Apple Watch Shuffle
Marco:
Would the tech companies please do us a favor and stop making news happen for like a week or two so that way when people hear this podcast a week after we've recorded it, it's not too outdated seeming.
Marco:
Please.
Casey:
So we have some excellent happy news to report.
Casey:
There's a new member special.
Casey:
And more importantly than that, it did not end up with us ending the show, which I was slightly surprised by.
Casey:
So the new member special is ATP Insider Roast My Home Screen.
Casey:
So the three of us shared our first page of our iPhone home screens, and we picked them apart and eviscerated each other for it.
Casey:
But we're still friends, and I'm happy to
John:
And as is usual for us, we immediately went off on a tangent, which we won't spoil now, but we didn't just talk about our home screens.
John:
We talked about other aspects of our life.
John:
And you'll see that very quickly when you start listening to the episode.
John:
And yeah, we've all talked about our home screens before, but not with each other.
John:
So now you will get to see all of our home screens and you can have opinions about them.
Casey:
All right, let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
Josh Osborne had some of their own thoughts with regard to TSMC and American workers.
Casey:
Josh writes, regarding the claim by Morris Chang, TSMC's founder, that if a machine breaks down at 1 in the morning, in the U.S.
Casey:
it will be fixed in the next morning, but in Taiwan it will be fixed at 2 a.m., U.S.
Casey:
factories with equipment that expensive run three shifts 24-7.
Casey:
So if some machine fails at 1 a.m.
Casey:
in the U.S.
Casey:
or Taiwan, someone's working on it from 1 a.m.
Casey:
until it's fixed.
Casey:
If an engineer can fix it by 2 a.m., it's fixed by 2 a.m.
Casey:
If it takes 16 hours to fix it, in the U.S., it will tend not to be the same person for all of those 16 hours, which, to be honest, probably helps fix it faster.
Casey:
Whoever hasn't fixed it in the first eight hours summarizes what they did, and then someone fresh with a different mindset takes over and probably has ideas the other worker didn't.
Casey:
The main point is that if a plant has a multi-billion dollar ASML fab, it is going to have someone or multiple someones on it at all times, even when it's not broken.
Casey:
I mean, it's tracks.
Casey:
Makes sense.
John:
Yeah, I mean, I feel like the founder, I don't know if that's the current CEO, but whatever, it's just kind of hyperbolic bragging about the Taiwanese work ethic, which I'm sure is very formidable.
John:
But the specific example about a machine breaking down
John:
maybe not entirely applicable.
Casey:
Talking about the EU again, their regulators have accepted Apple's commitments to open NFC access to rivals.
Casey:
This is from MacRumors.
Casey:
The European Union has accepted commitments from Apple to open its mobile payment system and give competitors access to the iPhone's NFC technology, bringing an end to a lengthy investigation by EU regulators into the technology.
Casey:
According to the announcement, Apple has agreed to open up its payment system to other providers free of charge for a decade.
Casey:
Apple will let users set a third-party wallet app as their default rather than its own Apple wallet.
Casey:
It will also allow rivals full access to key iOS features such as double-click to launch wallet apps along with Face ID, Touch ID, and passcodes for authentication.
Casey:
Apple has until July 25th to implement the changes.
Casey:
The company risks a fine if it violates the agreement, which will remain binding for 10 years.
John:
So you might look at this and say, see, Apple, you can get along with EU regulators if you just agree to do what they want.
John:
But I look at this and I just know through the lens of all of the EU versus Apple stories we've been going over here.
John:
I look at it and I say, first.
John:
Wait, just for the next 10 years?
John:
What happens after that?
John:
Was this some kind of concession where Apple's like, well, we don't know what the future will be like.
John:
Who knows what will happen then?
John:
So let's just say 10 years, right?
John:
And second, like you look at this, oh, it's so easy.
John:
You know, the third party should have access to the NFC chip.
John:
They should be able to use third party wallet apps, like done and done.
John:
That's easy to implement, right?
John:
It's not complicated.
John:
There's no weird ways to do it.
John:
And I'm looking at this now and saying,
John:
does apple get a percentage of all the sales made through third-party wallet apps does apple get to approve all the third-party wallet apps is apple going to reject third-party wallet apps that it thinks competes with the zone and keep them in limbo until it can implement the same features in apple wallet like this is what's going through my mind when i look at this like oh an agreement they're going to do it so and the eu is like apple said they'll do it they're going to allow third-party payment apps and just like what are the caveats what's the core technology fee i
John:
for this you know does apple get a piece of all the transactions like and that's not that's maybe unfair like i that nothing in this story suggests that or whatever but that's my mindset now thinking that whenever apple complies with anything even when there's an announcement saying we agreed we've come to terms we're going to do this thing together that potentially it's not as simple as we think it seems simple to me reading this press release it probably seems simple to the eu but what is apple actually going to do i guess we'll find out
John:
Whenever Apple, you know, they say they have July 25th to implement the changes.
John:
What form does that implementation take?
John:
Why in this case?
John:
Is there like this agreement announcement rather than just seeing what Apple ships in the EU saying whether it complies or something?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Obviously, I don't understand the bureaucracy and the nuances here.
John:
Maybe I'm forgetting about a press release they had about the DMA that said exactly the same thing.
John:
But as well as stuff, let's just wait and see what Apple actually releases before we celebrate for this one.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
After initially rejecting it, Apple has approved the first PC emulator for iOS.
Casey:
So it has, this is a reading from The Verge, Apple has approved UTM SE, an app for emulating a computer to run classic software and games, weeks after the company rejected it and barred it from being notarized for third-party app stores in the European Union.
Casey:
The app is now available for free for iOS, iPadOS, and VisionOS.
Marco:
why who knows i mean it's good news like i'm glad to see that this you know because like what this opens up is all sorts of fun retro emulation of like old dos and windows xp and stuff like that like and all all the massive library of games and stuff and ancient applications that are useful on those platforms like this is honestly great um i hope it sticks around and
Marco:
And I'm really curious to see like how this plays out.
Marco:
But I think the answer is like, how did it get approved afterwards?
Marco:
I think maybe somebody either got wind from the EU of like, maybe don't do this, or maybe they were afraid of that happening.
Marco:
But either way, it's a good outcome.
Marco:
It shouldn't have been rejected in the first place, but this is a move in the right direction.
Marco:
Hopefully, it doesn't get any more crap from Apple.
Marco:
But that's a big hopefully.
John:
And remember, Apple rejecting it from its own store is one thing.
John:
The story that we talked about in a past episode was they rejected it from third-party stores, too.
John:
And still, there are other things like UTMSEs.
John:
that have been rejected from the app store and still aren't allowed.
John:
Like, I think Eidos is still banned or whatever.
John:
So there's no policy change that we can see.
John:
Like, the policy change was like, oh, retro game emulators.
John:
And the ruling was UGM is not a retro game emulator.
John:
PC is not a console.
John:
Tough luck, right?
John:
And then also, by the way, we're not letting it be in third-party stores because, yeah.
John:
which didn't make any sense and surely angered the and so now it's available in both it's available in the third party ones it will be soon enough and it's available in the app store um utm se uh as you recall is the version of utm that does not have just in time compilation so the performance is not great uh if you're emulating something that was really old hardware you're probably fine but if you're trying to emulate something a little bit newer maybe it's going to be a little sluggish because just in time compilation really speeds up emulation
John:
And Apple is still forbidding that presumably for security reasons.
John:
We talked about this on a past episode.
John:
There are plausibly real security concerns about just in time compilation that Apple would have to do work to allow to be deployed safely.
John:
You could still argue that fine, it should still be allowed on third party things, but I can kind of understand Apple not allowing it in the app store.
John:
So.
John:
utm se in fact is so slow that the developer of utm se had said when we talked about the story last time when it was rejected they said we're not even going to bother to fight apple on this because we think the performance of utm se is so crappy because it doesn't have just in time compilation so they weren't even going to bother fighting for it but lo and behold they got it through and it's available so you can try it um i forget if this utm se can run like classic mac and you know classic apple hardware stuff um
John:
plain old utm on the mac can run versions of mac os so i don't see why this wouldn't but that'll be another interesting test case especially for apple's own app store will they allow a classic mac emulator an apple 2 emulator i don't see why they wouldn't but you know why use logic to try to predict what apple will do
John:
about App Store stuff.
John:
Anyway, that would definitely be cool.
John:
And in the meantime, I think InfiniteMac.org still works in Safari on iPad and the phone and stuff if you want to try to fumble your way through classic Apple emulation.
Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
No, that is very exciting.
Casey:
I saw somebody tweet.
Casey:
I don't remember who it was, but somebody said something like, hey, you know, if we can get reasonably modern operating systems on the iPad, maybe the iPad will actually be useful now, which I thought was quite funny.
John:
Yes, I'm saying that multitasking Windows XP on your iPad is a better experience than, I think it was Vettici, is a better experience than Stage Manager on iPadOS.
Casey:
No lies detected.
Casey:
Some more information on robots.txt.
Casey:
This is from Mike Lewis.
Casey:
I oversee SEO for a large news publication, so I'm very familiar with making sure websites are crawlable and indexable.
Casey:
While, yes, robots.txt, robots.exclusion protocol, and user agents are all voluntary and represent the sort of good neighbor libertinism of the early web, we do have other methods of keeping bad actors out.
Casey:
Both Bing and Google Search and many others publish their crawler's bots IP ranges.
Casey:
Our infrastructure team can use those to put friendly bots on an include list.
Casey:
It does look like OpenAI has published their IP ranges as well, but they took some digging to find.
Casey:
I eventually found it in a GitHub repository maintained by the MISP project, or Malware Information Sharing Program.
Casey:
We'll put some links in the show notes.
John:
Yeah, IP ranges are definitely a thing.
John:
I remember doing that at my jobby jobs, being on both ends of that, both having to give our IP ranges to someone to say, please let us do the thing that you're supposedly paying us to do.
John:
And the reverse, people who wanted to access some of our servers would give us the IP ranges.
John:
And then someone would forget about those IP ranges, and years would pass, and those people who left the company, and then someone doesn't understand why something's not working, and you have to figure it out all over again.
John:
It's great.
Casey:
Yeah, that's super fun.
Casey:
All right, that's it for follow-up, which was very fast.
Casey:
So look at us go.
Casey:
We have a little bit of a tale to tell.
Casey:
And it starts on the 2nd of July, where we got information from Bloomberg that Phil Schiller will be joining OpenAI's board as an observer.
Casey:
Again, reading from Bloomberg,
Casey:
The job allows someone to attend board meetings without being able to vote or exercise other director powers.
Casey:
Having Microsoft and Apple sit in on board meetings could create complications with tech giants, which have been rivals and partners over the decades.
Casey:
Some OpenAI board meetings will likely discuss future AI initiatives between OpenAI and Microsoft, deliberations that the latter company may want Schiller excluded from.
Casey:
Board observers often do oblige and exit meetings during discussions that are seen as sensitive.
John:
So when this was announced, it was kind of like in one made some sense in that.
John:
Obviously, we talked about the show, the sort of cultural mismatch, let's say, between OpenAI and Apple.
John:
But obviously, Apple has done that deal with them for OpenAI, ChatGPT integration with Apple.
John:
Siri stuff in iOS 18 and all that.
John:
And so they're together on something.
John:
And the rumor is there was no money exchange.
John:
They're just like, OK, well, we're getting this out of you.
John:
You're getting this out of us.
John:
So you can see this being part of that deal of like, OK, and also we'll get an observer on the board, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Microsoft has an observer role on the board because they invested, I think, like $15 billion or something into OpenAI.
John:
So Apple would be getting a board seat for a pretty good price.
John:
Instead of $15 billion, I guess we'll bundle you with our OS.
John:
Now, Apple could say that's worth more than $15 billion or whatever, but...
John:
It made some sense, but Microsoft is so much more closely aligned with OpenAI being a huge investor and, you know, all this, right?
John:
And Apple is just like a company that OpenAI has done a deal with.
John:
But it makes you wonder if this, at this point, rumored thing was actually part of the original arrangement or something negotiated after the fact.
John:
But that doesn't matter because...
Casey:
So that was July 2nd.
Casey:
On July 10, Apple and Microsoft ditch OpenAI board seats amid regulatory scrutiny.
Casey:
This is reading from The Verge.
Casey:
Microsoft has dropped its seat as an observer on the board of OpenAI less than eight months after securing the non-voting seat.
Casey:
Apple was reportedly planning to join OpenAI's nonprofit board, but now the Financial Times reports that Apple will no longer join the board.
Casey:
The changes to OpenAI's board come as antitrust concerns over Microsoft's deal with OpenAI have grown in recent months.
Casey:
UK regulators started seeking views on Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI in December shortly after the turmoil that led to the ousting of CEO Sam Altman and his return.
Casey:
EU regulators are also looking into the partnership alongside other big tech AI deals.
Casey:
The FTC is also investigating Microsoft, Amazon and Google investments into OpenAI and Anthropic.
John:
So Microsoft didn't buy open AI, which would have invited even more regulatory scrutiny in general when there is some next big new thing in technology.
John:
And one of the existing big companies from one of the previous big things buys up the most prominent company in the next big new thing.
John:
regulators take notice because you kind of don't want every hot new thing to be immediately gobbled up by the people who are already there and successful in the market that leads to bad outcomes um it's kind of weird that microsoft and open ai like there's been this slow motion rumbling about that it's like well
John:
Microsoft didn't buy them but they made a big investment they seem pretty cozy now they're gonna have someone on the board and regulatory pressure and people looking at it saying should Microsoft be on the board oh well Apple be on the board too but it would be non-voting again at this point the Apple thing was still a rumor although I believe it was sort of kind of or it wasn't confirmed there was other sources besides just Bloomberg backing it up so
John:
Anyway, deals off.
John:
No people on our board.
John:
Why would Apple want to be on the board?
John:
I think it makes perfect sense, even in an observer role, if Apple kind of doesn't trust OpenAI to... Not that they're going to do anything necessarily nefarious, but...
John:
open ai's short history has been tumultuous to say the least apple's early history was also tumultuous right young companies are not as sort of slow and steady as big established ones and if apple is uh going to be integrated so closely with this company they might want to keep an eye on hey how are things going over there i'm not sure how much that would help them if one day they go to a board meeting out of the blue they say by the way we just fired our ceo which is a thing that happened right
John:
Did your observer role help you with that?
John:
Or do you raise your hand and say, sit down, everybody, and you just get them all to get along or something?
John:
I don't know.
John:
But anyway, it's better than nothing.
John:
But without the observer role, I wonder if Apple is...
John:
less excited about this deal and maybe putting more pressure on them actually finalizing the long rumored deal with Gemini or Anthropic or one of the other companies so that it really is like we have a platform and a bunch of third party you know AI model companies can plug into that as long as they do a deal with us
Casey:
It's wild.
Casey:
It's a wild ride.
Casey:
alleging the artificial intelligence company illegally prohibited its employees from warning regulators about the grave risks its technology may pose to humanity, calling for an investigation.
Casey:
OpenAI made staff sign employee agreements that required them to waive their federal rights to whistleblower compensation, the letter said.
Casey:
These agreements also required OpenAI staff to get prior consent from the company if they wished to disclose information to federal authorities.
Casey:
I'm pretty sure that's not how whistleblowing works, but nevertheless, anyway.
Casey:
OpenAI did not create exemptions in its employee non-disparagement clauses for disclosing securities violations to the SEC.
Casey:
This is super gross.
Casey:
This is super duper gross.
John:
Yeah, so you should explain what the SEC whistle – like they're signing away the right to get compensation under the whistleblower program?
Casey:
What is that about?
Casey:
The commission is authorized to provide monetary awards to eligible individuals who come forward with high-quality original information that leads to an SEC enforcement action in which over $1 million in sanctions is ordered.
Casey:
The range for awards is between 10% and 30% of the money collected.
Casey:
So if the SEC gets at least a million bucks, the person who said, hey, this ain't right, can get between 10% and 30% of whatever they collect.
Casey:
That's pretty sweet.
John:
Most whistleblower, we have laws and various other statutes.
John:
I've never heard of this program, but even specific programs to try to encourage whistleblowers.
John:
For people who haven't heard that term before, it's the idea of someone who's working for a company and they see something inside their company that they think is illegal.
John:
that they can go to the authorities and say, hey, I work for company XYZ and we're doing bad stuff.
John:
Like we're doing something illegal.
John:
I was asked by my boss to do something that's illegal or unsafe or whatever.
John:
And the protections exist to say, who's ever going to do that?
John:
Because obviously you do that, you're going to get fired, right?
John:
You're going to get...
John:
Or worse, you know, who knows what, like, ask the people who work for Boeing.
John:
Like, you need some kind of protection that don't worry, you know, either you can't be fired, or in this case, you'll probably be fired, but you can get some of the money that we recoup, you know, if it's an SEC violation or whatever.
John:
It's...
John:
in the government's interest to encourage people to be whistleblowers because they know when a company is doing a bad thing dumping toxic chemicals somewhere or you know skimping on safety or stealing embezzling or hiding their income or you know all the sorts of things that are against the law that someone inside a company would know about you want to encourage them to essentially uh
John:
tell on their their their company and their bosses and so on and so forth and you want to give them some protection for doing so all going all the way to the point of saying even if you were involved in the illegal activity if you become a whistleblower you'll be protected yada yada right making an employee agreement that says uh sign this thing to work for us uh by the way if you ever want to be a whistleblower you just have to tell us first and also you're signing away right to get any compensation and
John:
Uh, as I think it was case, that's not how whistleblowing works.
John:
You don't tell your boss, by the way, I'm going to go to the federal authorities now and tell them about the illegal thing you're doing.
John:
Just my employee agreement said that I have to tell you that.
John:
So I'm going to do that now.
John:
Yeah.
John:
That's gives them plenty of time to shred evidence and fire you.
John:
Um,
John:
So, yeah, clauses like this, like the non-competes and stuff, employee agreements that say you agree to sign away your rights.
John:
The non-disparagement thing, which I think there was also at OpenAI, was like you agree never to say anything bad about the company, right?
John:
Or otherwise you don't get your severance or whatever.
John:
Yeah.
John:
companies are always pushing the limits of what they can get you to sign to be an employee and then you know non-competes are similar you agree that if you if you leave the company for any reason even if we fire you you can't work in this industry for two years blah blah blah right those are all examples of employers exerting power over employees usually to the detriment of employees and
John:
If all the companies do it, then it's like, well, you don't like it.
John:
Go work somewhere else.
John:
Well, it looks like all the companies do that.
John:
Now the worker is at a loss because everybody does this terrible thing.
John:
So I don't know how many of these things are illegal or will be deemed to be illegal or are legal and just terrible.
John:
um i think the non-disparagement thing was dropped maybe by open ai or maybe there was something else where it was like uh they won't get their their stock options if they say anything bad about the company or the all sorts of stuff like that and i think sam altman had to go oh we're never going to enforce that one but if anyone ever tells you don't worry about that part of the contract we'll never enforce it no that's not how the law works
John:
If they're not going to enforce it, they should remove it from the contract.
John:
And if they refuse to remove the contract, you should think strongly about whether they're really not going to enforce it.
Marco:
I mean, I would go even a little bit further than that and say, even if it's in a contract, don't assume they'll do it because they look at that and say, well, what if we just break this and what are you going to do?
Marco:
Sue us?
Marco:
Yeah, we have more money than you do.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
I have been screwed by that in the past.
Marco:
There was...
Marco:
Let me just say I have not had great experiences selling apps in the past.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So, I mean, there's things like the National Labor Relations Board and other sort of larger entities to say you as an individual employee are never going to be able to fight your giant employer over any of these things.
John:
But there are large organizations that will try to back you with money and expertise and legal things or whatever.
John:
Anyway, all of this is, you know, whatever.
John:
Who cares?
John:
You know, a young company doing dumb things and being vaguely evil.
John:
This is...
John:
yet another reason Apple wouldn't have Observer on the board because maybe they discuss issues like this in the board meetings and maybe Phil Schiller can say, hey, guys, this is not the way.
John:
Non-disparagement agreements are not going to save you.
John:
Drop them.
John:
It's not worth your time.
John:
Concentrate on the important stuff.
John:
The whistleblower protection thing, what do you think you're going to be doing that you need this protection?
John:
Tell us about it.
John:
Just...
John:
things aren't going great over there at OpenAI, I feel like.
John:
And also, by the way, the framing of this story, and I think the Washington Post story, like, priveting employees from warning regulators about the grave risks that technology may pose to humanity,
John:
I feel like that sentence really goes off the rails.
John:
It's like stopping employees from warning regulators about, and I'm waiting for them to say like things my company's doing that is illegal.
John:
And it's like immediately buys into the idea of like grave risk humanity because the computers are going to take over and we're going to be enslaved in the matrix.
John:
Right.
John:
That is a big leap.
Yeah.
John:
I mean, it's like, I wish other companies were like that.
John:
And it's like, of course, we don't want companies, you know, Apple doesn't want whistleblowers telling us about their, you know, holographic glasses that weigh two ounces.
John:
What glasses that weigh two ounces?
John:
Well, they don't exist, but come on, they're probably going to make them like by next week or something, right?
John:
I mean, it's the whole idea that OpenAI kind of believes, and many people who work there believe that like, we have these LLMs, dot, dot, dot,
John:
real artificial intelligence.
John:
It's like, you haven't connected those dots.
John:
I'm personally not currently extremely scared about being warned about the grave risks that their technology may pose to humanity, other than the normal way of just big companies exploiting their workers and
John:
burning, emitting greenhouse gases to, uh, put, uh, bad content on the web.
John:
Like all, you know, they can ruin things in other ways, but it's not because they're going to make an evil how 9,000 is going to enslave us all.
John:
Uh, if they get to that point, we'll worry about that.
John:
But right now I think it's not something that I'm particularly concerned about considering they can't seem to even run a company at a sort of teenager level of responsibility and, uh, you know, dignity.
John:
Uh, I'm not sure they're that close to cracking the how 9,000 problem.
Casey:
You never know.
Casey:
You never know.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Apparently the Apple Watch SE is getting a refresh and it's going to have a different kind of casing.
Casey:
So this is from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg.
Casey:
Apple is working on a new version of its lower cost Apple Watch SE model, which at last updated in 2022.
Casey:
One idea that the company has tested is swapping out the aluminum shell in favor of rigid plastic.
Casey:
Marco, as the token watch person of the three of us, how does that make you feel?
Marco:
In a vacuum, first of all, we have to acknowledge that rumors about new Apple Watch cases, case styles, all these things, they have been comically unreliable.
Marco:
So who knows what this means, if anything.
Marco:
But that being said, I think the idea of...
Marco:
A cheaper Apple Watch, like ways to make the Apple Watch cheaper, it makes a ton of sense in an abstract way because you look at the market for smartwatches and smart wearables that kind of compete with smartwatches, like little Fitbits things.
Marco:
There is a huge market for less expensive wearable computer watch kind of things or fitness trackers than what the Apple Watch, even with the SE, currently reaches.
Marco:
Because usually the SE is around $250, $300, something like that.
Casey:
I think $250.
Casey:
D-ish, I think.
Marco:
It's usually around that range.
Marco:
The thing is, if you look at what people actually buy and wear out there, yeah, the Apple Watch is doing great, but there is also a huge market of people who buy things that are a lot cheaper than that.
Marco:
And obviously, there's regular watches that aren't smart.
Marco:
Things like G-Shocks and Timex and stuff like that.
Marco:
Those are way cheaper.
Marco:
Those are like $40, $50, $60, $100.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
If you want fitness tracking, there is also this huge market of fitness trackers that Apple is currently not really competing that well with.
Marco:
The Apple Watch is by all means a huge success, but there's this whole other market that is below what the Apple Watch prices cover.
Marco:
It's below both in price and in size, honestly, that a lot of people prefer.
Marco:
So if Apple wants to address that market, they're going to have to make significantly larger cuts to the Apple Watch than what we see them doing right now with the SE, which is basically like the SE is just similar to the phone SE.
Marco:
The strategy is basically like issue like a special kind of cut down version based on maybe some older components and without some of the higher end features.
Marco:
But it's still it's still a whole Apple Watch.
Marco:
I heard this idea floated on a couple podcasts recently and various analyst things.
Marco:
What if they actually release something that's more like a fitness band that maybe doesn't even run watchOS?
Marco:
Maybe it doesn't even have full-blown apps.
Marco:
What if it is just something that is like the Apple band or whatever they would call it?
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But maybe it doesn't even run apps.
Marco:
Because the Apple Watch...
Marco:
as an app platform is not very fully realized.
Marco:
It is not very, as far as I can tell, not very widely used as an app platform as far as third-party apps.
Marco:
It seems like most people have settled in on using the Apple Watch for mostly just Apple's apps, and even then, mostly notifications and fitness-related stuff and health tracking.
Marco:
Well, if you look at what those smaller fitness band kind of things do...
Marco:
they're not running whole apps on them.
Marco:
They're mostly just watches that measure your steps or whatever.
Marco:
Some of them have some pretty basic workout or sleep tracking kind of functions, but it isn't doing everything that a full-blown smartwatch does.
Marco:
But that's enough for most people, and that's actually what a lot of people want out of their products.
Marco:
What's interesting is that, yeah, okay, if Apple can try to address this market by changing the case material, fine.
Marco:
I don't think it's going to change the world, but I see why they're doing that.
Marco:
But I think a better question to ask is, if they want to address a lower-end market, does it need to even be a watchOS-running computer?
Marco:
Does it need to have a full-blown screen?
Marco:
Does it need to have... Does it need to be like the big squarish screen?
Marco:
Or could it be something like a slim OLED that's just like a little strip or something?
Marco:
There's so many things that people do with these fitness trackers that they're very happy to choose those instead of Apple Watches.
Marco:
And I think if Apple wants to really expand its market of wearables on the wrist, that's probably the direction they should look at going.
Marco:
I mean, I'm sure they have, obviously.
Marco:
But like...
Marco:
i think i would challenge the assumption not does the apple watch need to be made of metal but does the apple watch need to be a full-blown app running platform or can it can we make something even smaller you know if you look at you know there's now this new category of smart rings even there it's literally like rings that you wear that like i don't know much about it so forgive me but i know that's a category people are very excited about recently there are rumors of apple working on a ring but there have been for years obviously they haven't actually made a product yet
Marco:
right and so like i think i think people are very interested in fitness tracking wearables that are smaller and cheaper than the apple watch and maybe are more discreet or can be worn in different ways or things like that and so i would like to see apple start to maybe address that like give me you know the apple watch shuffle even though i hated the ipod shuffle but give me give me the apple watch shuffle like i want to know what that looks like because the rest of the industry is doing it and succeeding at it and people like them
Marco:
So if they want to broaden their appeal for lower end or lower priced Apple Watch type products, I would look at that, not just making the case out of plastic.
Marco:
Now, going back to the actual rumor, if it is just a plastic case,
Marco:
I think that could have some benefits.
Marco:
Plastic is very light and very durable.
Marco:
And of course, I think it tends to be cheaper than metal almost always.
Marco:
So that's nice.
Marco:
But I think Apple's buyers don't want plastic largely.
Marco:
They learn that with some of their cheaper iPhone experiments.
Marco:
The iPhone 5C was the big famous one.
Marco:
There were a lot of things going into that.
John:
That's not the lesson I would take from the 5C experiment, though.
John:
It may be the lesson they did take, but I don't know.
Yeah.
Marco:
I don't know how well that would actually work.
Marco:
I'd be curious to see it, obviously, and I do think having it be even lighter weight would be appealing, but I don't think just changing it to plastic would make a big enough difference to the price.
Marco:
If it lets them drop it from $250 to $225, I don't think it would be that much bigger of a difference.
Marco:
They would have to be doing other things besides just the case material to meaningfully drop that price, but
Marco:
I'm sure they have their reasons if they're trying that, but I would like to see them try different types of wearables entirely in order to address that same market.
John:
This is very much like the Vision Pro rumor.
John:
Rumors of inside of Apple efforts to take an existing product and make a cheaper version of it, which they do all the time.
John:
You mentioned about the phone SE or whatever.
John:
And it's interesting that this rumor is about the case.
John:
In the Vision Pro, I was saying that the aluminum enclosure there is probably surprisingly expensive.
John:
With the watch, yeah, it's not just because it's metal, but it's also because it's how many machining steps does it take to make that metal out of presumably a solid block of aluminum or whatever, whereas, you know, molding plastic into that shape is a much more straightforward process than machining it.
Yeah.
John:
i would the the story here it was like oh uh you know and this is i'm sure this is just speculation but it's not presented as such it's like this is so apple can compete with other smart watches that cost 200 bucks right so apple's at like you know 250 they want to get down to 199 to compete with other smart watches that doesn't ring true to me because since when does apple care about matching the price of competing products they'll apple's happy to be 50 bucks more expensive but kind of like with the headset
John:
And as you were mentioning, I think plastic or composite or something that's not metal has actual advantages for a watch thing because weight does matter in some context.
John:
Someone who's running with a watch or whatever, having a lightweight one is nice, right?
John:
Some people choose lightweight bands for that reason, right?
John:
That's an advantage to plastic.
John:
It's not like it's a downgrade.
John:
Oh, it's not as nice, but whatever.
John:
It's an upgrade in many ways, you know, durability, resistance to dents and stuff like that.
John:
When you're looking at the watch and you're trying to figure out where can I extract cost, it's tough because that thing is small.
John:
You've got a screen, a battery, the SOC at the case.
John:
That's basically it.
John:
You don't have a lot of stuff that you can remove.
John:
You could try to remove sensors and stuff, but that's getting into your thing, Marco.
John:
Once you're removing sensors, why don't you just make a Fitbit thing or whatever?
John:
But if you want a full-fledged Apple Watch and you want to make it cheaper...
John:
Like, historically, Apple has done the Tim Cook method, which is like, which one have we been making for four years?
John:
And we've already earned out all the machines and all the labor and whatever, and now we can make it cheaply.
John:
But I think if any product is going to say, let's investigate what we can do with plastics or whatever,
John:
I think the headset and the watch are two strong contenders.
John:
And with the laptop, what we've always been talking about is, is there some material of the aluminum that might suit this, like carbon fiber or some sort of thing that is lighter than aluminum but just as strong?
John:
The answer so far from Apple's product releases has been no.
John:
Which is fine.
John:
Laptops are great.
John:
Aluminum is a good material for them.
John:
But you're always looking for that next materials breakthrough.
John:
Since this is a rumor about the SE and not like the...
John:
on again off again rumored apple watch 10 slash x for the 10th anniversary of the watch it's going to be a total form factor redesign and by the way the most recent rumor about that is forget it it's off no apple watch 10 we're bailing on that it's just going to look like the existing watch with a little bit bigger screens but anyway
John:
If there's going to be some materials breakthrough, a carbon fiber watch, some sort of composite material that is as strong as aluminum but lighter and fancier and can do, like, whatever, I assume that would be on a high-end watch, not a low-end one.
John:
But, yeah, it's hard to extract money from the Apple Watch if you want it to be a full-fledged Apple Watch.
John:
Like, the little chip that's in there can't be too expensive.
John:
I imagine the screen is probably still the most expensive component, but who knows?
John:
Maybe the case is the most expensive.
John:
So I'm kind of rooting for this rumor.
John:
I think Apple should...
John:
look into other materials for some of its devices and i think they have been looking to other materials they just never got one they said this is it we're going to ship this they've just been like you know what aluminum glass it's what we know and it's still the best it's still the best option i just hope one day that won't be true for some product although i would argue that the other vision pro it definitely wasn't the best choice but uh sure looks nice in the showroom
Marco:
I wonder, too, like for the environmental angle, I would assume, although I don't know this, but I would assume that their low end metal, which is aluminum, which is extremely easily recyclable, might be easier for environmental goals than plastic, which is not super easy to work into a recycling flow.
Marco:
Right.
John:
Yeah, I mean, there's, like, so car makers have been walking this route of, like, you know, Volvo and Polestar, I forget which one of them is more of this, of, like, you know, everything in this car interior is 100% recycled, including all the things that you would think are plastic, because it's recycled composite plastic made from bottle caps or whatever, right?
John:
There are ways to do plastic in a more environmentally sound way, and depending on what metals you're using, aluminum is probably not that bad, but various other metals that you have to mine from the earth have a big carbon footprint and everything, so...
John:
and also it's a very small amount of plastic or whatever so i would hope that if apple ever did anything that some kind of plastic composite or whatever they do have options for it to be you know made from old tennis balls or whatever whatever they whatever recycled plastic recycled plastic is not like oh it's magic you get it for free there's no additional waste you know it's just it's better than you know straight brand new plastic made from petroleum or whatever but
John:
There is a spectrum of how good it can be.
John:
But yeah, aluminum, I mean, that's part of the reason Apple, I imagine, sticks with aluminum is they've been slowly transitioning their products bit by bit to be more and more recycled aluminum.
John:
What does that mean, recycled aluminum?
John:
Like how much better is it than mined aluminum?
John:
It's, you know, we don't get the details, but in general, Apple has been walking down that path and they may be racing ahead of what they can possibly do with recycled plastics.
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We got news earlier today, actually, that Apple has released a new HomePod mini in a new midnight color.
Marco:
Well, is it a new HomePod mini or is it just a new color?
Marco:
Fair.
Marco:
It is a new color as far as I was aware, right?
Marco:
As far as I can tell, that's it.
Marco:
And even then, like, is it that new of a color?
Casey:
Yeah, that's very, very fair.
Casey:
I like Apple's take on various blacks and space gray and this and that and the other thing.
Casey:
There are ones that I prefer over others, but they're all basically the same.
Casey:
And so, yeah, reading from MacRumors, Apple today announced that the existing HomePod mini is now available in a midnight color option, which replaces the nearly identical space gray color previously offered.
Casey:
The speaker remains available in blue, orange, white, and yellow as well.
John:
This is such a weird thing that it makes me... What I immediately thought is...
John:
Whatever company was making them the space gray mesh that you put over the top...
John:
went out of business or otherwise is ran afoul of apple and they're just like we're splitsville with this company and this color and so we need a new color that fills that slot and so rather than space gray which is one of the darker of the million space grays that apple has ever made we're going to make a new color and call it midnight solely because apple is one of those companies that tends not to
John:
release a product in a particular color and then two years later the thing with the exact color name is actually a slightly different color like imagine if you got a home pod many years ago because it's like a 2020 2021 product you got one years ago and then you decide you want a stereo pair so you buy one in the same color and they don't quite match like one is a little bit darker than the other lots of companies will do that lots of products will do that and yes this is setting aside like it got it was in the sun the uv bleached it or whatever right
John:
If Apple makes a product with one of its ridiculous color names...
John:
and they make it for years and years, it better be that same color all of those years.
John:
That's the type of thing that I can imagine Apple being a stickler about.
John:
So I looked at this, and I'm like, maybe they just couldn't get that old color, and they had to get a replacement color, but they don't want to even imply that it's also space gray, which is ridiculous because, as we stated, they have a million different space grays.
John:
But within any given product, any given year, any given model, space gray should be consistent.
John:
Like all the space gray iPhone 14 Pros should all look exactly the same, even though they look totally different than the space gray iPhone 15 Pros and so on and so forth, right?
John:
So that's what I read on this story.
John:
But boy, so weird because the HomePod Mini hasn't been updated in forever.
John:
What does it have in it?
John:
Like the S5 chip or something?
John:
I think the HomePod Mini was released three or four years ago.
John:
It absolutely does not have enough RAM for Apple intelligence.
John:
it gets a press release hey here's a home pod mini in a color that is almost identical to a previous color but not so just be aware if you didn't buy a matching space gray one for your stereo pair don't get this one it won't exactly match frankly i kind of don't understand what's going on with this with this quote release um like if they didn't have a press release it would have made a lot more sense okay they you know they updated the color oh well
Marco:
you know but like this it's just so funny to me like they're drawing i mean maybe they're trying to drum up sales of the homepod mini because the homepod mini like it's a fine product i mean it's a very good value for sound quality for how small it is and how inexpensive it is like it is one of the best values in apple's lineup really like the homepod mini costs as much as some apple watch bands
Marco:
So it really does make a lot of... It's a very good value for the $100 it costs.
Marco:
It is by far the best smart speaker that is anywhere near its size.
Marco:
It is very, very small and produces surprisingly decent sound for its size and cost.
Marco:
So it's a good product.
Marco:
But yeah, it's ancient.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
i think the home pod line is going to start looking even worse as hopefully siri gets better with apple intelligence and and so like to to draw any attention to it right before the launch of the siri apple intelligence update um and have these products kind of be still fairly bad in that area probably forever um that's a little odd
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I've never entirely understood a HomePod.
Casey:
I've never owned one.
Casey:
I have friends that have them and like them very much, but I don't know.
Casey:
It's not for me.
Casey:
But yeah, what a weird press release.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then Apple has been rumored recently over the last few weeks in particular to have some sort of home accessories.
Casey:
So this is reading from MacRumors.
Casey:
Code discovered on Apple's back end by MacRumors confirms Apple is indeed working on a long-rumored home accessory in addition to the HomePod and Apple TV.
Casey:
The code references a device with the identifier Home Accessory 17,1, which is a new identifier category.
Casey:
The name is similar to the HomePod's Audio Accessory identifier.
Casey:
The 17,1 in the identifier suggests that this device may receive Apple's upcoming A18 chip, which will be used in all four iPhone 16 models later this year, allegedly.
Casey:
With the A18 chip, the home accessory device will have the power for Apple intelligence.
Casey:
This code also indicates that this quote-unquote home accessory will be running a software variant of tvOS, much like the HomePod.
Casey:
Earlier this year, MacRumors found evidence of Apple's work on HomeOS, which could be the firmware running on this device.
Casey:
The code also references two unreleased Apple TV models with the identifiers Apple TV 14.4 and Apple TV 14.5.
Casey:
Rumors suggest that an updated Apple TV could launch in 2024.
Casey:
Then additionally, there are rumors about touchscreen-ready interfaces that you can find in certain places.
Casey:
Now reading from 9to5Mac.
Casey:
The latest beta version of tvOS 18 available to developers has a new hidden interface that is touchscreen-ready.
Casey:
The new tvOS interface or system shell is internally called Plesterboard, similar to Springboard, the iOS system shell.
Casey:
It provides some core interface elements for the system.
Casey:
9to5Mac was able to confirm the existence of the new interface through the tvOS 18 beta 3 code.
Casey:
The new tvOS plasterboard interface has a lock screen with a passcode keypad similar to the one on the iPhone and iPad.
Casey:
The plasterboard interface seems to be at an early stage of development, so there's not much to see beyond basic lock screen controls.
John:
Yeah, so this is all kind of swirling around the rumors of an Apple Home thing, which I guess is in the same category as Apple TV or the various HomePods, with a screen.
John:
There have been many home accessories from other companies that have screens on them.
John:
A lot of the imagined concept art in the rumor stories, they take a HomePod and they would put a screen on the little circle part at the top of the HomePod where it had the swirly lights or whatever, which is always kind of weird.
John:
Um, and other ones will just take a HomePod, like a big HomePod and slap a rectangular screen on it or whatever.
John:
We've talked to everyone who's had any HomePods or any discussion about them.
John:
We've been talking for years about, uh, the useful things that can be done on a screen with a home type accessory.
John:
Uh, the, I know a lot of people got the Amazon ones and like many Amazon things.
John:
Those screens end up as just an opportunity for you to show your advertisement.
John:
It's just not great.
John:
Presumably Apple would do less of that, except for advertising their own products, as we discussed in the previous episode.
John:
But I think a home device that has a screen on it could be very useful.
John:
This is also the vessel for everyone's hopes and dreams because they're like, it'll be a big HomePod with amazing sound and it'll have a screen and it'll show my kids' calendar and everything on it.
John:
And it will also be my Apple TV and it'll also be my mesh Wi-Fi router for the whole house and it'll also be my internet gateway and my security.
John:
And then it's just like, all right, let's calm down.
John:
If we've looked at what Apple has actually shipped into the home,
John:
they tend to not have a lot of computing power and not do too many things the apple tv is the is the big bruiser in the home because it tends to have the best chip in it so it can literally do its job to show like 4k hdr video whatever and even that is massively underpowered compared to like an m4 ipad or even an iphone these days right but a home accessory with a screen is
John:
that is in your house i squint that and i say what will this be doing for me will this be a speaker will this be an apple tv with a screen that doesn't make sense a speaker with a screen makes me think well but to do its job as a speaker is kind of at odds with the screen part or will it just be a thing that's not a speaker and not an apple tv and has some dinky little watch chip in it and has a screen attached to it and just lets you see your kid's calendar and
John:
talk to apple's voice assistant and hopefully cheese hopefully have enough ram to run apple intelligence and that would be i guess i don't know i guess the equivalent of uh uh you know amazon echo or something but those are all speakers too so i don't i don't i don't understand these rumors i don't understand the like i i seeing actual code in tv os betas that seem to show a lock screen uh
John:
only makes sense in the context of i suppose a thing with a device because i'm trying to think is there context on tv os on apple tv where you have a lock screen i don't think so people don't have touchscreen tvs and i think i don't think they'd make you use the keypad to unlock it with a numerical code or whatever but anyway
John:
These rumors I've mostly been ignoring because there's been a lot of smoke but no fire here for years.
John:
But now that there's actual code being released that has traces of this in it, that makes me think that something is happening.
John:
So we've got device identifiers and we've got code.
John:
But for the life of me, I can't think of what this thing could possibly be other than like a not very good speaker with a not very good screen on it.
Marco:
i mean i'm assuming i mean obviously i'm sure it would have some kind of basic speaker functionality uh i think it would be a lot like you know the amazon show kind of devices but i think apple's angle on it hopefully would be a lot like um is it called standby mode on the iphone where you turn on the side is that what it's called yeah standby mode for home kit yeah like i i think it would basically be like a projection of you know maybe it would run its own
Marco:
iOS apps?
Marco:
Or more likely, maybe it would project the widgets from your phone for standby mode the same way your phone can project its stuff onto a nearby Mac.
Marco:
Maybe that's how it would work.
Marco:
But I think that would kind of be Apple's angle.
Marco:
It would be something similar to what we see as standby mode on the iPhone of just like...
Marco:
a way for apps to project limited kind of dashboard-y status kind of things to be displayed in the home, along with obviously being a Siri terminal, the same way HomePods are.
Marco:
My concern is not that it would be a crappy speaker.
Marco:
Apple has a really good track record of making extremely good speakers, especially for their size, for quite some time now, probably almost a decade.
Marco:
Their audio engineering team has been really, really good, and they make very good speakers now.
Marco:
So I think I wouldn't be too skeptical about it having a good speaker system for playing music.
Marco:
My worry is, as always, Siri, which, you know, we'll see.
Marco:
Hopefully something new in this department would be able to run Apple Intelligence and would be able to have whatever advanced Siri stuff is going to come.
Marco:
I think my larger worry is that what we've seen with the HomePod so far,
Marco:
is they really don't put a lot of effort into them and they're really buggy.
Marco:
And so what this ends up giving us is hardware that is not updated very often with software that is unreliable and a voice assistant that is not very good.
Marco:
And it's been very frustrating as we talked about on the show, like they make really great speakers and then, you know, Siri and the software kind of let them down over time.
Marco:
If they're going to do something like this,
Marco:
what's going to change that what's going to make them care more to invest in the you know the software and and these products that are probably going to be like quote hobby levels of sales are they going to be able to actually push it and make them good and care about them enough to like follow through because apple starts a bunch of stuff and then like there's not enough follow through so if this becomes that kind of product the same way the home pods typically have been
Marco:
I don't think I would trust it to be very good or to stay very good over time.
Marco:
But if they actually like put some effort behind it, this could be a really nice thing that many of us have on our kitchen counters in a year or two.
John:
It makes sense if, you know, the home strategy is kind of like fumbling and slow as it's been to have some kind of like home control center, like in the ideal Apple home.
John:
All your accessories are home kit.
John:
You control your climate controls on there.
John:
All your smart lights are on there.
John:
You can see your security cameras on there.
John:
And then also you have access to all of your Apple information, like your calendars that you share with your family and just like having a screen somewhere in your house where it's like, you know, there's tons of ways to do that.
John:
You can talk to your phone to do it.
John:
You can talk into the air and HomePod will hear you.
John:
Like you can do all sorts of stuff to control that.
John:
But having a screen where it's like, this is my dashboard for my house, that makes perfect sense.
John:
And it also does make sense why people see that and say, it should also be my Wi-Fi router and all the other stuff or whatever.
John:
Uh,
John:
My concerns about it being a speaker are, like, it should also be a speaker.
John:
Well, it probably has to have some kind of speaker, but I'm not concerned that it's going to be, like, a bad speaker as in, like, just, you know, doesn't sound good for the cost of the speaker.
John:
I'm afraid that the device will be, like, as expensive as a big HomePod with the audio quality of the small HomePod, the HomePod Mini, whatever.
John:
And that's not a great combination.
John:
And, like, honestly...
John:
the the like home dashboard screen thing probably shouldn't go in the same place as you would put a speaker unless it's a home pod mini quality speaker because you're just like oh we want this to be in the kitchen and it's nice to have music in the kitchen and it's fine but if you if you have big home pods people are setting them up or in the music listening room or whatever around their tv so i i still think there is kind of a conflict uh also with the idea that the screen is some big flat thing that they have to arrange in some way where it doesn't bounce the sound from the speaker off right because
John:
You're not going to just I don't I don't envision it as being that little circle on top of the full size HomePod being a screen.
John:
I envision the screen being bigger than that.
John:
Like when I'm looking at this is kind of like a cheap home iPad.
John:
Right.
John:
Because you need kind of an at least an iPad mini size screen.
John:
Right.
John:
And something capable of running some kind of dashboardy widget type things on it like the standby screen and all that.
Right.
John:
I just, I don't know.
John:
I worry that, like, I think Apple, to be clear, I think Apple should have a product in this category.
John:
They should have a screen thing that controls your house.
John:
I'm just not sure Apple is going to strike the right balance between the cost of the thing, the size of the screen, the quality of the audio, and the voice assistant.
John:
Like, if this thing, if this product comes out and it can't do Apple intelligence, I'm going to be like, what are you even doing over there?
John:
there and and you may think that's not going to happen this thing hasn't even released that surely it will be out with the apple intelligence but something everything is so compartmentalized and to your point marco the home the whatever section of the company does the home products does not seem to have a lot of resources money time and effort put into it right and that's not the fault of the people working on it it's the priority set by the company right which is probably based on the sales of those things or whatever but if you're going to be in the home be in the home have a full line of products have a suite of things that works together
John:
eventually have a wi-fi mesh router but you know baby steps right but a thing with the screen would be a good start i just like it what is what does this land in it lands in an environment where the apple tv is the best product in the entire like family of the home products which not that the apple tv is bad or anything but who would have thought that years ago he's like the home pod the big home pod is
John:
It's still not setting the world on fire.
John:
And the mini is good for what it is, but it is still mini.
John:
And the number of updates these products get is low.
John:
And they're all all these products that depend entirely on you talking to them because they don't have any screens or any other interface are not getting Apple's new thing that you talk to.
John:
which really just puts a pall over the entire home product line of saying, Oh, so all the things I talked to my house, they're not getting any smarter.
John:
And there's been a couple of stories about this.
John:
People surmising like, you know, or theorizing how Apple might deal with that.
John:
You know, can they do it all on the server and send it back?
John:
Are they not going to do it on the server and send it back?
John:
Because that would require big software updates to deal with that because of the way they do things now.
John:
And it would make them even less responsive and they're already not responsive because they're slow and
John:
Like, it's not set in stone that these things will never get smarter, but our hopes are low.
John:
Our expectations are low based on, again, how much effort is put into these products to begin with and how reliable they've been for even the basic functionality that they've had for years and years.
John:
So I feel kind of like we're like...
John:
You know, when Jason Snell has that like Apple report card every year and he asks about the home stuff and it's like I always give it kind of a not great grade because I just feel like the effort's not there.
John:
Every once in a while there's a standout product.
John:
I do like the Apple TV, but...
John:
you know another another product that's going to be hooked into this whole big ecosystem uh you know we're still waiting for that big matter and threads radio revolution to make everything more reliable and standardized and interworking with everything else and we're just not there yet
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
This is just something I personally don't have any particular need for.
Casey:
So it's hard for me to get super excited about it.
Casey:
I think it's something that Apple should absolutely be exploring.
Casey:
And it sounds like that's what they're doing.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I don't feel like I have a need for a screen in my kitchen.
Casey:
And we have some friends that have a big Amazon doodad in their kitchen.
Casey:
It's probably like a 13 screen or something like that.
Casey:
And it's just not for me.
Casey:
And it seems like it does show some useful and informative things.
Casey:
But generally speaking, it's like you said, it seems to largely be trying to hawk different things at Amazon.
Casey:
It's just not for me.
John:
I wonder how many people have an old iPad in their kitchen and use that as like their kitchen speaker through like the iPad speakers.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like because having an iPad in the kitchen for doing recipe stuff or having a calendar up on –
John:
Is like I know a lot of people who have screens in their kitchen for that purpose.
John:
So it's essentially the modern equivalent of the calendar that's like, you know, magnet to your refrigerator that shows all the kids activities and stuff.
John:
Most people track that online these days.
John:
Having a visual representation of the family calendar in the family place like the kitchen makes sense.
John:
And also you can watch shows on it while you're doing dishes or.
John:
pull up recipes or play music from, you know, from across the kitchen on like a five year old iPads, speakers or whatever.
John:
But iPads are expensive and not exactly well suited to that as they sit on whatever, you know, foldy triangle stand that they came with years ago.
John:
That's all disgusting from sitting on kitchen counters or whatever.
John:
Like you can imagine a better product in that area.
John:
But like when I look at the iPad and then I look at everything Apple makes in the home, it's clear which one of those products gets more attention and is generally better executed.
John:
And it's the iPad.
John:
Yeah.
John:
iPads are expensive and they're usually pretty good, especially when they're new.
John:
And Apple's home products, neither one of those things is really true about.
Marco:
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Oh,
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
You want to do some Ask ATP?
Casey:
I haven't done that in a little bit.
Marco:
Let's do it.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
This is from Anonymous.
Casey:
Given Syracuse's frequent mentions of the ancient relic of a bygone time called Pearl.
John:
You are editorializing.
John:
That is not in this person's message.
Casey:
I think it was implied.
Casey:
Is there a reason to learn Pearl today?
Casey:
Well, no.
Casey:
Do we need to keep reading?
Casey:
I think we're good.
Casey:
Obviously, there's always the chance of becoming the one person who can maintain this critical COBOL pipeline at a place that has such a case with Perl.
Casey:
But I mean worthwhile more in the sense of this will teach you something useful about programming that will benefit your non-Perl work.
Casey:
Or pure, this is a good intellectual pursuit.
Casey:
So obviously, John, you're going to say, heck yes.
John:
Yeah, I mean, especially with this framing, like this will teach you something about programming.
John:
Absolutely.
John:
Like one of the things I'm always touting about Perl is that I'm so glad that I learned it very deeply very early in my career for many reasons, but also for this reason of like teaching something useful about programming.
John:
Every concept that I eventually encountered in some other language, I encountered first in Perl because Perl has the ability to be used to explore lots of programming concepts.
John:
And also, for whatever reason, the people attracted to Perl use that ability to explore lots of weird computing concepts.
John:
stuff that took years and years to show up in other languages.
John:
And I'm not talking about regular expressions.
John:
I'm talking about stuff that goes by different names, other languages, like roles and traits and different ways of doing class compositions and, you know, obviously single inheritance and multiple inheritance and all the things that everyone knows from older languages, right?
John:
But like just so many different experiments, how to implement objects internally, how to make your own object system, how that should work, how to, you know, metaprogramming languages, like so much of that stuff.
John:
was in Perl before it was anywhere else.
John:
Now, it was in Perl in a weird way made by one or two people.
John:
It was not an official part of the language, yada, yada, yada.
John:
But it's kind of like a little build-your-own-language construction kit because Perl was so powerful and had so many capabilities to...
John:
experiment with things and most of the experiments were in the pearl ecosystem failures or didn't catch on or whatever but you would encounter them and maybe even use them to do a useful project and learn what their pros and cons are and so i really do appreciate pearl for that purpose so were you to learn pearl even today i think and say it was like your first or second language like you learned some other you know more mainstream language than you learned pearl if you really learned all about pearl and used it to do stuff when you moved on to let's say swift uh
John:
There is very little in Swift that you would look at and not have seen something like that in Perl.
John:
Even all the weird concurrency stuff and all that, like there are equivalents to that in Perl.
John:
And you'd squint and say, oh, this is how Swift is dealing with that problem.
John:
And I've seen something similar to this.
John:
In fact, there was three failed projects in Perl that tried to do stuff like this.
John:
And so, yes, I think you will learn tons of concepts.
John:
if you really get into Perl and into the ecosystem or whatever.
John:
Now the ecosystem is kind of old and crusty at this point, and you might have to do a little archeology to find all those failed experiments in the past, but having lived through it in real time when they weren't failed experiments, it did definitely prepare me for that.
John:
Second thing is benefiting your non-Perl work.
John:
If you do anything where you might need a scripting language to do stuff on a Unix system,
John:
I still think Perl is one of the best choices to do that type of stuff.
John:
Obviously, you can do it in shell script and more advanced shells have more advanced features.
John:
You could use any, you know, you can use Node.js, you can use Python, you can use Ruby, you can use any of these sort of dynamic programming languages and quote unquote scripting languages.
John:
But Perl is still in that conversation.
John:
It's commonly found.
John:
And depending on what you're doing, Perl might be the fastest, best and easiest way to do it.
John:
Obviously, I do tons of stuff like this on my system in Perl because it's the language I know the best.
John:
But even if I didn't, even if you're not a Perl person, you will have occasion to encounter a task where the best solution is a three-line Perl script.
John:
And your ability to make that three-line Perl script, instead of banging your head against shell or trying to remember how to do it in your favorite programming language where you tend not to do tasks like that, Perl is a utility thing that...
John:
it has not gone away for decades.
John:
And I think will be a good thing to have in your toolkit.
John:
If you're kind of a Unix, just a mini type person who needs to do Unix scripting tasks, because Pearl really does give you scripty, very friendly access to the whole Unix API.
John:
Uh,
John:
It's even a great way to just, like, if you wanted to do something, you wanted to write it in C against the, you know, the POSIX API, you can write that same thing in Perl without having to worry about segfaulting or whatever, and then, you know, figure out your ideas, figure out what you're going to do, and then go write it in the, quote, real language after that, because the APIs are so similar.
John:
And then, yeah, obviously, you know, being the one person who knows Perl in a company that has a huge code base like that, hopefully you don't find yourself in that situation, but it is.
Yeah.
John:
It is a thing that can potentially, like those COBOL people, get you paid a lot of money if you really are the only person.
John:
Unfortunately, I'm going to say with Perl, there's tons of people who know it, so it's not going to be like COBOL where you're going to be paid some huge sum of money to come in and rescue a company with a code base that no one else can understand.
John:
There's still a lot of people out there who know Perl and they're employed using it.
Casey:
Do you think genuinely that there's a appealing or compelling reason to learn it for like production code?
Casey:
Like if you were to do presumably something web today, would you choose what, or what would you suggest Pearl as a choice for some web based thing?
John:
Yeah, probably not for web based stuff for production stuff.
John:
Um, as a, as a glue language, it depends.
John:
Like, uh,
John:
It depends if there's another language that a project is already using that can fill that role, then just use the other language.
John:
But if you're in a situation where there's nothing filling this kind of glue role and the other language is like Rust or Swift or something, I would say Perl is better suited to those glue language type tasks than either of those languages.
John:
And so knowing it and being able to deploy it for the things that it's good at is important.
John:
And like I said, for one-off little thingies that you need to do to do some simple thing,
John:
It's good to know this, but I see people all the time trying to do stuff with shell script, and I look at it, and it's like, this is why Perl was invented, because shell script was annoying, and you can make these complicated, huge pipelines in Unix with awk and grep and sed, and it's like, how about we just combine all that plus access to the full Unix API in one language?
John:
That's Perl, right?
John:
So it seems like people are going back in time, and they're like, oh, I need to do this task, and they start writing a shell script, and in the shell script, they're using sed and awk, and it's like, you're like...
John:
You've forgotten your history.
John:
That was found to be unsatisfactory and not as portable as you wanted and slow and annoying and buggy, and that's what Perl is for.
John:
If you are in that mindset and you're comfortable with those tools, you will also be comfortable with Perl instead of having to use multiple different tools and worry about different versions of Grapacross systems and worrying about if everybody has Bash or if they're just using the Born Shell or if they're using Fish or whatever.
John:
Yeah.
John:
pearl pearl still fills that role there's no replacement for that thing it's just that that is a much smaller job than like you were saying casey like oh if you had to write a web app would you write it today in pearl no of course i wouldn't write it in php either but then what do i end up working on at the time a php web app you can it will work it's just maybe not the best choice
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Thomas Brock writes, what is the correct placement for the charging port on an electric vehicle?
Casey:
So you can check your answers.
Casey:
Here's my answer key in the form of a tier list.
Casey:
For Thomas, the S tier was left front quarter panel.
Casey:
So that's basically in front of the driver's door in countries where the driver is on the correct side of the car.
Casey:
A tier is left rear quarter panel, front center.
Casey:
What does front center mean?
John:
There's two locations.
John:
It's a tier list.
John:
What's in the A tier, left rear quarter panel, and front center?
Casey:
Sorry, I'm with you now.
Casey:
B, right front quarter panel.
Casey:
C, rear center.
Casey:
And F, right rear quarter panel.
Casey:
I think for me, this is actually relevant because follow-up, we ended up getting Erin a car.
Casey:
We have leased for the very first time a brand new XC90 Recharge, which is a plug-in hybrid.
Casey:
So we sort of kind of have an electric car now.
Casey:
And hers is in the...
Casey:
front, left front quarter panel.
Casey:
So in front of the driver's door.
Casey:
And I don't love it.
Casey:
I would prefer it in the back of the car.
Casey:
It works.
Casey:
It's fine.
Casey:
But, you know, we back into the garage because we are awesome.
Casey:
And so the back of the garage is where the charger plugs into the house.
Casey:
And then you have to sling it all the way up the garage into the front of the garage where the plug or where the receptacle is for the car.
Casey:
And that's
Casey:
I don't love that.
Casey:
And yes, I suppose we could turn the car around if we really wanted to, but we've been parking this way for the 16 years we've been in the house.
Casey:
We're not going to change now.
Casey:
So for me, I think the driver's side in whatever your particular country is, the driver's side of the car in the rear quarter panel is what I would say is the best place for it.
Marco:
So I, as the only one of us who ever drives electric until I guess this moment, I agree.
Marco:
So with some asterisks.
Marco:
So the Rivian has it in the driver's side front corner.
Marco:
Teslas all have it in the driver's side back corner.
Marco:
And TIFF's i3 has it, I think, in the worst place, which is the passenger side back corner.
Marco:
The main question is, how easy is it to charge it wherever and however you park?
Marco:
So I think the driver's side wins no matter what.
Marco:
Driver's side is always the right choice for left or right.
Marco:
Driver's side, definitely.
Marco:
Because a lot of times you have to get out, plug it in, then maybe get back into the car for some reason, like to check to see if it's starting or whatever, or just to hang out in the car while it charges.
Marco:
So driver's side is the right answer for side.
Marco:
But front or back, there's benefits to both.
Marco:
is it's generally easier if you if you back in to wherever you are and you do have to consider like you're going to charge it both you know at home hopefully if you have some kind of garage or set up there like you can charge it at home but also when you get to a fast charger on a long highway trip and how are those set up and how easy is it to pull in and out of those
Marco:
Some of those you could have actually like pull through arrangements, but that's fairly unusual.
Marco:
Most of them are like they're in big rows with like, you know, one side solids that you can't pull all the way through.
Marco:
So it is more convenient to have it on the back corner if you are a good enough driver to want to and be able to back into things reliably.
Marco:
It is quite entertaining because this is where, again, this is where all Teslas have theirs.
Marco:
It is quite entertaining watching Tesla drivers pull into superchargers, who you can tell they don't do this very often, maybe.
Marco:
And you can tell, like, oh, this person has never had to back their car into a spot before.
Marco:
And it is, you know, quite entertaining watching it.
Marco:
But anyway, that I think is the best.
Marco:
It's like the most convenient spot for it is the driver's side.
Marco:
And if you like pulling into things, you know, backing into things, then the back.
Marco:
And if not, then the front.
Casey:
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense.
Casey:
John, do you have an opinion about this, despite being completely ignorant?
John:
I do.
John:
I mean, I haven't actually ever charged an electric car, so this is all just speculative.
John:
But I was kind of thinking about, like, with gas cars, like why it is where it is on gas cars.
John:
And it obviously varies from car to car.
John:
Honda is a driver's side thing.
John:
But I don't even need to mention where it is front rear, because at least in this country –
John:
It's pretty much always the back half of the car somewhere.
John:
Back in the 70s, sometimes it was literally like in a dead center back, like underneath the logo of the car maker or whatever.
John:
But in general, these days, it's, you know, it's some part of the back half of the car.
John:
Right thinking companies put it on the driver's side for the reasons Marco mentioned and companies that are doing it wrong.
Casey:
I disagree with that, actually.
Casey:
I think it's better because both our cars have the gasoline going in the passenger side.
Casey:
And while on the surface I agree with you that it should be on the driver's side, what ends up happening is almost everyone has it on the driver's side.
Casey:
Like almost every car manufacturer does it on the driver's side.
Casey:
And so if you're a passenger side car, you can just scoot right up to the pump because more often than not, nobody's there.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Well, that's what I was getting at.
John:
I was like, why is the back part, setting aside the side, why is the back part where it is?
John:
And it has a lot to do with how quickly you can fill a car up with gas and the way gas stations are structured to be kind of like a line of cars.
John:
And you go in, you fill up, you go out, you go in, you fill up, you go out.
John:
Sometimes they stack them, like my local gas station stacks the pumps up.
John:
next to each other so there's a front pump and a back pump in each of the little rows with the expectation that if the person in the front pump is there and you pull them behind them at the back pump and the you the person in the front pump will leave and now you're blocking you're at the back pump but you're blocking the front pump but no big deal you're probably going to be gone in two minutes anyway because how long does it take to fill up with gas like it doesn't jam up the thing you could never do electric charging like that because then you'd be there for 45 minutes and people be like
John:
I want to get to the pump in the front of you, but I can't because you're blocking me.
John:
They would never arrange electric car chargers that way because the cars could be there for a much longer time than just a few minutes.
John:
And that's why, if you're wondering, why are we having this discussion about gas pumps versus charging ports?
John:
It's a very different usage case where...
John:
the expectation is and i know people go into the thing and they buy potato chips and they take too long or whatever but anyway you could be charging 45 minutes and hopefully you're not going to be clogging up a gas pump for 45 minutes so that's why there's a different answer my personal preference would be for the for the same reason that i don't like backing into parking spots i want the port to be on the front because i think it is it is more time sensitive for you to get into
John:
the parking spot or the charging thing than it is for you to leave it.
John:
You need to clear the parking lot or the line of cars trying to find a thing or whatever.
John:
You need to get out of the flow and into your charging spot fast.
John:
So don't take the time to go and stop and back in or whatever.
John:
Go nose first.
John:
And I don't think the front center is great for that because that's a place where you can hit things and it'll screw it up, whatever.
John:
So it's got to be on the quarter panel.
John:
And I think it should be on the driver's side quarter panel.
John:
Now, as Thomas wrote, reading from his message here, bonus points for Porsche to putting a charge port on both the left and right side, like in the McCann.
John:
Lots of car companies do that.
John:
The fancier ones will have a charge port on both sides of the car.
John:
So then you don't have to argue about which side.
John:
But again, I think the front is my preference because I'm not a backer inner.
Casey:
For the record, real-time follow-up, the reason the gas cap or whatever, the gas chute, I can't think of the word I'm looking for, the thing, where you put the gas.
Casey:
The reason that's in the back is because typically the gas can, or the gas can, the gas tank is in the back.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
Man, words are hard.
Casey:
So anyway, so...
John:
Although even in like, well, I guess even in rear engine cars is there.
John:
Like the gas tank does move around in some cars in some ways.
John:
And again, it has been in different places.
John:
Historically, you can find lots of old cars where you'll show it to a modern person.
John:
They just won't be able to find where they're supposed to put the gas in and not because it's electric.
John:
But yeah, we've really standardized on the rear quarter panel in this past few decades.
Yep.
Casey:
Russell Fitzpatrick writes,
Casey:
It's a great question to which I don't have a good answer.
Casey:
I will say, and I think we talked about last week, the week before, my backup Vortex had a little bit of a chink in the armor insofar as the Synology that was living at my parents' house had died, or so I thought.
Casey:
what it ended up happening was, forgive me if I'm repeating myself, is that the power supply, which is external on this particular Synology, because it's a physically small Synology, the brick power supply had failed, so I got a new power supply, now it's right as rain.
Casey:
But I bring all this up to say...
Casey:
Depending on what your particular setup is, you could get a duplicate of how much you're willing to spend on it.
Casey:
You could get a duplicate, even a physically smaller and cheaper duplicate of your main network-attached storage, and put that at a friend's house, at a relative's house, or something like that, and potentially back up to it.
Casey:
And Synology makes this really easy to do.
Casey:
Granted, Synologies are not cheap, and filling them with hard drives is not free, but
Casey:
I don't ever really have to worry about the size of things because in a worst case scenario, I'll just either replace or add a new drive and suddenly I've got that much more space.
Casey:
Marco, I have a feeling you will not have too much to add here since you've mostly gotten out of this game.
Casey:
And then John, let's finish up with you, please.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't currently use Arc.
Marco:
I switched back to just regular Backblaze ever since I stopped really needing to back up a NAS.
Marco:
Because regular Backblaze will back up any kind of external drive.
Marco:
So if your entire data set can be what's on your computer...
Marco:
possibly plus also what's on an external drive, then regular Backblaze will back that up for its regular flat rate.
Marco:
So you don't need to pay per gig.
Marco:
So it's kind of not really a problem.
Marco:
It's only a problem when you start talking about backing up network devices and network shares.
Marco:
That's when you start having to pay per gig for various solutions.
Marco:
And Arc is good for that.
Marco:
There's lots of other solutions as well.
Marco:
So I don't really personally have this problem, honestly.
Marco:
I think the... I mean, that being said, Arc...
Marco:
If the problem is just the incremental backups just being, you know, changed data as opposed to lots of new data, I think the incremental backups have various, like, thinning features built into the clients.
Marco:
So, you know, in this case, Arc, I'm pretty sure it has, like, retention management features to help keep the backup set, you know, to only keep, say, the last, you know, 60 days or whatever you want to set it to.
Marco:
So I would look at some of those options if you're having that problem.
John:
John?
John:
Yeah, it's not entirely clear how the decision to use Arc with Backblaze B2 and be charged per gigabyte was arrived at.
John:
If you're just backing up a single machine, you can get a flat rate thing, which is a great deal, right?
John:
Backblaze flat rate for a single machine or whatever.
John:
I don't know if there's any NASes in the mix here.
John:
But anyway, no matter what, I think having a cloud backup is a good idea.
John:
And if for whatever reason the cloud backup you have is going to charge you per gigabyte because you can't use one of the flat rate ones or you just don't want to,
John:
You're going to be faced with the problem we all face, which is that we accumulate data that we care about over time and the graph may be lumpy, but it just goes up.
John:
Right.
John:
And mostly we've been relying on the fact that storage gets cheaper over time because of the advances of technology.
John:
But if you keep living, you're going to keep making data.
John:
The only way to stop that data from getting bigger over time is to die.
John:
because you're going to be taking more pictures of your family.
John:
And you're not going to, again, I've said this a million times, you don't want to go back and throw out the baby pictures once you get the graduation pictures.
John:
You want to keep them all, right?
John:
Now, you can thin them.
John:
The question of like, how do I keep this under control?
John:
All you're doing is slowing down the slope.
John:
You're never going to reverse it.
John:
You're always going to have more and more data.
John:
but you can decrease the slope by doing things that Marco mentioned, the how many days worth of incrementals do you want to keep?
John:
That's a great knob to turn.
John:
Again, that's not changing it too much, but you can get a one-time dividend from that.
John:
Are you backing up stuff that you don't actually care about?
John:
Are you backing up your applications folder?
John:
At one time, backing up your applications folder made sense.
John:
These days, where applications basically come from the internet and are often subscription-based anyway,
John:
There's probably almost nothing in your applications folder that you need to back up.
John:
Confirm that.
John:
Look at your applications folder.
John:
Say, hey, if I was setting up a new Mac, can I get all these applications somewhere?
John:
Do I have all my serial numbers?
John:
Can I get the installers?
John:
Do I have some data in my applications folder that I shouldn't?
John:
Maybe I should move it out of there.
John:
But the applications folder is not only potentially large, but also a huge source of churn every time like the Adobe updater runs and does a bunch of stuff.
John:
And then you're just wasting time and churn and filling your incremental backups with, you know, 30 days worth of the updates to whatever the Mac App Store and your Adobe updater is doing behind the scenes.
John:
Right.
John:
And things that grow without bound like your photos.
John:
You can go through your photos and start thinning them, but I would caution you that it's very easy to get into a situation where you're either frustrated or panicked and decide you're going to get some storage back by deleting some pictures and regret that a few years later.
John:
Right?
John:
Because, I mean, you don't want to keep every picture, but...
John:
deleting stuff that is literally irreplaceable like years old pictures is something worth considering and not doing when you're again and frustrated or in a hurry or something like that it's tempting because very often it's the biggest thing on your computer but you know think twice so yeah i think a combination of those strategies uh trying to find flat rate backup um you know don't back up stuff you don't actually need to keep things that you can get elsewhere right if you're if you're backing up a bunch of huge media files
Marco:
throw them out right like just you know don't stop backing them up and you're like but what if i what if i lose all my media it's still so much better than losing your kids baby pictures right so yeah don't be like you know paying per gig to back up like ripped blu-ray mkvs because like after a while you will have paid more than it would have cost to just buy like the streaming version of it in five years if you lose it right
John:
You lose them all, just rebuy them all.
John:
Maybe it's like, well, I won't be able to get Blu-rays anymore.
John:
Well, hopefully you still have those discs.
John:
But if you don't, you can probably buy them somewhere.
Marco:
Yeah, here's the thing.
Marco:
In the future, off in the distance, you can always go to eBay and buy Blu-rays for $2.
Marco:
Trust me, that won't be a problem.
John:
Or you hope.
John:
But anyway, really think about what do I actually need to back up?
John:
But in the end, the thing you need to wrap your head around is as you keep living, you will keep accumulating data.
John:
And all you can do is try to bend the slope of that line down, but it's never going to decrease.
John:
You're just going to have more and more data that you need to back up.
John:
And just accept that.
John:
And it's just a cost of doing business, a cost of being alive.
Casey:
Finally, Ty Bolt writes, why doesn't Apple put a small battery in desktop Macs?
Casey:
It would eliminate any concern with power surges or outages and no need to have an ungainly and annoying UPS.
Casey:
I get that, but it takes up space.
Casey:
It's heavy.
Casey:
It eventually goes bad.
Casey:
I don't think the juice is worth the squeeze on this.
John:
He's real close to a revelation here.
John:
Why don't they just put a small battery in them?
John:
We wouldn't have to deal with those clunky, ungainly, and annoying UPSs.
John:
The UPSs are that big because that's how big a battery you need to power a computer for any amount of time.
John:
So if you could put a small battery inside the Mac, you would also be able to have a UPS that's the size of an Apple TV.
John:
But you don't.
John:
The UPSs are huge, right?
John:
And that's kind of the problem, to get a UPS that is worth anything, that gives you enough time to do a panic shutdown, that gives you enough time to do automated shutdowns, which macOS supports.
John:
It can do like, hey, I'm on UPS power.
John:
I'm going to shut everything down, right?
John:
that battery needs to be big enough that it's heavy ungainly needs to be replaced like a ups battery adds cost weight and volume that's why they don't do it because the battery would need to be just it would ruin apple's computers and you're like
John:
Well, they put batteries in laptops and that's not a problem.
John:
It's like, yeah, they're designed to be battery powered.
John:
Apple's desktops are not designed that way.
John:
Even the gigantic Mac Pro, all that space in there, in theory, is designed to hold stuff other than batteries.
John:
And let me tell you, the Mac Pro is already heavy enough.
John:
Please do not put a gigantic battery inside it.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I think the answer really is, number one, you don't want to get rid of ungainly annoying UPSs because then you have no footrests unless you use subwoofers.
Marco:
But number two, you're so close to it, Ty.
Marco:
You're so close to the solution here, which is use a laptop as a desktop and then this problem goes away.
Casey:
Like magic, Marco.
Casey:
Like magic.
Marco:
And the laptops are so good...
Marco:
that you can do that and you're not really giving up anything and in fact sometimes like right now you actually have the best desktop performance available in certain contexts so anyway yeah that's i think that's the answer is if you really don't want if you really don't want a ups and you want battery backup power for your desktop um just get a laptop as a desktop it's super easy or just get a laptop computer with a ups
John:
Because that's what it takes to provide uninterruptible power to devices.
John:
It requires a big battery.
John:
And really, honestly, you want that big battery to be separate because that battery will eventually go bad and you'll need to replace it.
John:
And all that you can do without touching your computer, but just messing with your UPS.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thank you to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Trade Coffee.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
One of the member perks that we offer is ATP Overtime, a weekly additional bonus topic or segment about some topic that we kind of just couldn't fit in the main show or never quite got to.
Marco:
So this week's Overtime for members is going to be...
Marco:
on Apple's product longevity.
Marco:
And in particular, they released a longevity by design paper.
Marco:
We're going to be discussing Apple product longevity in overtime.
Marco:
You can join at atv.fm slash join to get there.
Marco:
Thank you so much.
Marco:
And we'll talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
And you can find the show notes.
Marco:
notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-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-
Marco:
Accidental Tech Podcast.
Marco:
So long.
Marco:
So I just got my car back from the body shop.
Casey:
Yes, I've been meaning to ask about this.
Casey:
So remind me you had tagged something in the beach town.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Tagged?
Casey:
Like bump.
Marco:
Speaking of quarter panels.
Marco:
Yes, exactly.
Marco:
So while backing out of my own sandy driveway...
Marco:
in the beach town, um, across the street from, you know, where I, where I pull in and I, cause you know, keep in mind, these are like, you know, the, the eight foot wide beach sidewalks are our streets.
Marco:
And so maneuverability is very tight.
Marco:
And the eight foot wide walks, you know, behind me on, on my street is a telephone pole.
Marco:
Uh, and next to that is a like kind of twisty, stumpy beach tree.
Marco:
I think it's like a cedar or a juniper or something.
Marco:
So it's all, you know,
John:
Have you thought of a slight tangent?
John:
I was thinking about the other day.
John:
Did I already mention on the show?
John:
Have you thought about that recently?
John:
What you just said?
John:
What's behind?
John:
When you back out, what's behind you?
John:
What do you mean?
John:
What's behind you?
John:
Say it again.
John:
The telephone pole and a tree.
John:
Right.
John:
A telephone pole.
John:
What the hell is a telephone pole?
John:
You think there are kids born today, living today, who if you really ask them, maybe they just refer to it as a telephone pole and you ask them, what does that pole have to do with the telephone?
John:
And they'd be like, honestly, I don't know.
John:
That's just what everyone calls it.
John:
They call it a telephone pole.
John:
Maybe it's because it's shaped like a telephone pole.
John:
I really think the telephone pole is rapidly becoming one of those, whatever, neologisms or whatever.
John:
That's the wrong term.
John:
But anachronism, whatever.
John:
Because, I mean, ask your kid.
John:
If you're listening, ask your kid.
John:
Point to a telephone pole and say, what is that?
John:
When they say telephone pole, ask them, why is it called a telephone pole?
Marco:
Well, I can tell you at least this one is, I know it's a power pole because the funny thing is I actually bought that pole as part of my house construction.
Marco:
I had to pay to have a pole moved.
Casey:
What?
Marco:
I actually had to pay for a power pole.
Marco:
It was a whole thing.
Marco:
Trust me, you don't want to have to do this.
Marco:
Beach living.
Marco:
It was a very expensive pole.
Marco:
Anyway, so a few, maybe a month ago, it was as driving was starting to slow down.
Marco:
It was like the second to last time I drove onto the beach for the season before the big summer rush.
Marco:
And it was starting to get a little crowded in town.
Marco:
And there were a bunch of people walking back and forth and a bunch of bikes going back and forth behind me.
Marco:
And I had to pull out in the direction I normally don't pull out.
Marco:
I almost always go in one big loop around the block.
Marco:
This time I had to go the other way.
Marco:
And so I was looking back and forth like I was I was doing a lot of checking side to side as I backed out because of all the pedestrians and cyclists.
Marco:
And for one half second, I forgot to look behind me.
Marco:
And this tree has like this like stumpy like tree protrusion off the like like a like a low like side branch of the tree was cut off.
Marco:
So there's like a side diagonal stump next to the telephone pole.
Marco:
And this tree and pole that I have almost hit a hundred times, I finally actually hit the tree stump.
John:
Do you have proximity sensors on your car or do you have it turned off?
Marco:
The proximity sensors are not enabled when the car is in off-road modes.
Marco:
Now, normally, this is generally a good thing because, again, these streets are eight feet wide.
Marco:
Yeah, be going off the whole time you're driving.
John:
yeah like you're constantly near everything around you that's the reason why i assume they turn them off during off-road modes because when you're off-roading there's always crap around you you kind of just have to be aware of it i'm dealing with this with my wife's new car was uh she's got proximity sensors for the first time and there's a button on the dashboard i said look just leave it off all the time until you're about to park and you want it because otherwise you'll be hearing beeping all the time but that's that's the time to use it backing out pulling in whatever yes
Marco:
And this one time I backed up and I hit the stupid tree diagonal stump thing and I put a nice big dent in my quarter panel.
Marco:
Now, I have sent you the picture of this.
Marco:
I will put it as the chapter art of this chapter.
Marco:
I would like you to guess what it cost to repair this quarter panel.
Casey:
Well, I think we did the stance privately.
Marco:
Yeah, we already did the guessing game.
Casey:
And if I recall correctly, that quarter panel runs halfway up the whole damn car.
John:
You mean height-wise or length-wise?
Casey:
No, no, no.
John:
How big is the piece of metal that you would have to remove to this?
John:
Well, I mean, I didn't say this last time, or maybe I did mention it, but when I look at this, I immediately think of YouTube paintless dent repair videos, and I say, oh, no problem.
John:
Paintless dent repair will take that out.
John:
No need to replace the quarter panel.
Marco:
I went to two different body shops just to just to see what the first one told me was surprising.
Marco:
And so I went to a second one and I'm like, hey, what do you think?
Marco:
You know, could this be could this be, you know, pop back out or, you know, suck whatever they do?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I don't know.
John:
PDR, paintless dent repair.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So I asked about that.
Marco:
And the guy looked around.
Marco:
He looked at the stuff.
Marco:
He looked at how it was bent and and basically said, like, no, that's not going to do it.
Marco:
there was some minor damage to the bumper and you can see a little bit like a little but it's more of a scuff on the bumper and i told him like you don't need to replace the bumper like i'm fine with that scuff like just you know get the big dent out how much is that and i went to the body shop thinking i don't want my insurance rates to go up from this and so i i had in my mind a price i'm like all right if i think i think if it's below like three thousand dollars
Marco:
I'll just pay it.
Marco:
I'll just pay them directly and not go through insurance.
Marco:
I know how this is going to, you know, be a pain once insurance gets involved and raise my rates up and everything.
Marco:
Let me just, let me see what it's going to be.
John:
And by the way, is there, you haven't told us and you can't tell from this picture.
Uh,
John:
Did this dent impair any of the functionality of your tailgate and stuff?
John:
Was this purely cosmetic or was it functional where you could see how something is scraping now when I open the back of my car?
Marco:
It didn't seem to affect the tailgate or the little flappy thing on the bottom of it.
Marco:
So as far as I can tell, it had no functional problems as a result of this.
Marco:
So in theory, you could just drive around with this dent.
Marco:
forever for free i could yes i did feel a decent amount of shame driving around with this dent because i'm like i'm driving around a bright yellow electric suv on long island now that yellow isn't seeming so smart now huh
Marco:
And Long Islanders, like, there's a lot of, let's say, political diversity on Long Island.
Marco:
And so the idea of seeing somebody who dented their new electric SUV or Long Island parlance truck would be, I think, amusing and satisfying to many people in the region in which I live.
John:
On the other hand, when you back up and hit that stump again, you'll hit it in the same spot and you won't even notice.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
Well, but unless I push it in further, uh, maybe then I'll break the tailgate.
Marco:
We'll see.
Marco:
So anyway, so I had, I had the body shop, take a look at this.
Marco:
And the first body shop says, this is probably going to be something like $15,000.
Marco:
Oh gosh.
Marco:
And I was floored.
Marco:
I'm like, you gotta be kidding me.
Marco:
Like for what?
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
And they were saying, look, you know, you got to take this off, you got to do this, you got to do that.
Marco:
And the reason I picked this body shop was that they were Tesla certified.
Marco:
And I know Tesla runs a pretty tight ship with some of that stuff.
Marco:
So I'm like, all right, if they're Tesla certified- Wait, wait, wait, wait.
Casey:
So Tesla will ship the cars with panel gaps as wide as a house.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
But once they get repaired, they need to be very, very, very precise-
Marco:
Oh, yes.
Marco:
Cool.
Marco:
Because a few years ago when my Tesla was sideswiped in the parking lot in the ferry terminal, that was like a $6,000 repair.
Marco:
So I went to one of those shops and they were like, this is probably going to be XYZ.
Marco:
But they said that they actually couldn't take the business because they weren't Rivian certified.
Marco:
And Rivian won't even sell them the parts unless they're certified.
Marco:
So I had to go to a second place.
Marco:
The second place looks and they're like, hmm.
Marco:
Like, all right, yeah, we can do this.
Marco:
We'll get back to you on the price, but we think it's probably going to be even more than that.
Marco:
Oh, my gosh.
Marco:
So first, I'm like, all right, well, okay, insurance.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
This is definitely going to insurance now.
Marco:
So, Casey, you recently had the insurance balk at spending, I believe it was $20,000 roughly, right?
Marco:
That was a pebble.
Marco:
That was a pebble, yes.
Marco:
Yes.
Casey:
It wasn't a tree.
Casey:
It was a pebble.
Casey:
It was roughly $20,000, and the car was allegedly worth $25,000-ish, and so they said, the heck with it.
Casey:
The car is totaled.
Casey:
I would hope that they didn't total your car for this, given that your car is much newer and was considerably more expensive when purchased.
Marco:
They did not total the car.
Marco:
Thank God.
Marco:
I was worried about that.
Marco:
But the total price to get this repaired—I now have it back.
Marco:
It's perfect.
Marco:
The total price to get this repaired, $20,000.
Marco:
The cost to allegedly replace your entire engine of Aaron's car is the same cost it takes to repair a quarter panel dent on a Rivian.
Marco:
Did you get like a parts list?
John:
Because I'm wondering, did they replace anything other than the sheet metal?
Marco:
They did.
John:
I'm assuming they replaced the bumper because it was going through insurance.
John:
So it's new bumper, new sheet metal.
John:
What else?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So they replaced some kind of bumper and that and like some trim, like a couple of trim pieces along the boundaries of them.
Marco:
But like I like I don't even know what most of these terms mean or are.
Marco:
But as far as I can tell, they had to take apart the entire car like everything.
Marco:
everything was taken apart everything like you know because like you know i got back into it and i'm like oh this they you know they moved all the stuff in my trunk of course the whole trunk was clearly taken apart like they took apart like the center console at some point like they took apart my entire car it seems i don't know why i don't know how cars were built i don't know how body shops work but every i mean and they did a nice job like the car looks good it looks new again but oh my god so if you now i understand like why
John:
car insurance for these new nice evs is kind of expensive um sorry for my part in making it that expensive right um oh my god well i think uh there i think rivian has that's why casey was asking about the the where the panel goes the r1t specifically i think has like one of their back panels is yeah a very large piece of metal where there's it's not just like
John:
If you look at a regular car where there's like the C pillar and then the trunk and whatever, it's kind of like these small units where it's like, oh, if you get a dent on this panel, we can just replace that small panel.
John:
But on the Rivians in particular, there are very, especially the R1T, there are pieces of metal that go farther than you would think.
John:
Now, what a lot of body shops will do, at least in these YouTube rebuilding channels that I watch, is anytime there is a problem on like a panel like this on a car, they will cut the
John:
the panel and remove the you know like a reasonable size panel and then buy a new panel and cut that and match them up and weld it and sand it and blah blah blah and insurance company is not going to do that like insurance company wants it to be like new and they're going to replace the entire panel whatever it takes and if that means taking off all the lights in the back of your car the windshield all the things that are stopping them like just to get that one gigantic panel off as a single piece and by the way you still probably have to cut it because it's probably spot welded in various places right
John:
Taking that whole thing off and then buying that one new part.
John:
Like the insurance company doesn't want it is for it to be like an artisanal thing where like a craftsperson has to reassemble your car from a hodgepodge.
John:
Like, look, this is the part.
John:
We remove the damaged version of that part.
John:
We buy a new one of those parts, and we put the new one on.
John:
And if the part is huge, they're replacing the whole huge part.
John:
Or even if they won't sell like the individual thing, like they won't sell you just like one part of the light bar or something, and you have to buy the whole bar, even though just one part of it's broken.
John:
that's what they'll end up doing so i have to that's why i was asking what else was down which i have to imagine that either it was a very large panel that required lots of disassembly and reassembly or that maybe the there's like a crash bar in there in the back of cars in the front there's various bars that are meant to bend on impact to absorb uh you know crash damage and you might have had to replace that entire bar if it got even dented a little bit because like oh now the crash bar has done its crash thing so we need to replace that and that thread through the whole back of your car or something but
John:
This would have been a great opportunity to have this problem put on a YouTube channel, the repair of your car, so we could see exactly what was involved.
John:
But did you get a breakdown on parts versus labor?
John:
Because that's the next thing I'd be interested in to see.
Marco:
I probably did.
Casey:
I don't have it in front of me right now, but it was... Yeah, I would love for you to scan the report or receipt or whatever.
Casey:
Not for public consumption, but for John and I. I know he and I both would love to just tear that apart and see how they got to 2030.
John:
thousand dollars yeah like what percentage of that is labor is it like 50 labor 90 labor like and what were the parts cost how much how much of that one panel did they replace how much of that panel cost was the panel you know because if you're buying like a rolls-royce panel versus buying a honda civic panel right even though they both look like equal size pieces of sheet metal the prices are very different
Marco:
well one thing like the first body shop told me um that i don't know if i didn't verify this but they said that they think rivian sells only like that whole side of the car like you can't buy apparently just that panel you have to buy like the panel plus the two doors in front of it or whatever so like i i think that might have been part of it who knows did they read did they repaint stuff is painting on your bill
Marco:
Oh, yeah, there's definitely painting.
Marco:
Because they said they were going to blend it or whatever.
Marco:
I mean, the car's only six months old or a year old.
Marco:
How much did they repaint?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I mean, the car looks fantastic.
Marco:
It's all done now.
Marco:
It looks great.
Marco:
But, yeah, I am very thankful for car insurance.
Marco:
Me too.
Marco:
In moments like this.
Marco:
And I am just shocked that what looks like a fairly simple thing...
Marco:
$20,000.
John:
That's why it's good to know a good paintless dent repair person because at a certain point, like maybe when, you know, this car depreciates more and you get a dent similar to this that might be close to totaling it, but you still like the car, PDR is the way to go.
Marco:
What I want to know is I want to learn the limits of that.
Marco:
I've got to see how much that can do.
John:
They're pretty surprising.
John:
As long as there's no structural damage and it's just the sheet metal is messed up, they can do amazing things.
John:
And you can decide, like, even if there's like, oh, the crash bar got this little quarter size, you know, dimple in it.
John:
Do you care?
John:
You probably don't.
John:
The thing I always worry about with these, like, they don't want it to be artisanal.
John:
So you're essentially not relying on like a craftsperson to beautifully make this amalgam of stuff.
John:
But what you are relying on is the competence and care of the people who disassembled and then reassembled your car.
John:
Because kind of like Apple's laptops or any other kind of device that's precisely assembled in a factory-controlled environment, when they disassemble it and reassemble it in the body shop, they don't have as much experience as the person who's working the assembly line doing that process day after day after day, right?
John:
They don't have the machines.
John:
They don't have the temperature control.
John:
They don't have all the same tools.
John:
They don't have all the other parts off the car that make it real easy to put that part on, right?
John:
So I'm always worried with any kind of car repair that it's not going to go back together easily.
John:
Quite the way it was.
John:
And it'll be a little bit loosey-goosey.
John:
A little bit squeaky.
John:
They didn't put one of the little things in.
John:
They broke a clip.
John:
They broke two clips.
John:
Something is inside.
John:
Just...
John:
Recently, I was watching one of my YouTube videos, and this guy got a very expensive, fancy Porsche, and he brought it back in.
John:
It was a comedy of errors.
John:
But anyway, one of the things, he's like, oh, when I roll down the window, it makes this noise.
John:
It's like, oh, that's not good.
John:
This is a $200,000 Porsche rolling down the windows making a noise.
John:
What could that possibly be?
John:
So he had it in.
John:
They were doing other stuff for it, and they figured out what it was.
John:
He had paint protection film, PPF, put over his entire car because that's what you do when you get an expensive car.
John:
And when they were doing it, one of the backing pieces that's on the PPF slipped down the slot between like the window and the car.
John:
And it was the backing from a piece of PPF that was scrunched up underneath the window.
John:
When you'd roll it down, it would scrunch it up or whatever.
John:
Someone didn't do that on purpose.
John:
That was just like it was probably on the roof of the car and it slid down and went in the slot.
John:
I'm always worried about that with any kind of car repair.
John:
That's why in general you don't want to hit things with your car because taking apart a car and putting it back together, it's never going to be quite the same.
John:
And it's really easy to forget a bolt, forget a screw, leave a little thing rattling around in there and not get it quite back together.
John:
The clips again, breaking the clips and saying, well, it's good enough or whatever.
Casey:
that's why that's part of the reason why you want to get a good place that does charge you an arm and a line because you hope they're going to be more careful than the than the place that gave you the cheap price but there are no guarantees that is bananas my goodness but this panel is quite physically large i mean it is i don't i don't know that's necessarily bigger than an equivalent panel like i'm trying to imagine the rear of aaron's car and i don't think
Casey:
The equivalent panel is that much smaller, but nevertheless, the $20,000 is just bananas.
John:
Unlike the R1T, it doesn't wrap over the roof because it's an SUV shape.
John:
I think if you look at the R1T's back panel, it goes up and around the rear glass, you know what I mean?
John:
And his doesn't do that.
John:
so that should have at least been cheaper but yeah if they had to buy it with the doors or something yeah i would just love to see a parts list in this but anyway you just had to pay your deductible i guess and uh find out how much your rates are going to go up oh my god i'm scared because again like these are already not cheap to insure but my god this is
Marco:
It's not going to help.
Casey:
Like you said, now we know why.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
Can you go remove that stump?
Marco:
Unfortunately, that would be literally a federal crime because of the land that it is on.
Marco:
It's on federal land.
Marco:
But someone cut off the big branch that the stump is a stump of, right?
Marco:
Who did that?
Marco:
Well, the part of it that was stumping out would have been covering the village walk.
Marco:
And so I'm guessing the village would have had the rights to say, hey, we got to trim this tree back.
Marco:
But I don't have the rights to remove the tree from either the village walk or the federal land that it's resting.
Marco:
on all right well maybe get an orange reflective cone and put it over that stuff or i could just not back out that way anymore yeah look at your review camera turn on your proximity sensors yeah just look i mean this time i'm like it's funny like when i got the car back the other day from the body shop i mean i'm driving around running some errands around town and i'm like just being so careful every time i back out of anything like don't hit it again today like that would be so awful like i said but i think i said on the show when uh my wife uh
John:
side swiped her car in a parking garage and we got the door replaced and repainted it was like the passenger side door it was i think it was less than a week when she had it parked in a parking lot and the person next to her opened their car into the exact door that we had just gotten repainted and dented it badly enough that we needed to get it repainted again
John:
Went back to the same exact body shop.
John:
I'm like, hey, remember you did this door?
Marco:
Once more with feeling.
Marco:
Well, because literally the very first thing I did after picking up the body shop, the body shop is across the street from a storage facility that we had stuff sorted during the move.
Marco:
And I had to go get stuff out of the storage facility.
Marco:
And so literally I drove across the street and then had to back it into the storage garage.
Marco:
And I'm like, oh my God, if they actually see me dent this, that would be even worse.
Marco:
fortunately it was uneventful you used the rear view camera then you don't have 360 camera on this thing oh of course I do yeah I used it like crazy that time there weren't like cyclists and pedestrians walking behind it the whole time so I wasn't looking side to side I actually used it correctly the 360 camera doesn't show a big enough range to be able to see walkers and cyclists
Marco:
I wouldn't necessarily trust it.
Marco:
Also, the visibility pulling out of that driveway is very poor.
Marco:
So like the angles that I can see, they're not great angles.
Marco:
And so I kind of rely on my own sight a lot as well because I don't trust only what the cameras will see.
Marco:
But it's a whole thing.
Marco:
I've learned my lesson.
Marco:
I won't do it again.
Marco:
i kind of shock that casey has not told you you need to back in i used to back in um backing in uh there's there's like a bunch of like trees like bushes and stuff that so you can hit stuff when you back in instead of when you back out right like it's no stumps like it would just be scratching the clear coat but i there there would be a lot of clear coat scratching if i did that a lot
Casey:
Well, in Marco's defense, having spent very little time at the beach house, but enough to have seen it during the daytime, that car, while it is in many ways the right choice for you, in so many ways, particularly the size of the car, it is very much the wrong choice because it is way too large for the roads in which you're driving it.
Casey:
And if I recall correctly,
Casey:
I think you had said it would probably be for the best if I drove you to the beach before I tried to break your car.
Casey:
But I looked at this and even if you hadn't offered that or kind of politely requested it, there's zero chance that I would have done anything in the town with this car because it is just absurd how little clearance you have.
Casey:
And John...
Casey:
I would love to sit here and make just immense fun of Marco for this $20,000 oops.
Casey:
But truly, the oops was when you signed on the dotted line for the Rivian in the first place because it is just so big for that specific area of the country.
Marco:
It was kind of fun, though.
Marco:
In New York, you have to file the form with the motor vehicles department whenever there is an accident over a certain dollar amount of damage.
Marco:
And you have to describe what happened.
Marco:
And my favorite part was you have to draw a diagram or illustration of the accident...
Marco:
Are you serious?
Marco:
And they don't tell you, like, you know, what level of detail.
Marco:
So I drew, like, trees, like, fluffy.
Marco:
Like, I drew, like, the beach.
Marco:
Like, I drew a whole little diagram in that box.
Marco:
And I'm like, this is going to make someone's day, I hope.
Marco:
Like, someone, you know, reading this form, filing it somewhere.
Marco:
Like, I hope this makes somebody smile.
Marco:
It made me smile to draw it.
John:
You'll be able to find it on the web somewhere.
John:
I'm sure it's enshrined in digital form somewhere.
John:
Like, car, stump, path, arrow, stump.
John:
Gracious.
Casey:
Well, I'm glad it's back.
Casey:
How long was it gone?
Casey:
How long was the repair?
Marco:
Like three weeks.
Marco:
It was a while.
Casey:
I mean, it makes sense.
Casey:
They tore apart half the car.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I'm so worried now about what John said about it not being quite right.
Marco:
I noticed the trunk lid and whatever the bottom thing in the trunk is that flops down, it's a little bit tighter.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
When it closes, like it doesn't lift up as easily as it used to.
Marco:
And I'm like, oh, something's different.
John:
If you got away without something rattling inside your doors or side panels that aren't doors, consider yourself declare victory.