I Can’t Give Him the Carrot Fast Enough
Casey:
Hey, so John, how's it going?
John:
I think COVID-19, everyone's favorite disease slash germ, has achieved the ATP hat trick.
John:
We knocked off all three hosts.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Apparently, so the way I think this has happened, this is the headcanon, is that I received it from Lex via your daily Lex.
Casey:
He infected me, that he infected me, and then I have now infected you, and hopefully I have not taken down the rest of the people in your house with you.
Casey:
What's the status there?
John:
So far, so good.
John:
I mean, so I, you know, I've been having symptoms since Monday.
John:
I was negative on Monday and Tuesday, and then I was positive on Wednesday.
Casey:
Were you taking evasive maneuvers within the house on Monday or Tuesday?
Casey:
Or were you assuming it was a cold?
John:
No, because here's why.
John:
People are always having colds in the house.
John:
And whenever someone has a cold, we give them COVID tests and they come up negative and everything's fine.
John:
So I had a cold and I was giving myself COVID tests like I do anytime I have a cold and they're coming up negative.
John:
And then on Wednesday morning, it was positive, and then I immediately retreated to my room where I have been hiding since then.
Casey:
All right, so what have you been doing to kill time then?
John:
Well, I mean, for the first three days of this, I just basically had a fever the whole time.
John:
That's sucky.
John:
I know people had it much worse than I have for sure, but no one likes having a fever.
John:
I'm used to fevers breaking, and this wasn't breaking, so that was kind of crappy.
Mm-hmm.
John:
It's not the worst cold I've ever had, but it's a pretty crappy cold.
John:
I did get a Paxlovid prescription and I talked to my doctor and she was like, well, you know, if you don't want to take it, you know, because you don't want any weird side effects or whatever.
John:
If you start getting better, that's fine.
John:
But if I can tell you that, you know, the third day of your symptoms is probably not the peak.
John:
It could get worse.
John:
So do what you want to do.
John:
And after my third day of symptoms, it was not getting better.
John:
It was getting worse.
John:
And so I started taking it.
John:
And that's what I'm on now.
Casey:
And so today, how are we feeling this evening?
John:
I mean, I feel like the fever is mostly gone.
John:
So all you got is stuffiness, headaches, body aches.
John:
You know, it's not a terrible cold.
John:
I do credit some of that to the medicine.
John:
But who knows?
John:
Honestly, I just started taking it because I was like, look, if it got better on its own, I wouldn't have taken it.
John:
But it wasn't getting better on its own, and I knew I had to do a podcast.
John:
So, you know, I did record a podcast on Tuesday, which at the time I'm sure had COVID, right?
John:
Even though I was still testing negative.
John:
And that was kind of miserable and involving a lot of coughing and sweating and feveriness.
John:
And so, you know, it's part of the grand ATP tradition of all of us podcasting when we are COVID positive.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
I mean, that is the rule, apparently, amongst the three of us.
John:
The show must go on.
John:
And the great thing about podcasting the way we do it is, despite the earlier joking, it is not transmissible to the other co-hosts.
Casey:
So let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
What was the context for this?
Casey:
This is about getting a copy of your data from Apple.
Casey:
And for the life of me, I can't remember when this came out.
John:
It was an Ask ATP about how to export your messages or something.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I remember talking about Google Takeout, which is Google's version of this.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
So I presume, John, somebody put this in the show notes, privacy.apple.com, where you can get a copy of your data.
Casey:
And a few years ago now, Zach Whitaker at ZDNet, back in 2018...
Casey:
uh did did exactly this and it was funny um zach went through all the data he received and he said it actually wasn't that much which in this context is a good thing because it means apple didn't have that much well if you trust apple to be telling the truth no it doesn't i think they didn't even give him his messages the reason the date is important here is that 2018 is this is before gdpr i think
John:
uh right yes or it was around and so i mean if you're wondering why apple is improving this feature i'm assuming it's for regulatory compliance because what his download contained was like well here's some metadata about your messages but not the actual messages and of course apple does have that data even though it's encrypted they could give it to you and you could decrypt it with your local machine keys uh but they didn't used to do that but i think now it has improved so oh fair enough you know why why is apple now making this feature better probably for regulatory compliance reasons
Casey:
That is true.
Casey:
I did think the post was interesting, though, nevertheless, and it's worth a quick read if you're interested.
Casey:
And then also tell me about iMazing, if you please.
John:
That was a third-party application that a lot of people recommended.
John:
I think I either bought or at least downloaded that application.
John:
multiple times in the past to try to use it.
John:
It's from the old days back when you used to both like mount your iPod as a USB disk and pull things out of it.
John:
Remember that?
John:
I believe this software has its origins in that era of devices.
John:
Obviously, we're far from that now, but still they have a thing that lets you go onto your phone and pull stuff off somehow.
John:
And some people do use that to pull messages.
John:
I'm amazed that still works.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I'm not quite sure how they're doing it.
John:
Maybe they're secretly jailbreaking for one.
John:
I have no idea.
John:
I don't want to pass aspersions on this thing.
John:
But anyway, some people swear by it.
John:
They say, this is how I downloaded my messages from my phone onto my Mac to get a local copy.
John:
So if you're looking for a third party application that claims to do that, here's one.
Casey:
Uh, Rob Howard writes, uh, with regard to, oh yes, the context here is, uh, you, I think it was John was saying, uh, so it was kind of slagging on, uh, Dolby pro logic, you know, the original, one of the original surround sound systems.
John:
I didn't, I was saying systems that tried to take a, uh, stereo sound and put it into back channels, but there's lots of different ways you can do that.
John:
And the, the specific one that Rob is writing about here is one of the better ones.
Casey:
Yeah, so I actually, I didn't interrupt you at the time, because that was my understanding as well, is that, you know, the system would just kind of make a best guess as to what was in the rear channel.
Casey:
So I obviously didn't know much about this, and certainly less than I thought I did.
Casey:
So Rob Howard writes,
Casey:
Not as good as discrete channels, of course, but calling it guesswork probably sells the work of Dolby's engineers a little short.
Casey:
And this is with regard to Dolby ProLogic.
Casey:
And building on that, and we'll link to Wikipedia, Dolby ProLogic decoder or processor unfolds, quote-unquote, the soundtrack back into its original 4.0 sound, left and right, center, and a single limited frequency range mono rear channel, which was fascinating.
Casey:
I did not think that ProLogic was that smart, but it turns out it is.
John:
A seven kilohertz low low pass filtered mono rear channel is not ideal, let's say, for a surround, but at least they have a way of getting the signal out as opposed to just taking stereo and guessing.
John:
And by the way, the reverse of that is also true.
John:
If you have a multi-channel thing and you're watching stereo, every receiver and every receiver like a device thing will have a way to say, well, I'm only getting two channels of sound, but I'll figure out a way to spread it over your speakers in a reasonable way.
John:
I mean, that's a little bit easier because it's not like you're
John:
You're not losing information.
John:
Worst case scenario, you can just play back the same stereo sounds like evenly throughout the right and left half of the speakers.
John:
But it is true that, you know, no matter how many speakers you have, sometimes you're going to be watching content that doesn't match that number of speakers.
John:
And sometimes you might not be able to pick a soundtrack, especially in the modern age of streaming, where, you know, back when in the day when you get like a plastic disc, they'd often have different soundtracks on them.
John:
The stereo mix and a 5.1 mix or whatever.
John:
But with streaming, there's not that much of that.
John:
So you're at the mercy of whatever the audio track is.
John:
And if your number of speakers matches that, great.
John:
And if not, some device somewhere is going to be having to do something for you.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
I've probably told the story five times on the show over the last decade.
Casey:
But I remember vividly when this was probably like 93, 94, something like that.
Casey:
My dad's favorite party trick in the world, which says a lot about my dad in many different ways, was he would put on the Top Gun Laserdisc.
Casey:
And we had a Laserdisc player in a Dolby surround sound setup.
Casey:
And there were times that the plane would pass from the bottom of the frame to the top of the frame.
Casey:
And ostensibly, it's going over the camera and behind you.
Casey:
And it sounded like it was going behind you.
Casey:
And I tell you what, in 1993 or whatever this was, that blew my mind.
Casey:
And then it got even better because we had one of those really ridiculous remote controls that had a physical jog wheel at the bottom.
Casey:
So you could go frame by frame on the Laserdisc.
Casey:
And that was also like earth shatteringly cool at the time.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
It was amazing.
Casey:
And of course, the fidelity of these frames was straight trash.
Casey:
I mean, it was not quite real player bad, but it was not great.
Casey:
It was like basically VHS bad.
Casey:
And somebody's going to correct me and tell me it was actually better than VHS.
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
John:
LaserDisc was better than VHS, for sure.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Well, I don't think the resolution was necessarily better.
John:
But the fidelity is in terms of the reproduction, not being filled with noise from various things messing with the magnetic
Marco:
garbage on a piece of plastic tape right and it could freeze frame without like weird distortion or whatever right right right and so that's what he would do and it was just it just seemed like the coolest thing in the freaking world that's the thing like back back in those days like you know like like you know talking about dolby pro logic and all these different things i mean there were so many amazing clever hacks done with these old you know simple analog formats to try to cram more data or more channels or more tricks into them and some of them actually worked pretty well and many of them were from dolby honestly
Marco:
But I remember I also had, for all of my complaining about how surround sound really isn't super compelling for me today, we actually had surround sound in the 90s also.
Marco:
We had it pretty early because at some point in the mid-90s,
Marco:
my mom bought this 5.1 Bose system.
Marco:
She basically made three impulse purchases throughout my entire childhood, and that was one of them.
Marco:
And so we had this Bose surround sound system, and first it was just from VCRs or whatever was encoded on those.
Marco:
Eventually, we got a DVD player, and that broadened our horizons a little bit there.
Marco:
But it was amazing for the time.
Marco:
Ultimately, though, I don't find that compelling now because to me it is kind of like that 90s trick that we've made the trick better over the years, but it's still just kind of like this novelty thing that when I don't have it, I don't miss it.
Marco:
So that's why I'm down on it for myself now.
Marco:
And I don't fault anyone else for caring more than I do, obviously.
Marco:
I care more than most people do about lots of things, so I understand what that's like.
Marco:
And if you care more than I do about this, more power to you.
Marco:
But all this is to say that all this crazy surround hack stuff we had in the 90s was actually pretty decent and worked surprisingly well considering how little technical sophistication they had to work with.
Casey:
Yeah, I completely, very emphatically agree.
Casey:
Speaking of surround sound systems and hacks, let's talk about John's Sony HTA-9 setup, shall we?
Casey:
We got a lot of feedback about this.
Casey:
Personally, I'm just sitting here smug on my Sonos throne, feeling very good about my world right now.
Casey:
To come back to the Sony HTA 9, if you recall, this was, I think, I'm pretty sure John brought this up.
Casey:
It was considered, you know, we considered it a more baller version of the Sonos setup that I have.
Casey:
The way it works is there's a box, it's like an Apple TV box, and it communicates via, you know, a proprietary wireless thing to four satellite speakers and then optionally a subwoofer.
Casey:
And allegedly it sounds really freaking good.
Casey:
Well, a lot of people wrote in to us to say, oh, there's some evidence that this is not as good as we thought.
Casey:
There is a Linus Tech Tips video.
Casey:
I'm not a Linus fan, but we will link it in the show notes nonetheless.
Marco:
I'm making that expression on my face right now.
Marco:
That's not all of his thumbnails.
John:
I think that's why a lot of people said this, because he's a popular YouTuber, and a lot of people have seen that video.
John:
Surely not this many people actually own the HDA9, but some people who do own it did write in.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
And so the first bit of follow-up we got was from John Koch.
Casey:
I'm going to try to summarize this as best I can on the fly.
Casey:
It was a genuinely fascinating follow-up, but it was extremely verbose, and I'm going to try to do my best here.
Casey:
So John Koch starts off by writing, I'm writing to strongly warn you and the listeners about the HTA-9.
Casey:
Like you, I took Andrew's recommendation, found the system on sale for much less than the $2,700, but still almost $2,000.
Casey:
The system advertises using 5GHz wireless, and it turns out that's Wi-Fi.
Casey:
802.11n Wi-Fi.
Casey:
Yes, a wireless technology from 2009.
Casey:
It creates its own Wi-Fi network like Sonos, presumably to bypass contention with other stations in the user's home.
Casey:
The problem is, it's freaking terrible at it.
Casey:
Um, it uses a 40 megahertz channel.
Casey:
The other, other alternatives they could have chosen.
Casey:
Um, it's terrible about choosing a channel in order to get it to work without dropping out.
Casey:
I had to reconfigure my own home wifi to not use channels that the HTA nine seemed to like, which is not great, but okay.
Casey:
Other wifi systems may not be so configurable.
Casey:
Um, the issue for John is that he lives in the townhouse and you know, has a lot of other adjacent wifi that he can't control, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
So John said, sometime after I return the system, put in a traditional AVR or surround speaker setup.
Casey:
Linus Tech Tips posted a video describing an issue with the system affecting his own Wi-Fi.
Casey:
And John finishes by saying, when it does work, it really is incredible in effect and simplicity, but unless you have precise control over your own Wi-Fi and have little external 5 gigahertz Wi-Fi interference, you should stay away from the system or at least be very prepared to return it.
Casey:
Meanwhile, Ian White writes, One thing I will say is that I do occasionally experience speaker dropouts.
Casey:
That's not desirable.
Casey:
It's not common.
Casey:
It happens maybe once every two or three months, which, okay, fine, not that big a deal, says Casey, but it gets better.
Casey:
And requires me to rerun the built-in RF calibration to resolve it.
Casey:
Not good, Bob.
Casey:
But I still find it irritating, considering the cost...
Casey:
This is something.
Marco:
This is like when you're on iMac.
Marco:
You're like, it's fine.
Marco:
Nothing's wrong with it.
Marco:
Well, it does randomly power off twice a week, maybe, and occasionally corrupts its RAM.
Marco:
Oh, but it's fine.
Marco:
Everything's fine.
Marco:
It's fine.
Casey:
Don't worry about it.
Casey:
Don't look behind the curtain.
Casey:
So he writes, I still find it irritating, consisting the cost and that the little base station is not that far from all the speakers and has line of sight to all of them.
Casey:
Last, I'll say that I'm no audiophile, but I think the sound is great and nicely immersive.
Casey:
I wasn't aware of the smile curve you guys talked about, but I don't doubt it.
Casey:
I do sometimes wish it was better bringing the dialogue out.
Casey:
So yeah, that Sony magic is maybe not so magical.
John:
That's the problem with any kind of wireless system is, you know, if you're going to have wireless speakers, they're super convenient.
John:
But guess what?
John:
They communicate wirelessly and there's only so much bandwidth, especially if you're in a situation like you're an apartment or a townhouse where you have a bunch of neighbors real close to you and you have no control over their Wi-Fi and it's bleeding into your space.
John:
That can be kind of a mess.
Yeah.
Marco:
This is just like, you know, earlier tonight, there was, unbeknownst to me, there was an Apple Music outage.
Marco:
And what I wanted was to get music playing.
Marco:
I had just gotten home.
Marco:
We were out of town.
Marco:
I had just gotten home.
Marco:
I was unloading everything, unloading groceries, had to wash the dishes.
Marco:
I'm like, let me just put on some music.
Marco:
So I asked my HomePods, hey, play the Rolling Stones.
Marco:
Never heard of them.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Siri had not heard of them.
Marco:
It was giving responses like, I'm sorry, I don't find any songs by the Rolling Stones and Apple Music.
Marco:
hmm like cool was there a contractual dispute what like and eventually and eventually i just airplayed it from my phone and that worked fine but um and eventually i learned there was an outage but as i was as i was going through all that i was thinking like you know when our parents came home from a long day and they wanted to put some music on what they did was they walked over to the stereo they maybe took out a record or you know later on a cd um and and then you know they would put it in the
Marco:
stereo if it wasn't already there and they'd hit play and it would play it wouldn't play 60 of the time it wouldn't throw random errors halfway through songs one speaker wouldn't occasionally drop out for a few seconds for no reason it would just play like that was it sometimes the record would skip real i mean really rarely and then once once we went to tapes and cds that stopped being a problem too well sometimes the machine would need the tape that's very rare every technology has its own problems
John:
Yeah, but we have more of them.
Casey:
If you walked or jumped near the CD player, sometimes that would skip as well.
John:
Yeah, you've got to go by the one with the big buffer.
Marco:
Well, but the point is, I feel like with our modern ways of doing things, we've added so much complexity in the name of convenient features or nice abilities.
Marco:
And many of those are great.
Marco:
Many of those features and abilities we really do use and appreciate.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
it has come with it a lot of complexity.
Marco:
And so in an area like this, we're like, okay, if you have a home theater speaker system that is communicating between the speakers via a wifi network or a wifi like protocol or whatever it is, like there's so many layers of complexity there.
Marco:
And that's just one part of the stack feeding.
Marco:
That is whatever electronic, you know, media source is feeding the TV or receiver or whatever.
Marco:
So there's another point of failure there.
Marco:
And it's like the more complex you make your, your system, the,
Marco:
the more points of failure there are.
Marco:
And the more technical tricks you play, oh, we're going to make this one automatically smart and have it process the sound in this way to sense where the speakers are and have room calibration and Wi-Fi.
Marco:
The more of those things you layer on top, the more likely it is that you're going to run into weird failures or intermittent problems or bugs in people's implementations.
Marco:
And electronic manufacturers are not known for fixing bugs really ever.
Marco:
So this is a recipe for,
Marco:
a system overall and you're a setup overall in your living room that seems really cool and is really great when it works but you're just asking for like just periodic weirdness or flakiness or bugs and I don't know increasingly as I get older I'm like get off my lawn with that stuff like just give me like stuff that works every time
John:
I don't know.
John:
I think Casey Sonos shows that wireless speakers that are vaguely smart and communicate with each other wirelessly is not necessarily a recipe for unreliability.
John:
It's just that, you know, Sony maybe is not doing as good a job as Sonos in this area.
John:
And I feel like the Sony system, as you said last time, it's solving a specific problem that is not solved by other solutions.
John:
If you have a crap room where you can't put things in the right place.
John:
a regular system is not going to sound good.
John:
It'll be reliably bad all the time because you can't put the speakers in the right places or they'll bounce sound off of weird places.
John:
You need something like this where you're like, this is literally the only place I have to put these speakers.
John:
I can't run speaker wire.
John:
I need something that's small and I have to put them in weird, awkward places.
John:
Can you do something with that?
John:
That's what this product is supposed to do.
John:
It seems like it would be better if it did that job without as much wireless messiness.
John:
But everyone who's wrote in about it has said,
John:
That it does sound really good.
John:
And so I think it is solving the problem.
John:
And that and that problem can't be solved without this complexity.
John:
Right.
John:
So I'm still I'm still pro progress.
John:
I don't want to go back to big giant speakers like my parents had.
John:
They're like taller than I was as a toddler.
John:
And there's only two of them.
John:
And they're there, you know, next to a giant piece of furniture where the turntable is.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
No, it's funny listening to Marco talk and it's, you know, tell me you're a HomePod user without telling me you're a HomePod user.
Casey:
Well, whenever I try it, nothing works and everything's broken these days.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Well, okay.
Casey:
Now, to be fair to Marco and your HomePod setup, I can't shout to the Sonos using Apple Music, you know, unless I enabled like Alexa or something.
Casey:
I can't shout to the Sonos, you know, go play this.
John:
That's probably a feature, not a bug.
John:
Doesn't it have its own voice assistant where you can do Hey Sonos or something?
Casey:
You absolutely... No, it does have Hey Sonos, but to the best of my recollection, that's only about controlling the Sonos.
Casey:
Like, you know, volume up, volume down, move this to whatever room.
Casey:
You know, it's a very limited repertoire.
Casey:
So, in the defense of the HomePods, or in the defense of Marco's broken HomePods, you know, I can't do quite as much with my Sonos as he can with his HomePods, but...
Casey:
Genuinely, it has been, and it's only been a few months, I'll admit that, but it has been pretty much bulletproof.
Casey:
And the thing, I actually did this just two or three days ago.
Casey:
I keep my Sonos Roam, which is a little, like, you know, Jambox-esque portable speaker.
Casey:
I keep that on a base station...
Casey:
Yeah, right?
Casey:
God, I love my Jambox so much.
Casey:
Anyway, I took that off of its base station, which is in our room, which is clear on the other side of the house from the screened-in porch.
Casey:
And I, you know, mashed down on the play button, which is Sonospeak for, you know, continue playing.
Casey:
Whatever's playing in somewhere else.
Casey:
Take your best guess as to which one of the speakers you want to mimic here, which in my case, there was only one other thing playing, and start playing it right here, right?
Casey:
So, you know, something was playing on the porch.
Casey:
I mashed down the play button for a couple seconds.
Casey:
Then it starts playing whatever was on the porch here on the speaker, literally in my hand, right?
Casey:
And I am clear.
Casey:
Now, we don't have a very big house, but I'm clear across the house, a floor up.
Casey:
I go walking downstairs.
Casey:
I have three different Eero base stations in the house.
Casey:
I would assume that if I am on the house Wi-Fi that I've jumped between Eero base stations at least once.
Casey:
I go downstairs, I walk through the living room, which is playing the same song, into the porch, and I could not hear not a millisecond of difference between what was coming out of my hand and what was coming out of the speakers.
Casey:
As I'm moving between rooms through the house, it blew my mind, because I would have absolutely expected that there would have been some small, infinitesimal amount of latency somewhere, and I heard none.
Casey:
It was amazing.
Casey:
I don't know how it works.
John:
Well, playing back music, you can cheat with buffers, but playing soundtracks to video is much tougher.
John:
Yes, you can buffer the video as well, but the Sonos system and the other sound systems don't have complete control over the video unless they themselves make a receiver, which is the hack to get that.
John:
Or, you know, playing video games or whatever.
John:
So the latency...
John:
issue and sync issues get much harder as the size of the buffer you're allowed to have uh shrinks that's right so i think playing back music it can just build that sucker up and make sure everybody's synchronized and have no underflow problems and it doesn't matter if it takes a second or two to build that up you're fine uh whereas if you you know want to hit play on a movie and see audio and video start instantaneously your buffer can't be too big
Casey:
Everything you said, I completely agree with.
Casey:
And it may just be as simple as buffering and timing, like you said.
Casey:
And the other thing I want to very, very briefly mention is Sonos does have true... It's true something out there.
Casey:
I forget the marketing term they use for it.
Casey:
But what you can do is, for the home theater stuff, you can take an iPhone or an iPad.
Casey:
And actually, one thing that's not great about Sonos is they're not very good about updating this for new hardware.
Casey:
I presume because they have to get that hardware in-house and figure out what the microphones are like and blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
But
Casey:
One way or another, you can take an iPad or an iPhone, as long as they're not brand new, and you can go into the Sonos app, and you walk around your room as it plays different tones, as you're literally waving the iPad or iPhone up and down in your arms, you look like a friggin' idiot when you're doing this.
Marco:
This is one of those things, it's like, if your spouse walks in on you when you're doing this, there are so many better things for them to walk in on than this.
Casey:
Yeah, the list of things that are worse is not very long.
Casey:
But nevertheless, they do have this True Tone or whatever, I forget what it's called, where allegedly it will do similar things to the Sony setup that we've been talking about.
Casey:
I am not here trying to say that it's the same.
Casey:
I'm not trying to say that it's better than the Sony or even as good as the Sony.
Casey:
But allegedly, they will do some sort of sound shaping in order to accommodate your room.
Casey:
I mean, I did this and I didn't notice a particularly big difference, but who knows.
Marco:
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Casey:
Mark Johnson writes, with regard to John's woes, and it's not just John, with skipping intro and accidentally mashing on the touchpad and doing all sorts of various and sundry terrible things.
Casey:
Mark Johnson writes, when using the Apple TV and presented with the skip intro prompt on the screen, don't use the middle button at the top of the remote.
Casey:
Use the play pause button instead.
Casey:
In Netflix and Plex, that button works.
Casey:
The icon on the screen actually has the play pause icon before the skip text.
Casey:
I didn't know that.
John:
Couple, couple things of this.
John:
So first I did, since complaining about it in the last show, I did actually bite the bullet and turn off touch sensitivity on my Apple TV remote just to try that for a while to see if I, you know, and predictably as soon as I do that, I try to swipe on the thing on the main screen to navigate.
John:
And of course it doesn't work, but I'm trying that to see if it helps reliability.
John:
In terms of the play pause button, one of the things I didn't mention when I was complaining about apps is forget about the touchpad.
John:
Some apps that I use on Apple TV, I'll be watching a show and I will hit the play pause button to pause the video and then I'll go to do something and then I'll come back and hit the play pause button again to resume the video and it will start playing five minutes in either direction.
John:
Really?
John:
Yeah, I feel like that is, you know, that is as close to basic functionality fail as you can get with the Apple TV, short of not showing picture or sound, right?
John:
Because it's like, there's no touchpad involved here.
John:
This is not a complicated UI.
John:
And it's, again, I don't blame the Apple TV.
John:
It's the app, whatever app this is, is doing something terrible.
John:
Like, it's like the mortal sin of a playback application to jump me forward in a show that I've never seen before.
John:
Five minutes when all I did was hit play, pause, a non-touch sensitive button on my remote.
John:
So, so angry.
John:
So I really hope Apple TV apps get better with time because a lot of them are really falling down the job.
Casey:
I mean, I don't use that many apps on the Apple TV.
John:
I do, unfortunately.
John:
That's why I do this tour of all the bad programming across the industry.
Casey:
Because I'm not trying to argue with your experience.
Casey:
I'm not trying to say you're wrong.
Casey:
But for me, most of my watching is in Plex, Disney Plus, or Channels.
Casey:
And all three of them, I can't recall having had this problem.
Casey:
Maybe I have and I just don't remember.
Casey:
But certainly not with the frequency that you seem to.
Casey:
So I don't know if it just so happens that it's not those three apps that you're seeing this all the time.
John:
I don't think it's usually the more obscure ones.
John:
And I'm counting like Hulu is maybe more obscure than those things.
John:
Amazon, I think, is the worst, probably.
John:
Amazon is probably the buggiest in terms of, you know, fundamental bugs.
John:
I've had problems with Hulu.
John:
The various HBO apps over the years have been of varying quality.
John:
It's, you know, the Apple TV, Apple TV Plus one, I think is the only one that I've probably never had a problem with.
John:
The problem with that one, of course, is I can never find what I was watching.
John:
But that's that's a universal problem.
Casey:
Just yesterday, I sat down to watch the first episode of Ted Lasso to prepare myself for the new season.
Casey:
I think I'm a day behind already, but this is the time that if you watch one a day, you'll be roughly synced up by the time the new season starts.
Casey:
And for the life of me, the information architecture on the Apple TV app is the biggest pile of garbage.
Casey:
It is so bad.
Casey:
Maybe it's just my brain doesn't work the way that those designers do.
John:
Just give up and search, because if you have a goal in mind, that UI will fight you every second of the way.
Casey:
Yes!
John:
Their whole point is that they don't want you to have a goal.
John:
They want, says, don't you try to watch something?
John:
Let us tell you what to watch.
John:
And it's like, but what if I already know what I want to watch?
John:
Like, no, sorry, that's wrong, user.
John:
You should not know what you want to watch.
John:
I know you think you want to watch the next episode on the show you've been watching.
John:
For the past 30 days, all you've been doing every night is watching the show.
John:
You probably want to watch the next episode, but there's no way in hell I'm going to show that to you.
John:
Try and find it.
Casey:
Yeah, I could not agree with you more.
Casey:
It's so bad.
Casey:
It's so bad.
Casey:
Anyway, moving along.
Casey:
Michael McGuire writes, this is with regard to your Ask ATP segment about IDE updates.
Casey:
I think your focus on incremental updates of Xcode versus full downloads might have missed the point of the question.
Casey:
In almost every other development platform I've used, including Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ, and others, there's a separation between the SDK, the build system, and the editor itself.
Casey:
Take Android, for instance.
Casey:
The SDK is a direct download from Android Studio, and
Casey:
which uses Gradle for building.
Casey:
Even the compiler is a separate component that can often be independently upgraded.
Casey:
With Apple, it's a big gelatinous blob.
Casey:
When you update Xcode, you are getting a new compiler build system, SDK and IDE.
Casey:
Other than simulators and Swift compiler tool chains, it is an all or nothing affair.
Casey:
And even with Swift, you can't use a compiler outside of the one shipping with Xcode if you are deploying to the App Store.
Casey:
I think that this is perhaps why the writer of the question is confused.
Casey:
From the outside, Apple's way of doing things is completely foreign.
Casey:
That's a pretty good summary, actually.
John:
Yeah, I mean, but the explanation for that is pretty straightforward.
John:
Like everyone who knows enough to ask this question knows why Apple does it.
John:
It's more convenient for them.
John:
It's more convenient.
John:
It's actually it's you would say it's less convenient for users because you got to do this big download.
John:
But it has fewer permutations of stuff.
John:
If Apple lets you mix and match like they used to let you mix and match more than they do.
John:
But if they let you let you mix and match.
John:
debugging problems for Apple and for developers would be more difficult because it's so much harder to describe your situation.
John:
Whereas at least now you can say I'm using Xcode, whatever, whatever, right?
John:
And that description encapsulates the entirety of your situation.
John:
If you had to say I'm using this compiler with this IDE, with this, you know, it's more variables, right?
John:
So they ship it all to one unit because it's just simpler for everybody involved.
John:
It is more limiting.
John:
You have less flexibility.
John:
That's true.
John:
But
John:
I kind of don't fault Apple for this because they have a fairly complicated thing.
John:
Xcode itself is a very complicated IDE.
John:
Their compiler tool chain is complicated.
John:
They target lots of different devices.
John:
I would not endorse the idea that Apple should, at this point, with their current quality standards and resourcing, break out their IDE from their tool chain, from their build system or whatever.
John:
Please continue to ship it as all one unit.
John:
Just make it work better.
Marco:
And frankly, as a developer, with the disclaimer that my internet connection is good enough, that the download sizes aren't prohibitive...
Marco:
I actually prefer it this way because I don't want to have to deal with, oh, this version of this tool is out of date, but this is conflicting with this thing over here.
Marco:
You know what it would be like.
Marco:
We've seen this in other areas of tech and with these other ideas.
Casey:
Tell me you're a CocoaPods developer without telling me you're a CocoaPods developer.
Casey:
Holy smokes, it's so bad.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
We know exactly what – it would be a mess of package installation and conflicts and dependencies and tools not working right with each other or things thinking they're there when they're not.
Marco:
We know what that world would be like.
Marco:
I am very happy to have this one area of my life that I don't have to deal with that.
Yeah.
Casey:
William Vabrinskis writes, the Ford F-150 Lightning sunroof does kind of what you explained in the latest ATP.
Casey:
It's the full length of the roof, slightly tinted.
Casey:
It fully opens and has a cloth motorized cover.
Casey:
I am here for Marco driving a pickup.
Casey:
I cannot imagine what that would look like.
John:
I'm shocked that something like this exists.
John:
I looked at a video.
John:
It really does all those things.
John:
It's just a unicorn.
John:
I don't know of any other vehicle in the past two decades that had all these things.
John:
Glass on roof with tint with a cloth cover that also opens.
John:
It's unheard of.
Casey:
Aaron's does.
Casey:
Aaron's?
Casey:
It's not the full length of the roof.
John:
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
John:
In modern, sort of modern full glass roof thing, but that also is tinted, but that also opens, but that also has a cloth cover.
John:
It's everything combined.
John:
um it used to be the norm like this when you get in all of them back when sunroofs were these little rounded rec portals on the top of your car but now it's the whole roof yeah i mean aaron's is the largest sunroof that i have had you know had ownership of but it is not nearly as big as a lot of these and it doesn't there's this glass between it and the windshield too it's not continuous yes yeah there's there's metal between it yeah i think that's true on the f-150 as well it's just the model x is the full glass thing yeah
Casey:
Which, by the way, we made all the Model X owners mad and don't care.
John:
It does look more tinted from the outside.
John:
That is true.
Casey:
We have a little bit of COVID follow-up.
Casey:
Let me just start with a disclaimer that if you are worried about getting advice regarding COVID, the last three humans on the planet you should listen to are the three of us.
John:
we all have a lot of experience now yeah that's true also there's a lot of way worse advice out there well okay that's also fair i'm trying i'm trying to be self-deprecating here but no you are right well well hey let me let me preface this because uh the reason this is important the reason i put these links uh in here uh when i talked about this uh last time i i said a bunch of stuff about covet and mark was like oh i hadn't heard of that or one of you was like i hadn't heard of that um
John:
If you're not constantly keeping up with all the articles that come out about COVID and the various studies, like stuff's changing all the time.
John:
So what I had said about, you know, multiple COVID infections being subsequent COVID infections being worse, getting worse and worse instead of getting better.
John:
I wasn't just making that up.
John:
It was something that I had read.
John:
And then people said, oh, actually, you know, there have been more studies and they found out that's not really the case.
John:
Right.
John:
That's the way science works.
John:
Right.
John:
But I was like, is that really super outdated information?
John:
Because people ask for like, where did you read this?
John:
I'm like, oh, I've seen this recently enough.
John:
I can pull up the link and I would send it to people.
John:
And the study was like a Washington University study or something.
John:
November 2022.
John:
That's not that long ago.
John:
No, it is.
John:
So November 2022, it's like already outdated, right?
John:
Because there's so many people are studying this, as you can imagine.
John:
The status quo changes.
John:
And if you haven't looked at the status quo since like 2020 or 20, if you haven't like read up about COVID stuff since 2020 or 2021, so much has changed since then.
John:
So there's a whole class of people who I'd never heard that subsequent COVID infections get worse.
John:
I'd heard about it all over the place because for whatever reason in my various news feeds and Twitter feeds and Macedon feeds, I tend to see these articles.
John:
And there was a big hubbub made about this article in November 2022.
John:
And that's the last thing I had read about COVID that had stuck in my mind.
John:
And it wasn't that long ago.
John:
But since then, people have jumped on that and said, okay, we'll try to reproduce this study.
John:
Let's look at this study with their flaws in it or whatever.
John:
And so the upshot is that subsequent studies have found...
John:
They can't reproduce the results of this other one, and they're not sure it was representative of average people.
John:
So research continues.
John:
But this is just to drive home the point that it's hard to stay on top of the stuff because it is changing month by month, week by week.
John:
And even when there's a big story that's across all the big papers and everything, because as Washington University said, you'll find it in every single big news site covered heavily.
John:
You have to look and see if they were.
John:
And of course, that story gets more coverage than the follow up that says, actually, we couldn't reproduce this story, but it is out there.
John:
And, you know, and there'll be another one at like the recent round of things are like, what kind of things you're more susceptible to after you're infected with COVID?
John:
Oh, you know, five times higher chance of heart disease and three times higher chance of diabetes or whatever.
John:
And then the follow ups to those are like, well, but is it give you more of a chance of diabetes?
John:
Are you now going to the doctor?
John:
So you're more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes, whereas before you weren't going to the doctor because you were quarantining.
John:
It's like,
John:
Research continues.
John:
So it's hard to keep up with this treadmill, but I think it is, it's not important to be on the treadmill, but it's also not important to cement your idea of COVID in 2020 because so much has changed since then.
John:
It will continue to change.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
So I really enjoyed Keith's feedback.
Casey:
I'm going to try to make this very quick.
Casey:
As per the proof that your audience is extremely diverse, I'm a scientist, PhD medicinal chemist who has worked on viruses for pretty much my whole career, first as a medicinal chemist and then in other roles.
Casey:
And, you know, Keith has worked on basically anything you've heard of in the past.
Casey:
Uh, reinfection does not lead to increased severity.
Casey:
Most systematic studies have shown that disease severity is generally lower or similar on reinfection.
Casey:
There are tons of references out there, but there, and he cites different studies, put them in the show notes.
Casey:
Uh, and then a more recent publication seems to confirm this and suggest that reinfection has a similar severity to the first infection, not worse.
Casey:
Related COVID does not interfere with the immune system to make subsequent infections worse.
Casey:
This famously occurs with dengue and likely Zika through a mechanism called antibody dependent enhancement.
Casey:
There's no evidence that this occurs with COVID.
Casey:
Uh,
Casey:
So selfishly, I thought this was fascinating.
Casey:
Keith had commented that if Michaela had been vaccinated in the last three months, which again, she was first week in January and we got sick, what, like two, three weeks ago, then her antibody levels are likely to be high enough to prevent infection.
Casey:
And we tested her a handful of times and she was negative every time.
Casey:
And then John started, you know, sprinkling the links, which we'll put in the show notes, to this study that you were referring to just a moment ago, John.
Casey:
And in a subsequent email to me, Keith wrote, I would add that there's a study that seems to show worse outcomes on reinfection, which I think John may be referring to.
Casey:
This was a veteran study published late last year.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And it did indeed get a lot of attention.
Casey:
It is a good paper, and there are no obvious massive flaws.
Casey:
However, no other publication has shown this, and most have shown the opposite.
Casey:
Plus, it somewhat flies in the face of basic immunology that the immune system learns what infects it so that it is prepared for future infections.
Casey:
The study has received some level of criticism that the study is based to older white males.
Casey:
Personally, I think there's something odd about the selection criteria, i.e.
Casey:
who goes into the control group and who doesn't, that makes me suspect that there's an underlying bias that screws things up.
Casey:
Or perhaps the study is correct and old white dudes are getting some payback.
Casey:
which I thought was quite funny.
Casey:
So thank you to Keith.
Casey:
There was a lot more, a lot more that Keith wrote that I, again, found utterly fascinating, but that's the TLDR, which I also thought was very, very interesting.
John:
Yeah, and part of the, like, the people writing about and trying to study the idea of it and messing with your immune system is the idea that if subsequent infections get worse and not better, that flies in the face of what you would expect, and it only happens in infections that do actually attack your immune system in some way.
John:
I mentioned measles last time as another, other examples here.
John:
So that's why people study these things.
John:
And that's why, you know, when someone does a study, someone follows up on it and tries to figure out more.
John:
So, you know, every every day, hopefully we're making progress.
John:
But I think it is worth occasionally dipping your toe back into the updated information on whatever your trusted source is.
John:
Probably not a newspaper, but, you know, the big health systems like the CDC in the US or whatever.
John:
Tend to take a while to get on board, as we saw during the initial wave of COVID.
John:
Maybe CDC's advice lagged behind the best thinking by a significant amount and maybe as occasionally politically motivated, which is not great.
John:
But wherever you decide to check things out, it's a good idea to, you know, occasionally check back in and see how things have changed.
Marco:
Also, you know, quote, COVID is not just one virus.
Marco:
Like we've had so many variants that have become dominant at different times throughout this pandemic that, you know, whatever variant you get now, you know, you might have different responses to it because it's actually a different virus than the one you got two years ago.
Marco:
This is not a stationary target that we're talking about here.
Marco:
The virus is also evolving.
Marco:
Conditions are also changing.
Marco:
Treatments are changing.
Marco:
People have or don't have vaccines and different timings on that, different vaccines they could have gotten, different drugs they might have taken.
Marco:
There's so many variables here.
Marco:
So yeah, the way to stay on top of things like this is to be willing to change your mind when new information becomes available.
John:
yeah a lot of the subsequent studies are on exactly that they're like well we studied this and we're pretty happy that everyone was able to reproduce it and we understood it but that was for like the original variant so now we have to do all those same studies again with delta with omicron with like because they're basically redoing stuff to confirm hey does this still apply with the current variant that's out now right just like they had to do with like all this science they did about covid before vaccines they had to redo all that with vaccines as how do the vaccines change and do they affect it at all
John:
And that's why even if you think everything is, you know, settled down and it's understood, when new variants come out, they have to redo a lot of that stuff because they have to at the very least confirm, is this also true of whatever the popular variant is now?
John:
So it's tough.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
There are definitely worse people to get the advice from than the three of us.
Casey:
I don't know what I was thinking.
Casey:
This is the danger of speaking extemporaneously.
John:
We will never tell you to take horse paste.
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Casey:
Apparently it is the season, tis the season, for iPhone leaks and rumors, but more leaks.
Casey:
And we have a report from 9to5Mac, two reports actually.
Casey:
One about the iPhone 15 CAD drawings, which allegedly reveal a larger 6.2-inch display and a dynamic island and USB-C.
Casey:
And then separately, they also have an exclusive first look at the special edition color for the iPhone 15 Pro, which I believe is coral, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
It's rude.
Casey:
Okay, there you go.
Casey:
They just need to pair it with orange and they'll be set.
Casey:
And not many of you understood that joke, but power to you if you did.
Casey:
Go Hokies.
Casey:
So anyways, this stands to reason that the iPhone 15, the not Pro, is getting the dynamic island this year, getting a slightly larger display.
Casey:
USB-C is a surprise if that's real, but otherwise, this basically makes sense to me.
John:
I think it is real because I feel like this is basically iPhone announcement day.
John:
iPhones just reliably leak.
John:
I think this is earlier than normal, but once the CAD drawings, as they always call them in these stories, once that stuff comes out and it's close enough to the date and enough people corroborate it and it starts appearing around, it might as well be
John:
the day of the iPhone announcement.
John:
We talk about future iPhones all the time on the show, and usually we're just covering the rumors.
John:
Here's what people think it might be.
John:
Here's what it could be.
John:
Here's what it means technology-wise, right?
John:
But at a certain point, all of that coalesces to be, here's the new iPhone.
John:
And then when they announced the new iPhone, they're like, yep, that's exactly what we knew about, you know, however long ago.
John:
And so if you look at these CAD drawings, it has eliminated a lot of the things that I was hoping for and confirmed some things that, you know, that I was expecting.
John:
So...
John:
the usbc on everything uh you know even though these are just cad drawings we know usbc hole when we see it right that's what this is um i i think i've talked about it in the past but my desire for less of a camera bump and my hope that the quote-unquote periscope camera lens assembly on the on future iphones would make this happen this is not that year the only place there's going to be a periscope camera is in the pro max and they're not using it to make the bump smaller they're just using it to get uh more zoom right um
John:
These drawings, they look kind of like the existing iPhone 13 or 14 Pro, but with more rounded edges.
John:
So it's not the same case.
John:
It has more of a rounded edge.
John:
It's flat sides, but a little bit more of a rounded edge.
John:
And the Pros apparently have a titanium frame, which will be cool from a materials finish point of view.
John:
If that's even true.
John:
But otherwise, they I mean, if you look at the CAD drawings, they look a lot like a 14 Pro.
John:
There's a massive three camera gigantic plateau with many, many levels.
John:
And the regular iPhone has just the two cameras with a smaller plateau.
John:
They have not radically changed design.
John:
There's not a new camera hump.
John:
They're not slimmer in the camera area.
John:
They're just, you know, they're just new iPhones, which is not disappointing necessarily.
John:
But I mean, I guess it increases my odds because this is not my phone year.
John:
Next year is my phone year.
John:
I guess it increases my odds if that's going to happen.
John:
Maybe it'll happen the next year.
John:
But I don't know.
John:
I just kind of feel like we're stuck with this lump for a while and it's kind of disappointing.
John:
But the titanium will be exciting.
John:
And the other thing in the story is, oh, breaking down how it's going to be between pro and non-pro and how they're going to differentiate.
John:
uh they're already differentiating in this generation with the like the good soc and the pro and like quote unquote last year's soc and the non-pro uh that seems like they're going to continue to do that and uh this max tech video that we'll link in the show it's had like a little slide that listed what they thought would be the pro features to get you to pony up for the fancy one
John:
um promotion i'm assuming that would be there they list the screen sizes as well but i assume those will be close apparently the pro has a different size screen the 15 pro has a different size screen slightly than the 14 pro which whatever it could just be you know the screen manufacturer um 2.5 d glass which is their way of saying kind of like on the apple watch if you look at it from the side the glass bulges out a little bit which seems wild to me and you can't really see in these cad drawings because the cad drawings are just of the case um
John:
But like, wouldn't you want the glass of your phone not to stick out past the edge?
John:
Like that's what phone cases do.
John:
But on the other hand, kind of like the watch glass, maybe it does that because it's thicker.
John:
But on the other other hand, really thick glass would make your finger not feel like it's touching the things under the screen as well.
John:
So I don't know what to make of that, but I'm just reading out what's here.
John:
Thinner bezels, if you can even tell that without your, you know, calipers out.
John:
Titanium frame, solid state buttons, which we talked about in the past, which is wacky.
John:
Periscope lens on the Pro Max model, the A17, which the regular iPhone 15 won't have, presumably, 8 gigs of RAM, Wi-Fi 6E, and Thunderbolt 3.
John:
So the rumor is that the plain iPhone 15 has a USB-C-shaped hole, but it is not Thunderbolt.
John:
And the rumor was that it's USB 2 speeds, which...
John:
I mean, I guess that would definitely be an Apple thing to do, right?
John:
Put a USB-C on the iPhone and not increase the transfer speed.
John:
But the rumor is that the Pro has a USB-C shape holder that does Thunderbolt 3, which would be a welcome improvement.
John:
So that's actually a lot of advantages for the Pro, mostly achieved by making the non-Pro crappier, I guess.
John:
But...
John:
Anyway, if you're wondering what the iPhone 15 is going to be at this point, I feel pretty confident saying that if you follow this link in nine to five Mac and look at the pictures, the only things you don't know are the things nobody ever knows.
John:
What are they going to call the color?
John:
What are the new colors going to be?
John:
What are the new finishes going to be?
John:
What are the exact price is going to be?
John:
All that stuff like basically doesn't leak because you don't need, you know, thousands and thousands of people to know it.
John:
But because you need to manufacture so many of these things and because they're probably going to start manufacturing them soon, this stuff can and will leak.
John:
And so we'll, you know, when we watch these iPhone keynotes, it's like the only thing we're finding out is like, you know, seeing the Apple promo videos and seeing what they're going to call that coral color.
Marco:
This makes me very, very happy overall because here's the thing.
Marco:
All the things that we don't know, and there's so many.
Marco:
Every year there's usually some new camera feature that the new hardware enables that's only available on the newest phone.
Marco:
So there's going to be some cool camera feature.
Marco:
We don't know the details about the cameras really to any degree of credibility.
Marco:
If they're going to do a Periscope thing, how good is that going to be for the optical zoom or whatever?
Marco:
How zoomed in is it going to be?
Marco:
How compromised is that camera going to be relative to the One X camera?
Marco:
There's so many details like that, but for me, they had me at USB-C.
Marco:
They could change nothing else.
Marco:
They could make it just switch to USB-C charging, and I'd be sold, and I'd buy it instantly.
Marco:
To me, the two things I'm most excited about are USB-C, number one, by a mile,
Marco:
And then a distant number two, titanium.
Marco:
Because ultimately, I'm pretty happy with my, what are we on, 14?
Marco:
With my 14 Pro.
Marco:
Except it's really freaking heavy.
Marco:
And it's not like a deal breaker.
Marco:
I do wish it was smaller.
Marco:
But I really wish it was lighter.
Marco:
And it's pretty hard to make a modern smartphone lighter without giving up a lot of battery life because batteries are pretty heavy.
Marco:
And one of the ways they can do it is they can switch from steel for the outer rim, which there is no reason to have that.
Marco:
They can switch to a lighter metal and titanium is a great option.
Marco:
And I was like, you know, these we see these renders here.
Marco:
But remember a few days ago.
Marco:
somebody actually posted like a leaked alleged photo of the case oh yeah and you and as and i saw that photo and i saw the the kind of um horizontal grained brushed finish and i was like titanium but like i yelled it like it's i was so happy like that you could tell instantly by looking at that that's almost certainly titanium and i was so happy to see that i do wonder if that's an unfinished model you know what i mean though like uh like they haven't they haven't put the finish on it
John:
Yeah, oh yeah, we don't know what the final finish will be.
Marco:
It looked like brushed, finished titanium, and it wouldn't surprise me if that is the final finish.
John:
I wish they would sell one that looked like that, like the look would be brushed, unfinished titanium, but I have a feeling they're not going to.
Marco:
Yeah, well, I mean, I can't even tell you what the outside of mine looks like, because it's in a case all the time, because these phones are too big to hold.
John:
No, no, you just want it to be lighter, like that.
John:
If you look at the titanium watches, they have also not looked like unfinished titanium.
John:
They've always kind of had a uniform matte kind of thing going on.
John:
I'm not sure what that finish is.
Marco:
Well, no, it's interesting.
Marco:
So the Ultra, which is titanium, basically has like a uniform sandblasted look to it.
Marco:
There is no grain on the Ultra.
Marco:
Whereas the previous series up to seven editions that were titanium have vertical or horizontal graining.
Marco:
And it looks really nice.
Marco:
This is, I mean, I still, my daily driver Apple Watch is still a Series 7 because I like titanium so much.
Marco:
And they took it away with the Series 8.
Marco:
Again, I really hope they bring this back with the Series 9.
Marco:
That's...
Marco:
That's like my one wish for the Apple Watch Series 9.
Marco:
My biggest wish is bring back titanium.
Marco:
And then my second biggest wishes are things like make the software better.
Marco:
But that's a different story for a different day.
Marco:
But yeah, so iPhone 15 rumors.
Marco:
Thumbs up for me so far.
Casey:
I don't have a dire need for USB-C in terms of travel, which I think is when most people would be interested in it.
Casey:
Because I do love my little docking base thing that I talked about many moons ago.
Casey:
But I will tell you that we have a single USB-C Apple charging cable strung from the wall through the couch, so it's basically available to whoever's sitting on the couch at the time.
Casey:
And you know what's great about that is it can charge Aaron's computer.
Casey:
It can charge my computer.
Casey:
It can charge the kid iPad.
Casey:
It can charge my iPad.
Casey:
But you know what it can't frigging charge?
Casey:
My stupid phone.
Casey:
I would love it.
Casey:
I mean, I would love to have Thunderbolt in a pro phone, but even leaving that aside, and I think this is what you were saying a minute ago, Marco, like, just give me the connector.
Casey:
Like, I don't even care if it's USB two speeds for the most part.
Casey:
Just give me the damn connector.
Casey:
And so I can sit on the couch and use the cable that's right there.
Casey:
And actually charge the phone.
Casey:
Yes, please.
Casey:
I'll take two.
Casey:
I can only hope.
Casey:
There was a very interesting release from Mark Gurman this week.
Casey:
Gurman says that Apple has made major progress on a no-prick blood glucose tracking for its watch.
Casey:
Apple Inc.
Casey:
has a moonshot-style project underway that dates back to the Steve Jobs era.
Casey:
Non-invasive and continuous blood glucose monitoring.
Casey:
The goal of this secret endeavor, dubbed E5, is to measure how much glucose is in somebody's body without needing to prick the skin for blood.
Casey:
After hitting major milestones recently, the company now believes it could eventually bring glucose monitoring to market, according to people familiar with the effort.
Casey:
I'll be the first to tell you I don't know very much about all of this, but my limited understanding is, and please, one of you jump in whenever you're ready, is that for those of us who are diabetic, you need to know what the status of your blood glucose is.
Casey:
And to do that is kind of a pain, and there are these
Casey:
continuous monitors that you can get, but I guess they're very complicated and they don't work very well and then people will hack them.
Casey:
What's the guy from Microsoft whose name is escaping me right now that's done a lot of this?
Casey:
Paul Allen?
Casey:
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Casey:
He's dead?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Paul Allen's dead, right?
Casey:
No, I didn't think he was.
Casey:
Is he?
Casey:
Now we've got to derail everything.
Casey:
No, the programmer guy.
Casey:
Yes, he died in 2018.
Casey:
Oh, wow.
Marco:
I didn't know that.
John:
That's too bad.
Casey:
Anyways, no, the developer guy.
Casey:
Oh, gosh, I'm so mad that I can't think of his name.
John:
The developer guy, Raymond Chen?
John:
Hanselman?
John:
Scott Hanselman?
Casey:
Yes, thank you.
Casey:
Hanselman, that's who I'm thinking of.
John:
I would not have pegged him as the Microsoft guy.
John:
All right.
Casey:
Well, he is at Microsoft.
John:
I know, I get it.
John:
Yeah, you're right.
John:
He's a guy at Microsoft.
Casey:
Anyway, this is going right off the rails, and I'm pretty sure it's my fault.
Casey:
And I'm not the sick one.
Casey:
But anyways, I believe that he is diabetic or something along those lines and has done a lot of stuff with regard to continuous blood glucose monitoring.
Casey:
And I guess there's a whole hobby, not even industry, but a grassroots thing where people will figure out how to hack existing blood glucose monitors to make them work way better and something like that.
Casey:
So all of that is to say my very, very limited, mostly ignorant understanding is this is a big freaking deal.
Casey:
And I can only imagine how amazing this would be if I were diabetic to have something like this.
John:
Well, the good news is you're now 40% more likely to be diabetic.
Casey:
Why?
Casey:
Because COVID?
John:
Yeah.
John:
This is a March 31st, 2022 story.
John:
So I'm sure it's changed since then.
John:
But anyway, lots of people.
John:
Again, it's the question, as I was saying before.
John:
So they do these studies and it says, you know, people who had COVID-19 were 40% more likely to develop diabetes up to a year later.
John:
But then it's like, okay, but is that just because they went to the doctor?
John:
Right.
John:
Because they had they're getting diagnosed because they made a trip they wouldn't normally take him to the doctor.
John:
And so now it's discovered and it would have been there anyway.
John:
So it's hard.
John:
So I'm just making a joke.
John:
But anyway, I think that corrects that is like 10 percent of the U.S.
John:
adult population is diabetic or something.
John:
It's it's not a rare condition, which is why this story, which, by the way, as as the, you know, the German article notes, this project has been known outside of Apple as as a rumor, of course, because Apple isn't confirming this stuff.
John:
For just a long, long time.
John:
And it's kind of like saying, yeah, we're working on perpetual motion or, you know, cold fusion or whatever.
John:
It's a thing that if you were to find a way to do it, it is a big moneymaker.
John:
And also it would have a big effect on people's lives.
John:
Doesn't sound like it's a big deal.
John:
It's like, oh, what's the big deal?
John:
You prick your finger, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Imagine if you had to do that every day.
John:
sometimes multiple times a day to like plan out your eating it is painful and annoying and inconvenient and it really messes with people's lives and it's not and it affects millions and millions of people so if you can find a non-invasive way to do that uh you can make a lot of people's lives better which means you can also make a lot of money and there's there's those things they have now that you sort of slap onto your skin that look like little stickers but they have little things that poke into your skin and they're
John:
They're not painful, but they hook up, you know, they hook up to some other meter.
John:
Like, everyone's always trying to crack this nut because there's a huge addressable market.
John:
It is a big problem.
John:
And current solutions are seemingly barbaric.
John:
I mean, pricking your finger with a piece of metal and putting a drop of blood onto a strip of paper is, you know, stone age technology from a medical perspective.
John:
So...
John:
If your Apple Watch could just tell you, boy, wouldn't that be amazing?
John:
Kind of like if you had a car that could drive itself while you sleep at the wheel.
John:
Wouldn't that be amazing?
John:
That would be amazing, but also really hard to do.
John:
So the fact that Apple is trying to tackle this, I mean, at first it probably kind of seemed like, all right, I mean, I get it.
John:
That would make the world a better place.
John:
It would make Apple a lot of money.
John:
It's the intersection of liberal arts and technology, the intersection of altruism and capitalism, whatever you want to call it.
John:
Kind of makes sense.
John:
But why does Apple have to do this?
John:
Apple's not a healthcare company, right?
John:
But on the other hand, as technology advances, this problem, like the way you're trying to solve this problem is like, okay, well, we need a bunch of sensors that are attached to your body with a microprocessor to interpret the results because it's not straightforward.
John:
Like, it's not like, oh, we'll just, you know...
John:
take this measurement and if it's above this value it's your you know it's complicated it's like the technology they're talking about the rumors is they fire a bunch of tiny lasers into your skin and everything and and look at the scatter back and analyze it with this complicated out like you need a little computer and if the idea is you need to have sensors attached to your skin with a powerful little computer that people are willing to wear suddenly you're like hmm apple seems actually a pretty good fit for this so if apple can ever figure it out
John:
They're as well positioned as anybody to solve this problem in a way that, as they would say, synergizes with their business.
John:
They're already selling Apple Watches.
John:
Apple Watch's primary purpose is already mostly for fitness and health related things.
John:
Lots of people have this health problem.
John:
Being able to sell them an Apple Watch that would solve this problem, boy, they would sell so many Apple Watches.
John:
The one bad thing that Apple probably doesn't anticipate is that if they actually solve this problem, there will be immediate pressure for them to sell Apple Watches for less money because it is unfair to sort of keep this technology, you know, it's like, oh, it's Apple patented and no one else can implement it and blah, blah, blah.
John:
which is terrible and all.
John:
And the cheapest Apple Watch that has this feature is like $400.
John:
I mean, people will still pay it because they'll find a way to pay it because it's such a quality of life increase, but it almost seems... Cheaper than insulin.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It almost seems ridiculous and unfair that something that could improve so many people's lives is...
John:
You know, under the control of a private company that, for reasons unrelated to evil, but just related to their market positioning, doesn't sort of serve down market.
John:
And even when, you know, you mentioned the insulin thing.
John:
Like, what was it?
John:
The person who made the insulin discovery or got the patent for it or whatever intended it to be available for everybody and never wanted it to be expensive.
John:
But that person died.
John:
And the rest of the people...
John:
took that ball and ran with it.
John:
And now insulin costs a bazillion dollars in the U S because people found out that other people needed to live and you can charge them a lot of money, which is why healthcare should not be a for-profit enterprise.
John:
Anyway, um, I, I guess this is good to hear.
John:
Oh, progress is being made, but, uh,
John:
At this point, this is like the original Project Titan.
John:
Like, at this point, when I hear stories about the blood glucose thing, I'm like, okay, well, you know, when you figure it out, let me know.
John:
I'll just wait another decade here because it's been going on for so long.
John:
And so far, we've got pretty much nothing to show for it.
John:
Like, Apple does health stuff and, you know, blood pressure and ECG or whatever.
John:
Like, they do all these health things, but not once has there been a whiff of blood glucose anything from Apple.
John:
So, obviously, they haven't figured it out yet.
John:
So, I'm rooting for them.
John:
But I really, you know...
John:
i i don't think it's a story until it's a story and until then it is a a very long running uh money pit for apple that i think honestly has more promise than project titan at this point oh far more it's also been running longer than project titan without results so i don't know i mean the thing is like other companies make cars and they're pretty good which we'll get to a little bit later um and so like you know it's fun like we don't need apple to make a car
Marco:
No one has done this.
Marco:
And you're right.
Marco:
If they can pull this off, it's a massive deal.
Marco:
And so that's why I think hearing even a rumor from Mark Gurman that this might have made major progress and that this might be able to become a product at some point in the future –
Marco:
Hearing news about this, it's not quite on the same level, but I think it's a similar kind of moonshot as fusion.
Marco:
It's like, oh my god, when you hear news that we've made progress, as we actually recently have, made progress in the area of sustainable fusion energy, that's the kind of moonshot this is.
Marco:
That would be curing diabetes.
John:
categorize that and not just finding a better way to deal with it curing it would be more of that kind of or maybe cure maybe curing cancer because and fusion by the way so we don't get all the follow-up on that the progress on fusion the the fusion naysayers are going to write it and tell us that it's not as close as you think because that's the way fusion works i didn't say it was close but i said they made progress which is true and that's and i think that's how this is you know
Marco:
tell it's hard to tell when you're so far from the finish line i know i know but you know the point is like people care a lot even when small progress is made because if we ever pull it off it's such a big deal that's that's how this is like any news on this front is a big deal because if this thing ever actually is workable as a real product that's a huge deal like you know none of us have diabetes but my dog does
Marco:
And I actually have used on him one of those continuous monitor things.
Marco:
And, you know, you mentioned, oh, yeah, it doesn't hurt.
Marco:
Well, dogs don't understand, though.
Marco:
You can't explain to them.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
But, like, you know, so here's the thing.
Marco:
Like, what you're trying to sample, and please, actual diabetics out there, I apologize if any of these details are wrong.
Marco:
I only know it through my dog.
Marco:
But what you're trying to sample is you're trying to figure out the curve of your blood glucose level over time.
Marco:
And, you know, when you eat...
Marco:
That goes up and then it comes down over time as the effect of insulin comes in and everything.
Marco:
And so when you just prick your finger and get a little sample there, you're sampling one point on a wave.
Marco:
You might not necessarily know where on that wave you are.
Marco:
So while the point sampling has clear value over no information –
Marco:
continuous data is far more useful way way way more useful way more actionable way more precise and in fact i i'm pretty sure i don't know the details of this so forgive me but i know that the the like diabetic human world has long since largely moved to insulin pumps which kind of monitor stuff continuously and give you the right amount of insulin at any given times is how i understand it but you know instead of just like one big shot whereas i have to give my dog just you know two big shots a day because they don't have those for dogs and he's really small anyway so i wouldn't even fit him
Marco:
But anyway, and yes, it's horrible giving your dog insulin shots.
Marco:
It's heartbreaking.
Marco:
They let you do it because they let you do anything.
Marco:
But God, it's heartbreaking for you because you can't tell them why you're hurting them.
Marco:
Oh, God, I can't give him the carrot fast enough.
Marco:
I just... Oh, God.
Marco:
Anyway, so it breaks my heart.
Marco:
But anyway, but so when we were first figuring out his diabetes, we had one of those continuous monitor things.
Marco:
And it's basically... It looks like... It's like the size of like maybe like two half dollar coins stacked on each other.
Marco:
But it has...
Marco:
about a half inch needle pointing straight out the back it's like sticking a thumbtack into your arm like and it sits there and it stays there for like a week and then after a while you know you gotta like change it and you know put a new one on and and like they they have these things for humans it's the exact same product for dogs i forget what it's called um but it's it's the exact same product
Marco:
It's this Bluetooth thing, and I was able to go on the app and see his blood glucose curve and see, okay, well, here's where he's peaking roughly, so we'll give him the insulin here, and we'll measure it, and we'll see over time how it does, and here's how it's going to work, here's when we need it, all that stuff.
Marco:
So for diabetics, continuous monitoring is hugely valuable.
Marco:
And if you can do it on a device that you're already buying or that you might be buying for a combination of other reasons, maybe you're buying it for fitness notifications, whatever it is you're buying an Apple Watch, you already have it, then it's there.
Marco:
And then additionally, there's a huge amount of value for non-diabetics who would never have a reason to get a prescription for the thing that you stick in your arm and have continuous monitoring.
Marco:
I personally would never – why would I get one of those?
Marco:
I'm not diabetic, so I don't have any reason to get one of those and to stick it in my arm and have this needle sticking in my arm for a week.
Marco:
But there is huge value in knowing those levels if you're doing things like paying attention to your nutrition.
Marco:
Or maybe trying to avoid getting type 2 diabetes in the future if you're at risk for that.
Marco:
If you're on the border, you can start making changes.
Marco:
You can see what you have to do.
Marco:
You can maybe see like, hey, you know what?
Marco:
After I have this one kind of breakfast, my glucose spikes really high.
Marco:
Maybe I should think about changing that diet.
Marco:
There's so much value there in the same way that right now the Apple Watch will – there are settings and I believe that are on by default where if you're in a super loud environment, it will tell you, hey, you're above 90 decibels for the last minute.
Marco:
This could really hurt your hearing if you do this all the time.
Marco:
Everyday people can get that and see, huh, that's interesting.
Marco:
Maybe I shouldn't put my desk right next to this jet engine.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
In the same way, maybe they could have a future feature where if you have some massive sugar bomb meal and your blood glucose spikes way too high, maybe it could tap you in the wrist and say, hey, your blood sugar is really high right now.
Marco:
Maybe consider having some fiber or something.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
You can think not only would this be life-changing to diabetics probably, but even just for everyone in the world, they could build other health-conscious features around it.
Marco:
And not to mention the fact that even people who aren't paying attention can get kind of alerts in extreme cases like that.
Marco:
But people who are paying attention, like I would love that because I care a lot about diet and fitness these days.
Marco:
And so I would love to know, like to set goals to be like, you know what, I want to make sure I'm not going to I'm not achieving or I'm not exceeding this range of glucose levels in my day to day life.
Marco:
And maybe like maybe I would like to get an alert if I ever do so I can make changes.
Marco:
Just for my own, you know, the same people track their sleep and stuff.
Marco:
I want to be able to track, you know, that kind of health as well.
Marco:
So there are huge possible features and benefits to this kind of thing if they can get it going.
Marco:
You know, a huge part of the Apple Watch is taking something that used to be a specialized medical thing, you know, like the EKG, for instance.
Marco:
taking something like that and bring it to a device that a lot of people are going to just have for other reasons anyway.
Marco:
And then if they have a weird heart arrhythmia or something, their watch can tell them, hey, something's a little bit off.
Marco:
And that is such massive value.
Marco:
So you have the massive value for the people who have certain conditions, like the AFib detection is huge.
Marco:
If you know anybody who has AFib or if you have AFib, having the Apple Watch be able to
Marco:
Track that and tell you when you're in AFib is a pretty big deal.
Marco:
But also it's a big deal for a whole bunch of other people who don't know that this might be a problem for them.
Marco:
And then if it starts becoming a problem for them, like one of the things I figured out, weirdly, I know that this is going to sound really crazy and stupid, but I've had COVID twice, I think.
Marco:
And both times I had COVID, the day before I tested positive,
Marco:
There was a point in the day where I was feeling crappy and the Apple Watch gave me that alert that says, hey, your heart rate's a little bit high and you don't seem to be doing anything.
Marco:
alarming both times i had covid that happened to me the day before i tested positive and i've never got that alert any other time so it is telling me hey your body's something's wrong like something like that kind of alert that helps that that is actionable for people that that really has a pretty big benefit to people even who don't have whatever kind of certain certain conditions might have them get some kind of medical device in the first place
Marco:
So, again, this is amazing for diabetics, but it is not just limited to diabetics in benefit.
Marco:
This could have huge benefits to everyone.
John:
Especially hypochondriacs.
John:
They love it.
John:
Yeah, that's the dark side of all these things of sometimes, as Merlin would say, having more data is not helpful, especially with people who, you know, find it kind of an attractive nuisance.
John:
But in general, it's a net win to know this stuff, in particular, especially if our healthcare system wasn't barbaric and this could, for example, funnel into your doctor.
John:
Yeah.
John:
who is probably more qualified to know if this is normal for your age and activity for you or if there's something to be concerned about.
John:
It would be great if that could be tied in for them not to just ask you how have you been feeling or to look at your most recent measurements, but if you're doing continuous monitoring, it would be great if they could just see that graph over the past 30 days and say, looks like you might be a diabetic or...
John:
No, actually, you're fine.
John:
Don't worry about this.
John:
Don't freak out when you see this number because for your age and what you ate at that meal, this is actually fine.
John:
And it's not a thing to be worried about because they know whether it's something to be worried about and not.
John:
Whereas you're just looking at a number saying, that seems high.
John:
I Googled and the number shouldn't be that high.
John:
Maybe I'm dying.
John:
So it's tricky.
John:
So don't get too confident about that.
John:
But the difficult thing with the glucose monitoring, I feel like, is...
John:
Well, it's not difficult for them, but when you see the story, it seems like what they're going for is the brass ring of continuous monitoring that you can use instead of pricking your finger.
John:
That's what people want.
John:
No more patch, no more finger pricks, just an non-invasive Apple watch.
John:
The holy grail.
John:
But for all the other stuff they've done, like AFib detection and stuff, they're really cautious.
Casey:
They're like, well... You took the words right out of my mouth.
Casey:
I was going to bring this up as well.
John:
If something's really out of whack, we'll be like, hey, we think this is probably not great.
John:
But that's not what you want from glucose monitoring.
John:
I mean, it's better than nothing.
John:
That's what I'm saying.
John:
It's better than nothing.
John:
They don't have to get the brass ring.
John:
If it just tells you, oh, you might have missed a shot or something and things are really bad and it alerts you, that is useful.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But you really don't want that to be the only functionality.
John:
You want to be able to have the watch let you know what you would find out from doing your testing or whether continuous monitoring with a patch or pricking your finger or whatever.
John:
So you don't get into the bad situations.
John:
That's what you want.
John:
You want to avoid the extremes.
John:
But with the health measurement stuff, Apple's been so cautious because it's really difficult to be sure.
John:
And with something like this, where someone is making essentially a life or death decision about whether and how much insulin they should take, it's not like, oh, if I get it wrong, nothing bad will happen.
John:
No, bad things can happen.
John:
And if the pitch is kind of like self-driving cars, if the pitch is this car will drive itself and you can go to sleep, boy, that better be true.
John:
Because the consequences, if it's not, are really bad.
John:
And so if they say, oh, no, you don't need to measure with anything else except for the Apple Watch.
John:
they better really have solved that problem.
John:
And again, that doesn't necessarily have to be the pitch.
John:
They could say, now we have glucose monitoring the Apple Watch, and it will give you an alert if things are way out of bounds, but you still have to test normally, but it's just an insurance mechanism.
John:
That's still useful.
John:
Still give that a thumbs up.
John:
But when these stories come out, it's people dreaming that they won't have to do whatever uncomfortable thing they're doing now.
John:
And crossing the bar for that, it's really high.
John:
Because you have to really be sure it is literally life and death for millions of people
John:
You can't it can't be guesswork.
John:
And you're you know, if your watch crashes, there are big consequences that if it gets wrong, there are big consequences.
John:
And I don't know how they're going to handle it.
John:
Kind of like the car.
John:
It's one of those type of things where in general, Apple doesn't have products where if they get it wrong, like people die in short order.
John:
That's true of the car.
John:
And that's kind of true of complete replacement glucose monitoring, if that is indeed what they're going after.
Casey:
Yeah, I was thinking about, and then you brought it up, you know, when they did the EKG thing, they were very quick to say, this isn't, this is just a hint.
Casey:
This is just a hint, you know.
Casey:
And when they did the ovulation tracking and prediction and whatnot, oh, well, we're just giving you something else to think about.
Casey:
You know, you should still do your own thing.
Casey:
Just something to consider.
Casey:
And, you know, when they, with the AFib stuff, you know, we don't know if you're having a heart attack.
Casey:
We don't know that.
Casey:
We just know we have an idea about AFib and they pump the brakes on like everything, which makes sense.
Casey:
Like I don't begrudge them having pumped the brakes.
Casey:
But yeah, this is like you said, it is do or die, literally.
Casey:
So they can't pump the brakes on this if they are trying to get that brass ring as you referred to it.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I'm not sure how they're going to handle this.
Casey:
And if I were diabetic, well, I was going to say, I don't know if I would trust an Apple Watch this, but I would imagine I'd be so miserable with what I had been doing for years and years that anything would be like a cold glass of water in hell, right?
John:
Yeah, even if it doesn't solve the problem entirely, if you just have to have like one fewer prick per day or three fewer per week, still that's an improvement.
John:
It's just a question of what are they actually able to achieve?
John:
I have no doubt that they will not, you know, they're only going to
John:
announce what they can actually achieve they're not going to over promise like some other people you may be familiar with related to self-driving cars uh whatever they can do they will really they've been so conservative right they've been so sort of underselling what they've done so if they're not able to solve the whole problem i have full faith that they will not claim to have solved the whole problem they just say here's what it can do here's what it can't do it can improve your life but you're still going to have to use the other more invasive
John:
methods to supplement your apple watch it will just maybe help you skip some of those or increase the granularity of the sampling or whatever like it you know any improvement is good but this story is always so simplified in its rumor form which is like they're gonna solve it and you know it's great to think that before they actually announce anything but as a story notes this is this story is so old that it was around when steve jobs was still running the company so
Casey:
It's taking a long time.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Oh, blood oxygen was the other thing I couldn't think of a second ago.
Casey:
Blood oxygen, they were also like, we're not telling you if you have COVID or not.
Casey:
We're just letting you know.
John:
These numbers may not be, you know, accurate, accurate, but like if they're really out of whack, you might say, hey, you know, maybe look into this.
Yep.
John:
And blood oxygen, like the official thing they use that in hospitals is very similar to an Apple Watch.
John:
So it's not even like they're far from like that is not new technology.
John:
Shining a light through your skin, as long as your skin is white, shining a light through your skin and getting a blood oxygenation measurement is long established technology.
John:
And even on that, they're like, well, we do have a light and we do shine into your skin, but we're not going to make lots of promises because it is your wrist and not your fingertip and yada yada.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Memberful and the Tech Meme Ride Home podcast.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Casey:
Because it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Casey:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A
Casey:
I see something fascinating in the show notes for the after show.
Casey:
It reads as follows.
Casey:
Marco drove a Rivian.
Casey:
Tell me everything.
John:
Why would he need to do that?
John:
He's already got a perfectly good vehicle for driving on the sand.
John:
Why would he ever even look at another one?
John:
It performs beautifully.
John:
It solves his problem entirely.
John:
He even gave this car a watch.
Casey:
Are we really going there?
Casey:
I was going to be gentle on you, Marco, but I am here for laughing about the poorly constructed British car, if that's what we want to know.
John:
Well, I would love to know the order of events.
John:
Did the car rebel when it heard you were straying, or did you stray when it rebelled?
Marco:
That car rebelled on the way to drive the Rivian.
John:
Oh, it knows.
John:
It's like when you take your dog to the vet.
Marco:
It knows.
Marco:
It knew.
Marco:
It knew.
Marco:
But I will say, so there's a few relevant details here.
Marco:
First, what happened the day before was I sold the Tesla.
Casey:
Oh, you didn't tell us this.
Casey:
This is genuinely new news.
Casey:
I'm not putting on an ad here.
Casey:
Yes, I was saving it for the show.
Casey:
Oh, this is news.
Casey:
Who or what did you sell it to?
Marco:
So, as you know, I've been looking to try to get just somebody to buy it.
Marco:
I just wanted to do some kind of trade-in thing.
Marco:
I didn't want to go through eBay or Cars and Bids or anything.
Marco:
I don't...
Marco:
I'm hardly ever there where this car is, and it's winter.
Marco:
I don't want to go get it cleaned and take pictures.
Marco:
You're perfectly timing this sale for the peak of the used Tesla market.
Marco:
Oh, no, exactly.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
So anyway, and what kept killing the value of the car, whenever you go online, you fill out a form of like, give me a quote for this car.
Marco:
What would kill it is that officially in whatever database they're looking at, it has an accident report.
Marco:
Because, and I think I said this on the show when it happened, a couple years ago it got scraped by a plow in the ferry parking lot.
Casey:
Yeah, we talked about it.
Marco:
Yeah, it blew the tire up and everything.
Marco:
While it was parked.
Marco:
Yes, I wasn't even there.
Marco:
It was parked, it got scraped on the front bumper panel or whatever, so it was bad enough that a body shop had to replace the bumper.
Marco:
And I went through insurance because it would have cost like $6,000 because of the way Teslas are made.
Marco:
Cool.
Marco:
Anyway, went through insurance.
Marco:
And apparently that got reported as, quote, an accident.
Marco:
But there were no details in these databases of what this accident was.
Marco:
So whenever I'd go on, whenever I'd fill out a thing, I'd be like, all right, model year, model mileage.
Marco:
And it would tell me, okay, it's worth this.
Marco:
But then once it got down to like, all right, give us your license plate or VIN so we can give you like a firm offer on your particular car, it would go down like 10 grand because of that stupid accident report.
Marco:
Anyway, so I was at my wits end and I was like, I'm fine.
Marco:
I'm just going to – let me just see.
Marco:
A few people said try CarMax.
Marco:
And I hadn't tried CarMax before because for certain cars, they won't give you a quote online.
Marco:
It basically says, like, your car is too rare or finicky in the market value, so you need to bring it to our store, and we'll give you a quote in person.
Marco:
So I was like, I don't want to deal with that.
Marco:
But I was at my wit's end.
Marco:
So I eventually I'm like, you know what?
Marco:
Let me go see what they have to say, because I don't want to deal with this anymore.
Marco:
I'm tired of having three cars.
Marco:
It's a pain in the butt.
Marco:
This car is decreasing in value every day.
Marco:
I don't sell it.
Marco:
And the last thing I want is to be sitting on this any longer than I have to.
Marco:
Um, so it's already gone down enough since last fall.
Marco:
Like, I want to, I want to sell it.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Um, so I went, I, I drove all the way to the nearest one, which was in New Jersey.
Marco:
I'm like, you know, it's an hour away.
Marco:
I'm like, Oh, I'm going to drive an hour for this, but let me just see.
Marco:
And, and honestly, I was a little sad to sell the Tesla because I loved that car.
Marco:
But as I was driving there, my back's all hurting, and I'm trying to get the seat in the right spot so it doesn't irritate sciatic stuff.
Marco:
And I'm like, since I've been away from this car for so long, I can't get comfortable in it now.
Marco:
And I'm sitting on the ground, and everyone's all higher than me, and I'm like...
Marco:
You know, like I'm ready to get rid of it now.
Marco:
Plus it is, you know, driving around a big red mega hat.
Marco:
So anyway, I get there and I'm like kind of saying goodbye to the car on the way there.
Marco:
You know, we've had our good times.
Marco:
You know, I love my cars.
Marco:
Not all of them, but many of them.
Marco:
I love my cars.
Marco:
But yeah, the comfort thing, it was time.
Marco:
And it took forever.
Marco:
You go in there, and everyone there is very nice.
Marco:
But it's like, oh, we're behind.
Marco:
It's going to be like a 45-minute wait before you even see somebody.
Marco:
Then you sit down with somebody.
Marco:
It basically looks like a car dealership in there.
Marco:
It's like a bunch of sales desks.
Marco:
You sit down with somebody, and it takes forever to go through all the different steps in the computer.
Marco:
And they're very nice about it, but it's just a very slow process.
Marco:
I think I was there for like two and a half hours.
Marco:
But I eventually got,
Marco:
a number there and and i was all i was on the way there i was like telling myself in my head all right i'm hoping to get this here here's the like you know kelly blue book dealer trade in value then here's what i would accept below that right and then like you know another big chunk below that here's the minimum i would accept this is the way
Marco:
And I told myself, I'm like, even though I've driven there and I'm going to be tempted to just even if they lowball me, I'm going to be tempted to take it just because I've driven so far and it's been so long.
Marco:
But I'm like, I'm not going to take anything below this number.
Marco:
I tell myself before I get there.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So go through the whole thing.
Marco:
And sure enough, they're like, well, here's what we're basing the offer on.
Marco:
Here's all these check, check, check, check all these different lists.
Marco:
And then here's it says there's an accident.
Marco:
And I explained to the guy like what that was.
Marco:
But I don't think there's any like human input, really.
Marco:
I think it seemed like it was all algorithmic, like and then take it or leave it.
Marco:
Like it didn't seem like there was a lot of negotiation or human adjustment happening there.
Casey:
Oh, there is.
Casey:
But keep going.
Marco:
Oh, there is.
Marco:
Well, that's good to know.
Casey:
Yeah, because I have experience with this because the BMW almost got sold to CarMax.
Casey:
And by the way, CarMax is based in Richmond, and I actually did a little work for them a couple of jobs ago.
Casey:
So I am more familiar than you would expect with how CarMax works.
Marco:
Yeah, you're the reason I originally heard about it.
Marco:
But anyway, so the offer came back, and it was...
Marco:
Right in the middle of what I wanted like it was nice.
Marco:
It was about 10% less than the Blue Book trade in value and a recent Model S recently sold on cars and bids that had very similar specs very similar year very similar mileage Model S unlimited supercharging all that stuff.
Marco:
And it was very slightly below what that sold for.
Marco:
Nice.
Marco:
So I was like, sold.
Marco:
I'm like, it's yours.
Marco:
Take it.
Casey:
Give me the check right now.
Casey:
And I am sprinting out of here.
Marco:
And that's basically what happened.
Marco:
It was great.
Marco:
I can honestly say I had a pretty good experience with CarMax.
Marco:
It did take forever, but everybody was very nice, and the offer was good, and it was way higher.
Marco:
I would say it was probably maybe 20% higher than anything else I got from anybody else, any other offers.
John:
That's awesome.
John:
Did you take two cars there?
John:
Is that how you dropped off the car and then you got driven back and someone else?
John:
No, I took a Lyft back.
John:
An hour?
John:
Oh, that must have been expensive.
Marco:
You're really cutting into the sale price of your car with that ride.
Marco:
Seriously.
Marco:
It was like 60 bucks.
Marco:
It's not that bad.
Casey:
That's actually much less than I thought.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So anyway, and that was easy.
Marco:
That was fine.
Marco:
It was New Jersey.
Marco:
That was the hardest part.
Marco:
I had to turn left, and that's the whole thing.
Marco:
But we figured it out.
Marco:
good thing you didn't have to pump your own gas though yeah that's true well congratulations congratulations that's exciting thank you uh the following morning um a friend of mine has had for a while a rivian r1t the truck rivian and he had offered months ago hey if you ever want to come by see a test drive it let me know and i was in town so i'm like hey you know what
Marco:
I would like to do that.
Marco:
Yes, please.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
So anyway, so I get in the Land Rover.
Marco:
As I'm pulling out of my driveway, the dashboard lights up with a whole lot of lights.
Marco:
The car is like losing power.
Marco:
It's like it was shifted into neutral.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Marco:
I'm like, what happened?
Marco:
What the heck is going on?
Marco:
And it's, you know, all the lights in the dashboard are on, like all the error lights.
Marco:
Everything's warning, warning, like something's wrong.
Marco:
Did the British national anthem start playing?
John:
God save the king.
John:
I can't even name the song.
John:
The joke would have been better if I knew more about it.
John:
God save the king.
John:
Sorry, Brits.
John:
There you go.
Marco:
Whatever.
Marco:
So anyway, I'm like, what do I do here?
Marco:
And I noticed one of the lights that was lit was the battery light.
Marco:
And I happen to have plugged in to one of the little 12-volt ports one of those, like, big rechargeable lithium batteries, like the kind that has a built-in AC inverter.
Marco:
I bought one of these months ago for multiple reasons, you know, backup power and stuff like that.
Marco:
And I got a small one so it could go in the car, and that way Adam could use his gaming PC on long car trips.
Marco:
So I had this battery.
Marco:
And I'm not going to name the company because it's a terrible battery.
Marco:
It is...
Marco:
very buggy it was supposed to have like usbc in and out and it's the buggiest thing i've ever used in that way like it's incredibly unreliable i have no faith in the reliability of this battery um and i should have gotten a jackery that's that's i know it's a ridiculous sounding name that's the good brand and i had one of those in the past and i it got it got water damage at some point and so i don't have it anymore oh you don't say it was indoors okay it was uh
Casey:
Like actually indoors?
Marco:
It was in the water closet, yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
Actually indoors or indoors-ish?
Marco:
It was in the basement water closet where the water main comes up from the sand and goes into my house.
Marco:
Many rooms in Marco's house are semi-aquatic.
Marco:
Well, it was sitting on sand running, running some heat trace on a pipe so it wouldn't freeze over Christmas when we had that massive cold spell.
Marco:
We were leaving for a few days.
Marco:
I hook up this backup battery so that in case we had a big power outage, our water main would have something like 18 hours of backup power before it could potentially freeze.
Marco:
And there was a huge... The way that massive Christmas storm came through here was first as a whole bunch of rain.
Marco:
This backup power thing is sitting in a boxed-in insulated closet where the floor of it is sand.
Marco:
And enough water came up through the sand to have at least a few inches of water to the point where when I got home...
Marco:
I pick up this battery and I hear whoosh, whoosh.
Marco:
And I'm like, oh, no.
Marco:
That's not good.
John:
Batteries do not like to have salt water inside them in general.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
I pick it up and I tilt it and all this water just pours out.
Casey:
Oh, that's very bad.
Like, oh, no.
John:
If that happens with your car also, also bad.
John:
Yes.
John:
Have you ever tilt your car and salt water comes out?
John:
Yeah, not good.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Anyway, so that's how I lost my Jackery.
Marco:
And I should have bought another one.
Marco:
But instead, I tried this other brand that was all like USA.
Marco:
And it's terrible.
Marco:
Anyway, so I had this other brand's battery plugged in charging to my car.
Marco:
And as I am driving, I'm getting all this what appears to be power loss.
Marco:
The engine is cutting off everything.
Marco:
So I don't know enough about gas-powered cars to know, but if there's too much draw on the alternator, is it possible that the engine actually stops because it can't make sparks?
Marco:
Is that a thing?
Marco:
Ugh.
John:
What are you talking about?
John:
You're saying if your battery's dead, it could undervolt all the electronics, which could screw with your engine.
Marco:
Yeah, so my theory of what happened is that this crappy battery that I had plugged in that was charging through the cigarette lighter kind of plug...
Marco:
Maybe it was pulling too much power, although wouldn't the fuse have tripped?
Marco:
I don't know.
John:
Yeah, no, I don't think... I mean, the only way this should ever happen in a healthy car is if your battery is no longer holding a charge sufficiently.
John:
Right.
John:
That's basically it.
John:
I don't think there's anything you can plug in that would...
John:
cause the the electricity to be pulled from the engine to a degree or any of the other essential systems i don't know i mean i would assume there'd be electronic lockouts like you said a fuse or something similar yeah it doesn't let you stop the engine computers from functioning and you know firing the fuel injectors or whatever
Marco:
Yeah, so anyway, I'm like, what do I do here?
Marco:
So I just unplugged everything that was plugged into any USB port on the car, and I unplugged that battery thing, and it restarted, and I had to, as part of getting to my friend's house, I had to drive up a hill, and it started losing power again going up the hill, and I'm like, oh, no.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Marco:
It felt like a transmission problem.
John:
Now that doesn't feel like, but also here, here's the thing that's confusing this, right?
John:
So some people in the chat room are saying, well, it's not like you overloaded the battery.
John:
You just hit, it had just drained the battery, like leaving your dome light on for the people who know what a dome light is or, um, and if your battery is drained, it doesn't have, it's not like your battery is bad and has to be replaced, but you've drained all the electricity out of it and you end up undervolting something and it gets screwed up.
John:
Right.
John:
But then with the whole thing of going up a hill and you're losing power, it's like, well, it's not an electric car.
John:
The, the battery doesn't actually drive the wheels.
John:
How is that happening?
John:
Right.
John:
Once you undervolt systems in modern cars and parts of your dashboard light up, the car may not be happy until it is convinced that all is well.
John:
Because as far as it's concerned, all sorts of error codes are happening.
John:
Not because parts of the car are necessarily broken, but because they briefly didn't receive enough electricity to function and are now throwing error codes because they're like, I don't know what's going on.
John:
The world has gone crazy.
John:
I, as a sensor, declare sensor bankruptcy.
John:
I don't know what's going on.
John:
You have to sort of reset all the systems.
John:
Right.
John:
And that could cause the car to say, like, go into limp mode or not provide power or whatever.
John:
But I'm giving these things because it's the hopeful answer, which is like, don't worry, just unplug all your stuff, recharge your battery, reset all the codes and you'll be fine.
John:
But the other possibility that your car is breaking like British cars have for many decades is much worse.
Marco:
Yeah, it felt bad.
Marco:
Like, I've never felt a car do this before.
Marco:
It felt really bad.
Marco:
Anyway, I made it up the hill.
Marco:
I got the rest of the way to my friend's house.
Marco:
When I was driving back after the Rivian test drive, which we'll get to in a moment, it had the check engine light on.
Marco:
I'm like, oh, God, what did I break?
Marco:
But then today, it wasn't on anymore.
Marco:
And the car worked fine all day today, and I drove it a lot today, and everything was fine.
Marco:
So I'm assuming it was a temporary battery thing caused by that stupid battery pack that I should never have bought.
Marco:
I should have gotten the Jackery, damn it, but I didn't.
Marco:
I should have just gotten the same one again, but I thought I could go smaller and this other brand, and that was a mistake.
Marco:
Anyway, so the Land Rover seems to be fine now, but it... Well, sunroof excepted.
Marco:
oh yeah the sunroof is still broken i consider that a win he's already got things that he's just uh signing off as uh well that doesn't count as being broken anymore it's just part of the car now anyway so i did get to drive an r1t this is not the r1s the suv that's the one i'm actually waiting for i've been on the wait list for the r1s for oh god a long time
Marco:
And every time I look at my date for when my R1S reservation is going to come in, it is a few months later than the last time I looked, which is very discouraging.
Marco:
Anyway, I can tell you one thing.
Marco:
When my Land Rover was broken yesterday, I definitely, if there was an easy way for me to have gotten a Rivian that day, I would have.
Marco:
I would have sold the Land Rover that day and gotten a Rivian.
Marco:
Anyway, but you can't get them, so...
Marco:
I did get to drive it.
Marco:
I get to play around with the console.
Marco:
I get to ask my friend what he thought of it after months of ownership and everything.
Marco:
And ultimately, I am very impressed by Rivian.
Marco:
And so here's general high-level overview.
Marco:
It feels a lot like a big Tesla.
Marco:
And in lots of ways.
Marco:
And you can clearly... I would almost compare it to...
Marco:
handspring versus palm back in the 90s when like handspring was a whole bunch of like ex palm people that like went off and formed like a better palm basically and i think there's a lot of that in rivian like i know they've had some ex tesla employees that have joined rivian there's tons of tesla influence if you look at
John:
The whole rest of the auto industry and the way they do things, the way they make cars, the way they're... Like how everybody supports Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, but not Tesla, but also not Rivian.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
But if you look at the rest of the industry, they do things a certain set of ways.
Marco:
And then you see, oh, and here's how Tesla does things.
Marco:
And it's very different, better in a lot of ways.
Marco:
Well, Rivian is in that other group.
Marco:
They're in the Tesla group of lots of similar stylings in terms of how the screens are, how the dashboards are, what's in the screens, what's not in the screens, the layout of the screens, the general design, the UI design, the feature sets.
Marco:
There's so much.
Marco:
One of the biggest things I miss since having the Land Rover, I really miss
Marco:
dog mode, which is this mode where Tesla, where you could like, because it's electric, you can keep it running.
Marco:
You can keep the heat running or air conditioning whenever you want for a very long time.
Marco:
And so if we're like on a family trip and we, you know, we're on a road trip and we have to like, you know, go in to have a meal somewhere, we can leave the dog in the car and have dog mode, keep the climate control running the whole time and show on the screen, Hey, the dog is happy.
Marco:
It's, you know, it's 70 degrees or whatever.
Marco:
And so no one's going to break my windows and my dog is not in danger.
Marco:
That's a feature that I don't know how many cars offer that.
Marco:
Every Tesla does and Rivian does.
Marco:
And I don't know if anyone else does.
Marco:
The Land Rover has a remote climate thing where you can start the car climate remotely, but it will only run for 30 minutes.
Marco:
And then it stops and it won't do it again until you go start the car physically in person.
Marco:
So it kind of has that feature, but not a very good version of it.
Marco:
There's a whole bunch of features like that that Rivian and Tesla have, and no one else seems to, or at least doesn't have a good version of it.
Marco:
Lots and lots of that kind of stuff on the Rivian.
Marco:
But the Rivian is like a better Tesla.
Marco:
They've clearly taken a lot of influence.
Marco:
They've learned from Tesla's pluses and minuses.
Marco:
They're basically doing a better version.
Marco:
It's a lot like if Tesla was run by an adult.
Marco:
They have stalks on the steering wheel.
Casey:
Yes.
Marco:
They have a steering wheel.
Casey:
They actually have a steering wheel.
Casey:
Yes.
Marco:
It's a complete circle, or at least close enough.
Marco:
I think it might have the flat bottom or whatever.
Marco:
It's got a flat bottom.
Marco:
Otherwise, why even bother?
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But yeah, so it's a circular steering wheel.
Marco:
There's a shifter, like a real shifter.
Marco:
It's a column shifter, but you know, it's a shifter.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, there's the stalks and the knobs and the buttons and everything.
Marco:
Not a ton.
Marco:
You know, there's still a lot that's on the screen, but the screen is well designed.
Marco:
It's like original Model S, which used to have stalks and everything like that before they decided, no, we're moving all of that.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And I found the touchscreen to be very responsive.
Marco:
The animations are really smooth, panning around, and the map is super fast and smooth, almost iPad-like.
Marco:
Very responsive.
Marco:
I was very impressed with that because the Tesla is not that responsive.
Marco:
It's gotten better over time.
Marco:
The older Model Ss were way slower than the more modern ones, but it's still – Rivian was very good in the responsiveness.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And I think the quote unquote older Rivians also are worse because a lot of these EV companies, the day they launch their software is super janky, but they rapidly iterate on the software responsiveness because it's usually at this point not a hardware limitation.
John:
It's just that I don't know why they all have this problem, but they always launch with bad responsiveness on the touchscreens.
John:
And you're like, if you're worried, if you're a day one owner, is it always going to be like this?
John:
But, you know, software updates very often save it.
John:
So you're getting to see the Rivian with the 1.0 bugs shaking out a little bit.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But but it's still like I mean, I like for instance, one of the one of the clear benefits here is like this.
Marco:
The Rivian is designed for people who are still driving it.
Marco:
They're not making these big pronouncements.
Marco:
Oh, we're going to have self-driving cars in two years or one year.
Marco:
Just give us an extra five thousand dollars.
Marco:
They're not doing that kind of crap.
Marco:
And they have what Tesla calls autopilot, which is lane centering with adaptive cruise control.
Marco:
They have that.
Marco:
And it's, by all reviews, I didn't actually try because we didn't go on the highway, but from all reviews, it seems like it's just as good as Tesla Autopilot.
Marco:
It doesn't do like, you know, lane change and stuff, but I never did that anyway because it was really conservative and weird, and I never really used that feature.
Marco:
But the regular, like, you know, lane keeping and adaptive cruise, I use that all the time.
Marco:
And I really miss that because the Land Rover has neither of those things, and I really miss that.
Marco:
But this is a car that's designed to be driven by a human still, just to have these assistive functionality when you want them.
Marco:
But it still has a steering wheel.
Marco:
It still has a shifter.
Marco:
It still has knobs and buttons on stalks, and you can do a lot on the stalks.
Marco:
Can you open the glove box with your hand?
Marco:
It doesn't have a glove box.
Marco:
oh that's right that's just the big yeah yeah so anyway i'll get to that in a second but for the most part like every tesla vehicle has some like weird door handle thing rivian doesn't like there is no like pop out door handle there are no gullwing doors there is no weird like handle that you're not supposed to pull like on the model three where it's like okay don't pull this handle and every time you get in there for the first time you pull it you're like oh you open the door wrong i did that to underscore his car i think twice yeah me too
Marco:
Like, you know, you just operate this car.
Marco:
It has regular, pretty much regular door handles.
Marco:
And on the inside and outside, like you just operate it like a regular car and it just works because it's designed to be a really good regular car as opposed to Tesla is designed to be some kind of self-driving spaceship that no one's ever actually supposed to touch.
Marco:
And you kind of have to work around their constant desire to be innovative in superficial ways.
Marco:
The experience of being a Tesla owner is like a lot of really nice things of very nicely driving cars.
Marco:
But every car has at least one of those dumb things that you have to work around and you kind of have to forgive.
Marco:
Well, they're being very forward looking.
Marco:
It's this thing is stupid and breaks.
Casey:
And it's great as long as you don't want a steering wheel.
Yeah.
Marco:
By the way, I saw my first one of those in person, the first half steering wheel Teslas.
Marco:
It looks super weird when you see it, especially when you're sitting in a Land Rover in the sky looking down into a Model S. It looks really weird.
Marco:
Anyway, I'm so glad I didn't buy one of those.
Marco:
So the Rivian, it seems like a really nicely designed...
Marco:
And it's thoughtfully designed.
Marco:
There's all sorts of functionality in there.
Marco:
Not just the regular driving stuff.
Marco:
That's one thing.
Marco:
That's a big thing.
Marco:
That's most of the vehicles.
Marco:
The regular driving stuff seems really well done.
Marco:
But also, they have all their cool utility features.
Marco:
This is the truck.
Marco:
It had the gear tunnel and stuff like that.
Marco:
And there's all sorts of stuff like that.
Marco:
But overall, the feeling I got from driving it was like, this is a car designed by people who have learned from all of Tesla's mistakes...
Marco:
are doing a better job of that style and are doing it in a much more utility-centered way instead of trying to be too extreme just for extremity's sake.
Marco:
There were a few little things that I noticed.
Marco:
So some things that are, I would say, not negative but neutral.
Marco:
No CarPlay, as you mentioned.
Casey:
Oh, that's negative.
Casey:
That ain't neutral.
Casey:
That's negative.
Marco:
So now that I've been using CarPlay full time in the Land Rover for whatever it's been, how many months?
Marco:
I think it's kind of a toss up, honestly.
Casey:
Oh, hard disagree on that.
Marco:
Because I'm also using the ProClip USA phone mount next to it.
Marco:
I have a dual screen setup, which is really nice because I can have like, you know, music on one and the Waze directions on the big one.
Marco:
Or I can actually, most of the time, what I do is I have Waze on both because if you run Waze in CarPlay when your phone is on,
Marco:
in a dock or whatever on the phone it'll show the list of turns and then on the car play screen it'll show the big map and all the other stuff so you actually it's like having dual monitors like you have more information available to you so it's actually very nice but when i'm like you know when i was in the tesla like driving driving to go get rid of it um that was just you know using just a car mount for my phone like i always do in there
Marco:
When I don't have CarPlay, I don't miss it.
Marco:
As long as I can have a way to have my phone screen visible and have Waze or whatever running on that, that's fine.
Marco:
And in some ways, it's actually better than CarPlay.
Marco:
So CarPlay is to me a nice to have.
Marco:
I hope they add it.
Marco:
I hope they have a software update in the future that adds it.
Marco:
But I don't need it.
Marco:
It's not something that I find a requirement, a hard requirement.
Marco:
So it's nice to have, but not a hard requirement.
Casey:
I hear what you're saying, and I strongly disagree, but I am genuinely glad that you feel that way because that leaves you more options, particularly when it comes to fancy pants electric cars.
Casey:
I personally find it to be very, anytime I grab my phone, which I don't do often, I've gotten better about over the years, but anytime I grab my phone, when the car is in motion, even if I'm in a position where I feel like it's safe to do it, which it probably isn't, but that's neither here nor there, I just feel like whatever I'm doing on that, whatever I'm doing, it's way less safe than either waiting or doing a similar thing using CarPlay.
Casey:
And so for that alone, I find CarPlay is very worth it to me.
Casey:
But, again, to each their own and not insisting on it like I petulantly do is certainly the easier approach.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, certainly I would prefer if it was there, but it's not as big of a negative to not have it as many people would feel, I think.
Casey:
Like me.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So I noticed also the regen braking was actually way stronger than my Model S, which I actually consider a good thing because the other car that we now own is still Tiff's little i3.
Marco:
We bought that out for her.
Marco:
And I took a few drives in that when we were back because I could, and it was there, and it was way more efficient and smaller than the giant Land Rover.
Marco:
So I took a few drives in that, and that car has extreme regen.
Marco:
You can come to a total stop very easily with the i3 as regen.
Marco:
And I actually like that.
Marco:
I like having very strong regen because then I can choose how much of that power to use, how much of that to capture.
Marco:
You can actually do the partial one-pedal driving a lot more of the time.
Marco:
Model S is...
Marco:
It has good regen, but the Rivian was far stronger.
Marco:
I noticed that instantly.
Marco:
Some other downsides about it.
Marco:
No sunroof, as mentioned, although I currently have no sunroof, so here we go.
Marco:
Only two cup holders in the front.
Marco:
I know this is the standard number to have, but the Model S actually has four, at least the one I had, because in the little center console, you can set up two in there with these little inserts that they had that were actually a really clever idea.
Marco:
And then there were also the main two by your elbow in the middle.
Marco:
Oftentimes, we actually want three.
Marco:
It'll be like, you know, me and Tiff will have like a coffee and then we'll also have like a shared water or maybe a water for the dog or something.
Marco:
And so like oftentimes I want three cup holders in the front.
Marco:
This is a small, stupid thing I know, but two is not enough really if we can have more.
John:
Regular non-fancy cars, you can put that water in your door pocket.
John:
They have a place for water there.
John:
I know, I know, but it's not as nice.
John:
Anyway.
John:
I think it is.
John:
I think it's better for like, that's why we keep the driver's water, as we would call it.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So drinks go in the cup holders.
John:
Our court has, I think, just two cup holders and they're pretty big.
John:
But there's also in everybody's door, there's a place for a pretty big water bottle.
John:
So the kids have theirs in their doors.
John:
I have mine as the driver by, you know, by my shin in my door.
John:
My wife's got hers in hers door.
John:
and it always annoys me when i see these reviews of these 80 000 luxury cars where they show trying to put even something as tiny as a little like you know uh pull in spring water bottle and they can't fit it in the stupid door pocket because they made it so skinny that you have to crush the bottle to get it in total waste i think that i think the rivian has does it have crappy door pockets i forget a lot of the some of the evs have like they have that you can like pull them out oh that's right they have the accordion ones yeah those are not good
John:
Really, I find them usually to be pretty good.
John:
No, what we're talking about is a door pocket that is a big, rigid plastic thing that holds a gigantic kid's water bottle and you do not have to open or stretch anything.
John:
It's not luxurious, but that's what the utilitarian minivans and Honda Accords have.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, that's what the Land Rover has.
Marco:
It's just a giant pocket.
Marco:
Anyway, I consider it a bit of a negative to the Rivian that it has very, very similar to early Model S's.
Marco:
It has an overly minimal front console and dashboard.
Marco:
So, like...
Marco:
you know it's in fact exactly the same mistake that old model s has made they have that like flat floor across the front where you have this giant spot in front of the front like between the armrest and the front dashboard area there's like a flat floor and you can't really put much there like maybe if you have like it's for your that's for your purse
John:
that's exactly what i was gonna say i'm not kidding that is for the purse but it's way too big for most purses i'm not sure you've seen most purses right well and you also you don't want to put much there because it can very easily tip over into your footwell and that you don't want that the better the better ones put little fencing there but i know that that spot actually is really important a place to put your gigantic purse that is not the passenger seat is actually a big design consideration for utilitarian families like cars and i think that's what they're going for but what they missed is what you're talking about which is like
John:
you can't like on electric cars it's easy to make it actually flat because you're like hey there's nothing going through there like there's no transmission tunnel right it's really easy right but they forget some of them forget that you kind of do need something to kind of like a ship at sea to sort of hold that giant purse in place so it doesn't roll into anybody's foot well and that's why a lot of the better ones have like not big like fencing there but like little ridges or whatever to sort of make it so that if you were to put a soda can in there for example it wouldn't actually roll on your feet it would just go back and forth
Marco:
Yeah, and it has a small little tray thing on the floor there, but it's not substantial.
Marco:
In my very first model, I had two Model S's over the years.
Marco:
The first one had that flat floor thing, and there was just some aftermarket company that made inserts.
Marco:
And I just got an aftermarket insert that looked like a big, regular console.
Marco:
And then when that lease sort of ended...
Marco:
And I got the second one.
Marco:
The second one basically had that built in from the factory.
Marco:
It was a very similar kind of thing.
Marco:
They realized, oh, people want this, and they built it in.
Marco:
So hopefully, with Rivian's what appears to be pretty clear success, hopefully the aftermarket companies will come around and make... They might have already made some kind of console insert for that.
Marco:
So anyway...
Marco:
Compared to the Defender that I've been driving now for whatever months, the Defender has a more comfortable ride.
Marco:
One benefit Land Rover has, they don't work very well, but when they do work, they're really good.
Marco:
They're very comfortable, and the Land Rover was more comfortable.
Marco:
The Defender also has way more console storage.
Marco:
There's compartments all over the place with the Defender, and the Defender ones are also lined with rubber material because it's made to be an off-roader.
Marco:
So even the cup holders have those little rubber protrusions into them so they squish your bottle so it stays in place.
Marco:
The Rivian has a little bit of stuff like that, but not much.
Marco:
It's much more minimal, flat surfaces, not a lot of storage interior.
Marco:
The Defender also has the rearview mirror camera, which I love.
Marco:
The rearview mirror, you flip it and it becomes a screen.
Marco:
And there's a camera in like the tail fin thing.
Marco:
It looks like a radio antenna.
Marco:
There's a camera and then it looks back.
Marco:
And so you can replace your entire rear view from an optical mirror thing to a camera.
Marco:
And the screen is so high res and so high frame rate.
Marco:
You instantly forget it's a screen.
Marco:
You just see better.
Marco:
And it's amazing.
Marco:
Like, I've never seen as smooth and nice of a camera and screen as that is.
Marco:
And it's so, so nice.
Marco:
Rivian doesn't offer that.
John:
I'm kind of shocked that the big EVs don't have that because that's becoming more and more common on just regular cars.
John:
Like, you know, it's a Land Rover and it's not even the latest model of Land Rover.
John:
And a lot of cars have that now as an option, like with the flips from mirror to screen.
Marco:
why wouldn't they put that on all the evs you know they've got the cameras you know they've got the computing and the screen tech i guess they just figured oh we don't need that we have the big screen in the dashboard but it like it's the internal combustion engine seem to be getting that feature faster than the fancy evs though yeah that's that and that's that's like the one thing that i think rivian does lag behind in cameras like it it has a backup camera and it's nice and high resolution um and it has that top down view that that most modern cars have now that have a
Marco:
But, like, the Defender still has way more cameras.
Marco:
Like, it has, like, better, like, you know, like, the different views for the off-roading modes that you can get.
Marco:
Oh, show me, like, you know, my front left wheel, you know, what's going on around that.
Marco:
Like, there's more cameras, I think, in the Defender.
Marco:
Certainly, it makes better use of them.
Marco:
And, again, that rear-view camera is really, it's such a good feature.
Marco:
I really hope more people adopt it.
Marco:
The Defender, overall, you know, the Defender rides higher and everything, but...
Marco:
On the plus side to the Rivian, the Rivian is electric.
Marco:
That makes it better in a billion ways.
Marco:
I miss electric so much and I cannot wait to go back to it.
Marco:
It's so much better than gas in every possible way.
Marco:
The Rivian is way faster, way more responsive.
Marco:
You have all the benefits of electric, you know, charging at home, never having to go to a crappy gas station, the massive environmental savings.
Marco:
Like, it's just, it's so, so nice to be electric.
Marco:
Also, one little fun benefit.
Marco:
So one of the different experiments I've done over the months I've had the Defender is I keep and occasionally use MaxTrax traction boards.
Marco:
And these are these giant Australian plastic boards with all these little teeth on them.
Marco:
And if you or someone near you is stuck, you can stick these under the wheels and basically drive out.
Marco:
It's kind of miraculous how well they work.
Marco:
That'd be a perfect candidate for the gear tunnel.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
So the downside of Max Trax is that they're huge.
Marco:
And also, once you have used them, they are then covered in sand or mud or whatever.
Marco:
And you don't really want to put them back in your vehicle.
Marco:
So I learned this the hard way.
Marco:
I have not yet had to pull myself out of anything with the Max Trax, but I have occasionally pulled other people out of situations with Max Trax.
Marco:
And it's a wonderful feeling to be able to help somebody.
Marco:
I love having that capability.
Marco:
But I had to then put them back in my vehicles.
Marco:
I first was storing them just in the trunk.
Marco:
And they're huge.
Marco:
They take up a ton of space in the trunk.
Marco:
And then getting them out of the trunk is hard if there's anything in front of them, blocking them in.
Marco:
um and i tried keeping them in a roof box but that made my car too tall there's all sorts of like roof rack mounts you can get for them but the defender is so tall stock that you don't want to put anything on the roof if you ever want to go into a garage or anything you can't so any kind of roof mounting option was out the window for me i eventually found a spare tire mount that works so they're mounted like on my spare tire like on the back of the car and
Marco:
Um, but this, this has its own challenges.
Marco:
First of all, it makes the car longer and which makes it fit less well in garages in a different dimension.
Marco:
Um, they're also just out there in the elements.
Marco:
So they're getting damaged by the sun slowly and you have to like lock them.
Marco:
So I have a, I have like a lock that has to lock them in.
Marco:
I have to, you know, you get a key out of the glove box to unlock it whenever I need to use them.
Marco:
And so that's kind of a pain.
Marco:
So the Rivian, I knew the truck has not only of course a truck bed, but also the gear tunnel and the gear tunnel is massive and awesome.
Marco:
But I thought, hey, you know what?
Marco:
Could you pop the frunk?
Marco:
Max tracks are very wide.
Marco:
Like they're huge.
Marco:
They fit in the frunk.
Marco:
The frunk is so wide.
Marco:
The frunk is huge on the R1T.
Marco:
It could fit four.
Marco:
I'm telling you off-roaders.
Marco:
I have Max tracks extreme regular size boards.
Marco:
It fits four of them stacked, plus it still had enough spare room in there that I could put all my towing gear.
Marco:
The kinetic tow rope, the various shackles, and all that crap.
Marco:
I have a shovel.
Marco:
I have so much towing gear that I carry around the Defender, and it could fit all of that in the frunk.
Marco:
Oh my god, I am so... I cannot wait to get my R1S.
Marco:
I...
Marco:
i am like anybody if you work for rivian if you can like push a button oh my god i'd be so thankful like i don't ask for much but oh my god i i've been waiting so long for this car and now the weight is now that i've driven one and seen the utility it's like
Marco:
oh my god it's the perfect beach car like it it is exactly what i need to drive to my house like literally today i drove to my house it involves driving over like two miles of sand not like dirty roads sand with the waves right there on the national park beach that's what i do this car is made to do stuff like that and oh my god it's like
Marco:
I'm very happy with the Defender as an off-roader.
Marco:
The Defender is an amazing off-roader, but I would so much rather have the R1S as a general all-around vehicle.
Marco:
It's such a nicer vehicle in the ways that I care about.
Marco:
It has more space inside.
Marco:
It's, again, electric.
Marco:
It's really good electric, too.
Marco:
I would so much rather have an R1S, and I cannot wait.
Marco:
I'm watching all the resale sites trying to see.
Marco:
Honestly, I'm waiting for a yellow one.
Marco:
no one's selling a yellow one no no no you stop it you stop it right now absolutely not it looks awesome in the pictures what's wrong with yellow it's fine it's gonna be the beach car yeah it's either i either want the blue or the yellow those are the those are my top two god i'm gonna vomit oh not yellow oh the blue looks cool but i think the yellow looks even cooler so i'm waiting for a yellow but god i just want like no no no no no no
Casey:
application denied no the green one looks nice too oh not yellow anything but yellow a lot of good colors you're gonna sit here wait you're gonna sit here after 10 years of slagging on white cars and you're gonna sit here like a jack and say that yellow is the correct answer for something the size of a bus hell no absolutely not it's a happy fun car there's a little funny eyeballs in the front
Casey:
God, I'm so upset with you right now.
Casey:
I was all on board with this.
John:
Now I have to get the yellow.
John:
The R1S doesn't come with the gear tunnel, you know, but the good thing is that the car from the A-pillars forward is identical to the R1T, so the front is the same.
Marco:
That's why I asked about the front, because I knew I'm like, you know, because I was wondering, like, should I get the truck?
Marco:
you know but but ultimately i would have more use out of the i would have more utility from the suv um and you know because i i want a lot more interior space i don't really need a truck bed for anything else and so so that's why i that's why i was i was so shocked that the frunk was as big as it is because i thought for sure there's no way i'm fitting max tracks in a frunk of anything but nope they fit just fine and four of them and with room to spare oh wait the yellow isn't like a big bird yellow it's it's like a tan
John:
It's, it's called compass yellow, but it is barely yellow.
John:
You should look at it.
Casey:
Let me, let me look.
John:
It's basically metallic tan.
Marco:
No, it's, if you see like, look at, look at like real life photos of them.
Marco:
Cause like one of the, one of their press cars was yellow.
Marco:
So if there's a few like real life photos of them, it's not, it's not Honda S 2000 yellow.
Marco:
yeah i think it's closer to that than beige but it's it's hard to tell like you can't really see them in person but if you just do like a google image search for like r1s yellow or something you'll see there's it's i mean it's it's a yellow you know i mean and this is this is actually a somewhat popular color now like if you look there's there's a yellow bronco there's yellow wranglers no i stand by this i'd no yellow wranglers no yellow broncos no yellow rivians
Marco:
What do you have against fun colors?
Marco:
That's the thing.
Marco:
And like, so I have, I currently have a blue car and as fun of a blue as Land Rover can produce, which is not very fun, but it's still blue.
Marco:
And it's a nice blue, a very nice blue.
Marco:
But now I feel like, you know, for the Rivian, the Rivian has a really nice blue.
Marco:
Their quote Rivian blue, which is like their bright one.
Marco:
It's a very nice blue.
Marco:
It's very nice.
Marco:
And if it turns out I can't get yellow and I have to get blue, you know.
Casey:
You can't get yellow.
Casey:
That's tempting.
Casey:
It turns out you cannot get yellow.
Casey:
I'm telling you right now.
John:
No, but now I have to get yellow.
Casey:
Oh, God.
John:
Look in the slack.
John:
Look in the slack.
John:
honda s2000 yellow versus rivian yellow do you see what i'm talking about here it's i i see the comparison the rivian looks fine in that color i i think i think the the green is maybe more fun for the forest let's see is the blue the blue may be a little bit more beachy the blue is way more beachy oh and and despite what casey has said in the slack here i have a close-up picture of the uh the purse holder and i declared the walls purse ready look at them they're pretty deep that's like four inches
Casey:
Oh, Marco, this yellow is so bad.
Casey:
Just no.
Casey:
No, no, no, no, no.
John:
I don't know what your objection is.
John:
I hate yellow for cars.
John:
I have to get it.
John:
By the way, someone in my neighborhood has a white R1S now, and I think it even looks good in white.
Casey:
White can just happen to you.
Marco:
I think the white looks decent if you get the black wheels.
Marco:
My intended wheels are the black off-road wheels.
Marco:
All-terrain dark?
John:
That's it.
Marco:
All-terrain dark.
Marco:
This is what I want right here.
John:
I cannot wait for this trend of blacked-out wheels to end.
John:
The same rate I buy cars.
John:
It'll probably be fine because it'll probably take about a decade for it to stop, and that's when I buy a new car.
John:
But I know they've been in fashion for many, many years.
John:
I cannot wait for it to end.
John:
I hate blacked-out wheels so much.
Casey:
They occasionally work, unlike yellow, which never works.
Casey:
I don't think I've ever seen it.
John:
And I think the closest they've come to working is on off-road vehicles.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
I'm going to get the Rivian with the blacked-out wheels in yellow and piss off both of you.
Marco:
Because that's what I think looks the best.
John:
I think on off-road vehicles is the closest I've come to accepting blacked out wheels because it just kind of goes with the look of like, you know, not like military style vehicles, but like off-road type of utilitarian things.
John:
But like I'm talking about like, you know, sports cars, sports sedans.
John:
I just... It looks like a B. It looks good.
John:
I like wheels to be... They don't have to be shiny chrome, but you know... I like them to be matte finish, silver, neutral colored.
John:
Like I do not want them to be black.
John:
I don't want them to be shiny black.
John:
I don't want them to be matte black.
John:
Can we go back...
Casey:
It looks like a bee.
Casey:
It looks good.
Casey:
Yes, because when I want to think of something I want, I want to look like an annoying piece of crap insect that all it does is piss you off and hurt you.
Casey:
Yes, that sounds wonderful.
Marco:
No, people like... No, the wash are the jerks.
Marco:
People like bees.
Marco:
Yes, yes.
Casey:
Cue the stripy, buzzy things or whatever that image is that goes around every spring.
John:
Did you try the self-leveling thing?
John:
No.
John:
I feel like it should be part of dog mode.
John:
Your dog should be comfortable and also level.
Yeah.
Marco:
yeah anyway i man i i cannot wait to get this like there's no doubt in my mind like you know looking around the rest of the industry there's no doubt no doubt in my mind now like this is gonna be my next car it's just a question of like how quickly can i get this car the company is is struggling a little bit so hopefully they're still around by the time you know it's a tough gig
Marco:
And in many ways, it feels like early Tesla days in a lot of good ways, in the sense that they're rolling out all sorts of great features and software updates on a regular basis.
Marco:
My friend said that the servicing story has been pretty good, that he's only had a couple of issues, and they were minor, and they came to his house to fix them.
Marco:
And this is over six or eight months.
Marco:
He's had it a while.
Marco:
So that's pretty good for a brand new car.
Marco:
So I think...
Marco:
Ultimately, first of all, it would not surprise me if somehow Tesla bought them or something.
Marco:
I don't know.
Casey:
No, I don't like that either.
Marco:
I don't want that to happen.
Marco:
Please, don't say that.
Casey:
Don't put that energy in the world.
Marco:
You want General Motors to buy them.
Marco:
I don't want that to happen.
Marco:
But they're so clearly taking Tesla's playbook and just doing it better.
Marco:
And I hope they remain independent and succeed like crazy because...
Marco:
They seem to be doing a lot of stuff right.
Marco:
I almost wish I didn't go drive it because now I want it even more and I'm so impatient.
Marco:
If anybody was selling a yellow one, I would probably justify buying it somehow.
Casey:
I'm telling you.
Casey:
I was so... I could not care less about a pickup truck.
Casey:
I understand that for some people, they make sense, they're useful, etc.
Casey:
I am not some people in this context.
Casey:
I could not care less about a pickup truck.
Casey:
I do care about CarPlay.
Casey:
But other than that, this thing blew my mind.
Casey:
And I'm pretty sure I drove a quad motor, which was a mistake because, oh my good grief, this thing is so fast.
Casey:
And it weighs more than the earth...
Casey:
But to have it move that quickly is just astonishing.
Casey:
Do you happen to know if it was a dual or a quad that you drove?
Marco:
I believe they're all quads so far.
Marco:
I don't think they've... Is that right?
Casey:
I don't know.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't think they've actually shipped to any duels yet because the duels are like the lower-priced ones.
Marco:
You got to fleece the whales first.
John:
Yeah, I think all the launch ones are all quads.
John:
To try to stay in business, yeah.
John:
I mean, both companies that are populated with...
Marco:
fleece me i'll pay i've already like i know i'm not asking for a freebie i want to buy the car fleece me well i'll even you know what i'll even pay the like the higher price like because you know i booked it when it was the lower price and they're going to honor it but like now if you book it now it's higher i'd pay the higher price if i can get it right now like i just want i want my freaking car i miss electric so much and this is so good
John:
Both of the companies that are populated with ex-Tesla engineers who are trying to do the Tesla playbook but better are also both financially struggling with their finances and struggling with their ability to make enough cars to give to customers.
John:
Who's the other one?
John:
Lucid?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, Lucid, the guy who runs that is the guy who designed the Model S, and he basically made a better Model S. And like I said many times, Lucid has the best motor technology in the entire EV industry.
John:
So if and when they go out of business, somebody's going to snap that out because they have good stuff there.
John:
And the cars are pretty good, even though, you know, it's their first car, growing paints, blah, blah.
John:
But boy, being a car company is tough.
John:
Especially if you're not funded by an eccentric multimillionaire at the time and or aren't as good at getting government subsidies as Tesla was.
Marco:
Well, honestly, Lucid I'd be more wary of just because they're selling into a much smaller market.
Marco:
Whereas Rivian is selling into pickup trucks and SUVs in America.
Marco:
For God's sake, that's a massive market.
John:
You're no longer in the Lucid market, though, because you can't stand cars you need to be in a big SUV.
Yeah.
Marco:
unfortunately i kind of i kind of like the you know it's really nice not having like leg problems unfortunately no i mean i i can see myself in the you know in the future if i want something smaller like i was more comfortable in the i3 because it is more of like a crossover height seating position even though the car itself is tiny but it's it's tiny but kind of tall it's like a golf cart it is like a golf cart
Marco:
yeah like so like i just i just need to be careful not to get these like you know super low you know touring sedans anymore like get you know get something a little bit higher but even crossover height would be fine with me for that reason but right now you know living on the beach i still need something that's off-road capable and there is not a lot on the market that is electric and off-road capable i think this is it
Casey:
Oh, the F-150.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, I guess that's true.
Marco:
But yeah, I don't want to be, I don't want to drive one of those.
Marco:
I want to drive a Rivian.
John:
The Hummer EV.
Marco:
That wouldn't fit on the roads.
Marco:
That is also true.
Casey:
Hey, so to go back, if you were to build one, you said the god-awful vomit-inducing yellow, the black wheels, which I agree with John, not my thing, but I mean, whatever.
Casey:
Then for interior, I presume you would be contractually obligated to choose Ocean Coast.
Casey:
Here's the thing.
Marco:
I originally had selected Ocean Coast and they kept sending out these updates basically saying like Ocean Coast is delayed, that it's taking a while.
Marco:
And if if you have Ocean Coast in your configuration, your your date might be, you know, softer and squishier.
Marco:
So I thought, you know what?
Marco:
I don't really care that much.
Marco:
I'll switch it to the black one.
Marco:
And I switch to the black one.
Marco:
And what happens when you change anything about your configuration is your estimated date disappears.
Marco:
And then like a month or two later, it refreshes and it's further out.
Marco:
So that's what happened.
Marco:
I thought I was going to get closer by changing it to black.
Marco:
And instead, it pushed me on another six months.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Yeah.
Marco:
So I'll take at this point, the interior could be purple.
Marco:
I'll take anything like just.
John:
Yeah, if they were better on the website, they'd let you know if those changes had any effect on it.
John:
But it could just be that everybody got pushed out six months because, again, the company is struggling a little bit.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And yeah.
Marco:
And that's, you know, I expect stuff like that, honestly.
Marco:
Like, it's fine.
Marco:
As long as as long as they are healthy long term, that's that's ultimately what I want, because.
Marco:
There are so many companies that all make very similar vehicles.
Marco:
If one of them stops making a vehicle or goes out of business, it isn't that big of a loss.
Marco:
Whereas if you're a company like what Tesla has done for a while, up until fairly recently, where you're the only one in a certain role...
Marco:
Or now what Rivian is doing.
Marco:
They're the only ones doing what they're doing so far for the most part.
Marco:
You can get some of what they're offering in different vehicles, but not all of what they're offering, not this whole package.
Marco:
No one else is doing this.
Marco:
So if they go under, we're out of luck for as long as it takes for the rest of the market to catch up and do something.
Marco:
And then when the rest of the market does something, it might not be as good.
Marco:
They might do things in the more traditional, badly designed, bad user experience, no future-looking features, all this stuff, the way that...
Marco:
If you look at what BMW is doing.
Marco:
First of all, ignore the giant kidney girls for now, I know.
Marco:
But one of the vehicles I was looking at was the iX.
Marco:
Because the iX, I think, has a lot going for it.
Marco:
And the reviews all basically say, yeah, it's hideous, but it's actually really nice to drive.
Marco:
So there's a lot going for that.
Marco:
But there's a lot about that car that I'm like, you know...
Marco:
Ultimately, it would be a lot less useful to me.
Marco:
First of all, it can't go on the beach.
Marco:
Not any kind of off-roading capability like that.
Marco:
It's not made for that.
Marco:
But even just for day-to-day stuff, it's too small.
Marco:
It's a larger vehicle in terms of footprint, but they put no storage space in it.
Marco:
They made a bunch of weird decisions with that car.
Marco:
And then the infotainment system is all this huge...
Marco:
huge overwrought you know bmw complexity there that like there's a lot of hits and misses in that you know a lot some of it's good a lot of it's really you know experimental what i ultimately want i just want my r1s i just want it now and i know that's that's the stupidest most impatient thing to say like i know that i don't feel good saying that but that's how i felt after after after test driving the r1t and looking around and seeing how much better it would actually fit my needs
Casey:
There are two R1S launch editions available, including one in Katona, sir, on cars and bids right now.
Marco:
I have a search alert.
Marco:
I've been watching them come in for the last few months.
Marco:
There has not been a single yellow or blue one.
Marco:
There is a blue one on AutoTrader in New Jersey right now.
Casey:
Oh, come off it.
Casey:
Come off it.
Casey:
If you want the car, who cares that?
Casey:
As long as it's not yellow, who cares?
John:
If he's going to overpay by buying an aftermarket by somebody who's taking advantage of the supply and demand imbalance, he should get the color he wants.
Marco:
I mean, the good thing is the resale prices are actually decreasing pretty quickly now because there's a lot more supply than there used to be.
Marco:
So they're actually coming down to more reasonable levels.
Marco:
um but i i think they seem to be making colors in like in like timed color batches because like the ones that hit the resale sites are all the same groups of colors at the same times so i think they're like delivering them all right this week our factory made some black ones this week our factory made some gray ones like that's kind of how it feels i don't know if it's actually how it works that's kind of how it feels on the resale sites i've only seen one blue one for sale it's in new jersey and honestly
Marco:
If I had had the title to the Land Rover with me on that trip, I might have gone and traded it for that.
Marco:
I was very tempted.
Marco:
I'm like, this is stupid.
Marco:
I shouldn't do it.
Marco:
I almost did it.
Marco:
I was very close.
Marco:
If I had the title, I probably would have done it.
Marco:
It had just been really stupid.
Marco:
But, you know, ultimately, I should just wait for mine.
Marco:
It would be a lot cheaper.
Marco:
And, you know, it's the right thing to do.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I don't know, YOLO, you know, all that stuff.
Casey:
I mean, Katona, I forget exactly where Katona is.
Casey:
I just remember being off the Metro North.
Casey:
It's not far.
Casey:
It can't be far from you.
Casey:
It's not.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
No, if that was a better color.
Marco:
Also, very few of these have the off-road wheels that I actually would want, but the blue in New Jersey does.
Marco:
So that's...
Marco:
We'll see.
Marco:
I'm not going to buy it.
Marco:
I'm not going to buy it.
Marco:
I'm not going to buy it.
Marco:
God, I want it.
Marco:
I'm not going to buy it.
Casey:
Please buy that one because at least the blue is very pretty.
Casey:
It's so pretty.