Feature Headphones
Casey:
I have updated call recorder for Skype just barely in time for this phone call.
Marco:
Did you see they now have a feature where it will automatically offer to reinstall itself when necessary?
Casey:
Which didn't work, by the way.
Casey:
So I did my call recorder update and then I updated Skype.
Casey:
And then nothing.
Casey:
So then I had to manually go and re-update Call Recorder.
Casey:
I mean, just to show you the pains that we go through to bring this program to you, ladies and gentlemen, I am recording this not once, not twice, but thrice.
Casey:
I now have a hardware recorder.
Casey:
What is this?
Casey:
A MixPre32.
Casey:
Correct.
Casey:
I've got the Audio Hijack running and Skype call recorder.
Casey:
A call recorder for Skype, whatever it's called.
Casey:
Because darn it, I will not lose this recording.
Casey:
I will not.
Casey:
I swear it.
Casey:
But yeah, it's really getting frustrating that Skype updates even more often than Chrome, it seems.
Casey:
And that's saying something.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And every time it updates recently, it breaks Call Recorder, which seems to just uninstall.
Marco:
I mean, Call Recorder has given us years of solid functionality and solid service for what I'm pretty sure was only a one-time purchase.
Marco:
Like, I don't think I've ever...
Marco:
yeah like 20 bucks like six years ago like i don't think i bought it it just it keeps updating um but i think i think the time of relying on it for anything is over because skype is just outpacing it just constantly disabling it and issuing or rather skype is constantly issuing updates to itself that disable it i don't know if it's intentional but that's what happens and it's just i i think at this point like you can't really depend on that anymore actually working um
John:
It's unfortunate.
John:
I mean, it always works if it's installed.
John:
You just got to remember to look to see whether it's installed or not before you have an hour-long call and you realize, hey, where's that little window?
Marco:
Yeah, imagine if that's how your backups worked.
Marco:
If Time Machine just stopped every three days until you remembered to go look for it...
John:
i still feel like you can rely on i mean we all reinstall cold recorders i don't think one of us has had that that use case where it's like or that that failure mode where the problem is that we forgot the cold recorder wasn't installed we always notice it's not installed and then we reinstall which is annoying but i feel like once it's installed it still does the job so yeah but for me it's it's my backup recorder and it has been for some time and i use audio hijack for primary
Marco:
For all sorts of stuff, like the entire processing that generates the live stream file, the live stream itself, the processing to make me sound crappier on the live stream to match how bad you guys sound from Skype.
Marco:
All that's done in Audio Hijack, and then I have a couple of recording blocks.
John:
If anything, what we need to do is get rid of Skype and finally move to one of the bazillion services that everyone tells us has better audio quality than Skype.
Casey:
Yeah, I was just going to say that.
Casey:
So as with all things podcasting related, anytime any of the three of us complain about anything relating to podcasting, all of Germany comes out.
Casey:
Even people who have no idea what podcasts are.
John:
They were right about chapter markers, you know.
Casey:
They were.
Casey:
we're right about chapter markers.
Casey:
And so I'll never forget.
Casey:
It was a few months ago and it was, it was a genuinely well-meaning email.
Casey:
Like it was clear that this person just wanted to help.
Casey:
And they said, here's what you got to do.
Casey:
You got to get this like completely esoteric, like super professional, like tons of switches and knobs and buttons software that is either untranslated or lightly translated to English.
Casey:
And I swear that's going to be, that's going to fix you up.
Casey:
That's what you need.
Casey:
It's like,
Marco:
uh okay like i'm sure if you're a german person and can understand german this this works great for you but i am neither of those things i mean see we're lucky like usually i edit out any mention of skype from the published show can you imagine how many more times we would get these recommendations if i didn't do that that's true that's true
Casey:
Oh, golly.
Casey:
I know you probably should edit all this out, but I don't know.
Casey:
It's just it's it is kind of preposterous.
Casey:
It's it's like, you know, why do we use IRC as the chat room?
Casey:
And I'm not God, please.
Casey:
I don't need the Discord apologist to come at me.
Casey:
I know there are other options, but for the purposes and that the three of us have.
Casey:
I really think that IRC is probably the best answer for what is basically a group of people chatting via text for two to three hours once a week.
Casey:
I don't think I need a full Discord just for that.
Casey:
And yes, I understand we could do that for membership or something.
Casey:
And who knows?
Casey:
Maybe we will one day.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
But today, it seems like the best answer for a group of people that want to chat via text is IRC.
Casey:
And IRC is, what, like 30 years old?
Casey:
20 years old, something like that.
Marco:
And to be fair, IRC sucks.
Marco:
I hate IRC, but I just hate every other option here more.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
And that's Skype.
Casey:
That's the same thing with Skype.
Marco:
Yeah, Skype sucks, but there's a reason we keep using it.
Casey:
Yeah, and I mean, we could do something like Cast, which I've met the guy who writes it, and he's a super nice guy.
Casey:
I can't remember his name off the top of my head.
Casey:
I apologize, but super nice guy.
Casey:
From everything I understand, it's like a great service, but when we have something that works, even though we hate it, and it's free...
Casey:
It's a lot of, it's actually a surprising amount of momentum to get us to do something else.
Casey:
I mean, the chat room is saying we could use Slack.
Casey:
I've thought about pitching like FaceTime audio group calls, but God knows I don't want to rely on Apple for that sort of thing.
Marco:
Oh, wait, you mean Slack as, not as chat, but as the video or as the audio service?
Marco:
I forgot that everybody has that now.
Marco:
It's just, God, enterprise software is the worst.
Marco:
Like it's, now every single platform has some kind of calling feature built in.
Yeah.
Marco:
How do we know what's good, what to use?
Marco:
And it's like... I don't know.
Marco:
Anyway, I do have a slightly unpopular opinion.
Marco:
Oh, please.
Marco:
Discord is like QuickTime Player was in the late 90s or early 2000s, whenever it came out.
Marco:
Discord is that, to me.
Casey:
Tell me more.
Marco:
So, at the time...
Marco:
I was a Windows user back then.
Marco:
Casey, as were you.
Marco:
John, we're sorry.
Marco:
Please stop listening for a few minutes.
Marco:
QuickTime player to Windows people was just the worst because you'd come across some video that was in QuickTime format and you'd be like, oh, God.
Marco:
now i have to i have to either install that thing or run that thing and quicktime player in typical like you know apple on windows fashion was a terrible windows citizen and it just was bloated and installed like weird little hooks everywhere and tried to auto launch and it's like all the sorts of crap and and it would just it was just totally out of place and it just sucked like it was just a terrible experience and
Marco:
Having to open stupid QuickTime Player on Windows to play a QuickTime video that you had that nothing else would play.
Marco:
To the Windows people, it was just annoying and hellish and a big turnoff.
Marco:
But to the entire world of Mac people, that's just what they had.
Marco:
It was fine.
Marco:
On the Mac, QuickTime Player was just the video player, and it was fine.
Marco:
But in their world, what was fine was totally foreign and unpleasant to this other world that existed that they just never thought about.
Marco:
That's what Discord is to non-gamers.
Marco:
Gamers love Discord, and I think to some degree Slack has the same attribute where if you're in a community that uses Discord or that uses Slack...
Marco:
Adding another one is no big deal because you already run the app.
Marco:
You're already running it all day on all your devices.
Marco:
You already have it set up.
Marco:
You already have accounts and stuff.
Marco:
You know how to use it.
Marco:
You know what it does.
Marco:
You know what it doesn't do.
Marco:
So when you're already in one of these communities or environments that use one of these chat apps, adding another Slack to me is no big deal.
Marco:
But if I added a Discord to my regularly checked things...
Marco:
I would have to run Discord.
Marco:
I would have to install it on my phone, which I've never had before.
Marco:
I would have to make a spot for it on my home screen, which I don't have.
Marco:
I don't have any more space for that that I would want to spend on that.
Casey:
Especially not on your tiny phone.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
On my Mac, I'd have to install Discord on all of my many Macs.
Marco:
I'd have to keep it running a lot of the time so I wouldn't miss stuff or whatever.
Marco:
It's one more thing, one more bloated electron app that I'd have to run.
Marco:
The last thing I want is to have to add something like that to my life that isn't already there.
Marco:
And so if I was already in Discords, this wouldn't be an issue.
Marco:
Just like I'm already in Slack, so Slack isn't an issue for me.
Marco:
But because I'm not already in Discord, I don't want to have to add the entire bloat of yet another one of these services to my life.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I have a couple of thoughts here.
Casey:
First of all, I agree with you with regard to Discord and I have lots of complaints about it.
Casey:
Second of all, we are removing all doubt that we are the oldest, most out of touch of all of the people in our little sphere because everyone else seems to love Discord and I hate it.
Casey:
Third of all, I see your QuickTime player for Windows and raise you real player.
Marco:
Oh, that was, yeah, that was worse.
Casey:
Such a pile of garbage.
Casey:
I mean, QuickTime was bad, but, oh, RealPlay was such a pile of garbage, which is funny because, you know, back in the olden days when you had to carry your bits uphill both ways in order to get on the internet, when, you know, Marco and John and I were on the internet,
Casey:
streaming audio or video was just not a thing.
Casey:
It was not possible.
Casey:
And then all of a sudden, RealPlayer came out, and you could stream audio.
Casey:
And then, maybe it was the same time, maybe it was a little while later, then you could stream, quote-unquote,
Casey:
video which really was like a postage stamp sized video that had approximately 12 pixels of of data within it that would update once every seven seconds and that was and that was quote-unquote video back then and oh my god the real player app was such a pile of garbage and i hated it so much um with regards discord i i
Casey:
I think a lot of the problem I have with Discord is that, to my eyes, it fulfills the exact same needs as Slack does, even though I understand that they're not the same and there are very large differences between the two.
Casey:
But for the kinds of needs that I have, which is basically chatting with a select group of people in one or more different context, you know, like chat rooms or what have you,
Casey:
I don't feel like Discord handles that simple use case as well.
Casey:
Now, it does many other things quite a bit better.
Casey:
My understanding is that moderation is way better on Discord because it was built for gamers.
Casey:
I already insulted every Tesla fan ever last week, so let me try to be a little more gentle.
Casey:
Gamers can be challenging, and that could maybe require a little more finesse than your average Slack user.
Casey:
And another thing that I dislike about Discord is that, and this very well could be user error, and maybe I don't understand what I'm doing, but I feel like it is information overload always.
Casey:
Anytime I start Discord, which is basically only when I'm recording analog, because that's where the chat room is for Relay now, I start it, and first of all, it makes me log in again, because I haven't logged in in a month.
Casey:
And that's annoying in and of itself.
Casey:
So then they do this, you know, like really slick, and I mean that genuinely, a really slick, like, you know, scan this QR code with your phone because I'm on my desktop, you know, scan this QR code with your phone and we'll log you right in, which is great.
Casey:
Except I go to my phone and my phone's logged out because I haven't logged into that in a month.
Casey:
So then I log into my phone thinking, all right, I'll just do it here.
Casey:
I'll use my face ID to get my password and then that'll be great.
Casey:
And then every time I forget where the hell it is that I go to scan the QR code.
Casey:
Because I can't just use the camera on the iOS camera, the iOS camera, because then it just punts me to Discord.
Casey:
And Discord's like, okay, you're in Discord.
Casey:
Sweet.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
I want to log in on the other thing.
Marco:
Like in the web?
Marco:
Oh, I see.
Casey:
Because I'm on my phone.
Casey:
It just punts me to Discord from the iOS camera app.
Casey:
So then I got to figure out where the hell it is in Discord on the iPhone that I can scan the code to get me logged in on the desktop.
Casey:
And then I log in and there's 304 frigging channels, all of which are bolded because all of which have had activity since I've last been logged in.
Casey:
And unlike Slack, where you seem to be able to leave a channel, and again, it is very possible this is user error because I barely ever touched Discord, but it seems like in Slack you can choose to join or leave a channel.
Casey:
And the equivalent in Discord is muting a channel.
Casey:
Well, that man, I don't want all this.
Casey:
And I don't want all this in my life.
Casey:
No, I don't want it.
Casey:
I don't want to mute it.
Casey:
I don't want to frigging see it.
Casey:
So yeah, it's just, it's very frustrating.
Casey:
And I know that I am just, I'm just announcing how old I am by going on this rant and I can feel how old that I, that I am.
Casey:
I think my hair is actively getting more gray as I'm in the midst of this monologue, but I don't know.
Casey:
It's just,
Casey:
It's for the kids, man, and I ain't a kid anymore.
John:
It's too bad.
John:
You both can't be young and vibrant like me.
John:
That's right.
John:
That's right.
John:
I'm in six Discords.
Marco:
You're a gamer.
Marco:
Discord, to me, was clearly, you know, it clearly came from gamer roots.
Marco:
Overall, Discord looks like it was designed by Windows users, and Slack looks like it was designed by Mac users.
Marco:
And I'm not saying Discord is badly designed.
Marco:
It's just a different set of goals and way different priorities and way different styles of doing things.
Marco:
It's very rooted from those gaming roots, and you can see it in so many ways.
Marco:
Gamers are usually Windows users, and it feels like a big old Windows app.
Marco:
And Slack...
Marco:
For all of its faults.
Marco:
I've had many quibbles with Slack's design changes over time.
Marco:
It is a bloated electron app for sure.
Marco:
There's a lot about Slack that is not ideal or not great.
Marco:
But Slack still feels generally like it was designed by Mac people with Mac sensibilities and Discord feels like a Windows app.
Marco:
And that will probably always be the case.
Marco:
Speaking of communities, and Casey, speaking of Tesla people, I just got an email with a terrifying subject line.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Okay.
Marco:
It's an email from Tesla, and the subject is your new leasing experience.
Marco:
What?
Marco:
Please just try to do the lease correctly.
Marco:
Even that is very hard for you.
Casey:
So what is the new leasing experience?
Casey:
What do you have to look forward to?
Marco:
It looks like they're just moving lease stuff into the Tesla account control panel instead of, I guess, whatever financial company was subsidiary servicing it before.
Marco:
Tesla changing the leasing experience is kind of like Apple changing the laptop keyboards.
Marco:
It's like, ooh, please, please don't mess it up.
Marco:
Like, oh, God, you don't have a good track record here.
Marco:
Please just maybe not touch it.
Marco:
Like, once it works, just please don't touch it.
Casey:
Yeah.
Yeah.
Casey:
Is Apple Silicon ready?
Casey:
That's a very odd phrasing or title for a site, but it's actually a really good site and does what it says on the tin.
Casey:
If you want to know if an app is ready for Apple Silicon, just go to isapplesiliconready.com and it'll tell you for a fair number of different apps.
Casey:
It's quite stunning, in fact.
John:
I added the hyphens to the name so you would know how I think it's supposed to be done.
John:
So the URL is all stuck together is applesiliconready.com.
John:
But if you want to think of how it's supposed to be interpreted, my interpretation is...
John:
uh it's a question about a thing so so is and is leaving out some words to be short but it says is this thing apple silicon ready hyphenated because it's a three-word phrase that works as an adjective to describe the thing is apple silicon ready or in emacs parlance apple silicon ready p
John:
There, I've done my Macs joke for the month, so my quote is fulfilled.
John:
Anyway, yeah, good site.
John:
Check it out.
Casey:
Yeah, it is very well done.
Casey:
And you can even, you know, I played with this very briefly, even though I'm the only one of the three of us that does not have an Apple Silicon Mac.
Casey:
But among things you can do is you can, like, search for something.
Casey:
So I searched just arbitrarily for FFmpeg because, hi, have we met?
Casey:
And I think there's a way that you can actually fill out a list of things that you have that may or may not be on the site and make your own little profile.
Casey:
It looked very, very well done.
Casey:
And it seems like it's translated a bunch of different ways.
Casey:
So this is very impressive.
Casey:
And if I had an Apple Silicon Mac, I would be looking at it more often.
Marco:
Oh, for whatever it's worth.
Marco:
I know Homebrew is not quite ready for all this stuff yet, and it's probably going to be a while before all of the different packages, the popular packages like FFmpeg.
Marco:
It's probably going to be a while before all of those pretty much build on M1.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
through some kind of fluke of migration assistant, I, on my MacBook Air, I have my homebrew installation from another computer.
Marco:
It just got imported over.
Marco:
And it works.
Marco:
Like, because all those, they're just compiled binaries.
Marco:
And if you can get a compiled binary from an Intel Mac and run it on the M1, it'll run under Rosetta.
Marco:
And so my M1 MacBook Air does run FFmpeg just fine.
Marco:
It's not as fast as it could be if it was native.
Marco:
But Rosetta works on command line binaries also.
Marco:
So that is an option.
Marco:
If you need to run some stuff like that for some part of your workflow or something, you can bring that over from an Intel Mac.
Marco:
And I think there are certain ways where you can force...
Marco:
um like there's some command i forget what it is but you can you can run homebrew itself in rosetta with some kind of command line uh trickery and i again i'm sorry i don't know what it is off the top of my head but look that up if you're if you're curious um i haven't done that all i did was bring stuff over from the other installation which i assume is just like copying the user local directory over i guess maybe it's just again it's a little bit slower than than it could be
John:
Speaking of running things on Rosetta and then being fast enough, I tried to find this URL while you were talking, but I couldn't.
John:
Someone did a benchmark, like Lightroom just updated to be ARM native.
John:
And someone did a benchmark of Lightroom running under Rosetta versus the native version.
John:
The native version was only a little bit faster.
John:
And it was sad because the Rosetta is so good.
John:
I mean, it was faster, but not by a lot, by like single digit percentages.
John:
And it's like, wow, Rosetta is pretty good.
Casey:
Oh, here we go.
Casey:
Who is this in the chat?
Casey:
I'm not in the right window.
Casey:
Rip Mac in the chat wrote, there's a post on Notion.so that talks about how to do it.
Casey:
So what you do is you make a duplicate of the terminal app, and then you go into the info for that terminal app and tick the open using Roge Zeta checkbox.
Casey:
And then everything that happens in Terminal apparently is run through Rosetta, so you could use Homebrew.
Marco:
Oh, that's something.
Marco:
Also, thanks to Ryan Booker in the chat, there's a blog post by Sam – how do you pronounce his last name?
Marco:
Sophis?
Marco:
Sophies?
Marco:
I don't know.
Casey:
Sophis, I think.
Marco:
think i'm not confident i'm right so yeah been around forever anyway sam sofas wrote this good blog post also about running homebrew on apple silicon and it uses the arch command uh to basically use the entire homebrew installer under rosetta uh using the arch command so that's we'll look at these oh this is what i was thinking of and what i think you were thinking of as well yeah yeah this looks this looks familiar i always pronounce that as arc like short for architecture it's architexture just just like just like the mob file format short for mobby
Casey:
Oh, God.
Marco:
You think mob has the most RAM.
Casey:
Graphics interchange format?
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
All right, John, can you tell me about chiplets and multi-chip modules, please?
John:
Don't try to make me read this big thing.
Casey:
Is that all I am to you?
Casey:
That's all I am to you as a friggin' speaker, aren't I?
Marco:
We have our roles, and this is your role.
Marco:
You want us to have the say command read it for you?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right, Adrian Sampson writes, and this is a lot, so blame John.
Casey:
On the topic of sheer die size, an important avenue for scaling lately is chiplets, or multi-chip modules, or MCMs, where more than one logic chip goes in the same package.
Casey:
Think roughly the same idea as the M1's in-package DRAM, except it's multiple logic dies instead of one logic die and some memory.
Casey:
Chiplets were just a research topic until fairly recently.
Casey:
AMD CPUs are all MCMs as of a couple of years ago.
Casey:
A chiplet-based approach could be a way to scale the M1 CPU core count or GPU size without requiring separate packages or ruining yield.
Casey:
On the topic of using in-packaged memory as a cache for more traditional and larger onboard DRAM, a second rapidly approaching technology is relevant here, quote, 3D-stacked, quote, DRAM, where RAM chips are glued right on top of a logic die.
Casey:
The leading standard for this is high bandwidth memory, or HBM, which is a terrible name.
Casey:
And it has so far appeared only in a few high-end NVIDIA GPUs, Xilinx, is that right, FPGAs, et cetera.
Casey:
The capacity of this memory is pretty limited, so research on HBM often involves managing it as an OS-managed or page-based cast for a larger pool of DDR memory, which seems like a win because, as John mapped out in the show, the bandwidth and latency advantages over traditional off-package memory cross a threshold to make it worth it.
Casey:
Then there's some math, which I don't think we care about.
Casey:
Both of these technologies were coming soon for a long time, but now they're here.
Casey:
I wouldn't be shocked, but I would be thrilled to see them in a quote-unquote M2.
Casey:
Any acronym that has BM in it, I can't get behind.
Casey:
I can't get behind.
John:
So they have a link to TSMC's 3D thing on this.
John:
So I'm pretty sure all of the phone chips have used the RAM on top of the Logic for a long time now.
John:
So I don't think... I mean, maybe it's not... Maybe they're talking about something slightly different, but putting the RAM on top of the Logic instead of next to it is definitely a thing you can do.
John:
But for Macs in particular, especially big Macs,
John:
You probably don't want to do that because it is much harder to deal with heat in that scenario.
John:
It's handled on the phone because the whole deal with the phone is there's not going to be a fan in there anyway.
John:
So, you know, everything's clocked down and made low power because the battery is tiny and yada yada.
John:
But one of the reasons that the...
John:
potentially one of the reasons that the m1 in the max has logic with the ram next to it instead of on top is that it's much easier to cool right because you get direct access to the logic which is super hot right and you can put a heat sink right on that to draw heat away from it and then you have heat sinks on the ram modules as well so that's way easier that if you stack them now you have this hot logic thing that you're prevented from extracting heat from by the
John:
Also kind of warm RAM that's on top of it So I don't expect to see it stacked like that in any Mac but multi chip modules is definitely a possibility and that's related to Something we'll get to a little bit later
Casey:
So moving on, getting images from a Google Doc.
Casey:
And this is from Daniel Santos.
Casey:
So if you recall last episode, I think that I expected Marco would have cut this out, but he didn't.
Casey:
I was trying to extract, I think, a graph or something from our shared show notes document on Google Docs.
Casey:
And in typical Casey fashion, I think several colorful expletives were uttered as I was trying to figure out how the crap to get a image file out of a Google Doc stock.
Casey:
And so Daniel Santos writes, a few months ago, I spent hours banging my head against the wall and screaming profanities for hours trying to figure out how to do this.
Casey:
One would think it's a basic feature, but alas, Google being Google, they kind of included it but made it as unintuitive as possible.
Casey:
So basically, on a Google Doc, you can go to file, download, web page, HTML zipped, and it'll download a zipped package in which there's a nice little folder called images with all of the image files from the document and their original quality.
Casey:
Or I could have just asked John for the original.
Marco:
There's also, I found another method when I was just like poking around trying to get that image out of the doc for the chapter art.
John:
You should have just asked me for the original too.
John:
I forgot to send it to you.
John:
Obviously, I have the original.
John:
It's just ask.
Marco:
I save everything.
Marco:
You can also right-click.
Marco:
I think you have a virus.
Marco:
what the hell is safe to keep i don't see this option oh wait there it is okay i got it i got it okay so i have some kind of like rogue extension you just sent your whole key chain to uh yeah yeah like i i'm not i don't i the only thing i ever use google docs for is this so i like i'm not an expert in it at all but i did find that
Casey:
And, of course, I could have used the Web Inspector, I'm sure, but it shouldn't be that difficult.
Casey:
None of these options are good.
Casey:
Just ask me.
Casey:
I've got the images.
Casey:
That's difficult, too, John.
Marco:
Well, this is yet another thing.
Marco:
Going back to our Apple News discussion last week, yet another thing that you know when you have something in a browser, unless they've taken great pains to override the right-click menu like Google Docs has.
John:
Unless they're Pinterest.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
right but like normally like right click save as or right click open image in a new tab is something that you can always do yet another thing that like that things content that is viewed in browsers gives you this ability and content is viewed in apps oftentimes does not or copying pasting text which is yes more infuriating not that browsers do that well either but you've got a fighting chance at least
Casey:
Speaking of Apple News, we got a little bit of feedback in defense of Apple News.
Casey:
The feedback we got was very, very upset that we had besmirched their beloved app.
Casey:
But there was one fairly short email from Jay Peterson who wrote, news gives you better font size control, readability options and accessibility features than the quote unquote open web.
Casey:
No jerk bars.
Casey:
We had a different name for this back when Twitter was doing it.
Casey:
Cookie accepts flashing ads or page obstructions.
Casey:
And no ad blocking required for the average user.
Casey:
With regard to swiping behavior, which is what I was complaining about, if you swipe from the middle of the screen, it does move you to the next or previous story, depending on swipe direction.
Casey:
But if you do the edge swipe from the left to go back, news does take you back to the prior view like most Apple apps.
Casey:
So this is, I think a lot of people were very upset about me describing the swipe behavior.
Casey:
I guess that I just didn't get my finger precisely to the left edge of the screen in order to go back, which is my fault.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
It's just as we were discussing just a moment ago with Google Docs, you expect to be able to right click and say save image.
Casey:
And whether or not that's the best answer, it's the answer that it seems most people expect.
Casey:
And I could make a passionate argument that a good UI is a UI that doesn't make you go, huh?
Casey:
And so this was an instance where Apple News made me go, huh?
Casey:
So anyway, continuing on from Jay Peterson.
Casey:
Also, most stories in the news app link you to the web source by tapping the share button and tapping Safari, which opens the web version of the story, or swiping all the way to the bottom of the story in the news and then swiping further down automatically pulls up a web view of the story.
Casey:
Some sites abuse this in news by only showing a stub of the story in news and then requiring a full scrolling swipe to see the full ad laden and much more unpleasant to read version of the story.
Casey:
So in the defense of Apple news, there are some things to like about it.
Casey:
I still don't think it's for me, but there you go.
Marco:
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Casey:
So was it today?
Casey:
No, it was yesterday as we record.
Casey:
We were recording on Wednesday the 9th.
Casey:
Apple just randomly dropped a new product on us, and it was not the 4K Apple TV update I've been waiting for for a year.
Casey:
Instead, it was AirPods Max, and I don't care, so what else are we talking about?
Marco:
This is a very hard thing for us to talk that much about, you know, as everybody looks at the chapter marker and sees the 45-minute long chapters.
Marco:
It's a hard thing for us to talk about because no one seems to have them yet.
Marco:
Or at least, like, when the announcement was made, there were no...
Marco:
There was no like advanced reviews that were seeded before that announcement.
Marco:
So like there's no like MKBHD review or anything like that.
Marco:
So we don't have, you know, there was no like, you know, preview by John Gruber.
Marco:
Like there was nothing like that.
Marco:
And so we can't comment at all on how they sound, how they work, anything like that.
Marco:
But it is pretty unusual for Apple to release a brand new product in December.
Marco:
So we're going to talk about them anyway.
John:
and i think everybody wants us to yeah the one thing we can't talk about is the sound obviously um and the comfort and you know everything else well i mean we can say something about that because we can physically see the the device um i forget what was the airpod studio was the rumor name for these like it's not out of nowhere because like this is one of the many rumored things like leaving poor air tags as like i still like airheads and head pods and all those other fun names that we all came up with
John:
So AirTags is the, I think the lone, aside from the Apple TV, AirTags is the lone remaining sort of rumored product that still hasn't landed in any kind of form.
John:
If you set aside air power and think that weird folding travel thing is whatever those rumors are about.
John:
Yeah, so I think these headphones are... In the beginning, I thought, well, you know, it's nice that they made these.
John:
It's good.
John:
I feel like it fills out Apple's line, kind of like they're making a small phone and a big phone.
John:
They make AirPods.
John:
They want to extend the AirPods brand, even though it makes not that much sense.
John:
The Air thing makes sense.
John:
The pods part, not so much.
John:
But anyway, it's good.
John:
Apple should have an Apple-branded over-ear headphone.
John:
And I think this product comes at more or less the right time because the AirPods Pro introduced a whole new set of features that actually are ideally suited to an over-ear headphone.
John:
The noise canceling.
John:
I mean, it's cool that the little AirPods Pro can do
John:
noise canceling but it's obviously you can do a better job if you cover the entire ear with a thing the spatial audio stuff that they rolled out and of course all the wireless pairing and all the other convenience factors like this that whole feature set you look at that feature set that would work pretty well in and over your headphones so apple should probably make one of those
John:
And they have.
John:
And it looks super apply.
John:
And, you know, I think it's a reasonable product.
John:
But I didn't think it was for me because I'm like, well, you know, I don't even like the AirPods Pro.
John:
I just use my plain old, you know, regular or original AirPods.
John:
They're still my favorite because I don't like things in my ear canal.
John:
And the only place I use over-ear headphones is right now when I'm podcasting.
John:
And I don't really use them at any other time in my entire life.
John:
So I didn't really have a place for these.
John:
Uh, but, uh, as you know, it's still, there's only running reviews, right?
John:
So, you know, I don't, nothing has changed about my attitude towards this that related to reading what people think of them.
John:
But as the day has, the two days have gone on, I've been thinking, you know, I do put my AirPods in and watch stuff on my iPad.
John:
I watch a lot of content that way, sort of late at night, you know, in bed, watch a TV show before bed or whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
Um, and I do that with my plain old AirPods.
John:
uh which don't sound that great it usually doesn't matter for a tv show but sometimes i watch you know a movie like that or whatever and but you know these things i could put these on my head and watch something on my ipad right and i've done the spatial audio thing with the pros and it's kind of cool uh and what if these are really comfortable and what if they're even more noise isolating for my wife next to me in bed who doesn't want to hear if there's some loud part of a movie or something
John:
So I started thinking about these things.
John:
I didn't put it in order.
John:
I'm not, you know, I don't think I really need these in my life, but I am actually primed to be interested in the reviews.
John:
If people say, and yes, they are expensive.
John:
We'll talk about that in a little bit.
John:
But people say, yeah, they're super expensive, but they sound more or less like $500 headphones.
John:
And we already more or less know that all of the AirPod-y features are good because we have the AirPods Pro and we've done all the pairing things.
John:
And we've tried the whole feature set.
John:
We understand how they interact with the Apple ecosystem.
John:
And if you like that, these do that too, only now they're big.
John:
So I am AirPods Max curious at this point.
John:
I obviously don't need to buy a $500 pair of headphones, what am I, Marco?
John:
But I am waiting to see what the reviews say.
John:
If the reviews say, oh, they're only okay, and, you know, because I have Sony noise-canceling headphones, which I really like, but I only use them for travel.
John:
I don't use them for the sound quality.
John:
I can tell you that.
John:
It just isn't the podcast on them.
John:
But if they say, oh, these are not, you know, they're on par with much cheaper headphones
John:
models don't bother i probably won't bother if they say wow these things actually sound like 500 headphones and they're super convenient and by the way you can use them for monitoring during podcasts which we'll talk about a little bit i'm sure too i may consider these at some point in the future
John:
Marco, on the other hand, is not allowed to consider headphones.
John:
He's mandated to buy all of them sight unseen.
John:
So, Marco, tell us about what you think of these things.
Marco:
I did order a pair.
Marco:
I don't have it yet.
Marco:
I did get one of those day one delivery windows, though.
Marco:
So I think I'll have it in roughly a week or so, maybe.
Marco:
I have some concerns.
Marco:
I think it might end up being a really great product.
Marco:
But, man, $550...
Marco:
That is not a ton of money for a flagship headphone from a headphone brand.
Marco:
Like, if you look at, like, high-end headphones that audiophiles buy, that is actually quite mid-range.
Marco:
Like, high-end headphones for audiophiles go well into, like, the $3,000 plus range.
Marco:
And that's actually a fairly recent phenomenon, actually.
Marco:
But anyway, and I don't own any of those.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
For this market, this is very expensive because the direct competitors to this are the Sony, you know, WH, whatever, whatever, whatever, Mark, whatever.
Marco:
I think they're up to four so far.
Marco:
And those are about $350 usually.
Marco:
The Bose QuietComfort full-size model of whatever two-year period we're currently in, I believe it's currently called the Bose 700, those are usually also in the $350 range.
Marco:
So for Apple to come out with something that...
Marco:
you know those are the most obvious direct competitors at 550 is really above the market for what this product most likely is and what it most likely is competing with another very strong competitor in this area is apple's own airpods pro which are less than half the price they're 250 officially and have been on sale a lot recently at various places for like
Marco:
you know 190 200 like you know something like that so this is on track to be kind of another home pod not home pod mini but the regular home pod it seems like first of all like there's maybe more overlap than we think um the rumor mill seems to think
Marco:
that these were edited a lot and kind of rushed out the door.
Marco:
And that the final product has been changed so often in development and things didn't work out the way they wanted and they changed it around and changed it around and changed it around and then shipped something out the door.
Marco:
We heard a very similar thing about the HomePod when that shipped.
Marco:
The HomePod came out to a market where
Marco:
it seemed like it was kind of missing the market.
Marco:
The HomePod came out way too expensive, missing some key features that the market expects, and just kind of seeming like the people who designed and marketed and priced it
Marco:
either weren't familiar with the market they were entering or were so confident that they would be superior in some ways that they totally didn't bother competing in some other really important ways.
Marco:
And it looks like they've done the same thing here.
Marco:
There are some things about this that look really good.
Marco:
There are some things about this that are question marks for me and will remain to be seen until we get it.
Marco:
And it's super expensive for what it seems like its category is.
Marco:
And so I think this is probably going to have a similar outcome as the full-size HomePod, which is some of us will buy it, but it's really expensive for the market that it's going into.
Marco:
And most people aren't going to buy it.
Marco:
And it probably won't do the kind of volumes Apple wants it to do.
Marco:
So all that being said, specifically about this product, I'm excited in the sense that the AirPods Pro,
Marco:
Are so good.
Marco:
Like, they're so good that for the last couple of flights that I took back when I was flying.
Casey:
Wait, I'm sorry.
Casey:
What is a flight?
Marco:
For the last couple of flights I took, I took only the AirPods Pro with me.
Marco:
And it was remarkable in almost every way.
Marco:
The amount of space in a bag that you save by not having a full-size pair of noise-canceling headphones is substantial.
Marco:
And it was wonderful traveling with just one pair of headphones.
Marco:
Having one pair of headphones do everything is so great, so convenient.
Marco:
It's price efficient.
Marco:
So there's a lot of benefits to having one pair of headphones that you can do everything with.
Marco:
And that's why everyone loves their AirPods so much.
Marco:
Because for many people, AirPods can do that.
Marco:
And the AirPods Pro did that for me for so many things.
Marco:
I'm no longer interested for the most part in full size portable headphones for anything anymore.
Marco:
I use my AirPods Pro for pretty much everything away from my desk.
Marco:
At my desk, I use full-size headphones for reasons.
Marco:
But when I'm away from my desk, I use AirPods Pro pretty much all the time.
Marco:
I've stopped using almost any other headphones away from my desk.
Marco:
So something like this is very promising.
Marco:
If this can not only be that for people for whom AirPods Pro...
Marco:
weren't comfortable or didn't fit.
Marco:
Or if this can be that, you know, for people who need things the AirPods Pro can't do or don't do well.
Marco:
Noise cancellation is one of those things that you wouldn't think the AirPods Pro do well, but they actually do extremely well.
Marco:
Almost as well as full-size headphones like the Sonys and the Boses and everything.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I expect noise cancellation on the AirPods Max.
Marco:
I don't like this name, by the way, because I don't think anything about them is AirPods.
Marco:
But I think noise cancellation on these is likely to be excellent.
Marco:
But it's so good on the AirPods Pro, it actually might not be that much better on these.
Marco:
So if you want additional noise cancellation beyond what the AirPods Pro offer, this will probably do that.
Marco:
But I don't know if it's going to be a massive difference.
Marco:
We'll see when we get them.
Marco:
I have some concerns about long-wearing comfort.
Marco:
Now, the AirPods Pro,
Marco:
on a long plane flight have a problem of battery life they only last about four hours and so if you try to take airpods pro on a cross-country u.s flight that's about five hours usually long you're going to probably at some point have to pop one out put it in the case charge it up then a little while later pop the other one out put it in the case charge it up and then put them back in or you can do my solution and just buy two pairs
Marco:
which you can do for a little bit less than the cost of the AirPods Pro Max, whatever these are called.
Casey:
Wait, you bought two sets of AirPods Pro?
Marco:
I did.
Marco:
Did I never tell you guys that?
Marco:
I did.
Casey:
I don't think you told us that.
Casey:
And this might be the singularly most Marco solution to a problem that I've ever heard in my life.
Marco:
It was fantastic because it's so much smaller still than a full-size pair of headphones.
Casey:
And as with every Marco solution to every problem...
Casey:
I kind of hate it.
Casey:
And yet, and yet, and yet, I do understand the logic.
Casey:
And there is an annoying amount of logic there.
John:
I wonder if they'll get the rattle of death at the same time or if one of them will be like the backup pair when one of them starts.
Marco:
So the first pair, I only had one for a while.
Marco:
The first pair got the death rattle, and so that one got replaced recently.
Marco:
And I've been exclusively wearing the backup pair for a little while, hopefully to try to make it get the rattle within its whatever two-year period that it's going to have.
Marco:
Anyway, the thing with the Macs is, again, we haven't heard it yet.
Marco:
It might sound amazing, but the AirPods Pro are so good.
Marco:
that this has an uphill battle.
John:
You don't think it's a given that these are going to sound better than the AirPods Pro?
John:
I'm just accepting that as a given.
Marco:
I sure hope they do.
Marco:
I mean, because the AirPods Pro, while they sound excellent for their size, they sound merely okay compared to headphones of the Max's size.
Marco:
Now, for them to sound even close is remarkable.
Marco:
They're not in-ear monitors.
Marco:
They're kind of partially sealed earbuds.
Marco:
And so to sound – and they're only $250, and that's Apple prices.
Marco:
So to sound as good as a $400 pair over-ear headphones would be a tall order for that product.
Marco:
But the AirPods Pro do sound remarkably good for their size and convenience and portability and everything.
Marco:
But, you know, they don't sound amazing in absolute terms.
Marco:
And so if these headphones sound better, that's wonderful.
Marco:
And these do solve the battery life problem.
Marco:
They claim 20 hours of battery life where the AirPods Pro claim four and a half.
Marco:
So that's pretty good.
Marco:
You know, these are clearly made for flights and everything, and that's great.
Marco:
However...
Marco:
They're also significantly heavier.
Marco:
MacRumors noted this as well.
Marco:
They're significantly heavier than most of the headphones in this class.
Marco:
And weight has a lot to do with long-wearing comfort for headphones.
Marco:
Now, there's all sorts of factors.
Marco:
There's like the clamping force, like how hard it pushes against your ears.
Marco:
um you know how the headband is designed how the ear cups are designed what kind of materials are involved and everything how they fit on a given person um like for instance like the clamping force how like how hard it squishes into your head like from the ear pressure that varies a lot based on your head size and the headband can stretch in different ways and some models where the headband doesn't flex very well
Marco:
It's significantly uncomfortable for larger-headed people like me, whereas smaller-headed people, it might be totally fine for them because they aren't getting as much pressure because the headband isn't flexing as much for them.
Marco:
So everything's different for everybody here, but I do worry about comfort because of the weight alone.
Marco:
These are pretty heavy headphones for their category.
Marco:
That's a warning sign for me.
Marco:
It doesn't mean that it can't be comfortable.
John:
To give some numbers on this, by the way, these are 13.6 ounces.
John:
The Sony MDR-7506s that everybody has are about half that at 8 ounces.
John:
And the Beardynamic DT-770 Pros that I just got in Marco's recommendation are 9.5 ounces.
John:
So...
John:
I mean, it's not surprising when you look at it.
John:
Why would these be so heavy?
John:
What do you see?
John:
Those ear cups, those are metal.
John:
I mean, it's aluminum.
John:
It's lightweight metal, but it's metal.
John:
And the little adjustable, whatever you call them, thingies that, you know, the things that let you adjust how big it is, those look like they're stainless steel, which is also very heavy.
John:
So it's not surprising that
Marco:
that this is a heavy product because it's made of heavy materials and that presumably makes it feel expensive and appley and yada yada but when you're wearing something on your head probably not that great right and even and you know and they have to have a certain amount of electronics in there and batteries and like even when you compare them to the bozes and sony noise canceling headphones they're like 30 to 50 percent heavier than than even those direct competitors and
Marco:
So that's a warning sign there.
Marco:
Again, it doesn't mean they will be uncomfortable, but it makes it harder for them to be comfortable and harder for them to be comfortable on more people.
John:
And the Sonny and the Bose are just, I have both of those.
John:
And they're, I mean, they're not 100% plastic, but they're mostly plastic.
John:
They're like temples to plastic.
John:
Right.
John:
And, you know, that's fine.
John:
Plastic is a good material for that.
John:
It's lightweight, it's durable, you know, but like the Apple way to do it is to have stainless steel and aluminum and it looks very Apple-y, but the price you pay is weight.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Although honestly, it's so easy to use.
Marco:
Like usually when I hand off the sites I've made for people on Squarespace, they just take it and run with it.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Going back to the market and how this product fits in the market that it looks like it's made for, which is those high-end airplane trip noise-canceling headphones.
Marco:
Apple has always... I think in the same way that...
Marco:
Twitter's always jealous of Instagram, and Instagram's jealous of Snapchat, and Facebook is jealous of everything.
Marco:
In the way that all the social networks are just constantly trying to be like all the other social networks, they can't be happy with what they have and what they are.
Marco:
Apple has always seemed to, even way back from the Steve Jobs days, has always seemed to be very envious of the makers of the $400 speakers and headphones they would often sell in the Apple stores.
Marco:
All the Bang & Olufsen stuff.
Marco:
Apple has always seemed to want a piece of that market themselves.
Marco:
That's why they made the old, what was the iPod thing called?
Marco:
The iPod Hi-Fi.
Marco:
That, yeah.
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
That's why they made it, because Bose and B&O were making these hundreds of dollars speaker docks for iPods, and Apple wanted a piece of that market.
Marco:
And they're like, we could do that, totally.
Marco:
And they just walked in and flopped for reasons.
Marco:
Anyway, Apple has always wanted a piece of that particular market of the $400 headphones and speakers that they sell in Apple stores and high-end lifestyle places.
Marco:
This is their version of that.
Marco:
So it's clear what they're going for here.
Marco:
Beats never did it.
Marco:
Beats had its own success in different markets, but Beats was never a high-end luxury play.
Marco:
This is a high-end luxury play, and that's what they're competing against.
Marco:
But if you look at this market, too, like...
Marco:
The market for this, which again is often plane travelers, that's the people who buy multi-hundred dollar noise-canceling wireless headphones for the most part, the market for that has a few requirements or priorities that I'm not sure these do well at.
Marco:
Besides price, which it matters, it doesn't matter as much to a lot of these people, but it certainly matters in absolute terms.
Marco:
One of the things that those headphones all have is
Marco:
is a hard case, a carrying case that you can somehow fold the headphones into to varying degrees of how you fold them.
Marco:
These just fold where the ear cups rotate 90 degrees, so the whole thing kind of folds flat.
Marco:
That's one way to fold.
Marco:
It's the worst way to fold, besides just not folding at all.
Marco:
The better way to fold is what most Bose and Sony headphones have done over time in this segment, although actually not the current Bose ones.
Marco:
But most of them have done a thing where the ear cups fold flat like that, and then also they can swivel around the points where they attach to the headband, so you can kind of take advantage of the space between the ear cups and the top of the headband,
Marco:
and rotate one of the cups in there and make a nice little compact and flat package.
Marco:
That is not what Apple's chosen to do here.
John:
Yeah, Marco, you should exercise your image extraction skills to take out one of the pictures I put in the show notes of this, probably the Sony one.
John:
It shows just how much smaller headphones get when they are foldable in this way.
Yeah.
John:
And I'm looking, I mean, again, we'll talk about the case in a second, but like just ignoring the case for now, I'm just saying, how do these headphones get smaller?
John:
When I saw that they didn't do this, the thing I thought of right away, and hopefully you're looking at this right now in your podcast player that supports chapter images.
John:
The reason I thought of it was like, well, folding like that is asymmetrical.
John:
And it is.
Casey:
I mean, look at the thing.
John:
It looks almost like they're broken, and it looks ugly.
John:
And Apple really does not like asymmetry.
John:
There are things about asymmetry, yes.
John:
The aesthetic thing of like, oh, it doesn't look as nice.
John:
But also...
John:
folding in this way potentially makes the god i sound like johnny ev when i talk about these things but like potentially makes the the item less sort of cohesive less less of a solid thing you know because it has to have two degrees of articulation instead of just one right and so now you have all these extra joints and moving parts and things that can fail
John:
And the hard case thing, I can imagine this argument going like this inside.
John:
You know, the hard case thing is like these plastic ones, the Bose and the Sonys.
John:
And again, I have both of these.
John:
I've traveled with both of them.
John:
They fold up really small, but there's no way I would put this thing in its folded up state into my bag because I'd be afraid that it would crack or something because it's all these little plastic hinges.
John:
And the whole thing is made of plastic.
John:
And I'd be afraid if I squished up against something that all that plastic would just break apart.
John:
Whereas these metal things that Apple has made, there's only one degree of freedom for the folding.
John:
They don't get very small, but you get the feeling that, and again, we don't have these things, Marco will tell us when he gets his, that they're sturdier because it's stainless steel attached to aluminum, attached to what looks like a fairly solid headband.
John:
It doesn't look like they would crack when put in a bag, even with no case whatsoever.
John:
So I can imagine them saying, well, we don't need a hard case.
John:
We're going to solve that by being sturdier.
John:
i don't know if that's true but it can argument could be made for it based on the design but the real problem is okay but you're still not small right i if i'm gonna this is gonna be my carry-on bag that i have to somehow shove underneath the seat in front of me or whatever because i don't have to go up to the overhead thing or the overheads are always all full i need these headphones to get as small as possible if i'm going to use them on a plane
John:
and saying well we couldn't make them that small because it would be asymmetrical and it would be more delicate and then we'd have to have a hard case it's like yeah this market exists and these products that have been competing in it have converged on this design not for the hell of it because the original bose quiet comforts that i had didn't do this kind of folding they did the apple style folding and they were much bigger and they were also plastic right uh
John:
But the current Sony... Well, I don't know.
John:
You said the current Bose don't do this.
Marco:
Yeah, I believe the Bose 700 does not fold this way.
Marco:
It folds the way Apple's do, the stupid way.
Marco:
Even though it does still have a hard case.
John:
It's got that weird headband thing, right?
Marco:
Yeah, I think so.
John:
Anyway, I think this design is really good.
John:
The Sonys that I currently use get so small, it's ridiculous.
John:
And I like the fact that when they're all sealed up in their case, even though the hard case is not that hard, it is...
John:
uniformly shaped and i'm not afraid they're going to break inside there uh and it's small and it's lightweight and the airpods max just totally missed that target and i'm not entirely sure they're they were aiming at that target specifically because in all the advertising materials i you know it
John:
The pitch that it's making to me is that, like I said before, that these are going to sound good, right?
John:
That you're going to want to listen to music that you like on these because it will sound good.
John:
And yes, you'll be able to listen to that music out in the world and transparency mode and yada yada, all the features.
John:
But the idea is that...
John:
These will do your music justice, whereas the Sony and the Bose I've only used essentially as what someone who uses a jackhammer would use headphones for.
John:
It's like I'm blocking out the noise of the plane.
John:
But music through them sounds terrible.
John:
I mean, I'm not even a headphone snob, but the Bose and the Sonys...
Marco:
like i don't know if it's terrible it's not good right no it's terrible i mean the bows is more terrible than the sony the sony like the sony has an eq app that you can use to yes to fix some of its shortcomings which actually i'll get to that um you can you can make it a little bit passable the bows the bows has an eq app as well but no matter what you do it sounds like garbage it just sounds like different garbage yeah
John:
And that's not what I'm using for.
John:
These are clearly travel headphones.
John:
They get really small.
John:
They have a hard case.
John:
You put them on so you can't hear the plane and you can't hear your podcast or your music.
John:
But obviously, you're not going to have an amazing music listening experience on a plane no matter what because you're on a plane.
John:
So I feel like these things are...
John:
For when you're, you know, either out in the world or bopping around your house and you want to have a really high quality, good music experience, kind of like what Marco does, but he's got his fancy headphones and he's on his computer and he's coding and he wants to hear good music with high sound quality.
John:
I feel like that has to be what these things achieve.
John:
for them to be a viable product because i feel like that's what they promise that's what apple's advertising materials promise what they're not promising with their folding and their case and everything else is these are the ideal companion for a business traveler now you can bring them with you if you're a business traveler but you you will realize that they're heavier they're heavier in your bag like not just on your head they're heavier in your bag they take up more room and
John:
and it's you know you're probably going to be missing out on the improved audio quality because as good as the noise canceling may be planes are super noisy when i see the case of the airpods max come in i i just think this was this was not designed like you try to describe it
John:
um because is it really a case it's it's like it just kind of wraps it's like it looks like some kind of vinyl wrap it's you know you know we're talking about bras for your car yeah and i know there's an obvious bra butt thing going on but like this is like a bra for your uh ear uh headphones in that
John:
Like a bra for your car, it doesn't cover the entire thing.
John:
A bra in your car does not cover the entire car.
John:
It just covers the front of it.
John:
So they have what looks like leather that kind of covers some of the headphone portion.
John:
It leaves parts of it exposed for reasons I do not understand.
John:
Does anyone here understand why the bottoms have the little cutouts?
Casey:
I don't know.
Marco:
maybe maybe so they don't get because like after you wear headphones they're going to be probably a little bit moist they're sweaty like to air out maybe and so yeah maybe yeah maybe they would get like moldy if they didn't have that but the other ones don't do that all my bows and my sony hard cases don't have a place for don't have slits for things to come in and out and i don't think there's any anyway yeah well they also have permeable liners though
Casey:
What if it's for letting air in or out as you're extracting or inserting?
Casey:
Seriously.
John:
It doesn't look like it fits that tightly, though, because look at the gaps on the left and the right edge.
John:
Those seem like you could put a pencil on both of those.
Marco:
I assume the big flap that goes over the top, I assume that's like a magnetic closure thing.
Marco:
You flip it up like a bag opening and you pull it up.
Marco:
Everything about this, again, we don't have this yet, everything about this looks like
Marco:
It's not going to be – it looks clunky.
Marco:
Like the way the physicality of this looks, it just looks clunky.
Marco:
It looks like getting it in and out of a bag is going to be clunky.
Marco:
It looks like you probably – like you can't – like the way that when you're in an airplane or even just walking around the city or whatever, when you have the Sonys or the Boses in their hard case –
Marco:
You can then just toss that into a bag and have it bounce around, and it's fine.
Marco:
You know everything will be fine.
Marco:
But this isn't really a case, and so I would never toss that loose in a bag with other stuff because I know the other stuff would scratch up the metal on the headphones.
Marco:
It could get in there.
Marco:
It will fill with lint.
Marco:
It could damage the headband or whatever that mesh material on top of the headband is.
Marco:
So I would never toss that loose in a bag.
Marco:
And it's like, what's the point then?
John:
And just think of everything else that this thing doesn't do.
John:
So in all of my little hard cases for travel headphones, I have a lightning to headphone adapter, the cable with the little remote that it comes with some spare batteries, because a lot of these take, you know, interchangeable like double A, triple A batteries, like because it's a case, you can fit other little things in there.
John:
There is no place for anything like that in here.
John:
You can't even put a lightning to headphone adapter in this thing because it's not a case.
John:
Like, where would you put it?
John:
It would fall out the little holes, right?
John:
So it's not fulfilling the job of a case.
John:
Now, here's what's baffling about this product, right?
John:
It's $550.
John:
I think it's for better sound quality plus the AirPods Pro feature set, which is fine.
John:
It comes with a lightning to USB-C cable.
John:
Which is kind of weird that this thing has lightning on it.
John:
Like, it could just be USB-C to USB-C, and this is for charging.
John:
And it does not come with a charging brick, because, you know, that's not Apple's thing anymore.
John:
So you have to have something that you can plug this into to charge.
John:
Fine, whatever.
John:
Right?
John:
But it comes with the case.
John:
This is what's baffling about it, right?
John:
Right?
John:
We just talked about how strange and potentially useless the case is, but it comes with it.
John:
And so now it's like, wait a second, product.
John:
Are you trying to tell me that the case is so integral to this that you get it no matter what?
John:
Like you're not going to charge me $80 for this separate leather case that no one buys because it's $80?
John:
It comes with it, which makes me think, so you think people are going to travel with these?
John:
Because that's not what the product is saying to me.
Marco:
No, here's the thing.
Marco:
I think you have to.
Marco:
Because what it says about the case is that when the case is on, they enter an ultra-low power state that preserves the charge, which sounds to me like you can't turn them off without the case.
John:
But no one's going to put them back in the case when they're on their desk.
John:
I'm sure there's an idle... Because it has... Let's talk about some other features.
John:
It has sensors in it, okay?
John:
So this thing has...
John:
optical sensors in each ear cup and i'm assuming it will use that until when you're not wearing it to go into a low power mode and not just the magnets in the case it's got position sensors in each ear cup um it's got a case detect sensor in each ear cup which is i guess separate from the optical sensor that senses your ears the case detect sensor is the magnet thing that senses the magnets it's got accelerometers and gyroscopes that's all for the spatial audio stuff right uh it's got nine microphones
John:
eight for noise cancellation and three for voice pickup but two of the two of the three for voice pickup are shared with the noise cancellation right um the the hardware design wisely thankfully happily does not include any of the rumored touch surfaces i have sony switch touch surfaces and i don't like them i think it was a smart move even though it seems like oh they were having problems and they ditched them or if the rumors are to be believed but
John:
who knows but touch sensors on on your on big over your headphones i'm not a fan of instead what you get which is i mean in some respects it's like you gotta reuse everything apple but they put the quote-unquote digital crown on there yeah the little dial from your watch although i'm assuming this is not quite the same size but on the other hand that is an ideal control for volume
John:
It's a twisty thing that you can feel.
John:
And, you know, we've used the digital crown and it's actually surprisingly easy to manipulate the digital crown on your Apple Watch with your finger.
John:
So this, I think, is like the perhaps the best case scenario for Apple.
John:
manual mechanical volume control on a headphone maybe i'm not sure about the position because i don't have these marco will tell us when he gets them but maybe it could be in a different position that might be better they might have put up there for astag reasons but i love the fact that it's got a an actual physical dial for a volume control and you can also press it to play pause press it to answer a phone press twice to skip forward press three times to skip back skip back you can use siri through like all the things that you would expect um
John:
be unlike the airpods and the airpods pro where they have to do taps and pinches or whatever you can put physical controls on here because the head the head you know ear cup things are huge right um and then it's got a button an actual physical button that you press in and out to to switch between noise cancellation and transparency mode another thing that you can't really do on a tiny little ear pod like the airpods like the tiny airpods
John:
how are we going to refer to these things the non-max airpods you've got a room to have a physical button so they put a physical button on it and i think all of that is great i wish that the sony and bose headphones would take notes from this and say you don't have to try to put a touchpad in and these don't have to all be like a remote it's on the wire or whatever right setting the case aside i
John:
if i pretend that i'm not going to be using these on the plane i'm back to thinking oh well these sound really good and they look really sturdy and they somehow manage to be comfortable and aren't heavy i think the ergonomics and general design of these headphones when they're just headphones looks pretty good to me like not in their travel mode and not you know maybe again you can't say anything about the weight it might not be a problem if they manage to pull it off but i think it would be cool to use these i
John:
And I've never owned a headphone with these kinds of controls on it, so I don't know if I'm wrong about how easy it is to turn a little dial, but it seems like a good idea to me.
Marco:
I mean, first of all, I would bet it is exactly the same part as the Apple Watch Sport.
Marco:
So size-wise, I bet it's exactly the same size.
John:
It looks bigger to me.
John:
I don't know.
Marco:
It's hard to tell.
Marco:
So that's one thing.
Marco:
I think these headphones are not going to be that big.
Marco:
There's this huge tension when designing fashion headphones, which is what these are, between size and comfort.
Marco:
Because what you want, comfort-wise, is a pretty large ear cup.
Marco:
Because you want everyone's ear to not press against any edges.
Marco:
Ideally, the padding goes around the ear, not touching any part of the ear, because that's better for long-term comfort.
Marco:
But to do that, to have an ear cup that is large and deep to accommodate lots of people's ears, you have to make the headphones pretty large.
Marco:
And that doesn't look very good.
Marco:
And you have to have the attachment points where the headband attaches to them.
Marco:
They have to be further away from people's heads because the ear cups have to be deeper.
Marco:
And that doesn't look as good either.
Marco:
And when you're designing for fashion, you have to prioritize how you will look when you're walking around a city with these on.
Marco:
Because even though I never walk around with full-size noise-canceling headphones are, many people do.
Marco:
And so that's a thing that people have to design here.
Marco:
And Apple, for all of its good qualities, is not so good at prioritizing comfort over aesthetics and size.
Marco:
And so I think these are going to be pretty small.
Marco:
And I think for anybody for whom...
Marco:
very small headphones are not comfortable i bet this is going to be a problem for you unfortunately i'm one of these people so that again this is another reservation i have um but i think these are going to be substantially smaller than than what you think which again is is a potential comfort risk they look huge in the photos but like you just don't know maybe they're using small models but like one thing i can say is i applaud the fact that they are
John:
uh vertically rectangular and not circular like the barodynamics because ears are roughly vertically oval things right they're not nobody's most people's ears are not circular right and so i'm glad that these are proportioned like an ear which gives your ear a fighting chance they do look shallow though they don't look particularly deep and the pads look pretty
John:
Uh, like the, the, the border defined by the pads, the pads look pretty fat.
John:
So there's not a huge amount of room maybe for larger ears in there, but at least they're the right shape.
John:
So there's a, a fighting chance.
John:
This is the problem with any product like this that, you know, has to fit on people's bodies.
John:
People's bodies vary.
John:
These things are only adjustable in one way, which is those little stainless steel tubes that come out slide out different lengths.
John:
Now, that's the adjustability, but there is still the place where they connect to the headphone.
John:
It looks like a ball joint, so you can swivel in all directions, which is a very good idea because I hate the headphones that...
John:
demand that the ear cups remain exactly sort of you know parallel to each other or whatever and don't twist in any way so i think i think these have a fighting chance to actually be comfortable despite the weight if it if your head and ears fit within the bounds of the design and you know we should look at the size and we could you know make little models and figure it out but in all the pictures just wait a week i'll have these ear cups look so big to me
John:
right they they just they just look gargantuan they don't look deep they look shallow but they look really big and i and they look they look comfortable like they have that comfort look to them the only the only thing i'm a little bit wary about and uh mark you can tell me if you have headphones like this the mesh top lots of headphones have this mesh top i've never used a headphone with a mesh top how do they feel in general
Marco:
I don't think I've had one that was exactly like that, but I've had a lot of different headband designs, and they're all different, and they're all over the map.
Marco:
And how comfortable a headband design is is very complicated and varies a lot person to person.
Marco:
So there's nothing about this to me that screams this will definitely be comfortable or uncomfortable.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
uh it's probably going to vary for everybody i will say on on your size estimations keep in mind that what you're viewing is the headphones on their absolute smallest setting because the steel like you know push in push out tubes that raise and lower the ear cups appear to be pushed almost all the way in in these pictures because it looks best so when you extend that downward you know an inch on either side or whatever it is however big you wear your headphones they they will look smaller proportionally
John:
Yeah, the thing concerns me about the headband, and I think this is a universal thing.
John:
People don't like stuff tugging on their hair.
John:
Right.
John:
And so in general, I feel like headbands that are made of what this looks like, like a soft touch rubberized kind of plasticky thing.
John:
are not ideal because they sit on your head and there's a lot of friction between the band and your hair and any kind of movement there it's going to feel like the thing is tugging on your hair now the mesh part doesn't do that the mesh part is not going to tug on your hair but the whole thing isn't mesh and i get the idea that the mesh is like like a tennis racket springing kind of thing where that's supposed to be contacting your head but the borders on it are these thick tubes of the rubbery stuff and i do wonder if they will come in contact with your hair and
John:
mess with it a little bit um i mean presumably this is all the things that they tested and we'll have to just see how it goes but like my experience with over your headphones over the years of spending hours a day and them you know at work and coding and stuff like that is i tend to like the ones that are actually a little bit slipperier up there just because having stuff tugging your hair is terrible
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Marco:
Back a little bit to the market for these and the airplane.
Marco:
They didn't include an audio cable.
Marco:
And there is no regular 3.5mm audio jack on them.
Marco:
And they can't operate passively.
Marco:
Every one of their competitors comes with a headphone cable.
Marco:
Because sometimes you need that.
Marco:
And one of the most common places you need that is on airplanes.
Marco:
Where if you want to use the in-flight entertainment system...
Marco:
And you want to listen to the movie that you're playing on that crappy Linux screen.
Marco:
You have to plug into it somehow.
Marco:
Sometimes they have Bluetooth support, but that's usually more trouble than it's worth to try to get that to work.
Marco:
So usually you're plugging into a jack on the screen or on the armrest.
Marco:
And so you need a 3.5 millimeter cable.
Marco:
The Bose comes with one.
Marco:
The Sony comes with one.
Marco:
Also, sometimes you are on a plane on a long flight with your noise canceling headphones and your battery dies and you want to keep using the headphones.
Marco:
Well, it turns out headphones can be usually passive devices that require no power of their own and just get their power from the audio signal over the headphone cable.
Marco:
And almost all of these noise-canceling headphones can operate as just passive headphones where even if they have no power, their battery's totally dead, if you plug an audio cable into that jack on them and plug it into an audio source, usually you can play music through them even with no battery power left.
Marco:
The AirPods Pro, as far as we can tell from people asking questions and press briefings and everything, it seems like they have no passive operation.
Marco:
So once their battery is dead, they cannot operate at all.
Marco:
They do have that lightning port for charging, and there is a cable that Apple sells that only works on one Beats model and this that has 3.5mm plug on one end, not the jack, but the plug on one end,
Marco:
and the lightning port on the or lightning plug on the other end so you can you can use that cable sorry apparently i said airpods pro i mean max so you can use that cable to connect the lightning port on this to a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack on something and this will apparently take audio in that way
Marco:
That cable is $35.
Marco:
Nobody has one yet because it's not the cable that connects your iPhone to headphones.
Marco:
The little dongle thing that connects your iPhone to headphones that doesn't have a headphone jack, it's not that.
Marco:
But that might work, though.
Marco:
We don't know that that doesn't work.
Marco:
It might, but the audio goes the other direction on this one.
Marco:
Some combination of other stuff might work here depending on how this works, but all we know for sure is that the Apple cable definitely does work, and that's the one they say works, and it's $35.
John:
and so amazon has cheaper ones and i have to think like we talked about this when lightning first came out remember how like oh they had a you know a way to send analog audio over like when the iphone 7 came out like how does the adapter work or whatever we don't know that this does the same thing but it's it's entirely plausible that that's exactly what this is that it's just a weird way to essentially connect a
John:
you know a regular analog audio cable up to these things and we do know from uh this is from uh who did this come from let me see uh we do know from matt panzerino that these headphones do not support usb audio so if you're thinking you're going to use them like a usb audio device and send digital audio data over a usb cable to them that does not work right so what could possibly be traveling over that
Marco:
lightning to 3.5 millimeter uh jack cable it's got to be analog audio right most likely yes um so so well i mean that's what i'm hoping because first of all market fit wise this is hilarious because as john said like if you have if you want to bring this cable with you say on an airplane to plug into the in-flight audio system or your laptop easily whatever you know there's lots of ways or reasons a nintendo switch like there's lots of
Marco:
reasons you might want to plug analog audio into your headphones on a plane or in real life and so if you if you bring this cable with you there's nowhere in the case to put it a b you had to pay 35 extra for it
John:
on your already very expensive headphones so you're you're hitting about six hundred dollars for this combination i mean you could you could wrap it around the headband because there's plenty of room because it's not like the head it's not like the ear cups are folding into the area so now you've got your beautiful headphones and their leather case with this ugly cable wrapped around the headband
Marco:
this cable by the way which is not available in all these colors it's only black or white so you'll have this non-color match cable even though apple makes color match cables for every beats headphone and every beats headphone comes with them um but anyway we'll put all that aside for now um so assuming you do all this here's my one question on this which i i don't think we will know until we can get some press reviews or until i can actually have one of these in my hands
Marco:
Is there a way to get zero or effectively zero latency audio into these headphones?
Marco:
I know over Bluetooth this is not possible.
Marco:
What I want to know is, can somebody plug these headphones in to a computer or an audio device with that cable?
Marco:
and have zero or or you know perceptibly zero latency on that audio because that will affect whether these can be used for video games for podcast recording for podcast or video editing for live monitoring if you're like on a video shoot somewhere and you want to plug something into your phone real fast or whatever it is like your your camera
Marco:
There are so many use cases, so many applications that many of Apple's customers do where you need zero latency headphone monitoring or listening.
Marco:
This is the one big thing that when I'm bringing... If I'm on a trip and I want to bring only my AirPods Pro...
Marco:
I can get away with that as long as I don't have to do anything that relates to podcasting, recording a podcast or editing one.
Marco:
I did edit one on AirPods once.
Marco:
It sucks.
Marco:
It's terrible because of the latency.
Marco:
It's really a hard thing to do.
Marco:
It's very unpleasant.
Marco:
You don't want to do it if you don't have to.
Marco:
And recording one is nearly impossible.
Marco:
For anybody who doesn't podcast, the way it works is you need to hear yourself listen.
Marco:
What you're speaking to the microphone, you hear it back through your own headphones live.
Marco:
This is the same way if you are old enough like us to have used phones back when they were hardwired, landline phones.
Marco:
If you've ever used a landline phone.
Marco:
When you speak into a landline phone, you hear yourself out of the earpiece as well as the other person.
Marco:
And you hear yourself with zero latency.
Marco:
If there's any delay in hearing yourself, it sounds very strange.
Marco:
And so it drives you nuts.
Marco:
You can't have any latency.
Marco:
That's why every podcasting-targeted USB microphone has a headphone jack on it also.
Marco:
So you can plug in headphones to your USB microphone and hear yourself back with no latency without your voice having to travel first to the computer and back and be processed by any kind of thing.
Marco:
Like no latency.
Marco:
You hear yourself exactly.
Marco:
And if you don't have that, it's very disconcerting and it's harder to podcast well.
Marco:
similarly you know if you're editing a podcast or video you need that because as you're watching the playhead move forward it's crossing over audio that you're not hearing for another you know whatever 50 100 milliseconds afterwards and it's it's it makes it significantly harder to edit if you're editing video same problem even worse actually and
Marco:
For video playback, the system frameworks are made to take audio latency into account.
Marco:
And so if you play a video through an app that uses the system video playback frameworks, the system knows if you're listening to Bluetooth headphones, it knows what audio latency is for most headphones or for Bluetooth in general, and it accounts that.
Marco:
So it'll do things like delay the video by a couple of frames so it lines up with the headphones so that your audio and video play in sync.
Marco:
But any app that does not take advantage of that or does not take that into account or can't take that into account, which is almost everything besides video playback, latency and audio playback causes problems and makes it either difficult or worse to do a lot of things.
Marco:
One of the great things about the Sonys and the Boses and almost any other noise-canceling headphone is that you can bring it on a trip.
Marco:
And you can have that be the only headphone you have on that trip because if you happen to need to record something or monitor something or edit something or plug it into a Nintendo Switch or anything like that, you can use the exact same pair of headphones with that cable they come with to just plug it right in and you have zero latency, passive, like totally normal audio, unprocessed normal audio.
Marco:
With the AirPods Max, I know you're not going to have unprocessed audio.
Marco:
I know you're not going to have passive operation possible with no power.
Marco:
But I don't know whether it's possible to have zero latency input.
Marco:
And if it is, which I hope it is, that's great.
Marco:
Because then people can more often bring only or own only these headphones.
Marco:
This could be someone's only pair of headphones who does all sorts of things if it has a zero latency input.
Marco:
If it doesn't, then that's one less thing about it that can differentiate it from the AirPods Pro or the regular AirPods, both of which are very convenient, small, portable.
Marco:
The Pro has great noise cancellation and pretty decent sound.
Marco:
But you can't use those things for zero latency applications.
Marco:
There is no zero latency input on those because there's no input on those.
Marco:
This has an audio input.
Marco:
I hope it's zero latency.
Marco:
I will tell you as soon as I know.
Marco:
Hopefully, some of the press reviews will cover this.
Marco:
That's the one thing I really want to know here.
Marco:
That's my one big question.
Marco:
The sound, I'm pretty sure these are going to sound pretty good.
Marco:
Apple has a pretty good track record with that in recent years.
Marco:
I think they're going to sound pretty good.
Marco:
They're talking about all sorts of...
Marco:
technical tweaks and tricks and advanced methods they're using to do things like try to measure the ceiling around your ear and every person is different and have adaptive EQ.
Marco:
That all sounds great.
Marco:
I bet they're going to sound good.
Marco:
I don't know if they're going to sound amazing, but they might.
Marco:
And I bet they're at least going to sound very good.
Marco:
My question is, can I bring only these on a trip?
Marco:
And that's the one big unknown.
John:
You're going to bring these and then the inevitable third-party case that will actually have a place for you to put the cable you just bought for $35.
Marco:
But you have to also bring the Apple case.
Marco:
Otherwise, they'll never turn off.
John:
No, no, I think like, like I said, have you ever carried around AirPods without the case?
John:
But like I said, with the sensors on them, they'll know when they're not on your head.
John:
And I assume they'll just go into sleep mode then.
John:
Like, why would they not do that?
John:
AirPods don't do that.
Marco:
AirPods, like they sense whether they're in your ear or not.
Marco:
Well, who's carrying AirPods without the case?
Marco:
You're not going to be doing that for very long.
Marco:
I have.
Marco:
But the reason I don't is not because of breakage or loss.
Marco:
AirPods, without the case, fit very well in that little jeans change pocket.
Marco:
But the thing is, if you walk around with that, they will sometimes mistakenly think they're in your ear and they'll turn on.
John:
That's because their proximity sensors are pressed up against your leg, but these things have, like, it's much harder to fool these because they're so much bigger.
Marco:
Like, it doesn't take much to cover these.
Marco:
Not if they're, like, in a bag or something.
Marco:
Like, I bet this, I bet you have to have that case, basically, when you're not using them.
John:
I think, what is it?
John:
say it was it doesn't have optical sensors right it's got to know like there's no way that you're going to get two things pressed up against both of the cups in a way that convinces that it's next to your head i don't know we'll see when we get these things i just it just feels like i understand why airpods get confused about whether they're if you put them in a pocket especially a tight pocket you know they're so small those little pinprick sensors on there that texting proximity it's easy to fool them it should be much harder to fool these if that stupid magnetic case is the only way to get them to go to sleep
John:
that's pretty crappy but hey with 20 hours of battery life then just assume it's a one-day charge and charge them all and so a few more tidbits from jason snell he asked about this they say they get uh five minutes of charge gives you 90 minutes of use so they charge pretty quickly um no claims about water resistance and he says so maybe don't use these while exercising but the idea that someone would want to sweat into their 500 headphones is you know
John:
and then the earcuffs look like they're made of this category is not like nobody exercising uses this category of headphones especially it's so heavy they'd be like bouncing they'd be bouncing up and down on your head and it was like it's like rucking you know you guys know what that is no no no it's you put heavy weights in a backpack and walk around anyway oh yeah to give yourself some exercise for your neck muscles um replacement cushions if you you know if the cushions are magnetically attached as we said before which is nice um and very apple
John:
Replacement cushions are $70, which is typical Apple markup on what regular cushions might cost.
John:
That's actually not bad.
John:
Yeah.
John:
If the battery goes bad eventually, $80 battery replacement, which is reasonable.
John:
I mean, that's the other thing people are talking about with these headphones.
John:
They are made of aluminum ear cups and stainless steel tubes, and they look kind of like they don't have a lot of moving parts.
John:
They look like they could be sturdy, and if you buy these, unlike the Apple Watch Edition, it's not like these are going to age out technology-wise very quickly because...
John:
If they do a good job as headphones and they sound good and they support a fairly rich feature set, like hell, people buy headphones that don't support spatial audio at all.
John:
How do they get around with those?
John:
No dynamic EQ.
John:
And sometimes people buy headphones that don't even have noise cancellation and yet you can still use those primitive feature headphones, as they call them.
John:
for decades right so if these i'm saying is if you buy a pair of these and you like them and they fit you well and they sound good there's no reason you can't use these for long enough that the battery eventually dies and you have to get it replaced so i think if you buy 550 pair of headphones and three years later the battery is getting a little wonky
John:
you'll shell out 80 bucks to keep using them because they don't like technology wise unless apple does something very silly these should last you a very long time if you happen to like them and if they end up being as sturdy as they look and they do work with find my by the way that's from matt panzerino oh um uh and he also confirmed that they don't work passively which is a shame
Casey:
Yeah, that is something that I probably shouldn't be bummed out about, but it just seems crappy.
Casey:
Now, with 20 hours of battery life, I can't imagine it would be that often that one would need to run them passively, which is to say, you know, the battery is dead, but you plug it into a plane or a computer or a phone or what have you, and you plug it in with a cable.
Casey:
And the power coming through that cable is enough to power the headphones, but perhaps you wouldn't be able to use noise cancellation or anything like that.
Casey:
And that is not possible with the AirPods Max.
Casey:
I also tried to say Pro.
Casey:
It's not possible with the AirPods Max.
Casey:
That's kind of crummy.
Casey:
That's with all things Apple, especially when it comes to their accessories.
Casey:
It seems like this is designed to fit Apple's Apple-y world.
Casey:
And if you want to do anything else, it's not for you.
Casey:
If you want to have a case that doesn't look ridiculous, it's not for you or buy a third-party case.
Casey:
If you want to plug it into a plane after the battery is dead, it's not for you.
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
No, look elsewhere.
Casey:
And it's tough because in the same way that I don't think it's unreasonable for a HomePod to have a line in,
Casey:
I don't think it's unreasonable for these to have a case that doesn't stink, to fold a little bit better, to be able to work passively.
Casey:
And I mean, I'm talking out my keister because, I mean, I haven't handled these.
Casey:
I don't know anything about these, etc.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
This is the part of Apple that bothers me, that...
Casey:
They put the guardrails so close to the edge of the road that it makes their products worse, I think.
Casey:
And I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a little bit more of Apple.
Casey:
But, I mean, I'm the same jerk that's poo-pooing a product that nobody's ever seen, so who am I to talk?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
We'll see what Marco says in a week.
Marco:
I think that's a valid criticism of this product approach, though.
Marco:
Many of the products that Apple makes that we all love so much are really incredible generalists.
Marco:
The iPhone, the iPad, the MacBook Air.
Marco:
Air, these are incredibly generalist products.
Marco:
They hit a huge, broad spectrum of their markets, and there's kind of something for everybody in these product lines, and they do a lot, and there's not a huge amount of sharp downsides to them.
Marco:
And then Apple makes stuff like the HomePod or like the AirPods Max where like there's some pretty steep drop-offs to some of the appeal or the capabilities.
Marco:
And what a lot of people will say is this wonderful phrase, well, it's not for you.
Marco:
And there's a place and a time for that phrase.
Marco:
But it seems like Apple in so many ways so often makes products like this where like –
Marco:
It's not for so many people that it seems obviously targeted to that you kind of have to wonder, who is it for exactly?
Marco:
And would it have been possible to make a few compromises here and there that could make it for a hell of a lot more people?
Marco:
The HomePod, again, I keep going back to the HomePod because there are so many similarities between the apparent market fit between that and this.
Marco:
You're right.
Marco:
If the HomePod had any kind of input, you could use it as your TV speakers, and that would be amazing.
John:
I feel like they learned from the HomePod, though.
John:
I feel like this doesn't make the exact same mistake as the HomePod because it does have audio input, right?
John:
You can imagine, when I first saw this, I just assumed there would be no way to attach a wire to this other than to charge it.
John:
But it seems like that's not the case.
John:
Granted, they didn't go all the way, which is, hey, just give us an actual headphone cable, because imagine that, right?
John:
But...
John:
You know, it does have input and I'm for now I'm assuming that that really is analog input.
John:
And, you know, they that's the exact mistake that they made on the HomePod and they fixed it on this one.
John:
And I think that's a big deal.
John:
Same thing with the physical controls, despite the rumors or whatever they were about touch things.
John:
physical controls versus whatever the hell is happening on the top of the home pod physical controls was the right call here these you know they're learning from their mistakes right this i think most of the design of this product is good now the one thing that sticks out we've talked about uh over and over is no passive uh uses but if you think about this as a product like the whole idea of this product i know we think of it as like hey it's a pair of headphones but the whole idea of the product is the full sort of uh computational audio feature set
John:
not just noise cancelling, he's like, well, I never used noise cancelling, but all the other stuff, the spatial audio, the dynamic equalization, the sensing your ear, that's the whole point of this product.
John:
They didn't just make a set of passive headphones.
John:
So to have a sort of limp mode where, okay, well, all the electronics are off because the battery's dead, but we'll just allow the analog audio to feebly send audio signal to these drivers and it'll be really low volume, right?
John:
That, I think, is the type of thing I might have made the same call and said, that's going to be such a bad experience using these passively.
John:
Like, do we want to have to design the speakers and the drivers and everything to be able to be driven passively, even though we don't expect them to be used in that mode?
John:
And what do we have to compromise about audio quality to make them work well there while also working okay in the mode where they're powered?
John:
So I can see an argument for these not working as passive things.
John:
And, you know, assuming this is your latency analog audio input, I think they made a reasonable set of compromises for, you know, for people who never want to take these on an airplane.
John:
If you just want to use them in your house and have them as a cool set of headphones that you can, you know, dance around your living room in or just use while you use your computer.
John:
Like all the places where AirPods are good, but you're not an AirPod person.
John:
You were an over your headphone person.
John:
plausible it's plausible these what i see is i see growth i see a growth from the home pod to this you're very right that the development history of these sounds very similar and that the the home pod was supposedly going to be for the apple television thing and it didn't quite work out and like well now we got this big product and it just wasn't priced right and this could be doing the exact same thing in the pricing uh situation although honestly you know as someone who owns multiple 300 plus dollar pair of noise canceling headphones um
John:
Yes, this is more, but that's like, you know, the usual Apple markup.
John:
And I think it's in the realm of like, I think Bang & Olufsen, speaking of them, I think Bang & Olufsen makes a set of headphones that look eerily similar to this, like, and are probably priced very similar and probably don't have half the computational audio features that these do, right?
John:
So I'm not entirely sure this is as far outside the market because the reason the HomePod was, you know, the original HomePod was such a dud is it was competing with $100 cylinders from Amazon.
John:
right?
John:
This is not competing with $100 headphones.
John:
This is not competing.
John:
I think Apple thinks this is not even competing with $300 headphones.
John:
I think they think they're competing with other $500 headphones remains to be seen if there really are, if they have the audio quality to stand up to that or whatever.
John:
But it's not like they're coming into a market where everybody is is like 100 bucks, right?
John:
Or even less for the little dots, they're coming into a market headphones, which goes from super cheap, all the way up to ridiculous, and they're not at the ridiculous end.
John:
So
John:
i don't think they're going to sell a lot of them at 500 bucks is how many people buy 500 headphones but it's not inconceivable that this could land in the market and fit right into the slot where 500 headphones sit and sell a 500 headphone quantity of headphones and if apple's happy with that then congratulations you made a 500 headphone and then three years from now you can make the uh airpod what airpods mini
John:
God, I don't even know what the hell they would call it.
John:
But like the $199 version that's not made of aluminum and it doesn't weigh as much and it's cheaper.
John:
AirPods Air, obviously.
John:
Oh, golly.
John:
Yeah, the AirPods.
John:
I mean, they're not pods.
John:
I get the Air.
John:
They're wireless.
John:
I get it.
John:
But they're not like pods.
John:
They're little.
John:
These are not pods.
John:
What are they?
John:
Discs?
Marco:
The Air Discs?
Marco:
Air Beats?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
And John, to be fair, and to clarify my position on these two, the passive operation, I agree, that's very unlikely to happen here.
Marco:
And not that important.
Marco:
Relative to all of its other potential pitfalls and shortcomings, that's like the least important one.
John:
If it had a five-hour battery life, it would be super important.
Marco:
For 20 hours, I feel like you're okay.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
It makes sense not to have that because if you ever use the passive mode on most recent Bluetooth headphones, you learn how incredibly bad their drivers actually are.
Marco:
Because, like, something that's happened in the camera market, and our phones certainly are significantly benefiting from this, but this even applies to a lot of, like, you know, standalone cameras now, is that, you know, back in the olden days when cameras shot onto film, everything about their optical path had to be perfect because there was no software processing to fix the flaws, right?
Marco:
Digital cameras, especially modern low-end ones that are maybe very small ones, can rely on software processing not only to make up for the noise that their crappy little sensors produce, but even to correct for optical distortions.
Marco:
So they don't have to put really great glass in front of almost any modern camera.
Marco:
Because the software that's built into them can automatically correct for the known optical flaws of that lens or of the optical path that's going through.
Marco:
And so making something modern and digital with modern software advances, modern computational power...
Marco:
has actually enabled it to use crappier components or fit in smaller spaces and correct for those flaws in software rather than have to have the perfect physical capture path.
Marco:
The same thing has happened to headphones.
Marco:
As headphones move to Bluetooth,
Marco:
they they got significantly up market in part helped by apple in part helped by beats in part helped by you know just the world moving in this direction um they got a lot of budget applied portable headphones didn't used to cost 300 as the baseline uh that that used to be the top of the line and they can now afford to have lots of electronics in there
Marco:
as the price of small computational embedded computers and stuff has plummeted, and the price of headphones has gone way, way, way up.
Marco:
Newsflash, it doesn't cost $350 to make a pair of headphones like the Sonys and the Boses.
Marco:
Not even close.
Marco:
These are very, very high-profit items.
Marco:
So they can afford to have certain computational benefits in there.
Marco:
At the same time,
Marco:
Bluetooth by definition, unlike a wired headphone, Bluetooth is always able to process the audio with a DSP, with digital processing before it's sent out to the headphones.
Marco:
And so any flaws in the headphone drivers, any flaws in their frequency response or distortion characteristics or things like that, they can build in like a stock EQ profile to the headphones that's always on.
Marco:
And they can correct for some of those flaws the same way cameras correct for optical distortion now.
Marco:
They can correct for some of those flaws in software constantly.
Marco:
So they're able to ship crappier drivers or drivers in more compromised physical enclosures that wouldn't be able to reproduce sound unassisted that's that well balanced or that good or whatever.
Marco:
And so they do.
Marco:
And this is why if you play any, especially Bose is a severe difference between Bose's on and off modes.
Marco:
If you play a Bose headphone in passive mode and then you turn on their processing, it sounds radically different.
Marco:
They both sound like garbage, but the one that's off sounds like even more garbage and you're shocked that they're able to pull anything out of the non-garbagey one or the powered one rather.
Marco:
They're both garbagey.
Marco:
So Apple's doing that with these headphones too.
Marco:
Like they talk all about all their active EQ features and everything.
Marco:
And like they're doing that.
Marco:
So these headphones with no processing at all would probably sound about as good as if you ever took an iPhone raw shot and didn't apply any noise filtering to it or anything and just like took it raw as it was.
Marco:
And like those pictures raw look like garbage.
Marco:
These headphones raw might sound like garbage.
Marco:
It wouldn't surprise me at all.
Marco:
For Apple to require their processing pipeline at all times makes a lot of sense.
Marco:
Also, one thing I am super excited about, because here's the thing.
Marco:
We've talked a lot about our potential criticisms and pitfalls of this product, but like the HomePod, I like the HomePod.
Marco:
And like these AirPods Max, like, I think I'm probably going to like these.
Marco:
There are some, I have some reservations, as I've said, but I think I'm probably gonna like them.
Marco:
And if I like them, they could be really incredible because one thing I'm really super excited about is transparency mode.
Marco:
Transparency mode on AirPods Pro has changed the game for headphones, in my opinion.
Marco:
It used to be that to get anything like that, you would have to use things like our past sponsor Aftershocks, the bone conduction headphones.
Marco:
I'd have to use those.
Marco:
And the reason I love those so much is because I was able to hear the world around me and hear my podcast as I'm walking around with my dog or whatever.
Marco:
And so I could stop and say hi to people.
Marco:
I could hear cars coming.
Marco:
It's a wonderful thing to be able to hear the world around you selectively.
Marco:
And then as I'm walking past a leaf blower, I can turn on noise cancellation and it turns down the leaf blower.
Marco:
I can take these same headphones that I can wear outside as I'm walking my dog and hear everything.
Marco:
I can take the same headphones on a plane and turn on noise cancellation and be able to hear things at a low volume.
Marco:
And so it's wonderful to have both of those things in one headphone, to have super good isolation and noise canceling when you want it, but then to also have amazing transparency that, like, the Sony's, I don't know if the Bose's offer these...
Marco:
Recent Sony models do offer a pass-through mode that is like Apple's transparency mode, but it's nowhere near as good.
Marco:
It sounds kind of weird.
Marco:
You definitely know that you're listening to the microphone through your headphones that's being slightly altered on the way to your ears, whereas the transparency mode on AirPods Pro...
Marco:
You can almost forget that it's there.
Marco:
It's so good.
Marco:
It really is.
Marco:
Transparent is a great word to use for it because transparent in audio means you don't notice it.
Marco:
And that's exactly how transparency mode is on AirPods Pro.
Marco:
So on AirPods Max, assuming it's as good or better, that's going to be a game changer to have that good of a transparency mode.
Marco:
in full-size headphones and to also presumably have really good full-size noise cancellation when you want it with that one hardware button on top that is going to be great on planes if everything else about these is good and that's why i hope these are good and if they are good they could be worth
Marco:
$550 to some people.
Marco:
Again, I don't think this is going to be a mass market product.
Marco:
I don't think you're going to see consumer reports and wire cutters saying these are going to be the best noise-canceling headphones for most people because they're just too expensive and most people are going to be totally happy paying slightly more than half the price for one of their competitors.
Marco:
That's probably going to be almost as good in most ways.
Marco:
But if these really are
Marco:
as good as Apple says they are.
Marco:
And if all these potential pitfalls are workable and they aren't as bad as we think they could be, this could be an amazing product.
Marco:
And I really hope it is.
Marco:
I really, really do.
Marco:
Because the AirPods Pro are so good, they've made almost every other headphone irrelevant to me.
Marco:
If this could do that even further for full-size headphones and for more people who maybe the AirPods Pro don't fit or whatever, more power to them.
Marco:
I really hope they do it.
Marco:
45 minutes was so optimistic, Marco.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
Seriously.
Casey:
Marco and headphones.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
It'll only be five minutes, of course.
John:
I don't even have them yet.
John:
I know.
John:
Just wait until you do.
John:
Last question on the headphones.
John:
What color did you get?
John:
I got blue.
Marco:
ah good choice honestly i don't frankly love any of the colors that they're offered in the blue looks really good um but uh but tiff said that she wanted the blue like if if she were to get a pair she said she'd want the blue and so because i think these are a risk i think these are a high risk i think there's a high risk that either i will return them because they won't be at all what i want or maybe i won't like them but tiff will so i i yielded to her preferences on this one
John:
I think there's got to be only one color choice, which is the white, which you would think that that can't be the right color choice for any headphone.
John:
But in the AirPod family, as we know, you can get it any color you want as long as they're white.
John:
And that is the choice that I think most people should make.
John:
That said, if I got a pair of these,
John:
i would say all right white but the air pods are very small and are shiny glossy plastic that tends not to accumulate uh you know smudges but this sort of matte looking headband might get dirty so then i start looking at the black one but then black is super boring and i am i have fatigue at the uh
John:
the muted anodized color thing.
John:
Someone on Twitter pointed out that, like, the headband colors match the iPhone 12 colors and the ear cup colors match the iPhone 12 Pro colors.
John:
Oh, the iPad Air.
John:
Oh, yeah, the iPad Air color.
John:
So there you go.
John:
Someone will have to hold them up and see, is this literally the same green as the iPad Air or does it just look similar to our eyes in these product shots?
John:
But anyway...
John:
i i'm pretty sure you can anodize aluminum to not be so muted but apple's in this muted phase and i feel like all the muted ones like the blue yeah i guess it's blue but it's like a midnight blue headband and it just kind of faded ipad air blue for the ear cups and they're just they're just not doing it for me so i like the black and i like the white but i and i really hope most people do buy the white because then
John:
It's like the white AirPods.
John:
You see someone with a bright white set of giant over-ear headphones, like, oh, those must be the Apple ones.
John:
And speaking of Apple, it's kind of, let's not say it's amazing.
John:
It's notable to me that these gigantic ear cups that do not have a touchpad on them also do not have an Apple logo anywhere on them.
John:
And you would think Apple doesn't do that.
John:
They don't put logos in their products.
John:
Look at the back of your phone.
John:
Look at the back of your laptop.
John:
They're not above putting a big Apple logo dead center on a big flat surface.
John:
They have two flat surfaces on here and they didn't put a single thing on them.
John:
Even the engraving, which, by the way, is super cool and you can use emoji.
John:
Even the engraving is on the edge and not on the sides of the thing.
John:
It's on where the little stalk goes into the thing.
John:
um i never thought about that you're right there's no apple logo on i i wonder do you think it's because they would have to put one on each cup and there's nothing with two apple logos on it yeah i don't know if there's no apple logos on this i mean you can get it and examine it there's probably some apple logo hiding somewhere but um the the other the other thing i was bringing this up on twitter of like how do you how do you tell which is the right or the left now the obvious answer is
John:
Once you own these things, you figure out that whatever, the right or the left one is the one that has the digital crown on it.
John:
It's a thing that you can physically feel.
John:
Again, yay for physical buttons.
John:
You can see it with your eyes.
John:
It's very clear once you know which side that little thing is on.
John:
It's always on that side.
John:
But they do put a big R and L inside the ear cups, which is something that I hadn't seen before.
John:
but apparently every headphone manufacturer under the sun does.
John:
They do it by stitching slightly differently, like making the stitching thicker on the little mesh that is inside the ear cup.
John:
So you have to look inside the ear cups for a gigantic RRL, but I'm amazed at how many headphones get this wrong.
John:
Like I posted pictures of my Sony gaming headphones and, uh,
John:
the even in the the bare dynamic dt 770s um they like to do embossed r&l on plastic and it's hard to see that especially in dim lighting the bare dynamics have braille so if you know braille or you just learn what series of bumps mean r&l at least you can feel it without having to look with your eyes but in general if there's a wire and you learn that the wire comes out of the left side oh my god i've i've held so many bare dynamic headphones i never realized that those bumps were braille of course what did you think they were
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I wasn't paying that much attention, but I know exactly the bumps you're talking about.
Marco:
I have a pair right over there.
Casey:
Where are these?
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
Where are these?
Marco:
It's where the yoke connects to the headband.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
It's very snazzy.
John:
But with wired headphones, though, you just learn which side the wire comes out of and hope that you don't have one of those terrible headphones while the wire comes out of both sides.
John:
You just learn which side the wire comes out.
John:
There's usually a physical way for you to tell which is which, but Apple also did the thing where if you look inside the earcups, they stitch the mesh differently.
John:
It just makes me think like,
John:
You know, boy, do you really care about audio quality, Apple?
John:
If you're making different thicknesses of stitching in an R and an L pattern, that makes the left and the right ear cups sound different.
John:
You'll have to account for that in software.
Marco:
It doesn't make that big of a difference.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
Earpads make a big difference because of like the rim part.
Marco:
The actual part that covers the driver, the little thin piece of cloth makes almost no difference at all.
John:
But anyway, these are very sort of minimalist and featureless.
John:
Like because the ear cups are big expanses of a very smooth matte aluminum and there's nothing on them.
John:
No Apple logo, no markings of any kind, no R, no L. Like I said, if you can get them engraved, which you totally should because it looks cool.
John:
That's on the top edge.
John:
You can't see it when looking from the side.
John:
So I can't wait to see somebody in real life with these.
John:
The first time that happens might be the next time I see Marco.
John:
If they really sell in the volumes, we're thinking they're going to sell in, but we'll see.
Marco:
I can't believe we did the entire show.
Marco:
Of course I can't actually believe it.
Casey:
Who are you kidding?
Casey:
Of course you can.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week.
Marco:
The Apple Pro Max.
Oh my God.
John:
You don't even know what they're called.
John:
You already bought these things.
Marco:
You don't even know what they're called.
Marco:
Yeah, the Airheads Max.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, ExpressVPN, and Flatfile.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can do that for substantially less than $550 at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week, probably about something else.
Casey:
Maybe.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's 50-50.
Casey:
Maybe.
Casey:
It's 5-50 is what it is.
Casey:
Hey-oh!
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-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-
Marco:
I finally made an appointment at the Genius Bar.
John:
Oh, God, for what?
John:
To get your dust bunnies removed.
Marco:
To bring in my iMac.
Marco:
Fix that thermal paste.
Marco:
I don't know what they're going to do.
Marco:
I mean, it's always hard, like, when you bring in, like, when you have to tell them as a nerd, like, look, I'm pretty sure that I have thermal issues that are physical in nature.
Marco:
And they're just nodding, mm-hmm, sure, okay, dude.
Marco:
And they're like, did you try reinstalling the entire OS?
Marco:
Like, ugh.
John:
i'm not gonna come on like because that's what they're gonna do they're gonna be like did you did you restore your phone like you know they're gonna be doing my experience is if you go in there and just rattle off like a bunch of crap that makes them convinces them that you know what you're talking about they don't make you do all that stuff
John:
I hope not.
John:
Over the phone, they will because they have a script.
John:
But in person, they'll look in your eyes and be like, okay, fine.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Because the thing is, imagine from their point of view.
Marco:
If somebody comes in and says, my fans are running all the time, it's probably some kind of weird software thing because there's all sorts of things on macOS that consume 100% CPU as background processes all the time.
John:
But they don't have to have that discussion with you because if you frame it, here's how I think you should frame it.
John:
You should frame it as, I think this is a hardware problem and here's why.
John:
And they could be like, okay, well, now that you framed it that way, I'm not going to run any of your software.
John:
I'm going to boot it from one of my things.
John:
I'm just going to ignore anything that you have.
John:
I'm not going to run any of your software.
John:
I'm not going to run your OS.
John:
I'm just, you know, whatever, like whatever diagnostic tool they have to boot this thing up in a place where it's like total safe boot, ignore everything that's on the drive, ignore this person's crap.
John:
And just let's see hardware wise, like run our hardware tests and let's see what the cooling capacity is.
John:
Like if you frame it that way,
John:
Then if they ignore the software issues, you know, that's what you asked for.
John:
And I don't think you'll have to do the whole dance of like, let's reinstall, let's reset your PRAM, let's do all this or whatever.
John:
And then the second thing is, the reason they roll their eyes is because, of course, customers come in and they think they know what the problem is, but do they really know?
John:
Maybe it is a software thing because you've only booted from your OS.
John:
So maybe your fans are running constantly because you have some, you know, some things messed up in your SMC and you actually do need to do a PRAM reset.
John:
So don't just assume you know what the problem is.
John:
But I would assume you know what the problem is, and I would say, please just replace my thermal compound.
Marco:
Yeah, and clear out everywhere dust could possibly be in the cooling solution.
Marco:
Please clean it out.
Marco:
Yeah, remove all the spider eggs.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Then they're going to hand you a sandbox and say, well, we built this from the sand that was within your iMac Pro.
John:
So what you're saying is, you want me to open this up and blow the dust out of it?
Casey:
That's all?
Casey:
That's all?
Casey:
If you're so smart, why can't you do it?
John:
Yeah, the thermal compound is... The thermal compound is sus, as they say.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
I've seen that word so often.
Marco:
I was so close with the... I had like a whole iFixit shopping cart ready to check out with all the, you know...
Marco:
different like the the little pizza cutter thing that you have to like cut the screen adhesive with and the new adhesive kit and and a tube of arctic silver and all like i was all ready to go but i'm like i just i can't i i the this imac service wedge you could prop the screen up at the right angle i but i was just like i was i was reading the guide and i'm like okay you know you have to separate the screen out
Marco:
first of all you have to cut the adhesive around the whole screen this pizza cutter thing then you have to like slowly gradually pull the screen up but don't rip the cable and you better unlatch the cable in this exact right way i'm just like oh my god i'm gonna break something and i'm gonna feel like such an idiot and then what what finally did it was uh i i looked up my apple care coverage expires the day after christmas
John:
oh no you you love you love doing this you did it with image retention now you're doing it again with your dust bunnies i did exactly so i'm like the apple care expires in a couple of weeks i i gotta get this done this is your relationship with imax so you you buy imax you buy these all-in-one computers they eventually manifest problems that you ignore for as long as possible and then in a panic right before you warn he's gonna run out you say here apple fix it please please because would you do anything different i mean it's being without your desktop sucks it's a big pain in the butt to
Marco:
get it there to get it so you know to mail it in or bring it so it's a big pain in the butt because they're huge and heavy and fragile and so it's like yeah i i'm just i have such a love hate relationship with the imac as a family because like i i love imacs for about two and a half years and then like when something goes a little wrong and
Marco:
It's such a massive pain to have it addressed in any way.
Marco:
Apple's changing the way they lease their iMacs.
Marco:
A new experience.
John:
That's what you want.
John:
You want to lease.
John:
You want to own it for the good years, and then when it has any problems, you want to give it back.
Marco:
Well, no, but the problem with leasing is that you don't control when you give it back.
Marco:
So, like, imagine if my lease expired right now on my iMac.
Marco:
Right now is a terrible time to need to buy a new iMac.
John:
The Volvo leasing thing, the Volvo rent your Volvo thing, I think you get to pick when you send it back.
John:
There's lots of leasing possibilities.
John:
It's not the same as leasing.
John:
What is the Volvo thing called?
John:
Subscriptions?
John:
What the hell is that?
Casey:
Yeah, something like that.
Casey:
Oh, crap.
Casey:
I can't remember their branded thing, but yeah, it's a subscription.
John:
You basically use a car, and when you don't want to use a car and you want to use a different one, you bring the car back and you say, give me a different one.
John:
And it's more expensive, but you always are driving a new car that you like.
John:
That's what you need but for IMAX.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
And even just the process, I'm going to have to clone it, be ready for them to restore it because I know they're going to restore it.
Marco:
So be ready for them to restore it and then have to get it back, have to restore it from my clone and reset up all my crap.
Marco:
It's such a pain.
Marco:
This is why I don't do this more often than necessary.
Marco:
Um, and I don't know if there was any, and, and, and this is again, like because of where I'm living this year, this is, this is much more logistically expensive and complicated than, than it normally would be.
Casey:
Well, you brought that on yourself.
Casey:
Agreed.
Casey:
Agreed.
Casey:
You played yourself.
John:
Like on the bright side, you could drop it walking down the street and shatter the thing and then problem solved.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Problem solved.
John:
Except that what the hell would I do then?
John:
Like you've got 500 computers in that house.
Marco:
Be quiet.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I have one desktop.
Yeah.
That's the problem.
John:
But you've got the LG 5K.
Marco:
You hook it up to your super fast M1 MacBook Air.
Marco:
Well, and that's what I'm going to do in the meantime because I assume they're going to need to keep my computer for like a week or something.
Marco:
So in the meantime, I'm going to bring the 5K back.
John:
They're going to know in an hour and a half whether you need a thermal compound replaced and then be done with it.
John:
Like maybe it'll sit there for a while waiting for a tech to go look at it, but I don't think your problem is going to.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
They might not know in an hour and a half because the only appointment they had was on a Saturday at 7 p.m.
Yeah.
John:
well i mean you're not gonna get it back that day but i'm gonna say like they'll bring it in the back they'll sit it there it'll when it comes up in the queue someone will sit with it for a couple of hours and with all these things are like oh we let it sit for a while we let it run we look to the temperatures or whatever but hopefully i mean what you're hoping for and hopefully this is what made you go in it's like look i can reproduce this for them now right i can just bring this in and just plop it down and say here look
John:
I hope so.
John:
See how high the RPM is.
John:
See how there's no activity on the CPU.
John:
This seems abnormal to me.
John:
And hopefully they'll agree with you.
John:
I hope so.
John:
In a noisy Apple store, they might be like, what are you complaining about?
Casey:
I was just thinking the same thing.
Casey:
I was just thinking the same thing.
Marco:
Yeah, I know as soon as I get it there.
Marco:
It's like when you bring your car to a mechanic, it's making this noise and you can't get to make the noise.
Marco:
There's a high risk that happens.
Marco:
Because you will have dislodged the spider eggs when you carry it there.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
Well, and frankly, like, if that fixes the problem, it's like alternative medicine.
Marco:
If that actually fixes the problem... That's what I said.
Marco:
I said last show, just take it for a walk.
Marco:
Yeah, like, you know, my problem solved then.
Marco:
I only need this computer to last until the next iMac comes out.
Marco:
Whenever the, like, you know, ARM iMac comes out, I'm buying it.
Marco:
Possibly.
Marco:
Now, this is, like, what's driving me nuts with this is, like,
Marco:
I don't know what the future roadmap holds and what my future needs are, but every time I have a problem with my desktop, so roughly every three years or so, I always think at that point, maybe I should just go laptop and monitor only again.
Marco:
No, you don't think that.
Marco:
And every time I actually do that, I hate it.
Marco:
And I go running back to the desktop.
Marco:
So stop thinking about it.
Marco:
But the things that make that bad
Marco:
are diminishing over time like the laptops right now the laptop i have at least like has no fan so fan noise cannot happen if i plug my current laptop into a monitor ram limits ssd limits agreed agreed but here's here's your here's your purchase plan get the next imac when it comes out and then get the next mac pro when it comes out done we don't have to keep having this discussion wait why do i get but you mean the macbook pro
Casey:
no get the next iMac when it comes out which presumably will lead the Mac Pro by like a year or two and then and then a year and a half later when you're still happy with your iMac or maybe when it's doing the first thing that annoys you get rid of it and get a Mac Pro you know somebody somebody mark this down because that is exactly what's going to happen some unless Marco just rage quits everything and buys an Intel Mac Pro tomorrow
John:
No, but it's a good plan because he gets the cool new ARM iMac, which is probably going to be amazing, right?
John:
And he'll love it.
John:
And when the honeymoon just starts to end, they'll release the Mac Pro and whatever thing is annoying him about the iMac, he can ditch it and get a modular, quiet, half-sized, super fast...
John:
extreme capacity desktop and then he'll just use that forever uh because mac pros last forever because i use all my computers forever yeah forever and marco years yeah four years so what three months no it's three four years for a desktop yeah four years five years something like that but then you'll be able to keep the display and swap out the computer like i'm gonna do when the arm mac pro comes out maybe
Marco:
yeah i hope so i mean i mean that's one thing we don't know how the xdr ages yet john like so far so good yeah and that's the thing like i you know in in reality i would love like if they would just offer the the 5k panel as a standalone display which they still won't do what is this six years into the 5k panel era 5k is old and busted 6k but like
Marco:
I would love to be in a position where I would just have a separate monitor and a monitorless desktop, and if one of them needed service, I would love to be in that situation.
Marco:
Right now, the current Mac Pro XDR situation is not something that I'm super interested in, and that's why I'm going to bring back my 5K and just plug in my laptop as at least a temporary solution while my iMac is being serviced, but...
Marco:
I think it's actually a non-trivial chance that I might end up liking that a lot, and I might just stick with that for a while until the next iMac comes out, and I might do what Underscore has done.
Marco:
Underscore's iMac Pro is turned off in the corner of his office sitting on the floor, and he's using his MacBook Pro full-time because it's so fast.
Marco:
That might be my actual situation here.
Marco:
When I get this back from service, I might not want it anymore.
Casey:
You know, it's funny you say that because until you brought up the soon expiration or the pending expiration of your AppleCare Plus, I really thought that what you were implicitly saying here was that the MacBook Air was so good that you can stand to be without the iMac Pro for a week or two, and it wouldn't be a big deal.
Casey:
Now I see it's also about time, but...
Casey:
I think you're onto something.
Casey:
I think you're right that even though I know how much you hate the LG 5K, which admittedly I've never lived with one, but my dad has one and I've seen it from time to time and it seems fine to me, but you know, whatever.
Marco:
No, it is.
Marco:
It has the perfect name.
Marco:
It's called the ultra fine.
Marco:
And that is the perfect name for it.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
It's ultra fine.
Marco:
Like it's not, it's nothing about it is great, but nothing about it is awful.
Marco:
It's fine.
Casey:
It's ultra fine.
Casey:
It is ultra, ultra fine.
Casey:
Well, anyway, so I would not be surprised if you end up liking that setup so much.
Casey:
And you'll still have problems with it.
Casey:
But ultimately, once you're compelled and forced to live with the MacBook Air in 5K setup, I wonder if you'll find the things that offend you about that to be less offensive than Apple saying to you,
Casey:
Well, you know, we looked at it and we jiggled some crap around and hope for the best.
Casey:
OK, you know, like I wonder if you'll end up preferring that for any number of different reasons.
Casey:
So I think you're right.
Casey:
I think your iMac Pros days are numbered.
Casey:
In fact, I think if you're still using it by January 1st, if you're still using it full time by January 1st, I'll be slightly surprised.
Casey:
Now, in your defense.
Casey:
I am still flabbergasted that you have not bought a Mac Pro.
Casey:
Now, today, in the last couple of weeks since these new Macs came out, it makes a lot less sense.
Casey:
But I am really stunned that Marco Arment, of all people, has said no to spending a pile of money on something frivolous.
Casey:
So I have to commend you that you have impressed me and proved me wrong.
Casey:
So who knows what will happen.
Casey:
But I still, if I'm a betting man, I say you're going to be using that MacBook Air a lot more than you thought.
Casey:
In fact,
Casey:
I would almost go so far as to say, you might buy yourself a MacBook Pro because of reasons.
Casey:
I don't even know.
Casey:
Something about the MacBook Air isn't fast enough, so you need the Pro.
John:
Sometimes Marco trips in his house and buys a laptop.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Falls on his phone in an awkward way.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
I haven't ruled that out.
Marco:
This is one of the reasons why I don't want to buy the Pro Display XDR right now to solve my problem right now because I don't necessarily want to spend a huge amount of money with any kind of assumptions about what my setup will be in the next few years because I think there's going to be a lot of possibilities and a lot of potential changes.
Marco:
Because everything's in flux with this transition –
Marco:
It radically can change the landscape of what's worth it, what do I need, what do I not need.
Marco:
The things the Mac Pro offers are mostly things I don't need.
Marco:
I don't need expansion slots for anything.
Marco:
I don't need...
Marco:
that many cpu cores like i have 10 in my my pro and that's great um i don't like even when i bought the my pro i didn't get the 18 core model i got the 10 core model because like i didn't need the max i don't need pretty much any gpu power like and that's again one of the mac pro's main focuses is massive potential for gpu power i don't need that at all i don't use gpus for anything like i need gpus to display images that's that's about
Marco:
animate my windows moving around like very little um so you know i don't really need any anything super there i don't need like huge amounts of ram i have 64 in this and that's that's a lot but you can now can you get can you get that now in the 16 inch i thought so but i don't know for sure what i do buy is a big ssd like in this i have the four terabytes that was the biggest that was offered at the time now they offer eight in some of the things and i would love to have that
Marco:
ultimately like i think i would be totally fine to do all of my work on a 16 inch like that would be fine if i had a big monitor everything but there are parts of that setup i don't like as much i do like having a laptop that doesn't have my entire software and document and file bloat from my desktop i like that's kind of like a clean thing like it's it's like it's it's almost like having two cars in a good way it's like
Marco:
if you have a giant conversion van full of all your crap, and then you have a Miata, you don't want all your crap in the Miata.
Marco:
You want that to be clean and lightweight.
Marco:
It's different.
Marco:
I like having a laptop that is a different software setup, and there's lots of advantages to it.
Marco:
And there's disadvantages, certainly.
Marco:
It is a pain in the butt to...
Marco:
to have stuff synced in a lot of ways it is a pain about to have to like set up all the software twice it's also nice though like if one of them's in use or if one of them breaks you have another one like so there there is some some benefit to having multiple to having a desktop and a laptop i don't know but the point is like because the entire mac lineup is getting like turned on its head right now in in all good ways uh but it's it's being totally shuffled up
Marco:
right now the best computer i own is a macbook air that's that blows my mind i can't i never i would have never guessed a year ago that that's that would be the situation i'd be in right now and like things that are super important to me are things like fan noise well you know what maybe i mean honestly probably none of the m1 or m whatever based max are gonna have bad fan noise at this point but but like if they do like
Marco:
I have a great model here that's fanless.
Marco:
That's wonderful.
Marco:
Maybe my solution can be instead of buying a super high spec desktop every three years, maybe I buy a medium spec laptop every two years and have that be it.
Marco:
You know, I don't know yet.
Marco:
It's way too early to sell until we see the rest of the Mac transition to the ARM chips and see what those products look like and what they're good at, what needs they serve and what they're bad at.
Marco:
I don't want to commit to anything.
Marco:
My mind is open to all possibilities here.
Marco:
And that's why I don't want to buy another LG 5K.
Marco:
And I don't want to buy an XDR.
Marco:
I don't want to invest really heavily...
Marco:
Or make any assumptions in any particular plan for what I'm going to buy next or what I'm going to use over the next few years.
Marco:
Because I think it might change.
Marco:
And I want to leave my options open.
Marco:
And that's why, again, I can assume I will probably want the next iMac.
Marco:
But until it shows up, we don't know.
Marco:
We don't know what it's going to be.
Marco:
Whatever it is, I might not want it or I might not need it.
Marco:
And maybe whatever the next Mac Pro is, maybe the next Mac Pro is something that I end up not wanting or needing.
Marco:
Maybe my next computer is a Mac Mini.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Until we see how this lineup plays out, I want as few assumptions and massive upfront investments as possible.
Casey:
It makes sense.
Casey:
It is an odd time to want to buy a new Mac.
Casey:
You know, unless you want one of the two that has been released, then it's one of the worst times to buy a new Mac.
Casey:
I would argue it's almost worse than butterfly time because...
Casey:
In this case, you really don't know what you're getting.
Casey:
Whereas with the butterfly keyboards, like, yeah, we have, we all thought eventually one day, maybe they would, you know, backpedal and they eventually did.
Casey:
But up until that time, like you were getting a really great computer with the exception of the keyboard.
Casey:
So why not just go ahead and do it?
Casey:
Whereas now you don't know what you're saying no to.
Casey:
You don't know what you don't know, John.
Casey:
Or no, you don't know what you know.
Casey:
Ah, God, I'm failing.
Marco:
It's just like the known unknowns thing.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Donald Rumsfeld.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Anyway.
Marco:
I got that reference, John.
Marco:
Haven't seen any movies.
Marco:
A reference from real life.
Marco:
Good job.
Casey:
We just want you to be proud of us, Dad.