going to sell knobs to the family.
Marco:
Like this is not going to fly.
Marco:
Secondly, I'm like, I don't even know if I'm going to enjoy the knob based lifestyle because I've been using keypads my entire microwave using life.
Marco:
so first let me tell you the soft closed door is really nice the other parts of this microwave are really really nice too the sounds that makes are nice the ui is nice the things feel nice on it the inside is very well lit for some reason it's like it's very very nice inside it's not white though is it i think that was one of the things that turned me off no it's all silver inside yeah i don't i don't like the silver inside ones that's a trend i'm not i'm not a fan
Marco:
Well, I don't feel strongly about it either way.
Marco:
I mean, my insides have always been white or like that kind of creamy color before.
Marco:
And everything shows sauce flex just as well as every other color in a microwave.
Marco:
So, you know, it's not really a big deal either way.
John:
You don't have a microwave little thing that you put over stuff so it doesn't spray stuff all over the inside of your microwave?
Marco:
No, I've had those.
Marco:
I had those growing up.
Marco:
They were always a pain in the butt.
Marco:
I never thought that was worth it.
Marco:
I just try.
Marco:
I can't live without them.
John:
It's another one of the things that if I lose mine, I'm going to be like, oh no, where do I find this thing?
John:
Because I don't even know where to buy it again.
John:
It's probably 20, 30 years old.
John:
Just a little piece of plastic you put over your dish.
John:
Sort of exactly fits over our dishes.
John:
Keeps stuff from splattering.
John:
Makes a microwave not get as gross as fast.
Marco:
No, they still sell them.
Marco:
They're made of silicone now, but they still sell them.
Marco:
It's basically like a cake dome that you stick in the microwave.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
Whenever I'm microwaving something with tomato sauce, I'll just drape a paper towel over it when I send it in there.
John:
What's your objection to things?
John:
You don't like cleaning them?
Marco:
First of all, I don't think adding more plastic to the inside of a microwave is a great idea.
Marco:
I also don't like cleaning extra things that I... You're microwaving your vegetables in a plastic bag.
Marco:
Not all of them.
Marco:
Some of them.
John:
That thing is designed to go into the microwave.
John:
If anything's going to be safe in the microwave, it's that.
John:
It doesn't get hot at all either.
John:
Whatever it's made out of.
Marco:
What could possibly be less safe than a bunch of ancient plastic that you've inherited from somewhere?
John:
I didn't inherit the plastic thing.
John:
But anyway, this thing doesn't even get hot somehow.
John:
So it's made of microwave-resistant material.
John:
I don't know what it's made out of, but I think it's pretty safe.
Casey:
Chemicals.
Casey:
It's made of chemicals.
Marco:
Yeah, basically it's made from petroleum and other weird stuff.
Marco:
Anyway, so the knobs.
Marco:
I actually think it's better.
Casey:
So if you walk up to the microwave and you want to cook something for two minutes and 30 seconds, you have to spin, spin, spin, spin, spin, spin, spin to get to two minutes and 30 seconds.
John:
I don't think 230 is that many spins.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So you're both correct.
Marco:
I do have to spin to get there, and it's not that many spins.
Marco:
But also, there's two knobs here.
Marco:
The top one is time.
Marco:
The bottom one is power.
Marco:
The time one, the button in the middle is start, and it also adds 30 seconds.
Marco:
So if you want to put something in for 30 seconds, it's one button press.
Marco:
If you want to put it in for 230, one way you could get there is just hit that five times.
Marco:
There are different shortcuts available.
John:
Have you had to do like a 30-minute microwave and see how many spins it's going to take of that knob?
Marco:
No, I'm not like cooking whole chickens in there or anything.
Marco:
Like, I don't know what you do.
John:
Sometimes if you're doing like a long defrost cycle or something.
Marco:
Oh, no, it has auto defrost.
Marco:
And so the Panasonic one also, we do, again, as I mentioned, we have a lot of like frozen meat that we have to defrost.
Marco:
Don't defrost your meat in the microwave, please.
Marco:
Come on.
Marco:
I should clarify, it's frozen pre-cooked meat.
Marco:
Stuff like frozen pre-cooked meatballs.
Marco:
There's a place here that makes these amazing chicken meatballs.
John:
Boy, you're really giving a Casey run for his money with your plastic bag vegetables and your frozen pre-cooked meatballs.
Marco:
Don't forget, first and pre-cooked chicken meatballs, which I anger even more people.
Marco:
They're delicious.
Marco:
Anyway, it has auto-defrost, where you just tell it what type of meat.
Marco:
You pick up the scroll wheel, and then you tell it roughly how much it weighs, like a pound or whatever.
Marco:
And then you hit go, and it uses the sensor.
Marco:
I tried the sensor reheat.
Marco:
That's one thing I never trusted microwaves to do, is just heat my food and tell me when it's done.
Marco:
It actually seemed to work.
Marco:
It heated it, I think, a little more than I would have.
Marco:
It took a while because it did it on lower power, and it was pretty darn hot when it came out, but that worked pretty well.
Marco:
So the great thing about the knobs, first of all, adjusting the power level is way easier.
Marco:
than on any other microwave.
Marco:
Because before, it's like, all right, you've got to type in the time, then hit power level, then hit seven, and then do you type in that first, then the time, and what if you clear it?
Marco:
It was always very unclear how to use it, and it was a lot of button presses.
Marco:
And as Merlin has evangelized for years, becoming a microwave power user to make things really nicely, and it often requires changing the power level.
Marco:
What's also amazing about the knob-based lifestyle is you can change the time or the power level while it's running.
Casey:
Oh, that's interesting.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So as it's running, if you want to add some time, just turn the knob.
Marco:
Or if you want to subtract time, just turn it.
Marco:
And it adjusts the live time as it's counting down.
Marco:
You want to change the power level?
Marco:
You just turn the power level as it's going.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
I gotta say, it was a huge risk.
Marco:
Oh, and the first time Tiff saw it, she's like, oh, is this the new microwave?
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
That was it.
Marco:
She figured it out in two seconds.
John:
You should get the one with the one through nine numbers on it and see how she reacts to that one.
Yeah.
Marco:
This one, actually, on the inside of the door, it does have a series of little buttons that are for rarely used stuff, like setting the clock.
Marco:
I haven't really explored any of them, so I don't really know what they do.
Marco:
But I don't need them.
Marco:
Just having the two knobs, I thought this was going to be really weird and maybe not as good.
Marco:
It's way better.
Marco:
The speed at which you start it up and the ability to adjust things while it's cooking, and how easy it is to change power levels,
Marco:
That really is a game changer.
Marco:
And this thing is awesome.
Marco:
I'm super enjoying it.
Marco:
So anyway, this is a very long ad for a microwave that is not paying us for a sponsorship.
Marco:
But I love this stupid microwave from your stupid toaster company.
John:
Yeah, when I was looking at microwaves to replace mine, the things keeping me away from that one was the power level was a little bit below what I have.
John:
And the like interior like dimensions were a little bit low because it's kind of small ish.
Marco:
They make a smaller one, but this is the bigger one.
Marco:
This is a full-size American microwave.
John:
Yeah, now even the bigger one is a little bit smaller than mine.
John:
My microwave is pretty big.
John:
So anyway, my old one is still hanging on, but that's definitely on my short list of things to look at if and when this one finally dies.
Marco:
I got to say, try it.
Marco:
I feel like you would be grumbly for the first couple of days, and then you would fall in love with it.
John:
I mean, I'm not going to grubble about it at all as long as I can fit everything in it.
John:
I don't want to like buy something and it feels like it's too cramped or whatever, but I think it'd probably be okay.
John:
What are you putting in there out of curiosity if it's not vegetables?
Marco:
I have to like measure our plates and say like, hey, do the plates like fit?
Marco:
Yeah, it fits plates just fine.
Marco:
I mean, maybe not like, I mean, depends on how old your plates are and whether you inherited them from like the Queen of England.
Marco:
But, you know, if they're like typical American dinner plates, it fits just fine.
John:
Yeah, let's see.
John:
It's on the list.
John:
Like I said, I kind of wish it was white.
John:
It's silver on the outside, too, right?
John:
Yeah, it's silver everywhere.
John:
Yeah, I kind of wish it was white everywhere.
John:
But anyway, I'll check it out.
Marco:
I would prefer white as well.
Marco:
But, you know, hey.
Marco:
And the only weird thing about it, I will say there's one weird thing, is that it keeps the fan running for about a minute after it's done.
John:
Just like a turbocharger in a 1980s Nissan, right?
Marco:
I don't know why it does that.
Marco:
Like if it's cooling off some component, I'm not sure why.
Marco:
I've never seen a microwave do that before.
Marco:
But if that's the one weird quirk to make this thing happen, that's fine.
Marco:
I'm in love with this stupid thing as much as you can love an appliance.
Casey:
I'm very glad that we spent roughly 20 minutes digitalizing the microwave that nobody else is going to want to spend the money on.
Casey:
But we have done it.
Casey:
Marco feels better for having put that happy thought into the world.
Casey:
All right, so now apparently we're continuing the advertising portion of the show, but this time we're doing it in a completely self-serving manner because guess what, baby?
Casey:
The Holiday ATP store is here.
Casey:
It is back and better than ever or something like that.
Casey:
This is one of the time-limited sales.
Casey:
So now is the time to make your move and go ahead and buy some stuff because on Sunday, November 26th, Sunday the 26th,
Casey:
You will not be able to buy these shirts and other assorted items, which John will take us through here in a moment.
Casey:
If you are driving right now, if you are walking, particularly if you're in a place like New York where you need to walk with a purpose, pull yourself over to the side of the road or wherever you are and go to atp.fm slash store and take a look at our wares.
Casey:
That's wares with an S, not wares with a Z. Take a look, see if there's anything you might be interested in or maybe somebody that you love.
Casey:
might be interested in one of these things.
Casey:
And we have some pretty good stuff.
Casey:
I mean, not to imply that the other stuff is bad, but we have some interesting new entries this year, which I would love for John to take us through, please.
John:
all right so uh in our typical uh ill-advised product creations we have a doozy this year uh ill-advised and that we make these products that that have that have really uh that have the worst possible margins for us and are also extremely difficult to manufacture and we've done it again we've reached new heights so this is an idea that the designers at cotton bureau have had this idea for for
John:
I think several years now, we're always like, nah, I don't think so.
John:
It's not going to work.
John:
And their idea was this.
John:
Their idea was simple.
John:
Hey, wouldn't it be great to have the ATP logo, but do it in like pixel art?
John:
That makes sense.
John:
ATP, computers, pixels, it all fits, right?
John:
The problem with this idea is that the ATP logo has a bunch of slanted lines in it.
John:
The slanted six colors plus the slant of the A and everything like that.
John:
And those lines are not slanted at 45 degrees.
John:
And anyone who's ever done pixel art knows, hey, if you want to do pixel art, 45 degree angle lines, real easy.
John:
You just go up and over one, put a dot, up and over one, put a dot, up and over one, put a dot, makes a nice smooth line.
John:
You can change the size of the pixels to however chunky you want them or however fine you want them.
John:
That line always looks good.
John:
Whatever angle the lines are in the ATP logo, it is not 45.
John:
So if you make the pixels big and you try to draw those slanted lines, it's like up one, over one, and then two more vertically, then over one, and then a single one, and then two, and it's not quite right, and it looks ugly and uneven.
John:
And so you're like, okay, well, how do we fix this?
John:
We can fix this by making the pixels smaller.
John:
So then the line that's not at 45 degrees won't look as weird and jaggy.
John:
But if you make the pixels really small, they're really hard to print on the shirt.
John:
And if you make them small enough to make the line not jaggy, now it just looks like a bumpy logo.
John:
It doesn't look like pixels anymore because from a distance, you can't even see the pixels along the edge.
John:
So now it just looks like a low resolution version of a regular ATP shirt.
John:
so the solution to this is obviously to try something even more difficult which is okay how about we put we put space between every one of the pixels like when you go into fat bits mode on mac paint or when you zoom in really far in a graphics program and it stops showing the pixels touching each other but starts showing like the grid between them so you can see the individual pixels how about we do that
John:
And then we tried that and the problem there is, okay, well, there's a limit with t-shirt printing to how fine a detail you can put without, you know, all the colors just smushing together.
John:
So we have walked that delicate line.
John:
The pixels are small enough.
John:
that the angles in our logo are rendered nicely, but large enough that you can still see them with spaces between them that are small enough so that the logo still shows up, but large enough so that you can see the individual pixels.
John:
You will see the struggle we face when you go to atp.fm slash store and look at the little rotating animated graphic, which shows the shirt.
John:
And then from a distance, the shirt just looks like the ATP shirt with like a dimmer logo.
John:
But then I have two levels of zoom showing you what's really going on.
John:
Oh, and by the way, to make it not just look like the ATP shirt, we put a little drop shadow underneath it.
John:
And of course, the drop shadow was a different color than the rest of the shirt.
John:
So now you don't just have the normal like seven colors that you have, the six colors, stripes and gray.
John:
But now you have seven additional colors, which are all those colors, but slightly darker to be the shadow.
John:
So this is what we've done.
John:
Probably our most difficult to manufacture, most difficult to explain, most difficult to display on a webpage shirt that we have ever made.
John:
We call it ATP Pixels.
John:
It is our ATP logo.
John:
As the tagline says, one pixel at a time.
John:
It is not retina.
John:
You're supposed to see the pixels.
John:
That's the point.
Marco:
Yeah, the regular shirt is the retina version.
John:
Yes, the regular shirt is retina.
John:
You can't see the pixels.
John:
This one, we're trying to let you see the pixels.
John:
I actually, this is one of the only times we've actually pre-printed sample shirts, so I have a sample here to see, can we pull this off?
John:
Will it work on a shirt?
John:
And I have the shirt sitting right here on the desk, and I can say, yes, it is possible.
John:
Now, I didn't run this shirt through the wash 800 times.
John:
I really hope these pixels don't smear together or come off in the wash or whatever, but we're pushing the limits where this is our version of 3 nanometer, okay?
John:
this is n3b we're doing the best we can atp pixels that is a new shirt we have it as our headliner for the holiday season next shirt uh this was also another cotton bureau idea and i thought it was funny and good it's much simpler thankfully uh it's called atp space black uh and like another computer with that same color that you might have heard about recently
John:
It's not really black.
John:
The logo is just a really dark gray.
John:
That's it.
John:
That's the shirt.
John:
It's a black shirt with a dark gray logo on it.
John:
The twist here is that for this and one other product, we also are doing sweatshirts.
John:
It's the same logo.
John:
It's just the ATP logo in really dark gray.
John:
Don't call it black.
John:
It's space black.
John:
But it's a long sleeve crew neck sweatshirt.
John:
Well, I'm wearing one right now.
John:
I wear them like all during the winter.
John:
And I figure this is a winter sale.
John:
We should do it as a sweatshirt.
John:
It's the same product.
John:
It's just called ATP space black.
John:
When you pick the product, you can pick T-shirt or a sweatshirt.
John:
And, you know, so anyway.
John:
And also there's a solid color black tri blend, I think, which is a new option for that one.
John:
next we have our crop just like apple introduced their crop of m3 processors we have our crop of m3 shirts we have an m3 shirt an m3 pro shirt and an m3 max shirt and just like apple the pro is a little bit more than the m3 and the max is a little bit more than the pro unlike apple it's not like a 500 difference we just added a dollar but we think it's a good joke so there you go nothing on the back of these shirts no more chip uh design on the back i know a lot of people didn't want anything on the back but honestly we didn't have time to make them even if we wanted to put them there
John:
so it's just the m3 logo on the front if you have an m1 and m2 shirt you know what these look like with the pro and the max badges on the pro and the max shirts then we have the atp six colors shirt which you're probably familiar with it's a bunch of different colorful shorts with a white atp logo on them only now we've also thrown in crew neck sweatshirts in varying colors into the same mix again it's the same products it's just called atp six colors you got the shirts and the sweatshirts
Casey:
in varying colors wait i'm sorry i'm sorry hold on the atp6 color shirt and i think this name has been here for a long time it just now occurred to me the atp6 color shirt is monochrome white or at least the logo is monochrome white despite the name atp6 colors yes the shirt that's why it says colorful shirt i'm just saying we probably should workshop this a little bit
John:
I mean, that's what it's always been called.
John:
There's more than six colors now, by the way.
John:
But anyway, that's what it is.
John:
And then we've got a regular ATP logo shirt, which we always sell.
John:
We've got the ATP hoodie, which we always sell, which is great.
John:
And I highly recommend.
John:
I think people underestimate the hoodie.
John:
My kids all have them.
John:
They love them.
John:
We've got the ATP polo, which if you're looking for something more formal for the holiday season, there's that.
John:
We have the ATP mug, which we've sold many times before, but this is an entirely new appearance for the mug.
John:
It is not a black mug with either red or gray inside.
John:
It is a white mug on the outside with a cobalt blue interior.
Casey:
It can just happen to you, I tell you.
John:
That's right.
John:
Cobalt blue interior and a cobalt blue logo.
John:
It looks really cool.
John:
I think when you see the, it definitely looks different than the other one, but I'm excited to get these.
John:
A lot of people in my family have been requesting them.
John:
So it's a totally new look for the mug.
John:
Check that out.
John:
And we have our pint glasses, which are the same as they've ever been.
John:
Now, it's the holiday season.
John:
And as Casey mentioned, the sale only runs until the 26th.
John:
You're listening to the show.
John:
Maybe you want one of these things as a holiday gift.
John:
No one is going to know that.
John:
You can't be subtle.
John:
You're going to have to just take atp.fm slash store and message them and say, I would like something from here for the holidays, for a holiday gift, and the sale ends on the 26th.
John:
your friends and relatives are not going to find this on their own you really just if you want to be more specific you're like i want this specific shirt and this specific color and this specific size don't be shy people want to find something that they can get you if you like you're a nerdy person and they want to get you something nerdy for a holiday gift it's not just like socks or something something that you think you'll actually like
John:
send them a link otherwise they'll never find it uh same thing if you know a nerdy person in your life and you'd like to buy something for them uh as for buying these things for the holidays keep in mind anything that has multiple colors of ink on it including the pixel shirt is going to be more expensive which we why we included the six color shirt and the i know it's confusing because it's only one color for printing but anyway why we included the six color shirt and the space black shirt both of those are cheaper because the logo the printing on them is just a single color so they're significantly cheaper than the other ones um the
John:
i look at this list it's like every single product is like 17 different printing passes and then we have the stupid pixel shirt so bad on us for doing that but hey it's the holidays uh and some of these shirts you know who knows if we'll ever sell this pixels thing again same thing with the mugs uh you know depending on how popular this style is maybe this is the only time we'll ever sell it so
John:
If you want one of these things, I suggest either buying it, buy it for yourself, or buy it for someone nerdy in your life, or get a link and send it to somebody.
John:
And don't be sire subtle.
John:
Say, here you go.
John:
This is what I would like for a holiday gift.
John:
Please and thank you.
Casey:
Now, we don't make any explicit guarantees that this will be there by the holidays.
Casey:
That is obviously the goal.
Casey:
That's why we set the timing for now.
Casey:
But no guarantees.
Casey:
You have our full permission to print out a picture and put it in an envelope and say this is forthcoming.
John:
I did that with an iPhone one year for my wife.
John:
She got a picture of an iPhone.
Casey:
So that is an approach, especially if you are overseas.
Casey:
That is very – I'm not saying it won't work, but I wouldn't necessarily bank on having this show up if you're in Europe or somewhere elsewhere.
Casey:
But we are certainly trying.
Casey:
We're going to give it the college try, and Cotton Bureau is going to give it the college try and hope to get everything there by the Christmas holiday.
Casey:
Again, no guarantees.
Casey:
But a couple of other points of administrivia very quickly.
Casey:
If you are an ATP member, new or old –
Casey:
go to your member dashboard or whatever you want to call it, and there is your bespoke discount code.
Casey:
Since this is a time-limited sale, you can get 15% off anything you buy in the ATP store.
Casey:
So go and get your code, plug that in, and you will save 15%.
Casey:
And if you aren't a member, then Marco, what could you do in order to get yourself this 15% off?
Marco:
ATP.fm slash join.
Casey:
Now, Marco, do you need to cancel your membership subsequent to getting your 15% off?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
In fact, canceling membership is totally optional.
Marco:
You can totally choose not to and just continue to be a member afterwards for all the other cool member perks, such as the ad-free version of the show, the bootleg feed, access to various other minor things throughout the year, but mostly those two big things, and also the exclusive content that we do, which is sometimes very fun.
Casey:
and sometimes nauseating because we haven't done ATP food in a while and there's a reason.
Casey:
So anyway, so yeah, ATP.fm slash store.
Casey:
Thank you, John, for putting all of this together.
Casey:
You've done an excellent job as always and to our friends at Cotton Bureau as well.
Casey:
Check it out.
Casey:
We really think you'll like it.
Casey:
And again, up until the 26th of November, literally every time, literally every time people say, oh, I forgot.
Casey:
Oh, sorry.
Casey:
26th of November.
Casey:
You've got, what, three weeks?
Casey:
You've got time.
John:
Get your holiday shopping done early.
John:
Don't wait.
John:
This sale ends basically just after Black Friday, so you'll have one final frantic reminder three episodes from now.
John:
We're like, this is it.
John:
You've got to do it now.
John:
But just do it now.
John:
Get it out of the way.
John:
The peace of mind is worth it.
John:
And totally sign up for the membership.
John:
It's pretty easy if you order a couple of things to make up that membership amount in discounts.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
All right, let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
The Apple event video, I don't know how we didn't get a chance to mention this, but we didn't.
Casey:
It was shot on iPhone.
Casey:
It was in the show notes, I will point out.
Casey:
I think we just didn't have time.
Casey:
Yeah, we ran out of time.
Casey:
So anyways, it was shot on the iPhone or on several iPhones, I guess I should say.
Casey:
There's a very short and very cool behind-the-scenes video, which I love this stuff.
Casey:
I've been begging for years now.
Casey:
I want to see a behind-the-scenes like this for Fitness Plus because I find that fascinating.
Casey:
But anyways, there's a behind-the-scenes video about it.
Casey:
If you missed the discourse on the nerd, I don't know, like Mastodon and other nerd-centric things.
Marco:
Consider yourself lucky.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Consider yourself lucky.
Casey:
A lot of people were very grumpy about the fact that there were other devices next to the iPhone, like lights and drones and cranes and people.
Casey:
And apparently that invalidates the fact that it was shot on the iPhone.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I find it very...
Casey:
whatever uh but there's a short verge post which even though i do like the verge this is kind of a good encapsulation of the discourse that was going around i i think it's very silly but nevertheless um we have a link in the show notes for that and there is also um a a post from stew mashwitz that talks about this which i did not get a chance to read because this apparently showed up since i was prepping for the show uh john was this you that that put this yeah it's a list of like
John:
Well, the title is What Does and Doesn't Matter About Apple Shooting the October Event on the iPhone 15 Pro Max.
John:
And it's basically saying, like, what should and shouldn't you be impressed about, you know, the fact that they did this, right?
John:
And so it goes through the different items.
John:
The whole idea that, you know, oh, they shot an iPhone, but they use all this expensive equipment –
John:
does i mean it it makes a like intuitive gut sense and like oh i thought you were saying that i could make a video like this which is silly if you think about it for a second but i do see how people could have that idea in mind and then they think about it for one second they say but wait a second look at all those lights and they think about another second and if they thought about a little bit longer they would say okay but look here's the deal
John:
If they take a regular Apple video that they shoot, they make these videos all the time, and just replace the camera part of it with a different camera, I think that's a fair substitution.
John:
It's not like, well, normally they don't use all the lights, but when they have the iPhone, they have to use all the lights.
John:
No, they always have lights.
John:
Everything there is the same.
John:
They just swapped out the camera part.
John:
Whether or not you find that impressive, I think it's pretty good.
John:
Let's just change one variable situation.
John:
It's just the sort of the, you know, initial impression of like, are you saying I could make this?
John:
I don't have a crane.
John:
I don't have a director of photography and huge lights.
John:
It's like, yeah, right.
John:
But there it is.
John:
It is a fair test, which is like we kept everything else the same.
John:
All the super expensive equipment we always use.
John:
We just swapped out the camera.
John:
So the Stu Mashowitz article is good that it explains like, all right, what?
John:
What's impressive about the fact that they could do that?
John:
Is it impressive that it looks good?
John:
Is it impressive?
John:
Are there technologies or features of the iPhone 15 that are specific that makes this possible that they couldn't have done with the 14?
John:
So I think that's actually the useful article to read, because that's Apple's point.
John:
Apple's point is...
John:
we're now at the point where we can swap this, you know, $50,000 camera for a $1,100 iPhone.
John:
And it looks so good that nobody notices it was shot on iPhone.
John:
And to that, you know, to that degree, I think their publicity stunt for this was successful in the backlash is mostly silly.
Marco:
We as nerds, we tend to obsess over and overemphasize the importance of the central piece of gear about creating some new thing.
Marco:
Whether it's a camera, whether it's a microphone, a computer, or a phone.
Marco:
We tend to...
Marco:
obsess over that and like, oh, what kind of pen do you use to write down your thoughts?
Marco:
If I use that pen, my thoughts will be better.
Marco:
What kind of camera did you use to take that amazing photo?
Marco:
If I get that camera, I can take amazing photos.
Marco:
We tend to overplace the importance of those things in our mind because we love gear and we love the idea that, oh, I'm just one good camera away from being a great photographer.
Marco:
But the reality is making great stuff,
Marco:
does not usually first of all doesn't require cutting edge and the best technical specs on those things typically but also there's so much more to it than just the piece of gear that one central piece of gear you know making great video always takes way more than a great camera the great camera is a start
Marco:
But what great video takes more than anything is people like that's what it's like.
Marco:
Making great video usually takes a team of people.
Marco:
And the reason why is because there's so much to do to make great video.
Marco:
You have to think about the lighting, the sound, how the camera is moving, the writing.
Marco:
Like, I mean, there's so much, so much goes into it.
Marco:
So the fact that you can drop in an iPhone to replace some $5,000 and up professional video camera... Much, much more than that.
Marco:
Well, yeah, I'm thinking it's going to also... Not only is it going to replace some Reds on some of these sets or whatever, it's probably also going to replace some Sony A7 series video cameras and stuff like that.
Marco:
That kind of thing.
Marco:
It's going for that kind of market.
Marco:
I don't foresee a lot of people who are using the really, really big stuff on professional movie sets and stuff.
Marco:
They're not going to use iPhones.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Smaller productions that are currently using basically DSLR video cameras, many of those could use this either as their main camera or as a secondary camera if they wanted to now.
Marco:
But they probably wouldn't.
John:
They probably wouldn't, no.
John:
Those other cameras are better for the purpose.
John:
Apple is just showing that it is possible, which is what the Stu Maschwitz article is about.
John:
And people have shot feature length videos on iPhones many, many years ago when phone cameras were way worse.
John:
And I've watched some of these movies.
John:
I think it was a Steven Soderbergh one that I watched.
John:
And it's like you said, Marco, why is this a good movie?
John:
Because he knows where to put the camera and how to make a movie.
John:
And the script was good, right?
John:
And like the...
John:
The video quality, I don't remember how long ago it was.
John:
Maybe it was just many years ago.
John:
If you look at the camera technology then compared to what it is now, you'd be like, no one could have made a feature-length movie with an iPhone back then.
John:
But they did, and people watched it, and I bet most of the people who watched it didn't even know it was made on an iPhone.
John:
They just thought it was a grungy-looking indie movie.
Marco:
The impressive thing about the shot on iPhone thing with the event is that they just touched it at the end on that little ending card and everyone's like, wait, what?
Marco:
You didn't know.
Marco:
The whole time you didn't know.
Marco:
This is not saying that every single feature presentation of anything is always going to be shot on iPhones from now on, but the fact that they could do it
Marco:
and it didn't seem like it was that big of a problem or that big of a challenge to do it and they didn't seem to be leaving much on the table by doing it that's impressive and so even if it doesn't replace anyone's professional film set cameras or whatever it doesn't need to the fact is it is now good enough to do that and that and occasionally it will be used for things and that's great and
Marco:
All of us who are, you know, gearheads, we now can't say, man, if only I bought this other big camera, then I could make great videos.
Marco:
No, you could.
Marco:
I mean, that's one of the great things about the democratization of amazing technology being put into our phones and, you know, regular people computers.
Marco:
Anything that you can do with just a... Admittedly, the iPhone is not like the cheapest smartphone on the market, but it's a mainstream smartphone that lots of people have across all different demographics and places around the world and different abilities and different financial situations.
Marco:
Anything that you can enable people to do with just their iPhone, that's incredibly powerful.
Marco:
And that enables so many people in the world to do so many great things.
Marco:
They're not all going to have these big crews or anything.
Marco:
Sure, of course not.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
The fact that they have a camera in their pocket that they didn't even have to buy separately.
Marco:
They were buying the phone for other reasons.
Marco:
They kind of already have it.
Marco:
That's amazing to have that kind of capability.
Marco:
That's what Apple was showing us.
Marco:
And at that, they succeeded.
Marco:
And you don't have to dive too much into, well, they were putting it on a gimbal and using lights.
Marco:
Yeah, of course they were.
Marco:
They were making a professional video commercial for their company with a massive budget.
Marco:
But that's not what most people are doing.
Marco:
And that's fine.
Marco:
It's still ridiculously amazing that the phone can do this.
John:
A more convincing thing that they could have done is picked out some of the famous YouTubers who shoot tons of stuff on just plain iPhone.
John:
Like Doug DeMuro famously just skips out on it just shoots everything on iPhone.
John:
Not that his videos look great or anything, but they no one cares that they're on iPhone.
John:
Even MKBHD, who's got a gazillion dollar RED cameras that he loves very often when he's doing an outdoor thing, going around a car or whatever.
John:
all iphone sometimes he mentions it sometimes he doesn't but honestly people watching the videos can you tell if this was taken on a fifteen thousand dollar red camera or on his own personal iphone that he's holding in his hand and sometimes uh either you can't tell or you wouldn't be able to tell unless you're really looking for it and that i think is much more relevant to people's lives uh than
John:
you know well at least to people of a certain age what do these famous youtubers who have some in some cases basically unlimited money for their you know short little video that they're making uh why are they choosing to do an iphone because it's good enough and it's there and it's just easier and that's that's as big as an advertisement as the fact that apple can spend millions of dollars to you know pay a production company to make their latest infomercial
Marco:
I'll see you next time.
Marco:
In this world, phish credentials are useless to hackers, and you can manage every OS, even Linux, from a single dashboard.
Marco:
Best of all, you can get employees to fix their own device security issues without creating more work for IT.
Marco:
The good news is, you don't have to imagine this world, you can just start using Collide.
Marco:
Collide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and it ensures that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps.
Marco:
Visit collide.com slash ATP to watch a demo and see how it works.
Marco:
That's collide, spelled with a K, K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash ATP.
Marco:
Collide.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Collide for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Moving right along, David Steer writes, I've been hearing quite a lot of slightly negative commentary in the tech press regarding the new plain or vanilla M3 MacBook Pro.
Casey:
But when you start speccing it up, I think it becomes quite a compelling machine for those who previously might have opted for a high-end M2 Air.
Casey:
An 8-core M2 Air with 25 gigs of unified memory and 2 terabytes of storage costs 2,349 pounds in the UK, which I priced it earlier today, and I believe the bill that David is talking about is $2,300.
Casey:
Whereas in a 10-core M3 MacBook with the same memory and storage costs 2,700 pounds or $2,600.
Casey:
So again, 2,350 pounds versus 2,700, $2,300 versus 2,600, a Delta of about 300 bucks.
Casey:
With the M3 MacBook, the 350-pound difference gets you the latest chip, a bigger, better screen with promotion, higher-quality speakers, longer battery life, and a couple of extra GPU cores.
Casey:
I wouldn't be thinking of it as a substandard Pro.
Casey:
I'd be thinking of it as a beefed-up Air.
Casey:
Obviously, if size and weight is your biggest consideration, then the Air is still the best option.
Casey:
Luke Miani has a good video about the M3 Pro pricing.
Casey:
We'll put a link to that in the show notes.
Casey:
I see both sides of this.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
The vanilla M3 MacBook Pro, it seems a little bit light on the Pro for my tastes, and I feel like it kind of...
John:
uh it's great isn't the word i'm looking for but kind of it makes the i can't think of the word i'm looking for it makes what part of it did you think is light on the pro because i've been thinking the opposite the more reviews i've read because it does have all the same stuff except for the it's m3ness which exposes itself in lack of ports and stuff like that but
John:
Everything else about it isn't skimped.
John:
I think the point of David's feedback here is true with a lot of Apple products in that very often, especially if you're a tech nerdy type person, you're like, okay, you get it in your mind which product you want.
John:
But then because you're a tech nerd, you're like, okay, now I've got to pick which one of these.
John:
I'm going to go through the configurator and I'm going to bump up the specs that I care about.
John:
Maybe you need a big disk.
John:
Maybe you need a lot of RAM, whatever.
John:
And what you don't notice is that as you're cranking the dial up on the spec for the thing you're configuring, you're pressing up against like the next higher machine.
John:
So you're like, oh, I want to get an air because I can't afford a probe.
John:
Then you go into the air and you keep turning up the dials and you may not notice when you're starting to press really hard up against the next higher end thing, which is the M3 MacBook Pro.
John:
And, I mean, you know, again, the Air has a size and weight advantage, but that Pro screen just destroys.
John:
No matter how high you spec that Air, the screen's not getting any better, right?
John:
And so when I look at the M3 Pro, I think of it as, like, if you're making a really expensive M2-based MacBook Air and you want a faster computer with a way, way, way better screen...
John:
take a peek at the M3 MacBook Pro.
John:
The benchmarks of that plain M3 are impressive as well.
John:
So I'm feeling pretty good about it at this point.
Marco:
Yeah, also keep in mind, HDMI, SD card slot, better speakers.
Marco:
There's a number of significant advantages to it over the Air.
Marco:
And look, I love the Air.
Marco:
The Air is a fantastic computer.
Marco:
But once you are in this price range, once you are specking up the Air to have more resources and stuff, it is actually pretty competitive with this thing.
Marco:
The M3 MacBook Pro, it would be nice if it were higher spec.
Marco:
For instance, I do agree with a lot of the commentary around these days that a machine called MacBook Pro really should not start at 8 gigs of RAM in this day and age.
John:
It should support more than one external monitor, which is the other real limiting.
John:
Maybe you don't care about it, but if you do, boy, you'd be real disappointed if you didn't know about that and you bought it.
Marco:
Yeah, and I think the limitation of one external monitor is probably... If you're going to complain about one thing about that machine, that, I think, is more likely to hit more people than, for instance, having less memory bandwidth or only having one fewer Thunderbolt port.
Marco:
I think the external monitor thing, more buyers of this computer would be surprised by that limitation, I think, than the other limitations.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
And that limitation, you know, again, there are ways around it with like those USB-C display port hub thingies or whatever, but those solutions are always a little bit more, first of all, it's annoying that you have to buy an extra thing.
John:
And second, they're always a little bit janky, right?
John:
There's not an Apple branded one and you never know if you're getting the right switching thing.
John:
Like having dealt with those type of sort of external monitor expansion things for laptops for many years and my various jobby jobs, they're not particularly satisfying.
John:
And so that's another sort of, you know, we were talking before, like, you know,
John:
Apple dinging itself and sort of brand reputation by forcing its customers to cobble together a solution that is not up to Apple standards.
John:
You don't have to worry about that if you get the M3 Pro or M3 Max and you can just plug in more than one monitor directly to your computer.
Casey:
That is true.
Casey:
And yeah, to answer your earlier question, the thing that I don't love about it is the 8 gigs is the only one external monitor.
Casey:
It's not wrong.
Casey:
It just feels icky.
Casey:
It doesn't feel like a pro machine with those kinds of limits.
Casey:
But what are you going to do?
Casey:
And actually...
Casey:
I didn't get a chance to go back and look into this, but apparently somebody who works on the iMac team was like, oh, 8 gigs for us.
Casey:
It's like 16 for PCs.
Marco:
Yeah, Bob Borcher, right?
Marco:
Yeah, that's going around today, too.
Marco:
A lot of people are complaining about that.
Marco:
I don't think that was Bob Borcher's best moment in the press, honestly.
John:
Well, I think there was enough weasel words in there to make it actually true because he was comparing it to, like, Windows or something, right?
John:
So, like, I mean, it could be that the Windows operating system and the similar applications take up more RAM or they're less free.
John:
Like, it's just, it's so not apples to apples, ha-ha, that it's hard to invalidate it, but it's not what people care about.
John:
Like, with the 8-gig thing, I mean, on the one hand, it's good that you can upgrade it, unlike the external monitor.
John:
There's nothing you can, you can't add, you know, you have to go up to the next, uh,
John:
the m3 pro to get the extra monitor but you can get more ram if you want it but the reason people complain and i meant to look this up maybe i'll look it up for next week is that we know that in the technology world component prices go down over time if you go back 20 years in the past max did not come with eight gigs of ram they came with way way less but the prices were in the same ballpark because ram used to be way more expensive than it is now so over time we have some expectation that
John:
You know, you'll get more RAM for the same amount of money.
John:
And Apple holds the line on that so long that it's incredibly frustrating.
John:
Like, we don't expect to be like Dell where, you know, when the price of RAM drops by a dollar, it's reflected on Dell's website because their margins are always like, you know, cutthroat competition.
John:
We really need to be the cheapest possible option.
John:
So if our component prices go down, we pass it on immediately to the customer.
John:
Apple passes none of it on.
John:
Like, you know, how much does five gigs of iCloud storage cost, right?
John:
So how long have we been at eight gigs of RAM as the minimum?
John:
And how long...
John:
Component prices go down.
John:
We know they go down.
John:
It costs Apple.
John:
And I'm not saying Apple has to pass on all of that.
John:
Like, I understand the longer the Apple makes the same machine, the higher the margins go.
John:
Like, we're not begrudging Apple their margins.
John:
Like, by all means, reap the margins.
John:
But you can't hold the line forever.
John:
And so it's like when we get closer and closer to the point where we're like...
John:
come on Apple like for the past however many years you've been saying just eight gigs eight gigs eight gigs we know that eight gigs is getting cheaper at some point the dam has to break and you have to say okay we'll give you more and it doesn't go to 16 does it go to nine like we don't but whatever it is and
John:
enjoy your time when you keep the price the same and your component costs go down like enjoy that time but there has to be a point where you move off of eight gigs and when we get closer to where like collectively we tech nerds think they should be starting to get close to the point especially when at this point it's not like oh eight gigs is too little for a minimum we because they put it in something with pro and it costs 1600 we're saying in this scenario you're really highlighting the fact that you're being stubborn about you know not passing on any of your component cost reduction status which
John:
I mean, we talked about it last episode.
John:
It's the reason the Touch Bar one was sold for so long, because of margins.
John:
And so now it's like, okay, fine, you get the new computer with all the new Wizzy stuff, but we're still holding the line at 8 gig, and it's frustrating.
Marco:
I don't think it's that unreasonable.
Marco:
In my mind, of course, this is my little nitpick, I don't think there should be anything called MacBook Pro that is an inadvisable purchase.
Marco:
If one of your relatives comes to you and says, hey, I just bought a MacBook Pro,
Marco:
You should have no dread.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Marco:
Did they buy the wrong one?
Marco:
I mean, ideally, you'd have that same feeling about all the computers, but ideally, yes.
Marco:
But I recognize, you know, the the thing, you know, the lower end models in this, you know, currently the airs, you do have to have low end models to hit certain low price points.
Marco:
I get that.
Marco:
And there are and I'll get to this in a second.
Marco:
There are certain buyers where that would be OK.
Marco:
I'll get to that in a second, please.
Marco:
But but like I think something called a MacBook Pro.
Marco:
The minimum standard should be 16 gigs and 512 gigs.
John:
And they did increase the SSD to 512.
Marco:
Yeah, thank God for that.
Marco:
Because to me, I think that is, if you are at all a power user, 16 and 512 is your minimum baseline.
Marco:
Ideally, 16 a terabyte.
Marco:
And if you're mad about RAM prices, don't look at how inexpensive SSDs are right now.
Marco:
It is shocking how inexpensive good, fast SSDs are right now.
John:
ones that are faster than the ones that apple is putting in its laptops you can get for just a pittance right so yeah that's i mean the fact that they went to 512 like that's a relief because they were holding 256 for so long but still still 512 seems a little tight yeah all the pros should be 16 one terabyte at least at minimum but
Marco:
They're not.
Marco:
And OK, maybe we'll get there.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Apple's profit.
Marco:
But, you know, Bob Orcher's statement, first of all, I mean, look, he didn't he didn't mean to cause a cause a press hubbub with that.
Marco:
I think it's one of those situations where like talking to the tech press or to any journalist really is like talking to the police.
Marco:
Ideally, don't.
Marco:
But if you have to be very careful what you say, because it will be twisted against you in some headline posted on social networks.
Marco:
And so, you know, the what he said was a whole paragraph that basically the gist of it was basically the RAM quantity is not as important as you think, because there's lots of reasons why modern Apple Silicon Macs are super fast and they're faster than you think.
Marco:
Go try one.
Marco:
You'll probably see it's faster than you think.
Marco:
And that's all true.
Marco:
And when the Apple Silicon Macs first came out, the very first ones, the M1 based ones that were the only ones for something like six or six or nine months were.
Marco:
they maxed out at 16 gigs of RAM.
Marco:
And those of us who bought them and used them, I was one of them, we had to go oftentimes down from 64 or 32 down to 16 to use them from our previous computers.
Marco:
But they were so much faster that it wasn't as big of a problem for a lot of work.
Marco:
Some work it was still a problem, but for a lot of work it wasn't because the entire computer was faster.
Marco:
So that's not wrong.
Marco:
That's not untrue.
Marco:
The whole computer is faster.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
It is also held back when you don't have enough RAM, and it could be so much faster if you gave it enough RAM.
Marco:
I mean, yeah, the processor's speed and the architecture with the unified memory and everything, that does make a lot of things faster.
Marco:
So the overall system does feel very fast, even with 8 gigs, when you're not doing that much with it.
Marco:
But when you do start getting into a lot of multitasking and anything involving if you ever use Chrome for anything or anything that uses Chrome, like a lot of Electron apps, a lot of apps are super ram-hungry, including many of Apple's own apps now.
Marco:
And so you need...
Marco:
ram in a modern computer eight gigs and you know anything less than a terabyte i think is is inexcusable for anything marketed towards any kind of power user at all on the air if you have to get a super low price point for entry that makes more sense nothing called pro should have really stingy specs even at the base and that's i think that's a that's a relatively new thing most macbook pros you know years ago like most macbook pros the base model was respectable
Marco:
It wasn't super top of the line, of course, but it was always respectable.
Marco:
The 8 gigs really hurts this.
Marco:
Another angle that a lot of people are saying are like, well, these users over here, these casual users or the people who just use business computers, they don't need it.
Marco:
They don't need more than 8 gigs or they don't need more than 256 or whatever.
Marco:
And I think we have to be very careful as power users and as nerds what we assume other people don't need or won't appreciate.
Marco:
Honestly, there's a lot of gatekeeping that is kind of under the surface there and a lot of elitism under the surface there and a lot of condescension under the surface there.
Marco:
And so we have to be very careful when we're making assumptions about what other people would need or wouldn't need or would or wouldn't appreciate.
Marco:
In many ways, the computers that we use, that many people around the world use all the time, are way over specced in certain areas for what they need.
Marco:
All of the modern Apple Silicon chips are way faster than what people need to do word processing and fill out forms and web browsers for their job or whatever.
Marco:
But we give them to them anyway.
Marco:
The phones in our pocket, as I mentioned earlier, are way, way better than what most people, quote, need or would notice the difference between.
Marco:
But we keep making them better anyway because that's what we do.
Marco:
That's what we do as technologists.
Marco:
We make things better and faster and nicer and more capable over time.
Marco:
Whatever we think someone won't need or won't appreciate or won't notice, that might be true a lot of the time.
Marco:
But not all the time.
Marco:
There are those times when people notice and they appreciate it and they use it and they need it.
Marco:
And who are you to say what someone is never going to need or is never going to appreciate?
Marco:
Computers oftentimes have long lives.
Marco:
You don't know what someone's going to need now or five years from now.
Marco:
So give people the most you can give them with whatever resources you have available.
Marco:
Give them good tools and let them decide what they do or don't need.
Casey:
Yep, I agree with you.
Casey:
Building on a little more about the base configs, Ewan Makepeace writes, with regard to the penalty of quote-unquote unusable base configs, in Indonesia and presumably other countries, there are zero official Apple stores.
Casey:
While the standard Mac configs are available from stock in stores, custom builds take months and months to arrive.
Casey:
So when Apple ships laptops with 8 gigs of RAM or 256 gig storage, that's what many, many, many customers end up with.
Casey:
It's very frustrating.
Marco:
Yeah, all the more reason why the base configuration of something named Pro should be pretty decent.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Tomer Schmesh writes, I am absolutely shocked that they didn't announce Face ID on the new MacBook Pro.
Casey:
At this point, I'm starting to feel like there's a specific reason they are not doing it and they don't plan on it.
Casey:
But at the same time, why is that notch so freaking huge if all it has is the camera?
Casey:
Well, it has a camera and a light.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I really wanted Face ID for the longest time.
Casey:
I don't have any particular problems with Touch ID, especially since we now have external keyboards with Touch ID.
Casey:
In a perfect world, I agree that, yes, I would prefer Face ID, but I don't know.
Casey:
This is not one of the things that's actively bothering me.
Casey:
Am I wrong about this?
John:
Yeah, well, whether or not it's actively bothering you, the reason I put this in here is because, you know, we've spent many months praising the new MacBook Pros, mostly because they undid the mistakes of the past and got back on the right track.
John:
And because obviously Apple Silicon is amazing and laptop form factor.
John:
Uh, but it may lead some people to think, okay, so are the laptops, are they done now?
John:
And now we're just quibbling over like what the configs are and how much they cost.
John:
Like, have they, have they perfected it?
John:
And my answer is no, there are still obvious things that they should do.
John:
And my number one slash number two, depending on, you know, this in cellular is face ID.
John:
Uh, I'm, I think touch ID is great.
John:
I enjoy it.
John:
I think face ID would be as big a game changer as it is in the phone, just because the act, especially if laptops like they're sitting on a desk, the act of the act of sitting down in front of something and having it just unlock without you having to do anything.
John:
Is that still one step better than having to put your finger on the little spot on the keyboard?
John:
Not a big deal, just like it wasn't a big deal to put your thing on touch ID.
John:
But I'm a big proponent of face ID on my phone.
John:
I would love it on my Mac.
John:
uh it's not on laptops there's kind of a goodish reason it's not the fact that the notch is plenty wide it's just the screens aren't deep enough at this point to fit the face id stuff i believe if you took like the face id component out of a phone and tried to like you know disassemble the screen and tried to shove it in there i think it's still kind of tight and apple doesn't want to have a weird bulge or whatever but like but yeah that's on my list like oh are they just done they never have to do anything to laptops again no they should be working towards face id they should be working towards getting rid of the notch and they should be working towards face id
John:
And those two things could be combined if and when they figure out how to do under the screen stuff or getting rid of the dynamic island.
John:
We've talked about this on the phone, yada, yada.
John:
All this is to say is that the laptops are not perfect.
John:
They're not done.
John:
There's always, to Marco's point, there's always ways that we can make them better with technology.
John:
We're in a good period now where there are no glaring errors anymore.
John:
No unforced errors, no stupidity.
John:
But like, thank God for that.
John:
why do they not have cellular why do they not have face id look they have working keyboards and they have a reasonable complement of ports and the processors are amazing so we will enjoy this period but let us not forget there is always more that they can do and those i think those are obvious ones put cellular and do face id right uh and you know i'm sure there are other obvious ones that you can think of like we're not demanding them this moment we're not saying the laptops are bad because they're missing them it's what we're looking forward to for the future so hang in there tomer like i believe it will happen someday
Marco:
By the way, some real-time follow-up.
Marco:
I just did some quick research on every Mac because I remember the 2015 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, the base RAM was 16 gigs.
John:
Yeah, that's what I wanted to look up.
John:
How far do you have to go back?
Marco:
So if you're looking at the cheapest 13-inch MacBook Pro,
Marco:
It has been 8 gigs standard RAM since the mid-2014 model.
Marco:
Oh, my word.
Marco:
Nine years ago, which sold for the price at the time, $1299.
John:
And I'm going to say, RAM prices have dropped in the past years.
John:
nine years nine years like that's the thing component prices like they go and now i understand it's not the same ram because ram gets faster ssd gets faster but like same thing but it also gets cheaper yeah the ssds that we have now are cheaper than they were before they're also faster like that's the march of technology right and i'm again i'm not saying every you know from month to month as ram prices fluctuate apple should adjust the prices of their laptops and pass all the savings on to us like but
John:
But nine years?
John:
RAM prices have gone down in nine years, Apple.
John:
Like, just please give us... To be fair, Apple might say, well, like, the most expensive component in this laptop is actually the screen, and the screen we're making zero profit on because we're basically selling it to you at cost, and to make up for that, we have to charge... You know, like, there's always some reason why, like, the sum of the components in this laptop adds up, you know, we demand our margins because...
John:
Business, business, right?
John:
They have to be this amount.
John:
Otherwise, our stock price will go down and we'll lose our employees because they're retained by the promise of the stock price.
John:
I understand all the reasons behind it.
John:
What we're saying is the balance they have struck with holding a line on eight gigs of RAM and Pro laptops for nine years is perhaps not the right balance.
John:
That's it.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
And by the way, it's not inflation either.
Marco:
I just figured that out too.
Marco:
So this was $1,299 in 2014.
Marco:
In current dollars, that's about $1,688.
Marco:
So that's almost the same price that these laptops are now.
Marco:
So they've accounted for inflation and it's still eight gigs of RAM on the base small MacBook Pro nine years later.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Natasha Singh writes, dynamic caching is tripping up almost everyone talking about it.
Casey:
And in fairness, the way Apple presented it wasn't clear.
Casey:
But they did specifically say, quote, on chip memory, quote, which is SRAM.
Casey:
Apple Silicon's RAM is on package, not on chip.
Casey:
And John, I think you had some other notes about this.
John:
Yeah, Apple also said, I rewatched the video to see what they actually say.
John:
They didn't say on chip, but it was written on the screen in a slide.
John:
And they said local GPU memory.
Casey:
Apple was talking about maximizing the use of on-chip SRAM to maximize GPU utilization, as the chart shows, basically intensifying its use to increase GPU hardware hit rates and utilization.
John:
I would still like to say, like, a white paper from Apple, or I don't know why they would have a WWDC session, because this is totally transparent to the developer.
John:
So, like, I don't know why they would do it other than to just brag.
John:
But I would like to just...
John:
for instance for all like i i believe this i think this all makes sense like this i think this is what it is too but i would like to see the technical details involved just because i'm curious not that it matters but if they're gonna brag about it or whatever you don't you know obviously don't go into detail in the presentation but do link to something on your website that brags about the cool technology i don't know is it a secret they're trying to keep from everyone else but uh
John:
Looking at the benchmarks and everything of the GPU on the new MacBook Pros, I don't know if it's dynamic caching that's helping with it at all, but the GPUs do look pretty good.
John:
So now I'm doing the thing that's marketing at work.
John:
Is it good because of this dynamic caching thing?
John:
Who knows?
John:
But the GPUs are pretty good.
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Casey:
There are apparently no half-speed SSDs on the new MacBook Pros.
Casey:
Again, Luke Miani has a video about this.
Casey:
And John, I think you've done a copious amount of research.
Casey:
There's many, many figures in the show notes, in our show notes, many of which are bolded.
Casey:
So can you walk us through this, please?
John:
Yeah.
John:
So what we're talking about, the half speed SSDs, is that on the previous generation, the M2 generation, if you've got the base config, speaking of being planished by the base config, Apple would only use one SSD chip instead of two.
John:
I don't know, because of component costs or whatever.
John:
Like, so, you know, if you got it with 256, you just get one 256 gig chip.
John:
If you got the 512, your inside would be two 256 gig chips.
John:
and you're like well why do i care how many chips the storage comes in i get you know 256 512 whatever uh when you had the two chips you would get literally twice the speed reading right into the ssd because it would do both chips in parallel so this wasn't like a one percent difference or whatever so the base config in addition to having very little storage obviously you only get 256 it would be half the speed and that was one of those things where you're like oh
John:
oh, you're buying a MacBook Pro, wait a second, or whatever, don't buy the base config because the SSD is half the speed.
John:
And again, maybe it didn't make a difference, maybe you don't care, but you'd want the consumer to be informed.
John:
Like, do you do something where you're waiting around for large volumes of data to go to and from the SSD?
John:
Don't get the one with half speed.
John:
If you never do that and don't care, just be aware that it is half speed, and if you're okay with it, get it.
John:
But it's just one of those things where you don't want to have to have that conversation.
John:
So the rumor right after the keynote, um, last week was, oh, they didn't do that this time.
John:
Every, even the base models, they don't have like a, you know, one, uh, SSD chip when the other ones have two, they're all, they all have two chips or like, there's no difference or whatever.
John:
So, uh,
John:
uh someone did some benchmarking and they found the base luke did benchmarking a bunch of other people did as well uh that the base 256 gig m2 macbook pro was like 1400 megabytes per second so that's like the bad one that we're comparing it to and so let's try the base 512 again they bumped the storage for the base 512 m3 macbook pro and that gets 3000 megabytes per second so like
John:
yay the old one was the old bad one was 1400 and the new good one is 3000 so the old bad one was half speed and the new good one is twice that so we don't have to worry there are no bad base configs the base config is twice the speed of the bad old m2 with just a one ssd
John:
thumbs up right but then people tested the one terabyte m3 pro macbook pro and that one gets 6 000 megabytes per second which i mean i i think the truth is that the base model is not so here's the thing the base model is half the speed of the next one up right it's 3 000 versus 6 000 but it's double the speed of the old bad base config
John:
And this is kind of the way it is with the march of technology, right?
John:
And to be clear, by the way, the PlayStation 5, which came out many, many years ago, had a minimum spec where if you bought an off-the-shelf SSD, like an M.2 SSD stick and shoved it in there to expand the storage, it had to be able to be capable of at least 5,500 megabytes per second read-write.
John:
i think the one i have in there i think is like 75 now and it's a terabyte just fyi so you know consumer uh console you know playstation 5 a many year old console you can get something that's uh 5 500 megabytes per second
John:
But to get something faster than that in a MacBook Pro, you got to go up to one terabyte.
John:
Anyway, technology marches on.
John:
The more money you spend, the faster it will get.
John:
The one that costs more money is indeed faster.
John:
This year's quote unquote slow one is twice the speed of last year's slow one.
John:
I don't know how to feel about this.
John:
I do like the fact that they didn't, if you look at the logic board, you can see there's no like empty spot where there could have been an SSD.
John:
But that's, you know, I don't, this is the type of thing people might not think about when they're buying this.
John:
They're like, I should just pick up based on the amount of storage that I need.
John:
It's not obvious until you benchmark that going from 512 gigs to one terabyte in your SSD is going to double the speed of your thing, especially since they both use two chips apparently.
John:
i don't know like do with this what you will i give apple kudos for not making the same mistake they made last time and and again i don't begrudge the more expensive one being faster but boy that seems like a big leap yep yep definitely is a couple other differences between these if you're worried about like a lots of dissection of the plane m3 because the plane m3 is not the
John:
It's not the ugly duckling, but it's the most interesting and novel one because there wasn't one.
John:
There wasn't a plain M2 one in the same case with the same features, and now there is.
John:
But inside, they're quite different.
John:
So one of the differences is that the plain old M3 MacBook Pro just has one fan instead of two fans that are in all the other better M3-based MacBook Pros.
John:
And, you know, the M3 is a smaller, cooler chip, so it doesn't need two fans, but there's that.
John:
It just has one fan.
John:
It goes a little bit higher RPM.
John:
It's a little bit louder.
John:
Not that big a deal.
John:
You probably won't hear it unless you're benchmarking it.
John:
And interestingly, the plain M3 MacBook Pro has a slightly smaller battery than the next one up.
John:
Even though the case size is the same, even though if you look at them, it looks like the battery's the same, but apparently...
John:
The plain old M3 MacBook Pro is 6,068 milliamp hours, and the M3 Pro is 6,269 milliamp hours.
John:
Again, the batteries look identically sized, but apparently they're not.
John:
So this is Apple, you know, ensuring that the battery life is identical by taking the one that has the chip that uses less power and putting in a slightly smaller and presumably also slightly cheaper battery.
John:
So...
Marco:
Yeah, that's kind of a shame.
Marco:
I mean, so some of the differences here remind me a lot of the old MacBook Escape.
Marco:
That was my nickname for the back when in the early Touch Bar days, 2016 era, when they redid the whole MacBook Pro line like this, they tried to replace the MacBook Air.
Marco:
with an inexpensive version, very similar to what they did here with the M3 MacBook Pro.
Marco:
They tried to replace the MacBook Air with a cheaper MacBook Pro that was cut down in a few ways, had fewer ports, a lower-spec chip.
Marco:
It was like the MacBook Air class of Intel CPUs, that old 15-watt chip line, but in the 13-inch case.
Marco:
And they did similar things.
Marco:
There was only one fan instead of two.
Marco:
But in that case, they gave it a bigger battery.
Marco:
And what I loved about that computer until the keyboard broke very quickly, but what I loved before that happened was that it was a battery monster because they had taken this 13-inch size that was made for pro chips, a bigger case that had a lot of room for battery,
Marco:
And they had put a MacBook Air chip in there, so it really sipped power.
Marco:
And the bigger battery that they had room for in that case, because they filled the thing with battery as much as they could with the space they had.
Marco:
And so that thing was great for a long plane trip, for instance.
Marco:
I was kind of hoping that this base M3 MacBook Pro would be able to take that role again now.
Marco:
And it seems like they kind of half-stepped towards that, but didn't quite push all the way.
Marco:
Imagine if this thing had an even bigger battery than the 13-inch M3 Pro and M3 Max models, which theoretically it should have the room for.
Marco:
Having a bigger battery and a lower-powered chip should be an amazing airplane computer.
Marco:
But instead, I think they have yielded that spot to, more likely, the 15-inch MacBook Air.
John:
Yeah, I mean, it just makes, you know, some sense from that you're trying to get this thing to get a price point.
John:
It's on the one hand, there may be economies of scale using the same battery.
John:
But on the other hand, if these are just, you know, standard ish sizes and they just because it's like, you know, six different individual modules.
John:
So maybe they just shrunk a couple of the modules or whatever.
Marco:
And to be clear, like the need for that is also less now that like now that all MacBooks now get amazing battery life.
Marco:
Like, you know, that was back at the time when like, you know, when I was every year were like when I fly to WBDC, you know, flying from New York to California is like five and a half hour flight.
Marco:
And because I was going to or from WBDC, I'd usually be running Xcode for at least part if not most of the journey.
Marco:
And that was always great work time.
Marco:
And it was always such a challenge during the Intel days trying to get, you know, trying to use Xcode for five and a half hours back at a time when most planes did not have power outlets.
Marco:
That was always a stretch.
Marco:
Like that's when I would turn off turbo boost with those various utilities to turn off turbo boost.
Marco:
I would like turn the screen brightness way down and like turn off the reading light and make my seat dark so hopefully I could like see the screen still.
Marco:
Like all these hacks to try to like just barely stretch it and it would never make it.
Marco:
It would always come close.
Marco:
I would always make it like four and a half hours.
Marco:
And then, well, I guess I got to take a nap now because and now every laptop Apple sells could easily do that even using Xcode and it would be totally fine.
Marco:
So, you know, I get that there is less of a need for that kind of thing in the lineup now.
Marco:
But it is it is kind of a bummer that they like they came close to that and just didn't really follow through with it.
John:
Yeah, I would think this one, the M3 is still probably going to have better battery life because the battery is just a tiny bit smaller and the M3 is less than a tiny bit more power efficient than the M3 Pro.
John:
Yeah, true.
John:
I mean, and the other thing about the M3 with the benchmarks is people are pleasantly surprised at how much faster the plain M3 is than its plain M2 predecessor.
John:
Very often there's these YouTube videos saying, forget about the plain M2.
John:
Let's run the plain M3 against the M2 Pro, right, in various things.
John:
uh so the m3 looks like it's pretty uh i feel like the m3 is a worthy successor to the m1 with the m2 kind of being in in between and again remember i keep i don't know if these are true is this just rumors but all the rumors were that the m2 was supposed to have this new gpu and i feel like if the m2 did have this new gpu and was on three nanometers according to the supposed original plan
John:
uh the m2 would have been much more impressive but it seems like both three nanometer and the new gpu got pushed back to the m3 generation and so the m3 reaps that reward and the m2 is just kind of in between there holding down the fort waiting for the m3 to arrive
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So speaking of M3 and eventually M3 Pro and M3 Max, our friend on Mastodon F. Housler has revised their chip diagrams with, I don't know, like annotations and whatnot.
Casey:
John, do you want to take us through some of the highlights here?
John:
Yeah, the reason I put this in here is I was trying to find a bunch of like presumably real photos from Apple of what these dyes look like.
John:
So the annotated ones are sort of coloring regions saying here is the CPU course, here is the GPU course, here is the IO interfaces, here's, you know, to show where all the different parts are on this thing.
John:
And the reason that's relevant is the whole thing about packaging that I talked about with Johnny Surugi mentioning the packaging was interesting.
John:
What I wanted to know was, you know, because we haven't seen the M3 Ultra or whatever.
John:
It's like, is this year going to be a year with interesting packaging or not?
John:
And looking at these annotated chip diagrams and the diagrams of what the M1 Macs look like and the M2 Macs and the M3 Macs,
John:
i look at these and i think this year is going to be another year where they take two maxes and stick them end to end because if you look at the way the components are laid out on the m1 m2 and m3 max all of which were all the m1 and m2 were ultrified by sticking them end to end all the same pieces kind of line up like you can see the long rows down the side of you know i can't even see because i'm not zoomed in but like
John:
The way the features are arranged, you can see where the interposer is going to go.
John:
It really, really looks like the guts of this chip have been arranged to support the silicon interposer, and the ultra will be made by taking two M3 Maxes and putting them end in.
John:
Yeah.
John:
If that's not the case, I will be very surprised.
John:
Because if there was going to be some more exotic packaging for the step up from the M3 Max, I would expect the layout of where the internal components are to be different.
John:
So if you were getting your hopes up for an M3 Ultra that's not two M3 Maxes stuck together, maybe push those hopes off to the M4 generation.
John:
That said, two M3 Maxes stuck end-to-end is going to be pretty amazing.
John:
So I'm still kind of excited about that.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then do we want to talk more about M3 RAM chip counts?
John:
Yeah, this is just to confirm what we said last week.
John:
There's an Anatech article with photos from Apple that shows the chips.
John:
And it's kind of funny looking because we were mentioning like, oh, there's this many RAM chips on each of these things.
John:
uh the ram chips first of all having three ram chips looks weird because it's not symmetrical i guess uh and also the uh the the size and shape of the ram chips is interesting like if you look at the ones on the max the max has four ram chips around it and they're kind of more squarish but then on the pro they're kind of rectangular like anyway uh just to confirm uh two ram chips on the m3 three ram chips on the m3 pro and four ram chips on the m3 max indeed
Casey:
A friend of the show, Jonathan Dietz Jr., writes in with regard to TSMC's 3nm nodes.
Casey:
Jonathan writes, you can ignore N3X.
Casey:
TSMC's X nodes, such as N3X, are process variants tailored to higher drive currents.
Casey:
These nodes are mostly for x86 designs and trade higher leakage or power for the highest possible clock speeds.
Casey:
This is for products like AMD's Ryzen desktop chips and not anything Apple would ever use.
Casey:
N3X offers about 5% higher peak
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
N3S is a higher-density variant of N3E, which sounds like just the ticket if Apple wanted to largely avoid regressions while moving from N3B to the N3E-based family.
Casey:
TSMC has been mum as of late regarding this node, which indicates to me that it may well be another Apple-only node.
Casey:
Various ideas have been floated as to how the density improvements will be implemented, either through library optimizations or the introduction of a higher-density SRAM bit cell.
Casey:
Personally, I believe the simplest solution for TSMC would be to allow Apple to take the 4% optical shrink slated for N3P six months early.
John:
Yeah, this is the question for next year.
John:
We talked about how N3B has some density advantages over N3E, but N3E, of course, will be cheaper, so on and so forth.
John:
But when it comes time to make Apple's next phone...
John:
Like the phone is the one where every little millimeter counts and you really don't want a regression from N3B in terms of density.
John:
And N3E would be a regression.
John:
So N3S to the rescue, supposedly it's more dense and, you know, and Apple's willing to pay for it or whatever.
John:
tune in next year when we have another series of n3 things with the letter at the end uh it is interesting they were writing off m3x of like apple's never going to use this you have huge power increase for a tiny clock speed increase if only apple had a case that had a huge amount of excess cooling that's currently going to waste oh well wow of course uh we need we need a different sound effect for the for the mac pro i think we're running out of esoteric instruments but we got to figure something out
Casey:
All right, and John, maybe we should get a sound effect for this too.
Casey:
A new error network changed bug report has emerged.
Casey:
Tell me about this.
John:
Yeah, we are well into the error network changed era of our lives.
John:
Well, Chrome did just update, so maybe they fixed it.
John:
But anyway, this continues to rumble on.
John:
Someone filed a new bug against Chromium open source project with the same complaint.
John:
But this person has...
John:
has a has a new theory that they are putting forward angel 11 bug reports don't just say what's happening but they say here's why i think it's happening in some respects that useful in other sense i don't know if this person is right but here's what they have to say uh starting with sonoma this is from the bug report starting with sonoma 14.0 mac west uses a different way of communicating with other apple devices iphones home pods etc and
John:
I don't know if that's supposed to be micro, like a U, like micro, but it's U-T-U-N, U-T-U-N interfaces, by means of the processes remote pairing D and remote D. This happens several times a minute as long as a Mac is in a network with other Apple devices, although it can be best reproduced if there is also HomeKit hubs like HomePod and Apple TV.
John:
Whenever the teardown of a Uton interface happens, as can be seen in macOS console logs, if in that very moment Chrome attempts to load a website, it will abort with ER network changed as it detects the changing network setup.
John:
In typical frustrating bug reporting fashion, although obviously this did get responses, so they're head and shoulders above Apple,
John:
someone's like well since reproducing this bug requires hardware i'm filing i'm tagging this thing with like hardware dependency basically saying like no one can reproduce this bug unless they have like a bunch of other apple hardware or something i'm like look everybody's seeing this is a problem in the chromium engine and is it because a lot of people happen to have other apple devices like maybe they bring their phone close to their mac when they use it like
John:
Ah, so frustrating.
John:
Like, I don't know what it's going to take.
John:
Again, this bug was originally filed in 2019.
John:
So here we are four years later, still fighting with them to say, is this a legit issue or just some esoteric thing?
John:
It's legit.
John:
Chrome should not flip out when interfaces that have nothing to do with it change.
John:
Anyway, I don't know if this thing about remote parenting and remote D being new and the U-turn thing, like, is that what's affecting it?
John:
My experience has been, I got this when I was on Ventura as well.
John:
I just got it way more and I thought it was because of Docker, but it might've been because of Sonoma.
John:
Either way, Chrome, Chromium, stop flipping out when something about the network change doesn't affect you because you're making your product not work.
John:
And people continue to send me screenshots of their Electron apps with their network change topics, mostly Discord because it's a popular application.
John:
But anyway, tune in next week when the saga of network change will continue.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Just recently, somebody asked me, it's a local person here who is a landscaper.
Marco:
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Marco:
How do I do that?
Marco:
I said, go to Squarespace.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
And I didn't have to do anything for her.
Marco:
All I told her was, hey, you know, Squarespace does that.
Marco:
And she went there and did it all herself.
Marco:
And, you know, I never had to be involved as the nerd of the family because it's just that great.
Marco:
And it's fantastic.
Marco:
full of features and now i've seen them firsthand from her using them like all the different you know shipping integrations tax integrations inventory stuff it's all built in with squarespace and it's all so easy to use whether you are a coder or not and you know it's all visual you and your site looks like your site you can brand it with your own stuff your own colors your own layouts your own branding everything like that
Marco:
It is just a fantastic way for any kind of business.
Marco:
There's so many features there, you know, online storefronts, obviously fully supported, flexible payment methods, amazing checkout experiences, you know, get high conversions, analytics, email support, all sorts of stuff.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Now we should talk about the orders that we have all made over the last week or two.
Casey:
Let's start with everyone's favorite laptop superfan.
Casey:
John, has your MacBook Pro arrived?
John:
I'm not on a MacBook Pro.
John:
You know I did an R1.
John:
We covered this last week.
John:
I'm trying to be funny, John.
John:
You've got to play in the space with me.
John:
You get one episode per joke, and we did it last week.
John:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
We've restarted joke quota.
Marco:
We cannot make that joke ever again.
John:
That's right.
John:
It's in a set.
John:
It's in a set case in terms you can understand.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So, Marco, where's your laptop?
Marco:
This is the most frustrating thing ever.
Marco:
It is next to me right now.
Marco:
It is ready to be set up.
Marco:
But because it arrived a few hours before I had to record this podcast, I decided I should not try to set this up now.
Casey:
This is a tremendous amount of self-control that I can assure you I would not have expressed if I were in your shoes.
John:
You could have just booted up and had it running next to you.
John:
Although I do have to point out, now that you have the box.
Marco:
No, but I'm going to transfer everything over.
Marco:
It's sitting on the screen that's saying, do you want to transfer your stuff with Migration Assistant?
Marco:
And I'm not ready to click it yet because I have to do this podcast on the computer.
John:
What you could have done is opened it up and then just put it on your desk, but not actually powered it up and just touched it with your greasy fingers a bunch to test that.
John:
But we'll save that for next week.
John:
But I do have to say, now you have the box next to you.
John:
You see the cover art where it shows the open laptop and it's got that background that's black with a bunch of wavy gray lines?
John:
That leaked.
John:
Yes.
John:
I always watch these things.
John:
I always keep track of the leaks to see if they're true or whatever.
John:
The box art leaked early on this thing, which usually doesn't happen with Ackle products.
John:
But someone posted that.
John:
I'm like, that looks like it could be real.
John:
Guess what?
John:
It was 100% real.
John:
Kudos to whoever's leaking the packaging.
John:
Although, again, it's pretty boring packaging.
Marco:
yeah but it's so i have not used it enough to know how it how it works as a computer i can tell you i have high hopes based on my previous outgoing m1 max 16 inch macbook pro um but i did get the black um i've taken a break from black over the years because i kind of overdid it uh for a while like
Marco:
I was like wearing a black T-shirt every single day, you know, for years and years and years.
Marco:
I bought everything in black because, of course, I was a nerd.
Marco:
And that's, you know, standard issue for nerds.
Marco:
I kind of overdid black.
Marco:
And then when I moved to the beach, I went everything white and colorful.
Marco:
Like I went the total opposite direction.
Marco:
And I still generally prefer the light and colorful lifestyle for most things.
Marco:
But I decided to get black for this one because I've had silver now for so long that I kind of just wanted something new.
Marco:
And so far, in just looking at it here, it looks pretty good.
Marco:
The one glaring error is that for some reason they still have not made a black power brick yet.
Marco:
So they have a wonderful black MagSafe cable with the black end.
Marco:
Is the MagSafe cable actually black or does it match the dark gray of the computer?
Marco:
um it is darker i mean it's nighttime right now but i'm in a pretty bright lit office and it it looks close enough to black um and and the and even like even the the usbc end of the magsave cable the end that goes to the brick that's also now black you know in back when they first did colored magsave cables i think for the for the air last year i remember i think the ends were all white still like the imac has white ends too right
Marco:
I think so, yeah.
Marco:
But anyway, this one, they made the end black.
Marco:
So the whole cable is black.
Marco:
It looks great.
Marco:
And then they still have this bright white power brick.
Marco:
I'm kind of surprised.
Marco:
Anyway, honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if they did some kind of mid-cycle update where maybe in six months, these all start coming with black power bricks.
Marco:
Because it is kind of a glaring thing.
Marco:
And I think they're going to sell a lot of this color.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
The color looks pretty good.
Marco:
I still am a little concerned that it's not going to age as well.
Marco:
Not because of fingerprints, but because of little minuscule scratches and rubbing on the edges.
Marco:
Because underneath this thin black coating is silver aluminum.
Marco:
So any little scratch or dent and any edge wear on the edges and corners, that will show silver probably pretty easily.
Marco:
So I'm a little concerned about that over time.
Marco:
But for the most part, I treat my things pretty well.
Marco:
So I don't expect to see a lot of that.
Marco:
It does look very dark in person.
Marco:
I was, you know, based on a lot of the reviews and the early press photos and the videos, I was afraid it would be lighter than I wanted it to be for a, quote, black laptop.
Marco:
It is pretty dark.
Marco:
I would consider this a black laptop for all intents and purposes under most lighting conditions that people are actually likely to use it in.
Marco:
Yeah, if you bring it outside, it's going to look closer to a dark gray.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
But in indoor lighting, this thing looks great.
Marco:
It looks nice and dark.
Marco:
It looks fresh and new.
Marco:
And it's a cool look.
Marco:
I cannot wait to start using it tomorrow.
Marco:
So hopefully I'll have more to report on the actual use of this thing next week.
John:
Fingerprints.
John:
What's the fingerprint deal?
Marco:
So far, it's been fine.
Marco:
I have not been able to get a fingerprint to show up on it pretty easily.
Marco:
With one exception, the touchpad.
Marco:
Touchpad doesn't have the coating.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
The touchpad is coated glass.
Marco:
It's a totally different surface.
Marco:
So the touchpad still does show fingerprints fairly easily, just like they always have.
John:
Because it's glass, it should be easy to clean them off, though, right?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But keep in mind, that is also the part that you tend to touch a lot.
Marco:
So that's something to be aware of because the fingerprints are a little more visible on the black than they would be on, say, a light color like the silver, just because darker colors will show them a little bit more easily.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
Other than that, it's fine.
Marco:
Everything else seems great so far.
Marco:
But again, I've had it for like two seconds.
Marco:
So ask me again next week.
John:
I forget which YouTuber did this, but here is the tip.
John:
Because you may, if you get one of these and you're like, you want to review it or whatever, you're like, oh, I got to test the fingerprint thing.
John:
You're like, so do I just get nervous and make my hands sweaty?
John:
Like, how do I get the maximum greasy fingerprint to test this?
John:
And this YouTuber came up with the ultimate solution.
John:
I'll give you a chance to guess what it would be.
John:
Do they get like a hot dog and whack it against it or something?
John:
That's a good guess.
John:
That's a good guess.
John:
But you got to think a little bit more gross.
John:
Oh, grosser than that?
John:
What is the greasiest part of your body?
John:
Your head, your scalp.
John:
I mean, that's close.
John:
You're in the right area.
John:
You got to go to the T-zone.
Yeah.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
They rubbed their face on it?
John:
They rubbed their nose on it.
John:
Greasy nose grease.
John:
Nose grease is the ultimate weapon in the war against it.
John:
I would think forehead would be more, but okay.
John:
But the nose, like, it sticks out, right?
John:
So they put a nose, like, they just rubbed it on their nose.
John:
You want to get a good old nose line.
John:
As the producer and owner of copious amounts of nose grease, I have to tell you that is the ultimate torture test because it is a concentrated area, so you're going to see it.
John:
And this person did the nose swipe on the laptop, and yes, indeed, if you rub your nose in a little line on the space black MacBook Pro, what you'll see is a kind of greasy streak.
John:
But it does much better than the midnight one.
John:
If you do that same test on a midnight one, it will show up much darker, so...
John:
I think I'm in the Jason Snell camp, which is that this coding is an improvement, but it is not magic.
John:
And also don't rub your nose on your laptop.
Marco:
I mean, that's not really a common usage pattern that laptops tend to need to accommodate.
Marco:
Yeah, it's only for the Apple Watch, right?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
That's exactly.
Casey:
And occasionally a phone, maybe.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I went to the Apple store earlier today, knowing full well that we were going to talk about this stuff.
Casey:
And I looked at the new MacBook Pro and it looks good.
Casey:
It looks real good.
Casey:
Uh, and I flipped, if you will, I ran back and forth, um, from one side of the table to the other to the, uh, space gray MacBook air, which if I had seen that before, I do not recall having seen it before, but I went and looked at it and it is blue earth than I would have expected.
John:
You mean the midnight one?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
That's correct.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
It is bluer in the extraordinary lights of an Apple store than I would have expected.
Casey:
I mean, I knew people were saying it was blue, but it was still somewhat surprising to see it.
Casey:
But I played with the Space Black MacBook Pro for a little while.
Casey:
I touched it a lot, of course, and I used the trackpad.
Casey:
I didn't notice that that was more fingerprint-laden than anything else.
Casey:
Not to say you're wrong, Marco, which is I didn't notice it for what it's worth.
Casey:
But then I went over to the MacBook Air, put my finger on the area to the left of the trackpad, and immediately it was night and day difference between the Air and the MacBook Pro.
Casey:
You could, if you really tried, see some fingerprints on the MacBook Pro, but it is not the sort of thing I would notice, generally speaking.
Casey:
I immediately noticed it on the MacBook Air.
Casey:
It stood out like a sore thumb.
Casey:
I didn't even mean that joke.
Casey:
But anyways, oh, I'm sorry.
Casey:
We're not being funny anymore.
Casey:
My apologies.
Marco:
Nope.
Marco:
No more jokes.
Marco:
Restart quota.
John:
No, you got, you made that joke on this episode.
John:
Now you just can't make it in the next one.
Casey:
I'm going to need a flow chart.
Casey:
So anyways, so yeah, the new laptops, they look incredible.
Casey:
I didn't do any sort of like tests or anything.
Casey:
I just wanted to see what it looked like.
Casey:
For what it's worth, I did order one.
Casey:
I ordered mine several days later than I presume Marco did.
Casey:
And so mine isn't coming in for another two or so weeks, which is killing me, but it was a problem, my own creation.
Marco:
And by the way, just to give you some hope, mine came in like a week and a half early.
Casey:
Oh, well, there you go.
Casey:
That'd be nice.
Casey:
So we'll see what happens.
Casey:
Mine is due somewhere between the 20th and 22nd as we sit here now.
Casey:
What I had done, and I'm curious to hear what Marco has done, but what I had done is I took my laptop that I have now, which is the M1 MacBook Pro, 64 gigs.
Casey:
It's M1 Max, excuse me, 64 gigs, 4 terabytes.
Casey:
I looked at my situation, decided I don't think I need more RAM.
Casey:
It's extraordinarily unusual for me to bump up to anything that even seems to be a RAM-related issue.
Casey:
I think money, no object, I might have gone 96 gigs, but it just really didn't seem like for my use it was worth it.
Casey:
Um, and instead I decided, well, I'm starting to feel ever so slightly constrained on four terabytes.
Casey:
So yeah, let's go to eight.
Casey:
Why wouldn't we?
Casey:
Um, I did have someone get me a friends and family discount on this for the record.
Casey:
So that's why I could justify getting, uh,
Casey:
eight terabytes, uh, which is, I'm super excited for, uh, since everyone will always seems to always ask how on the, how on God's green earth could you possibly use anything near four terabytes?
Casey:
It turns out when you have a one to one and a half terabyte photo library, that'll do it.
Casey:
Uh, and also if you have more than like one Xcode simulator and or version of Xcode on your, on your computer, that will also make this problem bad.
Casey:
And so I decided I'm going to solve this problem at least for the next two to three years.
Casey:
I'm going to do it now and I'm going to hate my, or my wallet's going to hate me.
Casey:
But it will be one fewer thing, one less thing, whatever the right word is, one fewer thing to worry about.
Casey:
And I'm super looking forward to this.
Casey:
And of course, I got Space Black, and like I said, 14 inches, and an M3 Max.
Casey:
So that's what I bought.
Casey:
Marco, what's sitting next to you?
Marco:
I maxed it out, and I'm not going to apologize for it.
Marco:
I'm a computer professional.
Marco:
This is my computer.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
This is my job.
Marco:
This is my life.
Marco:
I got the big one.
John:
Speaking of bumping up to 8 terabytes, which you both seem to have done, that, of course, the reason I'm always wary about doing that is because when you do that, A, you know you're going to eventually fill it, and B, that cascades to all of your backups.
John:
So now whatever drive you're using to clone, it can't be four terabytes anymore.
John:
Your backups, your time machine backups.
John:
Well, the good thing is they're really cheap.
Marco:
It turns out eight terabyte SSDs are really cheap.
Marco:
I know, I know.
John:
I just like, oh, they're not that cheap, right?
John:
compared to apple's pricing they they are that cheap yeah apple's prices are ridiculous but yes but they're they're still expensive so just keep that in mind like i i bumped up to four with uh my mac pro in 2019 and i failed it so but but yeah i had to i had to bump everything else up in my whole chain of backups uh i would love to go to eight uh but with my next computer we'll see what the prices look like at that time
Marco:
Apple's prices, of course, will be exactly the same because why would they ever change?
Marco:
Like a four terabyte external SSD is like 200 bucks right now.
Marco:
Like they're so inexpensive.
Casey:
I bought one.
Casey:
Well, and actually building on that, so I am a devout Camel Camel Camel user, and I don't remember how I landed on this particular SSD, but I long ago, and I don't even know why I put an eight terabyte SSD in here, but for some reason I did like months ago.
Casey:
I put in a Samsung 870 QVO, you know, two and a half inch, eight terabyte SSD.
Casey:
And I swear to you, I'm getting like daily, sometimes hourly emails from camel, camel, camel saying, oh, this is below your threshold.
Casey:
Oh, this is below your threshold.
Casey:
Oh, this is below your threshold.
John:
Lower your threshold.
Casey:
Yeah, of course.
Casey:
But my point is just that these prices are absolutely coming down.
Casey:
And if you look at the graph,
Casey:
of some of these SSDs.
Casey:
I'm sure this isn't true always, but this same drive, I don't know, this is like two or three years ago, I guess it was mid-2020, which admittedly everything was weird mid-2020, but nevertheless, mid-2020, the same drive, $900.
Casey:
Right now, according to Camel, Camel, Camel, $347.
Casey:
That's eight terabytes for $347.
Casey:
I assure you, even with a slight discount, and thank you to the very kind person who I will not name that got me some discount, even with the discount, I paid a heck of a lot more than $347 for an extra eight terabytes or an extra whatever terabytes, seven and a half terabytes.
John:
It's only like four times as much, right?
Casey:
Yeah, something like that.
Casey:
I don't even want to think about it.
Casey:
But yeah, so I am super looking forward to my laptop, which again should hopefully be here in a couple of weeks.
Casey:
I don't currently have a buyer for my existing one.
Casey:
I thought I might have had somebody locally that wanted to buy it, but I'm not sure if that's going to work out.
Casey:
So if you're interested in a very, very well-loved, and I don't mean it's destroyed, quite the opposite.
Casey:
I just freaking love this computer.
Casey:
If you're interested in an old laptop, let me know.
Marco:
Mine is spoken for, by the way, which is part of the reason I'm upgrading.
Casey:
We should wrap things up soon, but we have to take notice of something that never happens.
John:
No, we don't have time for this.
John:
We've got to go to Ask ATP.
Casey:
Save it for next week.
Casey:
There's nothing urgent in Ask ATP.
John:
Save it for next week because we're too far into the show.
John:
It'll still be the top post next week, you think?
Casey:
Don't worry.
Casey:
It's not going to get pushed off the homepage.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, let the record show that John has blogged.
Casey:
John has posted a blog post.
Casey:
We'll do it next week.
Casey:
And I am not allowed to talk.
Casey:
I'm not allowed to make jokes, and I'm not allowed to talk about John's blog post.
John:
You're learning bad lessons from Merlin now.
Casey:
Apparently, what I am allowed to talk about, though, is Ask ATP.
Casey:
And Stephen writes, you often discuss various digital photo management and backup solutions.
Casey:
But what is a good strategy for dealing with physical photos?
Casey:
I have hundreds or maybe thousands of 5x7s from when I was a kid.
Casey:
And none of them are digitized.
Casey:
So they're hard to look through and they're just one flood, fire or theft away from being gone forever.
Casey:
I know there are services you can ship your photos to to have them digitized.
Casey:
Is this something you would recommend?
Casey:
I have a flatbed scanner, but it will really only scan one picture at a time.
Casey:
And I genuinely do not have the tens or hundreds of hours it would take to scan and crop them all down to reasonable digital photos.
Casey:
Is there a scanner that would work better for this that you would recommend?
Casey:
I have absolutely no advice for this whatsoever.
Casey:
Marco, I'm assuming you probably don't either.
Casey:
And then we'll go to John for the answer.
Marco:
Well, I do a little.
Marco:
So John's going to tell you the right answer, but I'll tell you my answer, which is already, again, what I said earlier, we always think we're like one piece of gear away from solving a problem.
Marco:
And I know I do the same thing.
Marco:
That's why I'm constantly buying crap I don't necessarily need because I think it'll solve some problem in my life because I like buying gear.
Marco:
In this case, yes, there are scanners that can bulk scan photos, but no, you should not be doing this.
Marco:
Use the services.
Marco:
And we use one – I haven't done photos because I'm not really the photo possessor in my family.
Marco:
But we did have some family videos from a million years ago that we digitized with one of these services because –
Marco:
Back then, I did the thing.
Marco:
This was back when I still had a Windows PC.
Marco:
This was maybe mid-2000s.
Marco:
I bought a video capture card.
Marco:
I tried it, and it was horrendous.
Marco:
It was a disaster.
Marco:
The audio couldn't sync up right.
Marco:
The software situation was very difficult.
Marco:
The hardware situation was very difficult.
Marco:
The quality was not as good as I wanted it to be.
Marco:
And ultimately, I ended up having these half-assed DVDs at the end of it that were not good.
Marco:
And anyway, later on, we just sent those to a service and they were perfect.
Marco:
It was fine.
Marco:
Like, and so one concern I had that I think is natural is you're going to ship off your like precious family heirloom videos.
Marco:
What if they get lost or damaged in the mail?
Yeah.
Marco:
We decided at that time to take that risk and it was fine.
Marco:
I personally haven't heard of anybody having that happen to them, but maybe to reduce the impact of that kind of risk, maybe what I would do is not send them all in one batch.
Marco:
Slice them up into blocks of maybe a handful of different batches, send them separately.
Marco:
Send one batch first to a service and see how you like the service before you then send your hundreds or thousands of pictures to all at once.
Marco:
This kind of thing is really not worth doing yourself, not only because you don't have the time, but because the places that do this in bulk professionally tend to have better equipment.
Marco:
Not only can you get better quality from it, but it's also usually better set up to handle the realities of people's family photos, like dust and stuff like that.
Marco:
They will do a totally fine job that you won't have to do yourself, and it'll take almost no effort.
Marco:
It'll take a little bit of money, but probably way less money than it would cost to buy your own, you know, awesome photo scanner.
Marco:
And you don't want to be doing this yourself.
Marco:
You want to digitize these ASAP, and that's the way to do it.
John:
Yeah, so there is a flip side to everything that Margo said, but first of all...
John:
Tell you some of my experiences here.
John:
Um, I was in a similar situation where, uh, we, for our wedding, uh, we paid some ungodly amount of money to get the negatives for our wedding photos, which was back in the day with film cameras was not a thing.
John:
Most wedding photographers would offer you, but so they wanted you to do is buy prints from them at some of those open and think, but anyway, if you paid them enough money, you could get the negatives.
John:
So we have the negatives from our wedding.
John:
Um,
John:
um and i wanted to get those photos obviously we have tons of prints and everything too but i wanted to get the wedding photos into digital form and we're faced with the same problem marco just said do i really want to send the one and only uh set of wedding photo negatives in the mail
John:
Right?
John:
Because there's not that many of them.
John:
I'm not like you're going to do it in, you know, again, with film cameras, they didn't give you 7,000 pictures, right?
John:
There was just a small number of pictures, most of which were good.
John:
And I'm not going to do it in five batches.
John:
So we did send our negatives through the mail to a company to get digital versions.
John:
And here's the first problem with
John:
No matter how you do it, service or yourself, despite what you may think by looking at Apple's RAM configurations, technology marches on.
John:
We got our wedding negatives scanned like, I don't know, in the late 90s, early 2000s, shortly after we were married.
Right.
John:
The technology they had at that time, even the very best technology, the very best commercial place for scanning negatives, is not that great compared to what we have today.
John:
That's always going to be the case.
John:
Whenever you decide to do this,
John:
uh at some point in the future 10 20 years in the future you're going to look at those things that you either paid for or made yourself and they're going to look like potatoes because you're like why are these so ugly why are they so low resolution why this why that why isn't it not ai super resolution blah blah you know like there's always going to be some way to take a second run at it
John:
And you can, if you want, you can take a second run at it later by doing the same thing, spending time or money to deal with it.
John:
Second thing is paying a service to do it.
John:
Obviously, that saves you a lot of time.
John:
The service will probably have better equipment than you because you're not a photo scanner scanning service and it'll definitely have more expertise.
John:
But the service won't have a couple of things that you have.
John:
One, no one's going to care more about how your photos look than you do, including the service.
John:
Right.
John:
They just they're just doing a job.
John:
They're going to do a job, hopefully do it competently, but they're not going to care as much as you do.
John:
And two, if you wanted to, chances are very, very good that through the application of tremendous amounts of money and time, you can purchase better equipment than they have because they're not buying their equipment every single year.
John:
They bought their equipment some number of years in the past and they're just making money with it.
John:
So their equipment is, quote unquote, old compared to what you could buy today right now with tons of money.
John:
I wouldn't advise doing that, but you can get better results than most places that you pay to scan your photos if you're willing to spend a lot of money on a thing and also then spend time, not just time scanning the photos, but time learning how to use the equipment you just bought in a way that takes advantage of the expensive equipment you just bought.
John:
that's a lot of effort but i will say having done it a bunch of different ways i've paid for services to scan things and i've done a bunch of them myself doing it yourself you can get better results but man it's like the reason we tell you to use a service is like okay how many hours are you willing to put this i'm still working through a bunch of my photos you know and i'm i'm not even using i i talk myself off the ledge of buying the better equipment than the companies have because it's so much money
John:
Like, what am I going to start a business scanning photos?
John:
No, I'm not.
John:
So I talk myself all that ledge.
John:
But just using the equipment I have, plus the application of modern technology that's good at like denoising and upping resolution and getting rid of scratches and everything.
John:
The things that I'm making are better than any service I've ever paid for, because the ones I paid for were years in the past.
John:
And now I can do better at home.
John:
uh the way i do it is i put them on a flatbed scanner because i'm just i'm doing prints i don't have the negative so i'm i put them on a flatbed scanner and i put multiple pictures at once because otherwise i would be here forever and then i manually slice the individual photos out of the scan why because apparently no flatbed this is this is a you know not this is a big market but if someone wanted to make this if you have an app that scans things like a you know like the equivalent of image capture
Marco:
have a mode where it slices up all the pictures and straightens them it's just a bunch of rectangles in between them there's empty space and here i am manually doing it right i think um it's kind of amazing that like that that the the process of flatbed scanning for photos like this it seems to have totally stopped advancing around 1998 and just has not gone anywhere since then like this is so this is such an obvious thing and you're right nothing does it
John:
Well, so, you know, David Schaub in the chat room was saying that image capture does it.
John:
Also, ViewScan, I think, a couple of apps do it.
John:
Let me tell you, they do a bad job.
John:
Yep.
John:
Or rather, they do a worse job than I do manually.
John:
I don't know why.
John:
It's like, it's just like, we have these amazing AI things and they can't find the edges of photos.
John:
Like, they're all rectangles.
John:
Like, they should never be trapezoids, right?
John:
Just trust me.
John:
Like, learn that they're rectangles and rotate them to 90 degrees.
John:
They're just, they're all rectangles.
John:
They're all standard sizes, right?
John:
Anyway.
John:
Maybe they get confused.
John:
Some of them have rounded corners on the older photos.
John:
Anyway, if you do that, if you put a bunch of photos on a flatbed scanner, scan them all, slice them up, rotate them, fix them up or whatever, you can get good results.
John:
But it takes so long.
John:
And that's why I went through.
John:
I went through like we have like 20 albums, like numbered albums.
John:
So those photos, I think I'm up to like 10 or something.
John:
And I just got exhausted and I'm going to take another run at it later.
John:
Maybe it'll come out better then.
John:
So my advice is use a service because, and no, I don't have any recommendations of good service.
John:
It is hard to find a good service.
John:
And if you have, if you have tons of photos, just send one batch to a service and see how they go.
John:
Send that photos you don't care about.
John:
So if they get lost, you're not sad.
John:
Mostly because, look, you just won't do it if you have too many photos.
John:
You just won't, like, even me, like, with my photos, it's not even that many, and I'm still on this multi-year pause because I just burned out on it.
John:
It is so boring and so tedious and so just mind-numbing.
John:
Let a service do it.
John:
They're not going to be as good a quality as you could do yourself if you spend a huge amount of money.
John:
They're not going to care as much as you do, and they might lose all your photos, but it's still better than the alternative.
John:
And on the flip side, if you do want to do it, like, if you have, like, six photos, like, your favorite photos, do those yourself.
John:
Do them on your plain flatbed scanner.
John:
Use some AI super resolution thing like hand perfectly, you know, because there's probably certain pictures you care about way more than the others.
John:
Yes, you may have albums full of photos, but like, I mean, at this point, my strategy for this going through the new one is I'm not scanning every photo because I would never make it.
John:
I'm scanning the photos that I like and care about.
John:
And you can narrow that down further and further.
John:
If you have a whole three-inch thick photo album, find the five photos that you care about most.
John:
scan them yourself do it like a ridiculous dpi on your flatbed scanner use your favorite ai program to enhance them you know get rid of dust and scratches denoise them like if you can find the negatives like if you can get it like a a negative scanner or rent one or something like do it for the pictures you care the most about like you know we paid as much as we could for our wedding photos and now they're like the worst looking looking scans that we have and those came from the negatives why because they were done 20 years ago
John:
we still have the negative so we can take another run at it if we want but anyway uh yeah it's it's more important to have them in digital and to actually have a good backup system or use marco's thousand year optical disc or something it's more important to get over that hump because when you know merlin's water leaks into his garage and and uh you know fuses his giant block of o's into one big thing they're gone forever whereas at least you have them digital you can do the thing where you just push the digital data from
Marco:
place to place as it slowly bit rots but it's more resilient than a bunch of photos in a shoebox yeah and most importantly like what john said earlier the reality is you won't do it you'll start doing it maybe if you're lucky you'll start doing it if you're unlucky you'll buy the skin i'm gonna do this this weekend and then life gets in the way and then you know it doesn't happen oh it's not a weekend thing forget oh no it's a year thing yeah
Marco:
No, and yeah, the reality is like when it comes to this kind of thing, look, you can do it, but first send it to a service and then see what you get back and then decide, do I really need to also do this myself?
Marco:
Because I guarantee you, first of all, you won't.
Marco:
And second of all, you probably won't need to either.
Casey:
Jack Johnson writes, what is the practical significance of the M3 chips supporting AV1 decoding?
Casey:
Is that the future of all streaming video, including Apple TV Plus?
Casey:
How is it better?
Casey:
So my understanding of this, which maybe I might have some details wrong and gentlemen jump in and correct me, but my understanding is that Netflix, YouTube, I believe Facebook, all are using AV1, which is a not patent encumbered version of...
Marco:
Hold on.
Marco:
It's not royalty encumbered, supposedly.
Marco:
It's a patent mess like every other codec.
Marco:
They're all patent messes.
Marco:
Everyone thinks it'll be not patent encumbered, but the reality of software patents is they hit everything because they shouldn't exist and they're stupid and they're damaging to the entire world like most patents.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
it's a mess.
Marco:
And so you can't do anything in software without inadvertently stepping on some dumb software patent.
Marco:
So there are like patent pools and licensing requirements for it, just like everything else.
Marco:
But you're right that the, I believe the intention of creating it was to make a, a less patent income board or at least, you know, low royalty or low royalty.
John:
They got all the people who have the patents to all pool together and agree.
John:
We're going to let people use this, right?
John:
Right.
Marco:
well they think and then others like come up in these yeah someone else says well you don't you didn't realize it but you violated my patent for moving pictures or whatever the hell yeah the more important thing is that this is a video codec that is being widely used and so you know when you the reason why we build in
Marco:
hardware support usually into gpus or something like something near gpu for decoding modern complex video formats is because watching video is a thing that people do a lot on their modern devices and they do it for hours at a time and so battery life matters a lot efficiency matters a lot when watching video modern video codecs are very complicated so if you can use specialized hardware acceleration to speed up a lot of that decoding stuff
Marco:
you can make a significant increase in efficiency.
Marco:
Almost every H.265, H.264, almost all these modern and complicated video formats usually are at least accelerated for decoding on modern device chips.
Marco:
Some of them are accelerated for encoding as well.
Marco:
It's not for AV1.
Marco:
For the M3, it does not include encoding support.
Marco:
But decoding, it does.
Marco:
And it's great.
Marco:
And so, again, this is mainly to improve efficiency and battery life when you're watching Netflix and stuff.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And without this, to be clear, you could still watch AV1 stuff, but it would be decoded on the CPU and the energy use is just massively higher.
John:
So that's why this is significant.
John:
People were already watching AV1 video on their Macs.
John:
They were just burning way more battery to do it.
John:
So now having dedicated hardware to do this, it's just going to.
John:
save so much power uh that's why you get like oh i can watch how long can you watch a video for like 28 hours because it's all being decoded in a little dedicated part of the chip that just does it's just this job and so now if you watch a lot of video sources that have been using av1 you will save on battery so like the impact on you if you have a desktop and it's plugged in all the time it's probably not that big a deal but for laptop uh folks uh and soon to be ipad folks it's going to make a big difference
Casey:
Christian Healy writes, how do you convince your family members to upgrade to a new device?
Casey:
I just listened to a recent segment about people not wanting to buy or use computers.
Casey:
My partner, a teacher, owns an iPhone 13 and does not want to give it up, even when I offered to pay for it for my tech budget, an iPad Air and an M1 MacBook Air.
Casey:
When it comes to research, writing an email or other everyday computing tasks, she will sit at her desk with an open MacBook and type away on her phone.
Casey:
I've observed that tendency a lot in my wider non-tech family.
Casey:
They're comfortable with their phones or iPads and don't want to have to use a complicated device that requires updates, typing in passwords, etc.
Casey:
I get where Christian's coming from here.
Casey:
And if their partner is a primarily phone person, it stands to reason that getting them a newer and better phone would be great for them.
Casey:
for the partner but if the partner doesn't want a new device then okay like what i i think i'm failing to see what the harm is there and and i think that's all right i mean you can pitch it and you can say oh the pictures will be better and it'll be faster and so on and so forth but and the battery will be better but ultimately if they don't want it then that's that's okay
Marco:
Yeah, I think, again, going back to some of the problems when nerds like us try to either tell people about their technology or have some kind of input as to what their technology is, oftentimes our partners or our family or our friends, it's a minefield out there.
Marco:
And it's mostly our fault.
Marco:
So you got to be careful.
Marco:
You got to realize, like, you know, if you got to think about it from the perspective of other people in your family, especially if they're not nerds and you are a nerd.
Marco:
They might just not want to mess with stuff because last time or some other time in the past that stuff was messed with, it interfered with their life in a negative way.
Marco:
You know, maybe there was, you know, maybe like you or someone forced them to go through with a change or something that you viewed as an upgrade, but that in some way was worse for them.
Marco:
And so they didn't view it that way.
Marco:
And a lot of people, this could be as simple as a software update and that it changes something in some way that breaks something for them or makes it worse or they just don't like as much.
Marco:
And it goes all the way up to hardware changes.
Marco:
If you one time replaced your partner's laptop that they loved with a new one that was better tech spec-wise, but maybe it was a different size or a different shape or it needed different ports or whatever...
Marco:
that can mess with people's lives and workflows in ways that, you know, maybe you as the nerd respect the tech side and you're like, well, yeah, now you need this dongle, but it's so much better in this other way.
Marco:
And they might, to them, they might be like, I don't care about it being better in that way.
Marco:
Now you just added a dongle to my life and took away something I loved.
Marco:
So I think the path to happiness here is let people in your family be their own people as much as possible.
Marco:
Let them make their own tech decisions.
Marco:
And you can be available to them if they want to ask you questions or advice.
Marco:
But for the most part, let them be their own tech person because they're their own person in life.
Marco:
And let other people make their own tech decisions.
Marco:
And even if they're different decisions than you would make,
Marco:
If it was your gear, that's fine.
Marco:
That's them.
Marco:
And let them decide what they use.
Marco:
You don't necessarily have to wear the same shoes as your partners or family members.
Marco:
You wear different clothes.
Marco:
You might watch different TV shows or listen to different music.
Marco:
They can have different tech choices and priorities.
Marco:
And if someone's not wanting an upgrade yet or if they don't make the same choices you would make...
Marco:
That's not really your problem.
Marco:
Let people live and let people make their own tech decisions.
Casey:
I mean, it's not like your partner is listening to fish.
Casey:
I mean, that's a problem you need to have an intervention about.
Casey:
But this, this is no big deal.
John:
I mean, there's nuances to this question.
John:
So, like, the simple answer is how do I cancel family or upgrade?
John:
Don't.
John:
Like, don't.
John:
Why would you do that?
John:
Because you're just asking of trouble.
John:
But the thing is, at a certain point, that does flip.
John:
Like, you know, depending on how close the person is.
John:
If it's your spouse.
John:
And if they're using a super old thing.
John:
And if the super old thing is causing them problems because it's old...
John:
At a certain point, it is kind of your duty to say, look, I can help you with these problems that you're having.
John:
And they have to be receptive to the help.
John:
So you can't, there's no way you can like force them to do it.
Marco:
If someone's, you know, if you see their computer super slow and because it's super old.
Marco:
And if they're complaining about it and it's bothering them.
Marco:
Yeah, you can say, hey, just so you know, if you ever want to upgrade to a new one, the new ones are faster, you know, and then leave it and, you know, let them let them deal.
John:
The new ones get better battery life or they're smaller or they're lighter or whatever.
John:
But you're going to know this because like if you're the tech nerd, like and the closer they are to you, the more likely they're already asking you or complaining to you.
John:
Why does X do Y?
John:
Or why is my thing so slow?
John:
Or why is it not working?
John:
Or can you make this thing work or whatever?
John:
And still, they may be like, I refuse to use your newer thing that you keep offering me, but I'm going to complain about the old one.
John:
I just want it to work like it used to, but now it doesn't work as well anymore.
John:
And then you have to explain it with you.
John:
My own battery aging and software updates.
John:
You'll know when you're already on the hook to deal with this.
John:
When is this partially your problem?
John:
It's partially your problem if the person is very close to you and they're already...
John:
essentially demanding that you fix their tech life or even just like they're demanding that you be the sounding board for their tech complaints at a certain point when you know like when is it going to be time to finally retire the intel mac right you know now it's 10 years from now or whatever they're still using it and it's not working right and the fans are going and it's filled with cat hair and the batteries doesn't work anymore and you have to leave it plugged like
John:
as the tech nerd that is already their personal tech support who knows that you can do better it is your duty to help them to guide them to the better life that awaits them but if someone using iphone 13 that's not that old right like let's get into specifics here like i know you think oh why are they using their phone they should be using their macbook an iphone 13 is fine like if they're using an iphone 4 yes it's time for you to help them right like but even then it depends like how close are you to them is it causing them problems or whatever but like
John:
you know, iPhone 13, just let it lie.
John:
Like you want, you want to be seen as a helpful thing, not as someone who's trying to coerce them into something that both of you end up regretting.
John:
They regret it because all of a sudden their world changed and they don't like it.
John:
You regret it because now they're mad at you for making their world change.
John:
So don't be in that situation.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Collide, and Hatch.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at tv.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
John:
Because it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
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-D-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A
Casey:
So breaking news, as we sat down to record tonight, apparently The Verge has gotten, I think it was David Pierce at The Verge?
Casey:
I hope I had that right.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
David Pierce at The Verge has an exclusive leak, and basically it's the TLDR on Humane's AI pin.
Casey:
So if you recall...
Casey:
This was a couple of Apple, I don't know if you would call them executives, but mucky mucks to some degree, that have gone on to create this company, Humane, which is trying to allegedly rethink mobile devices.
Casey:
And they've been extremely good at talking about how amazing they are and extremely bad at justifying that talk in any way, shape, or form.
Marco:
That's a great way to put it.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Here we are.
Casey:
It seems to me that there's a lot of fart smelling going on over there, but who knows?
Casey:
Maybe they're right.
Casey:
I'm not sure.
Casey:
But yeah, so apparently this has been leaked, and the short, short version is it's $700.
Casey:
It has integration with OpenAI.
Casey:
You need to have a $24 a month subscription to T-Mobile.
Casey:
Well, I guess they're like an MVNO for T-Mobile in order to get data on it.
Casey:
No screen.
Casey:
It has a couple of batteries.
Casey:
So this actually is clever.
Casey:
I guess the way it's mounted, if you will, or stuck to your clothes is it's a, you know, like a, not a pin, but you know, one of those things where there's a, there's a magnet on the device and you know, you, you slip the other side of the magnet under your shirt or jacket or what have you.
Marco:
It's like a YouTuber lavalier mic.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Casey:
And that's how it attaches itself.
Casey:
But I guess it's also inductively powered.
Casey:
I'm not saying that with any particular confidence, but that seems to be what's going on.
Casey:
And so there's a couple of different backs to the pin to the device so that you can have basically a couple of different batteries.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I have a hard time...
Casey:
Even if you concede that there's something wrong with our addiction to phones, which, okay, so far so good, I have a hard time thinking of a device that the only way to operate it is with voice, or I guess there's some gestures, but the primary means of interaction is voice and a speaker.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I don't want that in my life.
Marco:
Don't forget the cool, like, projected laser onto your hand thing.
Marco:
Oh, that's true.
Casey:
Which, I mean, I can get behind that, I guess.
Casey:
But, I mean, one of my favorite things about having an Apple Watch is that I never hear my phone.
Casey:
As we've talked about before we got the iPhone 15 or whatever we're on now, 15, I don't need a mute switch because my phones have been muted since 2014, 100% of the time since 2014 when the Apple Watch came out.
Casey:
So I don't want something that's talking to me.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
But no freaking thank you like this.
Casey:
Maybe we'll see what happens.
Casey:
Allegedly, they're launching tomorrow as we record this, which will probably be a day or two ago by the time you listen to this.
Casey:
But I don't know, like as impressive as the tech seems to be, this does not seem to be solving a series of problems that I feel like I have.
Marco:
And I think, you know, I want to, you know, I don't want to talk a lot about this because they haven't, you know, we haven't heard their side of the story yet.
Marco:
Totally.
Marco:
You know, we haven't heard like what, how are they pitching it?
Marco:
What are the features?
Marco:
What makes it compelling?
Marco:
And I'm sure, and you know, when you, when you look at, you know, what the Verge has, it's basically like, look, we have pricing information, 700 bucks and it needs a $24 a month service that uses T-Mobile as a backend.
Marco:
okay, that's fine.
Marco:
If this is compelling, the pricing is not a problem.
Marco:
If this is a compelling product, this will find its market even with those prices.
Marco:
I just...
Marco:
This product seems to be intended to replace a lot of phone interaction.
Marco:
And we can look at, you brought up the Apple Watch.
Marco:
The Apple Watch also replaces a lot of phone interaction.
Marco:
It does that by providing a lot of other value.
Marco:
And if the humane AI pin does that, and it provides it a lot of other value in some other way, maybe with the AI-based features or whatever, maybe there's a market for that.
Marco:
I don't see it.
Marco:
I think if there is a world in which this product makes sense, I don't live in that world.
Marco:
And maybe there is one and it's just not that big, or maybe I'm the weird one.
Marco:
I wouldn't rule out all those possibilities.
Marco:
But first of all, as I always say, don't bet against the smartphone.
Marco:
people love their smartphones the smartphone is awesome and it will continue to be awesome for lots of good reasons both technical and physical and just habitual uh it will be continue to be awesome for most people for the foreseeable future nothing is coming along to replace a smartphone anytime soon and it might never happen based on like
Marco:
You know, we have to hold things in our hands and our hands are a certain size and batteries are a certain size and things like.
Marco:
So the smartphone general idea and form factor, I think, are going to be with us for a very long time.
Marco:
But there is space in the market for other devices.
Marco:
That's, again, the Apple Watch.
Marco:
Great example.
Marco:
It's another mobile device that can optionally have cellular service and can do some of the same things as the AI pin, the human AI pin.
Marco:
So, clearly, there is space in the market for other things, some of which cost hundreds of dollars and have monthly service fees.
Marco:
So, there is potential here.
Marco:
The reason we are paying so much attention to this particular startup is, as Casey mentioned, there's a lot of ex-Apple talent working here or having worked here.
Marco:
and that's you know when a when a bunch of apple people go do something on the side it's usually worth paying attention to oftentimes those become very good or at least very interesting uh startups or products so i think it is worthy of the of the of the attention of like hey you know what whatever they release i'm gonna pay attention to it i'm gonna look at i'm gonna i'm gonna look you know i'm gonna watch their whatever their event is if they have a keynote or a video or whatever i'm gonna watch it but
Marco:
I do not see the motivation for this device.
Marco:
Most of the things that this purports to do, a phone would be way better at.
Marco:
Now, again, you could say the same thing about the Apple Watch, but...
Marco:
But most people, when they're using their Apple Watch, are also using their phone.
Marco:
And the Apple Watch is providing lots of other benefits, like the health monitoring, like notifications, like the workouts.
Marco:
There's so much more in the watch that's a reason to buy it.
Marco:
And I would also suggest I bet most watches sold are not cellular and just use the phone's connection and therefore have no monthly fees and cost less than this by a good amount.
Marco:
So it's kind of a different category.
Marco:
Also, just physically speaking.
Marco:
I don't usually wear clothes where it would make sense for me to clip on a lapel button like this.
Marco:
So far, like, you know, all of the demos we've seen and the press photo that the Verge got their hands on, it's people wearing jackets.
Marco:
Like, okay, like suit jackets.
Marco:
Okay, look, a lot of people wear suits every day.
Marco:
I don't think that's necessarily the common case anymore.
Marco:
And there's a whole lot of people who don't wear suit jackets every day.
Marco:
So, again, I mean, how big is the market?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
The fact that the Verge says it comes with two batteries...
Marco:
That's not a good sign for battery life.
Marco:
If a device ships with two batteries, that's never a good thing.
Marco:
That tells you right there, battery life, maybe not very good.
Marco:
And, you know, there's features built in, like, you know, there's, like, camera-based features.
Marco:
Well, is that the right angle for the camera?
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
Like, there's so many, like, physical questions I have about this device.
Marco:
It's going to be, I think, not fashionable, if I had to guess, how it will be received by the world fashion-wise.
Marco:
I think it's not going to succeed fashionably.
Marco:
So I just think there's a lot working against it.
Marco:
Yeah, the pricing is going to work against it to some degree.
Marco:
Even having T-Mobile be their network.
Marco:
T-Mobile sucks like it T-Mobile is cheaper in many cases and that's why they have good business because a lot of people want that and if you happen to be in an area where T-Mobile has good service that's great for you that's not most people most people T-Mobile does not have great service in their area so they like they have a lot working against them here.
Marco:
and for this product and i i don't see it succeeding but again we haven't heard their version of the story yet so time will tell i think it has some interesting ideas behind it this could be you know a product like in in a movie like a fake product in a movie or a concept that would be shown at a trade show and you'd never hear about it again i i don't i don't see this going well
John:
I don't think I need to hear their story.
John:
I don't think their story is going to change anything about this product.
John:
The thing I think about is, like, what is their innovation?
John:
What are they bringing to the party here?
John:
They're using AI stuff that they didn't make, right, or at least didn't invent or whatever that is mostly commonplace, right?
John:
So it is a gateway into, you know, large language model stuff that is ubiquitous these days, right?
John:
Various companies have it.
John:
They're all working out.
John:
They're improving all the time.
John:
But that's not what this company is doing.
John:
They're just using stuff that other people did.
John:
hardware they have a thing that you can talk into that will relay that information to one of these large language models so are they bringing innovation on the hardware front can they make a small low-powered device that's able to listen to you really well and translate what you say into text and feed it to a large language model and give you the response and do all that stuff once you start looking at that part of the innovation equation like oh this is what they're doing this is this is you know this is the value add they're bringing um
John:
it looks a lot like they're, you know, making a phone essentially like, Oh, you need a processor and an operating system.
John:
And it has to know about like who you are and all your contacts and communication and networking and the internet.
John:
And it's like, all right, well, so you're just making a tiny screenless phone.
John:
Are you going to be better at that than Apple?
John:
Probably not.
John:
Um, so to me, it looks a lot like taking a bunch of things that already exist, batteries, microphones, large language models, hardware and software, um,
John:
and putting them together into this device.
John:
And so it's like, how could they be bringing any value when all the pieces they're making out of it are essentially off the shelf, even though, yes, they're making their own custom hardware.
John:
And by off the shelf, it's like all these things are existed before.
John:
And a good counterexample of that is the iPhone.
John:
You know, cellular phones have existed before, even ones with screens and operating systems and web browsers have existed.
John:
And it's like, what are you bringing here?
John:
Great.
John:
You know, you already had a web browser on the Mac or whatever.
John:
Like, that's not new.
John:
And phones with screens, that's not new.
John:
And smartphones, that's not new.
John:
but there was something to the combination.
John:
Oh, well, I've browsed the web before and I've had a phone before, but have you ever browsed the web from a phone?
John:
It's like, oh, you're just combining two things that already existed.
John:
People already have phones.
John:
People have already browsed the web.
John:
What's the point?
John:
It's like, oh, actually there is something that is sort of more than the sum of its part when you can do a quote unquote real web browsing from a phone.
John:
That was one of the hugest wins we've ever seen in a product that is essentially cobbling together existing things.
John:
and they combine to form this amazing thing that you didn't even know that you wanted, right?
John:
That's what I'm sure this company is hoping they have on their hands.
John:
They're like, yeah, we didn't make the large language models, we didn't make the operating system, and our hardware is not great, although Apple had that going for them that their hardware actually was pretty great from the start.
John:
But let me just tell you, when you combine them in this way and clip them to your lapel, it's going to be an iPhone-like moment.
John:
And no story they can tell is going to change that.
John:
Of course they're going to say that, but what is going to happen is people are going to try this,
John:
And it's either going to be like the first time that you realize you could browse the web while waiting online for the grocery store or have like a Twitter app-like experience or whatever.
John:
It's going to either be like that or it's not.
John:
I'm voting for not right now, but I'm not willing to entirely discount this concept because...
John:
There are many cases where combining a bunch of off the shelf stuff in a new way really does break through.
John:
And sometimes there really is just one or two companies with this type of idea.
John:
And like no one else is doing it because they all think it's dumb.
John:
And someone does it and shows the entire world.
John:
It's not dumb.
John:
And you never thought about the lapel pin thing.
John:
But actually, that's the next big thing.
John:
And, you know, like Mark was saying.
John:
In the way of the Apple Watch, not in the way that it's going to wipe the slate clean and it will all be wearing lapel pins instead of having smartphones, right?
John:
But in the way of like, this is a cool thing that's actually useful and you might use it.
John:
I don't think it's a cool thing.
John:
I don't think it's going to be useful.
John:
I think it's more like a combination of Alexa and
John:
And a watch, right?
John:
Which like we kind of already have with the Apple Watch, but a little bit dumber because it's Siri.
John:
I don't want to talk to something.
John:
I don't care if it's on my lapel or not.
John:
I don't want to project anything onto my hand.
John:
I don't think this is the answer.
John:
I applaud the idea of trying some new approaches, but I always wonder with companies like this that surely smart people who are in the company, if this isn't going to be a big hit, some people who work there already know this isn't going to be a big hit because they've been using it.
John:
They've been trying it.
John:
They've been working on it.
John:
Yes, when you're working on it, you can get the tunnel vision and you think, but this has got to be a hit.
John:
I love it so much and I put so much hard work into it.
John:
But in their heart of hearts, if you really know, you get that sense of like, yeah, this isn't it.
John:
Right.
John:
In the same way that I imagine the people who are working the iPhone got the sense.
John:
This is it because they were the first people who got to have a cell phone that you could, you know, you do real web browsing from and use apps and stuff like that.
John:
And if they tried to explain it, they're like, well, my Nokia phone does that.
John:
I don't know what the heck you're talking about.
John:
I'm like, no, you don't understand.
John:
It's like the Nokia phone, but they know because they're using it.
John:
I think the people who work at this company, some of them probably know in their heart of hearts.
John:
this isn't it or maybe they're too early kind of like you know the newton or uh or uh what is it called uh magic cap uh magic cap general magic right many companies have had ideas that turned out to essentially be the right idea but it wasn't time yet and most charitably this looks like one of those less charitably this looks like an idea that is never going to have time because it's a bad idea