I’ll Just Keep You for Ten Years
Marco:
it took this long for something to break on the land rover oh hooray it's finally happened this car i mean i know you bought it used but it was like how many miles and how many years old was it when you got it it's it was like a year and a half old and something like 15 000 or 20 000 miles something like that seems like things shouldn't be breaking yet but anyway go on
John:
It's the sunroof.
Casey:
Oh, you know how much I love sunroofs.
Casey:
No, don't tell them.
Casey:
Can you not?
Casey:
I will give you infinite money to not talk about this anymore because the last thing I need is more of the anti-sunroof mafia.
Casey:
To have ammunition to be against sunroofs.
Casey:
I love a sunroof.
Casey:
Me too.
Casey:
One of the only problems I have with my car is that it does not have a sunroof.
Casey:
I am in a group chat that I'm sure I've brought up many times on this show with a couple of friends of mine who are car nuts.
Casey:
Not you two, different friends of mine that are car nuts.
Casey:
And the two of them are parts of the anti-sunroof propaganda machine.
Casey:
And I hate it.
Casey:
So I don't even want to know.
Casey:
I don't want to know.
Casey:
Let's move on.
Marco:
I mean, look, and look, the problem is really stupid.
Marco:
It just doesn't, like, yesterday, we drove off the island yesterday, and on the way there, I could open the sunroof just fine.
Marco:
On the way home, try to open it, nothing happens.
Marco:
That's kind of better than the alternative where it's open and you can't close it.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I thought of that.
Marco:
I told Tiff, I'm like, you know, it's a good thing it's stuck closed and not stuck open.
But...
Marco:
but uh yeah so i gotta you know i'm sure i have to get it looked at maybe maybe it's gonna be a simple you know reboot something or fix a fuse maybe it's probably gonna be a pain and and this is a minor thing in the grand scheme of things but you know and i know there's um that youtube channel is it tfl it's like the off-roaders on youtube they do pretty good videos and they got a defender and their sunroof died really fast on it too
Marco:
so it's something like that you know i'm sure it's a it's a thing but um but yeah i i love a sunroof and this is one of one of the uh great regrets i have is that whatever car i get next almost certainly won't have one because i really want to go back to electric as soon as i can and all of the good electric options of like you know either either off-road capable things which is basically just rivian at this point
Marco:
um or you know things that are at least like a little bit higher seating position so i can fix my leg sciatic things and keep them fixed they all are like oh we're gonna have this big expansive glass fixed ceiling panel oh you can thank tesla for that yep i have had a sunroof on almost every car i've owned and i love a sunroof i use it all the time in the winter i don't use it at all in the summer because i don't have enough hair and so you know i i mostly just keep it closed and or you know if i do open it i have to wear a hat and that sucks um so
Marco:
So, you know, in the summer, I don't use it at all.
Marco:
In the winter, I use it all the time because, you know, it's nice enough out that I want to get like some fresh air blowing in.
Marco:
But if I opened up the side windows, it would be too harsh and like would be too cold on my face or whatever.
Marco:
And so, you know, I know that my my the days of me having a sunroof are probably limited.
Marco:
And I want to enjoy them while I have them.
Marco:
But anyway, there goes that.
John:
I don't think they're that limited because it's like next to impossible.
John:
This is why Casey's friends, I'm sure, are complaining.
John:
It's next to impossible to find a car that doesn't require you to have a sunroof except for EVs that do this stupid glass roof thing.
John:
But I don't think they're going anywhere.
John:
If anything, the ability to find a car without them is disappearing faster.
John:
It's just that in the weird corner of the market that is EVs trying to copy Tesla –
John:
They all want to do the stupid panoramic glass thing, which I've never had a car with that.
John:
But like it always seems to me that maybe maybe it's cheaper or something.
John:
I don't I don't quite understand the motivation.
John:
I know it seems cool and everything, but all of them have to do something pretty drastic to prevent the car from becoming a giant boiling fishbowl.
John:
So they either like super duper tinted.
Marco:
Yeah, they're heavily tinted usually.
Marco:
So like it's more like you're watching a screen of the sky.
Marco:
You know, it's not you're not really feeling like you're out in the open.
Marco:
Like now there is one area where it helps a little bit.
Marco:
Well, there's two areas where it helps.
Marco:
One that doesn't matter to me, which is headroom, which is never something I need.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, that and to be clear, that is one of the reasons I dislike sunroofs, because once you put one on a car, I can no longer fit in it without my hair hitting the headliner.
John:
Right.
John:
You have very tall hair.
John:
Mm hmm.
Marco:
i wish not anymore so much it happens man but yeah and the other thing is like um you know i i do like when you have more visibility as as the like if the windshield goes higher up and then like you know if you're like stopped if you're the very first car at a traffic light sometimes you can't see the traffic light because your own try being tall it makes it so much worse right and so you know the the sunroofless designs that use more glass oftentimes improve that
John:
But they put so much dark tinting, though.
John:
Like the ones that have like glass, like the Model X where the windshield basically continues all the way up to the roof.
John:
It's so dark tinted.
John:
It might as well be like a metal beam across there.
John:
I don't think you could see a traffic light through the amount of dark they tinted that.
John:
The other thing they do in the fancy ones is they have like a...
John:
like the lcd type liquid crystal thing that you can darken it electronically right but like you can't the bottom line is you can't just have it clear glass open all the time because you'll boil in the car and no one wants sun on their face so there has to be some way to either darken it electronically or it has to be pretty darn dark all the time and at that point like why bother it almost makes the like the 80s version of like i don't know what the correct words for this are but like
John:
It would have a glass, a clear glass pane that slides in and out.
John:
Then it would also sometimes have a tilted thing that you could slide underneath the clear glass pane to darken it.
John:
And then it would have a carpeted thing that you would slide over it that makes it just roof, right?
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Inside the car.
John:
So you had the choice of, you know, completely open to the outside, clear glass to the outside, tinted glass to the outside, no visibility to the outside.
John:
And that is very passe.
John:
They don't make ones like that anymore because it's just, I don't know, 280s.
John:
And also the other thing, like,
John:
With your, you know, oh, it doesn't open sometimes and other landowner people had problems.
John:
This is like the adolescent acne of sunroofs.
John:
The real ailment that you'll get, of course, is they will start leaking water into your car eventually.
John:
And that's the real joy of the sunroof is that as your car gets older, if you still own it, eventually the sunroof does not keep the weather out.
Casey:
It's like I'm in that group chat all over again.
Marco:
I'm so happy.
Casey:
But I love the sunroof.
Marco:
And usually, with this one exception, I've never had a problem with any of them before.
Marco:
I've never had one fail.
Marco:
I've never had one leak.
John:
You don't keep a car long enough for them to leak.
Marco:
Well, I mean, the Model S is, at this point, almost six years old, five years old, something like that.
Marco:
I know it's not super old, but it's younger than your Mac Pro.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But still, I don't know.
Marco:
I'm going to miss... When I inevitably get whatever electric thing I go with next, I am going to miss the sunroof.
Marco:
But if it causes me to have to be in repair constantly, maybe I'll miss it less.
Marco:
I don't know.
Casey:
So in summary, a British car has electrical problems.
Casey:
You don't say.
Marco:
I love everything else about it.
Marco:
I'm not super loving the gas-osity of it, but... And Great Mile is driving around a giant rectangle.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
I'm a little surprised you're not driving to Jersey so they can pump it for you.
Marco:
Yeah, because I forgot how.
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Jersey's so weird.
Casey:
Anyway, no, I'm sad to hear that your sunroof was broken, and I hope that the repair, whatever it may be, is gentle, easy, and under warranty.
Casey:
And it probably will be a warranty, but it may not be gentle or easy, so we'll see what happens.
Marco:
and still you know i have to like go do it you know that's that's the the biggest pain in the butt you know even when you have warranty that's nice and all but you still have to like schedule the thing take take a day to like go get it done like that's it's all the pain in the butt part of it that's like you know it doesn't just it doesn't just happen for free it's like whenever people you know whenever there's some flaw with an apple product and they eventually very reluctantly very slowly after way too long do some kind of repair program everyone's like oh problem solved
Marco:
Well, no, it's not.
Marco:
I still have to send it in and go without it for a while and arrange things around my life to make that happen.
Marco:
Just because a company has a way to service a problem doesn't mean the problem is gone.
Marco:
It just means that it might cost you less than it otherwise would if you had to either replace the whole thing or pay for the repair yourself.
Marco:
But it's still an annoying problem that's going to cost you time out of your life.
John:
Yeah, I remember the recent episodes of your Daily Lex, Lex Friedman's podcast.
John:
No, not that one, the good one.
John:
He was complaining that he had something like a repair under warranty on his car, needed a new part or whatever, and he had to drive it there.
John:
He...
John:
He drove it to the dealer three times, and three times he got there and said, oh, we don't have the part.
John:
Because after the first time, of course, he would confirm, okay, so you have the part now, right?
John:
Because last time I took my car there, and I came, and you said you didn't have the part.
John:
You have the part?
John:
No, we totally have the part.
John:
Come on in.
John:
He comes in to go, we don't have the part.
John:
That happened three times.
John:
and it's a tesla dealer yeah well surprise yes it is a tesla dealer tesla with some kind of logistical thing where the dealers don't know what they're doing or don't know don't have parts because like you never know who you're talking to on the phone or who you're texting to like oh yeah no they we totally have the part come right in but that's not the person who's at the dealer staring at the part who knows where that person is or what you know it's all man it's all electronic yeah not fun
Casey:
Let's talk about how wrong you are about audio stuff, Marco.
Casey:
That's fun for me.
Casey:
And then down mixing to everything else.
Casey:
Even a 5.1 system can suffer from loss of detail in down mixing depending what movie you're watching.
Casey:
Since Marco insists on a 2.1 setup, he's losing detail more when he watches a new movie or show than basically anyone.
John:
It's a good thing that never happens, that Marco watches a new movie or show.
Marco:
well done no and we got i mean we got a lot of feedback on this and this is basically this has been john's argument for a long time that like that because especially in particular because the center channel is so important for things like dialogue and um you know that that i'm apparently missing everything out but like first of all my speakers are not the only situation in which a movie consumer might need a stereo mix it turns out a lot of people watch movies on tablets phones headphones like it
Marco:
Turns out many people use stereo mixes.
John:
Well, but spatial audio covers those.
John:
Because if they have spatial audio on their headphones, which you do if you have an Apple device, then I know it's only two things in your ears.
John:
But my understanding is that what you're getting there is not a down-mixed process thing.
John:
But, you know, the spatial audio track for that thing plays in spatial audio.
John:
Maybe I'm wrong.
John:
Maybe there is a separate processing step.
John:
But anyway, Apple advertises spatial audio for movies, which I hate, by the way.
John:
I don't like spatial audio on movies.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But...
John:
Down-mixing is a fact of life, but if you have a setup where you're sitting in front of your big TV to watch a fancy movie, which, again, Marco doesn't do that often, something in the system is trying to down-mix and make sense out of it.
John:
It's kind of the opposite of the way it used to be.
John:
When, quote-unquote, surround sound first came out, all the movies were mastered in stereo.
John:
And you had all these weird standards and techniques to take a stereo mix and try to turn it into surround sound.
John:
And they're all so bad because, I mean, what are they going to do?
John:
They have to figure out this sound, this portion of this sound, we should make sound like it's more behind you.
John:
And it's just all guesswork, right?
John:
Whereas now, when we say they're mixed for 5.1, if people think of like a big stew where they're throwing ingredients together and mixing it, no.
John:
What we mean is they have soundtracks for every individual speaker.
John:
They say this is the sound that plays on this speaker, and then this sound plays on this speaker, and like individual sounds that play on individual speakers.
John:
Obviously, they all come together to make the sound of
John:
the soundtrack but it's not like there's something doling out the sound in little pieces it's multiple tracks and so when you have the number of tracks equal to the number of speakers like if there's a 5.1 mix on your blu-ray and you have 5.1 speakers it says okay this speaker gets this track this speaker gets this track and just doles out straight sound directly to those speakers and there's much less guesswork than you know here's a stereo mix try to put it out on seven speakers good luck
Marco:
Yeah, but also, like, and I know, like, you know, more modern systems like Atmos are even more complicated and actually, you know, are kind of more abstracted in certain ways.
Marco:
But, you know, ultimately, a 2.1 setup, if the main way it's going to fail, look, I don't care if stuff doesn't sound like it's coming from behind me.
Marco:
I don't care.
Marco:
But if the main way it fails is in center channel mixing, well, that to me doesn't hold a ton of water because it's really easy to down mix a center channel into stereo.
Marco:
You just send it equally to both channels.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
It's super easy.
Marco:
That's why, like, most podcasts are generally issued in mono.
Marco:
Does that mean that you have to have a speaker on your forehead to hear most podcasts?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
No, you hear them in your ears because we just send the same data to both channels and it's fine.
John:
So for the lack of center channel, the complaint that we got in email is that if you have stereo speakers and you get the virtual center from the stereo speakers, it sounds great as long as you are sitting in the sweet spot between the speakers.
John:
But if you have a bunch of couches and somebody's way on the left or way on the right, the center channel doesn't work for them anymore because they're way closer to the left speaker than the right speaker.
John:
Whereas if there was an actual center channel, no matter where they sit, it would sound like the dialogue is coming out of the television, you know, where the people's pictures are, but the mouth's moving, right?
John:
You know, if you're way to the left and the TV is to your right, you'll, you know, like the sound, basically the sound always sounds like it's coming from the TV.
John:
Whereas if they're trying to do virtual surround and you're sitting way to the left, it doesn't sound like the sound is coming out of the TV anymore.
John:
It sounds like it's coming from like the left speaker more because it is.
Marco:
I would say if that is a problem for you, you're either sitting way too far off to the side or your speakers have too little spread in their coverage.
Marco:
That's not a fault of it being a 2.1 setup.
Marco:
That's just a bad situation in the room or a bad speaker.
John:
No, it is the fault of it being a 2.1, because the sound is not coming from the TV, and the only way to make it sound like it's coming from the TV is for you to be equally distant from the two side speakers, right?
Marco:
I mean, it's not the end of the world.
Marco:
Yeah, there's a lot of squish in that argument.
Marco:
You could be like, if there's two people sitting on a couch, well, they can't both be perfectly centered, but you're going to be close enough...
Marco:
for at most distances from a tv you'll be fine right like like you know and if you're sitting all the way off to one side like you know if there's like you know couch in the middle and then like you know a side chair off to one side like a lot of living room setups well if you're sitting in that side chair nothing's going to be positioned correctly for you anyway you can barely even see the tv no but if you have a center channel if you're in that side chair the sound of people talking will still sound like it's coming from the pictures of their faces because the center channel speaker is directly under or over the tv
Marco:
Well, anyway, this I if I haven't lost anybody, everybody yet, I might lose you with this, that this might all be somewhat moot because I listen to processed versions of movie sound anyway, because I keep my Apple TV setting on where it has the the basically dynamic range compression setting that's called something like reduced loud sounds.
Marco:
I keep that on all the time on Apple TV.
Marco:
I watch everything with that setting on because I find the dynamic range of most things to be far too much for my home where I'm like, we have oftentimes a sleeping child downstairs while we're trying to watch something or I just don't want... I want the volume on the dialogue to be as loud as everything else because that is what I'm trying to hear and it's not because I'm missing a stereo mix.
Marco:
It's because I don't want the soundtrack to be...
Marco:
It's a big, loud thing.
Marco:
And then, you know, people are whispering in the middle of, hey, what?
Marco:
Did you hear about this thing that we did?
Marco:
And it's like, oh, my God, what?
Marco:
Like, what are you saying?
Marco:
And that's not the fault of the mix.
Marco:
That's the fault of, or rather, that's not the fault of me not having a center channel.
Marco:
That's just the fault of the way things are mastered these days.
John:
Well, if you had a center channel, you could just crank up the center channel.
John:
But anyway, all receivers have that same mode of, you know, dynamic range compression and stuff like that.
John:
That's not an Apple TV exclusive feature.
John:
So your stereo speakers aren't the thing that's giving you that.
John:
It's just having basic AV equipment.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I was talking to somebody, I don't remember who it was now, that was saying, you know, this person was saying, I am in full support of the principle of John saying, oh, get a receiver and get a bunch of speakers and so on and so forth.
Casey:
But I just don't have space in my life for a receiver and wiring everything and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And I, now Casey, I feel the same way.
Casey:
I don't argue that John's setup surely sounds better than mine.
John:
You have plenty of room, Casey.
John:
That's not why.
Casey:
No, no, it's not.
Casey:
It's not the lack of room.
Casey:
I just don't want to deal with it.
Casey:
I don't want to wire it.
Casey:
I don't want to deal with it.
John:
I would argue that dealing with your Sonos stuff is pretty close.
Casey:
How so?
Casey:
All I have to do is plug it into the wall.
John:
Because they're little computers.
John:
They're pretty complicated.
Casey:
Yeah, but I never have to think about it.
Casey:
You know, here's the thing.
Casey:
There are companies that make things just work.
Casey:
We used to know of one, and then they stopped doing that.
Casey:
I can't remember the name of it.
Casey:
It was like Banana or something.
Casey:
But anyways.
Casey:
That's it.
Casey:
But Sonos, Sonos stuff,
Casey:
really does just work, or at least it has so far in the three or four months that I've had it.
Casey:
So I take your point, John, but it really was plug it in and then never think about it again.
John:
So speaking of that, this next item here is about this.
John:
So this is something that I didn't bring up in the last show.
John:
And there's a reason, which we'll get to pretty soon, of why I didn't go this route.
John:
But this would actually be an ideal setup for my scenario.
John:
So my scenario is I have a room that is not arranged any sane way that any person would arrange it.
John:
So my speakers and my television position and my seating positions are just messed up.
John:
Nothing is aligned the way you would want it to be in one of those home theater setup situations.
John:
It's challenging, right?
John:
And so my sound and everything about it, ergonomically sound-wise, it's never going to be right.
John:
There's nothing I can do about it because it's just the way my house is or whatever.
John:
So this system I'm going to describe is a Sony HT-A9 home theater system.
John:
solves that problem in a way that i kind of wish home pods did so home pods we all like we talked about it last time they're radially symmetrical you just plop it wherever the hell you want in the room it doesn't matter where you are relative to the home pod because it has speakers facing in all directions right and the subwoofer faces either up or down i still don't know um so and then it has microphones and
John:
And it adjusts itself based on where you've placed it when it has accelerometers to know, OK, if they put me in a new position, it will adjust its sound as best it can to make the best of wherever the heck you put it.
John:
That's exactly what I need in my weird cattywumpus room where everything's on angles.
John:
My TV's in the corner and the couch is on the other wall on an angle from it.
John:
And there's just no way to get things in the right position.
John:
So I would love, let's say, four HomePods plus a subwoofer without audio delay.
John:
to plop these little things in the corner, in the places where I can fit them in my room, because I can't fit them in any same position.
John:
It's like, well, this is the only place I have for the speaker, and this is the only, and HomePods are good for that.
John:
They're small.
John:
I mean, my problem is I don't have power to a lot of the places, which, as I said, is why I kind of appreciate being able to just run speaker wire to my backs, because I don't have a place to plug into HomePod, but set that aside.
John:
Put a smallish thing wherever you can fit them, and just say, computers, you figure it out, right?
John:
And, you know, that's another reason that I use the Dirac Live thing on my receiver.
John:
I put the little microphone where my head is on my couch and I say, I know the speaker's in the wrong place, Dirac, but do your best to make it reasonable.
John:
And then you put the microphone in 20 other places and it's not great, right?
John:
The Sony HT9 system does that thing.
John:
You buy this, you get a bunch of these Sony speakers, which look kind of like tall, bigger HomePods that are less fuzzy.
John:
You put them wherever the hell you feel like in your room.
John:
You get four of them, which sounds like a weird number.
John:
It's like, I get four for a home theater setup?
John:
Okay.
John:
And you just put the four, kind of one in each kind of corner of the room.
John:
And then you have to get a subwoofer of this if you want decent sound, because these small speakers have no bass because they're smallish, right?
John:
And then what they come with, kind of like the Sonos, is you come with these four speakers and a little black box that looks like an Apple TV, but bigger, right?
John:
And you plug HDMI into that and Ethernet into that.
John:
So you don't need a receiver.
John:
It's just these four speakers, this Apple TV type box, and then the subwoofer, right?
Yeah.
John:
and it just figures it out it runs a bunch of sound tests it bounces sound around all the micro all the speakers have microphones in them and it just figures out how to make surround and this is the type of thing you would think oh that's great for people who are in a compromised situation but this is always going to sound like garbage right and i mostly dismiss these things for two reasons one it sounds kind of janky and it's like that can't possibly be good and two the cost of the system i just described to you is two thousand seven hundred dollars
John:
you're not saving any money it's like what i'm just gonna buy a real receiver and individual speakers once i'm spending that much money right uh but i have to say that i watched one of my preferred uh audio review channels on youtube andrew robinson's channel am i getting his name right um we'll put a link in the show notes and he listens to all sorts of the you know the fancy high-end systems that nobody can afford or whatever and he was mightily impressed by the system i watched a bunch of other reviews too um
John:
This Sony setup, yes, it costs $2,700, but according to this review, it sounds almost as good as systems that would cost you like $4,000 if you bought them with individual components.
John:
And it doesn't make you have to have a receiver, which Casey doesn't want in his life.
John:
I already have a receiver, so it's not great for me.
John:
But they say that the – again, with four things, no center, right?
John:
But with four – how does it do it?
John:
It's all – it's like computational photography for audio.
John:
It's all doing what the HomePod is going to do.
John:
And he was just absolutely amazed that it can make the sound sound like they're coming from all directions, including the center and the sides and height things.
John:
And each one of these speaker things has –
John:
I don't know if it has speaker cones facing in all directions, but it's got speakers facing in a bunch of different directions and apparently is incredibly convincing.
John:
The other reason I wouldn't find this appealing for me, aside from the price, which is a lot, is that it does what they call in the video the smile curve, where it super boosts the bass and also boosts the treble, which sounds exciting and dramatic for movies.
John:
But even for movies, I, that's not what I prefer.
John:
I prefer something flatter than that.
John:
It sounds impressive in showrooms and it's kind of what people like.
John:
And I bet it's what a lot of movie theaters do, you know, cause you know, boomy base and, and real high travel, but it cuts out the middle of, you know, it makes everything in the middle kind of sound murky.
John:
Um,
John:
people if people like that curve get this system because if you have it's it's cheaper you can't get it something that sounds better for less money if what you're interested in is watching movies but if you wanted to play music you really don't want your music going through an eq like that i would imagine even though some people find that quote-unquote exciting i think it just sounds wrong
Marco:
It can be fun, but typically, if you're boosting the bass and treble that much in processing, usually you're doing it because the speaker's natural responses in those areas are not very good.
Marco:
If you have a really nicely engineered speaker, if it produces enough bass, if it's big enough to produce enough bass, if the tweeter is refined and well-designed enough to not have a whole bunch of weird distortion and be able to reproduce really good high frequencies...
John:
you don't need those tricks or you can greatly reduce them but that's not how most people design things and i think these speakers are reasonable quality but for movies in particular like what people consider to be exciting movie experience is the bass is very boomy and the the highs are very you know sparkly and especially with this system the whole the whole trick of this system is it will really make it sound like the sound is coming from all around you like they
John:
immersive or whatever you want to call it, which we'll get to in a second, the Sonos Proc that has that right in the name.
John:
That's what you feel in a movie theater where they have 17 speakers and the sound is really coming from all around you.
John:
You can watch the review.
John:
The person reviewing it was saying even with their expensive many, many thousand dollar setups, they were hearing things they never heard before in the mixes of movies that they were watching, probably because they're being cranked up artificially by the curve that this thing puts out.
John:
The other thing that's bad about the Sony HD9 is that
John:
you can't really mess with the audio too much if you don't like what the sony thing is doing with it you have like minor control over how much bass you want so you could turn down the bass but you can't really like say can you give me a more flat response curve and not over boost the treble that much and not you know you basically have a bass up and down thing and a couple of different modes and only one of the modes is any good anyway but i was impressed at this audio reviewer that i've been watching for a long time
John:
was impressed with this sony thing that seems like it should be garbage but is actually kind of ideal if you don't want to deal with a receiver and have a work a room that is weird and you can't put the speakers in the right places this thing will figure it out it makes me wish i could just get that at my house and try it because i think watching a movie with it would be kind of fun
John:
But I don't know if I'd want to watch like a TV show of people talking with that type of setup, with that type of curve, because that's just too weird.
John:
I think I need something more neutral.
John:
So anyway, the reason I'm watching this is I've been shopping around for speakers to see if I could upgrade my cruddy speakers to be slightly less cruddy.
John:
But as always, my constraint is like...
John:
how much space do i have to put these and i don't want to spend tons and tons of money on it because they're not going to be in the right place anyway and that's kind of like limiting me because i look at the speaker i'm like oh this speaker gets good reviews but that's for a room where the speaker is facing the right direction at the right height and i can't do that so i don't know maybe i'll end up coming back to the sony thing if i did it would basically have to bypass my receiver which would be a giant waste of money but
John:
I'm still thinking about it.
John:
Anyway, the Sonos Premium Immersive is the link that Casey put in here, which is a similar type thing where you buy this thing from Sonos, and it gives you all the things you need for home theater.
John:
It gives you a soundbar for the front instead of having a center, rear, and right.
John:
And it has the back channels, and it has the Sonos Arc subwoofer, which is pretty good.
Casey:
No, the Sonos Sub Gen 3, the Arc is the soundbar.
John:
Oh, that's right.
John:
No, what is what?
John:
Yeah, it's called Sonos Sub.
John:
It's the big one.
John:
Looks like a big Cheerio.
Marco:
Yeah, which is a very good subwoofer, in my opinion.
Marco:
Like it's it's force canceling and there are almost no home theater force canceling subwoofers that exist on the market.
Marco:
And the one as far as I know, it's by far the cheapest one.
John:
yeah this and this setup i would imagine i've seen reviews of this setup uh not on this exact channel but other things the sony one obviously it's like you know eight hundred dollars more than this so it better sound better but i think it does just because the the speakers themselves certainly the the you know the speakers are all the same size in the sony but all of them are bigger than the the bar or the back surrounds on this thing so they have you know bigger cones in them more more speaker drivers in them
John:
And obviously you can get better separation when you can put those four things in the corners of your room instead of having a soundbar right under the TV.
John:
So I feel like the Sony thing is the better choice if what you want is movies.
John:
But if you want to listen to music, probably the Sonos is better.
Casey:
Well, and that's the thing is for us, it was more than just a home theater.
Casey:
And then I think now I'm starting to come back into HomePod territory.
Casey:
But to finish my thought, you know, we do use the home theater, the Sonos Premium Immersive set or whatever it's called.
Casey:
We do use that to watch TV and to watch movies.
Casey:
But it is...
Casey:
probably just as often, if not more often, that it's just playing music ambiently in the house.
Casey:
And where Sonos does extremely well is being able to consistently, and here's a word you don't hear from Apple recently, reliably move sound between speakers and have it playing in different places and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And if I wanted to, I could do this using AirPlay 2, which all the Sonos stuff supports.
Casey:
But I find it's just as easy.
Casey:
And in most cases, I prefer to use the Sonos app to look up whatever it is I want to play and then have it take over.
Casey:
So my phone is none the wiser as to what's going on.
Casey:
It's not serving in any capacity, you know, the playlist that I'm listening to.
Casey:
My phone is completely ignorant of it, and the Sonos is just taking care of everything on its own.
Casey:
And again, adding or removing speakers, these are all things that can be done with HomePods and can be done with AirPlay.
Casey:
I'm not saying it's unique to Sonos, but it works 100% of the time, every time, which...
Casey:
In my experience with AirPlay, it's not the case.
Casey:
I don't have HomePods.
Casey:
I've never had a HomePod.
Marco:
Oh, they don't work 100% of the time.
Marco:
Don't worry.
Marco:
Okay, never mind.
Marco:
You are not over speaking here.
Marco:
Trust me.
Casey:
I was willing to give the HomePod the benefit of the doubt.
Casey:
Nope.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
Again, I'm not saying the Sonos stuff is for everyone.
Casey:
All I'm saying is for my needs.
Casey:
I didn't want to have a receiver.
Casey:
I wanted to not have to string wires across the room.
Casey:
I wanted it to be able to play nicely with other speakers because, you know, we effectively have three zones.
Casey:
We have the main living room.
Casey:
We have the porch.
Casey:
And then we also have a little portable, it's the Sonos Rome, the littler of their portable speakers.
Marco:
The little Toblerone bar?
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Casey:
Which, by the way, sounds phenomenal for a speaker of that size.
Casey:
Like, you know, I'm grading on a tremendous curve here, but given how small it is, it sounds very good.
Casey:
Now, in the grand scheme of things, is it a particularly great speaker?
Casey:
Well, not really.
Casey:
But given how small it is, I've been quite surprised how good it sounds to my ears.
Casey:
But that's neither here nor there.
Casey:
The point I'm driving at is, for my setup, the Sonos stuff was really, really nice.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
That being said, if I cared more about TV and almost none about music, which is what John was saying a moment ago, I watched that video that we'll link in the show notes by that Andrew whatever's name is.
Casey:
And if this fella seemed like he knew what he was talking about, I was not familiar with his work at all.
Casey:
Seemed like he knew what he was talking about.
Casey:
And again, to reiterate what John said,
Casey:
seemed really impressed by the Sony setup.
Casey:
So if I was in a position that I didn't really care that much about music, which I think is, of the three of us, probably more John than anyone, and forgive me if I'm unfairly putting words in your mouth, then I think the Sony setup, again, not worrying about where you're getting power for those rear speakers and whatnot, it does sound damn compelling.
John:
Yeah, the video is even more compelling if you know this guy because he's not like a high-end audiophile like Magic Gold Cables kind of person, but he does test speakers that cost like as much as car and everything.
John:
So like he's heard it all.
John:
He's not coming from like, oh, I just test consumer electronics and these things sound pretty good to me.
John:
He's heard all the good fancy speakers, and he has particular tastes, and his wife is also in the videos with her opinion of these things.
John:
And the fact that he was impressed by these things at the price, which is not a low price, $27 is not a low price, really shocked me because most of the time when he reviews stuff like this, he's like, buy real speakers.
John:
This is not it, right?
John:
So, you know, I came away with a newfound respect for a system that I had previously dismissed.
John:
And honestly, at $2,700, I think I would, because my setup does not cost that much, right?
John:
I don't think I'd be able to choke down that price unless I was pretty sure I was going to like it.
John:
And like I said, I would not buy this.
John:
I don't really listen to music, but I don't like that smile type curve, even for movies and especially not for TV shows that are not movies.
John:
Like I'm sure it makes for an impressive demo.
John:
And if you only watch action movies,
John:
This is the setup to get for $2,700 because you can't beat it.
John:
But I watch things other than action movies.
John:
I watch television shows, and I don't want boosted bass and boosted treble in an unadjustable fashion on all the stuff that I watch.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Maybe I'm wrong.
John:
Maybe I should just get this and try it in my house.
John:
I don't know.
John:
If Sony wants to send me a review unit, I will gladly test it out.
John:
But Sony is not listening, so that's never going to happen.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Mercury Weather, a really great weather app for iOS.
Marco:
I've personally been using this for a while now, and I love it.
Marco:
I'll tell you why in a little bit.
Marco:
But of course, it's a weather app.
Marco:
You want your weather app to have all the weather features, and they have that.
Marco:
All the information, the weather details you'd expect from a weather app,
Marco:
They have it.
Marco:
They even actually use two different data sources, Apple weather and open weather.
Marco:
And because since different data providers are more accurate or have more details in different regions, the app can switch depending on the forecast location so that you are always getting the best for your region to get things like minute by minute forecasts and other useful details through different parts of the world.
Marco:
And of course, if you prefer one or the other, you can just manually say, always use this one or always use that one.
Marco:
But really what makes Mercury Weather the best, in my opinion, is the delightful design.
Marco:
This is super carefully crafted, high-touch design.
Marco:
So the colors and interface are adaptive based on the current weather outside.
Marco:
And it has a really nice chart layout to present the hourly and daily forecast information in an intuitive way.
Marco:
And all of this, what got me into Mercury weather personally is their amazing widgets.
Marco:
They have beautiful, customizable home screen widgets that you keep track of the weather at your current and favorite locations.
Marco:
This is intuitive hour by hour and day by day forecast charts.
Marco:
And of course, all of this is available home screen widgets, lock screen widgets, and Apple Watch complications.
Marco:
And I think they have the best widgets in the weather business.
Marco:
Honestly, I have not found nicer, more useful widgets for weather apps on iOS than theirs.
Marco:
Mercury Weather's gorgeous interface makes it a delight to check the weather every day, even on gray and rainy days.
Marco:
The app's business model is super simple.
Marco:
No ads, no selling of user data.
Marco:
You download it, you can use the standard features for free, and then you can upgrade to Mercury Premium to unlock all features.
Marco:
Things like the home screen and lock screen widgets.
Marco:
Trust me, very much worth it.
Marco:
weather averages, and much, much more.
Marco:
So go check it out.
Marco:
If you get Mercury Premium this month, you can still lock in their special launch price.
Marco:
So check it out right now.
Marco:
Mercury Weather.
Marco:
Go to mercuryweather.app slash ATP.
Marco:
Once again, that's mercuryweather.app slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Mercury Weather for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, so Andy Galetly writes, your HomePod reviews got me thinking about the age of the chip in our Apple TV fourth gen from 2017.
Casey:
Would I notice a difference if I upgrade to a new 4K Apple TV?
Casey:
We don't have a 4K TV, and I don't really mind the old remote.
Casey:
Maybe we're missing out on a decent speed bump.
Casey:
Maybe?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I don't feel like for me and the things that I have done with the Apple TV, I don't feel like I've ever longed for processing power.
Casey:
But am I missing the boat?
Casey:
What's the right answer here?
Marco:
When going from the HD family to the 4K family, I did notice a pretty significant upgrade in just general menu performance, stuff like that, just like going in and out of stuff, opening apps, going between menus.
Marco:
I did notice a faster performance there.
Marco:
I have noticed less and less of those gains as we've progressed past the initial 4K version.
Marco:
So I think they are still to be had, but you might notice them less.
John:
Yeah, so the thing about...
John:
these tv boxes we said for years that the apple tv is just overpowered for a thing that watches streaming stuff because you know streaming apps are built into your tvs and their tv the processors and their tvs are garbage compared to what's been in even like the last five years of apple tvs because they don't have to be uh particularly fancy and apple's chips are really good but the the reality of any television connected box is
John:
you spend most of your time watching video and not interacting with the app.
John:
Like you have to go through a bunch of things, navigate, navigate, navigate, find the thing you want to watch, then you hit play.
John:
And then you're just watching it for 30 minutes, an hour, two hours, like however long.
John:
Most of your time is spent, like the performance of that stuff that happened in the hopefully one minute to two and a half minutes, doesn't really factor in that much.
John:
So that's why it always seems like it's overpowered.
John:
Do I need an amazing low-power processor to get me to the point where I press one button and then watch something for an hour?
John:
No, it's kind of silly, right?
John:
That said, there's two things to say.
John:
Menus being faster is a thing, and I think you will notice it if you upgrade from an HD1 to the newest Apple TV 4K.
John:
You'll be like, oh, look, the menus are a little bit faster and apps launch faster.
John:
Maybe you'll notice that, right?
John:
But here's the thing that really kills me with the, you know, because I always get the newest Apple TV.
John:
I have the newest one on my TV.
John:
Even though that's faster, depending on the app, this is not Apple's fault.
John:
It is the fault mostly of the people who make these apps.
John:
But depending on the app, they are often so terrible that basic functionality simply does not work and is maddening.
John:
Let's give some examples.
John:
I want to watch something on a streaming app.
John:
You launch the streaming app.
John:
Setting aside all the stuff I've complained about where you can't even find the thing you were watching before because that's just like, you know, intentional design to make you see new stuff.
John:
You know, see past episodes where we talked about, go to hypercritical.co, read about it, whatever, right?
John:
Setting that aside.
John:
You find the thing you want to watch.
John:
You hit play, okay?
John:
So first of all, very often in major streaming services, there'll be some kind of bug where you hit play and it will just spin for a while and not play anything.
John:
And you'll have to like force quit the app and come back and play.
John:
Right.
John:
And when I say very often, I don't mean like one out of ten times or whatever.
John:
But if that ever happens to someone who grew up with television that always worked is incredibly frustrating.
John:
You know, prime video.
John:
I hit play on the show.
John:
You're showing me a spinner.
John:
Is it ever going to play?
John:
double tap the thing flick up force quit the apple the amazon prime video app relaunch it hit play oh now it's working that should never happen and it does a fancier apple he doesn't stop that from happening next one oh a little button comes up it says skip intro oh i've seen this intro many times i want to hit skip and skip intro
John:
All right, what do I do?
John:
The button comes in the lower right part of the screen.
John:
It says skip intro.
John:
It's a big white button, right?
John:
You would think, and this makes me hate the Apple TV remote.
John:
All I have to do is press the action button on the Apple TV remote, which on the current one is like the little touch paddy thing that's inside the thing.
John:
Every time I do this, it makes me think, should I go into settings and turn off the touchpad entirely?
John:
Because I just want to press that button.
John:
I want to press that button so I can do a skip intro.
John:
But if you press that button and your thumb moves a little bit when you press it because you're not perfectly up and down, it's like, oh, I think you're swiping.
John:
And does some crazy thing that you didn't want it to do.
John:
But say I'm successful.
John:
I have it on a flat level surface.
John:
I come in from above like a robot and I go, okay, I'm going to press the center button.
John:
This is not a swipe.
John:
I swear.
John:
I'm just trying to press.
John:
And I press it.
John:
The skip intro button.
John:
What I want it to do is start playing the show after the intro.
John:
But sometimes it'll freak out and start playing the show in the middle or stop playing the show entirely and show a spinner.
John:
Again, that should never happen.
John:
But it happens enough for me to get angry about it.
John:
Like, does skip intro not work anymore?
John:
All right.
John:
Frequently, like my whole family now, when I go to do skip intro on certain streaming apps, they say, no, don't do it.
John:
We know it won't work.
John:
Just try to skip past it.
John:
Like, don't use skip intro, but skip past it with 30-second skip.
John:
How do you do that on the Apple TV remote?
John:
Oh, you hit the right side of the circular pad.
John:
Click, click.
John:
Be careful you don't swipe because that's the jog dial.
John:
Be careful you don't touch the touch dial in the middle.
John:
Click, click, click.
John:
30-second skip.
John:
Oh, spinner blacked out.
John:
Now it's not showing anything anymore.
John:
Force quit the app.
John:
The faster Apple TV doesn't help at all with any of this.
John:
It is not a performance problem.
John:
They're just plain buggy and crappy and don't work.
John:
And, you know, sometimes it's the Hulu app.
John:
Sometimes it's the Amazon Prime app.
John:
I forget what the other one that I was having to play over this.
John:
Like, I don't even notice half the time which apps I'm watching things on, especially if you go through the... Well, if you go through the Up Next thing, it uses the Apple Player, which is a little bit different.
John:
But anyway...
John:
those problems will happen to you on your old apple tv and on your new one and no matter how good apple makes this hardware it will keep happening until these app makers fix their stupid applications and make them perform the basic functionality correctly it shouldn't be acceptable that my entire family yells at me not to ever hit skip intro because they know from bitter experience
John:
experience that what that means is another 15 minutes of watching me futz around with the thing to get it to play again like literally you have to force quit the app come back in go back to your profile find the program again find the episode number it never freaking remembers what episodes were on of course and find the correct episode hit play on it again don't touch skip intro we'll just sit through the intro because they're so sick of me trying it twice thinking skip intro should work right it's not a complicated feature but
John:
it's maddening anyway um this is all to say uh if you're comfortable with your you know fourth gen 2017 apple tv there's not much reason for you to upgrade unless you're playing games on your tv it will be faster it will be better eventually you should probably upgrade but the most of the frustrations about this product had nothing to do with the performance of the hardware and everything to do with the quality of the software
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
No argument here.
Casey:
And then tell me, John, about the differences between the previous generation Apple TV 4K and the current one, please.
John:
Speaking of hardware, now that I've said that it doesn't matter, it is interesting from an academic perspective to consider what's inside these little Apple TV puck thingies.
John:
um we've talked in the past about how the apple tv was kind of expensive and yes it was higher performance than everything else but geez it's so much money and these things come built into your television and you can get like a one of those little you know streaming sticks for so much less from tons of other companies why would anybody ever want an apple tv it's not a great buy the new ones as we said came out and they are cheaper they made an even cheaper one without ethernet and without a thread radio which is probably not the right one to
John:
buy but still even the other one is is cheaper and doesn't have a fan um so you know thumbs up apple you're getting closer to a reasonable price but this youtube video that we'll put in the show notes shows what it looks like on the insides of these things it's comparing the second generation apple tv 4k which i think is the one that just got replaced and then the current generation the third generation apple tv 4k what do they look like on the inside and when you look in the the previous one of the previous apple tv 4k
John:
You can see how over engineered it is inside there.
John:
Like it was more expensive and you can see the money inside it.
John:
It wasn't just like, oh, they just charge you because it has higher margins.
John:
This thing has like giant solid metal plates.
John:
sandwiching all the innards and they have like the little raised metal things around the sets of chips so they're like rf sealed into these little metal cages because the that the the solid metal sandwich plates machined metal sandwich plates clamp the motherboard and press down on the little metal things surrounding each thing so every every set of chips and analog electronics is isolated from the connectors is isolated from the hdmi and everything and
John:
It is so over-engineered.
John:
And by the way, this one has the fan underneath it.
John:
It is so incredibly over-engineered.
John:
It's like, not if you gave someone an unlimited budget, but if you basically said, you have way more money than you need to do this, what can you do with it?
John:
It's like, oh, I'm going to machine some metal plates.
John:
I'm going to radio isolate these things like nobody's seen.
John:
I know you do this cheaper, but I'm not.
John:
I'm going to do it the most expensive way possible.
John:
Incredibly overengineered and actually really cool and fascinating.
John:
Then if you look at the current one, it is like a piece of electronics.
John:
It's got a motherboard.
John:
It's hanging out in there.
John:
It's got a little RF shielding made with like a little, you know, metal foil thing that covers stuff up like a sticker with a plastic thing.
John:
It looks like every other piece of electronics you've seen.
John:
You can see where the money came from.
John:
how did they save money on this it is obvious like this is way cheaper to make there are no more machine metal plates the rf shielding is the minimum needed to to pass you know fcc whatever things the person who is measuring it says hey on the new one you can see like the signal from the various chips and power supply showing up on the hdmi output it doesn't mean that it's bad or broken or wrong or incorrect or it's not going to work it is within spec of you know what is required to
John:
send an hdmi signal and to pass all the rf shielding stuff like it's fine but it is not over engineered like the other one used to be so you wanted an apple tv that costs less money you got one that is cheaper in both senses of the word
Casey:
And then Christopher Sardinia brings to our attention by writing, in episode 520, you discussed an iCloud Photos backup solution.
Casey:
It worked great.
Casey:
On that topic, I built an open source tool to do something similar for iMessage.
Casey:
Now, this came across my transom at some point in the last few weeks, and I haven't had a chance to play with it myself.
Casey:
But this looks really, really slick at a glance.
Casey:
Have either of you had a chance to play with this?
John:
I was trying to think of why I would want to export my messages aside from like not trusting Apple to keep them safe and someday they get corrupted and I wanted to save them because it's like an archive of fun stuff.
John:
And this is an area where another area involving online stuff where Google stomps all over Apple because Google makes it so easy to get any of your data out of Google in a reasonable-ish format whenever you want.
John:
They even make it so you can schedule it to do exports on a regular interval.
John:
they have different like if you go to what is it takeout.google.com google takeout is the branded name for it you can get everything you want out of google and that's we've talked about in the past i export my gmail on a regular basis just in case you know my google account ever dies or i lose everything i will have all my email messages you know and the stuff that's in gmail half of that is stuff that i imported into gmail when i signed up for it so i've got email and gmail going back to the 90s um
John:
But Apple is not so great on that.
John:
The notes application, I would love to export that to backup.
John:
There's a bunch of apps we've talked about on the show of like, here's how you can export your notes.
John:
Why is that not built in Apple?
John:
Like, why is there not a way for every Apple repository of data for me to export it somewhere else offline to have my own copy of it?
John:
The Apple way is you should never have to worry about that.
John:
That's a techie concern.
John:
Don't worry your little head about it.
John:
We'll take care of your data.
John:
Exporting stuff like that is a techie thing that we think people should not have to worry about.
John:
But we all know, some of us from bitter experience, it is a thing you kind of have to worry about.
John:
So if you're paranoid and you really, really want to preserve all those messages, Apple doesn't help you there.
John:
You've got your iCloud backup where, in theory, everything is stored.
John:
But if something goes wrong, it gets corrupted, or you lose your Apple ID.
John:
There's so many things that can go wrong where the Apple copy of your data...
John:
is inaccessible so if you really want those messages you need some way to export it and apple is not forthcoming way the way so all these people make these things that just use the official api to get your data out and put it in some format i haven't used it because i don't consider my messages to be particularly precious i don't do that much tech messaging they're kind of ephemeral to me but if you feel differently you can try this out
Marco:
Yeah, I haven't tried it either, but if I had a need for this kind of thing, I absolutely would.
Marco:
But yeah, I'm mostly with John.
Marco:
I wish these formats were easily exportable and importable back into their apps.
Marco:
I wish there were some better, more usable file system representation of them so that they could take part easily in other backup formats and other file management schemes that we might need some time or want to use.
Marco:
But that's not the world we live in right now, unfortunately, with these things.
John:
i vaguely do you remember didn't adm have like an html based format where you could like export your conversations and it would show like little h i think maybe it used html tables or something or maybe it was css but it would show like little speech bubbles but that was all html like the speech bubbles were html it was so overwrought and silly but you could open these html files and be like oh this is just like a big long scrolling thing that looks just like my conversation did in adm um those days are long gone
Marco:
I think even iChat might have done that.
Marco:
It wasn't something you had to choose to do.
Marco:
You could just find those files on disk.
Marco:
They were just in a folder somewhere under library and you could just find them and copy them and read them and do whatever you wanted with them.
Marco:
Now everything is more complicated and it's based on databases and it's based on cloud syncing stuff.
John:
It's encrypted and all the vast improvement over having all your messages in plain text in a library application support folder on your Mac.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
We had some breaking news a week ago or so.
Casey:
So I guess it's not really breaking anymore, is it?
Casey:
Anyway.
Casey:
Broken news.
Casey:
Broken news.
Casey:
Some broken news.
Casey:
The plate was broken.
Casey:
This is on MacRumors.
Casey:
Apple dropping product design chief role team to report to Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams.
Casey:
Reading from the article, Apple does not plan to name a replacement for vice president of industrial design Evans Hankey when she departs the company in the coming months, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
Casey:
Instead, the report claims that Apple's product design chief, excuse me, product design team will report directly to the company's operations chief, Jeff Williams.
Casey:
So there is no longer a king or queen of the design group.
Casey:
They are all mere serfs to Jeff Williams or something.
Marco:
It's always very difficult to try to analyze Apple executive and higher-up staff shakeups like this because we don't really have a good idea from the outside of the details of what everybody does.
Marco:
We have the public version of this, which is incomplete, oftentimes wrong, but at least very incomplete.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
we we don't really know what's going on here we you know big things that we don't know really are you know how first of all i i'm i think i'm upset about this because since evan's hanky took over i've been very satisfied with the with the better balance of functionality versus good design that apple's products have had home pod accepted
Marco:
And that goes right to, I'm sure, at least part of Evan Sankey's work.
Marco:
So I am kind of upset to lose her.
Marco:
But when we look at what they're doing here, there's two big unknowns to me, which is how good was everyone else who was directly under her who is now just going to have one less level of management between them?
Marco:
Because I think she reported to Jeff Williams before, I think.
Marco:
So this is just going to take away one level of that management.
Marco:
So big unknown number one is what do all those next level people like?
Marco:
How good are they?
Marco:
And how much of the work was theirs versus hers, etc.?
Marco:
And then the second question, which I think is one of the biggest unknowns to the outside world, at least, is what?
Marco:
What the heck is Jeff Williams about?
Marco:
What is he good at?
Marco:
What is his personality?
Marco:
What kind of product sensibility does he have?
Marco:
I don't think any of us really know from the outside.
Marco:
He shows himself like a brick wall of drab boringness to the rest of the world.
Marco:
So we can't really tell...
Marco:
does he have good product sense i mean first of all i hope so because tim cook keeps giving him more product responsibilities and he's clearly as we mentioned before the tim cook hot spare um so he's he's clearly you know like the the next ceo in line unless something major changes um so i wish i knew more about jeff williams i wish i had a better idea of the kind of things he's good at kind of things he's not good at you know we we have
Marco:
some of that visibility with Tim Cook.
Marco:
But Jeff Williams has been placed in quite a significant role in leading product development.
Marco:
And I don't think we know enough about whether that's a good thing or not.
Marco:
Evan Sankey was the replacement for Johnny Ive, right?
Marco:
Pretty much, yeah.
Marco:
Not quite in title, but I think in role, I think yes.
John:
But on hardware only, right?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Software is still our wonderful friend, Alan Dye.
John:
So here's the thing with this change.
John:
I don't know the details of this as well, but a couple things.
John:
With people high up in a company like this, it's very easy...
John:
to fall into the trap of having figureheads for things, right, from the outside.
John:
You have to do it.
John:
It's based from a PR perspective.
John:
You need a human face that represents a larger whole.
John:
So very often people like Johnny Ive or the head of any department or a big vice president, they become the face of whatever it is.
John:
uh you know people will the backlash against they'll be will be like well that person doesn't do everything they're just the public face of it they're just the figurehead right and in many respects of course that's true they can't you know they once you reach that level you're no longer actually doing the work really anymore you have people under you who are doing the work and sometimes you have people under you and people under them who are doing the actual work that's hierarchy but you need someone to be the face of that department and in many respects johnny ive was the face of that uh you know
John:
The whole industrial design group and eventually all user interface at Apple long after he had stopped, you know, individually designing any particular thing himself.
John:
Right.
John:
But the flip side of that is even if you never literally design anything, like if you never come up with an idea, you never make, you know, you don't design anything.
John:
You as the head of.
John:
Apple's hardware design, can have and almost inevitably will have a tremendous influence over what happens beneath you simply because in any company, you're always trying to sort of please the boss to get a good promotion, to do well in your job.
John:
It's one of the ways you measure your progress.
John:
And if you know your boss has a particular taste, like Johnny Ives doesn't like a lot of ports or buttons and likes simplicity, you know, don't come up with a design that your boss isn't going to like.
John:
And even if the boss never does anything,
John:
Once you show it to them, you present it to the wider group or you have a review with them or whatever.
John:
They're going to have opinions on it.
John:
They're going to say, even if it's just I like that, I don't like that, thumbs up, thumbs down.
John:
It's going to influence what everybody does underneath them because it's impossible, especially in a field of opinionated design, not to know what does Evans Hankey like and what does Evans Hankey not like?
John:
What does Johnny like and what does Johnny not like?
John:
And without lifting a pen, without designing a single thing, without drawing a single curve, without even coming up with any ideas of like, I think the next iPhone should look like an Oreo cookie.
John:
Without even that level of high-level stuff where you just say that and leave for two months and come back and expect the iPhone 4 to be there, right?
John:
And not that I'm saying that's what Johnny Ive did at that point.
John:
I think he was much more involved then.
John:
But like what I'm saying is even though you don't do any work, who's in charge has a tremendous influence?
John:
That's why I think this change, and I don't know anything about Evans Hankey and whether I like what she's done or not or whatever, but I think changes like this can potentially be a good kick in the pants because no longer having a single person as the head of all of this frees up all the people who used to report to Evans Hankey.
John:
to come up with designs that Evans Hankey might not have liked, but there are still good.
John:
The wild card here is what Marco was saying.
John:
Okay, but is Jeff Williams the type of person who's going to swoop in and be like, I'm the new Evans Hankey, and I'm going to give thumbs up and thumbs down?
John:
Or what I think probably more likely is Jeff Williams kind of like Tim Cook and kind of knows this is not my strength.
John:
I'm not an industrial designer, so I should mostly take a hands-off attitude and more or less trust the people who report to me
John:
in the design department that they know what they're doing so when they come and present to jeff williams if they ever even do that here's the design of the new apple whatever as long as he doesn't viscerally hate it as long as they make a convincing argument he doesn't have as many not preconceived notions but he doesn't have like
John:
the taste that a designer like evans hanky would have to say i would prefer it be like this and i'm not saying the boss always imposes their taste on all their subordinates and just makes everything a monoculture like that no good boss does that but inevitably that is a factor and so my feeling is that jeff williams is going to be going to have way less strong design opinions than evans hanky because he's
John:
not literally not a designer, right?
John:
No matter what product opinions he has, hoping that he will realize these are not his strengths and be more hands off.
John:
And what that will not allow to happen is people with good ideas who previously could, you know, people with good ideas that couldn't get past Johnny and maybe still couldn't get past Evans and,
John:
If they can just make a convincing case to Jeff Williams that it's a good idea, then that will give us new products that we previously couldn't get.
John:
Now, that's not sustainable long term.
John:
It is good to have someone who's in charge of the whole department and have that person sort of be an actual designer who, you know, and not Jeff Williams, not the COO, right?
John:
I'm not in favor of the org chart where your industrial design group has five people who report to the COO.
John:
That's not great.
John:
But this little break here, until someone rises from the ranks to become the new Evans handgear, until they hire someone from the outside or whatever, I think this is an opportunity for us to get designs that we wouldn't otherwise see.
John:
Because I still feel like...
John:
there are designers inside apple who would like to make products that are better in the ways that we can plan about all these shows an example of like hey if you put ports in your laptops people will like them we had to scream that for like eight years before personnel changes essentially allowed that to happen right maybe that's also true of the home pod or you know we're just talking about that sony setup with all the different speakers home pod could be that product if the people designing it
John:
wanted it to go in that direction and weren't obsessed with it just has to have one power cord and it can't be a piece of av equipment and it has to be you know standalone software powered siri whatever blah blah like that some of that is product design and you know you know what product are we making not how is that product designed but that is all kind of combined together to some degree um so what i'm hoping is that we will see in what i hope is a not too long break maybe a few years here we will see some new and more interesting designs to be able to come out of
John:
the second tier of designers because i know there's got to be good ideas in there that we're definitely not getting past johnny and maybe not even getting past evans so i am mostly not upset about this uh of course the caveat there is but i don't have any idea what's going on in the company maybe evans hanky was the best designer they had and now all they have are a bunch of people who are not not as confident in their abilities and the next time they're asked to do something big they're going to
John:
be put in a situation where they're over their heads and they could they would benefit from having someone more experienced like evans hanky to sort of guide the ship that can definitely happen too but i literally couldn't name a single person other than johnny in the industrial design group so i have no idea what the second level third level or fourth level that staff looks like i just hope it's a bunch of good people yeah
Casey:
I think the other thing that gives me pause about this is what are the political implications of it?
Casey:
Because like you were saying a minute ago, if I'm one of 20 or whatever designers and I want to be the new king...
Casey:
I'm going to do, maybe not, you know, maybe I'm not going to stab people in the back because I'm not a jerk, but I'm going to do whatever I can to be the star to Jeff and look like, oh, I'm the one that's indispensable.
Casey:
I'm the one with all the clever ideas.
Casey:
And that can be used for good or evil, right?
Casey:
Like it can be used to really try to get some incredible work out of this group of 20, let's say,
Casey:
But it can also be kind of a poison pill and it can really sour these relationships that from everything we've read, at least when Johnny was still around, allegedly these designers were all super duper tight with each other.
Casey:
And I don't know, I worry a little bit that it's going to get a little bit figuratively violent as the situation tries to figure out who's going to be the new king or queen.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Like Marco, I think, had said originally, it's hard for us to know from the outside what the political sphere and what really day-to-day looks like on the inside, especially with industrial design, which seems to be one of the most tight-lipped groups within Apple as it is.
Casey:
So it's tough for me to say.
Casey:
I don't think I love this.
Casey:
I think maybe I'm too traditional, and I like having...
Casey:
One one, you know, directly responsible individual to use an appleism, one DRI in charge of everything.
Casey:
And I don't love the idea of Jeff Williams having to split his time.
Casey:
I mean, just look at I mean, John, you're the only one who's been a people manager amongst the three of us.
Casey:
But I.
Casey:
having 10 or 20 direct reports when you're anyone is not easy from what I understand.
Casey:
And when you're already as busy as the chief operating officer of one of the biggest, most profitable companies in the world, I can't imagine he has an overabundance of free time to be doing day-to-day people management sort of things.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
I don't love this, but I don't think it's necessarily a problem right now.
Casey:
I think it would give me a lot of worry if it remained this way in a year or two.
John:
but we'll see what happens that's why i have to think that ceo is just a placeholder because this happens a lot in org charts if someone important leaves and they they're having trouble replacing them there's a placeholder person who for a while has too many direct reports and that's why i have to imagine that jeff williams is going to be necessarily more hands-off because he just doesn't have forget about the expertise he doesn't have the time to be dealing with i don't know how many new reports he's getting but his fan out is probably not appropriately balanced at this point and so they're probably going to rebalance it
John:
They could rebalance it by putting two or three lieutenants in charge.
John:
And maybe for all we know, again, we don't know what the org chart, for all we know, he only has two or three lieutenants and it's not even that bad, right?
John:
But if he has an extra 10 people reporting to him, that's too many.
John:
And so they're gonna want the fan out to be one or two or three.
John:
In terms of the infighting thing, I have to feel like the Evans-Hanky and Johnny Ive job is exactly the type of job that no designers want.
John:
Like when you reach that level, especially in a company like Apple,
John:
It takes a certain kind of person to actually want that job.
John:
More often, it's like, I'd rather just be a designer.
John:
I mean, part of it becomes the glory of like, you know, you're the figurehead.
John:
And now when the new Apple, you know, car comes out and everybody loves it, you can say that was my thing.
John:
I'm the head of design.
John:
And let me talk about the design in the video.
John:
You know, like there is some glory that comes with that.
John:
But boy, it's just like so much.
John:
It's so difficult to operate at that level of a company.
John:
So much politics is involved, so much complexity in terms of, you know, how do I tell whether I'm doing a good job or not?
John:
If there are products that succeed or fail in the market, how much of that is attributable to design?
John:
In many ways, Johnny Ive was protected by his accomplishments.
John:
I'm the iPod, iMac, you know, like you may have heard of my work.
John:
I'm kind of well known.
John:
I did a pretty good job.
John:
These products are pretty successful.
John:
And that protected him for a long time, probably too long from taking, you know, his fair share of the blame for products that didn't succeed as well in the market because he's Johnny freaking Ive.
John:
uh evans hanky did not have that much protection but i think made better products towards the end there than johnny which is great but a new person like who wants to raise their hand and say i'll be the person who takes all the blame even though i have very little to do with the products that come out just because i'm the head of the design and they come out with the stinker product like you know how even like the home pod which i was just saying that's an example of older thinking uh maybe evans hanky had nothing to do with that and that design was already in the can and
John:
before she took over right that happens you know products come out later than you expect or whatever but if everyone hated the new home pod or something we'd blame her because she's the head right or she would be the face of that that product and you know the same way we would be like oh the johnny ive design despite the fact again that it's not him designing it he was probably coming in for a meeting once a month towards the end there right but he was the face and he was the name and when we complained about something about an apple product and it had to do with hardware design his name would be in our mouths right
John:
Who wants that?
John:
That's that's a it's a tough, you know, gig.
John:
In my experience in big companies, I've seen more times than I can count, not just myself, but other people like where there's a position like, oh, who wants to be to go up to the next level to be, you know, whatever the senior, senior, whatever.
John:
Who wants to go to the VP level?
John:
And you would see all the best people, the people who are the best at the jobs that they had.
John:
They did not want to become a vice president of whatever they're doing.
John:
Because they wanted to continue to do their job.
John:
Sometimes they get frustrated and be like, oh, this vice president's a jerk.
John:
I need to be in charge so I can stop people from being a jerk.
John:
And sometimes they would get that job and say, I hate being a vice president.
John:
It is so different.
John:
It's so different to be that high in such a big company than it is to do the actual work.
John:
Even just one level below.
John:
Still, you can kind of define your own job and do the work.
John:
But once you're at the Johnny Ive level, you can't be there like machining stuff and sketching things.
John:
If you are, your boss is going to tell you you're not using your time appropriately.
John:
That's not what we're paying you for anymore.
John:
It's a different set of skills.
John:
You need to lead this entire organization.
John:
And leading them doesn't just mean looking at what they do and giving thumbs up and thumbs down.
John:
That's not leadership.
John:
You need to lead them.
John:
And it's like, how do I do that?
John:
I'm a designer.
John:
That's why people don't want that job.
John:
And why is Evan Sankey leaving?
John:
Maybe because she's got enough money and wants to do different things or whatever.
John:
Who knows?
John:
That's always at the top level of company like Apple.
John:
That's always the thing I'm thinking is, oh, someone left who was a senior executive Apple for a while.
John:
They probably don't have to work anymore.
John:
I mean, not that I'm counting other people's money, but like if you're a long tenured Apple employee or even if you're not long tenured, these jobs pay a lot of money.
John:
And, you know, setting aside RSUs or whatever people are getting, you know,
John:
They make a lot of money when you work for Apple and you like report to somebody who reports to Tim Cook.
John:
That's a good salary, right?
John:
Setting aside all the other benefits you get.
John:
So when someone's leaving, like good for them.
John:
Like who says you have to be, you know, from all the things we've heard, working inside Apple is a tough gig.
John:
It's a high pressure situation.
John:
A lot of eyes are on you.
John:
People work hard.
John:
They work long hours.
John:
If someone wants to take a job that is less stressful or just not work anymore after putting in many years at Apple, I say good for them.
John:
You know, and I don't read anything into it like they've lost faith in Apple or are leaving or they got kicked out of the company or whatever, even though that happens occasionally.
John:
But in this case, you know, like I said, I'm still I'm looking forward to a like, you know, when the cat's away, the mice will play for a little while until they can fix their org chart and somehow get things back into a normal shape.
Casey:
All right, do you need me for this next part or should I just take a nap?
John:
I think we do need you for it.
Casey:
There's a report.
Casey:
Apple is unlikely to launch a new Mac Studio as it instead focuses on the Mac Pro.
Casey:
That means that, hypothetically, the Mac Studio might be one and done, just like the iMac Pro, which makes me sad because I really dig the idea of the Mac Studio, even though I don't have one.
Casey:
But anyway...
Casey:
This is reported on 9to5Mac.
Casey:
They're quoting Mark Gurman who wrote, I wouldn't anticipate the introduction of a Mac Studio in the near future.
Casey:
The upcoming Mac Pro is very similar in functionality to the Mac Studio and adds the M2 Ultra chip rather than the M1 Ultra.
Casey:
So it wouldn't make sense for Apple to offer an M2 Ultra Mac Studio and an M2 Ultra Mac Pro at the same time.
Casey:
It's more likely that Apple either never updates the Mac Studio or holds off until the M3 or M4 generation.
Casey:
At that point, the company may be able to better differentiate the Mac Studio from the Mac Pro.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know what to think about this yet because it's hard to really say whether the Mac Studio needs to continue to exist before we know pretty much anything about the Mac Pro.
Marco:
It is very possible that this product was basically just a bridge product to get to the Mac Pro age, which wasn't ready yet.
Marco:
But this seems like it fits a pretty good slot in the lineup.
Marco:
The only thing that I think would make this report make more sense is if you also take into account German's previous reporting that basically the really big processor Mac Pro was canceled or delayed more.
Marco:
And so maybe Apple's original plan was...
Marco:
that the Mac Pro would be able to have a higher ceiling or have more capabilities than what they're going to end up being able to ship with it.
Marco:
And so maybe when they originally were designing this lineup and planning it all out, maybe the Mac Studio made sense as a permanent member of the lineup because the Mac Pro was going to be even higher above it.
Marco:
And then as they were developing the Mac Pro, maybe they realized or decided it's not worth going that high or we can't easily go that high or there's some major downsides or whatever.
Marco:
And so then once the Mac Pro is released closer to what the Mac Studio does and capabilities, then I could see the Mac Studio not being as necessary anymore.
Marco:
It's also possible Mark Gurman's info is just wrong.
Marco:
And that's, you know, like whenever we get rumors like this, you know, there's definitely some confirmation bias or whatever it is.
Marco:
Like when you remember all the correct things that the psychic says and you disregard all the incorrect things.
Marco:
You know, when you look back in retrospect at what the rumor mill predicts versus what actually comes out or what actually happens, oftentimes there's pretty large mismatches there.
Marco:
So it's really hard to tell.
Marco:
But I think if the Mac Pro ends up being...
Marco:
fairly accessible at its low end and that's a that's a pretty big if i think but but again we don't know anything about this product yet so if the mac pro basically ends up being a mac studio in a
Marco:
Well, that's not going to be that different.
Marco:
It will be substantially larger, probably, and it will be somewhat more expensive.
Marco:
But the Mac Studio is already pretty expensive.
Marco:
Without seeing the Mac Pro, though, it's really hard to know whether the Mac Studio will be necessary anymore once the Pro comes out.
John:
Kind of reminded of the iPad Pros that recently got updated but not really updated and all the gnashing of teeth about that and the various people from inside Apple, you know, conveying what it's like.
John:
Kind of gave a lot of support to the theory that...
John:
It just takes a lot of money to revise hardware products, and there wasn't enough time, money, and resources.
John:
Not just money, but time, money, resources, people, all the things that would go into making an all-new iPad Pro.
John:
It just wasn't in the cards for it to happen this year so soon after they were previously released.
John:
And that gets into what I think is the kernel of truth in this rumor, guess, speculation or whatever, is that the amount of resources Apple is going to put into a product line are proportional to how many they sell and how much money they make.
John:
And once you get into desktop Macs, as this article that we'll link in the show notes from Jason Sell reiterates, you're a fraction of a fraction of a fraction.
John:
The Mac is like less than Apple gets in services.
John:
Think of the Mac as like less than the iPad or maybe it's close to it.
John:
Like you're already in a fraction of the pie.
John:
And then like 75% of those are laptops.
John:
So now you're into a fraction of that fraction.
John:
And then of the desktops,
John:
How many people are getting the Mac Studio?
John:
It's so few machines, right?
John:
It doesn't mean they shouldn't make them.
John:
But what it does mean is when it comes time to allocate resources, whether that be people, time, or money, does Apple want to allocate the resources to update the Mac Studio every single year like they do the MacBook Pros or like we think they should in the MacBook Pros?
John:
No, it doesn't really like if you have to prioritize, you're going to put that money into the new line of MacBook Pros, right?
John:
Or the new line of 24 inch iMacs, for that matter, the ones that they sell more of that are more popular products that fill more people's needs.
John:
So the idea that the Mac Studio is.
John:
would skip the m2 and come out with the m3 makes perfect sense to me not because that's what i prefer to happen or not because apple couldn't put an m2 in it but just because when they're allocating the resources to do that whether it's manufacturing resources design resources or just plain money to you know make an all-new design because again when you make the all-new design you got it takes a while for that to become cheaper to manufacture it takes a
John:
You can't, like, it's more difficult to do that for a narrow interest computer like the Mac Studio.
John:
So, yeah, if it skips the M2 and goes to the M3, I think that will be reasonable.
John:
Obviously, the most extreme case of that is the Mac Pro, which it seems like, and again, this is the article linked from Jason Snell on Mac.
John:
No, it's Six Colors, or is it a Mac World article?
John:
I thought it was Mac World.
John:
Anyway, his title is, Is Apple Making a Mac Pro Nobody Wants?
John:
And he sort of goes through the recent history of the Mac Pro, which is, there's a big problem with the Mac Pro, but don't worry, Apple's going to fix it.
John:
wait a long time wait a long time wait a long time yay apple fixed it there's a big problem with the mac pro but don't worry apple says they're gonna fix it wait a long time wait a like the gap between the updates to the mac pro is huge and it is uh you know that gap uh is proportional to how few people are buying mac pros back in the heyday of the mac pro or the the power mac g5
John:
way more people were buying that computer because the laptops couldn't touch it in performance.
John:
All of the quote-unquote pros, anyone who uses Xcode all day, anybody who does anything remotely strenuous with their computer back in the day, you had to get a desktop if you wanted decent performance because the laptops could not come close to the performance of the desktops.
John:
And so if you looked at that, what does the Mac sales pie wedge look like back at the time of the Power Mac G5?
John:
It was still mostly laptops probably or becoming mostly laptops, but it's nothing like it is today.
John:
And there was a perceivable difference.
John:
All the people who wanted the best performance got desktops.
John:
That's not true anymore.
John:
And so the number of people who need the biggest computer that Apple makes has got to be so small.
John:
And then to top it off, Apple tends to invest huge amounts of money in the Mac Pro, even the trash can.
John:
No other computer that made it look like that.
John:
It was totally different from manufacturing technique to construction to shape.
John:
Like, everything about it was like, this is not a warmed-over existing desktop Mac.
John:
It is a totally new thing, right?
John:
And that turned out not to be a great design.
John:
But look at the original cheese grater, the Power Mac G5.
John:
Was it the first one that came out with that case, I think?
John:
Yes.
John:
Yeah.
John:
You know, it looked like a big heat exchanger, right?
John:
They made that case and they put the money into manufacture the case and they use that case for years.
John:
It survived a processor transition.
John:
Why?
John:
Because it costs so much money to design and manufacture that case.
John:
And yeah, they changed it.
John:
So like the fans, all the insides were different and the fan holes in the back were different and where the ports were were different.
Marco:
Yeah, I was going to say, the Mac Pro, the Intel version was radically different inside than the PowerPC version.
John:
Yeah, and even within Intel, if you just look at the back of the machines, you can identify them like, where are the fans?
John:
How big are the fans?
John:
How are they positioned?
John:
The ports in the front.
John:
But in general, they didn't say, clean sheet, we're making a new tower computer.
John:
They're like, we put the money into this thing, we're going to ride this tower design.
John:
Because they had to make their money back.
John:
We're not selling that many of these things, eventually selling fewer and fewer.
John:
We don't it's not in the it's not in when we're allocating resources.
John:
We can't say, OK, design team, you get to design an all new Mac Pro because it's a new year.
John:
It's like, no, you get to take the existing Mac Pro and give it a facelift.
John:
And even if all the insides have to change, we're still not giving you the time of resources to design entirely new external case.
John:
This happened again when the 2019 Mac Pro came out.
John:
We talked about when we first saw this machine, we said, look at this case.
John:
This is a complicated, weird, fancy.
John:
It's the fanciest Mac Pro case I think they've ever made in terms of how much is this stupid piece of weird, you know, machined out aluminum cost to make versus the tube versus the cheese grater.
John:
This has got to be the most expensive, most complicated case they've ever made.
John:
This is not a one-off.
Marco:
Well, I think if you include unnecessary internal complexity, I think you have a hard sell between the liquid-cooled G5 and the trash can.
John:
That liquid cooling was farmed out and it was not very good.
John:
But I'm saying the case, just like the actual physical shell case thing.
John:
This case, it has to be the most expensive.
John:
It's certainly the most machining steps.
John:
It's the most complicated.
John:
And, like, you know, so they made this computer.
John:
They're not going to make a new full-size tower case, I don't think.
John:
If they do, I will just fall off my chair because...
John:
We said when this thing came out, this is going to be the case design for full-size tower computers from Apple until they stop making them or until many years pass.
John:
Because that's just the way they do things, especially if this is such an expensive case.
John:
So this gets into the Mac Studio question.
John:
If it is a tower computer, this is the case they're going to use because this is the one they have.
John:
They can't justify the resources to redesign the iPad Pro, which sells way more copies than the Mac Pro.
John:
There is no way a 2019 full-size tower is going to be followed by a 2024 full-size tower that is all new.
John:
That's just not going to happen.
John:
If it's a full-size tower, this is the case.
John:
Although I think it would be cool if they made it like Space Carrier black or whatever.
John:
And yeah, you can move the ports and yeah, you can tweak it or whatever, but this is the case, right?
John:
But maybe they don't make a full-size tower.
John:
Maybe it's just a bigger Mac studio, right?
John:
And this gets to what Jason was talking about and we've talked about many, many times in the past.
John:
If it's just a Mac studio with slots...
John:
like that's as they said in the movie contact it seems like an awful waste of space like like can you take take the guts of a mac studio put it inside this massive case and it's like hiding in the corner basically and then you have slots i guess on a giant motherboard that you're going to put what in and that's that question about the gpus we don't want to rehash all that right it's it's weird and mysterious if if the high-end one is canceled but the four things because that you'd need the cooling for that in here and it's really just an m2 ultra but with slots uh
John:
I don't understand like what the like the case is too big.
John:
It's like the M1 Mac Mini was where it looks like the insides are too small for the case you're putting them in.
John:
And so if that's if that's the case, there's room still room for the Mac Studio because no one who is no one is cross shopping a Mac Studio and this stupid thing.
John:
it's just physically space alone like it's not like well i could have this little thing that sits on my desk that looks like this you know a tall mac mini or i could have something the size of a truck that i don't even know where the hell i'm gonna put it they're not cross it's just too it's huge it's gigantic and what you'd have to be saying okay it's gigantic but in exchange for that gigantic thing i get what and if it's just like a mac studio inside there it's like i don't you know that's a product that nobody wants that's what jason's talking about i don't i don't understand it right so
John:
If the Mac Pro is in this case, they either have to keep making that Mac Studio or they have to bring back the iMac Pro because there is that hole in the lineup.
John:
And the Mac Studio now fills it.
John:
The Mac Studio and the Apple Studio display is the deconstructed iMac, you know, the high-end big screen iMac.
John:
If they don't want to make that, they can bring back a big screen iMac, but they can't go Mac mini, nothing in the lineup, thing the size of a truck.
John:
That's too much of a gap, right?
John:
That doesn't mean the Mac Studio is going to get updated constantly.
John:
If the Mac Studio skips a couple generations, that is, you know, it's more appropriate because the Mac Pro skips like seven generations.
John:
It's like the whole rest of the Mac line comes and goes like in one of those time lapses where you see seasons pass and the Mac Pro is just sitting there unchanged, right?
Yeah.
John:
And so the Mac Studio will be like that, but with fewer seasons passing in the montage.
John:
And I think that is, even though I'm disappointed by it, I think it is not surprising and probably an appropriate use of Apple's resources.
John:
And this is the kind of thing with Apple.
John:
They're so secretive.
John:
They never tell us what's happening, blah, blah, blah.
John:
It was nice that they told us they're fixing the Mac Pro, so let people hold on and not spend all those years screaming.
John:
We just spent those years waiting, right?
John:
At least we knew it was happening.
John:
If they had a cadence and told us the cadence, like...
John:
You know, they could spin it however they want.
John:
The Mac Studio, since it's a high-end machine and blah, blah, blah, will be updated every two years.
John:
Just tell us that ahead of time so we're not wondering if they're canceling the Mac Studio or are they going to make an M3.1, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Just let us know.
John:
Like, if you just tell us the cadence, you should expect a new Mac Pro every five years.
John:
Just let us know.
John:
Don't make a Mac Pro and then have us saying, are they ever going to make another one?
John:
We don't know because they never want to tell us.
John:
And they, especially with the high-end desktop Macs,
John:
They haven't had long enough to establish any kind of pattern because they're too erratic.
John:
It's perpetually in crisis.
John:
So it's not like they can say, well, we won't tell you the pattern because we can't promise that far in advance.
John:
But you can surmise it by looking.
John:
No, we can't.
John:
It's chaos.
John:
We have no idea what's going on over there.
John:
The Mac Studio came out of nowhere.
John:
Why is there no big iMac?
John:
Where the hell is the Mac Pro?
John:
We don't know.
John:
So you have to tell us, especially for high end.
John:
People want to know.
John:
Should we buy?
John:
We love the Mac Studio.
John:
It's perfect for our environment.
John:
The Mac Mini is a little bit too slow.
John:
We like the extra RAM we can put in the Mac Studio.
John:
We want to buy them, and when a new one comes out, we want to refresh our whole studio with them.
John:
Apple, tell us when you're going to come out with them.
John:
Okay, we're going to come out with them every other year, so it's going to be M1, M3, M5.
John:
Just tell us, and that would be fine, but Apple does not and probably cannot make those kind of promises that far in advance, so we're kind of left wondering, and that's why you get stories like this one where
John:
German's like, you know what?
John:
I think the Mac Studio just like they're not going to update it anymore.
John:
It's going to be a really long time.
John:
And it's it makes people afraid for like, oh, it's my favorite computer.
John:
I love a Mac Studio.
John:
I hope they make another one.
John:
It's like the mini iPhone.
John:
They don't tell us.
John:
And people have various fears.
John:
And sometimes those fears are founded.
John:
But in this case, you know, a little something from Apple would help either.
John:
put out the m3 one and then there'll be some relief or tell us that i mean i don't know how they say this vocalize the idea that high-end computers that don't sell a lot get updated less frequency we all kind of know that in the abstract but without any communication it makes everybody who buys those computers fear that as soon as they buy one like the the thing they just bought is now an evolutionary dead end and they're not going to be any more of them and that's never a good feeling
Casey:
You're just ready to buy a new computer, aren't you?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I mean, if they put an M2 Ultra in a case the size of my thing, I'm going to be like, especially if there's no, you know, third party GPU support.
John:
Like, why would I buy that?
John:
I would start looking at studios and minis and then I would look back at my computer and I'd say, I'll just keep you for 10 years.
John:
We'll see how it happens.
John:
I mean, once they stop supporting, once Intel doesn't, once the latest Mac OS doesn't run on Intel, it's really going to put the pressure on me.
Marco:
Yeah, that's that's going to be the end of it, because like, you won't be able to just like, you know, hack a driver here or there and make it work like that's going to be a pretty hard stop, I think.
John:
So I mean, what will actually happen is so that'll be a problem for me, because I do have my dinky little apps, and I do need to be able to build them and run the latest OS.
John:
And well, you know, I'll probably
John:
want to do that and then i'll start using other people's computers in the family which will already be armed but they already all are i'll use my wife's mac studio i'll use one of my kids arm laptops and they'll be like hey get off my computer you've been using xcode on my computer like and that's what's going to force me to do it not the fact that i can't run the latest os on my intel one but the fact that i'm hogging other people's arm-based computers and they don't like it
Marco:
And if only there was some other ARM-based Mac you could get that was, you know, not just the absolute top-of-the-line one.
John:
Yeah, imagine that.
John:
You know, if they fixed the fans in the Mac Studio, it would be a lot more attractive to me, I have to say.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, and it's funny, like, you know, the fan thing is odd, and I wonder if...
Marco:
If you think back to what I was saying earlier, why the Mac Studio exists, was it always intended to be a temporary holding spot in the lineup waiting for the big Mac Pro?
Marco:
Or was it intended to always be there and have the Mac Pro go substantially above it?
Marco:
I wonder if it was maybe designed in a rush.
Marco:
Maybe the Mac Pro was not hitting their schedule that they originally planned, and so they kind of made this as a rush job, and maybe that's one of the reasons why it has such weird engineering in certain ways, like the fans.
John:
so thinking back to what we talked about before and uh about the apple tv 4k and watching the old versus the new if you've seen the inside of the mac studio that does not look like a rush job like that is so it is much more towards the over-engineered custom beautiful on the inside design that is not a rush right combined with the fact that the quote-unquote half-size mac pro rumors have been around forever now was that referring to the mac studio we don't know because these rumors are so old but like remember like
John:
I guess as soon as the 2019 one came out and the ARM transition happened, the rumor was, hey, the next Mac Pro, they're going to have two Mac Pros.
John:
One's going to be a half-size one and one's going to be full-size.
John:
And it has never been clear to me whether the Mac Studio is the half-size one or the half-size rumor is totally false or they really had a half-size one.
John:
But when I look at the Mac Studio,
John:
If it was the half-size one, that rumor is super old, and that means the product wasn't rushed.
John:
And then I look at the inside of it, and I'm like, this does not look like a rush job.
John:
This looks like a computer that somebody sweated over every detail.
John:
It's too good-looking on the inside, and it's too perfect.
John:
And the fact that the cooler has low-diameter fans that spin too fast and make a weird droning noise...
John:
just seems like a like a design miss like i think they made the computer they wanted to make and they just didn't think about the idea that all their other computers are so damn silent that now this is the noisy one again it's dead silent when it's bolted under my desk but it's noisy enough and annoying enough like it's like it's not just the the volume if you put like a decibel meter by it it's the it's the nature of the sound the frequency of the sound it is annoying enough that people don't want it on their desk and so it got banished
John:
and banished under the desk it's you know totally silent and fine which is why i would consider getting one but i think it's a miss when all your other computers either have no fan or are dead silent including the mac mini which you think would be a more thermally challenging situation especially when it's got the same processor like in the m1 uh max mac mini which we now have compared to the m1 max max studio
John:
from all the reviews i've seen because i haven't seen an m1 mini m1 max mac mini but from all the reviews the m1 max mac mini is quiet it's practically silent and the mac studio they got that same drone they all have which is just it's just i think it's just a design miss so i feel like uh you know that's not i mean maybe the cooler was rushed but like everything else about it the motherboard the case everything about it looks just not as over-engineered as apple tv but pretty close if you've looked at the teardown
Marco:
Bye.
Marco:
Bye.
Marco:
Bye.
Marco:
And this is kind of stuff that used to be really hard to host yourself in other ways.
Marco:
And now Squarespace comes out and does it.
Marco:
And it's so easy to use.
Marco:
It's ridiculously easy.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
I've used it myself.
Marco:
My wife uses it to run her storefront and it's great.
Marco:
So whether you are making a site with no storefronts or whether you are actually hosting like physical stores, digital product stores, you can even sell your content with member areas, you know, gated premium content, videos, online courses, newsletters, all that stuff.
Marco:
You can do things like sell, you know, if you are maybe some kind of consultant or a trainer where you're selling time slots, you can do that on Squarespace too.
Marco:
All of that support for all of that is built in with Squarespace.
Marco:
It's backed by powerful features that businesses want, like analytics.
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Marco:
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They have a whole product for that, Squarespace email campaigns.
Marco:
You can collect subscribers and convert them into loyal customers.
Marco:
And of course, you can customize the email template so it looks like your brand, your colors, your logo, all that other stuff.
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All of this is, of course, also backed by SEO tools.
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Marco:
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Start a free trial there.
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
Scott Wright writes, Hey Marco, do people like me who remain subscribed to podcasts no longer release new episodes like Just the Tip and Hello Internet?
Casey:
Does that create much overhead for your feed crawlers?
Casey:
My guess is no, but I'm always surprised when I get glimpses of your data models, so I wonder.
Marco:
So the way Overcast currently syncs things, and this has actually changed over time, it used to be, and I think, I forget whether the watch still is this way.
Marco:
It might be.
Marco:
It used to be that the Overcast app would only sync information from the servers about episodes that were not yet deleted.
Marco:
So if you had a podcast that you'd like listened all the way through to and you went to its screen and there were no episodes in the unplayed or now current tab, if you tapped over to the all tab, it would have to do a network fetch to populate the all list because that was not stored on your device.
Marco:
A while ago, I changed that.
Marco:
So that now, any podcast that you have in your subscriptions at all, the app always downloads all information about all episodes about it.
Marco:
And that enables things like search on the app.
Marco:
That's, I believe, the reason I made that change.
Marco:
So it no longer only gets the current ones and now gets all.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
on some level you know the app you are you know you're syncing data about all of those old dead feeds to my servers all the time but that being said my server you know the protocol is a little bit efficient and i'm actually working on making it more efficient i talked about a little bit under the radar this week um but but the the current protocol it won't sync data it won't even check before first checking like basically like a like a change version number
Marco:
And if the feed is not really changing on a regular basis, it's not going to be downloading much of anything or loading much of anything.
Marco:
So it's not much of a load.
Marco:
But the number of feeds that you have in Overcast is the important factor there and how often they change their data on their end in their feed.
Marco:
The heaviest feeds for Overcast to deal with are Patreon feeds.
Marco:
Because Patreon feeds, there's a lot of them, because if you subscribe to a Patreon member podcast, every user gets an individual feed, just like the ATB member feeds.
Marco:
Every user gets individual feeds, and everything is hashed to that user.
Marco:
The problem with Patreon feeds is that they also have these giant long hashes that are like built into different content areas of the feed that change over time.
Marco:
They're like expiring signatures for S3 or whatever else.
Marco:
And so Patreon feeds are huge and they change constantly.
Marco:
They also tend, I believe they tend to have the full text text.
Marco:
of all their posts in their feeds as well so if you have a podcast um like john roderick's patreon where there's like these giant like walls of text as like essays that were also posted as the show notes that's being downloaded every single time anything in that feed changes and patreon changes their feeds constantly because they have these expiring urls so there are feeds like that that are that are pretty heavy loads on my server just because they on their end are changing those constantly uh and and and there's a huge volume of them
Marco:
I have to have special handling in my crawlers to kind of back off a little bit on Patreon feeds and to not save every revision they make.
Marco:
If I sense that they've only changed the signatures on the URLs, I actually will delay and not save every one of those.
Marco:
I'll only save it once a day or something like that.
Marco:
I forget what it's currently set to.
Marco:
Because I can't, I have no idea how long those URLs last.
Marco:
I haven't tested like how long they take before they expire, but it's at least a day.
Marco:
So anyway, and if anybody, if anybody out there works at Patreon and works on their feeds, please get in touch.
Marco:
I would love to talk about this and maybe, you know, save us both a ton of bandwidth at some point.
Marco:
Because this is, you know, this is hurting them more, even more than it's hurting me because they have to serve these to everybody.
Marco:
So anyway, but yeah, so for the most part, having a feed in Overcast that is subscribed at all, like that is in your list, whether you have the little like, you know, follow every episode or not, if it's in your app, if it's listed in your list, having that has a small amount of overhead to Overcast.
Marco:
But it doesn't matter what the status of your episodes within it is.
Marco:
It doesn't matter how many you have unplayed or how many, you know, you have marked as played or deleted or whatever.
Marco:
None of that matters.
Marco:
It just matters how many episodes are in the feed because that's being stored as database for O's.
John:
on both sides and then it matters how much that feed changes and for these old shows that are not having these you know time-bombed urls uh those feeds pretty much never change so it's fine yeah scott's question was specifically about how much overhead does it create for your feed crawlers and the whole reason you have feed crawlers is so you don't have to have it's not like every individual user is is doing the the same job your feed crawl is to run on your server you can crawl that feed once and everybody who subscribes that for non-changing normal feeds like regular pod
John:
podcasts like it doesn't matter if a thousand people subscribe to it or one person subscribes to your feed crawler crawls it and it doesn't have to crawl at n times for n number of people so uh you know hello internet for example regular feed nothing weird going on with it hasn't released new episodes in a long time it doesn't really matter how many people have this if scott keeps hello internet in his subscription list or doesn't keep it your feed crawler is crawling the hello internet feed more or less the same amount of time i'm sure you have adjustments for like when it becomes more popular or whatever
John:
and back off on it but it's like you know what i'm saying to scott is don't worry you're not hurting marco's feed crawler by keeping hello internet on your thing it's fine his feed crawler is crawling it the amount of times appropriate for a feed that has not updated in years and you staying subscribed to it isn't changing that
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
And it's funny.
Marco:
It's kind of like computer science.
Marco:
There's only three numbers, like 0, 1, and N. Or some people are even just 0 and N, depending on what version of this you've heard.
Marco:
But that's kind of how my feed throttling works.
Marco:
It's like, if I have a feed that has no subscribers...
Marco:
and is not listed in Apple Podcasts, Overcast will automatically delete it after a while.
Marco:
If it has no subscribers but is listed in Apple Podcasts, I don't think it'll ever automatically get deleted, but I will crawl a zero subscriber feed much less often than a feed that has any subscribers at all.
Marco:
And then there's also a big difference between one subscriber and anything more than one.
Marco:
Because, again, that's all those Patreon feeds or any kind of membership, the ATP membership feeds.
Marco:
Almost all of those are going to have at most one person in Overcast who has those feeds in their account.
Marco:
So I'm going to crawl those at a different interval as well.
Marco:
And there and there's certain like certain ones where I've worked with the hosts to say like certain hosts of membership stuff like like I think memberful I have I think I might I might special case them a special case the strategy empire of strategy plus and do the rings.
Marco:
I work with Ben Thompson on like, you know, what kind of rate do you want me to crawl you and is this too much or is this too little.
Marco:
So I have a few special cases in there, but for the most part, I just crawl based on frequency, based on popularity.
Marco:
And so, you know, if you have no subscribers or one subscriber or a lot of subscribers, that matters.
Marco:
But no other distinction really does.
Casey:
Do you have particular special cases for ATP membership?
Casey:
Because I know we're going to get asked.
Marco:
I got to check.
Marco:
I actually think I don't.
Marco:
So the other thing is I have a thing in place.
Marco:
I have a ping API where hosts, if they want to in their CMS, can send a ping request to Overcast that says, crawl these feeds with this prefix as soon as you can, like now or whatever.
Marco:
And a few hosts have done this.
Marco:
And I've actually run into issues because Overcast is too fast that a lot of times they will put this in some part in like, you know, the kind of like, you know, the after save method of their CMS or whatever the equivalent there is.
Marco:
But a lot of times their own CDN hasn't updated the feed contents yet at that point.
Marco:
and so overcast will say all right i'll crawl it right now and it goes and crawls it right now and gets old data um but because i have the ping api on atp and i implement caching correctly it's funny actually i actually like i think i artificially delay the ping crawls now by a few seconds just just to try to avoid that problem um but anyway because i developed the cms i implemented ping support so i don't even think i i don't think i have special case handling for our crawl intervals because
Marco:
whenever you publish a new episode the cms just sends a request to overcast hey ping these feeds and over the following few minutes overcast pings them all and reverses them all so if you have if you're telling me when your feed is being updated i don't have to be pulling it as frequently so i don't think i have any special case handling for us
Casey:
John Susek writes, would a MacBook with eight 64-gig NAND chips read data about eight times faster than a single 512-gig chip?
Casey:
Would that drive be about eight times less reliable?
Casey:
Is this conceptually something like RAID 0 at the chipset level?
Casey:
John, I feel like you should probably handle this.
John:
Yeah, I think it's a good question for people who...
John:
don't haven't looked into like hardware stuff that often because of the story we talked about uh you know a few times now with apple putting uh you know one ssd chip that has all the storage versus two chips of half the size and the two chips that have the size get you twice the speed and so it's an obvious question if you haven't you know uh looked into this is like well does that just
John:
work does that scale linearly can i just keep chopping up my ssd into smaller and smaller pieces and get twice the speed four times the speed is uh you know obviously you know if you think about it for a second it's like well if that worked they would someone would be doing it right and in some respects that is true if you parallelize access you can get more uh bandwidth and everything uh
John:
But the dollar sign comes in here.
John:
Yeah, you can make bus widths wider and wider.
John:
And as you do that, especially with high speed ish things like memory or, you know, SSDs are not as fast as memory, obviously, but like still faster than hard drives.
John:
It gets real expensive real fast.
John:
Especially when you're talking about something that interfaces into the CPU or, you know, into an SOC or into some large part of the system that lots of things have access to.
John:
Wider and wider buses are more expensive.
John:
It's part of the reason that the, you know, the VRAM that they put on high end GPUs, you know, it's like, why does it cost so much money to have 16 gigs of VRAM?
John:
16 gigs of RAM costs nothing.
John:
Well, the VRAM on a high end GPU is has a hugely wide interface to the, you know, to the GPU itself on the thing.
John:
First of all, it's physically close to it, which means the signals don't have to travel far.
John:
And like, I forget the bus widths, but I think they're like over 512.
John:
I don't like they're really, really wide.
John:
Back in the day, you know, in my youth with memory interfaces, it was like everything was like sipping through a straw.
John:
Right.
John:
It was just these tiny, narrow interfaces.
John:
And they got a little bit wider.
John:
We'd get really excited.
John:
But money has always been a limiting factor.
John:
So for like a laptop, for example, you know.
John:
If you made the bus eight times wider, well, at that point, you'd be like, okay, but the SOC can't even handle that.
John:
The SOC itself does not have enough.
John:
The bus width going to the SOC for this data is not wide enough.
John:
So it doesn't matter how big you make it.
John:
There's no more bridge chips anymore.
John:
But it doesn't matter how wide you make it.
John:
Eventually, it's got to funnel into what the SOC can handle, right?
John:
And I feel like probably on the ones where they have two or four chips, they're probably maxing out the number of – the width of the, you know, IO system that reads SSDs on those SSCs.
John:
And adding more of them, you would get nothing for it because you're already using up all the lines.
John:
Back in the, you know, PCI Express days and the various bridges, we talk about, you know, the PCI Express lanes and everything or the Thunderbolt we talk about bus width.
John:
But it's the same thing with –
John:
names that i just don't know for the soc and the ssd interface um so yeah the answer is you can make it wider but it'll cost way more money it'll take more power it'll produce more heat and so i think and someone from apple or someone who knows better can correct me or wrong i think the the fastest ssds in apple's laptops are using all the available bandwidth
John:
to those SOCs and you're not going to get any more speed by doubling the number of chips or whatever.
John:
And the ones that are quote-unquote half speed are using half the width because they just have one chip and the other one would use the rest of them.
John:
In terms of reliability...
John:
yeah i mean making two chips two chips don't fail twice as often as one chip usually because you know the it really depends on how you're pushing the envelope it's kind of like should i get the one biggest hard drive i can get or two smaller ones what does that do for reliability if they just came out with like you know i don't know what size hard drives are if
John:
So if you just come out with a new 28 terabyte hard drive and it's the only one in the market and it's cutting edge, maybe, you know, don't go with that one.
John:
Go with two 14 terabyte ones, right?
John:
But if it's a common size that's been around for a long time, having, you know, two 256s and a single 512s,
John:
I imagine the reliability of all those things is pretty good.
John:
Your main factor is going to be wear leveling and wearing out the NAND and all that other stuff that is more of a factor than somehow the chip going bad or whatever.
John:
So it's a good question, but I think the answer is no, Apple is not.
John:
Computing manufacturers in general are not being silly by not having tons of little SSD chips.
John:
They're more or less doing everything they can to get the most performance at a reasonable cost and power budget for their given computer.
Casey:
Bartoszikl writes,
Casey:
I don't have this happen very often.
Casey:
So for me, I typically just ignore them and let them roll the voicemail.
Casey:
And I'd say about eight times out of 10, I end up deleting the voicemail that they leave about my car's warranty running out.
Casey:
But that's just me.
Casey:
Marco, I feel like you've done a lot of, or in the past, you had done a lot of research on anti-spam apps and things of that nature.
Casey:
Yeah, call blockers and stuff.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
So what is the current state of the world for you?
Marco:
So, you know, it's different because, you know, everybody has different needs about, you know, what is your risk tolerance for inadvertently missing a valuable call or a call that you actually might want.
Marco:
So everyone has to set this differently.
Marco:
You know, some people, like, you know, if they give their phone number out as part of their job and, you know, they might have strangers calling them all the time and that's like, you know, new customers for them, they have to be pretty careful what they block, you know.
Marco:
If you want to go fully nuclear, the nuclear option, which I have done, I don't currently do it, but I did it for a while, is a few years ago, Apple added an option called silence unknown callers.
Marco:
And this is just a setting somewhere.
Marco:
I think it's in the phone app or in the phone app settings in the settings app.
Marco:
It's somewhere in the settings app.
Marco:
And silence unknown callers does exactly what it says.
Marco:
Any caller that's not in your contacts, it just gets sent to voicemail.
Marco:
And that is the nuclear option.
Marco:
And it does work.
Marco:
It works really, really well if you don't want to be bothered by unknown calls.
Marco:
The downside is you will miss things that that you would have wanted because, you know, it's if somebody is on your contact and it tries to be a little bit smarter.
Marco:
Like, you know, if there's like a phone number in one of your recent email messages or a phone number that you've recently dialed, it won't silence those trying to call you.
Marco:
So it's a little smarter than just your contacts.
Marco:
But it's you know, you will miss a lot if you if you use that option.
Marco:
But again, I used it for like a year, and it was fine.
Marco:
I have a bit of a different situation in that I got my cell phone when I lived somewhere else than I currently live.
Marco:
And I pretty much know – and the good thing is most U.S.
Marco:
spam callers –
Marco:
Not all, but most of them try to call from your local exchange, so it'll have the same first, usually six digits of your phone number, or at least it'll be from the same area of your phone number, because they're trying to trick you into thinking it's a local call.
Marco:
Well, if you don't live there...
Marco:
You know that is probably spam.
Marco:
So I'll have random calls from white planes.
Marco:
I know that I have no reason for any strangers in white planes to be calling me.
Marco:
And so what I do is I send, if I see a call that's from one of these areas that I know is going to be like trick spam trying to trick me into thinking it's a local call, I will send those to voicemail.
Marco:
I'll decline the call.
Marco:
And then sure enough, in the voicemail, I'll have a message that says the exact same thing.
Marco:
It'll be three seconds long.
Marco:
It'll say hello dot dot dot in the transcript.
Marco:
And I'll get maybe five of those in a day.
Marco:
But then, and here's the trick, I will block every single one of those numbers.
Marco:
Because it's just two taps.
Marco:
You hit the info on the missed call record or the voicemail.
Marco:
You hit block contact.
Marco:
I'll block every one of those numbers.
Marco:
And I did that for a few weeks where every time I would get these dud things that were sent to voicemail or something I would pick up and it was being spam, I would block the contact.
Marco:
And so I ended up having something like 30, 40 blocked numbers.
Marco:
But that actually has dramatically reduced the amount of spam calls I've gotten.
Marco:
Because it turns out, you know, most of these calls are coming from the same, you know, banks of numbers.
Marco:
Like the same relatively, you know, countable, knowable sets of, you know, spammable numbers.
Marco:
So that actually had a huge reduction.
Marco:
But that is, again, that's kind of a trick that I know.
Marco:
And I even found a call blocker app.
Marco:
Like there was...
Marco:
There's an area in Westchester where I've never done any kind of business with anybody, and I was getting tons of spam calls from their numbers.
Marco:
And so I just blocked the entire town.
Marco:
I forget what it is.
Marco:
There's some kind of simple call blocker app where you can just block ranges of numbers.
Marco:
So I just blocked the first six digits and then anything in the last four.
Marco:
So those 10,000 numbers, I just blocked them all.
Marco:
And that also had a nice big effect.
Marco:
But that's one of the luxuries you get if you know that if that local calling trick doesn't work on you because you don't live in the same area code as that number anymore.
Marco:
So for me, it's like if somebody calls from Long Island, I'm going to pick it up.
Marco:
But I've never had a Long Island phone number, so I don't get spam from Long Island.
Marco:
So it's actually kind of nice.
John:
and yeah there's another fun thing that i assume is uh uniquely bad in the u.s because usa usa uh don't you think there should be laws stopping people from making automated spam calls pretending to be from places they're not uh no because the uh the spammers who do this lobby our lawmakers and uh put money into their campaigns i think
John:
there are laws they just aren't you know very very forcing them to toothless wall laws that allow that have ways to get around them because those people spend a lot of money it's terrible anyway our system is stupid that's why we have this stupidity but given that we have this stupidity um
John:
The way I deal with it, so I do like the call blocking apps.
John:
I've tried a bunch of them.
John:
I never had the guts to try the one that I think Marco tried, but it's just like, hey, actually, we'll intercept your calls and your calls won't come to you.
John:
Your calls will go to us and then we'll forward them to you.
John:
What was that one called?
Marco:
I forget.
Marco:
It was terrible.
Marco:
I undid that within like a week.
Marco:
Yeah, it's too scary for me.
Marco:
I've tried a lot of those apps.
John:
I don't want to damage delivery of my... Phone calls are too important for me to allow it to actually go through like a third-party location and they get my number and whatever.
John:
Anyway, but the call blocking ones that just run on your phone and just have like a list of known spam numbers, I run one of those.
John:
They're better than nothing.
John:
The one I do is like $20 a year.
John:
I think it's Nomorobo.
John:
which means N-O-M-O-R-O-B-O, no more robocalls, it catches a bunch of stuff.
John:
It catches enough stuff that $20 a year makes it worth it for me.
John:
It does not catch all of it, not even close.
John:
So then I'm left with what gets through.
John:
I am also a serial blocker.
John:
If I get any call from anybody ever, if it's a voicemail about my car warranty, if it's a voicemail that's in a language that I don't understand, literally anything, block, block, block, block, block.
John:
Just block like crazy.
John:
And it's frustrating because you're like, I feel like I should get that app that Marco had.
John:
I've blocked the same looking numbers a million times.
John:
How many of these do they have?
John:
Well, I guess they have 10,000 because that same six inches is the same.
John:
They're just going to cycle through them to, you know...
John:
put this message in Chinese that I don't understand and they keep sending it to me.
John:
Right.
John:
So that's frustrating, but you do sort of like start to win that war of attrition because there aren't that many numbers.
John:
Right.
John:
I do have a one weird factor that factors into this.
John:
It's just why, you know, I don't do the block unknown callers because I just, I, you know, it's kind of like, uh,
John:
ad blocking on my mac i it's more frustrating for me when a site doesn't work because of an ad blocker than it is for me to deal with the ads so that's why i'm i'm less inclined to block as aggressively on my mac as i do on my phone um i don't want to miss calls you know it's just the car dealer calling or someone you have working on the house or the food delivery person it's frustrating for me when they go to voicemail especially if i don't know you know so i don't do the
John:
nuclear option of like block all unknown callers right that that means a lot of stuff does come through and the reason i can't 100 ignore every single unknown call which is my inclination by the way if a call comes into my phone i don't recognize the number i just you know tap the power button and you know ignore it right that that is what i do 100 of the time so i'm basically implementing block unknown callers myself unless i know that food is being delivered or i know my car is a dealership like those are the situations although i do try to put those people in my context so i get a good name for them
John:
But the one weird thing that I have is my telephone number is one digit off from a telephone number in a local hospital.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
Right.
John:
And so I get calls on that number and they leave voicemails about like patient X is coming in on Y or whatever.
John:
Oh.
John:
oh god and i feel bad about that and so what i do with those people as i answer right because i can tell because the the the the caller right there because they're not spammers they their caller id will come up and it will say such and such hospital because they're always calling from inside the hospital to another department in the hospital coming from inside the hospital yeah
John:
right right and so when i see that hospital number first of all when it started happening i'm like oh my god something you know my wife is dead in a car accident right but eventually i learned i figured this out after maybe a year or two by getting someone on the phone and say what number did you dial and figure oh it's one digit off like people are just you know typoing it right so now when i get those calls they're trying to talk to a hospital and you're trying to interview them
John:
Wait, before you go, it's just administrative stuff.
John:
It's because it's like this department saying, hey, this person's coming down or this is coming up or do you have this or whatever?
John:
You know, it's like it's not always like a life or death emergency.
John:
But I do feel bad because they leave voicemail and they think they're leaving voicemail at the whatever department.
John:
Right.
John:
they're not like it's never going to happen you're never going to connect it's on my phone right so i pick up every single one of those calls and just say you've got the wrong number right and they say oh sorry and they you know and they don't call back right because they're legitimate people right um i don't remember what the thing is i don't i don't interview them anymore to say what number did you dial because very often they don't know because they just punched a button on one of those like million button phones that's inside a hospital or whatever
John:
So that's why in my special case, I can't actually ignore every single call.
John:
If it says the hospital that's near me as the caller ID, I pick it up and I get to talk to a person in the healthcare industry and tell them that they have the wrong number.
John:
They keep you company during the day, right?
John:
It's not that frequent.
John:
It's surprisingly infrequent because I think people don't type.
John:
Like how often do you type a phone number on like a keypad, right?
John:
But somebody's doing it because they're off by one digit.
Casey:
These are your coworkers now.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Around the water cooler, you're asking them like, hey, did you see the latest episode of the TV show last night?
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
How about that sports team?
Yeah.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Mercury Weather.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
They did it.
Casey:
Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Casey:
So the cloud has stopped over the Liss family, or three-quarters of the Liss family.
Casey:
And this past weekend, we had a bunch of plans, right?
Casey:
We were going to hang out with some friends on Friday at their house.
Casey:
And then on Saturday, we were supposed to have a double date with a different couple friends of ours.
Casey:
And we were going to ship the kids off to my parents, which is a very rare treat.
Casey:
And I convinced my parents, which actually didn't take too much convincing, but I had convinced them, hey, why don't you insist on taking the dog, too?
Casey:
So this way, Erin and I would be alone.
Casey:
And then this way, I could treat her to a little one-night staycation in downtown Richmond.
Casey:
And so I had booked a room.
Casey:
I've heard the two of us at some bougie hotel that I've never been to that sounded pretty cool.
Casey:
And, you know, we were going to go do dinner.
John:
Going to go to White Castle.
Casey:
I got to go to White Castle.
Casey:
I wish.
Casey:
There's none anywhere near me.
Casey:
Probably for the best.
Casey:
Yeah, probably.
Casey:
We were going to go to a local Mexican restaurant.
Casey:
Or, well, I don't know if it's strictly speaking Mexican.
Casey:
It's in that neck of the woods, so to speak.
Casey:
But anyways, we were going to do that.
Casey:
And then we would stay overnight.
Casey:
And it would live like, what is it, childless and carefree?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I can't think of the turn of phrase I'm looking for.
Casey:
But we were going to do all that.
Casey:
And then we would go to mom and dad's on Sunday and pick up the kids.
Casey:
And then I don't think we had any particular plans Sunday.
Casey:
And Aaron woke up Friday morning.
Casey:
And she had a little bit of a sniffle.
Casey:
And I had gone to lunch with a friend on Friday midday.
Casey:
And then shortly after the lunch, I had a smidgen of a sniffle.
Casey:
And then at about like 3.30, Erin says to me, you know, my throat kind of hurts.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Uh-oh.
Casey:
My throat kind of hurts a little bit.
Casey:
So I said, does it now?
Casey:
She's like...
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So we look at each other and we both kind of say to each other at the same time, we should probably test, shouldn't we?
Casey:
And we were both like, but I don't want to because I don't want to scuttle our entire weekend that we have all these plans.
Casey:
And so sure enough, Erin tests and she has COVID.
Casey:
I run upstairs to try to cancel the hotel room that actually ends up was I had booked as non-refundable, but I threw myself at the mercy of the court and was like, look, my wife literally two minutes ago just realized she has COVID.
Casey:
I don't think you want me parading around your hotel.
Casey:
you know, is there anything you can do?
Casey:
And as far as I know, they did indeed cancel it.
Casey:
By the time I came back downstairs, Declan had tested positive.
Casey:
Michaela had somehow tested negative, which I'm not entirely clear how.
Casey:
And then I tested and I tested positive.
Casey:
And so we avoided it.
Casey:
This was February 10th.
Casey:
We had gone on what we had called our lockdown.
Casey:
I don't know if you... By many standards, it was not a lockdown, but for us, it was a lockdown.
Casey:
We had done that on March 13 of 2020.
Casey:
So we had made it a month and three days shy of three years before we finally got zapped.
Casey:
You would think that this was Disney-related, but Disney was like three weeks ago.
Casey:
So I don't know how...
Casey:
I don't know how we survived the state of Florida without coming home with a souvenir.
Casey:
By that, I mean COVID.
Marco:
Or a gunshot wound or an alligator bite.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Or a hurricane that just randomly came through.
Marco:
Florida is just a very high-risk area for lots of problems.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
It's our Australia or something like that.
Casey:
But anyways...
Casey:
I think Australia is safer.
Casey:
Yeah, probably.
Casey:
Certainly the people are better.
Casey:
But anyway, point being, yeah, so we survived Disney World.
Casey:
And again, we had masked religiously on the way there and back.
Casey:
Once we were there, it was like, who cares?
Casey:
And so we survived Disney.
Casey:
We did blow up all of our plans, and we immediately canceled everything, as you should, and as we felt like we needed to.
Casey:
Um, and that was a bummer, but all things being said, you know, all that said, I would much rather, you know, cancel the plans with friends here and in the, even if the hotel room was, you know, non-refundable, then, you know, I'd still rather have that go wrong than, than Disney World.
Casey:
Um, but that being said, I'm fine.
Casey:
I had a moderate cold.
Casey:
Uh, Aaron had a fairly severe cold.
Casey:
Declan has been boinging off the walls the entire time.
Casey:
Michaela.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
It doesn't seem to be any worse in any way, shape, or form.
Casey:
So, yeah, this has been a surprising bit of a nothing burger for us, but you never know, right?
Casey:
And I'll make another call back to Your Daily Lex.
Casey:
You know, our mutual friend Lex Friedman had just gotten over COVID,
Casey:
And he had a real rough go of it.
Casey:
And, you know, the List family is vaccinated.
Casey:
To the best of my knowledge, Lex was vaccinated as well.
Casey:
You know, the List family, I can tell you for fact, is boosted.
Casey:
I wonder, although I think this is very biologically shaky, but I wonder if the reason Michaela never, and we've tested her a couple times now, has never tested positive and has only a sniffle at worst, I wonder if that's because...
Casey:
She got her most recent booster literally like two or three days before we left for Disney.
Casey:
And so that's still maybe coursing through her blood.
Casey:
Again, that's probably biologically shaky, but it's the best theory I've got.
Marco:
I mean, she got a most recent booster like, you know, within like three weeks ago.
Marco:
That's I think that's a pretty like she's at like peak resistance at that point.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Right.
Marco:
That's actually pretty reasonable of an assumption to make.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, who knows?
Casey:
It doesn't really matter.
Casey:
I don't know where it came from.
Casey:
I don't really know who patient zero was.
Casey:
The other theory we have is maybe Michaela brought it home and we were just none the wiser and she already got over it by the time the rest of us started to fall.
Casey:
But it's funny because the only reason we even tested in the first place, well, slightly it was Aaron saying, oh, I have a sore throat, but most of it was just because we didn't want to be turds and spread this to all our friends if it ended up that it was COVID.
Casey:
And at the time that we tested...
Casey:
None of us felt bad.
Casey:
Like, again, it was a sniffle for everyone at worst.
Casey:
And then just a touch, just a teeny little kiss of a sore throat for Erin.
Casey:
Now, it turns out that night she had a terrible night's sleep, like had a real bad sinus headache or something along those lines.
Casey:
The next day she had a real bad cough.
Casey:
You know, I've had a bit of a cough for a day or two.
Casey:
I've been stuffy and not stuffy and stuffy and not stuffy.
Casey:
So again, for me, it's like a moderate cold for her, severe cold.
Casey:
But it's been not that bad.
Casey:
And hey, you know, yay science, because I'm going to assume that the reason it hasn't been that bad for really any of us is because we are indeed vaccinated.
Casey:
So, you know, I'm very happy for that.
Casey:
I'm very thankful that, you know, we were able to last damn near three years before it happening.
Casey:
Um, we'll probably talk a little bit more about this in analog, uh, the beginning of next month and I'll, I'll probably get into more gory details about the whole thing.
Casey:
But, uh, I'm, I'm both a little sad that we finally fell, but also in a way, I mean, not that we had been really limiting ourselves in any particular way for the most part, but you know, we still weren't sure, you know, were we going to have crummy luck like Lex, where he was knocked the F out for like a
Casey:
Or was it going to be kind of a nothing burger?
Casey:
And it turns out it's been mostly a nothing burger.
Casey:
And so now, you know, the specter of COVID, I mean, granted, you don't want to get it again.
Casey:
I still don't know if I'm going to have some sort of long COVID symptom, but given that I don't have any particularly bad symptoms right now, I assume not.
Casey:
um so i feel like um i that that specter is is now fizzling which is yeah that's not a word is it but you know what i mean um it's it's it's not as strong as it once was it's kind of fizzled i think that's the word i'm looking for um and so hey covet brain right but
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
But, you know, all kidding aside, I don't want to get it again.
Casey:
Like, I'm not going to be a complete moron and just be like, well, you know, I'm now invincible.
Casey:
But it is nice to know that because of science and because we tried to do what we could to wait as long as we could before, you know, we put ourselves in a position to get it, I like to think, knock on wood, that, you know, hopefully we're just a few days away from being in the clear.
Casey:
So...
John:
uh john it's your turn baby it's only a matter of time i think i'll pass i've listened to lex's podcast as well and hearing him how bad it was for him and also how i mean obviously he hasn't been that long since he had it was a couple weeks now but like still feeling winded and like that kind of recovery no thanks i don't want any of that yeah pass on that entirely um and you know and because of the new variants and everything like that you know it's not as if
John:
getting it like it's like getting chicken pox and you're you know you're fine now nope and and i think covid kind of like measles but not to the same degree like attacks your immune system so that after you get covid like subsequent infections even with the same strain can be worse because it messes with your immunities uh
John:
You know, instead of being like, OK, well, now your body has seen it and you're fine.
John:
And, you know, again, no thanks.
John:
Don't don't want any of that.
John:
Even if I have mild symptoms, I don't want that thing running around.
John:
So, I mean, here's the thing with it, like like in the case of Michaela.
John:
Maybe Michaela had it and you don't even notice.
John:
Yeah.
John:
As far as I know, I have never had COVID, but I can't be sure.
John:
I'm not testing every single day.
John:
I haven't felt sick.
John:
And when I have felt sick, I have taken COVID tests.
John:
Like, I mean, my daughter is having the same thing.
John:
Oh, I've got a sore throat.
John:
I've got this.
John:
I've got that.
John:
We've used so many tests.
John:
She never has it.
John:
We're just like, well, we have to use them anyway.
John:
We got all the free tests from the post office or whatever.
John:
all right so you know it's annoying to every time you get a regular cold or a regular sniffle to test but that's only the only time i've ever been testing is when i have symptoms and they've all been negative maybe i got it and i was asymptomatic maybe i got it a year ago but as far as i know i haven't had it uh and i would like to avoid it because it is so like just random like it's not you know it's not like lex is decrepit and aged right he's he's
John:
similar age to you he's fit he's on his peloton all the time he's he's a young fit person in good health and it knocked him on his butt and he's still recovering from it and casey's in the same situation and it hasn't been that bad and you just never know right and you know again i also believe uh lex has had all his vaccines everything like that and so i prefer not to play that lottery and i will just continue to hope that my luck and that's all it is is luck holds out i mean i do i mask everywhere but the only place i go is
John:
The supermarket, the school, like, you know, anytime I go to those places, I am wearing a mask.
John:
But, you know, come on.
John:
Like, it's just dumb luck.
John:
Like, my mask is not fitted that well.
John:
I'm wearing, you know, KN95 instead of N95s.
John:
And I try to get them to seal around my gigantic nose, but it's really difficult.
John:
And I try to not be in enclosed places for a long period of time, but it's just...
John:
You know, when I had when I had friends over recently, we did that podcast.
John:
Everybody tested before they came over.
John:
And it's just the courteous thing to do.
John:
It's like if you're having a big get together, you know, we didn't mask when we were here.
John:
We all came together and had fun or whatever.
John:
But it's like, hey, just take a test in the morning.
John:
And it's, you know, it's.
John:
Better safe than sorry.
John:
And that's the most frustrating thing about it now.
John:
Now that so few people are masking, fewer and fewer as you get farther into certain geographic areas, it's so hard to know where it even came from.
John:
You want to say, did I put myself at more risk than I thought I was putting?
John:
In Casey's case, you just have no idea.
John:
You don't even have any idea.
John:
Again, it's not even connectable to your Disney vacation.
John:
This stuff is so contagious that it could have been...
John:
you know, you standing in line at the drugstore for an extra five minutes, and the person next to you had it, and you were wearing a mask, but it seeped through anyway, and it's just... You never know, but, like, you know, we all have our own risk profiles, and we decide to do or not do whatever we want, but...
John:
These people have had COVID multiple times and it's like worse than each subsequent time.
John:
I, that is like the type of thing I want to avoid, right?
John:
You know, there's no way to entirely avoid getting it unless you never have contact with anybody.
John:
Uh, and I'm not living that way, but I still prefer not to get it.
John:
So, uh,
John:
And this is this is not a contest and I'm not winning by not getting it because for all I know, I already had it, but I'm going to continue to try to not get it, as I assume both of you will, too, because it sucks.
Casey:
Yeah, absolutely.
Casey:
No, I a thousand percent agree.
Casey:
And, you know, the chat room is pointing out and to the best of my knowledge, they're correct that, you know, with each subsequent infection, you have more and more and more of a risk for long covid.
Casey:
And so that in and of itself is reason to avoid doing anything particularly stupid or risky.
Casey:
So yeah, I mean, I don't plan to be even dumber than maybe I was or wasn't.
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
But I don't plan to be even more, I don't know, aggressive, for lack of a better word.
Casey:
But I am glad because, I mean, and maybe this is just a Casey thing, maybe not, but
Casey:
particularly before Michaela could get her vaccination.
Casey:
And if you recall, you know, she just turned five a few weeks ago.
Casey:
And up until, what, like six months ago, it was not possible for an under five-year-old to get vaccinated.
Casey:
And so for the longest time, you know, we felt like there was nothing we could do.
Casey:
And it was out of our hands.
Casey:
Like there was nothing we could do to get her vaccinated.
Casey:
There was no vaccine to give her.
Casey:
And I lived in this just abject fear of,
Casey:
oh my gosh, what if this virus somehow gets into the family before she has had any modicum of protection and how terrible that could be?
Casey:
Now, granted, generally speaking, the younger you are, the easier it is for you.
Casey:
And certainly in our family, that seems to be the case for the most part.
Casey:
But what if it entered the house and Michaela had not yet been vaccinated?
Casey:
And what if it just knocked her out?
Casey:
And
Casey:
And again, I lived in this abject fear of it.
Casey:
And so I am relieved to know that it has run through the house.
Casey:
And at least this time, none of us in the grand scheme of things seem too worse for wear.
Casey:
You know, it seemed like it was mostly just a really crappy cold.
Casey:
Now, who knows if there's a time two or three or four, which...
Casey:
I would assume that this isn't just going to go away suddenly, that there will probably at some point be a time to for each of us and so on and so forth.
Casey:
You know, hopefully it won't be worse.
Casey:
Hopefully it won't lead to long COVID, but I don't know.
Casey:
It's, it's just, it, in a way it's a weird relief that this thing that I cowered in fear over for better or for worse, um,
Casey:
It has finally arrived and we seem okay.
Casey:
And I think that's, or at least the way I'm attributing this, whether it's right or not, who really knows?
Casey:
There's no way to tell.
Casey:
But the way I'm attributing this is because we did what we thought we should and could, and we got ourselves as vaccinated as we possibly could.
Casey:
And I stand by that decision.
Casey:
I'm glad I made that decision.
Casey:
I encourage listeners to do that.
Casey:
If you haven't gotten your most recent booster or what have you, please go ahead and do so, because how can it hurt?
Casey:
How could it hurt?
Casey:
And so, yep, that's the situation around here.
Casey:
But I'm hopeful that in the next few days, I mean, I already feel like, and again, this was just this past Friday, I'm recording on a Wednesday.
Casey:
I feel at this point that I'm at like 90% and it's been less than a week.
Casey:
So we've been very, very lucky with it.
Casey:
And hopefully by a week's time,
Casey:
Whether or not we're testing positive or negative, I'm just saying the way I feel, hopefully after a week, I'll be basically right as rain.
Casey:
And again, this is in stark comparison to Lex, who seemed to be wrecked for three or four days, lost his taste after like day four or five for a couple of days.
Casey:
He seemed to have a real bad go of it.
Casey:
And just like you said, John, I believe...
Casey:
Lex is a year older than Marco and me, if memory serves, but he exercises constantly.
Casey:
And, you know, it is of good health, like you had said.
Casey:
It's just you can have crappy luck.
Casey:
And Lex, unfortunately, had crappy luck.
Casey:
And his team also lost in the Super Bowl.
Casey:
So he's had a double dose of crappy luck.
Casey:
But that's neither here nor there.
John:
He did finally test negative in time for a Super Bowl party, though, because he got it like two weeks before – or a week and a half before the Super Bowl, and he was worried that he wasn't going to be able to have a Super Bowl party.
John:
He was still testing positive, but he was tested negative a few days before and then had everybody over.
John:
It's kind of disappointing that –
John:
it doesn't work like chickenpox does because you're like, oh, this thing I was dreading and now I finally got it over with.
John:
But you haven't really.
John:
In fact, it has put you in a slightly worse situation than you were before for subsequent infections.
John:
So it's not like, oh, that's a relief.
John:
I got it over with and it was okay.
John:
Not really much relief.
John:
I mean, it's glad that it wasn't bad, but it's not as if now you don't have to worry about it anymore.
John:
In fact, you have to worry about it now ever so slightly more than you did before because subsequent infections are worse.
John:
So it just really sucks.
John:
And presumably there'll be new vaccines for whatever the new variants are.
John:
you know the vaccines are just lagging behind the variants by a substantial amount when when i got the latest vaccine the variant that protected it against was was uh was prominent so it's great thumbs up but since that vaccine there's that that variant is gone and like five new ones have come and gone and the vaccine is not as helpful against those and so it's almost like you wish there was a new vaccine every month but that would be a little bit much and science can't do that so i'm still holding out hope for uh
John:
you know, superior vaccine research that can protect against future variants in a more sophisticated way.
John:
Fingers crossed.