It Might Not Be as Cool as You Think
Marco:
This is the first week that the bootleg will be up.
Marco:
We'll talk about that later, I guess.
Casey:
Well, no, no, no.
Casey:
I actually have something to say about that.
Casey:
It occurred to me moments before starting the show when I was reinstalling Call Recorder as my backup recording for the 95th time in the last two weeks.
John:
Me too.
Casey:
Because it keeps disappearing.
Casey:
It occurred to me that of the three of us,
Casey:
Far and away, irrespective of what computer I'm using, it is my recording that fails most often.
Casey:
It's not even a contest.
Casey:
And I would argue that it is not typically something that I have done.
Casey:
You know, there's no like negligence.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
Oh, come on.
Casey:
Come on.
Casey:
I would argue.
John:
Weren't there at least a couple times where it was kind of your fault?
John:
I mean, not that your fault that it failed, but maybe your fault you didn't have a backup, right?
John:
Because something's going to go wrong, and maybe that's not going to be your fault.
John:
But that's why you have backups and redundancies, right?
Casey:
Well, maybe, maybe.
Casey:
And certainly spilling water on the computer that was broadcasting is a problem, and that was my fault.
Marco:
That was all you.
Marco:
The third-party RAM, don't forget about that one.
Marco:
That was fun.
Marco:
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Casey:
My point, however, gentlemen, is that given that I am the one that typically causes the problems, be it deliberate or otherwise, if the bootleg is ever not there or ever late for any reason, even if it's just that you want to go to bed immediately for some reason, if it's that one of us did something weird, whatever, it doesn't matter.
Casey:
No matter what, I'm going to be the default fall guy.
Casey:
And to be honest...
Casey:
I kind of deserve it.
John:
But why are you the fall guy for the bootleg?
John:
I mean, you're saying if your audio gets like chopped up into multiple files or something?
John:
Like, why is that on you?
Casey:
Or just in general, if something goes south.
Casey:
Now, I guess in theory with Marco's fancy, fancy pants, self-degrading setup, then hypothetically, as long as Marco can see me, it's not a problem.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
That's the beauty of this system is that this system is immune to your audio being messed up because it's like whatever happened during the call.
Marco:
This is like the call during the show that we broadcast over the live stream.
Marco:
This is the bootleg, period.
Marco:
I don't need your audio to create it.
Marco:
It is being created as we speak, and as soon as we stop recording, I can upload it, and that's it.
Casey:
All I know is it's going to be my fault whether I want it to be or not, and I'm already sad about it.
Casey:
It hasn't even happened yet.
Casey:
That's okay.
Marco:
Anyway, I guess this is a good time to tell our members that now the bootleg feed is live.
Marco:
It is in your member control panel.
Marco:
There's a second feed you can add.
Marco:
It's basically replace slash RSS with slash bootleg, and that's how it works.
Marco:
But it's in the member panel if you want to have these little, like,
Marco:
you know, quick adding actions and it's up.
Marco:
It is now a member perk.
Marco:
You will now get the bootleg, which is the recording of our live stream that is broadcast fully, you know, unedited exactly what was broadcast over the live stream that is now available to you as a podcast feed.
Marco:
The downside of this is that you get Skype audio quality and you don't get any fun edits that will make the show sound better, remove talkovers and everything, maybe add some sound effects here and there.
Marco:
None of those edits will be there.
Marco:
The advantage is that you get to hear anything that we thought was too bad to keep in the show.
Marco:
You get to hear all the meta discussion of things like at the end we start talking about what titles to pick and everything like that.
Marco:
You can hear whenever Casey Brickshannon says, all right, programming notes, should we do Ask ATP this time or not?
Marco:
And you get to hear anytime Casey swears.
Marco:
And also you get the show earlier this way because we try to publish it within a few minutes of ending the live broadcast instead of the edit, which takes me about half a day, usually goes up like the next afternoon.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
This is an option now for our members.
Marco:
We appreciate all of our members.
Marco:
It's going very well, the whole membership thing so far.
Marco:
So we appreciate you all very much.
Marco:
And if you want to become a member, you can get the bootlegs feed now.
Marco:
And if not, we're still cool.
Marco:
Yep, absolutely.
John:
I got to talk about the show notes too in the bootlegs.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
So there's a few implementation details here.
Marco:
So the thing is we do the show notes during the editing process.
Marco:
When the bootleg first goes up, it will have the right title, but it will not have show notes yet.
Marco:
Oh, it also doesn't have chapters.
Marco:
I don't know if that matters to any of the bootleg people, but probably not.
Marco:
Because again, that happens during the edit.
Marco:
So when the bootleg first goes up, there's no show notes.
Marco:
But what I did was the bootleg episodes have the same IDs and everything in the feed as the published episodes.
Marco:
And so once the episode is published, the bootleg gets updated to have the correct show notes, description, everything else.
Marco:
Not chapters, because that would require readout in the files.
Marco:
That's not really possible easily.
Marco:
But during the first 12 hours or so, or 18, whatever it is, of the bootleg...
Marco:
Before I publish the edited show, it has no show notes, but they will appear later if you happen to listen to them later.
Marco:
Additionally, if we have an episode where there is no live broadcast, like sometimes if we have an Apple person on the show, we won't do a live broadcast just to make them more comfortable, and then we'll just publish the edited show.
Marco:
those will still go in the bootleg feed.
Marco:
So if you want to subscribe just to the bootleg feed, you can, and you won't miss an episode if we happen to have one that wasn't published live.
Marco:
You'll just get the edited version instead of nothing.
Marco:
Similarly, if your membership expires, the feed will be updated.
Marco:
You will still get the published versions of each show, and they'll all just be prefixed in their titles to say, like, hey, your membership expired.
Marco:
Here's the ones you renew them.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
It's a fully functional feed for people who want to listen solely or primarily to the bootlegs.
Marco:
You can basically subscribe only to that feed and you won't miss an episode even if either your membership expires or we publish an episode that doesn't have a live broadcast.
Casey:
Yeah, I thought the way you thought through this was both unsurprising in the detail you got into on this, but also really refreshing and great that you covered a lot of the edge cases that either I was worried about or hadn't even thought of in the first place.
Casey:
And yeah, I think it's important to stress that there will be times that one of us
Casey:
Maybe me.
Casey:
You never know.
Casey:
Might use a colorful expletive, adjective, etc.
Casey:
in order to explain something.
Casey:
Can't innovate anymore, Maya.
Casey:
So this is not the sort of thing you may want to listen to in front of children.
Casey:
Additionally, I think you're downplaying the deftness and the skill that you bring to the table as an editor.
Casey:
That's not to say that the bootleg feed isn't useful.
Casey:
It's not that it's not interesting.
Casey:
But I think in a lot of ways...
Casey:
some of the best moments of the show are a result of Marco doing very surgical, precise, and clever edits.
Casey:
And so I encourage all our members to certainly give it a try.
Casey:
You can't hurt to try it, but...
Casey:
I wouldn't fault any of you if you thought, well, you know what?
Casey:
I'll wait the extra, you know, half a day to a day and get the pristine canonical version of ATP that Marco has sweat over.
Casey:
In some cases, literally, his sweat over editing and making as perfect as we can possibly make it.
Casey:
And so I think this is a very cool perk for those that are interested.
Casey:
But just like membership at all, if you're not interested, that's cool.
Casey:
We're just happy you're listening at all.
Marco:
yeah like like you know what what you get from an unedited show it sounds cool if you're like a super fan you want to hear more of us we are honored it sounds really cool it might not be as cool as you think in practice because it's a lot like dvd extras like the the cut scenes right and you and you watch them and you're like oh there's a reason that was cut it actually wasn't as good as the
Marco:
rest of the of the movie right and like so there is some value in editing of like okay like you might get more of the stuff before and after of us like messing around or doing administrative work or something it might not be
Marco:
good so you know the main benefit of the bootleg seems to be people who want it quickly because it does get you the show about half a day earlier so and depending on what time zone you're in that could be important for like your your weekly routine or commute or whatever else so there is a lot of value to people of getting it sooner and that's seemingly primarily why people want this kind of thing but
Marco:
If you want it because you think we're withholding a bunch of amazing content from the main feed, I assure you that's generally not the case.
Marco:
Because usually if something is very good, we leave it in the show because it's good.
Casey:
But for all three of you neutral superfans out there...
Casey:
If there's ever a time that Marco will cut something from the show, it's typically some sort of post-show neutral that often but not always I bring up and often but not always is indeed trash.
Casey:
And so if you are one of the three neutral super fans, now is your opportunity.
Casey:
Please sign up to be a member and use the bootleg feed.
Casey:
You might enjoy that just a little bit more.
Marco:
yeah and one other clarification um if you do sign up you don't get all the historic bootlegs forever in the past like it's basically from this point forward i think they have like two or three of the last episodes in there but like there's not a whole archive just because i haven't kept them all so we're starting from basically now forward the other thing to think about for the bootleg i don't know if this is a plus or minus listeners can decide but like when we do the show you know i don't know we
John:
Talk about topics, especially if they're difficult or controversial topics.
John:
And if we say something that we don't want in the show, it gets edited out, right?
John:
Like, you know, we take a run at a topic and we change our mind and say something different or whatever, right?
John:
But that's all in the bootleg, right?
John:
So if you listen to the bootleg and one of us says something stupid...
John:
Check to see if it's in the edited show, because if it's not, if it's not, that's us going, oh, I said something stupid.
John:
And then we go back and we try it again.
John:
Right.
John:
Like people make mistakes.
John:
Right.
John:
What I'm kind of afraid of is people listening to the bootleg and getting really mad that we said something.
John:
But that's the point of editing.
John:
We made another try at it.
John:
And if you listen to the show, maybe we cut out that whole segment because we thought our take on it was bad or wrong or changed our mind.
John:
That is what editing is for.
John:
By seeing the unedited one, you were getting a peek into the process of creating a thing.
John:
We're letting you in on that.
John:
We don't want to be yelled at for making mistakes on our way to hopefully putting out a show.
John:
You can yell at us about the actual published show.
John:
People do that all the time.
John:
But I feel like
John:
That it's kind of like you're getting to see a private thing.
John:
Obviously, we stream it live to this tiny group of people who's able to listen live.
John:
Thank you.
John:
Live listeners and chat room.
John:
But now that we're releasing the bootleg to potentially more people who can listen to it at their leisure, keep in mind you're we're inviting you into sort of this private space where we build the show that we then published.
John:
lots of stuff is not doesn't make it to the show because it's not good but sometimes it makes it there because we talk about it afterwards and you say you know what we should just cut that whole segment because we you know we don't think we're not happy with that we don't want that to be in the published episode but guess what it's going to be in the bootleg and our discussion of it might not be in the bootleg because you're wired in the bootleg but you didn't say anything about it then you know we continue talking after we go off the air too right so anyway keep that in mind please be nice to us we're
John:
We're inviting you into our little recording booth.
John:
We're inviting a larger group into our little recording booth.
John:
The chat room, of course, is always good to us and never says anything to me.
Marco:
Yeah, that's a good point.
Marco:
Because part of the edits that I perform are... For instance, if we say...
Marco:
hey, what about that thing?
Marco:
How does that thing work?
Marco:
And then somebody speculates on how something works and then it turns out we were totally wrong.
Marco:
I will usually cut that if I can, if it doesn't break any conversation around it or any future references that went back to it.
Marco:
Because I don't want to have something in our show where we just kind of waffled around for a minute and all of us didn't know what we were talking about and we were all wrong and that doesn't have any value to listeners.
Marco:
So usually something like that happens.
Marco:
I will try to cut it if I can.
Marco:
But other things might be things like
Marco:
social or speech habits that we're trying to get better at so for instance saying guys for everything we've been really trying hard to be you know socially responsible inclusive as much as possible and so certain speech habits things like saying guys or unnecessarily making a gun reference by like using certain vocabulary
Marco:
I try to edit those out if any of us slip up and say that.
John:
Using the wrong pronouns for a person.
John:
Right.
John:
We are all trying super hard, but we suck at me in particular.
John:
So we edit that out.
John:
We fix it in post, right?
John:
But during the bootleg, you're going to hear us mess up, right?
John:
So that's part of the bootleg promise between us.
John:
You will be forgiving of our mistakes in exchange for being able to see them all.
Marco:
exactly exactly so anyway it's a fun little member perk i i don't expect this to be a big thing i would be shocked if we have more than like a hundred people subscribe to the bootleg feeds um but uh for those of you who are out there who actually want the unedited raw live stream feeds and can't listen to the live stream directly here it is it's now a member perk there you go and keep it down or john will have to turn that car around you want bumpers fine here's a bumper yeah
John:
We're such a jerky Steve Jobs free iPhone 4 bumper.
John:
That was so great.
John:
We should cut this whole thing out of the show because we sound ungrateful.
Casey:
See?
Casey:
The magic of editing, ladies and gentlemen.
Marco:
So, okay, I feel like I kind of have to whisper this because nobody tell Apple, okay?
Marco:
And nobody tell, like, MacRumors.
Marco:
But is it just me?
Marco:
Or is Face ID starting to work with masks?
Casey:
Nice.
Casey:
North Carolina Barbecue's Trash, at Marco Arment on Twitter, if you disagree.
Marco:
But anyway, the point being... I lost my barbecue place in COVID.
Marco:
I'm really sad.
Marco:
Wait, what?
Marco:
My barbecue place is gone.
Marco:
Like, COVID killed it.
Marco:
I think so.
Casey:
The one back at Home Home?
Casey:
Yeah, it's gone.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
I don't know if I'm going to be able to see you in the next 15 years, but I was hoping one day that you and I could go, because I'm not a connoisseur, but I do really like barbecue, and I really wanted to try yours.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm really upset.
Casey:
Oh, that genuinely bumps me out.
Casey:
I'm really sorry to hear that.
Casey:
You know, I think I've told the story on the show before.
Casey:
Now we're on like tangent number seven.
Casey:
But hey, welcome bootleg people.
Casey:
But Declan and I, when he was pretty young, would do like baby gym.
Casey:
It's a place called Romp and Roll, but it was basically like, you know, baby, not even gymnastics, just like baby gym.
Casey:
gym time and he and I would do that on Sunday mornings and then we would go to one of my favorite barbecue places in the area and do lunch together and we did this like every week and we did this for probably six months or a year and one day I don't know it was probably a year or two ago now
Casey:
Uh, it was the whole family.
Casey:
We were going to go into this barbecue joint and it just had suddenly closed out of nowhere.
Casey:
And I kid you not, I cried a little bit.
Casey:
I was so upset.
Casey:
Now, the good news is it was a very small local chain.
Casey:
And so there's actually another one almost equidistant from my house.
Casey:
Don't be creepy from the one that closed.
Casey:
But so I, we can still get our fix, but like, it's so funny that this, this restaurant, which in the grand scheme of things, even though I would argue it's excellent barbecue in the
Casey:
but this restaurant had like such a defining moment or section of my life that I spent my time, you know, with my son every, every Sunday morning or Sunday lunchtime with him.
Casey:
And it just up and disappeared.
Casey:
And what really chapped my hindquarters was like six months ago, I said to Declan, you know, do you remember us going to romp and roll?
Casey:
And we would go, we would go get Q and it was so good.
Casey:
And it was like, and we do that all the time.
Casey:
Q barbecue, just literally the letter Q. Um,
Casey:
Yeah, sorry, I'm not shortening.
Casey:
Okay, I was worried about that.
Casey:
Sorry, sorry.
Casey:
Going to get the Q. We were going to the establishment named Q. That's better, okay.
Casey:
Do you remember we used to go to Q all the time?
Casey:
We used to get barbecue, just you and me, and he looked at me and blinked a couple times.
Casey:
no no i mean and i was just like oh no it's starting kids kids don't remember that stuff oh no it's starting this thing that was like so pivotal for me that involves you and you just have zero recollection of it it's starting now he's five and a half years old i remember my stories of my mother saying i'm making memories for my children yeah yeah yeah yeah that's the same deal i had the same thing with my son my although my question for you is did you do romp and roll with michaela
Casey:
not nearly as much.
Casey:
Um, second child, second child.
Casey:
I can give you a thousand and five reasons, but second child is the side.
John:
I had a thing that I did with Alex with a similar memory in place or whatever.
John:
And I asked him about it years ago and he has no recollection.
John:
Um,
John:
i should have taken more pictures my problem is alex like it was it was like when you know cell phone cameras slash ipod touch cameras were bad and i never you know i don't have lots of pictures of it i was like today i would have 100 pictures of it that's yep that's one good thing my daughter gets is because she was because she was born later we have many more of those pictures those casual things but yeah i'd go to a place with him practically every single day and we have this routine and he has no recollection of the routine so it's just for me
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
Anyway, we are so far.
Casey:
This is my fault.
Casey:
We are so deep in the tangents.
Casey:
I don't even know where we start.
Casey:
Where did this come from?
Casey:
You were talking about barbecue.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So it turns out that so masks.
Marco:
So face ID and masks.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
Did we get deep on that?
Marco:
Pop that back up.
Marco:
I can't tell whether this is a side effect of the way face ID works, where it's training itself.
Marco:
Because, like, so, okay, the way face ID, and I don't know if texture ID worked this way, but at least the way face ID works, I'm pretty sure, is that if it fails to recognize you and then you input your passcode, it feeds that into the learning algorithm of, like, okay, it didn't recognize you, but this is you as verified by the passcode.
Marco:
So learn that this is you and try to get better next time.
Marco:
I think that's how it works.
John:
Hmm.
John:
I don't think so, because that would make it learn random crap.
John:
I think what happens is every time you successfully unlock it, there's some distance you are from the ideal thing that it thinks it's looking for, and there's some leeway to say, well, it's not exactly what I was looking for, but it's close enough so you can unlock.
John:
I think those unlocks adjust the model, right?
John:
Because if the failures did it, because then you'd point it in the dirt and then unlock it with your code, and it'd be like, I guess you look like dirt now.
Right.
John:
like it's not you know you can't have it learn based on failures because failures can fail for all sorts of reasons i think it's the successful unlock same thing with touch id successful unlocks that are within the margin of error but like it allows it to evolve over time i guess i suppose it's the same way not that anyone's iphone batteries last this long but it's the same way it would work if as you aged right you're always within the margin of error and slowly gradually you're changing the model that's my guess i don't know for sure
Marco:
right or things like you know your beard gets longer or something right like yeah exactly so yeah so so there is some some like you know learning aspect to it where if it fails but then you unlock it but you were as close or it's something so there is some element of it where it's learning so i don't know if it's that that is slowly learning what i look like with a mask and accepting it but it started out like i had one masked unlock like two weeks ago and i was like
Marco:
How did I do that?
Marco:
Wait a minute.
Marco:
Was that a fluke?
Marco:
And then I couldn't get it to happen again.
John:
Is it mask material?
Marco:
Because it's IR, remember?
Marco:
So maybe you have an IR transparent mask?
Marco:
Well, but it wasn't... I've been wearing mostly the same couple of types of masks for most of the time.
Marco:
Just fish masks all day?
Marco:
Mostly fish masks, yeah.
Marco:
If I'm in a higher risk place, or if I'm running... If I'm in a high risk place, I have the KN95 things.
Marco:
Please don't at me.
Marco:
And then if I'm in the...
Marco:
if i'm doing like a running kind of thing where like i'm going to be sweating a lot in it i'll use i'll use a disposable like procedure mask like one of those like you know square ones with the flaps um because those like i don't mind messing them up and after a few uses i can throw it away and i feel bad because i have a box of 50 of them or something so it's not not a big deal i don't want to like mess up my fish mask with sweat too too unnecessarily i just hope people are picturing a giant scaly fish on the front of your face when they say this i mean you say fish mask baby fish mask
John:
Sweeping the nation.
John:
Another movie Marco hasn't seen from his list from five years ago.
Marco:
Anyway, you know, it started out with like one unlock that I'm like, wait a minute, that just did it with my mask and I couldn't get it to happen again.
Marco:
And then like the next day, it happened again.
Marco:
I noticed that like if I would hold the phone from certain distances from my face or certain angles, it was more likely to succeed than others.
Marco:
Over the next couple of weeks leading up to about now, it just started working more and more often.
Marco:
And now, my phone unlocks with a mask, I'd say probably about half the time that I try it.
Casey:
Now, you're on iOS 14, though, aren't you?
Casey:
Yeah, you're on the beta.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
And so I thought it might be that, but I heard from some friends who are using 13.6, the new 13 branch, I've heard that it's happening there, too.
Marco:
So here's the thing.
Marco:
So I don't know...
Marco:
Did Apple quietly tweak the algorithm to be more accepting, which I think would inherently also make it less secure, which is why they probably wouldn't want to talk about it?
Marco:
Or is it just a coincidence that my phone and many other people's phones seemingly are starting to learn what you look like with masks on and starting to accept it, not intentionally, but just as a result of how the algorithm works?
Casey:
So this is very interesting.
Casey:
And I don't have I don't really know one way or the other, but I will say based on only my own anecdata.
Casey:
So I could be dead wrong about this.
Casey:
But there have been several times when I've had my mouth area.
Casey:
This is like pre mask on the before times when we could see people.
Casey:
I would have like my mouth area covered up by, I don't know, like maybe I'm laying in bed and I have the blankets up really high because it's wintertime.
Casey:
And so like part of my mouth is covered or something like that.
Casey:
And I feel like there's other examples, but I can't think of any at the moment.
Casey:
But basically when the lower, say, quarter or third of my face has been somehow occluded and yet face ID would still work.
Casey:
Now, this is not exactly the same as having a mask on, but it's similar because I remember thinking to myself, I feel like this is mostly about the eyes.
John:
So I don't think it is actually just the eyes, because if you look at the videos we saw back when Face Eddie was first put out, you'd see the big, you know, the IR dots all over the people's faces.
John:
And it's like, yes, it does look at the eyes and everything like that to find the features and distances and angles between them and stuff.
John:
But it's also the contours of the face.
John:
That's the whole point.
John:
You can't fool it with a picture of yourself.
John:
You have to have...
John:
you know, a 3D model of your face.
John:
Like, it's this whole amalgam of things, right?
John:
So to the degree that the mask changes the shape of your face, like, it's not like it just cares about your eyes and your eyebrows and your nose.
John:
It cares about the whole shape of your face.
John:
If the mask is form-fitting or if it's within the margin of error, I can imagine eventually learning, oh, it seems like this face is all rumply and flat on the lower part, and then it just would come to accept that.
John:
Although...
John:
Some people remember when we first started wearing masks, people tried to train with the masks and that didn't work.
John:
So maybe what they did was tamp down its sort of face normative coding where it expected everyone to have a mouth.
John:
Right.
John:
And it said, look, if you don't even see a mouth, something has gone wrong.
John:
So try again.
John:
And now it's like, you know, lay off on that if they train it or if that's the way to try it, like erase your face from Face ID and train it with the mask.
John:
And if you can train it with a mask and it works 100% of the time, it probably means they change whatever part of the algorithm that insisted on finding something that looked more like a mouth.
John:
And it's okay for it to just be a blank down there.
Marco:
The rejection of masked faces from the training screen
Marco:
might be a different set of criteria than what the learning algorithm of face id permits so like maybe it won't let you train yourself with a face mask but it will let itself learn into that direction over time because that's like that's what i'm seeing is like it didn't work at first i tried all the training methods back you know a couple months ago when people started first experimenting with that uh with like you know you fold it in half or whatever i tried all those different things i couldn't get anything to work
Marco:
But I have been using the same phone with Face ID repeatedly with masks for months now, and they're slowly starting to work.
Marco:
And so that's why I feel like it's probably a learning algorithm thing.
Marco:
But because I have recently installed the beta, then I kind of felt like maybe it's a 14 thing.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
I'm happy it is this way because it's one of those things where it would be better for all of society right now if it was more convenient to wear a mask.
Marco:
face id working is one thing that's within apple's control to affect that pretty strongly and yet they're not going to get everybody to wear a mask by simply making this one change but it removes one you know one more element of friction to wear a mask and if for all the people out there who aren't wearing them
Marco:
Or who are doing the kind of, you know, like the chin strap thing, which is not wearing one, you know, because because something about it irritates them or annoys them.
Marco:
And they're like, I don't want to do this.
Marco:
Like any small thing that anybody can do to make wearing a mask easier and more universal and more accepted.
Marco:
will have strong dividends here.
Marco:
So Apple could have intentionally tweaked the algorithm to make it just accept that more, but they would probably have to reduce the mathematical security of it to do that because they're reducing the amount of data that's recognized as valid.
Marco:
So they would probably never be able to really say that publicly because they would probably get potentially trashed by various communities for reducing the security of it.
Marco:
But it's best for the world if they do this.
Marco:
So I'm not sure whether this is just an unintentional learning algorithm thing or whether they are slowly tweaking this over time because that is kind of the most pragmatic thing for them to do, but they could never talk about it.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I'm going to have to keep an eye out on this, especially with 13.6.
Casey:
And I think I'm crumbling on the beta on my carry phone.
Casey:
I think it's going to happen sometime in the next beta or two.
Casey:
Like if we get three or four down that aren't complete disasters, then I'm going to probably commit because I'm a big wuss.
Casey:
And I'm not going anywhere anymore.
Casey:
I will caution you.
Casey:
Steer me straight, steer me straight.
Marco:
Okay, so I've had the beta since day one.
Marco:
I've put it on my main phone on day one, and now we're in beta two, and the public beta, I believe, just started for iOS.
Marco:
It's fine, but it's not super amazing that you have to really have it for any real reason.
Marco:
So there's not a lot of upside to it, and there are still downsides.
Marco:
Sometimes I have to reboot my phone to get web views to work in any app.
Marco:
Or there does seem to be some kind of change to the way things are fetched over the network in certain conditions.
Marco:
Sometimes apps that fetch images or whatever over the network will just stop until I either force quit them and restart them or reboot the whole phone.
Marco:
Something's up with network fetches and connectivity and stuff like that.
Marco:
I don't know what it is yet, but it's persisted throughout betas 1 and 2.
Marco:
And there are little things like that where like, yeah, this is actually really good for a beta 1 and a beta 2 compared to past years, but it's still very much a beta.
Marco:
You still shouldn't install it unless you have a pretty good reason to because there are still beta bugs.
Marco:
It doesn't work as well as you think it should yet because it is still really early.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
If you're not really itching to install it for a particular reason that you know it will make better in your life or that you need to for work, I wouldn't recommend it still.
Casey:
Yeah, so here's the thing.
Casey:
I don't want to get specific about it, but I want to have all of my HealthKit data in my test device.
Casey:
And currently my test device is Aaron's old iPhone X, which is not logged in.
Casey:
I don't believe it's logged into my iCloud.
Casey:
It's not logged into really anything.
Casey:
And I know I could log into iCloud and then it would sync up all my health data.
Casey:
And that is the easiest way to do it.
Casey:
But I'm trying to be a good boy and not put iOS betas anyway on iCloud.
Casey:
And so I don't know.
Casey:
I don't think there's any good way of exporting and importing health data as far as I'm aware.
Casey:
And so I kind of want to use the carry phone so I can get all that data.
Casey:
But I know I shouldn't.
Casey:
But I think you've scared me enough to at least...
Casey:
Keep me as a good boy for at least another couple of weeks.
Casey:
But guaranteed, it's only a matter of time before I cave because I'm a big wuss.
Marco:
Yeah, and it won't be the end of the world when you finally do.
Marco:
You'll see the same thing I do, which is like, yeah, it's fine most of the time, but every couple of days you'll be reminded, oh, this is very much a beta still.
Marco:
In particular, I would not recommend it on the Apple Watch.
Marco:
That is in a bit of a rougher state.
Marco:
In particular, the battery life area is still pretty rough on the Apple Watch, and I've also had occasional issues where the face of the watch will just freeze for a while.
Marco:
and so including the time part of it yeah which is kind of important so yeah i've had i've had more issues with the watch os beta than with the ios beta but uh you know neither of them are like fatal but it's definitely not recommended that you install them unless you have a really good reason
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Uh, John, can you tell me about the mugs that everyone is getting, but I haven't gotten yet, please?
John:
Yeah.
John:
We, when we do our sales, we have like the store page where it's like a landing page at ATP.fm.
John:
And that leads to the cotton bureau site where you can buy stuff and we have descriptions of the product or whatever.
John:
And you know, the deal is like you, you order your stuff and then the sale ends after some period of time.
John:
And then all the stuff gets manufactured based on how many orders we got.
John:
And then we ship it.
John:
Like that's the way we do these things.
John:
But one of the side effects of that is that after you order something and all the pages, you know, go away, like we take down the store page and we say we're not having a sale now and all that other stuff.
John:
You can't if there was like information about the products that were there, you can't go back and reference it.
John:
It usually doesn't matter because what are you referencing?
John:
Like, right.
John:
But this is the first year we sold mugs and a question a lot of people have about the mugs.
John:
So that people are asking questions.
John:
When they were ordering them, hey, is it microwave safe?
John:
And so we had that information.
John:
But another piece of information that now that people have the mugs that they want to know is, is it dishwasher safe?
John:
And I want to tell you, hopefully you're hearing this either before you got your mug or before you washed it.
John:
These mugs are not dishwasher safe.
John:
Do not put them in the dishwasher.
John:
They will burn your whole house down.
John:
No, they won't.
John:
They'll be fine.
John:
But the logo will probably come off.
John:
So don't put your ATP mug in the dishwasher.
John:
Wash it by hand.
John:
Again, I hope the people who like the show enough to get a mug listened this far into the episode and hear me saying, don't put it in the dishwasher, because if you put it in the dishwasher, it might destroy the logo, and that's the whole reason why you bought the mug.
John:
So wash it by hand.
Marco:
Well, to be fair, it is a very nice mug otherwise.
Marco:
However, yeah, I mean, I've been a fan of novelty printed mugs for a long time and I always hand wash my favorite mug.
Marco:
Like whatever my favorite mug is for that given year or two, I always hand wash it because I've had mugs that I didn't hand wash and with any printer, like pretty much any screen printed mug, and these are screen printed, but pretty much any screen printed mug,
Marco:
If you put it in the dishwasher on a regular basis, like if you do it once, you probably won't notice anything wrong.
Marco:
But if you're on a regular basis, the logo, the printing will start to either fade or run or both.
Marco:
And so it's just an effective printing thing.
Marco:
So hand wash your mug if you care about it.
Marco:
If you only intend to use it for a few months, maybe you might get away with dishwashing it then.
Marco:
But yeah, I wouldn't recommend it.
John:
It is microwave safe, though.
John:
You're fine to microwave it.
Marco:
Just don't put it in the dishwasher.
Marco:
That is all.
Marco:
We should make a mug addition that is not microwave safe because it has gold foil on it.
Marco:
Oh, my gosh.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
That's the caveat about the mugs.
John:
If we had used the metallic ink, it wouldn't be microwave safe, although it might put on quite a light show.
John:
But we did not use metallic ink, so it is microwave safe.
Marco:
we also like man we we sure we're not great at logo design and the low the rainbow atp logo that everyone loves uh is wonderful because it looks really great but from a like merchandise design perspective it's terrible because it requires like eight colors to print or whatever incredibly it's the most expensive logo ever made
John:
It's like the Apple logo.
John:
It's telling the story of when Apple originally had the rainbow logo on its hardware.
John:
When they were first manufacturing hardware, nobody wanted to put the rainbow logo on the Apple II because it's so expensive.
John:
Every additional color you add adds complexity and cost.
John:
It's like, can we just put just a solid color silhouette?
John:
But of course, Steve Jobs insisted that it had to be rainbow striped.
John:
If we ever do mugs again, we might do a monochrome one.
John:
We have all sorts of things we might look into, but that's for a future date.
John:
For now, everybody, please enjoy your mugs.
John:
Indeed.
John:
Except for Casey who didn't get us yet.
Casey:
Not yet.
Casey:
It's coming.
Casey:
It's coming.
Casey:
Just not yet.
Marco:
Wait.
Marco:
So, okay.
Marco:
You don't drink coffee.
Marco:
What do the two of you put in mugs?
Casey:
First of all, you want to get the merch for your own thing.
Casey:
In fact, I've realized, I don't think I've talked about this, but I've realized over the last few months, particularly since I stopped leaving the house, that basically my entire wardrobe is ATP t-shirts, at least during the summertime.
Casey:
Like I am that guy that is wearing my own band t-shirt everywhere I go now because I have so many of them because I always buy, I buy at least one of every run.
Casey:
Like I didn't get the addition way back when, uh, because I'm a fool, but, uh, but you know, I, I got a different, I think I got the sport shirt, you know, during that run, for example.
Casey:
And so I have all these ATP shirts and I just wear them constantly.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I wanted a mug because I think they look great.
Casey:
And I wanted to have a copy of the thing that we made.
Casey:
But beyond that, when it gets cold, I love me a hot chocolate.
Casey:
Hot chocolate is delightful.
Casey:
And so that's what I'll be putting in there.
Casey:
And that's at least a lot more interesting than water.
Casey:
Right, John?
John:
I'm drinking nothing out of my mug.
John:
Although at work, back when I used to go to work, I have a mug that's like my company logo on it that I got like as part of your welcome, you're a new employee, you know, like first day package of stuff 11 years ago.
John:
That's not even our company logo.
John:
We had a logo redesign since then or whatever.
John:
And so I was sort of the point of pride that I've got one of the super old mugs.
John:
But anyway, I would drink water out of my mug at my desk.
John:
I've done that for a decade.
John:
Water.
John:
I'd come in in the morning.
John:
I'd get my mug.
John:
I'd go into the little kitchen area.
John:
They have little water machines there that will give you both ice and water.
John:
And I would fill it up with water, bring it back to my desk.
John:
That's all I do all day is refill my mug with water.
John:
Why was I using a mug?
John:
Because they gave me a mug and it's got the company logo on it.
John:
But when I'm at home, even though I have these mugs, I don't use them.
John:
I just use regular glasses.
John:
I got the mugs because my daughter uses mugs for various tea concoctions that she's into lately.
John:
like casey just want to have a copy of the mug or whatever and me being me i got one for my daughter to use and i got one for me to keep pristine it's up in the attic now uh and then my wife and and then my wife wanted a mug too and so we have three mugs so my wife's got one my daughter's got one and i've got one in the act most of the merch that i buy i don't tend to wear on my own shirts i have a million podcast shirts from other podcasts that's mostly what i wear but i do want
John:
pretty much one copy of most of the shirts that we make.
John:
And so they're all neatly folded in the attic, including the edition, which I will sell to Casey for a huge amount of money in his retirement.
Casey:
It's true.
Casey:
You should do that.
John:
It'll be a pristine, never worn ATP edition shirt.
Casey:
You know, if it weren't for you sharing, at least with us, I don't think they were shared publicly, but you shared with the two of us, I don't know, maybe around the time of the Mac Pro, I believe, you shared with us photos of your attic.
Casey:
And I've seen it, and there's a lot of stuff up there, but it's not nearly as bad as I had envisioned.
Casey:
But the way you talk about it, and the way you talk about how your house is supposedly crumbling...
Casey:
I am surprised that your attic has not become your second floor.
Casey:
And it's like the attic just hasn't fallen through and has taken the place of the second story of the house.
Casey:
Because it sounds, the way you talk about it, like you have so much stuff up there.
John:
I mean, it's a lot of stuff.
John:
You saw the picture.
John:
It's things stacked basically to the ceiling, to the angled ceiling.
John:
Not enough stuff has left the attic.
John:
Really, most of the stuff up there is baby and toddler stuff that we need to get rid of.
John:
But on the computer side of things, it's just...
Marco:
boxes and boxes filled with computer hardware now my mac pro is up there too so that's a big box yeah that's a big so i was going to give you crap about using a coffee mug as your like work water cup because it doesn't hold that much like for a water cup but then you said all i do all day is go back and refill it and then i realized oh like this is like a yeah like because like i always i always felt bad like i i was gonna say i always felt bad i didn't smoke i'm like
Marco:
It turns out I don't feel bad about that.
Marco:
But I didn't have anything in the workday back when I had a real job that would give me an excuse to get up and leave my desk on a regular basis.
Marco:
And so I too would drink a lot of water, but I was using one of those big 20-ounce.
Marco:
Now I realize if I was using a 12-ounce coffee mug, that would have been way better because I could get up and refill it twice as often.
John:
I'm mostly just sipping it.
John:
Like I would fill it in the morning and then I wouldn't have to fill it up again until like lunchtime or after lunch.
John:
So I'm not, you know, guzzling it down.
John:
It wasn't so I could take more frequent trips.
John:
It's just that's what I had.
John:
And, you know, a mug is a pretty stable vessel, right?
John:
You know, it's short and squat on the desk, whatever.
Casey:
Why does that matter?
Mm hmm.
Mm hmm.
John:
at work i did not practice the thing of keeping the drink on a different level than my computer back when i had a desktop it was because the desktop was under you know it was on the floor and the drink was on top and they were on opposite sides that was all set but now i've got a laptop and i had the laptop on the same level albeit at the far other side of the desk because i got my drink by my right hand the laptop would be way over in the left hand corner but anyway i'm at home now and i'm using water glasses and everything is fine
John:
oh goodness all right john tell me about uh thunderbolt and usb4 please yeah this topic is always confusing it will eternally be confusing not the least of which because there are cables that look the same on the outside and have no markings on them but behave incredibly differently uh last show we talked a little bit about usb4 or thunderbolt 3 and 4 and i was saying a thunderbolt 4 doesn't get any faster but it's a has some different constraints than thunderbolt 3 uh and apparently i got some things wrong about usb4 versus thunderbolt 3 imagine that because it's so confusing
John:
Jonathan Dees wrote in with some more information so he says is while USB 4 is conceptually based on Thunderbolt 3 there are material differences regarding implementation such as signaling rates and coding schemes etc according to the USB 4 specifications interoperability with Thunderbolt 3 products only optional for USB 4 hosts and devices this is where you get into this whole world of like
John:
Well, I'll have this port and this cable and this thing like there are lots of things in these specs that are optional.
John:
Right.
John:
So USB for being, quote unquote, the same as Thunderbolt three is not really true.
John:
It's just that USB for can optionally be interoperable with Thunderbolt three, but doesn't necessarily have to be.
John:
which is just maddening right uh and so interoperability is enabled by using the usb type c thunderbolt alternate mode uh the bulk of the usb4 spec explains how usb4 works and a single chapter is devoted to covering what you need to do differently in order to be compatible with thunderbolt 3 products thunderbolt 4 on the other hand is the same protocol as usb4
John:
You're probably already confused.
John:
So Thunderbolt 3, different.
John:
USB 4 and Thunderbolt 4, same, right?
John:
Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4 are the same, but with mandatory support for Thunderbolt 3 interoperability.
John:
Let me read that sentence again.
John:
Thunderbolt 4, on the other hand, is the same protocol as USB 4, but with mandatory support for Thunderbolt 3 interoperability.
John:
So if you have a Thunderbolt 4 port...
John:
You know it's compatible with Thunderbolt 3 because that's a mandatory interoperable thing.
John:
If you have a USB 4 port, you're not sure whether it supports Thunderbolt 3 or not.
John:
Anyway, Thunderbolt 4 uses USB 4 as its primary protocol, but Thunderbolt and DisplayPort alternate modes are also required.
John:
We will link you to a PDF if you want to read more about this spec.
John:
All I can say is expect more confusion about what the USB-C-shaped holes on the sides of your Mac do.
John:
I mean, Apple's already said in that we did talk about last week that
John:
They're going to support Thunderbolt on their Macs, which shouldn't be a surprise.
John:
Will it be Thunderbolt 3?
John:
Will it be Thunderbolt 4?
John:
If Apple ships a USB 4 port that is Thunderbolt 4 compatible, we can just call it a Thunderbolt 4 port, because if we called it a USB 4 port, we might not know if it has Thunderbolt 3 compatibility, so they'll call it.
John:
It's so freaking
John:
confusing we'll get on the other side of this eventually but you know not for the next five years i guess in the meantime uh thunderbolt 4 is still the best because it has compatible with the most things but the top speed of thunderbolt 4 and thunderbolt 3 is exactly the same so you're not getting a speed advantage
John:
I think we will be revisiting this topic in the future when the ARM Macs come out and then we can figure out what the hell the ports actually do.
John:
But for now, let's move on.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
And speaking of ARM Macs, the rumors haven't mentioned touchscreens yet, but there are some other things that have been mentioned, including the thought that the 13.3-inch MacBook Pro with a form factor similar to the current 13.3-inch MacBook Pro could be the first one to get an ARM-based chip.
Casey:
That sounds wonderful as someone who just bought one.
Yeah.
John:
Well, this is like in the last show we were talking about the potential hard arm Mac hardware.
John:
Casey, you were the least optimistic that we would be getting something radically.
John:
Like I think maybe if we have that eventually, but the first crop of ones will just be look like the current Macs, but I have different things on the inside.
John:
And there was a little another crop of these rumors like, oh, which ones are going to be the first arm ones?
John:
Maybe it's going to be a 13 inch.
John:
Previously, there were rumors about a 16 inch and mini LED screens and all sorts of hardware rumors.
John:
But when these went around again, I think because most of the people in the tech sphere had been listening to podcasts like ours where we were discussing the potential features of our Mac hardware, everyone commented, hmm, more rumors and still nothing about touchscreens.
John:
Now, maybe that's because, I don't know, like the parts leaks are from the panel source, but not the digitizer thing, if those two things can be separate.
John:
Like, I don't know.
John:
Maybe it just hasn't come out yet.
John:
But the longer these rumors go on and we still hear nothing about touchscreens, the more it seems like Casey is right and that the first crop of RMAX won't have touchscreens.
John:
I still don't understand...
John:
like unless it was some kind of emergency and they just wanted to ship and couldn't somehow couldn't do it like it seems it seems like it would be so much cleaner that's why everyone has been talking about on their podcast including us so much cleaner to ship the first arm of the mac with touchscreens because then you have from day one oh you know all those macs that can run iphone and ipad apps
John:
Yeah, they're all touch.
John:
So no problem.
John:
Like there's no confusion about, well, how the hell do I use this iPhone app on my Mac?
John:
Oh, it's a touchscreen.
John:
They're all touchscreens.
John:
All the ARM ones are touchscreens.
John:
And the Intel ones don't have to be because they can't run iPhone and iPad apps.
John:
Like it would just be so clean, such a clean break of like the old world when a Macs couldn't do this stuff and the new world when they can.
John:
And for all the other reasons we've listed and we'll talk about more later, maybe.
John:
But these rumors so far aren't mentioning it.
John:
And it made me rethink something I said in the last show.
John:
where I said, like, these RMAX are going to come, it's not like they're going to have, when we're talking about the touch bar, it's like, it's not like they're going to have a separate T2 running the touch bar, and then another ARM system on a chip running the whole rest of the system.
John:
Why would they do that?
John:
It would be so wasteful.
John:
But...
John:
if they're really shipping a line of our Macs that are basically just like the Intel Macs, you know, but we swap out the Intel CPU and maybe the discrete GPU for a system on a chip, but everything else stays the same.
John:
Maybe they come with a touch bar and maybe that touch bar is run by the T2 for the reasons I was mentioning last show of why they wouldn't do it is like,
John:
They don't have to re-architect it.
John:
The T2 runs this different OS that runs the touch bar and it's on a little separate computer that communicates with the main computer.
John:
And, you know, they'd have to re-implement all of that if they want to keep the touch bar because these are the Macs that are basically just like the old Macs but different guts on the inside.
John:
Maybe they would ship.
John:
It would be so gross to have an ARM system on a chip and also a T2 in there.
John:
But if these rumors that don't mention touchscreen and just keep talking about models similar to our current models are true, I don't want that to be the case, but it's more of a possibility now than I thought it was.
John:
The rumors also mention a quote unquote all new form factor design, which is in the future, the 2021 models, right?
John:
So that would be like, okay, well, this first crop are not like that, but the second crop are the ones that have all the rounded corner screens and the touchscreens and all that other stuff.
John:
I don't know.
John:
We're still far away from ship dates.
John:
All we know is that the first ARM-based Mac was shipped before the end of the year, so just assume like December or holidays or whatever.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It'll be a while still.
John:
I'll be keeping my eye on these rumors, but the fact that the rumors never mention touchscreens has really dumped a bucket of cold water on all my optimism from the last show.
Marco:
I'm not sure we can actually really read much into that because the rumors so far about whatever the future Mac hardware is have been so thin.
John:
And they're all over the map.
John:
They've predicted like every possible Mac you can imagine in every size has been predicted at some point.
Casey:
What about iPad Pros becoming like an ARM Mac of themselves?
John:
So this is some feedback from Remy Vichon.
John:
Since they announced ARM Macs officially, I've been thinking about the fact that the iPad Pro with a keyboard and mouse is very close to being an ARM Mac on the hardware side.
John:
This is assuming, like I said in the last show, that they make these ARM Macs that have almost all the features of an iPad, a curved screen, a touchscreen, all those things or whatever.
John:
I'm thinking about the possibility of Apple letting users install Mac OS on iPads, especially Pro ones.
John:
If Apple releases a new ARM-based Mac with a touchscreen around a corner, cellular antenna, etc., that does sound an awful lot like an iPad Pro.
John:
I just can't picture the idea of going to an Apple store, having the iPad Pro and the new ARM Mac next to each other with almost the exact same hardware feature set.
John:
The only difference being that Apple forbids you from installing Mac OS on the iPad, and you can't install iPad OS on the Mac, right?
John:
We think the hardware is going to be similar.
John:
We think that the Mac system-on-the-chip, especially for the low-to-mid-end laptops, is going to be based on the same design as the iPad system-on-the-chip.
John:
If not, it's not going to be exactly the same, but for the A14 core, that design we think is going to be used in Macs as well.
John:
If they all have touchscreens, obviously the Mac would have more RAM, it would have more storage, it would be bigger, it would have an attached keyboard, a lot of this stuff.
John:
But hardware-wise...
John:
like the distinction we've been making so far it's like oh the mac can run all the stuff uh it can run ipad apps it can run iphone apps it can run mac apps it does all the things it's that's why it's the mac that's what differentiates it but if you're looking at an ipad and saying okay but why can't this run all the things like one excuse would be well that ipad has you know six gigs of ram and that's just not enough to run a lot of mac apps right so i think to answer the question here
John:
why wouldn't they let you run mac os on the ipad it'd be tight like you'd have to give the ipads a lot more ram at which point you're just basically turning into a mac the second thing is that you know mac os farm is going to be adjusted to run on whatever mac arm hardware apple ships
John:
it would be some effort to make mac os run on ipad hardware some additional effort right because ipads aren't exactly the same as the r max going to be a lot of the guts are similar but not exactly the same there are things that are different about them um you know they're you know the hardware is different in particular the power tuning or whatever like all the stuff they're going to do with power on the r max it's going to be different than what's done on the ipads
John:
Just because, you know, the batteries are bigger and there's different expectations about battery life and all that other stuff.
John:
But the main reason I think is product line differentiation.
John:
Like everything I just talked about results in a price difference and a capability difference.
John:
And that's how you segment your product line.
John:
So the Macs cost more.
John:
They're bigger.
John:
They're heavier.
John:
Like for the most part, all this is true.
John:
They have more stuff, more storage, more RAM.
John:
Maybe they have more options to configure them.
John:
We'll see about that.
John:
Like if they have different CPU options or something like that.
John:
uh that's how you segregate a product line now it may seem weird that like oh why do they have a whole different os but the whole point of this platform unification is yeah they have a different os but they look kind of the same and you can run ipad apps in both places it's just that one has more the mac you can run all that stuff and then more why can't i run mac os on the ipad
John:
Because the iPad is not the machine that lets you do the more stuff.
John:
That's what the Mac is for.
John:
So I don't think it's too confusing.
John:
Like, I can see how you can squint, especially if you're looking at the lowest and lightest weight Mac laptop and the highest and heaviest iPad, and start seeing a little bit of crossover there.
John:
But...
John:
There is a worthwhile distinction between them.
John:
The iPad presumably would get better battery life.
John:
It would be simpler.
John:
Right.
John:
It can only run iPads apps.
John:
It can't run Mac apps.
John:
And that's a feature because the people who want iPad don't want the complexity of Mac OS.
John:
Right.
John:
So I don't think this will be a problem, even if from a technological perspective, it seems a little bit weird.
Marco:
Yeah, it also is just so, like, the way you design the hardware is just so incredibly different.
Marco:
I mean, think about, like, the weight balance of, you know, if you have an iPad and a keyboard and mouse or whatever, the iPad has to operate independently of everything else.
Marco:
So it has to be able to be detachable.
Marco:
So it has to have all of its computing guts, the battery, everything, all in the tablet itself.
Marco:
So in that kind of, like, fake laptop configuration, all in the screen side.
Marco:
And a Mac, where the screen is not detachable, at least not if you want it to keep working, they can put all that stuff in the bottom and the weight balance is totally different.
Marco:
And if you're going to use it on your lap, a Mac laptop is way more comfortable and pragmatic in most ways than an iPad with a keyboard stand and a mouse or something because it's designed to sit in your lap.
Marco:
It has all that weight in the bottom and the screen lid is super thin and light and doesn't tip forward or stays in your lap and various things.
John:
That's the weird thing about this, though.
John:
Whatever you're saying is true, but, like, you could say, okay, that's what the Mac is for.
John:
And, of course, the iPad is for the thing where you're going to touch it.
John:
But touching the screen of a laptop like the Mac is better than touching it on the iPod and the keyboard thing because when you're touching the screen, you're potentially tipping it, right?
John:
And so the more weight you have in the base, the better it works as a touchscreen, right?
John:
I know everyone likes their Magic Keyboard thing.
John:
Actually, we just got one of those now, Stuart, and it's kind of neat, right?
John:
but and yeah you know you can use your ipad by touching the screen but it would actually be a better touch screen if all that weight was in the base it would bounce around more though but it's less tippy like it wouldn't bounce around more like assuming the hinge is just as stiff and i think it is it's it's there's less danger of it tipping over and i don't think it's a big deal anyway i don't think people are tipping over their ipads like people don't accidentally poke them with all their force and they go flipping over right but
John:
In the grand scheme of things, it would probably be better if – I mean, I don't know.
John:
Maybe there's also the inertia thing of like, well, it has more mass, so it's harder to get moving.
John:
But if you get it moving, you can tip over.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Either way, I feel like that move of like mostly using touch for a screen that's mostly vertical is not –
John:
ideal like when people have their ipads in that case it's because they want to use the keyboard and the trackpad and yes also the touch thing at the same time but like they've decided when you're in that configuration that they're not really doing touch primary right that's the whole point the whole reason the keyboard is there it's the whole reason everybody likes the trackpad it's because i'm saying okay when i'm in this mode i'm not mostly going to be using touch um and the other factor we're throwing here is convertible max there's not none exists now but once they can run ipad apps that's on the table for apple to pick up at any point
John:
Convertible meaning that they could fold over and become a tablet.
Marco:
Yeah, and honestly, I think that would be a really cool feature set to explore for them because the PC industry did that a long time ago and not everybody needs it, not everyone uses it, but it is kind of cool for the people who do want it.
Marco:
We don't have to fantasize about what if somebody made a computer that could flip around and be a tablet.
Marco:
Nope, they've been doing that for a long time.
Marco:
We know exactly what if and it's specialized but pretty cool for people who want it.
Marco:
I think the bigger challenge to this to like you know why is iPad and Mac stuff so different is you know John you kind of breezed over it earlier but just like you don't fully appreciate until you think about it quite how low end iOS hardware is in a lot of ways compared to Mac hardware and not in all ways you know like things like you know processors are going to be you know processors and iOS hardware now are very competitive with Macs and I'm sure you know they're going to continue to be for the foreseeable future into the ARM Mac world and
Marco:
iOS devices tend to have significantly better cameras, front and back.
Marco:
There's other hardware things where iOS devices are competitive or better than Macs.
Marco:
But the highest-end iOS devices cost as much as the lowest-end Macs.
Marco:
And that isn't all because Intel is greedy.
Marco:
That's part of it sometimes, but that's not most of the reason.
Marco:
Most of the reason is Macs have way more memory, way more disk space, way more expansion ports, PCI lanes, throughput controllers, peripheral support, so much more stuff in them.
Marco:
than iOS devices.
Marco:
And iOS as an operating system is optimized for this super low resource environment because it was made for the phone first.
Marco:
And so it's optimized for very low RAM, very low disk space, super limited multitasking, very, very limited app resource controls to make sure apps aren't burning too much of your battery or using too many resources or whatever else.
Marco:
Very, very strict controls and all that stuff.
Marco:
Macs aren't.
Marco:
Macs have a lot more software variability, a lot more hardware support, much higher ceilings on all the various resources that are available to them for most of the hardware resources.
Marco:
It's a whole different world.
Marco:
And while you could technically probably make an iPad run macOS, like if you were Apple...
Marco:
it would be a really low-end Mac.
Marco:
And I just don't think Apple wants to make the high-end version of this other product line attempt to behave like the worst low-end version of a different product line.
Marco:
I think Apple would rather have the really great iPad be a really great iPad.
Marco:
And then if you want a really great Mac, you can buy a really great Mac.
Marco:
And I don't think they want to make the iPad look bad by making it try to be a bad Mac.
John:
It would burn through that battery so fast if you ran macOS on it.
John:
Like, it would just be a bad experience.
John:
But, like, I think the main thing is the complexity of macOS is not a plus on the iPad.
John:
Like, especially for, you know, I think all iPad customers appreciate the things they don't have to worry about on the iPad that they do on the Mac.
John:
Yeah.
John:
bringing that experience over to the mac and also having terrible battery life and all the other things you mentioned small screen too yeah like the biggest ipad they sell is the size of the smallest mac screen they sell yeah so anyway i think this this differentiation uh is not going to be a problem in the short term despite the fact that i feel like it will be an homogenous family and they're
John:
you will have to explain at some point like it's easy to explain it's like the the biggest one that can do the most is the most expensive and and the one with the most variability that's the mac and then you step down to the ipad and the phone like it it makes some sense it's just that we know the details of it and we you know the historic names like well this one's called mac os and that one's called ipad os but like this is something people forget i see lots of these articles especially when they're from people who are not they're not sort of technical articles but it's coming from a consumer's perspective and they're saying boy it must be hard for apple to have three different os's
John:
uh we forget this but we shouldn't like this is all based on the same technology as mac os 10 it's the you know the stuff they got from next it's the mock kernel it's the bsd layer it's darwin which is apple's open source like that's underneath all of them right it branches once you get up to the higher levels and there's different frameworks and there's ui kit versus app kit but even that is kind of merging as we've discussed in past shows uh
John:
but it's not three entirely different os's even though they have different names just like a good example is ipad os and iphone os or ios or whatever uh those they change the name of one of those it's still the same under the cover like there's not seven different kernels they're they're not totally different os's from the ground up apple has effectively a
John:
unified base os model across all their products even the watch like everything right it's just what's built on top of that how much stuff is built which frameworks there whatever so they're actually in a pretty good position from a technological perspective for family unity it's just that from a marketing perspective they look more different than they really are
Casey:
The other thing I think that it's worth remembering is that today the DTK is the, what, A13X, A12X.
Casey:
I always get the name of it wrong.
Casey:
A12Z.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Which is, from everything we gather, very, very close to modern iPads.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I don't think that the first shipping Mac, and we've talked about this already, but I don't think the first shipping Mac is going to have an A12Z or maybe not even an A13Z.
Casey:
And I'm not talking about the name as much as I'm saying, I think it's going to be a very different CPU that's going to be considerably faster and considerably more powerful, especially if these forthcoming Macs have fans.
Casey:
Because there is not an iOS device that I'm aware of that has a fan.
Casey:
And you can do some very different and interesting things if you are able to cool a lot more aggressively.
Casey:
Yeah, I think today, in terms of components, it's the same basic ingredients across an iPad Pro and this DTK, but I think it's going to be quite a bit different once real honest to goodness Macs ship and not just a developer transition kit.
John:
it'll be a 14 based like all the you know the new iphones are going to be a for it and when we say 14 we're talking about sort of the computational cores but the number of cores and the size of the gpu gpu is very easy to scale up because you just add more execution units because they're sort of you know they're they're facing an embarrassingly parallel problem so i can imagine the system on a chip on the max like they have a power budget and like you said casey they can decide is this going to be a fanless model or is it going to be one with the fan they can just basically choose
John:
They can pick a power envelope and they say, what's the biggest system on a chip we can fit in there?
John:
How many A14 cores can we fit in there?
John:
How big can we make the GPU?
John:
How much power and everything does the Thunderbolt stuff that's going to be built in there add to the system on a chip?
John:
And they can just do that math, right?
John:
The reason I'm excited about them is that math is going to work out to be a much better machine than the Intel ones that we have now.
John:
That's what's exciting.
John:
But Apple has complete flexibility to basically...
John:
make whatever kind of Mac they want and whatever they choose it's going to be so much better than what they have now and like you said certainly better if they go with something with a fan that's going to be so much more capable than the fanless iPads or whatever just because they will spend that power budget on more CPU cores more GPU execution units than
John:
more everything higher clock speed like they'll spend it right and you will reap the benefit of that it's hard to see now because we're like how well our current ipads are faster than our max and it's all depressing it's like yeah because they're using intel chips like that's not going to be the case if you if you take even if you just took the a12z and put it in a system with a fan and overclocked it like
John:
you know that i don't think that's what the dtk is doing but even if you took that two-year-old chip it would be better and when the a14 comes out i fully expect these macs to kick major butt or be fanless like because the first one introduces the adorable replacement and it's fanless it'll be plenty fast way faster than any adorable has ever been well that's not hard yeah exactly
John:
It'll be embarrassing if the fanless, adorable replacement is faster than the highest-end MacBook Pro.
John:
That's going to be embarrassing for Apple.
John:
So maybe that factors into which machines they want to send out first.
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Casey:
I think that's it for follow-up.
John:
It is not.
Casey:
Of course not.
John:
Of course not.
John:
What has Casey named his computer?
John:
His last show we had some homework and that was for Casey to stop having his hard drive be called Macintosh HD and stop having his computer's name and the sharing preference pane be Casey's MacBook Pro and to give his computer a name.
John:
He just has a big one name and then you just name your computer that and the sharing thing and you name your boot hard drive that.
John:
So, Casey, what did you name your computer slash computers?
Casey:
So let's see here.
Casey:
So Apple menus, system preferences, sharing... Doing your homework while it's being collected.
John:
Casey's iMac Pro.
John:
You don't have... Because the second item here is if you have not done this homework, we will suggest names for you.
Casey:
Feel free.
Casey:
That's totally fine to suggest names.
John:
You don't have any... You have lots of things that you're interested in.
John:
Can't you think of some kind of name that you think... Here's my suggestions for naming your computer and your hard drive.
John:
If possible...
John:
pick a name that is short-ish because long names they don't look good on the desktop if you have your hard drives matched on the desktop and long sharing names don't fit in the sidebars and it's just it's generally unwieldy some people prefer them to not have spaces i understand where they're coming from but uh one of the beauties of being on a modern computer is that you don't have drive letters and you can have names with spaces in them and the world doesn't end um so
John:
You don't have anything like it, you know, you shouldn't be on the nose.
John:
Like it's not just the name of your favorite band or something like that, but like you name your cars, right?
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
I don't think I've ever named any of my cars, like any sort of real name.
Casey:
Like I will call, like I called the BMW, the Beamer or the, or the BMW, but I'd never had like Susie or something like that.
John:
Beamer would be a perfectly good, if you were still into BMWs, B E M E R would be a good name for your computer and your hard drive as an example.
Casey:
kari mccarface yeah there you go i mean that's a little long the only good suggestion i have heard is which came from jelly and i think one or two people on twitter was using characters from the hunt from the hunt for october so like um i don't know ramius being perhaps the imac pro for example um but i just i don't get i don't have a need for cutesy names for any of this stuff i really don't cutesy it's just a name
John:
Why?
John:
Why do I need it?
John:
For the same reason you give names to anything, so you can identify it at a glance without reading.
Marco:
I mean, to be fair, like, KC-S iMac-Pro, like, that does actually uniquely identify the machine.
John:
It's just a bad name, but it does work.
John:
If you have multiple MacBook Pros, it's a problem.
John:
And if you have, like, KC's Mac Pro, KC's iMac Pro, KC's MacBook Pro, at a glance, those aren't easily distinguishable.
John:
If you name them after Hunt for Red October characters, it would be way easier to distinguish them.
Casey:
No, because then I won't remember which freaking one is Ramius.
John:
But you will.
John:
Do you remember what you named your kids?
John:
Once you give something a name, once you give it a name, it has the name.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
It's not like you have a hundred computers in your house.
John:
You called your Synology like Synology or something.
John:
You're not confused about what that is.
John:
You have a couple of Macs.
John:
You give them names.
John:
I think the hunt for red October theme is a good idea.
John:
Okay.
John:
Um, or emoji names is another, another possibility because we live in the modern world.
Casey:
You could give your, what exploding hyphen head is one of my computers.
Marco:
That, that would be better than Casey dash is as I'm act.
Marco:
exploding dash head would be better than that i i will disagree with john i i do think that if you can keep it to not have spaces that is more graceful because all the contexts in which it will you know use that in a way that it can have spaces like a host name if it'll automatically create one um although you can set the host name separately from the computer name right it just it just adds hyphens like it'll it'll take care of that for you if you have spaces
Marco:
That's ugly.
Marco:
If you can avoid that, that's better.
Marco:
So having your computers have a name that is lowercase and free of spaces will make it appear the same way everywhere.
Marco:
And that has a certain appeal to me.
John:
Agreed.
John:
All mine don't have spaces and are very short.
John:
I use the Legend of Zelda theme.
John:
My boot drive and my computer are Link, which is four letters long and has no spaces.
John:
And my icon is a little icon of Link.
John:
How do you feel on capitalization?
Casey:
capital capital l because it's a proper noun monster because link doesn't have any other uses anywhere in computing yeah right but like it's linky you look at my desktop there's link he's sitting there right and i've and my time machine backup my time machine backup is ocarina time out not only do you have your hard drive as an icon on your desktop like an animal but you changed the icon no like a mac user is what you mean oh god
John:
get out of here with of course you change the icon that's part of the fun once you pick like whatever ramus or or you know uh what is it typhoon or whatever like you just if you pick typhoon for example it's the name you'd get a typhoon class submarine icon the subnames subnames is good that is good you'd get the icon of the typhoon class submarine a really good looking icon of that and you'd put that there and then you'd show your your volumes on your desktop so you can look at that every day
John:
Like, that's the identity of my computer is the top right corner where the boot hard drive is.
John:
There's a little picture of Link, and underneath it it says Link.
John:
And my super-duper backup is Hyrule.
John:
I've got a drive called Zelda.
John:
There's a lot of single, fairly short names in the Zelda universe and lots of really awesome icons that you can apply to them.
John:
Anyway, we're trying to help you, Casey.
John:
Have some fun.
John:
Give your computer a name.
John:
Let it be a free elf.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I mean, to be fair, nothing would be more Casey than to name your computers after, like, you know, mediocre 90s movies that only you care about.
John:
Hunter Rocktober is a good movie.
Marco:
Come on.
John:
Oh, my word.
John:
Was it 90s?
Casey:
I think it was 1990.
John:
Anyway, Hunt for October.
John:
Good movie.
John:
Check it out.
Casey:
You know, I wasn't really on board until – it was 1990, by the way.
Casey:
I wasn't really on board until you said I could change the icon.
Casey:
Well, two things.
Casey:
You said use the subs, not the characters, which, okay, I think I can get behind that.
Casey:
But then saying, like, if I could find good – which I can't, I'm sure.
Casey:
But if I could find good icons – You can.
Casey:
They're out there.
John:
I have a vast icon collection.
John:
Ask me if I can help you out.
John:
I do choose based on what kind of icons I have.
John:
I have a bunch of good Zelda icons.
John:
That definitely factors in.
Marco:
When you say the subs, is it like, you know, meatball, turkey?
Marco:
Like, what are we talking about here?
John:
Yep.
Marco:
Yeah, that's what we're talking about.
Marco:
That's exactly right.
Casey:
That's exactly right.
Casey:
Yeah, go ahead, listeners, and find me some really high-quality Hunt for an October icons in the year 2020 for a 30-year-old movie, and let me know what you come up with.
John:
Well, see, the thing about modern... It used to be harder back when they were pixel art, back when they were 32 by 32 pixels in the classic Mac OS days, because then you had to have an actual icon that somebody made.
John:
But icons are so big and so high-res now that if you can find a good, like...
John:
photo with a with a transparent mask on it that can work as an icon depending on the photo you might have to massage a little it's obviously it's not as good as an actual hand-drawn icon factory icon although icon factory occasionally does do icon sets for popular movies so for all i know they did 100 red october one you can just grab some of those
John:
I'll check iconfactory.com for more info on that.
John:
But if you can just find a good photo of your submarine and quote-unquote shrink it down to 1024 by 1024, which is the largest size icon on macOS these days, you're good to go.
John:
You have to make sure it doesn't turn into mud when you scale it down to 48 by 48 or whatever size you have it on your desktop.
John:
But you have a lot more options than back in the day when you had to actually have a 32 by 32 256 color pixel grid that somebody painstakingly made.
John:
I wonder if I could have a My Cousin Vinny theme.
Casey:
This is a whole lot of work for something that really does not bother me.
Casey:
I'm sorry it bothers you.
John:
You should call your hard drive clock and have it be a high-heeled shoe clomping on a wooden plank.
John:
There you go.
John:
Biological clock.
John:
Sticking like this.
John:
You got the shoe.
John:
You got the... Clock is one word.
John:
It's short.
John:
What is even happening?
John:
Oh, my goodness.
John:
It's a movie that Marco saw.
John:
That's what's happening.
John:
I didn't.
John:
You haven't seen My Cousin Vinny?
John:
What?
Nope.
John:
Nope.
John:
Oh my God.
John:
We've been over this like a hundred times.
John:
Weird holes in your media.
John:
Sorry.
Casey:
I think we have it on DVD somewhere we used to.
John:
And Marco's seen like six movies, but it's weird when one of the six movies he's seen is not one of the movies that you've seen because you figure he's... That is true.
John:
That is true.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So now that we're done with follow-up, you want to do some Ask ATV?
Ha!
John:
i think we have one more thing one more actual topic here that i want to hear about it's another casey topic okay the big sir thing yes sorry so there's a bunch of more wwc stuff most of which we'll probably skip over but there's one thing that casey mentioned in a couple past shows and factors into this topic that's been on the wwc list which is how you know big sir looks different uh and casey mentioned on the past show
Casey:
that he loves how it looks he wants to marry it so i want to hear more about that casey uh presumably you've been running big sir you have another drive or something i have been running it pretty much full-time on the macbook pro actually it's it's the dual boot setup that i think it was jowkit had advised with and i'm sorry john i'm getting this wrong but what is it different volumes rather than different containers or something different containers or different partitions
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Well, anyway, so I did that on the MacBook Pro.
Casey:
I do have it on a physically separate hard drive for the iMac Pro, and I think I booted to it like once, and that was that.
Casey:
Which iMac Pro was this?
Casey:
Yeah, it was Casey's iMac Pro.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
Thank you for asking.
Casey:
I'm glad we could clarify.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
um so anyway so yeah so i've been running it almost full time on the macbook pro and i please i don't i don't want to hear email about this please no but i think it looks really good i really honestly do there are there are problems there are absolutely problems i am not saying it's flawless i think it looks really good i think it looks modern without completely losing what makes the mac the mac
Casey:
and it just looks like somebody has taken some time to freshen things up a bit you know it's like when you when your kitchen maybe isn't spotless you i don't know if either of you can relate to this but like your kitchen isn't spotless and then you take the time and you just like really clean it nicely you clean it up well you get under the you get you get around the burners you know because we have a gas stove you spend the time to scrub around the burners and
Casey:
You clean off the countertops and spray the countertops down.
Casey:
You don't just swipe it with a paper towel like you do when you're rushing between kid issues.
Casey:
You actually properly clean it.
Casey:
And your kitchen, it just looks good.
Casey:
And that's what I feel like Big Sur is.
Casey:
It just looks good as long as you're not looking at sheets.
Casey:
You know, the pop-ups that once were sheets and now are God knows what.
Casey:
And as long as you're not trying to figure out what the active window is.
Casey:
Oh, and you're not looking at the battery icon and system preferences.
Casey:
As long as you're not doing any of those things, it looks really good.
John:
what is your favorite aspect?
John:
You know, I guess you're saying about looking cleaner, but like, how does that manifest?
John:
It's like, what, what aspect of it do you feel looks cleaner or more modern?
John:
Is it like, uh, I mean, I can, I can name some attributes of it.
John:
Like, I feel like it's brightened up.
John:
Like most of the places where there was gray in the earlier version of the OS are lighter gray.
John:
Um,
Casey:
now is that is that part of the airiness feeling that you're talking about i think to some degree i also think that i i really like the simple iconography so for example i'm looking oh see i can't talk to you about this because now you're going to yell at me about having the finder sidebar open but i do have the finder sidebar open i like the finder sidebar and i think the iconography there is really good you know it's it looks very sf symbolsy which i like it is that's what that's what it is
Casey:
yeah so i i i like the way that looks um the freshened like something as simple as like the way an external hard drive looks when you plug it in like the iconography there looks nice i do like that it's brighter i like that it it seems to have lost a lot of the texture which generally i think is good but in certain cases is very bad like everything looks more like lines than it does like things and i think i like that and i think it's certainly very trendy but
Casey:
Um, but that come, that does cause problems from time to time for, and like I said, one of the things that really drives me nuts is that I, I am, I still find it even after running it almost full time on one of the two computers I use very often.
Casey:
Um, and I've been doing a lot of work on this particular on the MacBook pro lately because I'm doing some stuff for iOS 14.
Casey:
And so I, I only have the Xcode beta on the, on Big Sur, um,
Casey:
on the MacBook Pro.
Casey:
So I've been spending a lot of time in it, the time that I would normally spend on the iMac Pro.
Casey:
So anyways, one of the things that drives me nuts all the time is I can never tell which frigging window is the active window because I feel like the difference in tint or whatever is nowhere near strong enough to make it obvious which one is the active window.
Casey:
That really, really annoys me
John:
um is it a sheet an action sheet is that right that it used to drop down from the top of this probably from the title bar and now it does not am i is that the correct term for it yeah it's just called a sheet and now it dims the background right close your eyes for a second stop looking at your big sir computer uh is the active what distinguishes the active window without looking what distinguishes the active window from the inactive window
Casey:
So I'm going to cheat because I was just looking at it a minute ago.
Casey:
But what I would have said up until a minute ago was that the active window is darker.
Casey:
But I don't believe that's true.
Casey:
It's that in Big Sur, the active window is like white and the inactive windows are darker, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
Did I get that right?
John:
I'm not in front of Big Sur, so I don't remember.
John:
But historically speaking, on the Mac and in most of Apple's interfaces, the things that are not active are... The phrase we often use is dimmed.
John:
That can mean a bunch of different things.
John:
Obviously, inactive buttons are quote-unquote dimmed.
John:
On the original Mac, the dimming of menu items...
John:
famously was like the reason they use the chicago font the reason it looks like it does is because they had to dim them on a monochrome screen so you could knock out every other pixel but still be able to read them because there was no grayscale right so dimming meant like well the regular menu items that are active they're black like the text is black uh what they were trying to do is make the dim ones
John:
gray right and so you could still read them it didn't have gray but you can still read them but they're they're dimmer same thing with the background windows the front most window whatever the look of the os was it was that it was fully saturated it was pinstriped if it was the the platinum you know copeland look or whatever it was that was the front most window it had maximum contrast it was whatever style it was it was there the windows that were not the front's most were sort of dimmed meaning less saturated
John:
maybe lighter colored, maybe that reads as lighter colored, maybe they didn't have pinstripes, right?
John:
But in general, they were lower contrast, less detailed, seemed to be faded, as if in a fog.
John:
The same way things farther away in real life get dimmer, right?
John:
I think that's the sort of physical analogy they're going for, so that it became clear that the focused window is the one that is... that doesn't have fog in front of it, essentially, right?
John:
In Big Sur...
John:
They kind of stick to that a little bit.
John:
Again, I'm not looking at it, so I don't recall offhand.
John:
But my recollection is the front one is brighter white than the backgrounds.
John:
But you can say, well, that means the background ones are dimmer.
John:
But really what happens in real life is that the fog tends to make things less saturated, lower contrast.
John:
But there's, you know...
John:
I don't know.
John:
It's it's certainly not a change in detail.
John:
It's certainly not like the front one has more sorts of intricate detail.
John:
Like you said, it doesn't look like a thing.
John:
It doesn't look like a plastic or metal bar.
John:
There are no pinstripes.
John:
There are no grooves.
John:
There are no grippy things.
John:
It is very sort of line art, solid thing.
John:
And I have the same problem.
John:
Like maybe it's because I'm used to all those years and decades of Mac doing the dimming thing.
John:
But I think it's really – it's more profound than that and that we expect things that are – we expect the active thing to be more saturated and detailed than the inactive things and it's such a close contest.
John:
Like I can't even recall off the top of my head what the difference is.
John:
My recollection is they're not as different from each other than you would think and –
John:
One of them is not – even whatever difference does exist, it's possible to argue that it's not actually dimmer or more distant or more fogged than the active window.
John:
It's just different, but not that different.
John:
So anyway, you're sitting in front of it.
John:
Go make a bunch of text edit windows.
John:
Tell me what distinguishes the front one from the back ones.
Casey:
So actually I'm using Finder at the moment, and I have two Finder windows open.
Casey:
The one that is active, the sidebar looks translucent to me.
Casey:
So it's got a little bit of color to it because I'm using the default Big Sur background, but it's translucent.
Casey:
And the stoplight in the upper left, whatever you call them, they're obviously red, yellow, and green.
Casey:
The title, so I happen to be looking at a
Casey:
The title blends into the columns, so there's no clear delineation between the title of this window, which is the folder name, which is development, and there's no delineation between that and name, date, modified, size, etc.
John:
This is the foreground window you're talking about?
Casey:
This is the foreground window.
Casey:
Now, by contrast, the background window, the sidebar is the same color as the title.
Casey:
The title does have a difference between the whole title area, so the title and all the icons in the toolbar, and name, date, modified, size, kind.
Casey:
So in the inactive window, the sidebar is the same color as the title bar.
Casey:
And it is different than name, date, modified, size, kind, etc.
Casey:
In the active window, the sidebar is translucent.
Casey:
It is a very different color than the title bar.
Casey:
And the title and toolbar do blend into name, date, modified, size, kind, etc.
Casey:
That I really don't care for.
Casey:
I really, really genuinely think that it's very difficult to tell what is active and what is inactive.
John:
I think there's too much stuff in that window.
John:
I think what you need to do is hit command option T and like get, because you can imagine that's why I was saying text edit as having a window because like in, in the minimal case, all you've got on a window is a title bar.
John:
There's no sidebar.
John:
There's no controls like a text edit window.
John:
You've got a title bar.
John:
Open text edit.
John:
All right, all right, all right.
John:
Hold on.
John:
Because that's what you have to distinguish.
John:
Like in text edit, when there's two, when you make new document twice, uh,
John:
There's one in the front called Untitled 2 and the one in the back called Untitled 1.
John:
And the only thing you have to go by, there are no controls, there's no sidebars, no nothing.
John:
You have a white document window that I presume is white in both cases, is all you tell me.
John:
And then you've just got the title bar and the little window widgets.
John:
So what does that look like?
Casey:
So the differences are that the inactive window is a...
Casey:
darker color and like the title area i'm sorry let me try that again because the the the composition area you know where you actually type into text edit that is identical as far as i can tell or i think it's identical it's hard to say um identical more movies than marco
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Another one I haven't seen.
Casey:
Anyway, so the title area in the active window is lighter, and the stoplights are colored.
Casey:
The inactive window, the stoplights are not colored, and the title area is darker.
Casey:
But otherwise, they look identical.
John:
What about the text?
John:
Untitled 1 and Untitled 2?
John:
Is the text black in both cases?
Casey:
No, I'm sorry.
Casey:
That's a good point.
Casey:
I had not considered.
Casey:
Untitled 2 is the active window right now.
Casey:
It is black.
Casey:
Untitled is inactive.
Casey:
It is more of a gray.
John:
So there is a little bit of dimming, but it's a little bit reversed in that the title bar of the foreground window is brighter, is whiter.
John:
So this is a problem.
John:
Whiter versus brighter.
John:
Like, as things get farther away and they go into the haze, they do get whiter.
John:
They never go completely white, though, probably.
John:
So bright white should say to us foreground, but seeing the darker window in the background is, I don't know, I...
John:
I don't want to belabor this week, because we do want to get to Ask ATP.
John:
But I wanted to hear what you liked about the thing.
John:
Maybe next week I'll talk about all the things I don't like about it, and we'll go into more detail about that.
John:
But for now, I think it's – I mean, I wanted to get your opinion just because I don't hate it.
John:
Like I said when we first talked about this, I pretty much always like it when they change the way macOS looks just because –
John:
If it's not to my taste, I know they're going to change it in a couple years anyway.
John:
And I just like things like Casey with the laptops.
John:
I just like it when they change sometimes.
John:
It's kind of cool.
John:
I'm not particularly married to any look.
John:
It's just that Big Sur seems like it might have more unforced errors than normal.
John:
But it's still early beta.
John:
They can still change things.
John:
They won't.
John:
I guarantee it.
John:
You never know.
John:
Like the Leopard title bar, the Leopard menu bar, rather.
John:
They changed it due to complaints during the beta.
John:
It's been known to happen.
John:
We'll see how it goes.
John:
But...
John:
But yeah, I think we'll talk more about this next week.
John:
I just wanted to get Casey on record with his undying love for the coolness that is Pixar.
Casey:
I put in the chat and I'll put in the show notes the two text edit windows next to each other and it's a little screenshot of it and you can check it out for yourself.
John:
It's already the chapter art.
John:
Thanks, Marco.
Casey:
Who knew?
Marco:
Now we need to teach Casey that chapter art needs to be square.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Sorry.
Casey:
Whoops.
John:
That's okay.
John:
He put them side by side.
John:
Have you ever seen Overcast?
John:
Have you ever played a podcast, Casey?
Casey:
I wasn't planning on being chapter art.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
John:
Marco, he'd alternate between them every one second.
John:
a b a b a b yeah no i i see it looking at this picture now um much more efficient than having easy to describe it it's actually looking we should do this earlier uh yeah there is definite dimming like look at the toolbar items that you know i forgot that i was trying to say text edit because i thought the windows was simple but i totally forgot text that it has a stupid toolbar too doesn't it yep
John:
I was expecting it to just be like, you know, like a bare window with a title bar.
John:
Cause that, that I feel like is, yeah, it's, it's dim.
John:
There's definite dimming going on.
John:
I see it there.
Marco:
I mean, this is better than windows that have like toolbars, like the regular Mac kind of toolbar where it gets integrated in the title bar.
Marco:
Because then I feel like the alerts and the sheets are two areas where I agree with most of the criticism that they are massively worse in Big Sur.
Marco:
But one area that I'm not hearing a lot of criticism about that I really keep running into in usage of just being kind of horrible...
Marco:
is the way toolbars are treated for apps that have regular standard app kit toolbars where you have a group of things.
Marco:
You can show icon or text or both, and you can customize it with the customization.
Marco:
That's the regular style app kit toolbar.
Marco:
I think in Big Sur, they look and work way worse, both in the iconography style, which is, I think...
Marco:
Yet another example of something that maybe it looks good in a screenshot in marketing or something, but does not work well for usability and real-world use.
Marco:
And I also find that the new design of basically having very few dividing lines or anything like that, and certainly no color, make title bars of rich applications that have a lot of functionality, much of which is in toolbars and AppKit.
Marco:
It makes the title bars really get very crowded and get very hard to visually distinguish where stuff is and what these buttons are supposed to do.
Marco:
There seems to be a bigger difference than usual with this design between how it looks in idealized screenshots and how it looks in reality, when people actually have real apps with real content running on real devices and real screens.
Marco:
This design does not survive contact with the user nearly as well as previous designs have.
John:
Some previous designs.
John:
Many of my Mac OS X interviews had sections demonstrating this exact thing where I'd show the beauty screenshots, sometimes Apple's own beauty screenshots, or my own beauty screenshots, and then it'd say...
John:
This is what it looks like when you've got a bunch of Windows all over your screen, and then you'd be like, ugh.
John:
I remember, I think, in the very first... Maybe it was a public beta, or maybe it was the very first release.
John:
The title bar of inactive Windows in very early Mac OS X was super translucent.
John:
It was like...
John:
kind of like the the glass appearance that windows did like it was very sort of clear frosted glass but very translucent so if you had a bunch of overlapping windows yeah the one in the front was opaque and you could read the title but the ones in the background because they were so translucent the text of the names if they overlapped in any way it just became a complete jumble right and that's what you're talking about it's like okay you got one screen one you got two windows you're active one and you're inactive one and beautifully arranged in a screenshot it looks nice
John:
You get a bunch of windows overlapping and now you can't tell what the hell anything is, right?
John:
So this is not a new problem, but it is like the fact that it's not a new problem shows that Apple should have learned this lesson.
John:
And it's repeated itself many times over.
John:
Yosemite had a similar problem.
John:
Like, and I would encounter this when...
John:
making screenshots because i'd always have to make that choice am i making a beauty screenshot to demonstrate a feature or am i making a screenshot to show you the failure modes and like yosemite with all the transparency i did both i did a beauty screenshot to say look this this can be really beautiful os and then i did the ugly screenshot to say if your backgrounds are unfortunately colored and it pulls them through into your ui and all of a sudden your app has a bunch of color coming through that you didn't plan to and
John:
It makes it hard to read and gross looking, right?
John:
So it's kind of frustrating to see them recycle these same mistakes, but I think they have learned, like, again, if you go through my reviews, the specific mistakes they made, they're not repeating.
John:
Like, except for maybe the menu bar.
John:
But like things like the translucent sidebar and all that stuff, they've worked really hard on the algorithms to defend against the worst of the failure modes.
John:
But it's still, you know, kind of frustrating to see that like, yeah, but to what end?
John:
Why do you continue to pursue this?
John:
What benefit are we getting as the users?
John:
And the same thing with the toolbars that you're just mentioning, like.
John:
The distinguishing characteristics that anchored that design before are now missing, and so you're trying to make it coherent within this design, but then what's the benefit that we get?
John:
I mean, the benefit is presumably, like, uniformity with iOS and all sorts of other benefits that are not like, oh, it makes this app easier to use, it's just it makes it, like, a family resemblance, but...
John:
I see where you're coming from, looking at some screenshots.
John:
This is a problem.
John:
I wish I could be running Big Sur during the podcast, but I'm not Casey, so I'm not going to do that.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm not going to do that.
Casey:
It's a different computer.
John:
It's a different computer.
John:
I know.
Casey:
It's on Casey's hyphen MacBook hyphen Pro.
John:
I don't think I have another computer that can boot this.
John:
Big Sur is on an external drive.
John:
Maybe I can boot my work laptop.
John:
But like I said, next week I want to talk about this more.
John:
I'll either take a bunch of screenshots myself or I'll have another computer.
John:
Running Big Sur that I can look at and poke at things.
John:
But I think – I didn't want to make this go negative.
John:
I just wanted to hear what Casey liked.
John:
But next week I think I and probably Marco will go in more in depth about where Apple has screwed things up.
John:
If Apple hasn't already fixed it by then, right?
John:
Yeah, they won't have.
John:
I'm just wishful thinking.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I think in general it just feels like a nice fresh coat of paint.
Casey:
And like I said, I have problems with it.
Casey:
The alerts – the sheets, I'm sorry.
Casey:
The sheets are –
Casey:
oh they're so bad i and at first i was like why is everyone so upset about the centered text on these dialogues but no everyone should have been it's it's so bad why aren't all books formatted like that it i i thought everyone was getting grumpy for no good reason but no everyone was right and they should have been grumpy because it's terrible that's all right no one reads text and dialogues anyway apple knows that
Marco:
That's a perfect example.
Marco:
If you're going to show a screenshot of a perfect idealized dialogue, you can make the text only one line.
Marco:
And if it's only one line, it'll look okay if it's centered.
Marco:
But as soon as you have a real dialogue where that text wraps onto a second line, it instantly becomes worse.
Marco:
This is a problem with almost every Alan Dye software design I've ever seen, where it looks good in screenshots, and it just does not survive the real world.
Marco:
It works worse once it gets to the real world, once it gets to real content and non-ideal circumstances, real apps.
Marco:
It seems like he designs for screenshots, and only for screenshots.
Marco:
And I don't know how to teach a designer that user content matters, but it shouldn't be my job.
Marco:
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Casey:
Steve Letter writes, could you explain what Intel has been struggling with in recent years?
Casey:
How can Apple be so much better at making chips and meeting goals?
Casey:
What went wrong at Intel?
John:
Intel just needs to get good, right?
John:
So we've talked about it on – if you haven't been listening to ATP for many, many years.
John:
Long-time listeners know the main answer to this question.
John:
But just to reiterate, Intel's biggest problem was they –
John:
were delayed and are now very far behind with their next process shrink so part of what silicon chip manufacturing uh has been powered by is every couple of years we're able to make the little transistors on the chip even smaller and that has many benefits you can fit more of them in the same amount of area they generally use less power um if you look at like the very first microchips the intel 8080 or whatever the i forget what the name of the first one was but um
John:
The number of transistors in them is minuscule and the size of the chips relative to that number is fairly big.
John:
Right.
John:
So I don't I can't pull out real numbers, but it was like, you know, thousands of transistors in a chip that you could hold in your hand.
John:
And then eventually you could fit millions in that same size and eventually billions in that same size.
John:
And of course, you make the chips bigger and all that stuff.
John:
So shrinks.
John:
That's what we call shrinks are really important.
John:
The shrink that Intel missed on was they were making 14 nanometer chips, which is like the feature size.
John:
There's no standard way to measure this, but basically you can imagine the smallest feature.
John:
The distance between two of the smallest things is 14 nanometers, which is very small.
John:
They were going to make a shrink down to 10 nanometers.
John:
And they missed their schedule for that.
John:
They said, well, we're going to, you know, here's our 14 nanometer chips and in a couple of years we'll have 10 nanometer chips, right?
John:
They had this whole big roadmap and then their deadline came and went and they didn't have 10 nanometer chips.
John:
They said, oh, we'll have them next year.
John:
And next year they didn't have them either.
John:
Oh, we'll have them next year.
John:
And next year we'll have them and they didn't have them either, right?
John:
They've been stuck
John:
Yeah.
John:
While Intel dropped this ball and wasn't able to get their next process shrink on time, the rest of the industry caught up and eventually surpassed them.
John:
So Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, TSMC, is now shipping chips that are quote-unquote 7 nanometer.
John:
It's complicated by the fact that Taiwan Semiconductor 7 nanometer is comparable to Intel's 10 nanometer, but all you have to know is that the competition essentially caught up.
John:
These new Macs, I think, are going to come with five nanometer chips, right?
John:
Like the A14 is going to be five nanometer, I believe.
John:
TSMC five nanometer design, right?
John:
Intel doesn't have anything.
John:
They can compete with that right now on a chip that size.
John:
So anyway, that is the main place that Intel fell behind is the process size.
John:
The second thing is Intel has had the benefit of x86, but has also been saddled with x86.
John:
x86 has tons of historical baggage.
John:
It doesn't mean it's impossible to make them fast or anything like that.
John:
It just means that implementing a...
John:
compatible compliant x86 64 chip is way more complicated because the feature set has so much you know the instruction set has so much historical baggage so there's whole features on intel chips they're taking up dive space and power granted not a lot but some but really it's like the complexity of verifying will this be compatible with all that existing x86 binary software that's out there
John:
So ARM is a simpler architecture.
John:
It's simpler to do that.
John:
I don't want to get back into the whole risk-cisk debates of the early 2000s.
John:
It's not actually that big of an issue, and internally a lot of chips work the same.
John:
But all other things being equal, it is more straightforward to deal with a simpler architecture like ARM than it is to deal with x86-64.
John:
a whole group of silicon designers that you can design a chip and here's your budget and here's your amount of time and so on and so forth and you can choose the instruction set would you like and would you like to choose x86 64 and it has to be compatible with all that existing software would you like to choose arm and has to be compatible with all the arm software they'd pick arm because there's just fewer edge cases less weird stuff less historical cruft right uh i'm not sure that's such a big factor but it is a factor
John:
And the final thing is like a company that's in the lead, technologically speaking, has no right to be in that lead forever.
John:
A company is just a group of people.
John:
People get old and retire.
John:
New employees are hired.
John:
The landscape of hiring changes.
John:
Where are the smartest and best people going?
John:
You know.
John:
What is the educational pipeline for producing those people?
John:
Do they want to work at Intel where the things are located?
John:
Do they want to work in the United States at all?
John:
Where are the brightest minds in the world?
John:
Are they all in America or are they elsewhere?
John:
All that changes over time.
John:
So it's not inconceivable that just – even if none of the other stuff that I said was true, that over the course of many decades –
John:
the best chips and the designers in the world might not be at intel anymore they might be someplace else they might have left to start a startup that apple then bought right you know apple bought pa semi and got a lot of talent maybe some of those people came from intel apple bought intel cell modem business if not their employees i don't i don't remember but anyway like the personnel human beings who are the best group of people who come together in gel under the right leadership in the right conditions to create the best chips
John:
I think all that stuff combines to the point where Apple is unquestionably making the best quote unquote cell phone chips system on a chips that anyone in the world and Intel is not.
John:
so i'm not here to instruct intel on how to catch up but i like they they have lost the lead over the course of many many years with a couple of easily identifiable sort of strategic errors but lots of much smaller harder to pin down sort of intangible things that have all added up to put them in the position that they're in now so bummer for intel but good for apple
Casey:
Joseph Barron writes, I've really been enjoying ATP and wanted to know your take on how the iOS iPad 14, iPadOS 14 announcements affect the ability to replace a computer or laptop with an iPad or iPhone, specifically for aging parents or grandparents.
Casey:
Maybe connect an external monitor, mouse and keyboard.
Casey:
What would you do here?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's so hard to make any sort of recommendation like this because it all depends on what people are doing with it.
Casey:
Like, my dad is a grandfather, and he's extremely technically savvy, and I don't think he would be happy with just an iPad.
Casey:
But my grandparents, they do have a PC, which is...
Casey:
which I never talked to them about because I refuse to do any sort of tech support for it.
Casey:
Um, they have other people they can talk to about that and also tell her I'm a terrible grandson, but be that as it may, uh, they do have, I think it's my iPad third gen, whatever the first, um, retina iPad was.
Casey:
And basically that's just a FaceTime appliance.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
But maybe they're using it for more than that, and I just don't know it.
Casey:
And the only thing they really want to do with a computer is, you know, look at email and look at news and so on.
Casey:
So for them, they probably would be just fine with an iPad.
Casey:
I don't think they would need an external monitor.
Casey:
They probably wouldn't even need a mouse, just maybe a keyboard of some sort.
Casey:
So it all depends on the situation.
Casey:
I don't think there's any easy way to make any sort of recommendation.
Casey:
Now, Marco, I thought you were doing something like this with your grip?
Casey:
Is that right?
Marco:
Sort of.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, it's changed over the years.
Marco:
So first of all, I would say that if you're connecting a monitor, keyboard, and mouse for whatever needs, if that's a requirement, if you need keyboard, mouse, external stuff,
Marco:
I would say go for a laptop at that point.
Marco:
Go for a Mac.
Marco:
Something that's designed first and foremost to be a laptop with a keyboard or mouse or a trackpad or whatever, as opposed to making that work with an iPad somehow.
Marco:
Because
Marco:
Generally speaking, you can do all that stuff with an iPad, but it's just a little more seamless when it can be a nice integrated thing, generally a laptop.
Marco:
Again, needs may vary, but I would recommend going in that direction.
Marco:
Use the thing for what it's best for.
Marco:
And iPads, I think for the most part, setting all that aside...
Marco:
I think iPads would still be my recommendation for simplified computer devices, for maybe elderly relatives that need things to be simpler for whatever reason.
Marco:
My grandfather, he's now 96 years old.
Marco:
We had to shop for a cell phone for him recently, and it was unbearable because all he wants is a phone that he can use, you know, reasonably.
Marco:
And he's 96.
Marco:
You know, he doesn't hear very well anymore.
Marco:
He doesn't have, like, a lot of, like, you know...
Marco:
fine motor control in his hands so like you want you want what you'd expect for a cell phone for a 96 year old you know you want like big buttons easy to see not a lot of complexity it was shockingly difficult to find something like that and all of our options were were terrible in various ways and the one we went with is not great it's just kind of less terrible than most of the other options out there um
Marco:
And the only reason that we had so few options was because the phone world has matured and progressed so much, and the functionality of phones has gotten so rich and complex now that there is no more simple phone.
Marco:
Like, no one makes one.
Marco:
There's a few companies that kind of try to specialize in this area, try to make things that are kind of simple, but they're not as simple as you would like.
Marco:
They aren't as accessible as you would like.
Marco:
They all have significant downsides.
Marco:
But it's mostly because the market is so mature and so developed.
Marco:
That what everybody wants in most of the market is competing on features.
Marco:
Everything needs to get bigger, better, faster, you know, and do more all the time.
Marco:
So if you're the person looking for something that does less, you have very few to no options.
Marco:
The fact that when the iPad first came out, it was a great option for your grandparents' computer because it was so simple.
Marco:
There was almost no way to screw anything up in a permanent way.
Marco:
Everything it could do, because it couldn't do that much, everything it could do was significantly more understandable than the problem set of what computers were doing at that time.
Marco:
And so one of the reasons why iPads were such a popular choice and such a good occupant of this role is that they were so much simpler.
Marco:
But part of that was because they were a simpler design, but a big part of that was just because they were new and young.
Marco:
And today, iPadOS is way more complicated than it was in 2010.
Marco:
And so today, if you want something that somebody can understand that really needs things to be very, very, very simple...
Marco:
It still is probably the best option there, but what you want doesn't really exist anymore.
Marco:
The ideal tablet or computer for someone to use who has very low needs and just basically wants to use Facebook and get baby pictures from their grandkids or whatever, that doesn't exist anymore.
Marco:
And it's a shame because that market is still there.
Marco:
And granted, it's probably shrinking, but it's still there in the same way that the market for a very simple flip phone with big numbers and that doesn't have a volume rocker on the side where they can hold it and accidentally mute themselves.
Marco:
There's lots of potential market for stuff like this, and it just doesn't exist because the market's too mature.
Marco:
And the same thing, unfortunately, is true for computers now and tablets.
Marco:
That all being said...
Marco:
I still think that an iPad is usually the best choice for this kind of role.
Marco:
If they don't have needs where you'll have to venture into iPad power user territory.
Marco:
If they have needs that are like, okay, well, sometimes I have to get this file off of this thing and then do this thing with it.
Marco:
Okay, that's...
Marco:
a laptop will very likely be simpler.
Marco:
If anything they ever have to do involves multitasking or a shortcut or a web service to take an API thing to transform this thing, there's lots of crazy hacks that iPad users have to jump through to do power user stuff on it.
Marco:
If this person has to do any of those things, get a laptop instead.
Marco:
It's easier.
Marco:
But if they can use iPads in the ideal case with multitasking disabled and just basic usage of the built-in apps, then that's still the best choice.
John:
Leave it to me to read the question as usual.
John:
This is asking how iOS and iPadOS 14 changed the ability of it to replace a laptop.
John:
I don't think it makes that big of a change.
John:
It says specifically for aging parents or grandparents.
John:
But to go off of the stuff that Margot was saying...
John:
There are many aspects of computing that need to be tailored to people who are aging and have the disabilities that come with aging.
John:
In general, I think it takes a lot to recommend a computer over an iPad when you get to the extremities of age.
John:
Just because, as Marco just noted, you can disable things like multitasking and multitasking gestures on the iPad that simplify it greatly.
John:
The biggest weakness that I feel like iOS devices have specifically that has not changed by iOS 14 or any of that stuff is...
John:
is that we touched on earlier the biggest one is 12.9 inches and so if any of your issues have to do with fine motor control or vision having everything compressed into a 12.9 inch diagonal thing uh that you have to semi-precisely manipulate is not great for either one of those things um my own mother who still has good motor control but has terrible vision
John:
ends up using she has an external monitor a much larger external monitor that she either connects her ipad to or mac to like this she just basically needs a bigger screen if she could get you know an ipad with a 27 inch screen like the whole drafting table thing and if that thing could be put into i keep thinking of at ease which is an older version of this but if there was a simplified interface that she could get where it mostly just made the elements on the screen bigger
John:
like she would use that device and it would find it much more valuable than any like the simplest phone the simplest ipad none of those can get around the fact that they're just small so you got to hold them real close to your face or like if you have bad vision you can't see things that are small yeah you know she cranks up the dynamic tech size she changes the resolution to have the everything like she's doing all the things and it's good that apple has those accessibility options but in the end uh
John:
No substitute for cubic inches, as they say in the car world, right?
John:
Nice.
John:
Sometimes you just need a big honking screen.
John:
And in that respect, Macs are just so much more capable.
John:
They're multi-resolution.
John:
You can have monitors of any size.
John:
You can choose how big you want the elements on the screen to be by checking the specific resolution that you want it to be displayed at.
John:
They're worse at dynamic text in a lot of applications, although it depends.
John:
But they're better in terms of the input flexibility.
John:
So I still think there's a ways to go here, but...
John:
In terms of technological complexity, macOS and any type of computer like that has so many more places that people can go wrong that I just feel like if they want to have any fighting chance of surviving and not screwing stuff up, an iOS device, despite all the things I just said about the size limitations and everything, is a much safer bet.
John:
And I don't think any of the enhancements they've done to iPadOS have...
John:
made it so that ipads are now so complex that it flips that equation it's still absolutely true like people you're you're never going to be able to explain mounting a disc image to someone who's who's 90 something years old who does not know or care about technology they don't want to learn it like like marco was saying they just want to see pictures of their grandkids so what you really want them is like
John:
the biggest ipad you can get for them with nothing on the home screen except for the three icons they have to pick they'll pick that like launch maybe make a shortcut for them that launches directly into the photo stream that has the pictures of the grandkids on it right like that's all they want maybe they don't even want to web browse you really have to know what they want to do but the point is there's very little they can do by stabbing their fingers at the ipad screen that's going to like break it whereas there's a million things let me tell you there's a million things they can do to screw up their mac
John:
I'm in the middle of a fairly long tech support saga with my mother about her Mac right now.
John:
Macs are just so much more complicated still than iPads.
John:
Forget about things like OS updates or Macs getting too old or what's going to happen to all the audiobooks that I ripped from CD that are on my Mac with an optical drive.
John:
Things like that can't get their foot in the door so far on the iPad, and that is a blessing.
Casey:
You made a car reference earlier, so let's round the show out with a little bit of neutral.
Casey:
Gavin Shanley writes, please give us a bit of welcome distraction this week, although this was written like three months ago, and talk about the new BMW 4 Series and its questionable grille.
Casey:
What do you guys make of it?
John:
I mean, this picture that we have, we'll put it in the show notes or the show art or the chapter art or something like that.
John:
This picture, I feel like, paints this grill in the most flattering possible light in that I feel like the picture works hard to minimize it.
John:
having the european proportion license plate going right through the middle of it makes it so that from a distance if you look quickly you can be forgiven for thinking oh it's just a double kidney grill on a bmw and it's actually not a bad looking bmw it's sporty it's a coupe you know it's the it's modern looking design like it looks pretty good but then you look closer and you realize wait a second
John:
That grill goes from the top all the way down to the bottom, and the license plate is in the middle of the grill.
John:
What is this, a Lexus?
John:
Is this an Audi?
John:
What is this?
John:
And those kidneys are less kidneys and more like potatoes.
John:
I don't know, like robo-potatoes, because the corners are sort of squared off, chopped off Battlestar Galactica style, and it's just...
Casey:
I put a link in the chat.
Casey:
It'll be in the show notes as well.
Casey:
To car and driver, you know, here's what we know so far about the 2021 BMW 4 Series.
Casey:
Look at this.
Casey:
Look at the grille.
John:
Why?
John:
See, yeah, the picture at the top of the link you just put is a less flattery angle because now from this angle, you see not only is that grille really big, but it protrudes.
John:
Yeah.
John:
like a weird like like pick nostrils and like you know like it it's like it's like on a little it's on the surface of like a pimple that's sticking forward from the thing and that hasn't been the case like the b the bmws that we loved like if anything the the grill was like underneath an overhang sort of tucked in or at least flush with but i know they're trying to make the front of the car pointy
John:
I mean, this trend, which is sort of sweeping the industry, I mentioned Lexus and Audi, Toyota is doing it now, of having just massive front, I don't even want to call them grills, because most of the time it's just like hexagonal or diamond-shaped plastic pieces, but just a huge gaping maw as if suddenly we've created engines that need like way more air intake, but they don't, so most of it is actually blocked off, right?
John:
So there's just a little section where the air goes through.
John:
Yeah.
John:
um is weird and it's especially weird that bmw like is hopping on that train because bmw's characteristic their branded characteristic is the double kidney there the two little openings which have changed size and position and moved all over the place but that's their branding other car companies that are doing this that's not a really big part of their branding alexis is trying to make it part of the branding right but they have different
John:
Different brand identifiers that are not so focused on the grille, where they have the flexibility to change the grille around to follow trends, but it still looks like a car of that brand based on other characteristics.
John:
So it's kind of weird that BMW is chasing a fad and allowing that fad to infect the most important visual branding element of their cars, which is this front part here.
Marco:
I mean, I don't even know if it's the most important.
Marco:
I mean, to me, like, I see these giant girls.
Marco:
And, you know, Lexus can be forgiven because Lexus is a company that is run by very boring people trying to make exciting cars.
John:
I mean, arguably, they started this trend, too.
John:
Like, I think they were first out the gate with this.
Marco:
Or Acura, even.
Marco:
Acura has had a grill problem for a while.
Yeah.
Marco:
But I feel like BMW is holding so tightly to the kidney grills being this incredibly important thing.
Marco:
They must have the kidney grills.
Marco:
But I hate to be an electric car guy all the time, but we are rapidly in a world and definitely heading towards more of one where cars don't need front grills nearly as much at all anymore.
Marco:
uh and bmw is going in that direction too reluctantly finally slowly late and poorly but still they're getting there are they going to hold on to this thing forever like is it a bmw if it has a kidney grill or is it bmw if it's a good car like that seems like the thing they should care about more and that's the area they've been suffering in recent years more than they should like why do people buy bmws is it because it has a two-piece grill on the front not really
Marco:
People buy them for lots of reasons.
Marco:
That isn't a big one.
Casey:
I don't know if I agree with that because I think a lot of people buy BMWs because they want to be seen getting into a BMW.
John:
But no one's going to know this is a BMW, though.
John:
The thing that Marco laid out is there's no tradeoff between those two things.
John:
They can make good cars with kidney grills and bad cars with kidney grills.
John:
And I don't even think it's an electric thing because the beauty of the kidney is you can make it super tiny like it was on the H50.
John:
You can make it huge like it is here.
John:
There's nothing about the kidney that requires air to enter it at all.
John:
It's just two chrome shapes.
John:
You can put it on the front of an electric car, and if you looked at it, people were like, oh, it doesn't look like the kidney anymore.
John:
Sure, of course it does.
John:
The kidney is all about the shape.
John:
You don't need any actual air.
John:
It doesn't need to be a grill.
John:
It is just...
John:
it's like a logo it is a slightly 3d silvery logo like sometimes it's body colored like i feel like that that visual branding can survive the tech transition no problem whatsoever unlike for example the lexus thing which is all about being open to the air because it's not part of their branding but but yeah they have to keep that grill because it's not a bmw without that it like it is totally disagreeing
John:
They absolutely have to keep it.
John:
It doesn't have to be big or be small or be wide or be tall.
John:
They have many options.
John:
Look at the history of BMWs.
John:
They have moved that thing around all over the place.
John:
It can be minimized.
John:
It can be maximized.
John:
But they have to keep it because they are wedded to that as the visual distinguishing branding characteristic.
John:
It's like saying you're going to have a Mac without an Apple logo anywhere on it.
John:
Like, it doesn't make any sense.
John:
You have to have it.
John:
You know, wherever it happens to be, whatever it happens to look like, if it's a rainbow colored, if it's big, if it's light up, if it's opaque, if it's shiny, kind of have an Apple logo on it.
John:
That's how you can tell it's a Mac laptop, for instance.
John:
So I don't think the kidney's going away.
John:
I just think they need to... At various times, they've incorporated it into their designs in more or less successful ways.
John:
And this one is where they're following the industry trend of the bigger grills, which...
John:
As Marco pointed, it doesn't make much sense if we're going towards electric, but it's not a deal breaker in the end.
John:
But it's not serving their grill well.
John:
From most angles, this looks less attractive.
John:
It draws attention to itself in an unflattering way, which is a shame because I think the rest of the car is a reasonably nice shape.
John:
And the headlights are nice, right?
John:
And the rest of the front is fine, and the wheels are nice.
John:
It's not a terrible styling error for BMW, except for their treatment of the kidneys.
Casey:
Agreed.
Casey:
And, you know, I was looking into this briefly, and the M340i, which I believe is the equivalent of my car, but, you know, 10 years newer, actually literally 10 years newer, it is 3,800 pounds, which is not obese for a car of this caliber, but it's not light.
Casey:
And it is $67,000 for a 3 Series.
Casey:
However...
Casey:
I remember, and maybe I have this wrong because this was 30 years ago, but I remember my memory of reading like car and driver in road and track or whatever when I was eight years old or thereabouts was that supercars of the day would get into the low four seconds to get to 60.
Casey:
So like a Lamborghini Diablo, I think was somewhere around like 4.1, 4.2 seconds to 60.
Casey:
If I'm wrong, it's no big deal, but it's something along those lines.
Marco:
I think about eight more seconds to a breakdown.
Casey:
Well, there's that.
Casey:
Actually, I'm not sure this BMW would do much better, but that's neither here nor there.
Marco:
Twelve more seconds to a replacement clutch.
Casey:
Yeah, right, right.
Casey:
Well, no clutches anymore.
Casey:
None of the three series get a six-speed in America anyway, which is another terrible thing.
Casey:
But anyways, the M340i, 3,800 pounds, $67,000, zero to 60, 3.8 seconds.
Casey:
3.8 seconds to 60 miles an hour.
Casey:
That is supercar fast 20, 30 years ago and is still blisteringly quick today.
Casey:
And I don't remember off the top of my head how fast, Marco, your Tesla will get to 60.
Casey:
I don't doubt it's faster.
Casey:
There's no doubt in my mind that it's faster.
Casey:
But is it that much faster?
Casey:
I don't even know.
John:
Marco's can only do it three times, then it needs to rest.
Casey:
Well, that's also true.
Casey:
That is also very, very true.
Casey:
And last I heard, Marco, you were a very anti-ludicrous mode.
Casey:
No, there's something more than ludicrous now, isn't there?
Marco:
I don't get the P version.
Marco:
I get the long-range version.
Marco:
So what I currently have is a 100D, which I don't know how fast it is, but it's faster than I need it to be, that's for sure, and I'm very happy with it.
John:
I just pasted it into the chat and also in our Slack, the 850, in case you don't remember what that looked like.
John:
I think this is probably the most minimized, although the i8 is pretty minimized.
John:
Well, maybe it's just stretched out.
John:
But anyway, this is probably the tiniest it's gotten.
John:
I honestly don't even know if air was allowed to enter those.
John:
I suppose it was.
John:
It might have all been coming from the bottom.
John:
But this was the time when cars having very pointy fronts were sporty.
John:
So they just took a BMW and they made it super pointy.
John:
They're like, oh, but we've got to have the kidney.
John:
And so they did.
John:
There it is.
John:
It's just this tiny little... And I remember thinking at the time, it's like, it was kind of embarrassing for them because they were like, well, you have to have it because it's our branding, but there's so little room for it.
John:
And they're like, ah, we can fit it.
John:
And so they did.
John:
They made a little tiny little nostrils in the front of the car.
John:
It looks a little bit silly, but looking back on it with now decades of hindsight, I don't think it looks bad.
John:
I mean, it looks like a car from the 80s or the 90s.
John:
Like, that's what it is.
John:
But...
John:
you know it doesn't look bad right uh when we look back on these cars they will look like cars of their time i'm not sure in the end 20 years from now if we hold the 850 versus this these these these fours i think i'm gonna like the 850 better like just from an aesthetic perspective just because i'm not big on the giant gaping maw styling trend at all on any brand same and so i'm also kind of not gonna like it on the vm it can be made to work i think
John:
i think audi has had the most success just because they tend to break it up with a lot of horizontal lines and so it tends to be a little bit more coherent but yeah like the the giant and the giant scoop thing like even if it's all blocked off it's still not great aerodynamically and i feel like it looks less slippery like this 850 looks looks sportier because it has lower frontal area it is a smaller car it is sleeker it cuts through the wind better because it's not a gigantic vertical wall trying to plow through the air right
Casey:
I've said this a thousand times, and I'll say it again.
Casey:
This was not my theory.
Casey:
I have heard this before.
Casey:
But everyone always says that the BMW that you own is the last of the good BMWs.
Casey:
And I really think that for me, the E90, which was the late 2000s, early 2010s, like this is before electric steering, before they started really removing the six speed.
Casey:
I really think that the E90 might have been it.
Casey:
And actually, I really, really, really liked your M5, Marco.
Casey:
What was that, an F10?
Casey:
Is that right?
Marco:
F10 M5, yeah.
Marco:
It shared a lot of the nice aspects of the E series without going too far into the worst parts of the F series.
Casey:
Yeah, but either way, I feel like the super late aughts, early to mid 2010s, that was when I think BMW really lost its way.
Casey:
And last I recall...
Casey:
they haven't used the ultimate driving machine in quite a while.
Casey:
And if you look at your average BMW, I would argue it's not the ultimate driving machine.
Casey:
Like, they're definitely very good BMWs to this day.
Casey:
I mean, again, this M340i, 3.8 seconds.
Casey:
Like, I can't get over how fast that is.
Casey:
But your average, like, 320i that you see running around where I live, like, it's... I'm sure it's nice, but I wouldn't say it's the ultimate driving machine or anything like it.
Casey:
It's just...
Casey:
It bums me out, you know, in the same way that, and I think I've said this before on the show.
Casey:
I, as a kid, I really enjoyed Sony stuff.
Casey:
You know, like I had a, I had a Walkman, an actual honest to goodness Walkman.
Casey:
And then I had a Discman, an actual honest to goodness Discman after, you know, after the Walkman.
Casey:
And Sony, and we had a Trinitron TV, which I think we spoke about fairly recently.
Casey:
You know, all of this stuff was so good at the time.
Casey:
And it was, and I loved Sony so much.
Casey:
And now, like, I could not possibly care less about Sony.
Casey:
I can't even think of the last Sony product I owned, much less if there's anything in the house now.
Casey:
And I feel like BMW has fallen out of favor for me in a very similar way.
Casey:
Maybe I was obsessed.
Casey:
I don't know if I was obsessed, but I was darn close to obsessed if not obsessed.
Casey:
And
Casey:
And the trip that you and I went on, Marco, that was at the pinnacle.
Casey:
That was before my car exploded every 10 minutes.
Casey:
And I loved being in Munich and going to BMW Welt and seeing all of the BMW history.
Casey:
And every part of that trip was so amazing.
Casey:
And now I would be flabbergasted if I ever owned another BMW for the rest of my life.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I've never owned a BMW, so I can't be infected with that.
John:
The one that you owned is the one that you like.
John:
And I think I have some favorite eras of BMW.
John:
And I think, honestly, this current crop of cars is on the upward trend.
John:
They made some very bad choices for a couple of generations.
John:
And they're trying to correct them, setting aside the styling and everything, just sort of the feature set and how they do things.
John:
I think they're...
John:
They're getting better.
John:
And Sony, I know what you're talking about with the dissolution of Sony because they were sort of kings of the world at a certain point and then sort of were dethroned and lost their way.
John:
But Sony does still make some good stuff.
John:
People forget, of course, that PlayStation is Sony.
John:
That's a pretty darn good game console.
John:
And they didn't win the last console generation just on a fluke.
John:
Sony is very good at a lot of things, even the TVs they make, even though they're using LG panels and their OLEDs and all sorts of other realities.
John:
Uh, a lot of the stuff they do, their strengths are evident.
John:
Like their image processing, uh, is best in class of all the televisions.
John:
Um, you know, again, they, they can't, they're not innovating in the panels anymore, so they can't really compete on that front, but they can compete on all of the computery stuff.
John:
Same thing they've been applying to their cameras.
John:
Their, their lenses are surprisingly good in many cases and their electronics and their cameras are the leaders in certain, for certain aspects, for certain applications.
John:
So I think their, their cameras are pretty good and I have sensors.
John:
Their sensors are amazing.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Right.
John:
A lot of people use their sensors in other cameras and other applications.
John:
Unlike the panels that they buy from LG, they are making sensors, right?
John:
So Sony still has its strengths.
John:
And I think it's a good example that a once great company can do things that are great again.
John:
I feel like Sony's strengths have never really changed.
John:
The things they're good at are things they've always been good at and things they're bad at are still basically the same.
John:
But it's just like, well, how many hits do you get, right?
John:
How are you leveraging your strengths to make good products?
John:
There's a through line to Sony products that...
John:
i think you know it's still there bmw i think lost its way in terms of like you're saying the ultimate driving machine i don't know what the status of marketing is but bottom line is they took a diversion into but it seems like our biggest customers want kind of luxury cars and and the enthusiasts the the loud enthusiasts kind of like the mac pro users or the people complaining that apple isn't paying attention to the mac apple's like mac users they just need some computers they can use and
John:
the fringe group is like no we need we want you to pay attention to the mac and we want you to make this big impractical mac pro and it's like we don't need to do that's stupid so few people buy those but you need to to some in some respects you need to set your sights on the fringe enthusiast uh users to not have your whole line lose its spirit and just become like oh it's a german quote-unquote luxury sedan that just starts to feel mushy and
John:
It starts to be less distinguishable from your competitors.
John:
It's like, well, now they're all basically the same.
John:
It used to be, oh, BMWs were the sporty ones, Mercedes was the squishy ones, Audi were unknown or not competitors, VW were the cheap ones.
John:
And BMW had staked out that identity as the ultimate driving machine.
John:
They built cars based on that.
John:
And to the extent that they have deviated from that sort of mission statement, their cars have gotten worse, right?
John:
Like, they're not bad cars, but people who want a BMW instead of a Mercedes or instead of an Audi are looking for that ultimate driving machine experience.
Yeah.
John:
I think they're finding their way back to that now.
John:
They really messed up the 3 Series for a couple of generations and are just slowly finding their way back.
John:
The 5 got mushy but then got better.
John:
I think Marco's generation was the return to form of the 5, and the current 5, by all accounts, is really good as well.
John:
The 7 has always been weird because that's the big Lugso boat, but if it's supposed to be an ultimate driving machine, it's kind of confusing.
John:
And the electrics, we don't know how things are going to shape out in the electrics, but when everyone starts fueling their full line of electrics,
John:
Will BMWs be the – like a good example is Porsche with the Taycan.
John:
Is that how you pronounce it?
John:
I forget.
John:
I think that's right.
John:
They've staked out we make the sporty electric.
John:
We're going to brag about how you can do zero to 100 to zero all day long and we'll just do it.
John:
We're going to brag about our Nürburgring times.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, it makes sense.
John:
That's Porsche's brand.
John:
We're a sporty car.
John:
But then guess what?
John:
We're electric.
John:
Same deal.
John:
We're doing the same thing.
John:
We are the sporty car company.
John:
If you want an electric car and you want it to be a sporty electric car, we're going to try to make that for you.
John:
When BMW goes electric, are they going to say we're the ultimate electric driving machine?
John:
Is that where they're going to shoot for?
John:
Are they going to say actually for the electric, it's all going to be about hush, quiet and long mileage or something or whatever like.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I feel like BMW, like Volvo, they have it so easy.
John:
Like Volvo is the safety brand, right?
John:
So if you buy Volvo, whoever owns it now or whatever, it's not a question about what distinguishes a Volvo?
John:
Why would someone buy a Volvo?
John:
Safety.
John:
The word is safety.
John:
That choice has been made.
John:
If you buy a Volvo...
John:
You better make it a really safe car.
John:
You better invest money in safety because that's your brand and that's who buys your car.
John:
You can change your mind about that and say, oh, Volvo is going to be the sporty brand, but you're going to lose all your safety customers and chances are good you're not going to gain a sporty one.
John:
BMW?
John:
Sporty.
John:
Sporty cars.
John:
They pioneered that.
John:
That's their brand.
John:
You can decide to change it.
John:
But you'll lose all your sporty customers, and now you're competing with the other people who might have been in that spot already.
John:
So I would advise BMW to get back that ultimate driving machine spirit, as they have been, and to maintain it through the electric era.
John:
Learn from Porsche.
John:
It's possible to do that.
John:
It's possible to say...
John:
There are a lot of electric cars in the market, but ours is the one that's sporty.
John:
Go with that and make the real small one.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Fully, and Notion.
Marco:
And thank you to our members.
Marco:
If you want to join up, go to atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, 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 Arman, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
They didn't mean it.
Casey:
So I haven't had the time to look into this literally at all.
Casey:
I have spent probably 15 seconds looking at this, but have either of you guys paid any attention to the new Ford Bronco?
Casey:
And if so, can you give me the quick summary of it?
John:
It's a big Tonka toy truck for grownups.
Casey:
So it's because it seems to me, I guess there's like three different trims or models or something.
Casey:
Like I guess there's a two-door, four-door, and then some sport model, which I'm not familiar with what makes that sport.
John:
There's like six trim levels that go from 30K at base to 60K at the top.
John:
It's kind of like the Jeeps in that regard in that it is a base.
John:
It's a foundation for a car that you can mold to your tastes and budget.
John:
yeah right and and yeah it's a big it's big it's like a target truck it's like a toy truck with big knobby wheels and you know and i was like what do you want to use it for are you mostly just going to drive to the mall you can set it up that way right are you actually going to go off-roading and use it to camp it you can set it up that way and you could do it all the ways in between two door four door interior that looks like a luxury car versus the one that looks like you know
John:
It's all vinyl and plastic.
John:
Do you want to have a winch accessory?
John:
Do you want to have a tent thing?
John:
It looks like a very versatile platform that's squarely aimed at customers that this type of car appeals to.
John:
I admire their flexibility because they know, look, some people are going to buy this and they're just going to
John:
You know, drive to the grocery store.
John:
So it has to serve that need.
John:
It has to be an OK car for doing that while also looking like a fun little truck.
John:
But also some people are actually going to take it off road.
John:
So it has to be able to do that, too.
John:
And to the extent that we can make it legit as in like, oh, this really can go off road like this really can go up the side of a mountain and have a winch.
John:
That reflects down the whole rest of the line, legitimizing the person who's just taking it to the grocery store to say, I have a Bronco, too.
John:
And they can think in their heart of hearts, if I just change the wheels on this thing, I can go up the side of a mountain, too, even if it's not really true because they didn't get the transfer case or whatever features it allowed.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I did truck details.
John:
I'm not into trucks, but I think this product looks like a good product for its target market.
John:
Again, not having read any reviews, maybe it has terrible quality and the engine stinks or something.
John:
We'll find out.
John:
But just from sort of the design and features that are available on it, it looks like a pretty good job.
John:
And judging from the few people we know who are into trucks, mostly just Stephen Hackett...
John:
He seems excited about it.
John:
No, I've seen it online.
John:
Lots of people talking about the Bronco.
John:
People who are into trucks and fantasize about driving around a big Tonka truck seem to be enthusiastic about it.
John:
So that's, I mean, that's what you hope for, right?
Casey:
Yeah, and from what little I've gathered, and I might be way off base because, again, I have not really looked into this, but from what little I've gathered...
Casey:
You can take the doors off a la a Jeep Wrangler, which, again, like we can argue about whether or not that's cool or fun or safe or whatever.
Casey:
But as someone who has experienced it many, many times, I can tell you that I really enjoy doing that.
Casey:
So you can take the doors off.
Casey:
I guess there's like hundreds of accessories that Ford has come out with.
John:
You can take the roof off.
John:
You can put on different doors.
John:
Yeah.
John:
You can get a hard top or a soft top.
John:
You can get doors with windows in the bottom of them.
John:
You can take the doors off.
John:
You can have two or four of those.
Casey:
All of this seems extremely well thought out.
Casey:
Like somebody who actually cares about this sort of thing was leading the charge to make a Wrangler – not a Wrangler killer necessarily, but a Wrangler equivalent.
Casey:
And, you know, in the same way that for me I'm a single-issue voter when it comes to cars, and that is three pedals.
Casey:
Well, first of all, this has a seven-speed in certain trims apparently, which –
Casey:
it's it's the it's the default you have to the the automatic is an optional extra on the models that's like still my heart you have to pay extra for the automatic like the old days be still my heart in 2021 a brand new asterisk car getting a set well six slash seven speed seven speed in this case as the default bravo bravo ford bravo indeed
Casey:
But no, I think that this I don't see myself buying a Bronco, but man, if I was still in my Wrangler phase, I think this would be very interesting to cross shop.
Casey:
Very, very interesting indeed.
Casey:
And and I just really think this is a very cool and different approach.
Casey:
to making a car where you have this Tonka truck, tinker toy sort of thing where you can make of it whatever you want.
Casey:
And I love that.
Casey:
And I feel like in the Wrangler world, from what I've seen, which I haven't looked at this in a year or two now,
Casey:
You certainly could get some options from Jeep, but it wasn't the overabundance of stuff.
Casey:
Now, absolutely, there is an infinite world of possibilities with the Wrangler when you consider the aftermarket.
Casey:
But for first-party OEM stuff, I don't think there was near as many options as you can get on the Bronco.
Casey:
And I just think this is super-duper cool.
Casey:
I think it's a reasonable way to reboot an old name.
Casey:
From what little I've seen of this, five stars.
Casey:
I'm really pleased that Ford has gone this way.
Casey:
You know, Marco, you could get one of these to drive on the beach.
John:
Well, maybe your grandkids can get a permit to do it.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
Exactly.
John:
It's true.
John:
I was saying it was like a Taga toy just because the proportions of this car of just like tall with giant wheels and a big ride.
John:
It looks like a toy car.
John:
The reason you don't build real cars like that is because they'll
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But comically huge wheels, you can buy it with a factory, you know, whatever kit that raises it up.
John:
So the ride height is like an extra foot higher, like all those things are there to make it basically a worse car for taking to the grocery store by all possible measures.
John:
But I feel like the way it competes with the Wrangler is that.
John:
like we were saying about that with the hose down interior and you said in the slack like oh just like every jeep ever it's like yeah but this is just this is a real car like it's not like a jeep is like so utilitarian they try to dress it up but it's always just noisy and rough and awkward and weird and like yeah but that's not what it's for it's a jeep right this the bronco feels like it's trying to say let's make a car that if you just drive it to the grocery store it just feels like any other like mini suv it feels like a rav4
John:
right i'm not sure they've achieved that i'll have to wait till i see reviews but it seems like they want to reach down to that segment it's you know you can buy the one that there are no winds uh whooshing by there are no rattles there are no creeks the ride is gentle it's like you're in a really tall tippy camry like
John:
Make it work for that, but then also make it tough enough and built sturdily enough that if you outfit it the right way, you can actually take it off road and actually make it make it out of durable materials and rubber seal all of the controls so you can spray down the dashboard and nothing will short out.
John:
Right.
John:
And offer it with vinyl seats like a lot of is just choices of options like.
John:
I look at this and I think of like imagine if Apple made a laptop to bring it back to tech for a second, made a laptop with this range of options, right?
John:
Like you can get the one that has the giant battery pack or that's water sealed, but you could also get the one that's as thin as possible.
John:
Like that's the beauty of this product line.
John:
Again, if it's a car, it's worth a damn at all.
John:
I haven't read any reviews of it.
John:
If the engine is decent, if the transmission is decent, if it really is tough, if the reliability is okay, they seem to have built a platform that has a lot of flexibility and it can last them a lot of years and serve a lot of different customers.
John:
And all that crap with those options, that's all gold, right?
John:
Like, that's Porsche, right?
John:
That's just...
John:
you know this car is expensive like it starts at 29k it's not like you can get into this for 16 000 or something right starts at 29 so it's it's i put myself on this big tangent but what i was trying to get at is this is trying to appeal to people who know what the hell the bronco is like the retro styling like mustangs have been doing this for years like a modern car
John:
that evokes design characteristics, not just like the Kidney Gorilla and BMWs, but like reminds you of a specific Mustang, right?
John:
Ford has done that with Mustangs for years.
John:
Oh, this is a modernization of the 68 Mustang or whatever it is, right?
John:
And you see it, right?
John:
This is a modernization of
John:
I think the original Bronco design, like you look at it and you can see the family resemblance.
John:
It doesn't look exactly the same.
John:
It's not like some of the cars that have come out of American car companies are really just giant inflated cartoon versions of an exact car from the past.
John:
But the Bronco is trying to specifically evoke the old Bronco.
John:
And every time I see that, I'm like, that's cool and everything.
John:
And you're going to get those customers who are now older and have the money to buy a car that starts at 30K because they remember the original one.
John:
But that road is eventually a dead end.
John:
you need to always be creating new models that become that for the next generation to give an example the acura integra was a thing that did not exist honda made it and now when those people get older i fully expect someday honda to come back and say we're gonna well honda doesn't really do this that much but you could come back later and say hey all the people who grew up loving the integra
John:
they're old now and have a lot of money so let's make a modern integra that evokes the design of the 1992 integra and get all those people to buy it for a lot more money right you have to always be creating new models like that if all you ever do is go back to the past and say you remember that bronco that everybody loved here's another modern reinterpretation of it you're that's
John:
that's that's dead end you will run out of things to keep reinterpreting you have to always have new models that that didn't exist before it's like making new ip you can't just keep making marvel movies forever a certain point you had to have new intellectual property like star wars was new until i believe it or not once was new intellectual property was not based on something that came before it right it was not based on a comic book wasn't based on an existing franchise it was entirely new
John:
You have to do that every once in a while.
John:
And sometimes I wonder if American car companies are able to do that at all.
John:
Like Jeep is just going to make new new things called, quote unquote, Wrangler forever with round headlights and vertical slots in the grill.
John:
Like they're they're just never going to make it.
John:
I mean, the Cherokee, I guess, is a new IP kind of.
John:
But like I think this Bronco is great.
John:
But when what's the next like new brand name?
John:
of you know what's the new ip for american car company that to you know 25 30 years from now someone's going to be looking back with nostalgia and buying the much more expensive version of that that's what i worry about when i see things like the bronco but for what it is it seems like so far it's a good interpretation of that