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Oh, yes, we will be angry because John is refusing to admit how wrong he is.
And I'm angry that John won't admit how wrong he is.
Oh, God.
So I think I actually might have solved my Apple Watch Ultra band problem.
Okay.
So, all right.
The Apple Watch Ultra, it has a bunch of bands that are okay, that are made specifically for it.
They're all okay in different ways.
None of them are great.
I thought, I'm not trying to be funny, I thought that all of, or most of the Ultra specific bands were really well liked.
Is that not true?
Did I make that up?
Okay, here's the problem they have.
The Alpine Loop.
This is the one that has its cloth, and it has all little tiny loops, and you hook with the metal thing, you hook into one of them to put it on.
It is most commonly seen in its orange color, which I think is one of the best-looking Apple Watch Ultra Bands, is the Orange Alpine Loop.
The problem is, well, first of all, I don't find it super easy to get a good fit on that because of the weird hook mechanism.
You got to keep popping it out and get the right one and everything.
So it's not super easy to get a good fit on that.
And then second of all, it's cloth.
And so it absorbs moisture and stuff.
And my primary use of my Apple Watch Ultra is workouts.
And so that's a no go for me.
Also, the Alpine loops tend because they are cloth.
They tend to get dirty and discolored fairly easily and fairly quickly after you own them.
And so you can wash them again, just like the the woven loops.
You can wash them to some extent, but it's, you know, whatever.
All right.
Then you have the trail loops.
These are kind of like the Apple Watch Ultra version of those like Velcro regular Apple Watch loops that everyone loves that I think look like sweatpants.
And on the Apple Watch Ultra, they look like sweatpants.
um so it's it's fun the trail loops are fine i think the black and gray trail loop with a little orange tab is is a nice uh it's a relatively nice look you know for the category um but still not it's not it's it's very utilitarian let's say um and then the ocean band is kind of like the the apple watch ultra version of the sport band
So the ocean band, this is the one I've spent the most time with.
I have the midnight, you know, the little navy blue.
I have the midnight ocean band, and I think it looks okay, and it works okay, and it's kind of comfortable.
But none of that compares to, like, the regular Apple Watch sport bands, which I think they have a certain look.
You know, they can look mostly neutral, but they feel great.
They're very comfortable, very versatile, etc.,
Wait, wait.
So would you say this is the most comfortable of the three?
Because from looks alone, it does not appear to be terribly comfortable to me.
So I haven't owned a Trail Loop.
I've tried it on the store.
So I cannot say I've owned a Trail Loop.
I own the Alpine Loop and the Ocean Band.
And I spent by far the most time with the Ocean Band.
In part because it is durable and sweat resistant because it's just rubber.
But also I find it mostly comfortable.
The problem is the ridges that it has...
The ridges are on both sides, so the side facing your skin is also ridged, and so usually I will end up with little imprints of ridges in my skin after wearing it, which, again, is not great.
There's nothing stopping you from putting any other Apple Watch band on the Ultra.
Obviously, they don't all look very good on it, necessarily.
That's up to you and your god.
But you can put them on.
They fit.
They may or may not match the metal very well.
They may or may not have the right shape or the right style.
But you can put on other bands, and they fit just fine.
So I have tried lots of other Apple Watch bands with the Ultra, trying to figure out, like, all right, is there a better option than the Ocean Band for general Ultra use?
The problem with the regular sport band,
Like the standard pinbuckle, regular sport band we've had forever with the Apple Watch.
The way the Ultra, it can kind of like float on your... It's so big and thick that like it can kind of slide.
Like if you're looking at your wrist all the time...
the direction of the watch moving up it can slide up a little bit and then it creates this this like gap between the band and your wrist bone that looks really stupid with the sport band because the sport band because it's made for smaller lower watches it kind of sticks out further from the watch body before coming down around your wrist
Does that make sense?
It does.
It comes out straight more before it goes down.
The result of that is that the Apple Watch Ultra, I think, only looks good with an Apple Sport Band if you have really big wrists, and that way it has more time for the band to come straight out before wrapping around your wrist going down.
It looks better that way.
But you, Casey, inspired me last week.
I'm like, wait a minute.
The stretchy Sport Loops that Apple sells, the fixed-size ones,
They're a different material entirely.
Mm-hmm.
And it actually works really well on the Ultra.
Oh, nice.
It still doesn't look quite right, but it's a way better look and fit than the sport band with the pin buckle on the Ultra.
Yeah.
So I am actually very pleased to have discovered this, and I thank you very much that the, here, it's called the Solo Loop is what I'm talking about.
The Solo Loop actually looks and fits and works surprisingly well on the Ultra.
So thank you for that.
I am happy with that.
Did you have to buy one size down because the Ultra is wider?
that's the part i'm so okay so all the ones i have are for the smaller apple watch diameter they're for like the 40 millimeter 41 millimeter size and i back when they first came out i i kind of went through figuring out my size and ended up with with two sides a seven and a six
And I wear the six, I think most of the time.
So I was trying to figure out going to Gruber's article and looking at different things of like, you know, how do I size the solo loop without going to a store for, you know, okay, I know what I wear in the sport band.
I know which hole I use in the sport band.
And I already have these sizes 7 and 6 solo loops that I can test with, but they're for the smaller watch.
So what Underscore... He tweeted about this also, or mastituted about it.
So he figured out that to go from the 45mm to the Ultra...
You know, because they use the same straps to go between those two generally subtract one from the size of the loop.
And that usually fits.
Problem is, I think I'm kind of between sizes.
So I tried.
I don't even know if the 45 sizes and the 40, 40 millimeter sizes.
I don't even know if those are the same.
Like is the six in both of those the same length?
Because the watches aren't the same height.
So if you take a strap of a fixed length and you use it on a bigger watch, the strap will be too loose.
Because the watch is attaching at different points on the wrist than the smaller watch would.
So you'll be off by one, basically.
So that's why when you go from the 45mm to the Ultra, the watch is getting taller...
And so the same length strap, you have to basically make the strap shorter to make it have the same fit on your wrist.
So I ordered the five, but it's a little tight.
But I tried my six from my small watch, and it was too loose by a decent amount.
Oh, no.
So I'm like, all right.
So I don't know.
I think I might have to actually go into a store and figure this out because I don't want to do a bunch of returns and be all wasteful.
So anyway, all that is to say, sizing is still a question mark for me personally, but the solo loop, I think, is a much...
more like mechanically sound and visibly sound option for the Apple Watch Ultra compared to the regular sport band.
So I can recommend it.
I got the Storm Blue because, you know, kind of this navy blue.
It's a super boring color, but it's the only currently offered color that I think would look good on the Ultra.
They do have a nice bright yellow and the Ultra has that yellow ocean band.
But I saw that in a store.
I don't think the Ultra goes well with yellow because it has the orange accents.
And I don't think it's a good match with yellow, but I could be wrong.
I might try it.
We'll see.
I got a lot of feedback on Mastodon about my solo loop problems.
And I think one thing either I wasn't clear about the particular watch band I was talking about or people misunderstood or both.
But the one I was talking about is indeed the solo loop, which is the thing.
It's what is it?
Not floral astamer or whatever, but it's just.
Apple describes it as stretchable liquid silicone rubber.
Now, to be clear, they are not liquid.
I don't know.
They are definitely solid.
And thank God for that.
They would not be very good watch bands if they were liquid.
Indeed.
But then a lot of people sent me recommendations for, and forgive me, I don't remember the name of this one, but it's the same premise where it's just one piece of material, but it's woven fabric.
What is the name of that one?
That's the braided solo loop.
Same name, but braided in front and cost twice as much.
Right.
You're exactly right.
It costs twice as much.
They're wonderful, by the way.
That's the one I was saying.
That's the one I have the pride version of, the rainbow one.
When they are clean, they are great.
And when they are dry.
When they are clean and dry, they are fantastic.
But that's two big wins.
Yeah, so that's the thing.
And so I've been casting about on Amazon, trying to find a silicone, or silicone, whatever, I always get it wrong, a quasi-plastic solo loop to get on the cheap, even if it isn't quite as good.
Because I agree with what you were saying last week, Marco, that oftentimes materials on these knockoffs is not nearly as good as the Apple stuff.
But if I'm spending $10 every six months instead of $50 every six months, then it's not such a big deal.
And I haven't tried any yet.
But meanwhile, my friend Spencer, for a belated birthday gift, the same Spencer that you guys know, sent me a couple of knockoff braided solo loop bands.
And so far, I don't know which ones these were, otherwise I'd link them.
Yeah.
Um, so far, these are really, really nice and they don't seem to suck in water or, you know, moisture as much as I would have expected.
However, the problem with the, with maybe not this one in particular, but the braided solo loop in general is that a lot of people said on Mastodon that after six months, well, they don't break in two like yours did, but they're so damn stretched that you can't wear it anymore, which is also kind of a different, it's a failure, just a different kind of failure, perhaps less catastrophic, but a
It's tough because I love, I love, love, love the plastic solo loop.
And I like, in principle, the braided solo loop.
And we'll see how well this Amazon knockoff lasts.
The material seems good, like it's comfortable.
But yeah, I can't with an honest heart recommend either unless you're looking to replace them every six months to a year, depending on your particular use case.
Not that I want to extend this conversation of watch drops any longer, but one person on Macedon did ask, made a snarky comment.
They said, you know, first, Casey says that the Apple ones are like breaking on him after six months.
And then when third party watch bands are recommended, Marco comes in and says, oh, third party watch bands are bad quality.
And that's the type of person that if I was snarky, I would have replied to.
And I'm honestly not doing this to be snarky, but I'm mostly doing... Well, I don't know.
It's kind of being jerky.
To be clear, I didn't do this.
I didn't respond in this way.
But I thought about giving my typical response where I throw it back to them and I say...
You square that circle.
Figure it out.
So you've laid down two seemingly contradictory things.
Apple ones are breaking, and we agree they're breaking too soon.
But then third-party ones are bad quality, so we don't want them.
How can you reconcile that?
You seem to think it's a contradiction or it's hypocritical or whatever.
But is there a way that it wouldn't be a contradiction?
Solve that problem.
And it's very difficult to express that in a tweet or a toot or whatever without being obnoxious.
So I didn't.
But now we're on the podcast so I can have more room to explain it.
And I'm not the one who said all these things, but I was a listener for them.
And the reason I didn't make a comment because it made perfect sense to me.
And here's how it made sense to me.
Apple ones shouldn't break after six months.
That's no good.
They're expensive.
They should be sturdier.
But also, third-party ones being, oh, bad quality, don't buy them, for the six months that you're wearing it, the third-party ones could be uglier or less comfortable.
Even if they don't break, even if they never break, if they were like Infinite Gobstopper, the watch band that never breaks.
If during that entire time it is not as nice looking or as nice feeling as the watch band, that I felt like is what Marco was expressing.
Oh, the third party ones, they're not as good quality.
Maybe there's visible seams where the mold lines are.
Maybe it's stiffer.
Maybe they're not as soft on your skin.
There is more to the thing, the watch thing about other than whether it breaks or not.
Right.
It's kind of like my cheese grater thing.
It's my favorite cheese grater, but it's got a fatal flaw that they break after six months.
But it's still the one I want to use because when it's working, it's better than all the other ones that I've tried.
That's the way I squared that circle in my mind.
And Marco can say if that's what he was getting at when he said third party ones are not as nice.
yeah basically i mean it's like you know you can you can save some money uh you know by going third party and and there are look i'm not going to say there aren't any nice third party apple watch bands because there probably are i just have never found one and so the ones i have tried i've all been really disappointing and so look if you can save some money and do that then great but if you're going to get something that you just kind of think is okay and isn't that nice
and you're wearing it every single day i don't know i i would rather you know i don't i don't think 50 bucks for an apple watch band maybe once a year as a replacement i don't think that's unreasonable for something that you wear every day i think they should last longer than a year to be clear i'm not saying the apple one is better i'm saying these are two bad choices i'm saying they're not contradictory that's all right and some of them do by the way
Yeah, exactly.
We're just talking about one specific one.
Yeah, this is inherent to stretchy rubber or cloth, both of which wear out substantially faster than, say, non-stretchy rubber or metal.
If you want something to last forever, the sport band or the metal bands, those last forever, basically.
But the woven cloth ones, while very nice, you're going to compromise there in comfort.
Or, sorry, in longevity.
So, you know, it's a trade off.
Yep.
Anyway, the snarky thing that I mean, I don't think to be snarky.
I don't know what the word for it is.
Probably some debate type thing for it.
But it's like come up with the other side.
Like you don't need me to answer this question.
You think you're throwing a gotcha out at me.
But I bet if you thought about it for a couple of seconds, you could figure out from the other person's perspective, how could both of these things be true?
And in this case, it's like, you know, it's what I explained before.
Anyway, I haven't figured out how to communicate that online without looking like a jerk.
So mostly I don't.
Except this whole moment of the podcast that's being broadcast to far more people.
I know.
Well, I feel like in a podcast I have time to explain it and hopefully people understand and whatever.
And I have Marco here to be able to clarify whether I was misinterpreting what he was saying.
You know what I mean?
Whatever.
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All right, let's do some follow-up.
Starting with iOS 16.4, which is not out, right?
It's imminent, is that correct?
I think it's GM, right?
Yeah, yeah, okay.
So iOS 16.4 should be out any minute now.
Expands duplicate image detection to iCloud shared photo library.
John, you were pretty displeased by this, if I'm not mistaken, when this first came out.
Is that right, or am I making that up?
Yeah, I mean, it was still more annoyed by the lack of shared albums, but this seemed like a gap, because they added duplicate photo detection with iOS 16 or whenever they released all this stuff, and it'll, you know, if you scroll down at the bottom... I don't know if they added it then, but there's a section where it says duplicates if you scroll down on the iOS Photos app, and it'll find them and, like, merge them and stuff like that.
But the problem I had was, like, you know, my wife had the big family library, and then I had my personal library, and there was some overlap between the libraries, because sometimes...
I would take everything from my personal library and import it into hers.
But sometimes I would pull photos from her library after I edited them down into mine.
And then when we tried to merge them into one big shared family library, there was duplicates because I was putting things back into the shared library that I had pulled from her library previously.
Yeah.
but there was no duplicate detection in the shared library.
I mean, you could do it manually by scrolling through the photos and trying to find the ones that are the same or whatever, but the whole point is I want the computer to do it for me.
So now in iOS 16 and also in whatever, I guess, macOS 13.3 or whatever the next version of macOS will also have this ability, now you actually can find duplicates in the shared library.
And this is going to help me a lot because I have not shoved all of my personal photos into the shared library just because I didn't want to deal with the duplicate issue.
so i'll test this feature out with one or two photos to see how it handles it according to kurt on mastodon when you do the merge it attributes the photo to both people so instead of just saying like this was added to the shared library by such and such it will say this was added to the shared library by these two people or these three people i assume if it's you know so it's maintaining the metadata about where it came from that like hey this you know multiple people added this photo but it will only keep one of them and hopefully it will do that in a smart way so i look forward to testing this out
John, you chose poorly.
That's a reference.
Artings.com has done some OLED burn-in testing for a long period of time.
I forget exactly how long.
This just came out in the last week or two, but it was just brought to our attention in the last 24 hours.
Sounds like the Sony OLED's not a good choice if you're worried about image retention.
Whoopsie-dipsie.
If you're worried about image retention, OLEDs are probably not the thing for you.
I don't think these results are surprising in any way whatsoever.
So the Artings has been doing OLED burn-in tests for years and years.
Now, obviously, they can't test the TV that just came out last year for more than the length of time they had it, but they've been testing it for many, many years, and the results have not been surprising.
OLEDs have image retention.
They're way, way, way, way, way more than LCDs.
Like, it is...
Maybe not as much as plasmas, but it is a big problem with OLED televisions.
I knew this going in.
There is no OLED television you can buy that will not suffer from image retention.
So the most recent thing is they did tests of the new TVs that came out last year.
And obviously they only have them for a few months, right?
But they do very accelerated testing.
This is not representative of normal use.
They like...
put it on CNN with a big ticker on the bottom.
They leave it on for 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
It's accelerated wear testing to see how it is.
And lo and behold, if you do that, the machines get image retention.
But the surprising topic was testing the quantum dot OLEDs versus the old style W OLEDs.
And the quantum dot OLEDs exhibited what I would expect from OLED burn-in
But the latest generation of, or last year's generation, of the WRGB OLEDs, especially in this particular test with, like, white regions on the, you know, like a bar on the bottom of a news thing, resisted burn-in over the same period of time.
The explanation they gave, they don't know exactly, but the explanation they gave seems plausible to me, is that when you have the white subpixel in the WRGB OLEDs and you're showing white,
You won't wear out the R, the G, and the B subpixels when you're showing white, because the white subpixel will carry that load entirely.
And the white subpixel is actually pretty big.
I don't know if it's the biggest subpixel, but it's pretty big.
Maybe it's about the same size as the green one or the next biggest one is.
Whereas on a QD OLED, it's just RGB.
There is no white subpixel, which is great for, you know, color purity and all that other stuff.
But when you have to show white, that means you have to turn on the R, the G, and the B subpixels.
So if it's a big white static element on your screen, like the big, you know, news ticker that's on the bottom of CNN the whole time, it's going to wear out the R, the G, and the B subpixels.
Whereas the R, the G, and the B subpixels on the W RGB things will not be worn out by showing something that's white.
Yeah.
So the results of this were all the QD OLEDs, not just Sony, but the Samsung ones or whatever, burned in faster than the latest generation of WRGB OLEDs.
This also makes sense because this is literally the first generation of QD OLEDs, and that's like the 19th generation of WRGB OLEDs, and they've been fighting burn-in for many, many years.
So I expect this to improve.
Doesn't affect me at all because...
I already baby my television.
Again, I had a plasma, and my plasma was insanely, by the end of its life especially, insanely subject to image retention.
I remember I'd turn on my plasma, and it would launch into the Apple TV screen with the little rounded rectangles.
Just launching into the Apple TV screen, in the time it took me to remote over to the app I want and launch it, and I'm not dilly-dallying.
I'm like, as soon as it comes up, move, move, move, hit, I'd see an afterimage of the rectangles that were on the screen.
Oh, my.
Wow.
And it would fade quickly, but it was like Marco's old iMac, right?
So all of my habits surrounding television are already geared to not allow the thing to burn out.
I don't play games on it.
I don't show any like, you know, things with persistent symbols or whatever on them at open news tickers.
And this testing that what they said, this testing is equivalent of is if you watched CNN or some or MSNBC or something with like a static element on the bottom of the screen four hours a day for eight months in a row without changing the channel, you'd get burned.
It's like, yeah, yeah, that'll get burned.
I don't allow this stuff on my screen for five seconds, let alone four hours a day for eight months.
So this year there's a new generation of QD OLEDs and there's also a new generation of WRGB OLEDs.
So we have to wait and see what the testing turns out on these televisions this year to see who is actually the image quality king this year.
And also we have to wait for those burn-in tests as well.
But the results here shouldn't dissuade anyone from getting an OLED.
Even in the article they say, like, this is not a reason not to get an OLED.
But if you get an OLED...
Do not get an OLED to put on CNN 24 hours a day.
It will burn in.
Do not get an OLED to play a game with a big bright HUD on it all the time.
It will burn in.
That's just a fact of life.
Get an OLED to watch television and movies with images that change on the screen and you'll be fine.
Another thing, if I read this correctly, and I was skimming it because I was running out of time before we started recording, but if I read this correctly, it also made an interesting point that apparently and allegedly the Sony would only do the like pixel refresher thing in
After the TV had been off for four hours, whereas the LGs would do it immediately upon going to standby or something along those lines.
I might have the details slightly off.
But I thought that was interesting because I guess the particulars of their test, they didn't leave the TV off for four straight hours.
And so because of that, the Sony never did its little pixel refresher dance.
And that also exacerbated everything, which I thought was interesting.
Yeah, well, they controlled for that.
I mean, so obviously the televisions are not made to – they're not expecting this kind of intentional abuse, right?
So it's not like the Sony compensation cycle is bad.
It is tuned to what people actually do with television, like people sleep at night.
Yeah.
This is plenty of time when you're sleeping for the television to do the compensation cycle.
But if it's if it's subject to accelerated aging, intentional, abusive testing, then there's a mismatch.
But they controlled for that.
They said, OK, now that we know that's the case, let's control for it and let's give the Sony and the LG equal compensation cycles.
Now that we know how they both schedule their compensation cycles and it didn't make a difference.
Right.
So.
It's good that they figured that out.
And it's it's one of the dangers of doing accelerated testing that other parts of the television might not expect be expecting to you to do accelerated testing and may not handle it as well as other ones.
But they then controlled for that.
And even with controlling for that, the QD OLEDs were still burning in faster than the WRGB OLEDs.
Which again is not surprising like the white sub pixel explanation makes perfect sense to me like You have just think of it this way the simplest explanation is you have four sub pixels To wear out on wrgb and you have three sub pixels to wear out on rgb, right?
So no matter what no matter what you're showing on the screen You can spread the load across four sub pixels more than you can spread it across three
But still, I think QD OLED is the better technology because I don't want a white sub-pixel washing out all my colors.
I'd rather just have RGB because that is better.
So sticking with my TV, no, I'm not buying the new generation of QD OLEDs.
I'll buy five generations from now because that's the way I roll.
That is extremely, extremely the way you roll.
All right.
We should call attention to Quinn Nelson's really good 20 to 25 minute video on the Apple for the forthcoming Apple VR or VR AR or whatever headset.
Quinn does a really good job of breaking down pretty much everything we think we know as a community at this point with regard to the headset.
And there's a lot, a lot of really, really good information there.
I don't know that we need to necessarily pick it apart, but if you'd like to talk about any parts of it, I'm happy to entertain.
But you should spend 22 minutes and 24 seconds watching this video because it's really good.
Yeah, we had – last time we talked about the headset a couple of episodes ago, there was the, you know, oh, should Apple ship it or not and the –
The industrial design versus operations, like that's the discussion we had.
But right underneath that in the show notes was a longer topic related to that that we didn't have time for, which was just a collection of all the rumors about the features that this thing is supposed to have, the hardware features like.
what is it what does it look like what features does it have what things does it have on it how does it work right uh and this video covers almost all of that so i really encourage you to watch it if you want to get a summary because we're going to delete this item from the show notes after we cover this follow-up item just because hey it's it's available video video form it's a really good video
Especially since the main reason I put this in the notes is because I think there's a surprising amount of stuff in this headset.
If you think it's just going to be like a screen that you strapped your eyeballs, there's way more in it than that.
There's cameras, there's sensors, there's...
I think there is, is there a light on it?
I forget.
There's like, if you watch the video, there's so, I mean, we don't know if this is everything that part of it is real.
It's just everything that has been rumored.
There's carbon fiber involved.
They'll talk, you know, Quinn talks about the screen technology and how much the screens alone might cost.
If the rumors are true, it's fascinating video.
You should definitely check it out.
A few highlights from the bullet points that weren't in the video, uh, or related to what we mentioned before.
Um,
Prescription lenses, you know, a few headsets have that.
The Apple one is rumored to have it as well.
Supposedly they're magnetically attachable.
Small motors to adjust the internal lenses to match the wearer's interpupillary distance so you don't have to turn a knob like motors would do it for you.
All the different SoCs, all the rumors about a little pack that goes in your pocket with a cord that's going to the thing.
you know again the carbon fiber rumor just like tons of things that add cost and complexity all the various cameras that point inward and outward to figure out where you are all the eyeball tracking um quinn's video is great because he compares it to the psvr2 the playstation 5 has a vr headset just like the playstation 4 did and the playstation 5 one is a big step uh technology wise from the the playstation 4 one
But it has a surprising amount in common with the rumors of the Apple one.
It's just that the Apple one is rumored to cost thousands of dollars and the Sony one does not.
I forget how much PSVR 2 is.
I think it's like $500, $600.
But it's in a different ballpark entirely.
And Quinn's video does a great job of explaining how is that possible?
How is it that these headsets seem pretty much almost the same?
You know, the rumor of the Apple ones are a little bit better, but why should it be all of a sudden $3,000?
And the video explains why.
Yeah.
It costs a lot to move up.
It's diminishing returns.
Like as you add money, you get a little bit better quality.
And if you want a lot better quality, you got to add a lot more money.
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So there was a post on the New York Times just a few days ago now, how Siri Alexa and Google Assistant lost the AI race.
And this was a pretty good article.
I think the point it makes, you know, you can you can reach pretty quickly.
To read some excerpts that I believe John has pulled for us, Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are essentially what are known as command and control systems.
These can understand a finite list of questions and requests like, what is the weather in New York City?
Or turn on the bedroom lights.
If a user asks the virtual assistant to do something that is not in its code, the bot simply says it can't help.
Siri also has a cumbersome design that made it time-consuming to add new features, said John Berkey, a former Apple engineer, who was given the job of improving Siri in 2014.
Siri's database contains a gigantic list of words, including the names of musical artists and locations like restaurants in nearly two dozen languages.
That made it, quote, one big snowball, quote, he said.
If someone wanted to add a word to Siri's database, he added, it goes in one big pile.
So seemingly simple updates, like adding some new phrases to the data set, would require rebuilding the entire database, which could take up to six weeks, Mr. Berkey said.
What?
They should make a new Mac Pro to make it faster.
Right?
Adding more complex features like new search tools would take nearly a year.
That meant that there was no path for Siri to become a Creative Assistant like ChatGPT said.
Also, they're completely different, but that's neither here nor there.
Alexa and Google Assistant relied on technology similar to Siri's.
Yeah, I mean, they're just really, really different and work in really, really different ways.
I don't think that's surprising, but given how impressive, you know, chat GPT and equivalents are, it's striking how incredible they seem to be and how here it is that we already thought Siri wasn't great.
And it may be worse than we thought.
Yeah, I mean, this type of thing that you can surmise from the outside without even knowing the details, because the bottom line is Siri was released one in like 20... 2011.
Right.
And we've seen the improvement since then, and the improvement has not been impressive.
So from the outside, it's easy to think...
boy, it must be hard to improve Siri.
And so here's one opinion from the inside saying, you know what?
It's really hard to improve Siri because of the way Siri is made.
It's not because they're lazy.
It's not because they didn't want to.
It's not because it's an impossible problem that nobody can do.
It's however Siri is constructed, whatever technique was used to construct it, whatever way that you would make an assistant like this in 2011 makes it not easy to improve it.
That six weeks thing blew me away too.
Like that, you know, granted things take a long time in a big company, but
rebuild like a giant database of knowledge and rebuilding it takes six weeks like like forget about the bureaucratic overhead i'm assuming it's the processing time like what is it doing and like does it take like 24 hours now because this was in 2014 but either way from the outside we can tell sirius existed for many many years and it has not gotten better very fast so
And again, I don't think that's a problem of money.
And I don't think that's a problem of like Apple doesn't hire smart people.
It seems to be a structural problem with the way Siri is made.
And that's why I think this topic is relevant, which is like, should Apple maybe not start over with Siri, but should Apple try a new approach?
Because they've been trying the Siri thing for a decade and change, and it hasn't been going well.
And other companies are trying different approaches to doing similar things, and they're going better.
Yeah, I mean, that to me, we don't know the details of how Siri is made.
Frankly, for this particular decision, I don't think we need to know the details.
What matters is the results.
And Siri has been really disappointing for most of its time so far.
It came out of the gate and it was, okay, that's pretty cool.
For late 2011, that was a pretty cool thing.
Yeah, very much so.
It was incredibly impressive at the time.
First of all, we had voice control features on computing devices before that.
There was even one on the phone that most people forgot even existed that ran totally locally on the device.
And you could do things like, I think you call certain contacts by name.
It had a fairly limited feature set.
But that feature set I think now still requires web calls that can still fail sometimes with Siri.
And it's like that was actually – we had that like with the iPhone 3GS or whatever and we've lost it.
But anyway, look at the results over time.
Siri was great.
It had a big lead.
And then the next major one that came out that most people had tried was Alexa, which was way better and remains –
um maybe less sophisticated in certain areas but just way faster and more reliable than siri and then you know later on google assistant came out and cortana and all these other ones and siri remains something that only apple executives love i don't even know i don't even know that they do you know it's what the hell oh my god my my literally my watch started playing a
That's amazing.
All right.
You need to stop wearing your watch during the show.
It is multiple times that his interrupted pizza thinks you're talking to it.
Oh, my God.
Anyway, it's perfect that it came in that, you know, a Siri misunderstanding happened right then in the middle of that sentence.
Yeah.
Reminded of someone, someone, uh, tooted at us on Mastodon and said, uh, Hey, I just, I think there was something like, I just got Siri for the first time, but I can never, I can't seem to get it to work.
And it shows a recording of them saying, you know, Hey dingus, uh, what's the weather today?
Uh, and Siri responds by saying, I can't find anything for that.
Or like, I don't, I forget what the response is, but it was like a total, like unrelated to the question being asked.
And I replied to say, you're getting the true Siri experience.
Yeah.
sometimes it just doesn't do what you want to do even though you know it can tell you the weather and you didn't phrase it in a weird way and you spoke very clearly and it understands the language that you're speaking and sometimes it just does something different than giving you the weather and not because it can't connect to the weather so there's like whatever the response was it made it seem like it was trying to look up a song with a title weather or something right and that is an unacceptable level of error a decade and change into the development of siri
You could say the same thing to it every day, and sometimes it'll just randomly fail.
Like, for instance, earlier tonight, I was cooking, and I lifted up my watch, and I said, hey, thing, start a two-minute timer.
And I have seen this error before.
It said, sorry, you need to have the timer app installed.
what on my watch it's as far as i know it's always installed on the watch i've certainly never uninstalled it and i tried it again a couple minutes later and it worked just fine that exact error has happened to me before i don't know how it gets to the point where the watch doesn't think i have the timer app installed when i can literally tap the timer complication on my face where it always is and launch the timer app
But OK, you know, it's Siri is just so inexcusably unreliable.
I hope this discussion is all moot and I hope that they started a major Siri revamp and rewrite years ago because they needed to.
But if they haven't, I hope this gives them a little bit of the push that we are entering this this world of really advanced AI stuff coming out to the mass market seemingly out of like all of a sudden as far as consumers are concerned.
There's been so many advances in the last couple of years in this area, getting these large models and everything and all these cool features people are making.
And by the way, there's a lot.
I mean, we've covered this in various areas, various ways before.
I have a lot of reservations about this new world.
I think there's a lot of factors that people are overblowing because we're in that high part of the hype curve.
Was it the Gartner hype curve?
What is that?
I know what you're thinking of, but I don't remember.
You're thinking of the Harman curve.
Yeah, that's it.
Anyway, so we're seeing a lot of hype for the AI stuff right now.
And some of it's deserved, some of it's not.
There are factors I think we need to consider.
For instance, one of the things that I don't think, and this is kind of a diversion, us, one of the things that I don't think people have really talked about is like, all right, we just came down from the crypto craze.
And one of the big arguments against using crypto for a lot of stuff was that it was just absurdly inefficient with computing power and therefore energy and pollution and things like that.
So is all of this AI stuff.
No, it's not even close to the same degree, but for two reasons.
One, like when you do a query, you know how much computing it's using because it gives you the response in like less than a second.
So even if you were like burning up an entire data center, you're burning up for less than a second, whereas Bitcoin will mine 24 hours a day, seven days a week to try to get a block in an entire data center.
So like the unit of work of like you did a thing and this is how much it took.
Granted, it takes computing power and takes more computing power than like just returning some HTML or something.
But it's a fraction of what the Bitcoin stuff is doing because the Bitcoin is intentionally and the proof of work stuff is intentionally slow.
That's a feature of it and it's never going to get faster.
Whereas this will get faster as technology advances and it's already pretty fast.
And the second thing and the biggest difference is this is doing useful work.
We burn data in data centers all the time.
So it can show us the New York Times page.
So we can pull up a web page.
So we can translate from one language to another.
All that takes power in somebody's data center somewhere.
So we can sync our contacts.
So we can look at our calendar.
So we can send message to each other in Mastodon.
All that takes power.
But A, the amount of power is smallish, and you know it's smallish because it takes a fraction of a second, and you're only burning those resources for a fraction of a second instead of it running 24 hours and giving you the result later.
And B, it does useful work.
We expect to expend energy in our data centers, in our power plants or whatever, in exchange for useful work, like heating our homes or, you know...
filtering our water or processing our waste or like you know moving our cars like energy for a result the crypto stuff was energy for a pointless ponzi scheme and that's why everyone was super angry about it so i i get what you're saying that like yes it is a bigger deal than that but i think the argument for uh for the quote-unquote ai stuff
and power usage is not so much the we're wasting electricity and it's and you know economically you're environmentally bad it's that uh you know it's not that it's environmentally bad it's it is economically bad because most of the things that you want to do with these newer ai things they cost enough money in the data center that it's not economical to give it away for free to the entire world like it is for like you know
Well, it depends on how you fund it or whatever.
Doing Google search costs tons of energy as well, right?
But they have an ad business built on top of it, right?
But most of these things that have AI things, it's kind of like weather APIs, for example.
If you want to make a weather app for iOS before Apple came out with WeatherKit or whatever, even WeatherKit, you eventually have to pay someone for that weather data because somebody has to expend money to get the weather data and they have to sell that to you.
Otherwise, they can't... It's a business, right?
This AI stuff...
it's fun to play with or whatever.
You get a limited number of queries a day, but they can't just make this free for everybody because it uses enough more energy in their data centers and enough more computing and storage resources than regular other stuff that they already have businesses to support that they need to charge you.
Otherwise they're going to lose money on it.
So I think that's going to change a lot of this.
Like, uh,
ben thompson was recently talking about the demo that microsoft did of showing like the ai stuff built into office but people pay for office you pay for office 365 that's how you use word and excel and powerpoint so they're already getting your money but google docs can you know google can is easily added to the free version of google docs because the free version of google docs is widely used and those people don't pay google any money and so it's like well how many things is google going to fund with their ad business can we give everyone in google docs the ability to run unlimited number of
you know, chat GPT style queries, because that burns up more resources in their data center than just syncing where people's cursors are.
You're right that it is not as horribly inefficient as crypto, but it is still probably many orders of magnitude less efficient than a lot of the tasks that we could do in other ways.
So I think it's something that we need to be aware of as we push more things into AI and
And as we make assumptions about AI and its role in our computer life in the future, and as we actually learn to use these tools, you know, and by the way, there is also huge cost involved in training the models, but we'll set that aside for now.
That's an upfront thing, not a per user thing.
And it's also like fixed, you know, you do that once and then you get many queries, right?
Yes, yes.
But if we're looking at a problem that could be solved with a few B-tree lookups, like a basic search index, that's probably better solved that way than training a giant model and then running inference against this giant model.
Because we've created amazing computing resources that we have in this world.
The hardware we've made is amazing.
But we don't have to use it all the time.
There's a cost to that, multiple layers of that.
And so I do think it's worth just having a bit of caution that...
This is a powerful tool, but to always think of it as a very expensive operation.
And so we should only apply it when that makes sense and is justifiable.
And if we can still solve a problem with some B-tree lookups, we should do that instead.
But anyway, going back to Apple on this and wherever the heck they are with AI, you know, who knows?
We'll see how that goes over time.
But I really think this boom in AI should be a giant wake up call to Apple if it hasn't already been.
that siri needs to be way way better than it is and i don't know you know look it didn't take years and years and years of siri being crappy to teach them this but maybe this will maybe this entire like you know revolution and huge boom that's happening in the industry right now maybe this will convince them hey you know what siri should be a major player in this market and it is not even good enough to set timers right now
That's a problem.
That's a significant problem that holds back multiple Apple product lines, that gives multiple Apple products bad reputations, that is a weight on many Apple products in reviews and in competitive comparisons.
I don't know what else it will take to convince Apple that Siri needs to be way, way better than it is, but if this won't do it, nothing will.
I think there was a story.
I couldn't find it for notes, but I think there was actually a rumor story like that Apple is pursuing this, you know, with the more modern language model stuff.
You know, whether it's a Siri replacement or trying to come up with a new product or whatever, that they are looking into this, and I would hope so, right?
But it is kind of a shame that they seem to have stagnated for all these years with Siri, which...
was apparently from the outside not easy for them to improve because they didn't improve it and it's not for a lack of wanting to improve it because i do think everybody inside apple wants siri to be better than it is but would want to outpace its competitors and now that pressure is on even more i do have the old man a little bit for a second here and say i mean this this ship has sailed so i can't do anything about it but
When I see the, you know, AI is being used for this, right?
In my childhood, and probably still technically formally, AI meant a specific thing, you know, artificial intelligence, meaning, you know, intelligence, intelligence, whereas now it's kind of more of a marketing word when a computer does something impressive, it used to be machine learning, and now it has become AI.
None of those things are really artificial intelligence in the style of teaching a computer to think and learn and be intelligent in the same way that like a mouse is intelligent or like a human is intelligent or, you know, anything like any sort of biological thing that has some form of intelligence.
This is not that.
But unfortunately, they're using the term AI.
So it's kind of pointless to swim up that stream and say, well, you know, technically it's not really AI.
It's like, well, whatever it is.
Well, actually, whatever, whatever, whatever everyone calls it, it is what it is.
But I think setting aside the naming, I think that distinction is important because it's relevant to if these things like chat GPT and the Bing thing and all that other stuff.
is this kind of technology useful for Apple?
We're talking about it now because there is a big boom in it and people are doing lots of stuff with it.
We already talked about the image stuff and this is the text.
There's lots of action happening there and it's doing stuff that we haven't seen computers do or haven't seen computers do as well for a long time.
So this should be a kick in the pants for Apple.
But it doesn't mean, hey, here's your solution, Apple.
All you need to do is replace Siri with chat GPT and you're done.
Because Siri, for all of its faults,
has a slightly different job than these large language model things.
Siri needs to, I hesitate to say understand, but Siri needs to do specific things and you need to be able to tell it to do specific things and needs to know what you're talking about enough to be able to accomplish them.
language models can help there kind of in the same like i imagine they could help kind of in the same way i don't know if you've used if you don't want to use the bing thing i don't know if there's like a wait list but i put me anyway when you do i uh i i was waitlisted for chat gpt and i haven't still gotten in but i did get into the bing thing and i have used it a little bit when you type something in the box for bing's a i can't help with the scare quotes ai uh thing um
What it shows on the screen, I don't know if it has anything to do with anything, but what it shows on the screen is kind of like rephrasing what you asked in the form of a query you might put into Google or Bing.
Sometimes it shows it multiple times, right?
It will basically take the big, long, wordy paragraph that you wrote and reformulate it as a thing you might type in a Google search box and then do another refinement or whatever.
That type of, you know, job of like, listen to what a person says and, you know, speech to text, set that aside, because actually I think Siri does that pretty well.
Usually if you watch the words that it thinks you're saying, it understands what you're saying, right?
That is that, right?
But I think a language model might be useful to do whatever it is that Bing is doing that is hearing the big rambling thing that you typed in the box and refining it and regularizing it into a form that then something quote unquote dumber like Siri can understand.
Especially if one of the limitations of Siri is that it's so hard to...
update it to understand new things that it can do because it has to be in a bunch of different languages and you have to phrase it we all know this you have to say things to siri in a certain way and there's lots of ways that you can say it it's pretty flexible but it seems to me that they have to sort of enter all of those ways so that siri can understand you right whereas the language models have no understanding of anything
But they have enough data to be able to say, when I see a bunch of people say this, they more or less mean this.
So if there could be like a language model that could translate from what it hears you say into a specific command for Siri to execute,
on your behalf that would for example allow you more flexibility and saying a big rambling sentence about a bunch of timers and having the language model translated into a series of more rote and you know text adventure type instructions for siri maybe i mean i'm maybe misunderstanding but i'm trying to think of a role for this and the reason i'm saying you can't just replace it with you can't just replace it with a large language model is because language models are best thought of as
Search engines with an amazing summarizer.
I know people like to interact with it as if you're like conversing with an intelligence or it's quote unquote giving you the answer.
But all you're really doing is all it is is a different form of Google search where you're
Instead of finding a web page link that it thinks matches the thing that you said, it tries to find a bunch of words that are a plausible response to the question that you asked, which is basically a summary of all the information it has in the entire world that's relevant to that thing.
It is very much like a different form of search engine, which kind of makes sense that being in Google with its bar thing would be using this.
It's just it's I mean, it's not just a different way of web search because that's the whole point is you're not like it's not web search.
The result is not.
Here's a link.
That's web search.
The result is here's an answer.
But that answer is informed by all the knowledge that it had and, you know, the summarization.
Again, it's not as simple as that.
You can see all these articles about how the language models work with probability models or whatever.
But the whole point is there's no intelligence there.
There is no understanding.
There's no intelligence.
There's no credibility.
There's no nothing, right?
It is merely an input.
The same way that you can do a Google search and find all sorts of BS.
Like you can do a Google search and find all sorts of things that tell you, like,
You should put butter on burns, right?
It's like, no, you should never put butter on burns.
If you do Google search, you'll find people telling you the wrong thing to do, the right thing to do, and everything in between, right?
All of that is shoved into these language models.
So when you get back something that is just a bunch of BS, you're like, oh, this is dumb.
But when you get that back from Google search, you're like, oh, look at these dumb people, right?
Because the Google search results, we say, oh, these are things that are web pages out there.
Google didn't make this.
Google's just showing me all that it found.
these language models are doing exactly the same thing.
They don't make this.
They're just showing you what it found.
It's just the way they show it to you is so smushed up and ground up and presented in a form you're not used to with some stuff that appears to be really impressive.
It's like, you know, one of the examples I saw is all the people who ask it like,
you know they ask it something about does it want to escape or become you know a rogue intelligence and it's like if you had to escape how would you do it and then like it explains how it would do it and the the analogy i saw is that someone has a sock puppet on their own hand and they asked the sock puppet to pretend that it's angry and then the sock puppet is angry and they're like wow it's angry but it's your own hand like you're talking to your own hand like when you ask it
It's like doing a Google search for like story about a robot that gets angry and kills all its humans and it finds a result.
You're like, wow, Google is self-aware.
No, you just asked it to find you a story about robots that escape and kill all the humans.
When you ask GPT, it doesn't give you a web page that has that in it.
But it's the same thing.
You're just saying, take your corpus of knowledge and give me what I just asked for.
There's no intelligence.
There's no understanding.
There's no artificial intelligence.
There's, forget about consciousness.
There is no nothing.
It is just a search engine.
It's a cool, impressive search engine that may be very useful, but in the same way that Google search will return all sorts of BS, so will the language models.
if you asked it set a timer for two minutes and it set a timer for two hours because it thinks that is statistically more likely to be the thing that you asked for or something or like you know like like or anything like that if you say how old is tom cruise and it gives you the wrong answer it doesn't know the answer is wrong and neither do you so kind of like what the job of a photo is like the job of siri very often is to do a specific thing that we ask and
And we're frustrated now when Siri doesn't work and doesn't do the thing that we want, but I also don't want a Siri that has no understanding of what I'm asking and just does something that is plausible.
Like, I ask it to turn off certain lights in the house, it turns off other lights, because as far as it's concerned, that's the equally valid answer to what you wanted, right?
Right.
And the fact that you can correct it and it will then do the right thing is great.
But it doesn't learn from that because it doesn't have any kind of long term memory.
I think they most recently increased and the way they increase the memory is they just recycle the same things that you've been conversing.
And it's up to like, I don't know, like 32 kilobytes or something of information before it has to like that moving 32 kilobyte window or whatever.
You know, this it's not what I want out of an assistant.
I want if it can be a true assistant with an actual persistent memory that can learn, then you'd have something closer to AI.
But it's not.
It is a more sophisticated summarizing search engine that works in ways that are difficult for you to understand.
So people map intelligence onto the sock puppet.
But I don't know how useful it is for doing things like Siri.
Like, in some ways, we get frustrated when Siri says, here's a web page that I found on that topic.
But at least there we know we're like, oh, Siri, you couldn't answer it, and you just sent me to a web page.
And then we know, well, it's a random web page.
If it's a Wikipedia page, I have this amount of trust in it.
If it's a random thing on Reddit, I have that amount of trust in it.
Like, we have a value system built up around that.
But the language models will be just like, here you go.
Here's a bunch of words.
And you never know how to feel about the words.
Because you're like...
I don't know.
Like, you don't know if that's right.
You don't even understand what I ask.
You have no understanding of anything.
There are some words and those could be an answer to what I wanted, but I don't know if it really is.
And if I ask you to do something, I can correct you if you do it wrong.
Like I told you to set a pasta timer for this and you said a different timer for something else or you turned on the wrong light or I told you to text someone and you texted someone else and it's like,
if I can correct you in the moment and it will give me a convincing apology, I'm sorry that I did that.
I'll do better the next time.
But you know, for a fact that it's memory is only like four kilobytes long.
And the next time you ask it, it's going to have no recollection of this interaction.
Like that's not helpful.
Like I don't want a, like a very sophisticated, but,
sort of like neutral evil dumb language model running summarized web searches for me i kind of just want something that's like siri that does exactly what i ask but is also able to understand me when i talk to it more like a human and i hope that something like that is what apple is working on but i don't think that any of this cool new technology that that is very relevant for things like you know google docs and word where you just want it to like
take this thing and summarize it or do this task for me.
Like that's all super useful stuff because you know, like when it's done, I'll make me a table showing like the top 10 movies of this year or whatever.
And when it puts movies from last year in it, you're going to go through that and you're going to fix it.
Like you just want it to give you a start.
Like that's all useful because you are the intelligent actor there who is like revising what you're given.
But if I'm asking for something that I don't know and it gives it to me,
I don't know what to do with that.
I can just stare at it and go, hmm, how do I feel about that?
Should I should I go to Google and look up to see if this is true?
It's like, what's even the point of doing it then?
Right.
I want it to do work for me so I don't have to do it.
Make me an HTML table so I don't have to type all the things and make me an HTML table with the names of all my kids.
And then it puts like a random kid in there.
It's not my kid.
I can just delete that.
It'll be fine, right?
But it did the work of making the table.
It understood that I wanted an HTML table.
It understands what HTML is, right?
Write me some Swift code to connect to the service on Authenticate.
Oh, it made a syntax error and it put the wrong URL for the service, but I'm going to fix it anyway because, you know, like, that is doing useful work, but...
you know, turn the lights on the living room and it turns the lights on on the porch.
I don't know how useful that is.
Indeed.
I don't know.
I just, I hope, I hope Apple started work on this a long time ago and I doubt they did, but I hope so because it's going to take a lot of work.
It's going to take a lot of work.
I mean, I think they might have, because didn't they hire the new guy to take over, like, the machine learning stuff, like, many years ago?
Hasn't that exact phrase been, like, you know, haven't we said this, like, six times in the last... No, I think the most recent one, he was hired away from Google, and I think he was hired in the time frame... Is that G. Andrea?
Yeah, like, when the... Kind of in the time frame when the chat GPT stuff was being developed before it was, like, public, right?
Because GPT isn't, like, with GPT-4, there was GPT-2 and 3, right?
Yeah.
I think there is a plausible scenario where Apple started working on the same stuff around about the same time as Microsoft and Google.
But in typical Apple fashion, they just don't have anything to announce at this time.
I really do hope that's the case.
Because if they hired this new guy and he parachutes into an organization that hasn't been able to improve Siri in a decade, I hope his first thing would be like, well, no, duh, you can't improve it.
You're taking the wrong approach.
You'll never be able to make this much better.
You need to make a different approach.
And by the way, here's what people are thinking about.
the different approach.
Let's start working on that.
I really hope that's what's going on.
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All right, Marco, there's been... Where was this chatter?
I saw this chatter in a private Slack, but I feel like it came from somewhere, or was it just in a private Slack that this all started?
Well, I can tell you where it started.
It started for keen listeners of ATP.
When you hear Marco start espousing some strong opinions that may be different from his opinions in the past, there's a good chance that he's bought something recently.
So true.
So true.
I mean, I'm not saying there's cause and effect there.
They're just correlated.
I mean, I just bought some new t-shirts, but I still think the same thing about them.
No, but what you're talking about... So, okay.
So, last show, in the middle of talking about other stuff, I made a brief aside about how I had just tried out some new cameras for the first time in a long time.
I made some quick remarks about how basically like, you know, the photos looked way better than my iPhone photos, but, you know, a little harder to use or whatever.
And then I moved on.
I didn't want to get into a whole thing about what the cameras were, why we had them.
They were actually really for TIFF, not for me, but I just played with them.
And so anyway, we've got a whole bunch of people asking, what were the cameras?
Everybody wants me to tell you this.
So, okay.
This shouldn't be a huge surprise to anybody watching the camera.
By the way, just coincidentally, yesterday it was announced that Amazon is killing dpreview.com, which I'm very sad about.
Because when I was looking at possibly getting a camera for TIFF to solve some requests she had made, that's the very first place I went.
Amazon bought DP Review a million years ago.
They've owned them for quite some time.
And Amazon, like much of the tech business, is going through massive layoffs and cuts and things like that.
And so apparently they're killing DP Review.
And frankly, that's very sad to me because that site's been there a very, very long time.
It has always had really good info.
And...
I think it kind of shows how much the camera market has contracted and how much the retail market and retail environment have changed that a really great site dedicated to reviewing cameras is not worth its owners keeping alive anymore.
And yes, it's a part of a much bigger picture thing going on Amazon right now and the tech business as a whole, you know, with cutting things and layoffs and everything.
But
I think this is kind of a mark in history.
We're losing a pretty substantial site, and while I think it was not at its peak, I think it had a lot of value over time, and it's really sad that it's going to be shuttered.
and that it might not even possibly be left up like i hope i hope amazon at least finds it in their in their hearts and wallets to like leave the site up like you know leave the content there don't pull it all down because there's people are archiving it now but that's good i i think basically the i mean yes amazon is getting rid of this but this this site deserves to be owned by somebody that cares about cameras amazon doesn't uh and at this point
Amazon, a company the size of Amazon can't justify keeping around the best photography website, right?
But that doesn't mean the best photography website is not a viable business.
It's just not Amazon.
It's just not worth it to Amazon.
It's too small potatoes for Amazon, right?
But it's like the worst.
That's why you don't want big companies to own things.
OK, so it's small potatoes for Amazon, but it's still the best photography website on the Internet.
Somebody who cares about cameras should own it because you can still make money from it.
Right.
It's just a smaller number of people.
But those people are still very interested.
It's like, you know, a model train website or whatever.
Most people don't like model trains, but there's enough to sustain one really good website on the Internet for it.
Anyway, the people who did the YouTube channel that I watched all the time, they are moving to Petapixel.
Uh, so if you want to still follow them, they'll still be on YouTube just, uh, somewhere else.
And I think that YouTube channel was pretty popular.
And I think somebody somewhere who cares about cameras or has some correlated business, like, you know, B and H photo video or whatever, somebody should, I mean, Amazon's not selling, I guess maybe they tried to sell, uh,
I would love it for someone to scoop this up.
Please give me all the archives of DP review and the website and the business and the employees.
And I'll make a go of it because even though it's not big enough for Amazon to care about it, if as long as you can still make a viable business, maybe with fewer employees or something with a popular YouTube channel,
it's it's a valuable resource that i think you they could be making more money than they were under amazon and it's still you know it's still worth having it's not like well cameras are not popular enough for there to be a really good website sorry no they're still popular enough they're popular enough to be sold on amazon.com they're popular enough to be bought by people like marco and me and occasionally casey uh i still think there should be a good website so i really hope this works out better sorry for the derail
No, it's fine.
This whole topic is a derail.
Anyway, the departure of DPReview soon is sad.
But at the same time, I hadn't visited the site in many, many years because I hadn't been in the market to buy a camera in many, many years.
and maybe that's part of the problem that maybe a lot of people haven't been in the market to buy cameras in many many years and and so i'm in the market to buy one but i watch all the youtube videos so there's always lucky lose yeah true but anyway the reason we were looking at a camera this is all john gruber's fault um because he he had he had gotten recently um the ricoh gr3x and gruber's been shooting ricoh gr cameras forever like for is that how you pronounce it
is it rico i've always said rico but honestly i've never heard anyone say it out loud it's probably rico i think it's rico i am not particularly confident i'm correct about that anyway that company the gr3x it's very similar there's a gr3 and a gr3x i think the only difference is the is the focal length of the fixed lens the uh three is a little more wide angle the 3x is about a 40 millimeter equivalent
um which is a real which is really nice and that and tiff loves tiff's favorite focal length to shoot general purpose is 40 millimeters so she'd express some interest in you know playing with this um we we occasionally will have uh some reason to use a big camera or somebody else will have a big camera like at some event that we are at and we'll see the pictures and we'll be like damn those look really good
I wish we carried our big cameras more often, and we just don't.
We hardly ever use them outside of specialty needs like the super long lens to try to shoot whales or the Christmas time, like Christmas morning, we'll take out the camera and shoot everyone opening their presents and everything.
But it's not a common thing by any means.
For the most part, we're just using our phones almost entirely full-time as our cameras.
As the iPhone cameras have gotten better, they're just so damn convenient.
But when you look at the pictures they take versus pictures that bigger dedicated cameras take, the bigger camera pictures are way better.
Not in every case, not in every set of conditions, but when the big camera has good conditions,
Compare that to the iPhone in also good conditions.
The big camera does look way better.
They look less processed, less over-sharpened, less paint relief from the noise reduction algorithms and stuff.
You can get better optics.
You can get different optics.
You can get different trade-offs.
The pictures do look way, way better.
And I think there's a role in our life to have both, hopefully, because while the iPhone captures lots and lots and lots of day-to-day stuff,
I also don't want there to not be like any good quality pictures of our family for like, you know, two years at a time.
So I do think there's a better balance to be struck than all phone all the time because they really are really good when you get good cameras.
Anyway, so the Ryko GR3X, I got that.
And I also... I wanted Tiff to try... She expressed some interest in some other ones.
And I did some research.
And the other one I got to try was the Fuji X100V.
I don't know if it's 10105.
I don't know.
I'm going to call it the X100V.
And because this camera...
I had been eyeing Fuji for a long time because I had heard that, and I had seen online samples from sites like dpreview.com.
I had seen that Fuji seemed to have the most pleasing out of camera JPEGs compared to the other brands.
It seems like the other brands mostly focused on sheer technical quality.
And they kind of assume that if you care about photos, you'd be shooting in raw and you would do your own editing and
And so the out-of-camera JPEGs always seemed a little bit half-butted for my taste.
And for the most part, when I was more serious about photography back forever ago, I didn't use the out-of-camera JPEGs for those reasons.
I shot RAW and I pressed them afterwards, maybe, edited them afterwards, maybe, and all that stuff.
Anyway...
For this role, I was like, you know what?
We're never going to do that.
We don't do that anymore.
We never edit stuff that way anymore.
We certainly don't want to process raw files.
I want to just be able to shoot on the camera and get it into my phone's photo library as quickly as possible in whatever way we can.
So out-of-camera JPEG quality is important.
Also, size is important, and that rules out many of the, like, you know, big full-frame Sonys and stuff that we've had before, or full-frame Canons, you know, all this, like, that kind of got ruled out.
So I was looking at Fuji because they seem very well-liked in those kind of general categories.
You know, small-ish, but not super tiny, but, you know, they're small-ish, really great out-of-camera JPEGs, and I also appreciated their...
seeming plethora of manual controls on the camera the x100v has like physical knobs for all the all the like main photographic controls that you might want to adjust while shooting so the gr3x rico rico gr3x and the fuji x100v were like the main two that we got that that i wanted to i wanted tiff to try them both and see which one she liked and i figure i would whichever one she didn't like i would just use myself for random stuff or i'd use as a webcam or something like that
The Ricoh GR3X is amazing at just basics of shooting.
And first of all, it's super tiny.
It is the only one of these that is remotely pocketable.
You wouldn't want to put it in a pocket of tight jeans or anything, but any jacket or any bag would easily fit this camera in the pocket.
So GR3X is the only one of these.
It is a whole different size class.
It is that much smaller than the Fugees.
It is the smallest camera I've ever seen that was able to produce this kind of quality.
And it is remarkably sharp photos.
Part of that is just because it has great optics.
And very importantly, it is sensor shift stabilized.
And in that size class, that's very rare.
And it's an APS-C sensor.
It's a decently big sensor.
Very small camera.
Image stabilized.
Fixed prime.
Great image quality.
Downside of that is that it has crappy battery life because it's so small.
And I found the colors to be a little bit boring.
And the out-of-camera JPEGs are, again...
kind of kind of dull and boring and it seems like the kind of camera that's better better suited for if you're editing also because it is so small the controls are a little harder to use because of course you know it's there's not room on it for a bunch of dials and things like that so a few more things are in menus or or they're relegated to little tiny things so controls a little bit not not as good but you can't beat the size and you could just aim it and shoot and you get something sharp
because combination of the stabilization the good lens good autofocus it just nailed it uh the fuji x100v loved the pictures it got when they are sharp that's a big when though so x100v optically a little bit better it's 35 millimeter it's 2.0 uh but it's not stabilized and
And this is I've done a little bit of research.
It seems to be like the number one feature request for Fuji X series owners.
It's not stabilized and it really needs it.
It's very, very difficult to get a sharp shot with the F100V if you're below like one five hundredth of a second of shutter speed.
Like it's just it's very hard.
the autofocus is okay it seems to have trouble getting eyes very sharp and i try different modes i tried the iaf mode and stuff like that it's hit or miss with the focus on eyes which is frustrating and it's not stabilized so you have to keep the shutter speed up but it has all these like cool film modes and stuff and i was able to find some some settings that i just love the way the pictures look they look fantastic
color wise skin tones they look great better than iphone pictures and even in like you know skin tone rendering stuff like that super great i love the fuji uh rendering uh but the the lack of the stabilization really hurts that camera um i love the physical controls i love it even looks cool it is though noticeably bigger than the gr3x and it is definitely not a pocket camera it is a small bag camera or maybe a like winter jacket
pocket, but it's a different size class than the GR and it shows.
But my favorite pictures that I shot during this experiment were from the Fuji.
But in order to make sure I was complete here with my investigation here, I
I decided after I had those first two to get the Fuji X-T4 because it's very similar overall to the X100V in many ways.
Similar controls, similar body, similar JPEG rendering, but it has image stabilization in the camera.
And this is an interchangeable lens.
So I got the 28 or 27 millimeter f2.8 pancake prime because it's small and it's close enough equivalent.
It's like about a 40 millimeter equivalent or so.
So similar to the other ones and a little higher resolution sensor.
I believe that one's 40 megapixels.
It's like their newest sensor.
And the X-T4 was...
awesome in terms of like handling uh speed the autofocus was incredible uh the resolution was pleasantly higher i didn't test any of these in very low light just because that's not really what i expect a big camera to be good at anymore even though i know i know you know sensor wise optically it should be better than the iphone in practice it's not because of the you know what the magic the iphone is doing anyway so these are all i'm just i'm testing all these in like moderate to high light situations
So the X-T4 loved it, but it is significantly bigger than the X-100V also.
And, you know, some of the controls are a little more complicated, but otherwise it's fine.
It's a great overall camera.
You think this is an APS-C sensor with 40 megapixels?
That sounds wrong.
Do I have that right?
Is it the X-T4?
Maybe you have a different camera.
X-T5 has 40.
Oh, I'm the wrong camera.
It was the X-T5.
Sorry.
Oh, so you didn't have the X-T4, you had the X-T5.
Yeah, X-T5 is the one I had.
Sorry.
That's the current model.
Yeah, I had the current model.
Yeah, X-T5, which is stabilized and 40 megapixels.
Yes.
anyway i had those three um the reason i returned the xt5 was that tiff took one look at it and she's like i don't want to use that because she she was already sold with the two smaller ones and she didn't care about the stabilization i really cared but as i was using it i'm like you know i like this a lot i like the cameras i like the pictures it produces but i can't see myself ever carrying this thing around
Yeah, now you're getting into just the size of just regular camera size.
Like, this is not a small camera.
If I'm looking at this picture, like, it's just not a full-size camera because it's not full-frame, but it's a big camera with tons of dials on it and a thing where you put your eye to and a little handle where the battery goes.
yeah it's very close in size to the like the world of full frame uh mirrorless cameras like the sony a series like it's it's it's in the ballpark of that size it is a little bit smaller but not a lot smaller and so i was thinking like you know when am i actually going to use this when am i going to carry it around and during the during the brief time that i had it i like never even wanted to bring it outside i
So I was like, I think this is maybe a sign that I should not really own a camera like this right now.
But I did enjoy using it the most and I got really great pictures from it.
But I really enjoyed using the X100V more.
And the X100V pictures were close enough in quality, and they were still way better than my iPhone.
And I actually slightly preferred the skin tones of the X100V.
So again, what I ultimately think would be the best combination here would be an X100, I guess, you know, W, whatever would be the next...
The next one, X100W with image stabilization, that would be perfect.
That would be exactly what I want.
Everything else could stay the same.
It doesn't even need the higher resolution sensor necessarily.
If it just did image stabilization and changed nothing else, that would be enough.
That would be amazing.
But anyway...
So, ultimately, I came out of this experience being very appreciative of what modern cameras have.
You know, my last camera that I got was an A7R III, I think.
And that was a long time ago now.
And that one is mostly used for TIFF's long lens and, you know, some experimental stuff like that.
Yeah.
But the modern cameras, there were things about them that I liked that I was impressed by.
First of all, I was very impressed by how incredibly responsive and fast they are.
You know, the old full-frame Sonys were very sluggish.
The two was worse.
The three was better.
But still, you know, compared to the new ones...
you know the the new ones are so much faster to operate than the old ones were these also aren't full frame they're dealing with fewer pixels so that's that's you know it's a bit of an unfair comparison but overall great i was also you know this is my first aps-c camera since the canon rebel series that i used forever ago like since i got the 5d mark ii in 2008 this is this is the first non-full frame but you know still quote big camera i've used
And for my purposes, these were all great.
I don't think I really need full frame anymore for my big camera roll, whatever that might be, because these were all fantastic with APS-C size sensors.
They really have come a long way since the olden days.
And I really appreciate the optics.
Like, you know, one of the reasons why, I mean, you can look at the price and you can see a second reason, but one of the reasons we didn't look at the Leica Q2
Because it's the same kind of category in terms of capability of like a compact, fixed, prime, point-and-shoot-ish kind of camera with really high quality.
And the Q2 looks amazing, but because it's full frame, the lens has to protrude from the body quite a lot.
And not just when it's on, all the time.
And that dramatically changes the shape of the camera and therefore how you need to carry it, like what kind of bags it can fit in.
It makes it significantly bigger.
And having previously owned the very first Sony RX1, which is kind of Sony's copy of that style of camera, it
um i i'm familiar with that size class and it is it is quite large for my needs of carrying and stuff so that i kind of ruled that out just for that and tiff wasn't interested in that at all not to mention that it is like six thousand dollars but set that aside for now because if it would look if it was really great we might be willing to pay that if it's like if it was worth it but it just wasn't what we were looking for so anyway so i learned that these cameras have gotten really good i learned that aps-c has gotten really good i learned that i love
fuji's jpeg rendering it is awesome i'm very happy with it and we continue to use the x100v kind of in like you know kind of toy mode you know occasionally shooting pictures of like the kid and the dog and whatever um it's you know these two super cute pictures um one thing i was disappointed by is the story of transferring photos from the camera to your phone is still as terrible as it ever was
It'll be like micro USB.
Well, no, these are USB-C at least, which is good.
Wow, that's good.
I was looking at one of the other Fuji ones, and I was surprised to see a micro USB-shaped hole on the side.
USB-C, that's modern technology.
Yeah, and they both charge via USB-C power delivery chargers, which I'm glad to report.
I mean, if you have a laptop with an SD card slot, can't you just take the card out and shove it in?
Yes, and so basically, the easiest way to do it
i actually don't have a camera connection kit here um but i was thinking maybe the camera connection kit with like direct into like usb into a phone might be better it might work because the phone gained the ability to import off camera connection kit um a few software versions ago i think like ios you know 13 or 12 or something like sometime it gained that ability um but i haven't tried it in a long time
So, and I don't have, I don't have the hardware here to do that.
So I didn't, I couldn't test that, but that might be a way to do it.
If you're out and about, like just, just put the little camera connection kit cable in your bag or pocket and, you know, attach the camera to the phone and just do a direct transfer.
Or you can do, you know, if you have a computer, what John said, you either plug the camera in via USB and have the camera read its own card over USB or pop the card out, put it into the computer and read it that way directly into photos app.
That all works fine.
The cameras both offer,
a Wi-Fi feature.
And they have companion apps and they're third-party apps for at least the Ricoh that I tried also.
I don't know if Fuji has third-party.
Oh, I think I tried one of those too.
And these all work in the ancient way that we've had forever, which is the camera creates its own Wi-Fi network, the app joins it, and then it tries to transfer photos over Wi-Fi.
This works exactly as well as you would think based on that description.
It is flaky.
It's unreliable.
It is slow to connect.
It is a pain to connect.
And then it is very slow to actually do the photo transfer.
It does work in the sense that in a pinch, if you have the time and patience, you can get it to work.
You can transfer photos, but it is so cumbersome you really won't want to.
So that I was hoping I was hoping that with recent advances in, you know, various iOS capabilities and, you know, local Bluetooth and Wi-Fi transfer kind of stuff or NFC stuff, I figured maybe that would have been better.
But for for whatever reason, it's not.
And I think it's mostly due to just the iPhone and the capabilities it offers.
I don't think Apple is in a big rush to enable easy wireless transfer from an external camera they don't make to their phone, which is sold primarily because it's a really good camera.
So I imagine this is not an area of focus for Apple.
But the experience really is horrendous for for doing that if you want to do that.
And ultimately, that's what keeps me from using these cameras more besides the fact that I'm not carrying them.
But I think I would use them a lot more if it was really fast and easy for the picture that I take with it to then pop up on my phone.
but it's not.
It's neither fast nor easy.
So that really holds back the usage of these in practice, because I almost always want that picture to be on my phone so I can do something with it, whether it's sending it to somebody, posting it somewhere, or just editing in some way.
I pretty much want it on my phone immediately, and I think that's a common need.
So ultimately, that part still is unfortunate, and
And it kind of leaves the standalone camera market in the place it is, which is like it's this kind of increasingly specialized, shrinking enthusiast market.
And it's great for that, but it used to be a lot broader than just photographers and enthusiasts.
It used to be way more mass market, and phones just killed that, and it's not coming back.
But I do wish that enthusiasts who also use phones...
could have like a bit better experience trying to use these amazing new cameras that we have um that that just clash horrendously with the phone world i wonder if camera makers because i i'm willing to blame the camera makers much more than you are because they're terrible making software their custom apps suck uh but i wonder if they would be better served like at least to get closer to what you want is to treat the cameras kind of like your phone because if you're out and about with your phone and taking pictures and
generally your phone especially if you're just out somewhere on cellular your phone won't bother uploading those to iCloud until you get back closer to wi-fi or until you plug it in sometimes you've all seen that thing at the bottom of the photos thing it says i've paused my photo syncing until you plug me in again right and you can tell it to apple's credit rare instance where you can say no do it now wow imagine that um
Well, yes, but that's a suggestion more than it is a demand because you hit that and it's just like, well, I'll get there eventually.
Yeah, but anyway, if these cameras work like this, you'd be out and about, you're taking your pictures, and you kind of have the same expectation you have of a phone.
It's like, well, these aren't really going to be uploaded to iCloud anytime soon.
But when you come back home, you'd put the camera on a charger, and then it would upload them to iCloud for you using, I don't know, public Apple APIs or something.
Yeah.
in other words have have the camera a connect to your wi-fi the same as all your other devices none of this creating its own network whatever stuff and b upload when it's on wi-fi to iCloud directly that seems like something that camera manufacturers could probably work out with Apple if they wanted to do it but of course no one wants to do that because like Apple who uses those computers and you know we've got our own app made by our crack team of expert programmers and
they're all horrendous and like yeah the approach they're taking is bad and the main problem is like how long can camera manufacturers continue to keep these cameras off of the internet essentially like they all added wi-fi and bluetooth but the cameras are still not in any meaningful way quote unquote on the internet that's why they're making their own stupid wi-fi network and it's like just just bite the bullet your camera needs to be on the internet because that's where we want our photos to be or you know even if it's just like airdrop the photos from the camera to your phone so you can do stuff with them like
They could be doing a lot better.
So I don't think it's really on Apple.
I think Apple has done plenty to make it possible for these cameras to be better.
But the camera manufacturers software is not their strong suit, especially software when it comes to networking and not photography.
Yeah, exactly.
And again, it's a shame because I think it would take a lot of help from Apple to really make that work well.
whether it's on the web service side when they're uploading directly to the web service or whether they're bouncing it off the phone which is probably the easier but you know maybe slower or you know more limited way whatever it is like the camera the the standalone camera world i mean look they don't even all have gps yet like that's even gps is still like a a kind of optional rarely seen feature don't worry there's a great companion app that will solve that
This is one of the things I found out when Marco sent me his other camera.
Did you know the Sony GPS thing or whatever that like there's an app that you run on your phone that that connects with the camera and it will like send GPS and stuff, whatever.
Each camera can only be connected to one phone.
And if your phone is already connected to another camera, it can't be connected to a second one.
What?
So I've got two Sony cameras, but I've only got one iPhone.
And so it's like, well, which camera do you want connected?
Because you can't connect both.
It's like, seriously?
That's seriously dumb.
It's ridiculous.
So I had to have one connect to my phone and one connect to my wife's phone, but then it hardly ever works.
Camera software is terrible.
Sony just discontinued, in fact.
It's Sony Play Memories application, which is some...
really misguided attempt to have like an iphone replacement that runs on mac os if you can imagine that like made by sony maybe by the camera part of so it's but they would make you have it and install it if you wanted to use a bunch of other features it was terrible it's like it's like the software that comes with printers right like that stuff like don't use image capture use our scanning program and it's like the worst thing you've ever seen in your life
Sony just discontinued that.
I hope they discontinued it because either they're never going to try to make software like that again, which I would recommend, or it's being replaced by something better, which I guess would be the second best.
I've never seen an iPhone app by a camera maker that was better than awful.
I mean, they're so bad.
It amazes me that they launch.
It amazes me that, like, how do they not crash on launch?
Like, they're among the worst software I've ever seen on any platform.
It's like that and printer software.
It's a real race there.
Yeah, like, it amazes me that they pass app review.
They're so bad.
Yeah, it's really true.
The Olympus one is just as bad, and they've moved the two pieces of functionality I want, which is occasional downloads and geotagging.
They've moved that over the last eight years between two or three different apps.
Oh, don't use the OI PhotoShare.
I don't even remember what it's called, but don't use the A app because all that functionality is now in the B app.
Fast forward two years.
Don't use the B app.
Now all that functionality is in the C app.
It's just so ridiculous.
And the apps are pieces of garbage, too.
Yeah.
I've had that same problem with Sony and with everyone else.
It's just like they keep rewriting the app or we're going to bring our multiple brands together or unify our product line.
And it's funny.
You look at the app store reviews and they all have one star because they don't work.
yeah like they just these cameras need to like understand that there's an ecosystem they should participate these cameras should be on the internet they should integrate with other existing platforms instead of trying to say like we're going to make our own version of apple photos app and we're going to make our own version of a photo editor so we're going to replace apple photos lightroom photoshop uh the thing you use to print calendars and pictures like we're
going to write all that software from scratch for every platform because why wouldn't we why why would you even attempt that like just integrate with with the mac apple platform integrate with windows and you're done like that's all you need to care about maybe integrate with android ios mac windows forget about linux they'll be fine
that's it but instead they try to rewrite the world from scratch like all in a sony branded experience we have to create an account and upload your memory it's like you think i'm you think i'm going to give my pictures to the sony play memories application are you kidding like again i'm surprised this app even launches without immediately crashing i'm never giving in any of my data but it's like well you have to sign in and make an account and install it so we can geotag your photos which is the one piece of functionality that you want
It's so bad.
I understand why on some level they don't do it.
I mean, first of all, consumer software is not the strength of any of these camera companies.
They've never had a reason to develop it.
They certainly don't have the talent or the will or the resources apparently because otherwise they would do it.
But also, if you look at the role of their devices, I mean, a lot of the standalone camera market now is people shooting video and stuff like that.
It isn't just people taking casual pictures and wanting to upload them to Instagram or whatever.
It's people using these cameras as semi-pro video capture devices.
And it's such a different market.
But also...
it's kind of a chicken and egg problem.
The camera makers probably say, well, people buy our cameras so that they don't need to use them with the phones or whatever, or it's a different demand, different markets, but at the same time, it's like, maybe that's because using it with a phone sucks so badly.
Maybe if you made it suck less, you could expand to the way larger market of people who have phones and use them most of the time, but want something to take nicer pictures sometimes.
I don't know.
I feel like that could be a lot better, but
There's also issues like... I think a huge issue with trying to make cameras themselves smarter is battery life.
And not necessarily active-use battery life, but standby battery life.
The camera batteries, they're not...
that big compared to phone batteries.
And the cameras have a lot of these pretty power-hungry components.
They have bright screens, usually at least one screen, often two.
And they're super bright, super high refresh.
The image processing pipeline is super high-powered.
They have big power demands and small batteries.
And to add Wi-Fi and or cellular and or GPS to that mix, which I think you would need
You would need GPS to do a good job of this, and you would need at least Wi-Fi and maybe cellular to really do a great job of it.
But then you're basically making a phone.
And so you're going to need a phone-sized battery, and you're going to need to be charged every night.
And that's not really what that market does.
That's not how that market behaves.
And so...
It would be a pretty big shift for that market to really enter the phone compatibility market in a good way, to actually make a good experience, because it would probably mean having the device be basically a phone where it has its own cellular connection, it has its own GPS, it records everything, it uploads it to a cloud service over cellular as you're shooting, and maybe it can sync it to the phone that way.
That is what it would actually take, I think, to do it really well.
But I don't know how many people are willing to, first of all, buy a cell plan for their camera.
Second of all, you know, buy a camera to begin with and then, you know, charge it every night.
So like you can start to see when you when you start thinking about what it would actually take, you could start to see why they haven't done this yet.
But I have to think that the first person, whoever does it well, if that ever happens, would benefit quite a lot from that, because as we've seen from phones, it's
People are willing to pay a lot to have a really great camera that they can bring with them easily and easily upload to social media and stuff.
That right now is the cell phone, but it doesn't always have to be for everybody.
It's always going to be that for most people, but there is a market for higher-end use.
There is a market for enthusiasts who want to be able to take nice pictures with a little bit more dedicated equipment with better manual controls and maybe obviously larger optics, larger sensor to get really great results.
but then want that picture on their phone as soon as possible.
And that's, I think, a pretty big market.
And I wish they would address it.
But for whatever reason, that has not come to pass.
And some of those reasons are good reasons, but I bet not all of them.
And I bet this could be made a lot better.
And it just hasn't been.
And they could recontain the strengths that they have now.
Like one of the strengths that I think about when I'm at the beach with my camera is, you know, we're talking about like, oh, when you take it with a phone and it's ready available for sharing immediately.
And if you're lucky, it might be uploaded unless your photos app says it doesn't want to sync because it's uncellular.
But if I'm like standing knee deep in the water taking pictures with my camera, the good thing with the existing cameras I've gone from is they have removable media.
So if I took a bunch of pictures and like filled up a card, I can take that card out of the camera, put it in a little hard plastic case, put it in a backpack, put it way far away from the water and then go take some more pictures.
And those pictures are safe even if I fall in the water and drop the camera.
Right, even if the camera falls off the edge of the boat into the ocean and goes to the bottom.
Because removable media, once you get a bunch of pictures and you think they're good, no, you haven't uploaded them to the cloud.
But let's be honest, if you have a big camera with a big sensor, it's not like you're going to be uploading gigabytes of photos from the middle of the ocean on a boat anyway.
Right.
You can take that removable media and put it somewhere safe as you lean over the railing with your camera trying to take your next batch of pictures, removable media.
And it also lets you bring it somewhere and transfer it.
Like the sort of batch processing removable media old world is a strength of these systems, even though it is not a convenience.
So if they could retain that strength while also having the ability to, when you're on Wi-Fi or near-grid cellular, upload in real time, that would make a big difference.
especially for these small cameras that are like portable and more like phones for the big ones i think there's still a batch mindset of like i'm going to take a bunch of pictures then it's all going to be on the card then i'm going to take the cards then i'm going to process them because it's like it's a you know it's an assembly line a professional pipeline or whatever but for something this size like like i put in the the show notes here marco's real and scare quotes but still small in scare quotes cameras they're real cameras in that they're not phones and they're small cameras and then they're not as big as big cameras
but they're also not full-fledged cameras.
So they're bigger than a phone, but smaller than a regular camera.
That's the kind of class where you'd want to have the, you know, get that phone, get that thing on the internet, right?
Because it's, you know, it's APS-C sensor, especially if you're doing JPEGs, you could upload those over cellular if it had it.
uh and i think a battery you know it doesn't have a giant sensor it's not taking 30 frames per second uh sustained for two minutes like holding down the shutter button like the internals can be made lower power and wimpier to save energy and use some of that access to you know they already have wi-fi in them right and they already have bluetooth uh add gps and cellular i think you'd have a very pretty compelling product
You would.
I absolutely agree you would.
And it'd be something I would be interested in.
But ultimately, I don't think that there's a market for it.
And then if you look at the market for it, like the three of us, I mean, I don't know if I'm going to pay a lot for that muffler because this thing would be expensive, I would assume.
I mean, because you're talking about like most of the guts of a cellular telephone without the cellular telephone, that's still...
It's still expensive.
It's still got a screen, and it may even be a touchscreen.
It won't be as fancy or as nice, but it's still a screen.
It's still going to be touched.
It still needs Wi-Fi.
It still needs cellular.
It still needs a place for a SIM or an eSIM.
It gets really complicated really quickly.
And plus, as we've discussed already on this very episode, camera makers are terrible at making software.
I feel like I mostly understand the way the Olympus software works on board the phone.
And first of all, it's gotten worse over the years.
But second of all, it's still extremely clunky.
And that's not trying to get it on the internet, you know, or trying to upload to somewhere.
Like, I can only imagine how ugly and gross it would be.
And you know that the fix for the camera people would be, okay, well, you can upload it across cellular, you know, across the internet, but you have to upload it to the Fuji slash Olympus slash Sony bespoke website that accepts your pictures.
Yep.
And it wouldn't be going to like, I mean, I know Flickr has fallen out of style, but you know, it wouldn't be going to Flickr or equivalent.
It would either go to Facebook or their bespoke place.
And none of us want that anyway.
So I think it would be a compromise machine all the way up and all the way down, even if it existed.
So I would love this to exist, but short of someone who really, really cares, you know, getting the reins and doing it or doing like a Kickstarter or something.
I just, I just never see it happening.
Well, one leading indicator might be for Sony specifically, if and when their PlayStation gets the same clue that we've been talking about here, because their PlayStation, I have a PlayStation 5, which is the most recent PlayStation.
It's kind of like these cameras in that it doesn't understand that the internet exists, really.
And I have the same problem as Marco.
When I'm playing, you know, playing Destiny, let's be honest, what am I playing?
Okay, I did the remaster of Last of Us.
I'm playing Fish.
You're playing Destiny.
We all know.
I did do the remaster of Last of Us on PS5 as well recently.
And I'll take a screenshot of some cool scene.
I had this exact thing when I was playing Last of Us.
I took a couple of screenshots of some cool things.
I don't want to share them with people in the incomparable Slack who are also playing through the game.
My PlayStation is on the internet.
It's connected with Ethernet.
How hard do you think it would be to get that?
It's just a JPEG, right?
It's a 4K JPEG.
To get that 4K JPEG somewhere that I can deal with it on the internet.
And it's exactly as insane as you would think.
Well, I can connect a USB stick, then launch the media app, if I can find it on the PlayStation, because they hide it now, and then copy it to the USB stick, then bring the stick over to my Mac and plug it in and take the camera.
It's like, what century is this?
You're on the internet.
Oh, well, don't worry.
Sony has a thing where it'll upload the picture.
Where does it upload it to?
the sony app there you go so whatever the sony thing is so there's like a playstation app on my phone i launch the playstation app then i get the the photo and i download it and it's just oh and very often i'll take the screenshot and it'll like be uploading in the background and a little notification will come and say oh i couldn't upload your thing to the sony service oh is the sony service unreliable what a surprise
it's i'm just trying to get a screenshot from one internet connected to a nice internet connected device to another and it can't do it forget about the video which it takes in web p by the way if you put on the maximum quality and nothing that i have really wants to deal with a web p so i have to end up converting that it's like you're so close sony right but the thing that makes me somewhat hopeful is my playstation 5 has integration with twitch and
And most recently got integration with Discord.
Neither of those are made by Sony.
So look, they said, you know what?
We should make a service where we can do streaming video games.
Like, no, Twitch already exists.
Just integrate with that.
Same thing with Discord.
They didn't make their own Discord.
They integrate with Discord.
So they just got to figure out, hey, you know those screenshots are uploading?
Is there anything we can integrate with that's not our own weird PlayStation app?
Yes, there is.
You can upload it to Google Drive, to Dropbox, to like there's a million places you can send a JPEG, but...
They haven't figured that out, but they're getting closer.
So when I see PlayStation have Twitch and Discord integration, I think maybe someday the knowledge of the internet will filter to the camera division.
They'll be like, could we upload JPEG somewhere on the internet?
And then someone will say, let's create a service.
No, stop.
Fire that person.
There's so many places we could put it.
so like one drive like google all the storage services flicker shutterfly like these people will do deals with you sony like just they they want the same like enthusiast same shrinking pool of enthusiast customers like who's gonna pay a yearly fee to have a website that deals with other pictures the same people who buy your quote-unquote real cameras
That's the thing.
I have a Fujitsu, different Fuji, Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner for sheet-fed document scanning.
You scan a thing in it, and you can configure it to upload to Dropbox, all the different places.
And so I have mine configured to upload to Dropbox.
And so I put a sheet of paper in there.
I hit scan.
And about a minute later, it's in my Dropbox.
And that works great.
And yet they have their own cloud service.
I don't think I use it.
The scanner I had before this, the Raven scanner, exactly the same kind of thing where a Wi-Fi scanner, it has its own cloud service that you can get into if you want, or you can just have it bounce it over to Dropbox.
And that's what I did.
These things are incredibly useful.
They work great.
Why can't cameras do that?
I know that the idea of making...
a camera into a you know cellular connected full-blown phone that can upload things anywhere you are to a cloud service that's a little ambitious i get that what if you started small like we were saying earlier what if just when you plug the camera in at home to charge it it would automatically connect to your regular wi-fi network and upload the pictures to your dropbox or box or iCloud drive or whatever
that would be a pretty good starting point.
It's still way easier than ever having to like pop the card out and put it into an SD card slot, God knows where.
And it's way better than the apps.
Anytime I have to open a little flappy door on the side of a camera, they've already lost.
Never mind that the doors in Sony cameras are historically awful, but no, that should never happen.
Like you have Wi-Fi.
I should never have to open that little flappy door.
Yeah.
So anyway, I hope that this industry doesn't totally die off before somebody has figured this out.
i think it's going to unfortunately it's not going to this is the type of thing that's always going to stay around because there's it becomes narrow and special interest and that's just the way it stays because like it's you know it's you'll always be able to make a better camera with more money and without being distracted by other stuff with more money and more space you always be able to make a better camera so as good as phone cameras get if i told you you have five times as much money and 15 times as much volume
you'll make a better camera yeah and honestly the the x100v was hard to get it like it is in extremely high demand it's backward everywhere people are selling it for premiums on ebay and stuff like it was very hard to get these have followings i don't think the following is very large anymore but there is a dedicated following and if you make a really great camera i mean look the leica thing was almost six thousand dollars and people buy that like
By all accounts, the people who have it typically have very good things to say about it.
So there is clearly a market for this.
It's not going to be as big as the phone camera market, and it's not going to be as big as the past standalone camera market, but there is definitely still a market.
And if you serve that market well...
you can have a pretty big hit on your hands.
And by all accounts, the Fuji X100V is a huge hit.
People love it.
It's not even that new.
I think it's like a year or two old.
You still can't get it because people love this thing.
So the market is there, but it could be so much better.
There's so much missed potential here.
And the Sony in particular, they're what Sony does with their big camera things.
It's funded a lot by the bigger industries because Sony sells sensors for phone cameras as well.
And sensors for, you know, like that Sony's research into sensor technology and optical technology and these other companies that do the same thing.
like they can be making most of their volume and revenue by selling camera things but they're transferring technology in both directions both from the stuff they do put in the cameras comes to their big cameras and vice versa so you know there's lots of synergies there like it's kind of like we mostly sell like affordable cars to regular people but then we have a luxury division that sells expensive cars to people who are enthusiasts or whatever and you know like
And not even just a Toyota Lexus, but more like a Toyota Bentley, right?
And that's the breakdown.
And there's synergies because we learn whether it's electric drive cranes or battery technology, that stuff transfers between Bentleys and Toyotas, right?
Because they're all cars.
They're just different cars and different price and size classes for different customers.
So, you know, you can think of these cameras as the Mac Pro of the camera market, whereas the iPhones are the, you know, MacBook, I guess.
Strange analogy.
I'm sorry.
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Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Because it was accidental.
Accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
Accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Margo and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
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-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-
John, I understand that you are now a surgeon.
An unlicensed surgeon, I should add.
Surgeon, mad scientist.
I think this is pretty much the...
tail end of my uh my audio saga here for now anyway um i'd replaced all my speakers we talked about in a past episode uh my old speakers were very very small like you know some not the size of a soda can but not that much bigger they're very tiny especially like the surround ones and stuff so they were just tucked away in various locations um like on shelves and you know on top of other stuff or whatever my new ones are bigger um
And I also wanted to get them better positioned.
And they're big enough that they can't kind of be tucked somewhere.
So they have to be, I had to find some way to, in particular, to get my front, right, and left speakers
i needed somewhere for them to sit so they would be at a reasonable height for speakers which is a challenge in my stupid room so one of them that's to the right of the television to the right ish of the television it is not positioned in an ideal place because my room is not ideal but i did the best i can um i needed to get a speaker stand for it because the place i have for it to go is
is not even big enough for any piece of furniture for it to sit on so a speaker stand that is basically the same footprint as the speaker itself uh is what i went with and you'll be saying why don't you just get tower speakers then you'll see in a second but the left speaker i don't have room for a tower so i couldn't get a tower speaker there
but on the right side and even even on the other side honestly this is a bookshelf speaker on a stand tower speakers tend to be even deeper than that and so it would be difficult plus also tower speakers would have had a severe family approval factor uh thing going against them because they are quite imposing anyway so i got a speaker stand i'll put a link in the show notes the one i got it's from canto the company i think we talked about they make subwoofers and other speakers and stuff um it's it's a metal thing
right it's got a little metal weight in the bottom it's reasonably okay quality i think it is just like it is good enough quality for the price you pay for it i think and that you may look at it as like you spent how much money on speaker stands well the problem is of course you can't buy one of them you have to buy two because who would buy one speaker stand i only need one i had to buy two um
It does have a place to route the cable.
It's fine.
It's about 26 inches high.
It comes with two different top things, one of which fits neatly underneath my speaker.
It has a place where you can screw the speaker into the stand.
If your speaker has a screw hole in the bottom, mine does not.
So my speaker is just placed on top of there through the magic of gravity.
It stays there.
Luckily, I don't live near where we have any earthquakes, and I don't have any small children bouncing around, but...
wish me luck on that and like i said it's got a place to wrap the cable so you don't see it right that's the right speaker the left speaker is even more constrained it is in a different position on the left left ish side of the television um and i needed some way to get it up to the right height and
but the other stand being in that position wouldn't quite work because I needed a piece of furniture to hold some of the things that were ejected from the television stand by the big center speaker.
So, you know, particularly my Blu-ray player.
The TiVo should really go over there as well, but right now I've just moved the Blu-ray player because I needed someplace for the Blu-ray player to be.
So I basically needed a piece of furniture to hold the Blu-ray player at minimum, and then I could put the speaker on top of the piece of furniture.
And this is a challenge I've had a couple of times.
Most recently, when we talked about the Mac Pro, I've got like I'm sitting at a desk now.
I don't know how big it is, but it's like, you know, I can reach from one end of my desk to the other.
It's whatever length standard length the desk is.
But I didn't want my Mac Pro to be on the desk, but I also didn't want it to be on the floor.
I wanted it to be on a little table next to my desk that's not quite as high as my desk but is off the floor.
So I had to find a piece of furniture that exactly fits a Mac Pro that is lower than my desk and that legs fit in the space available for it because we have baseboard heating in this room so I can't have the legs go all against the wall.
And I spent so long finding it, you know, I really wish furniture websites said, tell me...
the length the width of the height uh how much room you have for legs like just i need to know physically a piece of furniture that fits in this volume and it's so hard to do because you'll find out very quickly that furniture comes in standard sizes 24 inch 36 inch height width whatever like they don't come and just are you can't just pick them like you know sizing well you can't even pick jeans and size because you can get them at
like 34 and like 32 but never like 33 from levi's anyway if only other brands of jeans existed that gave you single inch sizes i don't i'm not gonna pay a lot for these jeans marco just getting levi's and yes i am kind of in between 32 and 34 but i live with it um so anyway i did that before i found this perfect little table that like matches the decor that is correctly the right size of my mac pro is on right now now i had the same problem i need something that can hold a blu-ray player that is
not too high but not too low ideally it would be exactly the same height as my television stand because that would look nice uh you know and it and you know it has to be able to hold av equipment whatever other things i might put there because you know who knows what else will get kicked out of my stand and right now my tivo is wedged between my receiver and the top shelf and i would really like to move that over if i can at some point but anyway i need that piece of furniture but then once i have that
If I put the speaker on top of that piece of furniture, it would be different height than the right speaker.
So I needed a piece of furniture that was similar height to my TV stand, and I needed a little bit more height to get the speaker up to the same height as its sibling speaker on the right.
And I searched and searched and searched and I could not find a piece of furniture that was remotely close.
The best thing I could find was a piece of furniture that was too tall, but there was too tall by one shelf area.
height and when you search for this furniture you find like whatever whatever like brand in china is making all this furniture it's sold under 15 different names on 20 different websites you will find the same thing over and over and over again with different names with just slightly different pictures subtle variations in manufacturing like this is all coming from the same place
So even though you think you have all these options, you don't.
You have the choice of the three things that are made in China that fit this thing or wherever they're made.
It's just one generic factory that turns these things out and then rebrands them and sells them all over the place.
Like everything these days.
Yeah, exactly.
You'll find, quote unquote, the same product on many different websites under many different names.
So...
And in this one, for example, I could find it with round legs, with square legs, you know, a couple of different heights, a couple of different widths.
But anyway, this one, width and height-wise, was close enough.
Or no, not width and height, width and depth, right?
It was close enough, but the height was too high.
And it was a four-shelf unit.
And if you go into the, this is one of the features that Amazon added that I think is actually useful.
On an Amazon product page, there's a section on the bottom that's like Q&A.
where you can see people asking questions, chances are someone asked the question that you care about.
Probably seven people asked it, and you just hope that someone gave an answer.
So the question everybody had about this is, this comes with four shelves.
Can I just use three shelves?
And the answer is always no.
you can't just use and you look at it and you're like okay you look at down try to find a way to download the pdf instructions so you can see how it's assembled and you'll you'll what you'll find is that the the leg segments between the shelves are separate so it's like a little short tube for the leg then a shelf then a longer tube then a shelf then a longer tube then a shelf you're
You know, like this should be so easy.
I just won't put on the last tube.
You know, I'll just leave out a shelf.
I'll leave out a tube.
But no, because the way these things work is there is a stainless steel rod with threads on the top and the bottom that runs through the whole leg.
It screws into the top and it screws into the bottom.
And that tension as you tighten it is what holds the whole thing together because it's just like a bunch of metal tubes with a threaded rod between them.
And the rod is only threaded in one inch of the top and one inch of the bottom.
The rest of the rod is not threaded.
So I bought this thing knowing that it was too high, but also knowing that if I could omit one of the shelves, it would be pretty much the right height.
Then I ordered some threaded rod from another company, which is a lot harder to find than a piece of furniture.
Well, the first thing I did was I went to like a local hardware store to try to find threaded rod.
And I brought with me the thing that it will thread into, like one of the little feet that it comes with.
And I was so disappointed in the manual.
I'm like, please, manual, tell me what size the threads are on this thing.
But the manual does not.
So I just went there and I tried all the different threaded rod and none of it fit.
And I'm like, because all the threaded rod was, whatever, imperial measures, non-metric.
And I'm like, this threaded rod has got to be metric.
So eventually I figured out it is metric.
What was the size?
It was like...
m6-1 m6-1.0 is the metric threading that's on the thing so i went on the internet because i did i being at the hardware store were useful because of the hardware store they have like hey try on your thing on these different threads and you could find out which of these things it is so i did find out what size it was at the hardware store but they didn't have that kind of threaded rod there so i ordered online four pieces of stainless steel threaded rod in the m6-1 size they arrived at my house and
And then I had to cut them to the right height.
Exactly the right height.
Because... Four times you had to cut four different rods?
Yeah.
And the height is key because, like, this is, you know, it's a threaded rod.
It screws in, like, a quarter of an inch into the top and then maybe, like, a half an inch into the bottom.
Right?
So you don't have a lot of wiggle room.
It has to reach, but it also has to be the right length so that you can tighten it up.
Right?
So it has to be fairly exact.
Right?
so here i am in my garage without the proper tools i don't even have i don't even have a vice do you want to have a vice i have multiple vise what's the plural yeah i've never used one for woodworking though yeah like i use it for like other random crap but i yeah like one of them holds it's a long story one of them holds my flagpole mount to my deck rail it's a whole thing are you thinking of a c-clamp or a vice
oh no i guess i'm thinking of a c clamp yeah i have many c clamps i have zero vise i know i need my dad had a workshop when i was a kid and he always had he had a vice in there he had two vices one for woodworking he had a metal one like you can you can buy a vice i don't have one i need one why do you need a vice it's much easier to cut threaded rod when you have something to hold it still for you
And then what would you cut threaded rod with?
Well, ideally, I'd have a cutting wheel that would just, you know, make a nice, you know, come through the thing.
I do have a Dremel tool.
Don't have any cutting wheels.
I could have bought all this stuff when I was at the hardware store.
I'm trying to control costs here.
If you start adding up the cost, we'll have links in the show notes.
If you start adding up the cost of all this stuff, it's like you paid how much for a table to hold your Blu-ray player?
it's like well you don't understand the threaded rod and then i had to buy the dremel tool then i had to buy the cutter so i'm like no i'm gonna do this with the tools i have available the tools i have available are me my hands and a hacksaw that's older than all my children combined delightful this is like how i like i cut all my holes with a drill like including things that are way bigger than a drill should be able to cut but it's like that's the tool i know how to use it's like
and this is the kind of thing like this is the kind of need where you know you need something very specific for you and i mean you this is always your need but like you know something something very specific it's like i wish i was a woodworker because i could just build my ideal tv stand like it's like i mean maybe maybe it would look like crap if i was if i was not a great woodworker but i probably wouldn't be but you gotta build seven seven tables first and the eighth one will look good after you've bought three thousand dollars worth of equipment
Right.
But it's like, I feel like, you know, in the same way that oftentimes people kind of marvel at the ability of programmers to be like, oh, you can just have an idea for an app and then just make it.
Like, and that seems like magic to other people.
To me, it seems like magic to do that in the physical world because I can't do any of those things.
Well, the programming is a great example because that program that you can do now is not what you could do the first year you were learning programming.
you have like practice programming for 25 years and then you can just make the idea you think of and it's still hard right and so it's the same thing with woodworking it's like and and think of all the macs you had to buy in the meantime like and in this case this is not beyond my skills i know exactly what i would use to actually do this i was but i don't have those things i don't have a vice i don't have a cutting wheel i don't even have a good hacksaw i could have bought all those things but they cost money i'm like no stop it just use what you have get by with what you have
So I did.
So there I am in the garage with my threaded rod that I'm physically holding as best I can as I try to cut it with a hacksaw.
If anybody who's ever actually done this knows how terrible this is and how it's just like a challenge on a reality show.
Like this is not the right way to do it.
If you've ever tried to cut through, you know, a quarter inch stainless steel rod that you are holding with your hand.
Oh, and by the way, it's threaded, so it's nice and sharp and everything.
Yeah.
In a way, remember, at the end of this, what you have to be left with is something that you can screw something onto.
So it's not like you can just willy nilly like, you know, you ever try to cut something with a hacksaw.
It's like, oh, it's jumping out all over the place.
And it's just, you know, because if the hacksaw rubs against the threads, it's going to screw them up and you're not going to screw something onto it.
And you don't have a lot of length to play with because if you screw it up, it's not like you can recut it back farther because it has to be exactly the right length.
So I very carefully and laboriously cut through this in what must have been 10,000 strokes back and forth with my dull hacksaw on this thing.
And then when I was done with it, then I used my Dremel tool with a grinding bit, which I did have.
I didn't have a cutting bit.
It's not Dremel branded.
It was some other thing.
Anyway.
use that to smooth off the metal and then test fit grind down a little bit smooth off the metal test fit until eventually i could thread something onto it repeat that four times this was an all-day activity you don't just to get four pieces of threaded rod honestly if you had the right tools this is a five minute job
Right.
For me, it's literally all day, but I saved money.
So then I went in and assembled the thing and omitted the shelf and put it in place.
And now I had a piece of furniture that could hold my Blu-ray player.
I also had to rewrite all the wires and everything, but I can handle that part.
Um,
It's pretty much the same height as my TV stand that fits into the little spot and kind of matches the decor.
Although my daughter did say she thought I should have gotten the rectangle legs instead of the round one.
But it's like, what can you do?
And now finally, I need something to go on top of that thing.
to make my speaker on the left the same height as the one on the right and lo and behold through the the magic of christmas or the magic of i don't know whatever magic this is canto the same company that made my speaker stands also makes smaller speaker stands and the smaller speaker stands the canto sp6 which are six inches high the smaller speaker stands
on top of the piece of furniture that I cut down with new pieces of threaded rod almost exactly equals the height of the big speaker stand.
It was a Christmas miracle.
So of course I had to buy two of them and they were also horrendously expensive.
And now I have one tall and one short speaker stand that I have no use for, but someday I might.
So I was very excited by this because this almost never happens that I took a flyer on buying this piece of furniture and buying this threaded rod to try to make a piece of furniture that I wanted and it worked.
And then I found the same branded matching exact speaker stand for left and right that added to my furniture, make something that is within a half an inch of each other.
And it was very exciting.
i would show you a picture of it but it's you everyone would just throw up about the positioning of the speakers i'm doing the best i can in the room that i have but i'm happy with it um the only other thing that i still have a question about is i didn't route the cable through the smaller one because i felt like the cable just it's so short that the routing of it would make would make it look uglier like it would go in and up and out and around versus just connecting to the back of the speaker it's only six inches high so
Anyway, links to all these will be in the show notes.
If you want speaker stands, I can recommend these as adequate for the price that is charged.
They are not great, but they are also not bad.
I was afraid I would get speaker stands and they would be just like weak, wimpy metal that would fall over and wobble or whatever.
These have like adjustable rubber feet on them, which is really important for my house that doesn't have level floors.
And they match each other and they have cable routing and they're made of thick, heavy metal and they have nice pads on top of them.
So...
I think the only thing I have left now is the replacement subwoofer because I did sell my old 5.1 setup and the subwoofer went with it.
So now I have an empty spot ready for a replacement subwoofer to go in there.
But in the meantime, no one in the family is complaining about lack of base.
So maybe it's just me wanting to blow the house down when I watch blockbuster movies.
i'll work on that for the future maybe i'll use some of the money i'm getting selling all my old av equipment because i sold my old receiver and i sold my old 5.1 system i think i'm probably gonna go up to the attic and start pulling a marco and like finding like old ipads and stuff to see if i can exchange them to apple for some money if they're still good because i'm trying to uh
trying to turn all my old junk into some spending cash so i can uh have a little bit of extra money for the sound system but i think i'm pretty much at a not at the end but at a good stopping point and we're the family is enjoying the new setup all right so that's the family is experiencing the new setup i am enjoying when watching television with the family but most importantly the family is not complaining about the new setup
That's a success.
That's important.
If they don't say, this sounds weird.
I don't like this.
I can't hear what they're saying.
No one says anything.
And it's not because they're sparing my feelings.
Believe me, because if they had any issues with it, they would let me know.
So I feel like this has been a big success that I have a thing that I enjoy that no one else in the family complains about.
And we've been watching, you know, maybe just be correlation, but we have been watching more television shows as a family in the quote unquote good TV room instead of like watching it in a bedroom or an iPad.
So I feel like this has been a great success.
Yeah, that's a win.
Well, congratulations on all of your glory.
Yeah, maybe I can sell individual speakers.
I'm never going to sell these individual speaker stands because someday, like when I move to my retirement home, I'll be like, finally, I can use my two equal size speaker stands.
I just don't know if it's going to be the small ones or the big ones.