Multilevel Pizza Oven
Casey:
we have to talk about uh the atp membership and pricing and i really wish apple did not raise their prices on the day that we're talking about this because you know there's something something headwinds so we have some pricing updates to talk about for atp membership john can you give us like the bullet points at the very least maybe we can talk longer later on
John:
We should actually talk about foreign currency exchange rates.
John:
What kind of podcast is this?
John:
Foreign currency exchange rates.
John:
They affect us because we do accept memberships in different currencies.
John:
Anyway, Oscar-winning performance, Casey.
John:
Very good.
John:
So we do have some ATP membership changes to announce.
John:
We're going to announce them briefly, just the bullet points for now.
John:
We will talk about them more in the after show if you care about that type of stuff.
John:
If not, here's the deal.
John:
ATP membership, if you buy an entire year's worth of membership, the price is decreasing.
John:
Now, if you buy a whole year, you get a discount that's equivalent to getting one month free.
Casey:
Wait, we did this all wrong.
Casey:
We're supposed to be raising prices, John, raising prices.
John:
Yeah, we should be increasing prices to match inflation.
John:
I don't know why we're not doing that, but we're not.
John:
If you are an existing annual member, don't worry.
John:
Your subscription will renew at the new lower rate.
John:
There's nothing you have to do.
John:
Second item, we have a membership FAQ, depending on how you want to pronounce it.
John:
The link will be in the show notes.
John:
It's at atp.fm slash membership slash FAQ.
John:
And it hopefully answers a bunch of questions you might have about membership.
John:
And if you have other questions, send them to us and I'll add them to the FAQ.
John:
And then the final thing, and this is the weirdest thing, and again, we'll talk about it more on the after show, but not now.
John:
As part of our recent survey of listeners about membership stuff, we got some feedback where some people, not many people,
John:
But some people said they wish there was a way they could pay us more money for membership.
John:
I don't think Apple got a lot of those things about Apple TV Plus, but we got them about our program.
John:
And so we figured that's a thing that we should do.
John:
We now have a way for people who want to to pay more than this price for ATP membership.
John:
We will provide a link in the show notes.
John:
And of course, it is described in the FAQ.
Casey:
We got to start with some follow-up as always.
Casey:
And the entire internet wrote to tell us about something that I actually already knew.
Casey:
I was very excited that I was first to report this in.
Casey:
One of my really favorite podcasts is 20,000 Hertz.
Casey:
You can sort of kind of think of it as a 99% invisible, but specifically around audio and audio related things.
Casey:
And I think it was literally the day after we recorded or perhaps the day after we released.
Marco:
It sure was.
Casey:
Last week, Dallas Taylor and team did an episode called Auto Tone, which I presume is a play on Auto Tune, which is all about automotive noises and things like that.
Casey:
And wouldn't you guess, what did they feature prominently in the episode but Rivian?
Casey:
And sure enough, the Rivian sound engineers or whatever we're supposed to call them said, yep, they are based on nature, just as I think John had theorized last episode.
John:
I didn't theorize, I was just telling you.
John:
because I've heard this from the Rivian people for many years.
John:
I mean, as you would imagine, the PR push for their electric trucks, they've been talking about this a lot.
John:
But yeah, I listened to the episode as well.
John:
So we'll link it in the show notes.
Casey:
And it's genuinely really good.
Marco:
In all fairness, you know, first of all, I love the show.
Marco:
It's a great show.
Marco:
This is a great episode.
Marco:
But as a new Rivian owner and a sound nerd, I can tell you,
John:
they have twisted and turned these sounds so far from the natural sources like listen to the episode they'll play you like here's what it was based on here's a wolf howling or whatever i i thought it was weird that you were saying like oh it doesn't sound like nature sounds to me but like i think the the one that sounds like a bird chirp yes it's it's messed up as you'll hear in the episode like it's pitched up whatever but it still sounds like a bird chirp like are you not getting that i don't know it's going over your head
Marco:
Well, that sound I never hear.
Marco:
I'm just talking about, like, the whirring sound and the turn signals.
Marco:
Those are the ones I actually hear.
Marco:
It does sound very nice.
Marco:
I really enjoy the sound design of Rivian.
Marco:
But it's like, well, we started with this owl noise, and then we stretched it and pitched it down and added this river and tweaked it up.
Marco:
And, like, when you hear on the episode, they're like, here's the sound we started with.
Marco:
And then you hear the final sound.
Marco:
You're like, there is no part of that that sounds like an owl.
John:
You just gotta feel the nature.
John:
It's in there.
Marco:
Yeah, okay.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
So anyway, that's the deal.
Casey:
Rivian confirmed.
Casey:
Sounds are at least nature-inspired, if not nature-like.
Casey:
So here we are.
Casey:
We got a lot of feedback, many of which was quite interesting.
Casey:
Many pieces of feedback were quite interesting with regard to this whole updating iPhones while they're still in the box.
Casey:
And a lot of this was anonymous, but we have a couple of people that we can cite.
Casey:
Ryan Emmenecker writes, I tried a quick experiment to charge my iPhone 14 Pro Max through the original packaging.
Casey:
The iPhone 14 lines packaging did have the back of the phone facing up.
Casey:
It didn't work with a MagSafe puck, but it did work with two large multi-device charging pads.
Casey:
And I don't think Ryan was the only one to try this.
Casey:
And I don't have any other examples in front of me, but I feel like at least a couple of people said, yeah, yeah, it might take a little bit of effort, but it definitely does work as is, which is kind of interesting.
Casey:
Anonymous writes, what Apple is most likely to do is just stage the updated software on the device, which would mean transferring the installation image and having the onboard firmware verify its integrity.
Casey:
Then, once the customer unboxes the device and turns it on, it will perform the rest of the installation process.
Casey:
If the device arrives without enough battery juice for this process, the firmware could prompt the user to plug it in before finishing the installation.
Casey:
This is one of those things that as soon as I read this, I was like, oh, of course.
Casey:
That didn't even cross my mind, but it makes perfect sense.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
when i heard that i thought no way because like it's like that doesn't really that only half solves the problem like if the problem is these phones take too long to set up on first run like it's not going to really be that huge of a time savings if they're only going to like download the installation image but not actually install it and based on the first feedback like the whole idea is if you can charge it when it's in the box you don't have to do this staging thing so that's
John:
That's an interesting solution if you're like, well, we can't figure out a good way to charge them while they're in the box.
John:
So, but we can, you know, they probably have enough juice that we can just shove the image on there.
John:
That would shave some time off, but it seems like if you can get electricity through to them, you don't have to do it this way.
Marco:
We'll see.
Marco:
And like most of our speculation last time in discussion was based on, we were, I think, assuming that they probably couldn't get enough charging power to them.
Marco:
But, you know, with all this, you know, information and experimentation people have done, it turns out, yeah, actually, it seems like they have plenty of power available.
Marco:
Like they can charge through the box.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
They don't even need to change the packaging from where it is now.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
A different anonymous person writes, I work in an Apple store.
Casey:
Updating iPhones in the box would be really useful for the setup process.
Casey:
If a customer uses iCloud and their existing iPhone is an iOS version that's newer than what's in the box, an update has to be performed before they can restore.
Casey:
This extends their stay and their frustration.
Casey:
If 20 minutes can be shaved off anywhere, that's a huge plus.
Casey:
Yeah, makes perfect sense.
Marco:
That, to me, you know, when we were, again, we were saying, like, how could this possibly work in the stores?
Marco:
It seemed like it would be, you know, not enough volume or not enough capacity to deal with the volume and everything.
Marco:
What would this possibly be worth?
Marco:
And this is the part that I was not thinking of, because when I buy new iPhones, I don't do in-store setup.
Marco:
A lot of people do.
Marco:
And
Marco:
And if you can imagine, and you see this, like if you've ever been to an Apple store on launch day, a huge part of what's going on in the store is just massive quantities of in-store setups.
Marco:
Anywhere there's a table and an employee, there's somebody doing an in-store setup.
Marco:
And it's a huge bottleneck because it takes a long time.
Marco:
And so anything they can do to speed up in-store setup times, that actually is a pretty strong incentive for them to do this.
John:
yeah i think remember last time when i got like my camera was bad and i got a replacement iphone and i had to sit there in the store because at that time google authenticator didn't sync right so i had to manually transfer all my google authenticator stuff i think i was there you can go back and listen to the old episode was it two hours or three hours or something it was a huge amount of time because as you can imagine my phone is chock full of stuff and i had to run an os update from the one that you know the new one they gave me so um
John:
I mean 20 minutes yes 20 minutes being saved would be great but like it's not like you're taking it from you know 40 minutes to 20 minutes I was there for hours so yeah please anything to make this shorter and you know obviously this is not something I normally do I don't set up in the store but had to in this case so they wouldn't let me leave with the new phone without giving them my old one but I do see it as a common experience when especially on you know iPhone launch week or whatever.
Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
Another anonymous person writes, your recent episode triggered my memory of an old Apple patent application.
Casey:
It was about charging and transferring data to devices while still in the packaging in the retail stores.
Casey:
Now, I skimmed the actual patent application
Casey:
And I didn't look closely at the date, and it was very weird because I'm looking at this, and first of all, the diagrams all have home buttons in them.
Casey:
Secondly, they're talking about USB connections and wired network connections and all sorts of wired this and wired that.
Casey:
I'm like, what is going on?
Casey:
Turns out it's from December 12 of 2011, so 12 years ago.
Casey:
And that explains why all this tech seems so old.
Casey:
But nevertheless, U.S.
Casey:
Patent Application for Active Electronic Media Device Packaging.
Casey:
And again, we'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
A couple of poll quotes from here.
Casey:
The active packaging may provide power data or both power and data to one or more electronic media devices housed within the packaging.
Casey:
The data signal may include promotional information, for example, advertising or media content, for example, digital audio or video content for presentation on the electronic media device while inside the active packaging.
Casey:
The data signal may also include firmware or software updates, bug fixes or application customizations to be applied to the electronic media device.
John:
that's that's fun because like this bit you know it's an old patent and obviously companies patent everything doesn't mean they're ever going to make them um but this patent was not just hey we can do updates or charge them while they're in the box the idea with this is that you you'd be able to see the thing in the device and through the active packaging put in like video signals basically you know advertising your thing they're not going to run ads it would be just like you know what do they call like a track screens on a video game thing showing like apple advertisement or like the screen savers on some of the macs in the stores you know what i mean
John:
um obviously they never did this right but it's not just yes we can do software updates and bug fixes which is what we're talking about but also it would make the packaging like we could have the phones in the box and they'd be playing a little video telling you how great the iphone is uh that definitely does not fixed fit with apple's current or not current apple's years-long move to make the packaging smaller and simpler and made of more recyclable material so back in 2011 someone thought this was a good enough idea to patent
Casey:
A couple other interesting bits that I read.
Casey:
The encasing may allow for at least the display portion of the electronic media device to be viewed from outside of the encasing.
Casey:
This is what John was describing.
Casey:
The backing may be printed or inmolded with one or more wire traces to supply power, ground, and data to the device.
Casey:
So they're talking about actually having wiring within the packaging, which is kind of funny.
Casey:
And then finally, in some embodiments, the wire traces are routed to the appropriate pins or connectors on the electronic media device through the hooks or clasps that hold the device onto the backing.
Casey:
For example, one hooker connector may interface with a dock connector interface on the electronic media device.
Casey:
So this was talking about, like, how do you hook the iPhone or what have you into the box?
Casey:
And they're saying, oh, well, the physical thing that hooks the iPhone into the box might also provide the data or power or both, which I thought was quite fascinating.
John:
Yeah, this is all pre-MagSafe, pre-ubiquitous wireless power and data and stuff like it.
John:
So, yeah, older tech, but a similar idea.
Casey:
Yet another anonymous person writes, I was an Apple employee for nearly eight years, and I remember how much of an operations headache it was to have hardware tied to its corresponding software, RC.
Casey:
Millions of iPhones have to be manufactured, only to be stored on the side, waiting for the RC.
Casey:
This is a release candidate in this.
John:
Release candidate of the operating system, yeah.
Casey:
from Cupertino to be delivered.
Casey:
Once signed off, there's a gargantuan effort to flash all these devices, box them, and ship them all over the world.
Casey:
If the RC turns out to contain a late ship stopper, all of these phones need to be unboxed, reflashed, and reboxed, which is an utter catastrophe as far as ops are concerned.
Casey:
I've personally attended a meeting where one of these bugs was discussed.
Casey:
The estimated cost of halting production, unboxing, reflashing, and reboxing millions of iPhones at this stage was mentioned by someone in the know.
Casey:
It was mind-boggling.
Casey:
Operations would like nothing more than to completely eliminate this risk.
Casey:
It is well worth the cost of designing such a system and having every Apple store in the world follow a hopefully simple process before the iPhone goes on sale.
Casey:
Moreover, software teams would also appreciate such a system.
Casey:
It would remove a huge weight off their shoulders and allow them to deliver the release candidate with a bit more flexibility if the need arises.
John:
This is something people usually don't think about.
John:
Like they think like, oh, if there was a bug, you know, the phones haven't shipped yet.
John:
So they'll just put the new bug fix version on all the phones.
John:
And I guess they imagine there's some magic robot or something that does that.
John:
But it's, you know, the bottom, like someone has to take those phones and connect them to something and then wait for the thing to put the new OS on it.
John:
And that can be automated a little bit.
John:
But especially if you've already got them all boxed up and sealed up and you thought they were going to be ready to ship and you have to unbox them and then reseal them without making it look like every single new iPhone is basically used at this point.
John:
So it's not like you can just do it in a haphazard way.
John:
It has to be done carefully.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And I love the idea of they manufacture millions of phones and they're just sitting in big piles somewhere, but you can't put them in boxes yet because they don't have an OS on them because the software isn't done.
John:
That's always the way with these things.
John:
You're always waiting for the software.
John:
So, yeah, it seems like, you know, as ridiculous as this idea sounds, there are lots of parts of the organization that would love for this to be a thing.
John:
Yep.
Casey:
Then finally, an anonymous Apple retail person writes, the pad is like a multi-level pizza oven that can accommodate multiple devices at a time.
Casey:
It charges devices while updating the software.
Casey:
We are super excited about this innovation as it makes the experience much better for those excited to get started with their new device.
Casey:
We are most excited about the charging capabilities, especially with all the SKUs for watches.
Casey:
If you buy a watch and it's dead in the box, it can take up to 40 minutes on a charger before it even turns on, causing skepticism that the watch will even work in the long run.
Casey:
To be clear, it will support new phones first, then watch, an iPad, and hopefully, eventually, Genius Bar service parts, like when you swap a phone.
Marco:
If this is true, if this is actually what this thing is, like the multi-level pizza oven thing and going to all these different small products that they have, that makes this make a lot more sense.
Marco:
That's why I'm choosing to believe this anonymous report because...
Marco:
With these final details of what form it is and how it would work, it makes it both plausible and very sensible.
Marco:
And kind of impressive, to be honest.
Marco:
Because I was concerned last episode about, again, can they handle the volume?
Marco:
How many iPhones and watches does a single store sell in a day?
Marco:
I think it's a lot.
Marco:
But if they can have these stacked things, they can do a whole bunch of these things at once.
Marco:
That starts to become plausible.
Marco:
And it does seem like there's pretty good reasons from the store's perspective to do this.
John:
I think there's five anonymous bits of feedback in a row that may be a record.
John:
I mean, obviously, we pick which ones go in here.
John:
But yeah, a lot of people didn't want to go in the record.
John:
A lot of anonymous feedback here.
John:
But yeah, I'm also choosing to believe that bottom one because the original source of this rumor was fairly reliable.
John:
Uh, and everything that has been said so far sounds at least plausible to me.
John:
And the idea that if the watch is dead in the box, it takes 40 minutes on a charger, you know, some Apple retail employees like has had this conversation where the person's looking at them saying, do I really want this watch?
John:
It seems like it's a dud.
John:
Am I getting a lemon?
John:
Is it supposed to be this way?
John:
We've all kind of experienced this sometimes like an iPad or whatever.
John:
This totally drained Marco in a drawer drained its battery.
John:
And how long does it have to be plugged in before it will, like, boot the OS?
John:
Right.
John:
You think it would boot immediately because that's what laptops would do.
John:
You plug them in and they'll boot immediately.
John:
Nope.
John:
Not a battery-powered device like an iPad or something because they have to be ready for you to yank the cord at a moment's notice.
John:
I guess, in theory, a laptop does.
John:
But anyway...
John:
It's having to wait for 40 minutes while the Apple store employee assures you this is a working product.
John:
This is normal.
John:
Don't worry.
John:
I swear.
John:
It won't normally be like this.
John:
That's terrible, yeah.
John:
This is the first time it's ever happened.
Marco:
I wonder too if this actually might occasionally cause returns for Apple Watches that maybe the system will reduce the number of watch returns they get.
Marco:
Because if somebody gets an Apple Watch home, they don't do the in-store setup, and they get it home and they plug it in and it doesn't work for 40 minutes, maybe they give up and bring it back to the store.
Casey:
Yeah, very well could be.
Casey:
All right, moving on from that, M2 versus M1 efficiency.
Casey:
Jonathan Dietz Jr.
Casey:
writes, at any point where their power curves overlap, the M2 delivers higher performance than the M1.
Casey:
This means the M2 is more efficient.
Casey:
Given the same fixed workload, the M2 will always finish in less time, use less power, and dissipate less heat than the M1.
Casey:
The M2 has two additional GPU cores and a more dynamic power envelope than the M1.
Casey:
This means peak power consumption is indeed higher for the M2 than the M1.
Casey:
This does not alter the statements of the previous paragraph in any way.
Casey:
It simply means that if you push an M2 to its limit, it can do considerably more work in the same fixed time period by using more power and dissipating more heat than the M1 is capable of.
Casey:
Anand Shimpi, the founder of Anantek, who joined Apple's hardware technologies team back in 2014, made an appearance on Andrew Edwards' YouTube show and explained the dynamic power situation with the M2 generation.
Casey:
We will, of course, put a link in the show notes.
John:
Jonathan, he's defending the honor of the M2.
John:
He says, yes, it uses more power and gets hotter, but it does more stuff.
John:
i mean the m1 in the same amount of time given a fixed workload yes uh that is true i would always say that the m1 is more efficient than the m2 but really what we're saying is it gets less hot but it also does less stuff so let's be fair to the m2 although i still think the m1 is the the more impressive piece of technology than the m2 but that's just because the m1 came before the m2 and stole a lot of its thunder
Casey:
All right, John, can you give me some context behind iTunes Match, Apple Music, and DRM, please?
John:
I talked about it last week, and I had tried my best to describe what the caveats are.
John:
If you had iTunes Match and you cancel and you just have Apple Music when you're done, what does that mean for you?
John:
And I was mostly going off a very recent Threads post by Matthew Panzarino that seemed authoritative, and he has good sources, so I basically just said what he said.
John:
But it turns out that Sylvan Germer says that wasn't entirely true.
John:
Regarding DRM on iTunes Match versus Apple Music, since 2017, Apple Music has also been providing DRM-free access to songs you have in your personal library.
John:
And we'll put a link to an iMore article from, I guess, 2017 describing Apple rolling this out.
John:
So the difference that I said that Matthew said last week was...
John:
If iTunes matches your song and you have iTunes match, you will get a DRM-free version of it if you download it on some other device.
John:
But if you just have Apple Music, you would download the DRM version.
John:
And I think that was true at one point, but apparently not true now.
John:
Well, another thing I want to clarify that people were asking about is,
John:
What if I have something in my iTunes library, but iTunes can't match it because iTunes doesn't have it some obscure thing They just don't have yeah, then you'll get Essentially your file because what else could they give you like whatever your file was?
John:
They got uploaded and synced into your library from you know Whatever thing that you ripped it from that Apple has never heard of you will get that file back down But if they can match it, that's where the question comes in if they match it Will they give me their version of the file and will that version have DRM or not?
John:
So apparently you are... I haven't actually tested this, but these are the two warring theories.
John:
Matthew Panzirino versus Sylvan Germer.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
And then Tact writes, regarding the Ask ATP question about adding music to an iOS device without a Mac or PC, I went through the same struggle trying to add custom ringtones to my iPhone.
Casey:
I found it so frustrating that I wrote up a blog post half for myself as documentation and half hoping it would save someone else a week of searching.
Casey:
I quickly read through this and holy crap, it is something.
Casey:
It is utterly nuts.
Casey:
And it involves a lot of tapping about in GarageBand, which is not where I saw this going.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Apple really needs a better solution to this.
John:
Like, I really wish they would sort of rationalize their whole music situation.
John:
But talk about something with historical baggage.
John:
Just that whole thing.
John:
It has so much baggage from so many years.
John:
I mean, there's been a bunch of articles going around this week about the sunsetting of the iTunes brand and the fact that iTunes still exists for Windows, although they're breaking that up too, and the iTunes store will be going away and folding stuff into the existing TV app and everything.
John:
There's just so much baggage there, and they're still trying to rationalize it.
John:
For a while, we were talking about they're going to break up iTunes on the Mac and split it into its separate apps.
John:
And they did that.
John:
And it's still cumbersome and confusing.
John:
And a part of that is the fault of Apple Music.
John:
Apple Music was kind of a chance to rationalize all of this.
John:
But that chance was only partially realized.
John:
There's still a ways to go.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
And then, John, your favorite, well, one of your favorite bugs of late.
Casey:
It's still a thing.
Casey:
Tell me about error network changed, please.
John:
This is Chrome or the Chromium web browser engine pitching a fit with its net double colon er underscore network underscore changed error that appears when it thinks something has changed about the network and then it kills all outstanding HTTP requests, which really ruins your day.
John:
I had said that I thought this was happening because I was running Docker.
John:
uh we have gotten some additional feedback from people that are not running docker and it's happening to them as well so here's the jesus fish saying i have the same issue from chrome mine stems from being connected to pi vpn if i'm connected to the pi vpn chrome will throw our network change constantly even though it's not changing it's not just docker chromium is just overly sensitive to network stuff it drives me up the wall
John:
A fellow named Stephen Hackett sent a screenshot, which is of Discord, the app which uses Electron or whatever under the covers, saying, a JavaScript error occurred in the main process, uncaught exception, error network changed, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Anything that uses the Chromium browser engine under the covers is apparently susceptible to this error network change.
John:
So you might not think of Discord.
John:
You say, I don't use Chrome, but do you use Discord?
John:
Well, then you're susceptible to it too.
John:
And I think Stephen Hackett was also not running Docker when he did this.
John:
Final bit here from Mort.
John:
That Chrome error network change issue is so damn annoying.
John:
We had an embedded Linux computer running Chromium in kiosk mode for the UI with a local web server.
John:
We got bug reports from users where Chromium randomly failed to load the HTML from local host.
John:
because the 4G connected or the Wi-Fi disconnected.
John:
It's the most puzzling engineering decision for our browser engine.
John:
We eventually replaced Chromium with native code for many reasons, but this was absolutely among them.
John:
So that's Chromium loading stuff from localhost.
John:
I mean, I don't know if they were loading it off the local disk or connecting to the localhost network interface, but again, this does not seem like socially acceptable behavior for a web browser engine.
John:
What is it about the network that's changing that's upsetting it?
John:
I mean, maybe, you know, when I thought it was Docker, because maybe it was just a timing coincidence.
John:
When I thought it was Docker, I'm like, OK, well, Docker does weird stuff with networking.
John:
Maybe like whatever.
John:
This is an edge case.
John:
But so many people are reporting they're not running Docker.
John:
They don't even know what Docker is.
John:
And they have this problem.
John:
And in fact, I stopped running Docker here.
John:
And I see the error, too.
John:
Not as much.
John:
But I have seen the error when not running Docker.
John:
And, you know, not running the engine, not doing it.
John:
Like...
John:
So what is it then?
John:
I'm still tracking this down in my typical years-long bug-hunting things.
John:
I think it mostly started happening around Sonoma, but this is one of those things where I'm just trying to go based on my memory.
John:
Maybe this was happening before I didn't notice, and then when I ran Docker, I noticed it more because I was looking at the JavaScript console.
John:
Anyway, I'm here to say that this error network change thing is real and
John:
uh it is a chrome chromium thing it is affecting people who don't run docker to varying degrees and it has been around for apparently years based on you know the the stuff that we read last week uh so i hope they fix this because again even if you don't run chrome you're like i don't run any of that stuff you might run an electron app that uses the same engine under the covers and it could be dying for the same reason and like i said when this error occurs it kills the outstanding connections and unless the application is very resilient against that it can get angry and throw up
John:
scary error dialogues and just fail to work and there's seemingly nothing you can do about it i tried so many solutions by the way since last week i've been like disable ipv6 enable it disable ipv4 enable it enable wi-fi disable wi-fi like just everything that you could possibly imagine you know change your dns uh dump the if config to see if the network really is changing like so many different commands it was a bunch of commands that i'd never even heard of that someone was sending me to try to debug the problem eventually they exhausted their uh their ideas and said they couldn't figure it out either chrome
Casey:
fix this whoever chromium people like just be like safari safari doesn't get upset when apparently the network changes it just keeps doing its job how about you do that this is having read the um the bug reports before we recorded last week this seems like one of those things where if you take a developer's like purely academic view of the world um
Casey:
I slightly understand what the Chromium developers are saying.
Casey:
Hey, something happened with the network.
Casey:
It changed.
Casey:
We don't know what the state of the world is now.
Casey:
Maybe we should tell the user and do something about it.
Casey:
Which, again, academically or on the surface, okay.
Casey:
I mean, I'm not sure I agree, but I can understand that.
Casey:
But the moment you think about this bug pragmatically, it is so clearly completely freaking busted.
Casey:
And this is like the most frustrating kind of developer to deal with.
Casey:
And all of us do this at some time or another.
Casey:
So we're all guilty, myself included.
Casey:
But when somebody is too focused on what is the way things should work rather than what is the way things actually do work, or in this case, don't work.
Casey:
And I don't know, if you're a younger developer, this is perhaps a lesson for you because it is very frustrating to users.
Casey:
And
Casey:
if users are frustrated, I guess you could try to educate the users and explain to the users how they're wrong.
Casey:
But in my experience, that doesn't often end well.
Casey:
So you should probably think about meeting the users where they are and just fixing the darn bug.
John:
Well, see, the thing is, we don't actually know what the cause of this.
John:
Like, if it is Sonoma-related, it's the type of thing, maybe they have to talk to Apple and say, hey, did something change in Sonoma where something that we detect as a network change is happening much more often?
John:
Like,
John:
You know, if you ever looked in the Mac OS console, there's so much stuff going on there.
John:
And one of the it's kind of like a medical student disease.
John:
When you learn about all the different things that go wrong with the human body, you start thinking you have all of them.
John:
If you ever look in the Mac OS console and you see all the lines that are going there, you'll believe that whatever line jumps out at you like that must be my problem because I don't know what that is.
John:
And it looks weird to me.
John:
So like this is what happens.
John:
You have a problem with your Mac.
John:
You go to console.
John:
You see just so many messages and you latch on to one of them that you think is like that one looks funny.
John:
that seems like it's probably causing my thing.
John:
And you get obsessed with whatever that message is.
John:
And that message may be totally unrelated and totally benign, but you don't know.
John:
You're just looking for a cause.
John:
And so there are a bunch of those that, you know, that I've looked at and chased down to say, is this related to it?
John:
It's hard to say.
John:
But anyway, if something has changed in macOS,
John:
maybe that's the problem maybe the chromium people like i'm not saying it's like something that they need to fix it like well it worked before now it's not working that's not our problem apple should stop changing the network right but maybe the thing they're looking for to detect network changes is not what they should be looking at it's like well you know what is the intent are you supposed to look do you only care if like the default route changed if that's the case you should be looking here and not there because in sonoma x and y change right so it's not even clear where the bug is but
John:
You'll never find out where the book is if you don't investigate it.
John:
And you just think, well, this is just an edge case.
John:
And yeah, this is happening to you.
John:
But tough luck.
John:
It's the only sane thing we can do when the network change.
John:
But if suddenly people can't use your product and there's no workaround because requests, you know, 50% of your requests fail, that is a problem that you need to get to the bottom of, even if it's not, quote unquote, your fault.
Marco:
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Casey:
So since we recorded, some things have happened.
Casey:
No, Apple did not buy Nintendo.
Casey:
Not this time.
Casey:
But they did release a third Apple Pencil.
Casey:
And what the hell is going on here?
Marco:
Well, the best thing about the new Apple Pencil is that it appears to replace either of the existing pencils.
Casey:
And it's a mix of their capabilities.
John:
Very careful distinction there.
John:
Third Apple Pencil, not Apple Pencil 3.
John:
right because the rumors were apple pencil 3 is coming but what we got instead was a third apple pencil and its place in the line despite the feature set which we'll discuss in a moment its place in the line is clear it's the cheapest it's 79 and the apple pencil first generation is 99 and the apple pencil second generation is 130 so this is the cheapest pencil but it is not the apple pencil 3
Marco:
no or the apple pencil third generation no instead it's called apple pencil usbc such a good name which makes perfect sense because it's got usbc but the other but the apple pencil second generation works with all usbc ipads so it does not have usbc i know this is all very confusing oh and the apple pencil first generation has a an adapter that you can use with the new usbc 10th generation ipad
John:
So this Apple Pencil is the perfect Apple Pencil for the current iPad product line because it is just as confusing as the product line.
John:
It fits right in.
John:
It is an absolute mess.
John:
So this one, this cheapest Apple Pencil doesn't have pressure sensitivity, wireless pairing or charging, double tap to change tools, which is so weird.
John:
Is the accelerometer that expansive?
John:
But anyway, no double tap and also no free engraving.
John:
That just seems punitive.
John:
How much?
John:
Just a little laser.
John:
Like you can't get Casey Apple Pencil put on it.
John:
But it does have hover support.
John:
Deep cut.
John:
It does have hover support.
John:
And, you know, the compatibility matrix is like, okay, if you have an Apple Pencil, this should be a question.
John:
If we have like a quiz show, like asking Apple pundits who like follow the company, tell me what the Apple Pencil 2 is compatible with.
John:
like they would not get this grid so the apple pencil 2 works with ipad air ipad mini and ipad pro the apple pencil usbc works with all ipad models with the usbc port and the apple pencil one works with ipad 10 ipad and ipad 9 and the usbc and apple pencil adapter is needed for pairing and charging with the ipad 10 but it's included in the box
Marco:
oh my gosh and ipad 10 and ipad 9 are both still for sale so that's why like they have to clarify i mean this is the there's been a lot of good stuff said about this upgrade this week was very good on this um but good for them for making the pencil that is cheaper and more people will buy i guess but this i mean you look at the entire ipad lineup and like this pencil is just a microcosm of the entire lineup where like you know they currently sell six different ipads for
Marco:
Four of which are about the same size, but not quite.
Marco:
They have wildly different details and capabilities between them.
Marco:
It is a really weird and messy product line.
Marco:
They have been updated from all different...
Marco:
All different times of updating have all different accessories that work with each of them because they're all subtly different sizes.
Marco:
They have all these different exceptions.
Marco:
Well, this one has this, but this one has this.
Marco:
This one doesn't have this, even though this one's new.
Marco:
It is a confusing mess.
Marco:
Meanwhile, they seem to be slated to go all of 2023 without releasing a single new iPad of any line.
Marco:
the ipad's in a really weird place hardware wise right now and it's not necessarily because the hardware is bad on the contrary most of it's actually very good it's just like it's a weird place in terms of you know when are updates happening what has been half updated like what certain features have come to some of them that and that like some of the best features are on some of the lowest end models the ipad pro the highest end model hasn't been really touched in a while and
Marco:
They are still selling both the 9th Gen and 10th Gen low-end iPad, both called iPad, and they're both about the same size, but both very different machines.
Marco:
The low-end iPad that they are still selling still has not only a lightning port, which on the iPad is pretty old now, but still has a home button and the old screen shape and the old case shape.
Marco:
I mean, the whole thing, the whole lineup is...
Marco:
just a mess different parts of it seem like the people who make different ipad hardware decisions don't talk to each other like and i know that probably isn't the case but that's how it looks because everything isn't like certain ones like like the the 10th gen ipad that which is the the kind of the the current generation cheap one even though it is not the cheapest one because they're still selling the old cheapest one uh because it wasn't the cheapest one wasn't cheapest enough
Marco:
So the 10th gen cheap iPad has some of the best features in terms of like it moves the camera to the side, but they move the camera to the side and that means it can't charge a pencil over there, which is part of the reason this new pencil has to exist.
Marco:
Well, why wasn't maybe a new pencil designed with that in mind?
Marco:
Like I just, oh my God, there's so much that it just seems like one hand's not talking to the other here.
John:
in the entire ipad hardware lineup one hand is not talking to the other and and what they've learned from the apple pencil by the way is it's not like they've learned nothing because like the apple pencil 2 learned a lot from the apple pencil one no more cap that you can lose no more sticking it in the port magnetic like the apple pencil 2 was just a clean win we saw that came out it's like great you learned from the apple pencil one you made a better pencil everybody loved it no more ports beautiful device has lots of cool features sticks to the side of your ipad pro which was then new at the time thumbs up
John:
This new one, I mean, obviously it's the low-end one, so it's not going to be super fancy.
John:
That's fine.
John:
It learned some stuff.
John:
No more cap that you can lose.
John:
This one instead has a little slidey-uppy thing that doesn't come off, hopefully.
John:
But underneath the slidey-uppy thing is a sideways USB port.
John:
So you spear this thing kind of like the mouse to charge it.
John:
And why does it need to have a port?
John:
Well, because it doesn't charge magnetically, despite the fact that I believe it does have magnets inside it and does have flat sides and does to attach.
John:
to the ipad but it doesn't charge or pair that way it is just a physical connection type thing it's you know and i like i'm not saying this is the wrong feature set or the wrong price like balance and by the way this new apple pencil is not the same size as either of the existing pencils because of course it isn't why would it be the same size that's madness i think it's like seven percent shorter or something than the apple pencil second generation um
John:
I don't know if they're not talking to each other or this is just fallout from the edict that you must never make a new product when you can continue when you can conceivably continue selling the old one, which is why the Apple Pencil first generation is still hanging around.
John:
They still kept making products that not only used it, but required it.
John:
It's like, well, we already have that.
John:
We already paid for those machines.
John:
It's cheaper to do that.
John:
Why wipe the slate clean and upgrade everybody to Apple Pencil second generation?
John:
Maybe Apple Pencil second generation is very expensive.
John:
It costs more to manufacture.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It's just there doesn't seem to be a coherent division.
John:
Or if there is a coherent division, their schedule got messed with really badly.
Yeah.
John:
like maybe they wanted these all to come out at the same time this this pencil didn't even come out at the same time as the the ipads that it is the best match for you know what i mean but let alone like fixing the whole line so anyway we'll be watching for this i don't think it's terrible that the ipad line is updated in parallel but i think there's so many transitions going on the transition to usbc which as you noted marco is still not over in the ipad line despite going on for years now uh the tradition from the round pencil to the flat which is
John:
still not over because they're still selling the round one but at least this one is also flat uh the transition away from the home button also still not over like just there's just kind of this long slow motion we see the finish line we see like they all have flat sides they'll have magnetically attached pencil where they charge and pair with it um
John:
You know, they'll all have the camera and the landscape orientation.
John:
Like, we'll get there eventually.
John:
And then, you know, you have to progress.
John:
Like, if we ever get to a homogenous line, still probably the pros will be the first and only ones with the OLED screens for a long time because they're expensive, right?
John:
So it's not like we expect them to always be exactly the same because why would you have to have some differentiation?
John:
But we've gone beyond differentiation, and now it's just like this...
John:
long trail of hardware history that Apple continues to sell.
Marco:
It's just remarkable.
Marco:
I mean, the Apple Pencil 2 came out with the 2018 iPad Pro five years ago.
John:
And it was good.
John:
Yes, it was great.
John:
And it's still good.
Marco:
And yet today they had to introduce another pencil because the Apple Pencil 2, which we still need,
Marco:
is not still compatible with all the iPads in the lineup five years later.
Marco:
That's ridiculous.
Marco:
What they need, obviously, is a much simpler iPad lineup in a large sense on a lot of different levels.
Marco:
You should be able to go to an Apple store and there should be
Marco:
A consistent line of iPads of different sizes and capabilities.
Marco:
And look, yeah, you're right.
Marco:
Differentiate on screen size, on screen type, OLED, HDR versus non-HDR.
Marco:
Fine.
Marco:
Those are all easy things to differentiate on.
John:
And the SOC and RAM and all the normal stuff that you... Yes.
Marco:
That's all fine.
Marco:
They should all have the same port on the bottom...
Marco:
They should all be a small number of total sizes.
Marco:
There should only be a very small number of keyboards and pencils that should work with all of them.
Marco:
Ideally, the number is like, you know, one keyboard per screen size and one pencil total across the whole lineup.
Marco:
That's ideal.
Marco:
If they really have to have these like differentiated features for the pencil for cost reasons, then have a pencil and a pencil pro.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
And like this, God, it's so far from that right now.
Marco:
I'm hoping, you know, again, there have been no new iPads in all of 2023 so far, and there seem like they're not going to be.
Marco:
And that's its own oddity.
Marco:
But, I mean, geez, can you... We'll get to this in a minute.
Marco:
Can you imagine telling us of a couple years ago, during the bad days of the Mac, telling us that in 2023 there would be zero iPads released, but possibly two generations of MacBook Pro?
LAUGHTER
John:
i would not have believed you zero chance you know you mentioned like having a pencil and a pencil pro like if they did this right and at this point they're gonna have to come out with the apple pencil third generation because apparently the apple pencil 2 is not going to work with landscape camera due to the way they arrange stuff so you know bad on them for not thinking of that in 2018 but whatever uh if they had a pencil and a pencil pro um ideally
John:
both of all both those pencils would work with every single ipad you just you know the pro would have more features it would have the pressure sensitivity to have whatever like the pro pencil would be better but it's not like oh well you have an ipad pro you can't use the non-pro pencil and vice versa no all the pencils should work with all the things it's just what's inside the pencil is fancier if you buy the good one
John:
Imagine.
John:
Imagine that world.
Marco:
This whole world is such a mess.
Marco:
And it's so unnecessary.
Marco:
Again, hopefully this is transitional.
Marco:
Hopefully we're nearing the end of this massive weird number of transitions in the iPad lineup.
Marco:
But if we're five years into the Pencil 2 and it still doesn't work with everything, I don't know that they care.
Marco:
Look at the iPad lineup.
Marco:
they obviously don't care about consistency or simplicity or anything it's kind of hard to tell what they do care about with the ipad hardware choices across the whole thing i mean this looks like a samsung lineup it looks like spray and pray like it it looks ridiculous honestly and except that samsung would at least keep them up to date at least the ipad operating system situation is well sorted out right oh god
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I don't feel like we need to belabor this any further.
Casey:
It's just too bad because the iPad hardware, I know we've said this a thousand times, the iPad hardware is so good in general, but it's just strewn in so many different directions and we don't need to open the software can of worms one more time, but
Casey:
I don't use my iPad heavily, and I don't use it for particularly computationally intensive things, but I do still really like my iPad.
Casey:
It's one of those things where if you asked me to make a pros and cons list or charts about why I like it, I don't know that I could or do a convincing job of explaining why I like it, but I really do.
Casey:
I really do like having that iPad available to me.
Casey:
And yet, I just, I feel like this is such a mess.
Casey:
And, you know, they talked a lot on Upgrade about how this is, I think in no small part, an after effect of Apple's penchant, or however you pronounce the word, their love of keeping old stuff around in order to make it cheaper.
Casey:
And that's your cheaper stuff.
Casey:
Rather than bespoke cheap things, it's just old things that they can now make cheaply.
Casey:
And, you know, that eventually can lead you to this situation.
Casey:
And it's a mess.
John:
yeah unlike though unlike the laptops before like you mentioned you like your ipad i like my ipad too that's the thing about the line i think the individual products are probably well liked by the people that buy them this is not the same problem as when they were making like bad laptops that had no ports and crappy keyboards that didn't work like the individual products are mostly okay it's when you step back and look at the range of products that they're offering for example if you're a customer saying which one should i buy that's the problem eventually when you get down to an ipad and you buy it you'll probably be pretty happy with it because in general the ipads are pretty good at what they do and
John:
what people ask them to do is not that much.
John:
And maybe the Pro users are cranky at this point because the iPad Pros haven't been updated, but the individual products are not disasters, again, setting aside the software, but the line, the line is a mess.
John:
And now the peripherals are actually a mess.
John:
Again, not that any individual peripheral is bad,
John:
But they're so expensive and so limiting and so unclear about which one, which peripherals can even work with your thing versus which peripherals you like, which versus which iPads they work with.
John:
It makes the experience of selecting which product you want or upgrading your existing product to a quote unquote better one way too fraught.
John:
Even if the individual product you end up getting, you end up being satisfied with.
Casey:
All right, so there is indeed an Apple event.
Casey:
It's going to be on Hell Night, as it was called when I was a kid, on October 30th.
Casey:
Yeah, this was a thing.
John:
Or Devil's Night sometimes, right?
John:
Really?
John:
I've never heard that.
John:
It's an East Coast thing.
John:
I don't know if it's a East Coast thing, but anyway, we're both from East Coast and we both know it.
John:
It wasn't an Ohio thing.
John:
You said H-E double hockey sticks there.
John:
I know.
Casey:
Well done.
Casey:
Anyway, there's an event on October 30th, the night before Halloween.
Casey:
It's at 8 o'clock at night Eastern, which I don't have a problem with, but it's very, very unusual.
Casey:
What is going on there?
John:
It's spooky.
Casey:
I guess so.
Casey:
You could say it's scary late.
Casey:
I mean, scary fast, apparently.
Marco:
I love this because, first of all, the rumor mill has been very consistent over the last few months saying no new Macs for the rest of the year.
John:
But there were some naysayers.
John:
As the date approaches, there's always somebody who's willing to put their stake down and say, actually, no, before I said there wasn't, but now there is going to be.
John:
And I think, I forget who it was that says that, but they were right.
John:
Here it is.
John:
And they even said it was going to be, I think it was German who said, no, actually, there's going to be an event.
John:
It's going to be October 30th or 31st.
John:
despite what people you know so it's been confusing but yeah there isn't so many consistent rumors that there there wasn't going to be event or nothing good would be announced in it but so the invitation the little invitation image that you get it says it's got a spooky black apple logo and it says scary fast and if you go to apple's website to their apple events thing you can see a little animation where the apple logo turns into i love seeing people describe this some people say it's the finder logo because of course it is the little face that you see in the
John:
um it was also the originally the mac os logo uh back in the day and classic mac os uh now it lives on as the finder icon uh but either way both of those things say mac so if you're wondering what they're going to announce at the event on the 30th they're going to announce mac stuff maybe there'll be other stuff too but this is straightforward like there's you know and and reading into the graphic it's dark and spooky uh that's all we get from it it's happening at 8 p.m that's spooky and mac and
John:
So that leaves us in a weird place because, as you know, Marco, everyone's saying, yeah, all the M3 stuff that you thought was supposed to come this year, not only did it not come in the spring or summer, it's not even going to come in the fall.
John:
Forget it.
John:
It's all pushed to next year.
John:
But this Mac logo says some of it's not pushed to next year.
John:
They're going to have something with the Mac.
John:
And here's the second thing.
John:
It says scary fast.
John:
I don't think that Apple would use the phrase scary fast if they were only releasing Mac stuff that have existing M2 whatever processors in it.
John:
So that means they're announcing Mac stuff with M3 something in something.
John:
And I think when they originally released the M2 Macs and M2 Pro, they also used scary fast.
John:
They said scary fast for the M2 Pro and scary faster or something for the M2 Macs.
John:
That doesn't mean anything because they're just reusing marketing terms or whatever.
John:
But I'm actually kind of excited because they can't put a scary fast, you know, call it a scary fast event and say Mac stuff is coming and not have M3 something.
John:
And I had, because of the rumors, pretty much resigned myself.
John:
Oh, no M3 stuff this year.
John:
We'll have to wait until next year.
John:
So I'm kind of excited.
John:
No, I'm very excited.
Marco:
I'm really curious to see, like, what is this?
Marco:
Because there's so much about it that is surprising so far.
Marco:
We don't even know what it is yet.
Marco:
But, you know, the kind of suddenness of this being announced out of nowhere is surprising.
Marco:
The timing is surprising.
Marco:
Time of day being 5 p.m.
Marco:
Pacific, 8 p.m.
Marco:
Eastern.
Marco:
That's surprising.
Marco:
And then the fact that the rumor mill was so sure until two seconds ago that none of this stuff was coming this year.
Marco:
Now, all of a sudden, we have a pretty strong indicator that something about Fast Max is happening.
Marco:
And so we can think about, like, you know, what does that mean?
Marco:
And, you know, so the latest quote rumors at this point, who knows whether this is leaks or speculation or whatever.
Marco:
Everyone thinks this might be about an update to the iMac.
Marco:
and possibly the macbook pro and that i think would make sense um some people are speculating it might be gaming related um i was getting my hopes up like maybe this is going to be some kind of you know new product size or shape or whatever whether it's like a new laptop you know maybe a 12 inch or whatever there was a loose rumor about that
Marco:
But this doesn't seem to have any kind of in-person invitations going out.
Marco:
It seems like it's virtual only.
Marco:
I haven't heard of anybody in the press getting an in-person invitation to go out there.
Marco:
And that means no hands-on.
Marco:
The lack of a hands-on experience seemingly probably suggests no new form factors of products, no new shapes and sizes.
Marco:
We can probably rule out things like, you know, do a 12-inch MacBook Pro or whatever, a 12-inch MacBook or whatever.
Marco:
And I think that might also rule out a giant iMac, you know, like a replacement for the iMac Pro.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
I don't even think there's good rumors about that.
John:
I mean, the only rumors about that is that's still a thing that Apple's going to eventually make to make me win my $1 bet with Marco, but not imminently.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
So the safest bet here is probably...
Marco:
probably, again, I'm with you, John.
Marco:
I think they probably wouldn't emphasize fast if they were using chips they've already launched.
Marco:
Like, you know, Gruber's guess was maybe this is just M2 update to the iMac.
Marco:
And I think one thing that, you know, the most conservative guess, I think, for this could be
Marco:
maybe they're bringing not only the m2 to the imac which still has the m1 as we discussed last week maybe they're going to offer like an m2 pro configuration with the same imac case that we have now you know there is some precedent for that obviously it's a bigger power envelope than the m1 uh to have like the pro configuration with the more cores but it doesn't go as far as the max and they did that with the mac mini the mac mini you can you can buy now with the m2 or m2 pro but not m2 max and it's still the same same size and you know
Marco:
So maybe they're taking an existing product line that is currently M2 only and giving it an M2 Pro option.
Marco:
That would enable them to still not mess with TSMC's 3 nanometer capacity and everything for the M3, whatever else.
Marco:
That, I think, is the most conservative approach.
Marco:
And that could be, I'm thinking, either the iMac or maybe the 15-inch MacBook Air.
Marco:
Because the 15-inch MacBook Air...
Marco:
seems to not be selling well by by a lot of reports which is honestly surprising to me i think it's i think it looks amazing but um maybe that product um has slightly missed the market uh and maybe they you know maybe they're going to juice it up with the higher end config with the m2 pro chip who knows maybe that replaces the weird 13 inch macbook pro with the touch bar that is still being made oh they'll never replace that that's like the whatever the last mac was with the with the optical drive or whatever they're going to keep selling that forever
Marco:
Yeah, the MD101.
Marco:
That's going to be around for... Oh my God.
Marco:
The existence of that computer makes me so upset on so many levels because from what I've heard, they do sell a ton of them.
Marco:
But I think the reason they sell a ton of them is because it's called MacBook Pro and it's way cheaper than the 14-inch.
John:
And people who don't yet know that they're not interested in the touch bar or people are fine.
John:
People who are legitimately interested in touch bar.
John:
But let's be honest, it's not that many.
Marco:
I honestly think if it was not named MacBook Pro, it would the sales would drop to almost nothing.
Marco:
I think that I literally think that's the reason people buy it.
Marco:
And that's not a small reason.
John:
and it drives me nuts on the scary fast thing here's here's the confusing part of this because you know we agree that scary fast it's got to be something more than a chip that they have already released it'll probably be m3 something or other this is why a show or two ago i had mentioned the possibility of like can you imagine if m3 based macbook pros came out before plain old m3 based
John:
laptops like that's that's not the order they've done it with the m1 or the m2 and it's generally not the order as we've discussed in the past that cpus go they tend to you know do the lower power smaller ones first before you make the more complex higher power ones just because that's how manufacturing works easier to make the smaller simpler simpler chip when you're first getting started on the process than to jump to the big one but i mean part of what we're getting at is like the m3
John:
If you look at the schedules of when Apple released the M1 and the M2, the M3, quote unquote, should already be here by now, but it's not.
John:
And there are vague rumors that like, oh, the M3 has been canceled.
John:
What?
John:
What does that even mean?
John:
Are they not going to make an M3?
John:
No, of course they're going to make an M3.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But whatever they were planning on making and calling the M3 didn't arrive when we thought it would.
John:
So that leads into a lot of questions with this event.
John:
Obviously, 24-inch iMac is a great candidate, and that's one of the strongly rumored ones.
John:
Government is flat out saying there's going to be a new 24-inch iMac.
John:
And Case is the same, although he said some stuff about maybe the colors are different and maybe how they attach the stand is different or something.
John:
But anyway, that product.
John:
That could be with an M2-based thing, but then what would be the M3-based thing?
John:
M3 Pro and M3 Max-based MacBook Pros, same form factor, no need for a hands-on.
John:
They're scary fast, fits the bill.
John:
But the difficulty of figuring all this out is like, all right, what happened to the M3 again?
John:
Like why don't we have that?
John:
It's going to be three nanometer.
John:
We have the A17 Pro, which is three nanometer.
John:
And we keep talking about the various TSMC processes and not being able to remember the name.
John:
So I wrote them down this time so we can discuss them.
John:
So here's the deal.
Casey:
Wait, hold on though.
Casey:
Before you get there, I don't think an M3 is going to be three nanometer necessarily because the M2 is based on the A15, not the A16.
Casey:
So that means the M3 would be based on the iPhone 14's A16.
Casey:
God, there's so many numbers.
Marco:
yeah but but they did the same thing with it with the with the m2 like i think it will you're right about the core base but the gpu is going to be the new ray tracy gpu i think so that's that's that and i think it will it will be on the new process yeah no i mean a lot of people assume that like oh because you know the the m1 was based on a15 or whatever m2 like but the the a series chips for the iphone come out every single year they have a very fixed 12 month cycle
Marco:
The Mac chips don't need to follow that.
Marco:
Macs typically follow more like an 18-month upgrade cycle.
John:
I think they followed exactly an 18-month cycle for the M1 and M2, which is why we all expect the M3 to be here, especially when you consider that the M1 and M2 spanned the onset of COVID era when everything was madness.
John:
You would think things would be getting more regular, but of course we're going to 3 nanometers, which is the big wild card here.
Marco:
Basically, they're going to skip some of the A cores to make M chips.
Marco:
They're not going to use them all, and that's fine.
John:
Yeah, and so I do think that they're going to be 3 nanometer, but the 3 nanometer thing has been a source of confusion because of the different processes.
John:
So here they are from TSMC's website with some links and the show notes.
John:
The one that the A17 Pro is using is their very first one.
John:
It's N3B.
John:
It's TSMC's baseline N3 node.
John:
I don't know if the B stands for baseline, but it's a nice way to remember it.
John:
And here's some description of it.
John:
It uses up to 25 EUV, which is extreme ultraviolet layers, with some expensive EUV double patterning, allowing higher transistor density, but at higher costs and fewer customers.
John:
So this is what the iPhones are using.
John:
It's, you know, it's their very first run at this.
John:
It's very sophisticated.
John:
It's very expensive.
John:
And...
John:
people have been speculating that the only chip that they'll ever make with this process is the a17 pro because apple's bought all their capacity for this process and it's their first baseline process and the reason they think that maybe the only a17 pro will be the only one or at least the only one that apple ever buys from them using this process is because the next process is more attractive to more customers so that's n3e
John:
And this is, again, from an article like this, more clients have opted for the more cost efficient N3E process technology with up to 19 EUV layers, no EUV double patterning, offering lower logic density, but better yields and a wider process window.
John:
So this is actually worse than N3B, but cheaper, better yields, like worse as in you can't do as many layers.
John:
It has lower logic density, but it's easier to manufacture.
John:
So it will be cheaper, right?
John:
And this is CC Wei, the chief executive of TSMC, on the October 19th earnings call, I think it was.
John:
He says, N3E has passed qualification and achieved performance and yield targets that will start volume production in the fourth quarter of this year.
John:
fourth quarter of this year it's kind of now isn't it yeah right and so n3e seems ready for someone who to make a chip that doesn't require as much logic density but is cheaper and when i look at that what i think is like so was the was the m3 originally going to be on the n3b process
John:
But N3B ended up either not having as much capacity or being too expensive.
John:
And so that's why we didn't get the M3 chip on schedule.
John:
But now that N3E is here, the Mac can handle a chip that is a little bit bigger.
John:
You know, lower logic density means there's fewer transistors per unit area.
John:
The Mac can support that because you're not jamming into a tiny little phone.
John:
There's a little bit more room there.
John:
And if it's cheaper, that means, okay, if we manufacture an M3, I'm sorry for the enunciation.
John:
I hope the audio compression doesn't kill us.
John:
If we manufacture an M3 processor using the N3E process, then that will be cheap enough to put into a 24-inch iMac based on the M3.
John:
There are two more processes out in the future.
John:
One is N3P.
John:
I know this is so bad.
John:
EBP.
John:
N3P, which is an optical shrink of N3E, offering enhanced performance, reduced power consumption, and increased transistor density compared to N3E, all on maintaining compatibility with N3E's design rules.
John:
this is it's not entirely clear to me how much design tweaking you would have to do between these processes but at least n3p is explicitly saying hey if you design for n3e when we go to n3p you don't have to mess with it too much you should be able to manufacture and then finally there's n3x yay a different number that doesn't have the same vowel sound in it a different letter rather n3x
John:
as you would imagine from the coolest letter, is for high clock speeds, higher voltages, for high-performance CPUs.
John:
Maybe someday the M3 Ultra will be based on this, or maybe Apple will never use it.
John:
But anyway, that is the roadmap.
John:
N3B, shipping now, it's in your phone, if you're interested in it.
John:
N3E, volume production in the fourth quarter, and I don't know about schedules for P and X. So, given all of this...
John:
It makes sense that eventually when the M3 Pro and Macs come, whether that's on October 30th or in the future, they will use N3e.
John:
And I think N3e also makes sense for a plain old M3 to go into an iMac.
John:
I still don't understand why... What happened to the M3-based MacBook Air?
John:
Is N3e not good enough for the MacBook Air?
John:
Have they decided, like we did last week, that the 24-inch iMac is more desperately in need of an update?
John:
Then the MacBook Air, as the MacBook Air has been updated kind of recently, and it's fine with the M2.
John:
These are all the mysteries that will be revealed.
John:
It's not like Apple's going to put up slides and say, I'm our new M3 whatever processor uses the M3E.
John:
No, they're not going to mention that, but we'll be able to figure it out eventually.
John:
uh and if if if n3b like really is just too expensive and no one wants to pay for it probably not even apple except for the iphone that just as you know demarco must ship on a yearly basis apple's probably like we don't like this it's expensive and we wish it wasn't and we want everything to be on n3e as fast as we can but it's the only thing available to us so we'll just get it it is kind of disappointing to me that n3e is like essentially worse like not as good in in many ways that you would care about but uh cheapness is is a feature so
John:
I think, you know, I would not be shocked if MacBook Pros came out with M3 Max and M3 Pros.
John:
I would be shocked if they came out and there was still no plain old M3.
John:
Like, the very first and only M3 chips that they would ship would be, we've got the Pro and the Max, and they don't even mention a plain old M3.
John:
That would be surprising to me.
John:
Despite the fact that I can kind of understand the rumors of the plain old N3 being quote unquote canceled because maybe they wanted to do an N3B and it just didn't make financial sense.
John:
But part of the rumor about the 24 inch iMac, by the way, is like, oh yeah, they've been manufacturing them since June and they're all ready to go.
John:
What?
John:
They've been manufacturing them since June?
John:
Well, that doesn't mean they're M3e because M3e is just going into volume production now.
John:
June is not the fourth quarter.
John:
So I'm very confused by the set of rumors that we have.
John:
Again, I'm glad last week we talked about what machines should be updated or need to be updated.
John:
The MacBook Pros are not on that list, but I'm not going to complain about M3 Pro or M3 Max MacBook Pros if they are released.
Marco:
So let me try to tie this together.
Marco:
There's a few little tidbits that I think might make this make more sense.
Marco:
Number one, there was a rumor recently that next year's iPhones will both use A18-based chips.
Marco:
So in other words, that they won't drop the A17 Pro down to the non-pro phone next year.
Marco:
That was a recent rumor.
Marco:
So basically, the A17 Pro appears to be the only A17 series chip that may exist.
Marco:
And maybe that's why it's called Pro.
Marco:
That might also indicate that, for instance, it isn't going to iPads.
John:
I agree that they're going to brand it as A18, A18 Pro.
John:
Well, I shouldn't agree because that makes too much sense for Apple's naming.
John:
But that wouldn't make sense for the naming.
John:
It doesn't mean that our earlier speculation about like a cut down version of the A17 Pro, that may be what the A18 is.
John:
It's just the A17 Pro with some cores missing or whatever, but they'll call the A18, and if you look at it, you say, well, it has a different number of cores.
John:
Of course it's not the A17 Pro.
John:
It's a totally different chip.
Marco:
I'm guessing N3B process, the one that the A17 Pro is made on for the iPhone 15 Pro,
Marco:
I'm guessing the iPhone 15 Pro is the only Apple product to ever receive that process in a chip.
Marco:
I think the N3E process is what they are using for the M3-based things.
Marco:
Because it wouldn't make sense to put M3 on N3B.
Marco:
God, these names...
John:
As long as we have these Macs that have the Pro Macs in them.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
If that process is kind of a dead end and is very expensive, Apple doesn't want to be using that for years.
Marco:
The M series chips are used for years.
Marco:
Whatever chip is in the Pro iPhone is used for one year or at least only needs to be used for one year.
John:
And by the way, that phrase dead end, like every one of the TSMC's processes and also like like the five nanometer had a bunch of these little names that we couldn't remember as well.
John:
And I imagine seven nanometer did as well.
John:
Like when you go to a new process node, at least with TSMC and probably other companies, you're always climbing that ladder.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Once they make a quote unquote better process, you stop using the other one.
John:
So it makes perfect sense that N3B, the first one.
John:
would be left behind as soon as there's something better.
John:
It is a little bit odd that the one that is supposedly better is not better in all ways.
John:
It's better in yields and, you know, manufacturability.
John:
And, you know, that's good.
John:
You know, that's why people are going to go to it.
John:
But, you know, it's not... N3B is no more of a dead end than...
John:
n5 p i don't know what the hell the letters were but there were five nanometer ones that apple used and then moved on from them because better five nanometer processes came out they weren't dead ends they were just a stepping stone on the way to better five nanometer process in fact i believe one of the one of their five nanometer processes was like n4 something kind of like the 5g that wasn't really 5g 5ge never mind the fact that
John:
By the way, as many people point out when we discuss this, and I think we talked about it ages ago, the number that we're talking about, three nanometers, five nanometers, what does that refer to?
John:
And the answer is not anything sane anymore.
John:
It used to refer to something that made sense.
John:
now it's it's not entirely a marketing term because things are getting smaller and you can fit more transistors per unit area but there's no good measurement which is why you can get away with the you know 5g and quotes thing or like the n4 process that's a lot like the n5 is it still five nanometer well it's n4 is it four nanometer it's like well what do those terms even mean it's it's complicated because of the way they arrange all the things in the little transistors in 3d space
John:
to actually say what the number means.
John:
So all these things are essentially marketing terms for real technologies, which is like, how good are we getting at building chips with this process technology?
John:
And yeah, N3B, its whole deal is it's good, but expensive.
John:
And it wouldn't surprise me if only the richest technology company in the world could afford to buy all of their N3B capacity for the must-ship, cannot-miss-this-date iPhone N3B.
John:
uh and you know it doesn't bode well for apple if it really did cost a lot but although i think the screen is still more expensive than the soc so n3b is not a dead end n3b is the baseline and we will move on from it just like we did from the baseline n5 process i think what we're most likely to see in the spooky event is
Marco:
is iMacs and MacBook Pros.
Marco:
Because I think it is totally plausible when you look at the timing of these, if the cheaper, higher-yield N3E process is shipping in fourth quarter, which is now...
Marco:
that would line up with a few things.
Marco:
Number one, it would make sense why they can start deploying the M3 now because they would want the M3-based chip family, which will last for years in various products.
Marco:
They want that to be on a high-yield, lower-cost process that seems to have a brighter future.
Marco:
Number two...
Marco:
That would line up with Ming-Chi Kuo's thing, originally saying, this isn't going to happen until next year, and now saying, well, it can happen now, but it would be very low volume to start.
Marco:
That would make sense for a process that's just coming online this quarter.
Marco:
They probably can't make a lot of them.
Marco:
And I think that is why we won't see the M3 yet.
Marco:
Because the M3 that goes in all their higher volume products...
Marco:
They're not going to want to spend the yield on that.
Marco:
If they only have low yield on the N3E process to start in this quarter, they're going to want to put it in high price, low volume products like the MacBook Pro.
John:
The 24-inch iMac is also a low volume product.
John:
In fact, I think it's lower volume than the MacBook Pros.
John:
Look, maybe we still won't even get the 24-inch iMac.
Marco:
Who knows?
John:
They made them in June and August, Marco.
John:
They're sitting there waiting to be shipped.
Yeah.
John:
i love those rumors i don't for i call bs on that that's apple does not keep stock that long of giant things like imax i mean i who knows things are so weird but like the idea like if they had said they had already started manufacturing them like all right i buy that room or whatever but like they made them in june what chips did they put in there like i mean again maybe if they sell so few 24 inch imax that what they put in them was just like the very first run of n3e because the thing was like we'll start volume production in the fourth quarter uh but those imax that wasn't volume production
Marco:
But why would they do that?
Marco:
The iMac still has the M1, and no one cares except us.
Marco:
There's not this big rush.
John:
That is the thing that we'll talk about after the event.
John:
The main thing that I care about with the iMac is SSD space and RAM.
John:
I don't actually care whether it has the M3.
John:
I just want to see them update those things in the same way.
John:
We'll see if they do that.
John:
I also believe there's got to be the MacBook Pros because they're the only thing that's scary fast.
John:
There's not any ultra stuff coming.
John:
They're not going to say the scary fast Mac mini or with the M3 Pro in it or something.
John:
It's got to be the MacBook Pros.
John:
And I know those are much lower volume than the cheaper laptops, but...
John:
They're Apple's most popular pro products.
John:
And so, I don't know.
John:
I'm excited by new Macs.
John:
If the 20-inch iMac comes out and has an M2 in it, I won't care if it has reasonable RAM and SSD.
John:
And the MacBook Pros, we're in a place where
John:
we're not there's nothing that desperately needs to be fixed about them if they just have better socs capable of higher performance and maybe more ram capacity with better gpus in exactly the same case that no one needs to have a hands-on about that's that's great that's i mean the big question mark is still the whole thing of like what are we getting out of three nanometers
John:
um are we getting the gains that we thought we'd be getting in terms of uh power efficiency and all that and so maybe jonathan dietz will write in to tell it to defend the honor of the m3 when it comes out to say yeah it gets hotter still but you can get your work done faster so the hotness lasts uh last time i don't know you can burn your battery much faster it's not that's not true but the efficiency is saying like it's like race to sleep right you actually get the work done faster so it is better for your battery that's what higher efficiency means but using more power means there may be a higher peak temperature
John:
from all those YouTubers who point their thermal guns at their laptops.
Marco:
What do you think gets lifted first?
Marco:
The base 8 gigs of RAM on most Macs or the 5 gigs of free iCloud storage?
Marco:
Base 8 gigs of RAM.
John:
It's going to have 5 gigs of iCloud storage forever, Banner.
John:
It's up somewhere at Apple.
Casey:
i agree what happens if uh this is a mac pro announcement i know we just got one but what if they did something fun to the mac pro john what could they possibly do to the mac pro that would be fun the very first m3 series chip available is the m3 mega that it's like it's the quad it's the only one they make oh my word and it's built on m3b so it costs seventy thousand dollars can you imagine
John:
that would be scary but but that's not the way these things work though like you have to make the simpler chips first i know and i mean and the a17 pro is a good it's small like it's not simple but like it's in terms of how many transistors doesn't have the billions and billions and billions of transistors that the ultra is in let alone the quad so yeah no no rumors of that um you know maybe we'll get that an n3x in five years on the typical mac pro upgrade cycle
Marco:
Thank you.
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Oh,
Casey:
All right, Marco.
Casey:
I don't care what either of you says.
Casey:
The time has come.
Casey:
It has been decreed.
Casey:
I want to know about your Sonos experiments, as long as they were positive, because if they're negative, I don't want to know.
John:
I have some negative Sonos experiences for you, Casey.
Casey:
Why do you do this to me?
Casey:
I'm so excited.
Casey:
Why are you going to bring me down?
John:
Because I am apparently the king of the bugs.
Casey:
Oh, God.
John:
I have the Sonos Toblerone, which I really enjoy.
John:
I take it to the shower with me, listen to podcasts.
John:
It's great.
John:
Love it.
Marco:
The Roam.
John:
What I don't love about it is that every single time I do that, I take my iPhone, hit the little thingy, and I pick the output device to be Sonos.
John:
I think it uses AirPlay.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It's that little menu that you pick where you want the sound to go from your phone.
John:
That's AirPlay.
John:
I pick my Sonos thing.
John:
uh and then i hit play and what i hear is something out like it right down cut oh yeah that happens that happens to me but i feel like if i just pause the iphone give it a two count and then start again it's fine yeah so i've you know this has been going on for a while now and it's like well maybe i pause it and start it again it will work i have come up with the procedure that i now just do blindly every time this happens which is
John:
turn off the sonos device by holding on the power button which is very hard to press for way too long until it makes the i'm turning off sound and then power it back up and then reconnect sometimes it works if that doesn't work restart the phone what and i don't think i've ever had a situation where restarting both of them didn't fix it but yeah restarting the phone sometimes restarting the sonos fixes it sometimes i have to restart both the sonos and the phone
John:
Ugh.
John:
Madness.
John:
I don't know whose fault this is.
John:
Is it Sonos' fault?
John:
Is it Apple's fault?
John:
It's been happening for a long time, and I'm annoyed.
John:
Anyway, Marco, how much are you enjoying your Sonos experience?
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, actually, before you get into that, can we set the stage a little bit?
Casey:
So I genuinely don't recall...
Casey:
where we left things so the last i remember you were considering potentially embracing the home theater lifestyle in terms of i'm sorry in terms of audio in the main room at the beach but but i might have that all wrong so what what problems did you set out to solve which knowing you are very different problems than you actually ended up solving when all was said and done so can you give me a lay of the land if you don't mind from before you dipped your toe into the sonos pool please
Marco:
Sure.
Marco:
So where I had been was in my kitchen.
Marco:
I had a stereo pair of HomePods.
Marco:
And it's kind of like a great room.
Marco:
It's a larger space.
Marco:
We hang out at the island all the time.
Marco:
So these are very frequently used speakers to play music.
Marco:
both while preparing food and also just while kind of hanging out.
Marco:
I do have a Sonos amp as my TV receiver, kind of, powering two passive speakers that are not Sonos speakers.
Marco:
And I have the Sonos sub for my TV.
Marco:
I love that combination.
Marco:
But this is for the kitchen, really.
Marco:
And this is where HomePods go to die, apparently.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
This is the area that I have most of my HomePod use, most of my voice assistant use, and a large portion of music listening that is not in my office in headphones.
Marco:
I am no longer using my HomePods.
Marco:
They have been disappointing.
Casey:
You don't say.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Marco:
So I was at an appliance store and I found this little Sonos booth.
Marco:
It's just like this little demo table with a whole bunch of current Sonos products on it.
Marco:
This is the best executed demo table of audio gear in a store I have ever used.
Marco:
They had all these different speakers.
Marco:
They were all on and ready to go.
Marco:
And you could, using the little screen thing, switch audio between them seamlessly.
Marco:
It was fantastic.
Marco:
Whoever at Sonos designed this, you should get a raise.
Marco:
It was by far the best store demo table I've ever seen.
Marco:
So anyway, I was able to test out a lot of these speakers, and some of them I have had before.
Marco:
So the Sonos 1, that is the little-ish speaker that is kind of – it's about the size of a full-size HomePod.
Marco:
It was Sonos' entry-level speaker for a number of years.
Marco:
I had a pair of those before, like years ago when the Sonos One first came out.
Marco:
I frankly hated it, and I eventually gave it away.
Marco:
Everyone would say, oh, you've got to try the Sonos One.
Marco:
It's cheaper than the HomePods or whatever.
Marco:
And yeah, there was a reason it was cheaper.
Marco:
It sucked.
Marco:
It sounded way worse.
Marco:
And yeah, it integrated the Sonos ecosystem, but the sound quality, it was like an old computer speaker.
Marco:
It was not good at all.
Casey:
So very quickly, in the set that I have in the living room, I have two Sonos Ones.
Casey:
However, they're used as rear surround speakers, which is a very different application than what you're talking about.
Casey:
And for that purpose, I think they're pretty good.
Marco:
Yeah, they're fine for that.
Casey:
Yeah, I would not be surprised if as standalone music speakers, these probably do not have the oomph that you really want to play music with just these.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
So yeah, the Sonos 1 was not up to the task to play music to my standards.
Marco:
I know it can be a picky jerk about some things, but it was not good.
Marco:
It was not good.
Marco:
Anyway, so Sonos recently launched a couple of new products.
Marco:
They have the Aira 100 and Aira 300, these two new smart speakers.
Marco:
And I was able to hear these on this display and I was able to compare immediately the Sonos 1 to the Aira 100, which is kind of the Sonos 1 replacement now.
Marco:
And the Aero 100, they've done a lot more sophisticated stuff.
Marco:
There's more speaker drivers.
Marco:
They have two different directions.
Marco:
They fire tweeters now, kind of like the front third of a HomePod.
Marco:
And so they've amped things up a little bit, no pun intended, in the design and everything and the processing.
Marco:
And the Aero 100 in this display sounded way better than the Sonos 1.
Marco:
And so I thought, oh, okay, let's talk, Sonos.
Marco:
I'm interested now.
Marco:
They also had the first-gen Move, which has since been replaced with a Move 2.
Marco:
The first-gen Move was seemingly based on the speaker guts of the Sonos 1 and therefore sounded crappy, in my opinion.
Casey:
oh hard to say i know people like the move but oh i love i have the original move the one that they just replaced as you mentioned i think this thing sounds excellent for what it is is it in this picture it's the back left the back left it's it's the other portable wireless one but it's massive yeah
Casey:
It is portable and it is massive.
Casey:
You are not wrong about either of those things.
Casey:
But I actually think this thing sounds phenomenally good given what it is.
Casey:
And I don't think I'm grading on that much of a curve, but it is surprisingly willing to play decent bass for something that you can just pick up willy-nilly and move around.
Casey:
I really have been impressed by the original move.
Casey:
So the one you heard was the move one or the move two?
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, now I've heard both.
Marco:
I'll get to why.
Marco:
But this one was the Move 1.
Marco:
So again, I was able to compare and say, you know what?
Marco:
No, I'm not nuts.
Marco:
I'm not remembering this incorrectly.
Marco:
The Move really did suck.
Marco:
I will give you, it did have good bass.
Marco:
It's the rest of the sound that was the problem.
Marco:
So anyway, and it was interesting to compare, and the Era 100 sounded very good.
Marco:
The Era 300, the new big one that has, like, Atmos support and has an upward-facing driver, that's the one in the back center there.
Marco:
The Era 300 sounded...
Marco:
really interesting a little bit weird but really interesting and then finally the sonos 5 it's it's a much older model but it's still for sale it's it's like it's the giant one in the back there the sonos 5 really sounded um fairly basic it sounded like you know an old speaker design basically and not that interesting it didn't sound bad but it didn't sound good um it was fine
Marco:
So anyway, I thought this is interesting.
Marco:
The Aero 100 and Aero 300 deserve a greater look.
Marco:
And at about this time, my HomePods were degrading again.
Marco:
My brand new second generation full-size HomePods were doing similar things as the first HomePods always did to me, which is...
Marco:
Just being unreliable.
Marco:
Things would be slow, or they wouldn't respond, or Siri would fail, or they would take forever doing AirPlay because they'd be trying to do the AirPlay handoff instead of just freaking playing the stream from my phone.
Marco:
All sorts of behavior with HomePods that just annoyed me.
Marco:
This is at a time in my life when, again, we got a lot going on.
Marco:
We're very busy, you know, moving our house and everything.
Marco:
It's been a huge thing.
Marco:
I don't want to deal with tech problems if I don't have to.
Marco:
I don't want to deal with a million paper cuts with my speaker not working right and not playing music or giving me weird errors or delays or anything like that.
Marco:
You know, forgive me.
Marco:
I grew up with like regular music playing devices that you just pushed buttons and music would come out.
Yeah.
Marco:
And it would be fairly instantaneous and 100% reliable.
Marco:
I know that's a high bar with technology these days, but I want things to be instant and reliable.
Marco:
To me, playing music is not a sophisticated thing.
Marco:
It's a thing that you just do.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
Technology these days has allowed us has allowed this process to become so much better in certain ways.
Marco:
Voice control is amazing.
Marco:
Having access to the entire library of the vast majority of published music from any major label by just speaking something into the air is incredible.
Marco:
But when you just want to play an album that you already have, that you already know, that you play every week, and it takes forever to do it, or plays the wrong track, plays some weird live version, etc.
Marco:
It's like, what are you doing?
Marco:
Why does this work worse than the cassette deck I had in 1991?
Casey:
So very quickly, to interrupt one more time, and I apologize.
Casey:
So are you looking to use some sort of shout-into-the-air style dingus with the Sonos setup?
Casey:
Because that is something I don't personally have an overabundance of experience with.
John:
You can shout them to the air to any of these speakers.
John:
Don't they all listen to you?
John:
All the modern ones, yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, but the experience I have had, and this is partially because I just haven't asked very much of them.
Casey:
You can ask for, you know, play this or play that or turn the volume up or turn the volume down.
Casey:
I haven't used them, though, as general-purpose knowledge engines like you would a thing from Amazon or a thing from Apple or a thing from Google.
Casey:
And so I don't have any personal experience with that.
Casey:
I use the shouting to the air to move from one room to another or join a room into something that's already playing to turn the volume up and down to stop and start and so on.
Casey:
But basically, outside of media control, I don't think I've ever tried to set a timer on any of these things, for example, or an alarm or anything like that.
Casey:
So I'm just curious, Marco, is that one of the things you're looking for these to do?
Casey:
Because I know you can add like the Google Assistant, and I think you might be able to add the Amazon one too, I don't recall.
Casey:
And I'm curious to hear your experience with that as well.
Marco:
Yes, it depends on the model and the timing.
Marco:
Right now, current Sonos models don't have Google Assistant as an option anymore, as far as I can tell.
Casey:
Oh, that's right.
Casey:
They're in some sort of legal battle, I think.
Marco:
You can only add Alexa and you can add Sonos' own assistant, which I'll get to in a little bit.
Marco:
Anyway, I've been annoyed with my HomePods and their unreliability.
Marco:
It seems like the HomePod is a product made for conditions and expectations that I don't have in my house.
Marco:
I am kind of done with them.
Marco:
And this kind of breaks my heart to say, because I still love the way they sound, but I'm just done with them.
Marco:
Anyway, so I decided, let me try the new Sonos products since the Aero 100 sounded so good in the store.
Marco:
I got myself a pair of Aero 100s that I've been living with for about a month now, maybe a month and a half.
Marco:
It's been a while now.
Marco:
I took the HomePods, I unplugged them, and I put them in my office and just put them in the closet.
Marco:
And so I was living only with the Sonos Aero 100s for a while.
Marco:
In the intervening time, the Move 2 came out.
Marco:
And I happen to want and have wanted for a long time something like that.
Marco:
That's why I bought the first one and returned it because I hated the sound.
Marco:
But the Move 2 came out and it looked like it was based on the Era 100's guts.
Marco:
So I got one of those as well.
Marco:
And then finally, I'm borrowing from a friend two Era 300's.
John:
like the big new one that's it's still a countertop speaker sort of but it's it's bigger that's the one with the atmos i mean those those ones are really focused on home theater that's why they have the upward phrasing driver for the atmos stuff like i know there's music in atmos as well but those every single review i've seen of the era 300s has been in the context of connecting it to your tv to be a sound system they just don't seem like they would be good from the size alone that they would be good kitchen countertop speakers oh they're definitely not made for that and i'll get to that as well
Marco:
So I have some impressions.
Marco:
So first of all, the easy one, the Move 2.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
It's not the best sounding speaker.
Marco:
It has all the wonderful conveniences of the Move 1.
Marco:
It's portable.
Marco:
It's battery powered.
Marco:
It supports Bluetooth and AirPlay.
Marco:
It is really big and heavy, just like the Move 1.
Marco:
The Move 2 does sound better than the Move 1.
Marco:
It is seemingly based on the guts of the Aero 100, but it does not sound as good as the Aero 100.
Marco:
And I'm kind of surprised by that.
Marco:
I would have thought they would sound effectively identical, and they don't.
Marco:
The Move 2 is good.
Marco:
It is the worst sounding speaker in this test, which is disappointing for its price and size.
John:
Does it have a handle?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
It's kind of in the back.
Marco:
You like scoop under it.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
There's a cutout, an ovular cutout in the back, and you can, there's an area, it's hard to describe it, but there's plenty of room for your fingers to come up inside that ovular cutout, so it is designed to grab.
Casey:
It's very, very easy to grab, and it has a base.
Casey:
Which I believe the Move 2, the base can be disconnected from the cable, which is really nice because you cannot do that with the Move 1.
Casey:
The base and the cable are all one piece.
Casey:
But anyways, you basically just walk by and grab this thing.
Casey:
It'll pop right off the charging base and come with you.
Casey:
And it's really quite convenient.
Casey:
I really like the Move 2.
Casey:
It's what I have in the office if I wanted to listen to something with a little bit better fidelity than the studio display speakers.
Casey:
And then we also use that as an outdoor speaker for the far side of the yard.
Casey:
Our porch is obviously close to the house, and that has a couple of regular non-Sonos speakers but connected to a Sonos amp.
Casey:
I think it's an amp.
Casey:
I forget which model it is.
Casey:
But anyways, and then the Move, the Move 1, I will bring and put on the far side of the backyard.
Casey:
It's not a very big backyard.
Casey:
And between the two of them, you've got pretty much 100% coverage of our like one quarter acre, whatever it is.
Casey:
And it actually works really, really well.
Casey:
And again, I quite like this thing.
Casey:
It's not perfect sound, but I actually think it's better than, even the Move 1 is better than you're giving it credit for.
Casey:
But hey, that's why everyone's ears are different.
John:
i think one thing from the pictures of the move one thing i think the move has going for it in marco's testing scenario which we'll get to his next photo in a moment is the move just the move two and move one just have speakers facing a single direction like outward the move two has two angled tweeters so they kind of fire at 45 degree angles one big woofer in the middle i think same as the era 100 the the home pods have them in all directions obviously and the era 300 i think has them front back and upwards
John:
yeah there's a whole bunch in the era 300 there's like yeah there are like front sides up like it's yeah the era 300 yeah because so putting on a kitchen countertop especially your kitchen countertop i would not want any drivers firing towards the wall because the wall is like an inch uh to be fair i don't think i don't think the era 300 has one that fires behind it i mean i'm just looking from the shape of the thing i haven't seen a cutaway but it looks like it would have speakers firing backwards but maybe not
Marco:
No, the whole rear section of that mesh, it has speakers firing out the sides and up.
Marco:
But I don't think it... Anyway, the Air 300, I'll start with that one.
Marco:
The Air 300 being used for music is really weird.
Marco:
So, first of all,
Marco:
Just like all the other speakers in this test, including the HomePods, they have an automatic tuning thing where they listen to your room and you walk around and you wave the phone around and it plays weird sounds and it measures the response and everything.
Marco:
Before I did that tuning, the Era 300s sounded awful.
Marco:
Really bad.
Marco:
Very muffled treble.
Marco:
Huge booming bass.
Marco:
It sounded really bad.
Marco:
It was very strange.
Marco:
But after the TruePlay tuning, it was radically different.
Marco:
So the Air 300s, of all these, they have the best base of the group by a mile.
Marco:
That makes sense.
Marco:
They're the biggest, so they have an advantage there.
Marco:
They're also the most expensive, but best base of the group by far.
Marco:
The weird thing about the Air 300 is that, as John mentioned, they're designed to be home theater surrounds.
Marco:
They aren't even designed to be your front speakers because Sonos, as far as I know, Sonos has no way to make them your front speakers.
John:
Yep, I believe that's right.
John:
They want you to use their soundbar.
Marco:
Yeah, they want you to use a soundbar as the front and these as the rears or sides.
Marco:
So it's kind of an odd product from that point of view.
Marco:
But anyway, using them to listen to music as a stereo pair...
Marco:
Dolby Atmos tracks sound fantastic on them.
Marco:
Significantly better than on the other speakers.
Marco:
Now, part of this is, you know, when you're comparing an Atmos version of a song to the regular version, it's also just a different mix.
Marco:
So it's hard to compare.
Marco:
It's hard to say, like, this one's better sound quality.
Marco:
I can say it's more pleasing.
Marco:
It's different, though.
Marco:
And then when you play non-Atmos tracks on the Era 300s,
Marco:
They mostly sound okay.
Marco:
Some of them sound bad.
Marco:
It was a weird set of speakers to use for music.
Marco:
For some songs, the R300 was the best speaker in this test by a mile.
Marco:
And for others, it was the worst.
Marco:
It was really weird.
Marco:
If you're going to listen to Atmos tracks, and even then, by the way, I could not get Apple Music to send Atmos to the Era 300s.
Marco:
The only way I could get Atmos to play... Actually, the Apple Music app.
Marco:
The only way I can get it to play Atmos tracks for Apple Music is to call up Apple Music from the Sonos app, because Sonos can connect to Apple Music and whatever.
Marco:
So use the Sonos app as the playing app to the speakers.
Marco:
Using Apple Music as the backing service...
Marco:
then if it's sending to a group that only contains the era 300s then it will send atmos and so it's if you don't like listening to atmos tracks or you don't have a way to listen to them or you don't like using the sonos app to control your music these are not good music speakers do not buy them for that but again that isn't what they are for
Marco:
So let's move to the speakers that are designed for music, I think.
Marco:
The Era 100s.
Marco:
These are the ones that are HomePod-sized, near the HomePod's price, and seem to be direct competitors to the full-size HomePod.
Marco:
The Era 100...
Marco:
I am extremely impressed by it.
Marco:
As far as sound quality goes, it's in the same ballpark as the full-sized HomePod.
Marco:
There are certain tracks that I think sound better on the HomePods.
Marco:
There are certain tracks that I think sound better on the Arrow 100s.
Marco:
It's really a toss-up on a lot of stuff.
Marco:
The Aeros have way better bass than the HomePod 2.
Marco:
The HomePod 2 is just... We know the HomePod 2 is kind of weak on bass.
Marco:
The Aero 100 has much better bass.
Marco:
Also, you can control it because they have EQ settings in the app.
Marco:
Shocker.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
You can control how a speaker sounds.
Marco:
somebody send apple the message but you know until until they get that if ever um so yeah so as you can tweak it you can tweak bass and treble and this thing called loudness and whatever else um so that's very good and i've tweaked it and i i've my final eq is very it's just like a very it's like treble plus two everything else default just big marco energy there
Marco:
I know, right?
Marco:
But overall, the Arrow 100 sounds great.
Marco:
The only thing I can give the HomePod the edge on is HomePod still makes the best, smoothest-sounding vocals, but the Arrow 100 is very close, and it's better bass, and it has the controls and everything, so...
Marco:
I really enjoy the Air 100.
Marco:
I would also say that all of these modern Sonos products have really good touch controls on the top.
Marco:
There's more buttons.
Marco:
They're labeled.
Marco:
Shocker.
Marco:
They are more intuitive to use.
Marco:
They are faster and more reliable to respond.
Marco:
They are less error prone in the sense of accidentally brushing them.
Marco:
And actually, when the Sonos speakers are playing music that is not being airplayed to them, when they're playing off their own services, basically the speaker's doing it directly,
Marco:
Those buttons are instantaneous.
Marco:
You hit pause, it pauses instantly.
Marco:
You hit play, it plays instantly.
Marco:
You hit next track, it goes to the next track instantly.
Marco:
It is rock solid, reliable.
Marco:
It is everything I want music equipment to be that it so often now isn't.
Marco:
And that is a huge advantage.
Marco:
Now...
Marco:
With AirPlay, this is an Apple-designed protocol being sent from Apple hardware.
Marco:
You would expect the Apple HomePod product would have a better AirPlay implementation and it would be a better experience than using a third-party product that uses AirPlay like Sonos.
Marco:
You'd be wrong.
Marco:
Everything about AirPlay gets worse when a HomePod is involved.
Marco:
Even when I was testing, I would often have a group with AirPlay sending to more than one speaker, one of which was HomePods and one of which was a Sonos set.
Marco:
The second a HomePod is in an AirPlay group, everything about it gets worse and more buggy.
Marco:
It's slower.
Marco:
You have weird bugs with volume and commands that get sent.
Marco:
When AirPlay touches a HomePod, everything about it sucks.
Marco:
And it's a shame.
Marco:
And this has been a problem with every HomePod I've ever had.
Marco:
It's a problem with the Minis.
Marco:
It's a problem with the Ones.
Marco:
It's a problem with the Twos.
Marco:
Every HomePod, everywhere I've ever used one, AirPlay is really buggy and slow.
Marco:
And Sonos AirPlay just works.
Marco:
It's amazing.
Marco:
It connects faster.
Marco:
It disconnects when you're done faster.
Marco:
It sends commands faster.
Marco:
It stays connected.
Marco:
It's more reliable.
Marco:
They don't fall out of sync.
Marco:
AirPlay on Sonos works the way AirPlay should work everywhere.
Marco:
And it's kind of amazing how much better it is on this third-party product than it is on Apple's own products.
Marco:
So love that because AirPlay is usually the most common form of playing for me.
Marco:
So that I like a lot because I don't want to always talk to my stuff.
John:
Maybe I should get a waterproof move too for my shower.
John:
Maybe.
John:
It's a little big for a shower.
John:
I just want it to play my podcast.
John:
I don't ask much.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's really good at AirPlay.
Marco:
Like really good.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So let's talk about voice control.
Marco:
There's two options.
Marco:
There's the Sonos voice control.
Marco:
They have their own voice agent thing voiced by the guy who plays Gus Fring.
Marco:
What's the actor's name?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Giancarlo Esposito, I believe.
Casey:
And yes, Gus Fring is who you're thinking of.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
The chicken guy from Breaking Bad.
Marco:
Mm hmm.
Marco:
It sounds, he sounds amazing.
Marco:
I love this guy and I love his voice.
Marco:
And it's so, it's so funny.
Marco:
Like when, when someone's in the room who hasn't heard this before and you hear him respond, everyone's like, Whoa, who's that?
Marco:
If you point out like, Oh, it's, it's so-and-so and everyone's like, Oh my God, that's amazing.
Marco:
And I'm like, everyone starts asking it questions.
Yeah.
Marco:
It's good.
Marco:
The only thing is, Sonos voice control, the agent they've made with him, it's a very basic voice control agent.
Marco:
It is not very sophisticated at all.
Marco:
It only handles music.
Marco:
It does not handle general knowledge queries.
Marco:
It is fast and responsive to things like play pause and volume and stuff like that.
Marco:
I have found that it is not quite as good as HomePods at hearing me when loud music is playing.
Marco:
HomePods hear you like crazy.
Marco:
That's the best thing about HomePods is how well they hear you.
Marco:
The Sonos products have not been that good.
Marco:
They've been close, but not that good.
Marco:
And their own voice agent is so primitive.
Marco:
Not only can it not answer basic questions about knowledge or start timers or anything, but any kind of non-trivial query about music
Marco:
So for instance, I have named playlists and I have Apple Music connected.
Marco:
I can't say, play my best of fish playlist and have it play.
Marco:
That works every time on a HomePod.
Marco:
Well, every time that it responds.
Casey:
So actually, I feel like I've done this and it's worked, but I haven't tried it in a while.
Casey:
Now, I can try it live right now if you would like, but I don't think that's going to make for great programming.
Casey:
I could have sworn I have tried this in the past and it has worked for me, but I also only have a handful of playlists in Apple Music, so it's not choosing from very many of them either.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Marco:
Neither is mine.
Marco:
Maybe it was just a temporary failure.
Marco:
Maybe I'll try again.
Marco:
So the other option you have is Alexa.
Marco:
Now, I had Alexa stuff in the past, so I know roughly what it's good at, what it's bad at.
Marco:
I will say, again, back to music queries,
Marco:
I asked both Alexa and Sonos a question like, play the first album by the Cranberries.
Marco:
Now, both Alexa and Sonos, when I said play the first album by the Cranberries, simplified that question to play the Cranberries and just started playing random Cranberries hits.
Marco:
When I asked Siri, play the first album by the Cranberries, it got it right.
Marco:
So I think Siri's actually showing to be better at music-related queries than the other ones, in my experience at least.
Marco:
Back to Alexa integration.
Marco:
It is exactly as annoying as Alexa is everywhere.
Marco:
You have to authorize it in the Alexa app and it'll try to upsell you on a billion different things.
Marco:
Please give us access to all of your data everywhere forever.
Marco:
By the way, did you know we can do all these other things that you give us more money and more data?
Marco:
So you have to say no to a lot.
Marco:
You have to be very careful what you give them permission to do.
Marco:
But as Alexa always is, it is shockingly fast and reliable.
Marco:
That's what Alexa is good at.
Marco:
It's always fast and reliable.
Marco:
And it's fairly accurate.
Marco:
The general knowledge questions for it are actually pretty good.
Marco:
It slaughters Siri on general knowledge questions.
Marco:
It's not even close.
Marco:
As good as Siri is at music, that's how good Alexa is at knowledge.
Marco:
If you have that kind of usage pattern, it's very good for that.
Marco:
So overall, I've been extremely happy with the Sonos ecosystem.
Marco:
You know, one thing I'm trying to do here in my life in general, I think it is better for me.
Marco:
It's better for the show.
Marco:
And I think it's better for Apple for me to start avoiding Apple's like things they call hobby projects or
Marco:
whenever better alternatives exist by more motivated companies to succeed so you look at something like the apple tv they neglect it it's it has a lot of shortcomings but i've used the competitors products and i still prefer the apple tv i still think it is generally the best streaming box out there that's saying a lot because they really don't put much into it it seems but but you know the others are just worse
Marco:
But there's a lot of categories that I've been kind of carrying water for Apple, and I feel kind of like I've been had.
Marco:
And the HomePod is one of those categories.
Marco:
It is actually pretty good at certain things, but it seems like Apple really couldn't give less of a crap to really make it great.
Marco:
Apple has a lot of products that are great, and I'm happy to focus on those.
Marco:
My iPhone has never let me down.
Marco:
My Macs, generally speaking, recently especially, do not let me down.
Marco:
Even the iPad, which we complained about the, you know, the weirdness in the product lineup, but the iPad is a great overall product that is reliable.
Marco:
And while it doesn't have a lot of effort put into it from like a power user perspective, it does have a lot of effort put into it in general.
Marco:
Their core products,
Marco:
are are great and pleasant and they make me very happy to use and they rarely they rarely give me problems where i get into trouble with apple's products are when i like something more than it seems like they do or when i use something more than it seems like they do and the home pod has always given me that impression and unlike the apple tv what is now the case is there are better alternatives in this area you know
Marco:
Tiff and I, in our marriage, we have a general principle.
Marco:
Whoever cares the most wins.
Marco:
If there's some decision that has to be made or some minor policy argument that we're having, if someone cares a lot about it and the other person really doesn't, whoever cares the most, let them win.
Marco:
That's generally better.
Marco:
And I think I can kind of apply that to a lot of tech products as well.
Marco:
Like Sonos cares a lot about speakers because that's all they make.
Marco:
This is their entire company.
Marco:
Like Sonos is that this is what they do.
Marco:
And the Aero 100 is one of their most important products because it's like their main entry level and probably highest volume speaker that they sell.
Marco:
So, yeah, they're going to put a lot of effort into that.
Marco:
If anything's wrong with it, they're going to care a lot about it.
Marco:
That's the experience they're going to polish.
Marco:
That's their iPhone.
Marco:
So that makes sense.
Marco:
They are super focused on making speakers.
Marco:
This is like one of their high volume products.
Marco:
They're going to make it really good.
Marco:
And they do.
Marco:
Google's phones, you know, Google makes all these Pixel phones.
Marco:
Google's phones are usually not amazing.
Marco:
And they don't really take off in the market.
Marco:
And they have a lot of shortcomings in part because that's not what Google's main business is.
Marco:
Google's main business is ads.
Marco:
And you can bet anything about Google's ad system, they put a lot of effort into that.
Marco:
They put a lot of effort into YouTube.
Marco:
That's another major Google project.
Marco:
That's like a huge important product for them.
Marco:
Google doesn't put a lot of effort into their phones.
Marco:
It's just not that important to them.
Marco:
The HomePod is a total afterthought for Apple.
Marco:
Apple couldn't possibly give less of a crap about the HomePod, and it shows.
Marco:
So I have found that I am happier now getting away from Apple's hobby projects, where there is some other competitor that's their main thing.
Marco:
And whether it's smart home stuff sometimes, or these other various accessory things they make...
Marco:
Apple does a really great job at their core stuff.
Marco:
That's what I'm going to spend my mental effort on and a lot of my money on.
Marco:
And I am very happy to have found the Apple of speakers who cares a hell of a lot more about this.
Marco:
And I'm in.
Marco:
I love the way these work.
Marco:
They aren't perfect.
Marco:
They aren't better in every way.
Marco:
I kind of wish I could have, I hate to say this, I kind of wish I could have Siri on the Sonos 100 or the Sonos Aero 100 because I think Siri for the use as a music voice assistant is the best voice assistant for music.
Marco:
But otherwise, I like them a lot better than the HomePods.
Marco:
They make me crazy a lot less.
Marco:
They make me angry a lot less.
Marco:
They make me happy a lot more.
Marco:
That's what I need out of my speakers.
John:
Let me know if they just start cutting out every two seconds and you have to reboot your phone to make them work.
Casey:
I think that's just you, John.
Casey:
Now, just very quickly, because this is going on longer than intended, but I've been fascinated by every darn moment.
Casey:
I know, right?
Casey:
And I've been fascinated by every moment of it.
Casey:
And I'm glad that your experience, by and large, maybe the particulars are a little different, but by and large, your broader experience, I think, echoes mine or vice versa.
Casey:
I have been...
Casey:
really overjoyed with my Sonos stuff.
Casey:
It is not flawless, as you just said, but it is pretty friggin' reliable.
Casey:
It almost always works, unless your name's John Syracuse, and I cannot speak highly enough about how great the Sonos ecosystem interacts with itself.
Casey:
You can absolutely use AirPlay.
Casey:
That's not something I do often, with the exception, actually, of shower podcasts, but...
Casey:
Once you have something playing on basically any Sonos speaker in the house, it is incredibly easy via voice, via physical controls, via the Sonos app, any number of ways.
Casey:
It is incredibly easy to start picking and choosing what other Sonos speakers to play that same content.
Casey:
And it can get to the point, and I know I belabored this when we first were talking about the Sonos stuff that I had gotten like a year ago.
Casey:
You can walk all around your house, including outdoors, virtually.
Casey:
Varying distances from your wireless access points, and the music is perfectly in sync.
Casey:
Just flawlessly in sync.
Casey:
I don't understand how I can go from my office with my Move 1, walk down the stairs, through the living room...
Casey:
out through the porch and go to the far side of my admittedly small lot, and the music is in sync through all of these spaces.
Casey:
It's unreal.
Casey:
I don't know how they do it.
Casey:
And if I want to remove one of the speakers from that group, I can say, you know, hey, dingus, remove office, or hey, dingus, play this everywhere, or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
It is incredibly, incredibly good.
Casey:
I really love this stuff.
Casey:
This is not sponsored.
Casey:
They have not given us a dime.
Casey:
It's just the two of us, maybe I guess sort of three of us, just really, really like their stuff.
Casey:
It is expensive.
Casey:
It is not cheap.
Casey:
And I was able to get a discount through a friend of a friend when I bought the overwhelming majority of my stuff.
Casey:
So consider that, that my value for money computation might be a little different than yours because I got a really steep discount on my stuff, which I'm incredibly thankful for.
Casey:
Um, but honestly, it's one of those situations that now that I've lived it, I think I would, if I were to do it all over again, knowing what I know today, I would have been willing to pay full price for it.
Casey:
Cause it's that freaking good.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, that's like, there is, there are markets for good stuff, even if it is expensive.
Marco:
If it's expensive because it's good, then there's a market for that.
Marco:
That's how most Apple products are.
Marco:
Apple does not make a lot of products that are super price competitive with their competitors.
Marco:
Apple is almost always the higher priced option in a market.
Marco:
And yet, we are usually not only willing, but almost happy to pay the Apple prices.
Marco:
That might be pushing a little far, but we accept the Apple prices on things in so many categories because we want the best.
Marco:
And usually Apple's products are the best.
Marco:
So it makes sense.
Marco:
It's worth it to us.
Marco:
You want the best computer?
Marco:
You get the Apple computer.
Marco:
You want the best monitor?
Marco:
You get the Apple monitor.
Marco:
But it's just certain...
Marco:
certain products that they occasionally are not the best but i again going back to sonos like their stuff is solid you know they they've had quite a history they've always been pretty solid like with the audio stuff though you know i for a while i i didn't really like the way their speakers sounded and that's why i love the sonos amp because it's a product that lets me just use my own speakers then it powers them um but their recent stuff now like the the arrow line
Marco:
is really interesting and sounds way better than what was going before.
Marco:
So I am really excited to see where they go.
Marco:
And this is an ecosystem that I'm happy to be in now because it makes me happy and it works well.
Marco:
And that is something that, again, in technology, oftentimes the tech that we expect to be improvements to our life oftentimes causes more headaches than it actually provides benefits.
Marco:
And oftentimes the things that work 85% of the time can be really frustrating.
Marco:
Because it's like, oh, this is really great 85% of the time.
Marco:
15% of the time it is slow or does something weird or breaks or have to reset the whole thing up from scratch.
Marco:
So see all smart home stuff ever.
Marco:
With the exception of Caseta, which I still love.
Marco:
Anyway, so rarely in tech do we find a product or a product line that actually delivers on its promise well.
Marco:
And that's why on this show again like oftentimes that's an Apple product.
Marco:
And so that's why we are so happy to evangelize for those products to say this Apple thing works fantastically.
Marco:
If you have this kind of problem in your life get the Apple thing.
Marco:
It's amazing.
Marco:
And in this case, the Apple thing's not, but the great thing is the Sonos thing is.
Marco:
And there are not that many downsides to it besides the price and whatever your choice of voice system might be.
Marco:
But if you're willing to get over those things, they really work very, very well.
John:
I just want to point out that I have two Sonos ROMs.
John:
I have one and my wife has one, and they both do this thing.
John:
in all fairness the room is not one of their stellar products well like well but casey has one too and he hasn't had this problem but here's the thing my two roams i've had across multiple iphones many versions of ios across multiple years right so it's just weird to me i don't you know when you don't mean bugs they're gonna be bedeviled by this bug that i have a workaround for but the workaround is annoying every time i always go to that sonos app i'm like is there a software update is there you know because i just want a software update to the sonos thing to fix this problem but
John:
i mean ios has been updated my phone's been updated my wife's phone's been updated they both do it not all the time just enough of the time to be annoying bummer that's why i mean seriously i would get a more expensive sonos because i do like you know the experience i like having a little waterproof thing i like playing you know i just need it to be small and fit on a shower shelf well the move is not that
Casey:
Nope, it sure isn't.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Sonos.
Marco:
No, just kidding.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Adblock Pro and Notion.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at tv.fm slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
Marco:
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 So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-
Casey:
So, John, you've been busy.
Marco:
Yeah, I suppose.
Casey:
No, no, no, no, no.
Casey:
Don't I suppose this.
Casey:
John has been putting in a tremendous amount of work making all this possible.
Casey:
I was barely involved and Marco was also barely involved.
Casey:
This is almost all John.
Casey:
And I genuinely appreciate all the work you've been putting into this because this was a not insignificant amount of work.
John:
We might discuss all of that work in a future members-only episode, but I want to talk about the changes we made and why we made them, which goes all the way back to when we were discussing the bad ad market for podcasts like ours, and we said we were going to send out a survey to our listeners to ask them a bunch of questions, and we did that, and we got a bunch of responses, and you didn't hear anything from us for a while, partially because we were deciding what to do, partially because it takes time to analyze the data, partially because of scheduling stuff, but anyway...
John:
We did look at those server responses.
John:
I tried to analyze them as best I could.
John:
It is tricky because we had a couple of constraints here.
John:
One was I didn't want to ask a million questions in the survey.
John:
There are so many things that we could do.
John:
I didn't want to send people a 500-question survey that no one's going to fill out.
John:
So I really tried hard to make it as short as possible.
John:
There were multiple paths through the survey, but I think it was like less than 10 questions for each one.
John:
But that also meant the data we were going to get was only going to tell us about the few things that we asked.
John:
And we didn't ask, there was like an open-ended, there's a bunch of open-ended things where people could type anything they want.
John:
And I read through those.
John:
So that was kind of, we could get like any feedback people had, but we asked some very targeted questions as well.
John:
And obviously, a lot of the targeted questions were relevant to the one big change we did make, which was lowering the price of annual membership.
John:
And, you know, obviously, people write it and say, I wish everything was less expensive.
John:
Yes, everyone wishes everything was less expensive.
John:
Is that the right move for your business to lower your prices?
John:
Apple seems to think no.
John:
Here's the thing about lowering prices.
John:
Of course, I would be a member if you just lowered your prices.
John:
Some number of people said that.
John:
In fact, we asked this very specific question was one of the questions we asked.
John:
If we gave an annual discount equivalent to one free month, would you become an ATP member?
John:
And we could divide those into the people who had previously been a member and weren't or had never been a member.
John:
And people answered that question.
John:
And what we're trying to figure out is, hey, if we offer this discount, are we going to lose money?
John:
Because in case this goes without saying, we're trying to make more money, not less.
John:
So by rolling out this change and having every single annual subscriber renew at the lower price, we're losing money.
John:
The only way we can not lose money is to actually gain subscribers.
John:
That's the whole point.
John:
You lower the price, you make it more attractive.
John:
Maybe more people will sign up.
John:
And so we're trying with our
John:
non-business school education to figure out, are we going to lose money if we do this?
John:
So you think, oh, why is this hard to figure out?
John:
You have a survey.
John:
You ask people, hey, would you become a member if we did this?
John:
You ask them this specific thing was one of the choices.
John:
Just add them up and do the math and you can figure out if you're going to make money.
John:
But people don't always do what they say in surveys, right?
John:
Checking a checkbox on a survey says, yeah, totally.
John:
If you did that, I'd become a member.
John:
Things change from when they answered it.
John:
You know, like maybe they changed their mind.
John:
Maybe they thought they would.
John:
So you have to say, like, how much do we think people will actually follow through on what they said they were going to do?
John:
Because when it comes time to spend actual money versus saying that you will are two different things.
John:
Second thing is not everybody who listens to the show fills out the survey.
John:
It's not, you know, people don't want to fill out surveys.
John:
They're boring, whatever.
John:
How representative are the people who filled out the survey?
John:
Are they nothing like our other listeners?
John:
Or are other listeners exactly like the people in the survey, percentage-wise?
John:
These are questions that you have to answer to be able to figure out, are we going to lose money if we do this?
John:
How many people who said they would become a member will become a member?
John:
And...
John:
Can we extrapolate at all from the people who filled out the survey to the larger population of listeners?
John:
Or should we only consider the people who actually filled the survey?
John:
So anyway, we did all this math.
Casey:
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Casey:
We did not.
Casey:
You did.
Casey:
And I say that not to make fun of you, but to thank you for all the work you put in.
John:
Well, I mean, don't thank me until we see how it goes.
John:
But anyway, we did a bunch of math.
John:
And, you know, you participated because we had a bunch of fields.
John:
There was, like, percentages of, like, you know, of all the people who said X, they said they would do Y. You know, what percentage will do it?
John:
100%, 50%, you know, like... So we had to come up with those numbers.
John:
And we mostly just pulled them out of our butt based on our instincts, right?
John:
Anyway, what it came out to was...
John:
We probably won't lose money.
John:
Like it wasn't like, well, this is going to be great.
John:
So you may be saying, well, why did you do this?
John:
If you think it's like on the edge, maybe you lose money, maybe you make money.
John:
Why did you do this?
John:
One of the reasons is that it's not a huge change.
John:
I don't think lowering the price is going to make anybody angry.
John:
So thumbs up to that, right?
John:
There's not huge risk.
John:
Like, you know, worst case, you lose a little bit of money, but maybe you make it up over the long term of getting new subscribers or whatever.
John:
And of all the things that we asked, it was among the more popular options.
John:
It didn't have any, you know, sort of huge downsides, right?
John:
We also heard from people that they would like more members-only content.
John:
And I know we didn't sort of talk about this, but I hope people have noticed that we are...
John:
more consistently releasing members only content maybe you don't notice because it's like you know it seems like they come out once a month or whatever but it's been we had skipped months in the past and now we haven't recently uh it's been like less than 30 days between things and we're going to try to keep that streak going so i hope people do appreciate that because that was something part of the feedback hey how about more members only content and we are also trying to do that that's not a cost thing you just get that as part of your membership
John:
And then finally, the silly thing that we did, this was not on the survey, I don't think at all in any way, but people wrote it in.
John:
People wrote it in in the little free form thing and emailed us.
John:
Again, not a lot of people, but they said, I love ATP so much that I wish I could pay more money.
John:
How many people need to say that to you for you to spend time implementing?
John:
It turns out not that many.
Casey:
Three.
Casey:
I don't remember what the number was, but it was not a lot.
John:
Yeah, like you could count them on appendages on your body.
John:
It's not a lot of people.
John:
But like why, you know, if they want to do that.
John:
we should accommodate them and that was actually the most complicated feature we had to add because it's kind of weird like because you insisted on a free form text field for the price yeah pay what pay what you want right and we tried to hide it from the ui because like no one wants to do this we understand right but for the five people who do want to do it we wanted it to be there it is there uh one of the fact items is
John:
how do what you know because presumably the people who are saying that are already members so they have to change their membership to be this weird one there's a fact item for it adp.fm slash member slip slash fact hashtag patron i guess is how you would say it in the modern age the patron is the fragment part of the url no one knows that term anymore i don't know what you would call it but anyway it looks like a hashtag
John:
So we hope the five people who said that are listening to this and they will do that.
John:
And we hope the more than five people who answered the survey and said, hey, if you give me a discount on annual membership, I would become a member.
John:
I hope some of you actually do that because if you don't, we just lost a whole bunch of money.
Casey:
We didn't originally do any sort of discount for the annual plan because we wanted to make it fairly straightforward.
Casey:
And to a degree, I personally think it—I'm going to say it feels slimy.
Casey:
I think that's a little aggressive.
Casey:
But it feels a little icky, maybe is a better word for it, when—
Casey:
We're trying to coax you to spend more money than maybe you would want to by saying, well, if you commit to a whole year, we'll give you a little bit of money off.
Casey:
And really, I think especially Marco, but all of us wanted a very straightforward exchange.
Casey:
You know, you can give us either eight bucks a month or was it $96 a year.
Casey:
And you get what you get and you don't get upset.
Casey:
And now we're making it slightly muddier.
Casey:
But the results of the survey were fairly emphatic that, oh, I'm just really turned off by the fact that I don't get any sort of discount for an annual price.
Casey:
It really, really bothers me.
Casey:
We got some fairly aggressive versions of that statement.
John:
So the flip side of that is another way of looking at it, which is also true, is that you pay for the flexibility of being able to cancel any time.
John:
If you pay for monthly, why is monthly more expensive than annual?
John:
What you're paying for is the convenience to say, oh, I don't want to do it this month and just cancel.
John:
Right.
John:
Whereas you've already paid for the whole year.
John:
You don't have that flexibility.
John:
So there are multiple reasons why an annual discount makes sense and is desirable to people.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And plus, you know, you're only getting billed once a year rather than once a month and blah, blah, blah.
John:
Which saves credit card processing fees, which you don't care about.
John:
And it's generally peanuts.
John:
But like there's it is there.
John:
The main reason people ask for annual because we didn't originally have any.
John:
Maybe people ask for annual is that it just didn't want to see a bill every month, like just the annoyance of it.
John:
Right.
John:
And that does make sense.
John:
You know, one bill a year is easier to deal with and track than having this thing come in every month.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I don't know how much we want to talk about the nuts and bolts about how this works behind the scenes.
Casey:
Maybe we should save that for a member special.
Casey:
But suffice to say, a lot of this was far more complicated than you would expect.
Casey:
But if you are currently an annual member, and as far as you knew until you were listening to us tonight or today or whatever, you were paying $96 a year.
Casey:
John, remind us what those people have to do in order to get this new $88 per year price.
John:
If they're currently an annual member, they do nothing.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
You do nothing.
John:
You do nothing.
John:
Like you can go to your member page right now and you will see it says the new lower amount.
John:
And like I said, people have already renewed.
John:
So we're pretty sure it worked.
John:
Like they're renewing at the new lower price.
John:
The old prices are gone.
John:
You can't buy them even if you wanted to.
John:
Everybody's subscription who was annual has switched to the new prices.
John:
So you don't have to do anything.
Casey:
Well, slow down, though.
Casey:
If I wanted to do the enter my own price, I could put in $96 per year, though, correct?
John:
Yes, yes.
John:
Okay, just making sure.
John:
Anybody can – I don't want to – if you do this, if you're one of the five people who does this, someone should do it just to test that it works.
Yeah.
John:
No one has ever done it in production.
John:
So please somebody be the person to test it in production.
John:
It was tested many times in depth.
John:
If you do this, you will get a little badge next to your name that I copied from Letterboxd that says patron.
John:
What do you get with that?
John:
The badge is what you get.
John:
That little yellow box, there is no additional anything for patrons.
John:
I don't think it would be a good idea to have this special tier for that.
John:
But anyway, five people are going to do it.
John:
Who cares?
John:
But yeah, we're not using that language anywhere, but internally I needed things to name the variables and I call all that stuff patron stuff or whatever.
John:
So if you want to become an ATP patron, which is not a term that we use in public facing things, but I just said on the podcast, it's in the fact.
John:
That's the whole reason I made the fact.
John:
I will add to that fact as people ask questions because people frequently ask things and I want to put them somewhere.
John:
And that's what a fact is for.
Casey:
And remind me, so if I am currently at the new $88 per year plan, but I'd like to pay $888 per year, what I need to do then is cancel my current plan and go in and name my price and start a new plan at that point.
Casey:
Is that correct?
John:
Yeah, that's a new feature that I added as part of this because it just seemed like it was always so complicated and weird.
John:
The fact is one feature of like, how do I do this?
John:
And the second thing is like on the member page when you cancel, like it's not like when you cancel, it ends immediately.
John:
When you cancel, you'll still whatever you paid for the rest of your term that you're paid for.
John:
You will continue to get that.
John:
Obviously, it's just that it won't renew essentially at the end of it.
John:
But right on the member page now, you can start a new one, even though the old one hasn't run out yet, which was a big thing that people were confused about or bothered by.
John:
It's like, oh, I got to wait for my monthly membership to actually expire before I can sign up for the annual.
John:
And now you don't have to do that through some weird sleight of hand that I did with Stripe where...
John:
you end up getting like a free trial essentially so if you end you end your monthly membership of the month isn't over yet and you start a new membership the new membership will start when your old one ends but when you do the checkout thing uh it will it will account as a free trial until your old membership ends and then it starts billing it's just to make the math work out
John:
I tried to do it the more sane way where you can just forward date it or whatever, but apparently you can't forward date past the end of the billing period.
John:
So like past the, I don't know what language to use.
John:
So basically say you had an annual membership and you want to go to monthly and it's the middle of the year, the middle of your year.
John:
you cancel the annual fine great it's going to end at the end of your year right and you're like i want to sign up for monthly right now the feature that the stripe has that lets you forward date it to say hey start their monthly membership when their annual one ends it'll be like i can't start a monthly membership later than one month from now that's basically the problem like it is a monthly thing and the farthest in the future all that you started is one month from now or less and
John:
And so you can't start a one month membership six months from now, which is dumb.
John:
So that's why I came up with the free trial workaround, which is also dumb, but I explained it in the FAQ and on the screen where you do stuff.
John:
So hopefully people won't be too confused by it.
John:
And it's better than it was before where you'd have to like put a calendar reminder to remind you when your annual membership ends in six months to start your new monthly one.
John:
That's very good.
John:
Very clever.
John:
Not clever.
John:
It's a terrible hack, but that's programmed for you.
Marco:
Indeed.
Marco:
Well, I got to say, too, like, I am so... First of all, I'm incredibly thankful that John is bored.
Because...
Marco:
John has had on his request list for the CMS that basically was like a list of to-do items that only I could do that John cared the most about by far.
Marco:
Again, whoever cares the most wins.
John:
Only you could do, to be clear, because you wouldn't let us do them.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So this has been built up for months or years, actually.
Marco:
Years.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Look at the date on the document.
John:
ATP.FM wishlist.
John:
Created when.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I don't even have it open.
Marco:
I don't even know where it is.
Marco:
I know you don't.
Casey:
I know where it is.
Marco:
Oh, there it is.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Anyway, let's see.
Marco:
What does it say created?
Marco:
2020.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
That's about right.
Marco:
June 27th, 2020.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Because that's when we launched membership.
Casey:
I was going to say, not long after or around the time that we launched membership.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So anyway, John's had this wish list for the CMS for a long time, and I have had no time to do it.
Marco:
Because, you know, also, between all my, you know, moving my house and everything, I'm also trying to rewrite Overcast, basically.
Marco:
Like, so this was never going to happen as long as it was on my plate.
Marco:
You did a bunch of stuff on the list, though, to be fair.
John:
It's just recently...
Marco:
Yeah, recently I've done very little.
Marco:
But anyway, so John's been caring about this the most for a long time and has all this newfound time since you quit your job and now your house is mostly fixed temporarily.
Marco:
And you don't seem to have a lot of dying appliances right at this moment.
Marco:
So you had all this time.
Marco:
And so I and I thought like this is always going to be on my plate because first of all, I'm bad at delegating.
Marco:
Second of all, neither of you guys knew PHP.
Marco:
And I figured odds of you being willing to touch it were low.
John:
And third of all, you're bad at delegating.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
But I was so wrong because not only were you super willing, but you I mean, it turns out PHP is not that hard.
Marco:
So you learn it pretty fast.
John:
We'll talk about it in an hour special.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And then the rigor to which you and Casey treated this like professional software, pull requests, code reviews, testing, staging.
John:
I wouldn't go that far.
John:
In fact, I have some complaints about the QA process because there were some big bugs in there that I fixed.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
Well, anyway.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
That's going to be me.
John:
My one-person 15-minute QA team of Casey lists failed me.
John:
Well, that's more than I ever used.
John:
I know.
John:
Marco's the zero person, zero minute QA team.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
The two of you, the way that you professionalized this process.
Marco:
It's almost like we did this for a living.
Casey:
Almost.
Casey:
Imagine that.
Marco:
It's so much more professional than anything I've ever done.
Marco:
Which is funny because I've been a professional software developer for as long as at least Casey has.
Marco:
And almost as long as John has.
Marco:
Your boss is a weirdo.
Marco:
Yeah, like I never did any of this stuff.
Marco:
You really, you did it so like professionally and so honestly, I was blown away.
Marco:
So first of all, I'm very thankful that you did all this because I was never going to do it.
John:
You start worrying when I install Jira.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Absolutely not.
Casey:
I quit.
Casey:
I will not subject myself to that.
John:
Both Casey and I have PTSD about that.
John:
Don't worry.
Casey:
I really don't like throwing around that term, but if I was going to throw it around about anything, it would be about JIRA.
Casey:
Oh, gosh.
Casey:
Uh-uh.
Marco:
uh uh yeah anyway so second of all i am so it this is so clearly the right choice to put it on you instead of me because you're doing such a better job than i was so anyway thanks and yeah we showed it on this long time ago my fault
John:
it's all good we got there we got over the hurdle and that's all that matters and uh yeah i don't know if we really need to talk about it too much more because i know a lot of people aren't too terribly interested you know navel gazing and inside baseball and whatnot but and if we do talk about it on a member special we wouldn't be talking about the business stuff we'll be talking about it from like a programming perspective more general type of thing which is kind of also tech nerdy but don't worry it wouldn't be about the show it would be about the software let's see member special john's review of php that would be in there for sure but i think it'd be more expansive than that
Marco:
Oh, I can't wait.
Casey:
Well, I mean, the literal thing we have in the show notes is John talks about working on the CMS and quote-unquote learning PHP.
Marco:
Oh.
Marco:
We got to make that.
Marco:
We got to make that.
Casey:
We got to do that.
Casey:
But I will take this opportunity before we sign off just to thank everyone.
Casey:
I know I do this all the time, but it really does mean that much to all three of us.
Casey:
Thank you, anyone who has even considered becoming a member, those of you who are members.
Casey:
Thank you so much to all of you, and we appreciate you so very, very much.
Casey:
And who knows what new PHP trick John will pull next time.
Casey:
We'll all have to tune in to find out.