Sent Without Pants
But the British are going to love this title.
Yeah.
Oh, I didn't even think about that.
That's fine.
They know how to... They do code switching.
Oh, I'm on my Mac Mini now.
I'm on my new setup.
My new, new, new setup.
So I kind of restored my iMac's installation onto this with a few minor exceptions so it would fit.
But otherwise, it's mostly the iMac installation.
And I kind of regret doing that.
Because it's like I inherited all of the cruft from my old desktop installation.
And I had been using my, like, nice, clean, fresh install on the MacBook Air as my only OS for, I mean, what was that, like, about a month and a half or so?
So I'm kind of like, oh, I kind of – first of all, I kind of miss the MacBook Air as my primary.
And there are some reasons why I'm going to keep the Mac mini as the primary for now, but I might do a clean install.
And honestly, like going back to two computers again, it is feeling a little bit more of like a burden than like a worthwhile gain this time, you know, because like they're so similar.
They're basically the same computer, but now I just have more ports on it.
So, but, you know, but the Thunderbolt docks were good enough at the port thing that I don't necessarily need that.
But there are some reasons why I benefit from having a desktop in our current situation in life and what our household needs here.
I'm going to keep it this way, but honestly, the MacBook Air is so good and so similar in its capabilities that...
um i might like i don't know down the road like we'll see how our needs change with you know like we kind of have to share the podcasting equipment and stuff like that and so like we have some you know certain needs here that i really benefit from the desktop but it is really tempting to just go to one computer and have that one computer just be that macbook air because that's what i was doing for a while and it was fine it was great uh so we'll see we'll see what the future holds
It's fascinating to me that Mr. I hate laptops.
I don't like laptops at all.
Give me my desktop, pride for my cold.
Well, I guess that's more John on the give me my desktop, pride for my gold dead hands part.
But you were very devout in your belief that laptops were not really for you.
And here it is, one different CPU.
And suddenly the world has changed.
The skies have opened.
The sun is shining down.
The angels are singing.
Yeah.
It's a whole new world, Marco.
I mean, in all fairness, it's a heck of a CPU.
It's no small change.
It's like when you go from Windows to Mac, it's like it's just an OS.
That's kind of a big deal.
and uh and yeah so in this case like it is it is a pretty important cpu change and i was reminded when you were like you're social at like you hate laptops i remember that scene in um in clerks like like i work at a video store but like i want to go to a good video store it's like i hate crappy laptops like i
I don't hate good laptops.
This is a really good laptop.
It's the best laptop I've ever had.
I don't even like good laptops.
I know.
That's fair.
But really, so much of what made laptops suck in the past...
is either gone or greatly minimized with this one and a lot of that's temporary like the there will presumably still be a larger performance gap between desktops and laptops once the desktops are all updated and that's why like this is kind of a unique time to be a mac user right now because right now the best mac they sell is the macbook air
That presumably won't be the case in six months, maybe, or maybe less, maybe more.
But as soon as they release the iMac, probably, whenever that's coming, spring, summer, whenever it is, that's probably going to have whatever the M1X or similar is.
And that's probably going to be faster.
And it's going to have a lot of built-in ports.
And it's going to have probably more GPU power.
And it's going to have the great new design and everything.
So certainly the shine will wear off on this basic entry-level Apple Silicon Mac once the newer, higher-end ones come out.
And there will come a time where we'll rationalize upgrading to one of those, I'm sure.
But...
But you.
Yeah, right.
But like, right.
That's why this is why I keep trying to sell people on the MacBook Air, because like it's such a cool thing right now that the lowest end laptop is the best laptop in the lineup.
That's such a cool thing that is almost never the case.
And really, for most of my needs, it's like all these M1 computers are totally fine.
I have yet to hear the fan in the Mac Mini.
And yeah, it's just these are fantastic computers.
And it just makes me so excited that soon these are going to be considered the low end because the high end is going to be even better than these.
This is just such a great time to use a Mac.
So actually, let me pawn that thread for a second.
Do you suspect that the high-end of any of these devices... So I'm eliminating the Mac Pro.
Let's leave that aside because it's kind of its own weird one-off.
Do you think the high-end Mac Mini, do you think the high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro, do you think they will be that much faster than the things that are out now?
Because, you know, history and momentum makes me think, sure, of course it would be considerably faster.
That's the way these things work.
But...
What if it's not?
What if the differences really do boil down to just port configurations and touch bars or not and screen sizes or not?
I mean, what if we end up with a real iPhoneification of, let's say, the laptop line where really you're not choosing what processor.
You don't choose what processor you're getting in an iPhone.
You're choosing what screen size you want.
You're choosing whether or not, or at least in years past, you're choosing whether or not you want a home button and things of that nature.
Do you reckon that the next, whatever the next processor is, it will be a, you know, a bump from the M1 and it won't be that big.
And even the top of the line, even if there's like a brand new iMac pro, it's still powered by an M1 with maybe a couple more cores or some, some special sauce.
You know what I mean?
Like, I don't know if it's still going to be that way.
I think what we're going to see is single core performance is probably going to be pretty similar across every generation.
So M1 anything, M1X, M1, like, you know, whatever, like, however they like make the chip like bigger and wider for the higher end models.
I suspect single threaded performance is going to be very similar across all of them.
They might clock the higher end ones a little bit higher because they'll have the thermal and power headroom to do it.
But ultimately, I don't expect massive differences in single threaded performance.
We're going to see that same core being used across the whole product line.
Then the question becomes how many of them?
How many high-performance versus high-efficiency cores do you get?
And then GPU power is the other big question mark.
And of course, things like RAM ceiling might also be affected, as we've discussed.
So I think, ultimately, we're going to see single-core performance being very similar across every model of a given chip year, chip generation year, whatever it is.
But...
we will see certainly like GPU stuff is probably the easiest to scale because GPUs are, are very easy to scale.
You just give them more transistors and more heat and more power.
And they, they, and GPU performance scales up very easily.
Um, and processor performance is close, like up to a point, uh, you know, you can, you can add more high performance cores and make this perform even better in parallel stuff.
Um,
but scaling the single threaded performance is much harder and has usually you hit ceilings on that much faster than than anything else you know even it gets to the point like even if you try to clock it really really really high and it sucks down tons of power you just get you know pretty diminishing returns pretty quickly with that kind of thing so
That's why I'm guessing like we're going to see everything get wider, more cores, bigger GPU with itself, more cores, but probably not each one being that much faster.
And if that's the future we see or that we get, then what's probably going to happen is the higher end machines and everything are
are going to be very similar in performance to the lower end machines when you're not doing either high power GPU things or very parallel tasks, which honestly is not that different from the world that we're leaving with the Intel world.
Like that's, that's largely where it got as well.
If you look at all the single threaded benchmarks of geek bench and everything else, like most generations, you know, like they, they improve the core occasionally, but for the most part, single threaded performance doesn't change that much between, between model families.
Cause that's just, you know, modern, modern chip design and thermals and stuff like that.
So I think largely the higher end machines are going to feel like largely the same until you do something like a video encode or something like that where you're using like massive parallel operations.
And then you'll probably see differences.
This is what we've been talking about for a while that we still don't know the answer to, which is how much of an appetite does Apple have to make things more exotic and weirder for the higher end machines?
We just don't know because we've just got the low end ones and low end ones look so much like the iPad chips, essentially.
Like it's not we don't it's an open question as to how invested Apple is going to be into really wringing out the power from these things.
um and i agree with everything marco said the the interesting part here though as compared to the intel world that we were coming from and in fact on the intel world remember that the higher end you got the worst single core performance got because when you get the 28 cores in there they couldn't clock the single ones to match the highest the fastest single core one was the imac with the low number of cores because then you could crank the speed up but anyway um
In terms of what you can do to single core performance, the advantage that the ARM ships have, doesn't mean Apple can take advantage of it, but the advantage they have is they're so far below the cooling potential that we know the size, class of like an iMac has in it, that Apple has actually the option to really turn the screws on it and crank it up to an absurd degree because they're like, look, we've got this giant case.
We know we can put huge fans in there that aren't actually that loud.
we have so much headroom even if it's like marco said it's going to be diminishing returns it's not a linear ramp but but it's like but we've got all this headroom and are we really going to like essentially make a fanless imac we could because if the case is so big and you could just put a big passive heat sink in there and it would probably be fine or an imac with a fan that you literally never heard like the you know the the current m1 macbook pro and mac mini but
If Apple has an appetite to really take it as high as they can on a high-end iMac, whether it's called the iMac Pro or not, you could also really just turn it up as far as it'll go.
Make an M something CPU that uses as much power as the outgoing Intel model.
And that'll be a massive, like, not overclocking, but a massive increase in thermal headroom
to for for the ship and i don't know where it tops out it's not like you can just keep making the clock speed faster and fast and it'll just run forever right um because we don't know a lot of details like the pipeline depth and stuff like that of these chips but that's what i'm going to be looking at is it's sort of get apple's philosophy
Are they going to say, we're going to take the thermal headroom win across all our models?
That's the most important thing to us.
Like, basically, you should not be able to tell that any Mac has a fan.
They can do that, and it will be exactly like Marco said, where single core will be about the same, multi-core will be scaling mostly linearly with the number of cores if you have a highly parallel task, bigger GPUs.
And the philosophy kind of like the iPad 10 hour battery life will be, oh, Max, you shouldn't hear their fans anymore.
Another philosophy is whatever case we have, whatever thermal headroom is there, if we can dissipate 200 watts of heat, we're going to dissipate 200 watts of heat and we will do whatever it takes to generate 200 watts.
Right.
We'll we'll make a bigger GPU.
We'll increase the clock speed.
We'll add more cores or whatever because, hey, we've got 200 watts.
let's just do it right uh and and until uh until apple lands like their first non-entry-level arm-based mac we just don't know what their philosophy is going to be so exciting times coming indeed all right we should move on with some follow-up um we have gotten so much feedback about marco's ethernet problem my eyes are spinning in my head i
Everyone is, as with our feedback often goes, everyone is unequivocally convinced they are correct.
And generally speaking, they are unequivocally convinced that we are incorrect, which both of those things aren't quite possibly true.
However, everyone seems to disagree with everyone else as far as I'm concerned.
So I don't even know what's real.
I'm not even going to touch this.
So, John, I guess, do you want to tell me what's going on here?
Sure.
I think the biggest correction from last week is the T568A versus T568B.
A lot of people wrote in to bust myths about that, myths that were in that article that we linked and talked about in the last show.
And I think that from the people who know, it's pretty conclusive.
The difference between A and B is which colored pairs of wires are on which pins.
And that's the only difference.
And as many people pointed out, electrons don't know what color the insulation is.
So there, the supposed performance and reliability, uh, and interference, uh, resistance properties of B are non-existent.
There is not, there are electrically exactly identical.
Cause again, the electrons don't know what color things are now.
Uh,
There are two different wiring standards and you shouldn't mix them up with each other because you'll mess things up and accidentally make crossover cables where you're not supposed to.
And all that stuff is true.
But that article, which was very highly ranked in Google, which is how it ended up in our show notes, and many similar articles that tout the supposed benefits of B, those are just entirely a myth, right?
They're electrically identical.
I'm so happy to hear this.
Because when I read the article and I was looking at the wiring diagram between A and B,
i was like why is it what's the difference because like i noticed like okay it says like you know pairs you know like like which pair is split like pair number one pair number three or whatever but it looks like why would this be different and i i assumed that like maybe
the pairs themselves are not twisted around each other.
They're not the same, yeah.
If pair one is, like, diagonally across from pair three versus next to pair three, like, but I'm like, that's probably not how they do this.
And so, but I was looking at that thinking, like, there must be something about this that I'm not understanding because I don't see what, why this would be different.
yeah and i don't know how this myth propagated probably because like b was the new one right like oh you don't you know when we do it for networking stuff we do we do it the b style versus yeah and and again i want to stress if you don't pay attention to this and make like one end a and one end b and then just like it's random throughout your thing like nothing will work right like don't do that all right you do want to pick one and stick to it but whichever one it is it absolutely doesn't matter now speaking of weird myth stuffs in my in my like looking at more uh
research on this and youtube videos because marco mentioned the weird like cat 7 connectors and i wanted to see what the heck are these connectors so i watched a bunch of videos on on cat 6 versus cat 7 versus cat 8 and what the differences are and how to make the connectors and everything at one point one of the people who seemed like they knew what they were talking about because they you know they you know were showing how to make the connectors and giving all these tips whatever they said that in one of the cables i think it was like in cat 8 or maybe it was cat 7
that they change the colors around so in the ethernet cables that most of us have in our home if you open them up there's like a green wire and then there's a wire that has green and white stripes and they twist with each other so it's the green wire paired with the green and white wire right and so it's like the green white wire is like green white green white and little sections all the way down right
And the guy says in the video that in whatever this higher standard was that supports higher speeds, they said, you'll notice that it's not a green wire and a green and white wire anymore.
It's just a green wire and a white wire.
Which is tricky because he was like, here's the technique I use not to get them mixed up because basically every colored wire has its own corresponding white wire.
So there's the white wire that goes with the green wire, then the white wire that goes with the blue wire, then the white wire that goes with the red wire.
And the white wires are indistinguishable from each other.
So he's saying when you're making the connector...
bend them in like this direction so they don't get them mixed up with each other.
And he mentioned offhand, by the way, the reason they got rid of the striping, which seems like a good idea so you don't mess them up in that way, was because apparently printing the stripes on the insulation caused interference problems.
what and now i'm like oh wait this is just like 568 a versus b again printing like the in like do the electrons know what color is it is the printing process change the insulation in some way and so i don't know if he was just pulling my leg with very dry humor or anyway like obviously none of us are networking experts but our toe dip into the world of networking has revealed all sorts of strange myths and urban legends and it's very uncomfortable
it seems like again i don't know anything about this but i would guess like i mean be unless the ink itself was like conductive and grounded or like the process of stamping the ink or the right it doesn't make any sense like like the only thing i can think of is like if the ink has some thickness to it and then maybe it's like spacing out the twisted pair like every time it passes a stripe by how much how thick is the ink
But then if you think like, you know, they have the pairs, the twisted pairs have to untwist for some kind of short amount of distance at each connector.
And obviously you try to minimize that distance to, you know, to keep, you know, noise low and try to keep bandwidth high and, you know, minimize crosstalk and all that other stuff.
But I have to imagine whatever amount of signal degradation you'd be introducing by just having a connector on the end of the wire with that very slight amount of untwisting of the pairs would have to be greater than whatever the ink printing on the wire could possibly do.
Yeah.
And on the flip side of that, though, why would you ever make this change?
Because as the person was talking about when making the connector, when you're sort of separating the wires from each other, you have to be really careful not to get the whites mixed up.
Like if you just have them as a big bundle of wire, like, wait, did this white one go with the green one?
And then you got to take out your continuity tester and figure it out again or whatever.
The system of having green with the green and white and blue with the blue and white.
that's a good system for matching them up right well i would argue though if you get the whites mixed up you have probably untwisted too much of distance of the wire like because again like you're supposed to try and minimize the amount that you untwist to make the connectors and stuff so i i think like if you have lost track of which whites go were twisted around which ones you've probably untwisted too too long of a section well
i mean it's like when you're trying to put them on the pins you want you know what i mean like you've got you've got the eight wires sprayed out in front of you and they're all in order but then two of the whites get crossed over each other and of course remember the twisted pairs are themselves twisted around each other right through the length of the wire are they i didn't know that yes they are so it's anyway i don't know the answer to this networking is weird a versus b there are no performance differences but you do need to know which one you're doing and just stick to it
Oh my.
And here we are continuing with Ethernet follow-up.
Travis P writes, the PowerBook G4 Titanium also had auto-sensing Ethernet.
I bought one in April of 2001, which was before the original Xbox One, One X, Xbox, Box X release.
So the tie book was January 9th of 2001.
The original Xbox, November 15th of 2001.
I just thought that was interesting, but Marco's point still stands.
The device that most people had that first had auto-sensing Ethernet was surely the Xbox and not the tie book.
Right.
Well, because like at the time, if I remember correctly, auto sensing, I think it's part of the gigabit standard.
So I think all gigabit jacks have always had auto sensing.
At least that's how it seems to have worked out.
But at the time, not everybody had gigabit stuff and the Xbox didn't either.
It was 100 megabit port that supported auto sensing.
And that was a very unusual combination.
Usually back then your choices were 100 megabit Nix and stuff that didn't have auto sensing or the more expensive, you know, like 50 or $60 gigabit equipment that would all have auto sensing.
So that's why I think it was weird to or at least unusual to have 100 megabit thing in the Xbox that had auto sensing.
All right, Ted Barnes writes, the 30-inch Apple Cinema display was very impressive at the time for print design.
At 30 inches, designers could design a full magazine spread at 100% with room to spare for toolbars and panels for the very first time.
That was huge.
That's a good pun.
It was huge.
It was huge.
The Apple monitors, the cinema display included, are also known for their stellar color fidelity.
Most print shops would only guarantee color matching when using calibrated Apple monitors using their custom press color profiles.
The print world ran on cinema displays for over a decade from design through pre-press and printing.
You know, even though I don't have a lot of energy to care about the 30-inch cinema display from way back when, it is interesting to me that Apple really did cater to these kinds of professionals in a way that I don't think they do anymore.
And yeah, you can make a really solid argument that who cares about print professionals because print is a dying, to some degree, dying art.
Not a lot of people I know get newspapers every day, for example.
But
I think the point is still interesting that it seems like Apple would do things that one could argue were explicitly directed at certain professions.
And I don't really see them doing a lot of that anymore.
And when they do it with your guys' ridiculous $90,000 monitors, it doesn't seem like it's enough.
Like, it seems like all the real true professionals that are really, truly wanting...
what is it, reference monitors, that they're still not buying Pro Display XDRs.
Do we care about this?
I mean, it seems like it's a bummer to me.
I mean, we know that they let the ball drop on the pro market, right?
That's why they had to, you know, reverse course, right, which they're doing.
But in general, I think ignoring the big dip and neglecting the market, it's the same situation that it's always been, that Apple serves those markets in the way that, I mean, how did it get that market in the first place?
It serves them by basically making a platform
that fundamentally has like foundational technologies that are suited to the platform so to give an example in this case um or that are suited to the profession uh color matching color fidelity color sync like apple made an os level system framework technology api for doing color calibration and matching and that was back in the classic mac os days
And that's a thing that you could say, well, who cares about color calibration?
Well, a lot of the print people do, right?
But that feature benefits everybody.
Having computers that are able to control and deal with color on more than just guesswork, like actually having color profiles and having it be system-wide and having it woven throughout the entire OS –
benefits everybody who uses an apple computer most people don't care as much as the print people do but everyone benefits from it and this if you think back to this era looking at your friend's pc versus your other friend's pc the colors could be all over the place because
Hey, it's a PC, whatever.
You connect a monitor, you connect a video card, the color is what you get.
Like, who knows about color calibration?
And it certainly wasn't baked into Windows, right?
But it was baked into macOS.
And that's true of almost every feature that the Mac has, proportional fonts, the retina, as an example, and the UI scaling.
Like, there's tons of things that Apple builds in
to the foundation to benefit ostensibly you know just people who care about this and whatever weird market but everybody gets the benefits right it's part of the reason we like using max is they have all sorts of nice things and high quality above and beyond what we need i mean hell that's the entire all of our computers maybe probably including casey are more than we need and that's and that's why we like them
Because they do give us way more than the bare minimum that we need.
And though, you know, we don't need to have all of this extra color fidelity.
I don't need 1600 nits.
And, you know, the way retina works, maybe we don't need that high DPI to look at text in a code window or something.
But we enjoy it and like it and benefit from it in sort of an ambient way, right?
So Apple at its best, that's how they get those markets in the first place.
That's why desktop publishing came up on the Mac.
And that's how they keep them.
They lose them by just neglecting to give that market what they really need.
we're not going to make a tower computer for you anymore.
We're going to stop making monitors, you know, you take it or leave it.
Right.
And that's how you lose the market.
Right.
But you get it back by continuing to do things like make an FPGA, a weird, a weird custom FPGA card that is literally only useful for people doing a particular kind of video and building, you know, building support for it into your video app.
That's for professional video editors that you ship on your 1600 nit XDR display, yada, yada.
Christopher Klein writes, I never thought listening to a tech podcast would change my life, but thank you.
As a 39-year-old paramedic, I knew I had moderate hearing loss from almost 20 years of occupational exposure to sirens and other loud noises.
I followed your instructions to use Mimi to create an audiogram in the health app, used audio accommodations with my AirPods Pro, and started playing music.
I nearly wept.
What an amazing difference it makes.
I should try this.
I don't feel like I have hearing loss, but I should still try this.
Yeah, I made a profile for myself.
I mean, in some respects, you're like, I want the feel-good story too.
But in other respects, you're like, I don't want to have hearing loss.
But that's the thing about these accessibility options that we've said many times.
Accessibility is for everyone, including you, if you live long enough.
And the alternative is worse.
So your choice is death or you're going to use accessibility features.
Uh, so you may need them now and you might not know it because you think, oh, I'm not an old person.
I don't have any hearing loss.
Uh, but try it out.
This is a thing built in.
This is another example of like serving the market of people who need accessibility features that benefits everybody.
Eventually it literally will benefit everybody again if you stay alive.
but even people who you know are young and healthy and have no accessibility issues and perfect hearing and perfect vision and everything they also benefit from having an os that supports these kinds of features even if it's just preference of like hey i can make the text bigger not because i can't see it but that's because that's what i prefer or dark mode which has some accessibility benefits right maybe you just like dark mode because it's cool right so just like those pro features accessibility features can benefit everybody
Say you have some hearing loss.
When I took the test, I tried two different apps.
I did the Mimi one and I did another one because I thought the Mimi test was difficult to do.
But I tried a different testing app that was a little bit more conclusive.
But either way, they showed that my hearing wasn't perfect, but they both rated me as you don't have hearing loss.
They did still make a profile for me and I listened with the profile and...
And I really couldn't detect much of a difference.
Like if you look at my little curves, I'm showing like frequency sensitivity.
I think it's just sort of like the expected curve.
Like it wasn't perfect.
It would have been better if I took it when I was 18.
But all of them chunked you into like percentages or whatever.
And I was like the 90 something percent.
So the profile did not sound that different than regular audio to me.
But, you know, who knows?
You won't know until you try it.
We are sponsored this week by Liquability.
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They really are incredibly skilled and they make extremely high quality apps because what they care about most is getting the details right and polishing the apps they make from accessibility to performance to localization.
They're always paying attention to those details and
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And their work has earned multiple App of the Day and Editor's Choice features from Apple.
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Thank you so much to Lickability for sponsoring our show.
Dan Riccio begins a new chapter at Apple.
This was a very unusual press release, which I certainly did not expect.
I mean, we don't typically hear about these sorts of machinations in advance, but this is weird.
So it's Riccio.
How am I supposed to pronounce this?
I'm probably getting it wrong.
I tried to look this up before the show.
I'm like, surely his name has been pronounced in a WWDC video.
but i a i couldn't find anything i was trying to use like apple's transcript search and that was just totally failing me and b i realized that half the time it's just like tim says and now here's dan yeah right he never pronounces the last name all right so from from the press release apple today announced that old danny boy will transition to a new role focusing on a new project and reporting to ceo tim cook building on more than two decades of innovation service and leadership at apple
John Ternus will now lead Apple's hardware engineering organization as a member of the executive team.
This press release was a little weird.
It seemed to bounce back and forth between Dan and John.
But I guess what we're gleaning from this is that Dan is going into a bunker and will only come out when something new has emerged.
Or at least that's kind of what I took from it.
What did you guys take from this?
i took the same thing as you did i mean it's it doesn't sound like dan richie was being promoted into the sky or onto the roof it sounds like he actually is like going like not not reducing his role but simply changing it um and you know and that makes sense like i i mean i don't know that much about like the you know various machinations how do you pronounce that of a
of um of this area of apple but uh i don't think dan riccio would be like slated for retirement yet or anything like that um or have any reason to be pushed out or anything like that so i don't think this is any kind of like negative thing in all likelihood that that seems unlikely so it is most likely that
they're actually not BSing us with this wording and that he actually is just going to something super secret and therefore having to give up the fairly broad role that he had, you know, like it, it, it would be hard to continue in the role he had, which was kind of like above all hardware and,
if what he was actually doing was going to do something, some kind of big new hardware thing that was one specific product.
And that's basically what they're saying here.
And we can debate what that product might be.
It seems obvious that it's most likely either a car or the AR stuff.
But honestly, I'm not even sure how much that matters right at this point.
But I do actually believe...
this press release and the way they have like spun this, I think sounds like it's probably like fairly accurate and, and not a bad thing.
And, and, uh, just, just he's changing what he's focusing on.
Nick, given that he's not being, you know, becoming a fellow or, you know, being phased out or whatever, it is difficult to get a read on this, but, and also knowing nothing about what's going on inside of the company, it does seem to me that,
That this is not a promotion for Dan.
Now, I could be totally wrong.
It's hard to tell from the press release, but like being in charge of lots of stuff actually is mostly like the ladder, right?
The more stuff you're in charge of, the higher you are on the ladder.
Tim Cook is in charge of everything.
He's at the top, right?
So being in charge of all hardware, I mean...
That seems bigger than working on even a very important project.
Now, that said, that's a very sort of, you know, mercenary way to look at things.
And maybe if you've been in the company for a long time, what you want to do is work on the super cool new project, right?
Even if it's just the one thing, you have less responsibility.
you are you know you're in charge of fewer things but maybe that's just what you want to do he's dan ritchie has nothing to prove to anybody he's been there a long time he's been wildly successful and has overseen tons of great products and everything and maybe this is just what he wants to do this is the type of thing you don't get from a press release we don't know what the actual situation is right but it still seemed to me in the absence of any other information that maybe
This is not really like, you did such a great job, now you get to be heavily involved in this new project for VR goggles or car or whatever the heck it's going to be.
But that's not really what I took from this thing.
Casey asked, what did you take from this?
The main thing I took from it is that John Ternus is going to be the new Dan, right?
He's going to be taking over Apple hardware engineering.
He's going to be on the leadership page.
He's on the executive team.
And John Ternus is a name that I just started hearing basically when the Mac stuff was turning around.
So I know very little about him other than when I started hearing his name, good things started happening to the Mac.
And I care a lot about the Mac.
And so I am very in favor, based on the small amount of information I have, of John Ternus being in charge of Apple's hardware engineering.
This potentially ties into last week's show, maybe even this week's show,
We went through a litany of rumors, all of which were like wish fulfillment for this podcast for Apple hardware, right?
So, yay, John Ternus, I think.
Go, John Ternus.
I like you.
It's good.
Keep doing that.
And on the flip side of that, Dan Riccio was...
head of hardware when a lot of bad things happen to hardware that i care about at apple now again he was also in charge when tons of awesome stuff happened but if you're going to try to assign blame for dropping the ball on the mac or you know bad things happening
The person in charge, like, fair or not, shoulders some of that responsibility.
Even if the person in charge disagreed or was fed bad information or whatever, it wasn't his fault.
In the end, it is your fault.
You're the person in charge.
Like, that's the way it works, right?
That's why you can blame Tim Cook for all that stuff, too, because in the end, he was the CEO when they shipped the butterfly keyboard, right?
So that's on him, just as much as it's on anyone else, right?
So the higher you are in the org chart, the more responsibility you bear for the bad decisions, even if they happen 20 levels below you.
So...
i you know i don't know what the fancy new project is uh i but i'm enthusiastic about the future of apple hardware based on again the tiny circumstantial information i have from the outside about uh john turnus and what has happened since i've been hearing his name throughout his nearly 20 years at apple turnus has overseen hardware engineering work on a variety of groundbreaking products including the first generation airpods and every generation of ipad
Most recently, Ternus led the hardware team responsible for the incredible iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro, and he's been a key leader in the ongoing transition of the Mac to Apple Silicon.
Ternus graduated with whatever.
So basically, it doesn't sound based on what they put in the press release that he was that much into the Mac until Apple Silicon, but I'm not arguing with anything you're saying, John.
It's surely more than meets the eye.
The wild card in all this, too, is like the way Apple's organized and especially with the people involved in the past decade or two, it's never been clear to me exactly how much control, let's say, the senior vice president of Apple hardware engineering has over what makes the product.
Right.
So with when Johnny Ive was rattling around in there, he was he he was, you know, swinging a lot of weight.
Right.
if johnny ive insists that your macbooks only have usbc ports on them and you get rid of magsafe does even the senior hardware senior vice president of hardware engineering have the ability to override that is that like more of a product decision and the hardware engineering is not at that you know like is that not something that you can control i don't know how that decision making works i don't know how like product design happens at apple i
Surely hardware and software and design are all involved together.
But who is the final decision maker in those things?
I feel like when Johnny was there, he was the one, the end all be all.
It was like him and then Tim Cook, especially when he was put in charge of software, UI and hardware and design and stuff like that.
But now that he's out...
I don't know how that balance works.
So should we be blaming anybody in hardware engineering for the butterfly keyboard?
Or is that something that was a decision made above them, right?
You know, because again, the higher up you are, the more responsibility you have.
Maybe the butterfly keyboard was a Johnny decision and maybe Dan Riccio hated it and just had to go along with it because that was the way.
And eventually it got reversed when he left.
Who knows?
That's why I would love to read a book about Apple when all these people retire.
Somebody please write a book.
We had Ken Kishenda's book about the software part of things.
And I mean, not that it was disappointing.
I thought it was great.
But doing software for a living gives me a reasonable feel for how software works in any company.
And reading the book confirms that, yeah, even though they do things a little bit differently, their software is software.
And that's how that comes together.
But I've never been a product designer as in like we're going to make a hardware thing and it's going to have a software component and we're going to figure out how to do market fit and what should we price it at and what kind of things should we make and what features should it have.
And I would love to know how that has happened historically at Apple.
Someone please write that book.
One other thing I would caution us on about like trying to read into the timing of this and everything is that the way Apple does things like this in almost every case is usually pretty long planned out stuff.
Probably the reason we've been seeing more of John Ternus recently in the last couple of years is...
Maybe they were planning this for a while, and so they wanted to raise the public profile of John Ternus over time so that by the time they finally made the move official, we all knew who he was already.
Well, he was climbing the ladder.
The list of products, Casey said, ended with the iPhone 12.
If you're in charge of the iPhone 12, probably the previous year you weren't.
He was the iPad, which is a lower-profile product, but by the time you're in charge of the iPhone, your next step up is, okay, now you're in charge of everything.
So I feel like John Ternus has been climbing the ladder,
And then Dan Ritchie was there at the top of the ladder, and then the shuffle takes place.
And I think he started appearing in meetings because he was climbing the ladder.
But you're right.
Like, these transitions, especially ones that are not sudden, you know, like something like, what was it?
Yeah.
forestall and i've butting heads and having an ultimatium like that's where you don't get a lot of time to react but things like phil schiller becoming an apple fellow or this transition probably right probably transition for a long time but the transition takes place because someone has been rising in the ranks and i feel like half the reason we keep seeing them is because they're rising in the ranks yeah that's fair anyway this is probably a good thing or at least a neutral thing
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All right, we do have some more Mac rumors that came out after we recorded.
And Bloomberg had an article wherein they had several interesting tidbits.
Apple Inc.
is working on a thinner and lighter version of the MacBook Air.
This new computer is planning to be released in the second half of this year or at the earliest or in 2022.
It will include Apple's MagSafe charging technology and a next-generation version of the company's in-house Mac processors.
Yeah.
And this is where Marco and I sob.
I wish we were closer and, you know, the world hadn't ended so we can give each other a very long hug.
Apple has also developed underlying Mac support for both cellular connectivity and Face ID.
But neither feature appears to be coming soon.
They say it right there.
Developed underlying Mac support for both cellular connectivity and Face ID.
But neither feature appears to be coming soon.
Why, Marco?
Why do they do this to us?
Why?
And then it gets even worse for you.
I mean, I agree with this.
I just don't feel as strongly.
The upcoming MacBook Pro is an example of Apple's renewed focus on Mac loyalists.
The company is planning to bring back an SD card slot for the next MacBook Pros.
Marco, you want a justification to buy a new computer in a few months?
Well, there you go.
Well, they didn't say Air.
This is mixing a bunch of things.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, you're saying, hold on.
You're saying that if there was a MacBook Pro with an SD card and a MacBook Air that didn't have one, that you would be like, oh, no, I want it in my MacBook Air.
Oh, heck no.
You would get that SD card in a heartbeat.
That depends on my overall priorities and the overall products and everything.
I mean, I haven't been using an SD card a lot recently because I haven't been going anywhere.
So my laptop mostly travels between upstairs and downstairs.
So I actually have really enjoyed the small lightness of it.
I'm frequently carrying glasses of water with it.
So I'll frequently be carrying two glasses of water, one in each hand.
Oh, are you?
And then have the MacBook Air tucked under my arm.
Mm-hmm.
It's really nice having it be the size and weight it is, so I'm probably going to stick with it for a while.
But I kind of got annoyed by this.
The upcoming MacBook Pro is an example of Apple's renewed focus on Mac loyalists.
The word loyalist there, I don't think it's an entirely positive thing here.
Typically, things that end in ists are not entirely positive things.
It kind of sounds like they're not doing this to make the product better.
They're doing this to please the fanatics.
And I don't like that framing of anything.
But anyway...
yeah this is overall you know continuing the the recent rumor dumps i think the one thing that tells you everything you need to know about this though is that it says it uses a next generation version of the company's in-house mac processors meaning it uses the m2 meaning we're not going to see it this year in all likelihood it's this is this is going to be like the 2022 macbook air in all likelihood
so that's great but it's not immediately on the horizon that being said these all sound like interesting changes and what's nice about it i think although i think didn't they say somewhere that they're actually going to keep the current macbook air in the lineup in all likelihood and have this be like a higher priced one but assuming not i like that they're doing things like bringing magsafe to seemingly the entire lineup and not just the macbook pro
I'm looking forward to a time when the laptops are, like when they make something better about the laptops, they all get it.
It's more about just how big do you want it to be, like how big of a screen do you want, and how many ports and how much power basically.
But otherwise, if a lot more about them can be the same or similar, and if when something gets better, it gets better for the entire lineup, that's all good things.
So overall, this sounds good.
This is basically what I would hope to happen.
When the rumors of the imminent arm transition were really heating up over the last couple of years, I had held the opinion, and I said multiple times in the show, that I thought one of the launch models, like one of the...
Apple Silicon or ARM-based Macs that would be shown off at launch would be a totally redesigned, ultra-slim, ultra-small laptop.
Because I said they would probably want to show off what they could make with their ARM chips.
And they didn't do that this time.
They instead changed nothing about the externals and form factors and everything of the computers they released as the first batch.
And so we haven't really seen them really flex with what kind of physical design does this transition now enable them to do.
And all the designs that we got are also pretty old designs.
So while they are remarkable computers, they look and feel kind of old.
So what I'm really happy to see here is that this is actually coming relatively soon and will be coming presumably to their smallest entry-level laptop currently.
And that's going to be great.
I'm looking forward to it.
I was kind of disappointed that we didn't get it at launch for Apple Silicon.
Although, honestly, again, these computers are so good.
I'm so happy with them.
I guess we didn't need it after all.
But I am very optimistic to see...
What does something designed for Apple Silicon from the start, what can that look like?
And if these rumors are even partly or mostly true, it sounds like it's going to be pretty cool.
The most interesting part of this rumor, aside from the sad parts, Casey, which we'll get to in a minute, is the fact that thinner and lighter are back on the table for Apple product advancement, right?
Yeah.
And for the MacBook Air class of computer, if you're gonna keep it as 13 inches, but you're gonna make it thinner and lighter, lighter is always good for a laptop, but if you're making it thinner, you're probably going to be sacrificing battery life, unless there's like a system on a chip shrink between this generation and the next, which is maybe plausible, right?
And I think that the whatever problem the current M1 MacBook Air has, like its size, thickness and weight are not on that list.
Like, it's got a bad webcam, you know, it's... Maybe the speakers could be better, but I don't know if I would want to sacrifice any battery life on that amazing machine for the sake of another millimeter or two.
A new design, maybe a redistribution of mass to, you know, I don't know, have thinner bezels on the screen or something, or...
adjust the size of the trackpad they're never going to add more keys to the keyboard but i would um there are things you can do with the design to freshen it and modernize it make it common colors as we've discussed before but i don't really want it to be thinner that said i think there is a place in apple's laptop lineup that was previously filled by the whatever we're calling that
what was our i've already forgotten all our names these things the adorable the 12 inch yeah the macbook one the macbook adorable the yeah the 12 inch macbook setting aside the the one port thing making some product that is look this the whole point of this product is it's amazingly thin and amazingly light
they should absolutely make that product it just makes i just don't want that to be the macbook air which goes back to what marco said of the rumor of like keeping around the fat air which has the amazing battery life this current one has and then having a thinner one now with these rumors maybe what they're talking about is the updated macbook adorable and they just keep calling it the air because it's not like they have the product name stamped on them that's all product marketing who knows what the thing will be called remember they called the last one macbook
right so that wasn't very helpful but that wasn't the macbook or the macbook it was the macbook i know it's it's so bad but anyway uh so i my objection is not to the existence of a thinner and lighter laptop i think there is a place for that computer in apple's lineup and finally that computer will actually be pretty darn good it'll be for the people who like the most important thing about my laptop is how thin and how light it is and by the way it should also be a decent computer bam we can do that now thank you arm right um
But I don't want this to displace the air because I think the beautiful thing about the air, all the airs that we've loved, this current M1, the 2011 design, right?
Those computers, it's because they're like, they're the right set of compromises.
They have good battery life.
They're not too big.
They're not too small.
They're powerful enough.
They're cheap enough.
Like that's what you want.
They're the Honda Accord of Apple laptops, right?
They do all the things well.
And if you care about something more, you want more power, you want less weight, then you can spread out to the more exotic models.
But that's sort of the meat and potatoes, right?
So I really hope they don't mess up that balance, especially because I like the fact that the current MacBook Air is like over-provisioned on battery life.
Like the battery is too good.
Like they accidentally made the battery last too darn long.
Apple would – I don't think Apple would – I think I said this in the past show.
I don't think they were ever targeting battery life that good.
But they didn't want to change the case.
And so this is how much battery fits in that case.
And it's an embarrassing amount of battery for the M1.
And so the battery just lasts all day.
And I think that's fantastic.
Like that's part of the thing that makes these laptops amazing is they exceed expectations in so many areas.
Not just performance but also battery life.
And I don't want to go back from exceeding expectations on battery life to just merely meeting, right?
So I'm rooting for the fatter MacBook Air to soldier on.
And as for the 15-inch MacBook Air, I'm intrigued by that idea partially because if you make a 15-inch MacBook Air,
you're probably going to end up putting bigger batteries.
You just have more square inches because the laptop got bigger.
What are you going to fill that space with?
You're going to fill it with more battery.
Granted, you have a bigger screen to power too, but I'm hoping that net-net, a 15-inch MacBook Air would be like the MacBook Air Max or Plus or whatever.
It's the bigger laptop, and it has the same guts, but the only difference is it's got a bigger screen but also a bigger battery.
So in the same way the big iPhones get the best battery life,
the 15 inch macbook air could be like the battery camel it's got the wimpier cpu like it's not the macbook pro cpu it's got a huge battery uh and in exchange for that huge battery it's bigger in your backpack because it's a 15 inch i would love that machine i kind of said they they're bailing on that um for face face id and cellular
i like the fact that this rumor says that they're at least considering it so at least that someone in apple said hey you know what people are staring at their macs all day why don't we read their face yes please do that but i'm so sad that this won't this is apparently according to this rumor not coming in the big redesign because i feel like that's the that's what you know once we knew that they're not going to do the radical redesign for the first round it's like okay well fine second round when you redesign the iMac when you make all the designs that's when you come out with the face id and everything i'm like nah nah we're gonna we're gonna wait on that so
The only thing I have left to hope for is better front-facing hammers.
But honestly, Apple, in anything that sits on our desk that we stare at all the time, that we constantly have to unlock, Face ID.
Face ID.
Cellular is by far my lower priority, but I understand people want it for laptops and everything.
Oh, it's much higher for me because Touch ID on laptops works fantastically and so does Watch Unlock.
You have to reach your hand out and you have to use your hands?
It's like a baby's toy.
Not for Watch Unlock.
You don't even have to be looking at it.
yeah i don't wear those things well that's your own fault you don't wear that thing either marco you're wearing your fancy watch i've been wearing an apple watch full time for a few months what wait wait wait wait you know no no stop stop marco marco is familiar with tide charts now uh we need like a marco hardware tide chart to see is the apple watch coming in or going out fair enough
you're not wrong wait what changed that you're not wearing your fancy watches because nobody else is looking at you i don't i'm not going anywhere he doesn't need to be seen another paparazzi no and and like i'm doing a little i'm doing more fitness stuff recently and i had the covid thing so i was i wanted to do oxygen monitoring for a long time and everything so a bunch of stuff is stacked up such that uh i'm i've been doing the apple watch full time for a while now have you ever been in a double watch phase
Like wearing two at the same time?
Mm-hmm.
No.
No, no, no.
I was never at all tempted to do that.
I mean, because one is your watch and one is your fitness tracker.
So you could just put them on different arms.
Nope.
Not for me.
Well, you know what you could do?
You could just put the Apple Watch on your ankle.
It'll be a little anklet thing.
It's calibrated for ankles.
Oh, come on.
It'll work just fine.
But what's great about watch unlock, too, is that if you're using clamshell mode...
Or if you have a non-Apple screen or an Apple screen that doesn't have a camera in it, it still works.
Which is not true for Face ID or Touch ID.
Which is awesome.
Yeah, but then you gotta wear a watch.
Yeah, I know.
That's the downside.
Going back to what you said a few minutes ago about the different trade-offs and everything...
I had heard a phrase a while back, especially during some of the bad old days of Apple's laptop design.
They had apparently justified making one of the batteries smaller and making a laptop thinner and lighter that really needed its battery life and was giving it up unwillingly.
I heard it described as shedding excess battery.
And that phrase made me so angry.
Because I was like, what do you mean...
are the batteries like good enough for everyone yet?
No.
Then they're not excess.
Then we don't have the, we shouldn't be shedding this excess.
It's not excess.
Like I love, like I had to, um, this past weekend I had, I had to take a trip back home.
Um, so hops could go to the vet.
And so of course I, I brought my MacBook air.
I grabbed it from the house.
Like as I was leaving to take it with me for like an, an overnight trip.
I didn't check to see whether I had plugged it in all day.
It wasn't plugged in when I took it off the table.
I didn't know what the battery life was or what the battery level was.
I just figured it'd probably be fine.
And I used it as a supercharger for a while on the way.
And then I brought it home and I used it for, you know, various work things that evening and various work things that the next morning.
And then I came back to the beach.
I never plugged it in the entire trip.
And I don't even know what the battery level was.
I never looked because I hardly ever need to because it's amazing.
that's how I've always been able to work with my iPad.
Because iPads have really good battery life and really good standby life and everything else.
I love the idea to not be like, is it topped off?
Is it topped off?
Is it topped off?
And have to be constantly babysitting that all the time or stressing about it or worrying about it.
I love that I'm able to take my laptop on an overnight trip and not plug it in the entire time and be fine.
That's amazing.
And I really hope that we get to keep this battery camel aspect, as John called it.
I love it so much.
It really radically changes the relationship you're able to have with a laptop.
That's one of the reasons these M1s are so good.
And so I really do hope that the hardware engineering team at Apple has not decided that this is a lot of excess battery they need to shed.
When I operate my MacBook Air, when I'm carrying it, when I'm handling it, when I'm using it,
At no point have I ever thought, this is too thick.
This is too heavy.
Never.
And while I respect the former market of the 12-inch probably wants something in that range, that's great.
I hope that, assuming Apple does get something that's closer to that, presumably in part by shedding their excess battery, I hope that they don't make that trade-off the only trade-off.
One of my main criticisms of the bad years of the laptop design is that they applied the same priorities and the same trade-offs to the entire lineup.
So if you wanted something that had...
more ports, a better keyboard, the things that you might think would require a bigger, bulkier design, but that's what you wanted, you didn't have any choice in the entire lineup at any size, at any price.
There was no option for you.
Because they were applying the ultra-thin, ultra-light priority set to the entire lineup.
So I hope that they have learned from that.
And I hope that...
While I'm not saying keep the laptops giant bricks or anything, the reality is they're not giant bricks now.
They're already very well proportioned for their size classes and compared to everything the PC market is doing.
I would like to see them do things like shrink the screen bezels.
That'd be nice.
That's something where they're falling behind in the design department a little bit from the PC world.
But...
I don't really need my MacBook Air to be substantially thinner or lighter.
And if they do make a substantially thinner and lighter computer for people who do want and need that, I hope that they don't apply those same trade-offs to all of the other laptops.
Because people have different needs and different priorities.
And something in the lineup, whatever your priorities are, something in the lineup should come pretty close to being your ideal computer.
Rather than forcing them to all be ultra-thin and then doing something terrible like the bad keyboards.
Although, God, one of the most frustrating things about the keyboard thing...
is that when they brought in the Magic Keyboard to replace them all, they didn't have to make the computers bigger.
Which is like, so wait, so you didn't even need them to be that thing?
Well, they never did the MacBook Adorable with that keyboard.
That's true, that's true, that's fair.
But anyway...
And it was just uniformity for the other ones because they have the same keyboards everywhere.
Right, right.
To be clear on the thinnest thing, the MacBook Air should continue to get thinner and lighter, but not at the cost of something else.
Like, oh, we can make it thinner and lighter if we shed excess battery.
It's like,
well, have you affected battery life and is the battery life good enough yet?
Like if you look at the MacBook Air over time, it has gotten thinner and lighter as it should at a steady rate.
We don't want that to stop.
We're not saying this is how big laptop should be forever.
20 years from now, we better have a thinner and lighter MacBook Air if that product is still around.
But what we're saying is don't take current technology and then make this particular tradeoff like you were saying, Marco, make the same tradeoff on all the lines.
And I think the adorable is was a good sign in that regard.
It's like they clearly there was one computer that was making an extreme tradeoff.
It's just that they never really made different tradeoffs for the rest of the line.
So this will be a good test to see how much diversity is there in Apple's lineup of computers.
I think the M1 MacBook Air is.
is a great data point because it exactly fills the 2011 macbook airs role 999 fantastic laptop that does everything really well for almost everybody is the easy no-brainer recommendation that spot in the lineup is filled good job now we'll be seeing okay what is the what does the 16 inch pro look like what is whatever this super thin light thing look like
And what choices they make.
And related to that is this SD card, which last week the rumor was more I.O.
ports.
And I was, you know, my mind was boggled that you could have that rumor but not know what the port is.
Now we have a more concrete rumor that said, oh, it's an SD card slot.
What computers, if any, will this appear on?
It should probably appear on the bigger ones.
They have more space inside.
You won't be cutting into battery life and all that other stuff.
sd card used to be on the macbook air if i'm not mistaken yep and it didn't destroy that computer so that's plausible too wherever they want to put that that's fine uh you don't need to put it everywhere but it shouldn't be nowhere put it on the computer and the people who care about that will get it uh and you know the main like the main use that i have of this thing is going on vacation you can't bring your desktop mac with you you have to bring a laptop
and if you're and you if you want to pull photos off and edit them on your powerful laptop it's great to be able to just take the card out instead of having to deal with the cable or trying to do a wireless and all that good stuff so um in some respects it's maybe like almost too little too late given the vastly improving connectivity options on modern cameras but late is better than never so i endorse the sd card slot
Oh, I mean, the SD card, it's an obvious thing because, again, as I've been arguing for a long time, typically if you need SD cards in your workflow, nothing about the advancement of ports is likely to remove that need.
Certainly now, you know, we've had...
significant market pressure since 2016 when the touch-powered laptops came out.
We've had significant market pressure from the computer side for device makers and pros with their workflows and tools and everything to move away from SD cards.
If it was reasonably possible to move away from them and all we needed was a motivational push from Apple, we've had that.
And we still need SD cards for a lot of things.
And, and like this, you know, this says, so users can insert memory cards from digital cameras, which kind of makes it seem like the, a point and shoot, like kind of quaint outdated thing that nobody does anymore until you realize that's a, you know, that's like a Bloomberg style guide simplification.
Probably.
Yeah.
That's actually really useful for video cameras, which people use a lot.
And it's also useful for audio recorders, which people like us use a lot.
And it's also useful if you have any kind of embedded hardware that uses SD cards as its medium or for configuration.
Things like Raspberry Pis.
There's so much stuff out there that uses either SD or microSD.
And I'm aware that there are newer card standards in certain high-end cameras and stuff.
But the fact is, if you're going to put one media slot for some kind of flash media, if you're going to pick one of them to maximize the utility for the broadest segment of the population, it's SD.
And you don't need to take my word for it.
You can look at what has happened in the market.
If you look at the dongles that every single person who has bought an Apple laptop since 2016 has had to or chosen to buy, you don't see a huge variety of different port types on these.
And you don't see them changing much over time.
What you see is the exact same three ports on every single dongle out there.
USB-A, HDMI, and an SD card slot.
Every single dongle out there has those three things that people are actually buying because the need for those ports is not going away anytime soon for almost anybody who buys these laptops.
So I think the most likely answer and the most useful answer, if they're going to add more ports to the laptops, is those three things.
USB-A, HDMI, and SD card.
And I know the USB-A is a stretch because they want to move forward and everything.
And that's the one that over time is slowly, very painfully slowly, the need for that is decreasing.
Yeah, I feel like we're turning the corner on USB-A or close to turning the corner on USB-A.
Right.
And I think it seems like it kind of feels too old for them.
So I think, and it is a larger port, you know, it would be hard to fit that.
So I don't see that coming.
I mean, and that's why also on the SD card thing, like CF is the main competitor and CF continues to advance, but it's just too darn big to fit in a laptop.
And the fact is, it doesn't have as broad of compatibility as SD does.
Yeah, that's like super high-end Pro.
It would be great for the super high-end Pro models.
But kind of like HDMI and Ethernet, it has been sized out of the edge of your laptop.
Yeah.
And that's the problem with HDMI.
I'm like, I don't think they could fit HDMI.
And I hope they wouldn't do something like one of the micro HDMI standards.
Oh, I was just going to make that joke.
He took it from me.
That wouldn't solve the problem in a great way.
It would possibly.
possibly be better but it wouldn't solve the problem in an amazing way so nobody likes micro HDMI yeah so I'm assuming what we're going to see for the new ports is just MagSafe and of course keeping USB-C and the addition of SD and that might be it and that's
Fine.
I mean, if you think about, you know, by adding MagSafe back as a power option, you effectively add one more port to all of the computers, assuming they don't lose any of their USB-C ports in the process, because so often we're using one of our USB-C ports just for power.
And so it's kind of wasted, which is another reason why this is a weird engineering decision to go in this direction.
And so to basically be able to offload the power to its own dedicated port, you are effectively adding one USB-C port to every computer they make, which is fantastic.
So I do hope to...
see that happen and and uh and the sd card slot and everything i do think ideally they would have a single usba port for those times when you don't have your usb dongle with you whatever and a single hdmi port because so many people need it but i don't see those happening that being said i do want to push back on one other little quick thing before before i let go of the floor here um you know earlier when talking about the thinness uh trade-offs and and things like that
So often when we talk about things like, you know, this would be a lot more useful a lot of the time if it just had like one USB-A port and an HDMI port.
So often the response to that is, well, they can't.
It wouldn't fit.
It's too thick.
And the thickness of your laptop lineup is a self-imposed, self-created problem.
And so if a product line could benefit from something that would require the case of the laptop to be a little bit thicker, it shouldn't be blanketly ruled out as, oh, we can't do this because it's too thin, period.
Well, you can change the thickness.
Not every computer, again, not every computer has to have the same trade-offs.
Not every laptop Apple makes has to prioritize thinness over everything else.
So, for instance, at some point, as we get into these smaller and smaller case designs...
we will start hitting limits of things like how many USB-C ports can you fit into the thickness of something like a MacBook Air, or especially a next-generation MacBook Air?
Can you still have two side-by-side?
Or will the case tapering become so severe or so thin at the starting point that you can only have one on each side, like the old 12-inch had, with just the headphone on one side, USB-C on the other?
If that's the case, you can't fit more ports because it's too thin,
is not a great defense for not having the number of ports that you would need to make it a useful product.
And so I want to keep that framework in mind as we judge future products.
If it comes out with, you know, there's a new MacBook Air, and instead of having the two USB-Cs that the current one has, it goes down to one USB-C on one side and one headphone on the other, like the little 12-inch, or if they get rid of the headphone jack and just have one USB-C on each side,
I would argue that was a bad trade-off because the computer didn't need to be made so thin that it has to lose the useful ports.
That is a self-imposed restriction that there's a trade-off to everything and that trade-off should not be made in a way that reduces utility on other computers.
If you remember the original MacBook Air, obviously the design— I sure do.
I had it.
As the first unibody, and it has to be beautiful and elegant and curved, and it's like, oh, but with this beautiful design, we can't put any ports on it.
And they solved that by making a door, right?
Because they didn't want to give up the curves, essentially, on the side.
People don't remember the original MacBook Air.
The sides were not flat.
It was kind of curved like an airplane wing in all places, right?
Yeah.
And there was a little door and you folded it on a door and there was a flat surface with the USB-A port and whatever the other port thing, like the headphone was on there as well.
Headphone and monitor out.
It started out being a really weird like custom, like mini HDMI kind of thing or mini DVI thing.
And then later on it moved to Thunderbolt.
And so that was an example where, okay, well, so design dictated this thing had to be shaped like an airplane wing, but they didn't say, well, that means we can't have any ports, right?
Because they didn't have that much courage back then.
So instead they put a door and the door wasn't elegant, but if you, if Apple ever finds itself in that situation again, where they really want to include a port,
that has just been sized out of laptops, but it's still super useful, there are things you can do.
You can find the fatter edge.
You can put a port on the back or something.
You can have a little bit of a door or something that folds down, or you can have just a little area that is a flat sort of port, like a dock on the edge of your computer, like a dock on the water, as in the side of your computer is beautiful and thin and curved, and there's this little bulge area to just give you enough flat space for a USB-C port.
Something like that, that would seem inelegant, but is solving the customer's problem, because having dongles is, as we've all learned, mostly worse.
And getting to this final item here, which is even more up in the air, random rumor, patent related thing.
When I think about the area where Apple's laptops can improve,
uh aside from like having a thinner lighter model however the bigger model with more ports and more stuff the main thing i think about as time progresses is not so much at this point getting thinner and lighter although i still think that should happen but the main area where apple's laptops are lacking and all laptops are lacking is durability
uh right now they're very vulnerable as casey will tell us to liquid in a way that our phones are not i don't like that if you drop a laptop they don't like that they're not as durable as phones obviously but phones are lighter so it's easier for them but i don't even think they're as durable as ipads i know because i've seen my kids drop their ipads down the stairs so many times and i'm amazed they haven't broken yet if they had dropped one of our laptops down the stairs like that it would not survive so
if if apple wants to concentrate technology wise on on physical advancements of the design of their laptops i would encourage them to water seal those suckers and make them more durable to drops right as they make them thinner and lighter and as they go into book bags i don't want them to be subject to compression cracking of the screen i don't want them to be if you drop them and they land on a corner from a foot and a half
uh off the ground that they shatter the entire screen like aluminum is great and it's very durable and there's no moving parts and there's no spinning hard drive and we're all set except that keyboard is a giant place for water to destroy your computer and the screens are still very breakable i don't know what they can do about this i don't know what the solution is this is a very difficult problem it's not like apple is behind in this area in general but even just something as simple as one model laptop that's essentially made to go into a kid's backpack and go to school having just discussed in the last show searching for cases
to put these beautiful, expensive aluminum laptops inside so my kids can take them to and from school, as kids do, and not worry that they're going to break them, I would love a laptop that is ruggedized for that purpose.
Arguably, the crappy plastic Chromebooks that every kid in my kid's school will get are more durable than the much nicer-looking, much better Apple laptops.
They're made of crappy plastic, and they're ugly, but I feel like that crappy plastic is more...
uh resistant to denting and maybe absorbs more energy rather than transferring it through the screen that said the first week my son had a chromebook when he was in middle school he broke it in his backpack so you know laptops are more fragile but that is a potential area of advancement and this final little bit of rumor here is a patent that apple came out with uh i don't know i think it's an older patent we always find out these things after the fact
about using titanium parts in and showed a little picture of a laptop right obviously apple already made a titanium laptop this was about having a sandblasted surface texture that's glossy and it's all this crazy you know patent jargon in the description but the bottom line is it's a patent about apple using different materials to make their laptops and they already did titanium once but titanium is you know lighter and stronger than aluminum also more expensive it has different materials trade-offs
I would love to see an advancement in Apple laptops that really uses some different materials.
Titanium, carbon fiber, God forbid plastic.
We love the unibodies.
They're great.
They're wonderful.
But in the spirit of diversifying their product line, I would love one, one model of the laptop lineup that's the rugged one.
For kids, for education, for anybody who just wants to chuck it into their backpack without treating it gingerly.
For Casey.
The same way people do with their phones.
That was years ago, y'all.
Years ago.
And they should all be waterproof, to be clear.
I think they should all be waterproof.
I know it's a hard problem because they've got the keyboard and everything, and you don't want to screw up the keyboard feel and stuff like that, but they should all be waterproof.
Especially now with the...
the arm max and how tiny the motherboard is because of the system on a chip like if they could just cordon off and seal off the motherboard elsewhere and so then you could like spill water into it and then just like let the water drain out through the keyboard and the computer would be fine i don't again i don't know what the solution is but if we're thinking what areas what physical design areas can apple advance in laptops merely keeping the exact set of current trade-offs that we have now in terms of it's it's a
single piece of aluminum it's carved out has a screen in it and has a system on a chip and an ssd and if you put water on it dies and if you drop it it dies it's time to revisit that so i really hope if not this titanium rumor or the various carbon fiber rumors or whatever i really hope five years from now apple's making some inroads on the physical design of their laptops that that have something to do with uh factors other than how thin it is
I keep coming back to what I was talking about earlier during follow-up, which is if the processors are the same throughout the lineup, and let's just go bananas, and let's say even the amount of RAM may be the same.
So the things that vary, maybe SSDs, and maybe that's it, like GPUs may be the same.
If the only thing you're really choosing is maybe how big an SSD or how big an SSD in RAM is,
Why wouldn't you also get the option to upgrade to cellular for $130 or probably $200 because it's always more expensive than it needs to be?
Like, why wouldn't you get the option to upgrade or maybe not even upgrade as like a line item, but choose a different line that is cellular?
the super-duper Pro, not Pro Maxes in size, but Pro Maxes in more Pro, where you get the SD card slot and things like that, and you get an HDMI port, and maybe you have the education version, which is, you know, not a tough book, but something like it.
And I feel like
I'm probably underselling in my own mind how many different SKUs Apple has.
And I know that there's all these different laptops in all different sizes with all different colors, with all different SSDs, with the different CPUs, with different RAM, with different GPUs in some cases.
I understand that if I really properly think about it, there's a lot more variation in the lineup today than I think there is.
But I, for one, would really strongly consider or be willing to trade the ability to choose how much RAM I have, which is something just an episode or two ago I said is something I feel like I want more than 16 gigs.
But I've yet to hear anyone complain about 16 gigs, including you, Marco.
So I would almost be willing to make the tradeoff that...
I don't get to choose the processor.
I don't get to choose how much RAM.
I get to choose SSD and like one or two other things.
And that might be worth it to me because I don't care about what GPU I get.
If the RAM really doesn't matter, I don't care how much RAM it has.
I do care about how much storage.
I do care about cellular.
And I might care about HDMI and SD cards.
So I don't see Apple going this way.
I don't think this is the way, this isn't the style of computer manufacturer they want to be.
They don't want to be the gateway 2000s of the late 90s, but it would be really sweet if they did.
It would be super cool.
I mean, to be fair, I would love more RAM.
I just don't need more RAM.
And I'm choosing these computers right now because they are so good overall, as overall rounded things.
But if more RAM was an option, I would definitely take it.
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All right, we haven't done Ask ATP in a long time.
So let's see how long we can go and how many of these we can get through.
Starting with Brendan Beckerer.
How much do you think macOS or iOS costs?
People pricing out Apple's new hardware seem to want to take all the components and add up their costs and say the rest is Apple's margins.
They seem to ignore the software component as a cost of the device.
And I'm curious what you think that is.
This is a great question and something that I think I forget about as well.
In terms of a number, oh, golly, I can't even imagine.
I'm sure some way somehow we could compute it, and I'm sure we could guesstimate how many source lines of code there are and about how much each line of code costs and things of that nature.
But that's something that I never found particularly interesting.
I don't even know how to put a finger in the wind to guess.
I don't know.
John, what do you think?
The most salient point is not actually the cost.
It's the difference in these kinds of costs.
So macOS and iOS are fixed costs.
You need to make that once, right?
But the other costs you're talking about when selling Mac hardware, those are variable costs, right?
And so every time you make a new Mac, you have to pay for making that new Mac.
You have to pay for the materials, the labor, so on and so forth.
And the more Macs you sell, for every single new one you sell, you have to pay whatever the cost to make that Mac.
Right?
Not true of the OS.
That's fixed.
You made it once.
No matter how many Macs you make, you don't have to keep paying for that OS because you're not licensing it for Microsoft, right?
So the reason most people don't talk about this is because compared to the number of things that Apple sells, the fixed cost to develop the software that runs on them is dwarfed by the variable costs of the literally millions of individual instances of that product that get produced.
That's why people care more about how much does it cost to make a physical iPhone object
then how much does iOS cost?
So if you had to do the math and you said, okay, well, iOS costs Apple $150 million this year, right?
And every year it costs that much or whatever it is.
Divide that by how many iPhones are sold and suddenly you're like, oh, it's like two cents of every iPhone.
You know,
And who knows?
Like, obviously, they already have macOS and iOS.
So the costs on a year to year basis that I'm writing it over from scratch.
So whatever they paid to make it in the first place, you know, whether it be macOS 10 or the classic macOS, original iOS, that gets spread over years and years and years.
So I think the reason it's not discussed is because the fixed costs are so diluted by the volume of things Apple sells that the variable costs are really dominating.
Rohit Sharma asks, if you use Siri to send a message, I recently learned that Apple now includes a bit of text that informs the recipient that you use Siri.
That text is also a link to an ad within iMessage to use Siri.
Is it just me or does this feel like an email signature that you can't turn off and is not a great move for privacy-conscious Apple?
I don't know how to put this gently, but I could not disagree more.
This is just letting somebody know that if there are transcription errors, it's probably not that person's fault.
It's probably the fault of the robot that's doing the transcription.
And if anything, I almost feel like this is a very unApple thing to kind of implicitly say, hey, if we screwed up, it's our fault.
Yeah, exactly.
So I can see, I guess, how Rohit got to this perspective, but I very strongly disagree with it.
I very strongly disagree with you.
Okay, tell me why.
Yeah, so this is this thing that I started, when the first time I saw one where under somebody's message, an iMessage, it said, sent with Siri, learn more?
I thought, oh, no.
I wish they didn't do that.
To be clear, part of it is a privacy issue, I think, in the sense that it is unintended and undisclosed to the sender information disclosure about this message and the person who sent it and how they sent it.
I don't want people to know how I typed it.
What if it said sent without pants?
Like what if I was sent from the bathroom?
Like that could be a fun one.
You don't want to send that information as metadata to your messages unless you're aware of it and you choose to do that.
And so to have Apple be adding metadata to the recipient, unbeknownst to the sender, you don't know that it's going to say sent with Siri and be an ad for Siri on the bottom of the message that you sent.
What if you don't want the person to know that it was sent with Siri?
What if the fact that it was sent with Siri implicitly discloses something to the recipient that you didn't want them to know?
Like maybe you're on the go right now.
It's a recipe for potential problems.
And the goal it achieves... See, I didn't think of it as to excuse transcription errors.
I thought of it, especially because of the Learn More link that is literally like an ad for using Siri, basically.
I looked at that more like...
Apple is adding promo stuff to my messages for their benefit.
This is like to get people more using Siri.
Please come on.
There's been an issue in the OS recently that Apple has been adding ever more ads for upsells into their services into various parts of the OS recently.
That I agree with.
Yes.
And people who don't subscribe to all the stuff Apple sells are really getting quite annoyed about it.
They've been egregious in the music app for a few years now.
The more recent, even more egregious ones are the entire banner in settings that will appear.
Hey, try Apple Arcade or whatever.
At the top of your settings screen as what looks like a setting, but then it's actually just a promo for some Apple service that you haven't signed up for yet.
They're...
Walking over a lot of lines that I don't think they should be walking over for like user experience or even in some ways possibly ethical reasons all to promote more of their own services and stuff to their existing user base and I find that really gross.
It's probably just a relatively unavoidable side effect of them becoming more of a services company for their revenue growth.
This kind of stuff will definitely happen.
Anytime a company benefits significantly from upselling you with stuff you already bought from them,
they're going to slowly ruin the user experience to sell more of their crap to you because that is directly tied to their most important area of revenue growth.
So this has been a long time coming, but Apple's kind of gross feeling and kind of overstepping promos are infecting the UI of their products to a degree that I don't think they should be comfortable with because they're supposed to be a company with taste, and I think this oversteps that line.
And while the Siri promo that we're talking about in this question...
siri itself is not like an add-on service for apple that they could make more money with directly if people used it so it doesn't quite have that same feel as like sent with apple music premium or whatever like it's not quite that bad but it's in the ballpark of that kind of thing where this seems like a promo that apple has inserted without your knowledge or permission
And as far as I can tell, no way to turn it off, like for the sender to turn it off, to not disclose that you sent this message with Siri.
So it's like information leakage of the sender's implementation details of how they sent this message, how they composed this message for no really clear benefit to the sender and seemingly a benefit only to Apple.
And that's gross.
And I think it's a mistake.
And I hope that they revert this.
I could not possibly disagree with you more.
It's not a freaking ad.
You can't buy anything in there.
It's not an ad.
Then why is the learn more a link there?
What's that for?
If they take out the learn more sent with Siri, I still would disagree with the information disclosure, the unintended information disclosure.
Because again, what if it's sent from the bathroom?
I know that's a common example.
But that's not what it says.
Can you imagine a situation in which you wouldn't want someone to know that you sent a message with Siri?
Well, you know what, Marco?
You could use a kitchen knife to murder someone.
You could imagine that that's possible.
So we shouldn't have kitchen knives.
All right, all right.
I have to come in and settle this for you, too.
So it's all the things that you all said, right?
So it's not just one thing, right?
So...
marco's right that the services infecting the ui is definitely a thing that's happening but yes and i agree with that but even in those cases like there are multiple aspects to it and it depends like whether or not how you value those aspects they do definitely exist one aspect is absolutely for sure to excuse transcription errors right it's kind of similar in a strange way to the original scent from my iphone signature that was the default on like apple mail and stuff in the original iphone
That was partly there to, yes, advertise the iPhone and show that you were cool.
But it very quickly came to serve a function in our society of excusing the idea that I type this with my thumbs on a little phone screen.
So maybe excuse some typos, right?
So regardless of the intention, sent with Siri, and I've seen this in real life for myself, absolutely functions as a way for you to parse whatever gibberish that just sent in that message to say, what is this?
Oh, they sent it with Siri.
That explains it.
They're not having a stroke.
It was just...
siri transcription right the learn more link serves multiple functions most of which are you know advertising promotion and i would say that there is something they want you to buy if you get used to siri which is like home pods and stuff right because it is you know it is a value-added product but it also serves the function of letting people know that this is a thing that their phone can do bingo and it's difficult to walk that line but
Part of designing the OS is to make it so that all the features you worked hard to put into the phone, somehow the person who's paid all that money for it realizes that they can use the phone to do this thing.
Like Apple does it themselves and they're like, hey, did you know you can scan documents with the Notes app?
Nobody freaking knows that until Apple starts telling everybody.
And yeah, they're advertising that it's a feature of their phone, but also people who have phones and don't realize that there's a magnifier on it are missing out on a feature that they paid for.
And so you want to...
tell them the things that their phone can do but you don't want to nag them because that's terrible so you know and again it feels worse if it's like hey pay for this premium service but in general trying to figure out how to make people aware that their phone can do thing one way to do it is say hey your friend talked into their phone to send you this message did you know that's a thing you can do that you can talk into your phone to send a message if you can't like don't have time to type right now or maybe you have difficulty typing um
And it's also an ad, right?
And it is also unexpected information disclosure.
All of that is true.
You just have to look at this feature and say, are these the correct trade-offs, right?
I think we would all agree that there should be some way to turn it off.
We could debate whether it should be on by default, right?
But it serves all of those purposes.
And I think it's less important what Apple's motivation was for putting in it, although I can imagine having worked in big companies, that everything I just said to justify it would absolutely be used to...
sort of explain why we have to include the feature when in reality maybe someone's motivation is like we should you know drive up brand satisfaction with siri and sell more home pods or whatever but regardless of what their motivation is for putting the feature it does serve all those functions in real life and some of those functions are good and some of them are not so great so i i don't think this this feature is as bad as marco's saying and it's not as good as casey's saying it's you really have to decide for yourself what you think about and i would imagine the only thing we can all agree on is
disclosure and options are better because then if you don't like it you can disable it see and and i i appreciate the value that you're talking about about like telling people what the features are and and you know improving discoverability and explaining why the message is garbled mess yes those are all those those have positive value
But I think this is an inappropriate place and way to do it.
And I think the downsides are significantly worse than the upside.
Like, for example, and just a separate version of this, almost every feature that is annoying to a lot of people has benefit to somebody or has upside to somebody.
Like, there's this feature that's been in mail, I think since about iOS 12 or 13, where if you move...
If you do a multi-select and do a move to a message to a folder, sometimes it will try to guess what folder you're likely to move it to based on something.
Instead of the folder selection screen, it will put up an action sheet
first saying move messages to junk mail or other full or like other and you got to click the other to then bring up the sheet to pick the folder and i can imagine the discussion that went into the design of this feature of like hey if we can guess based on like the senders of of what you're what you have selected where you're moving these three messages we should ask the user to be cool and smart and do that maybe that'll delight them
The problem is, for me at least, this feature guesses wrong the vast majority of the time.
And it only comes up about maybe a third or a quarter or a fifth the time that I try to move messages.
And so my experience of using this is I try to move messages in mail, and most of the time I hit the move button, and then the sheet comes up to move it, and it lists all my folders, and I tap the one to move it to.
Sometimes I'm interrupted in this workflow by this sheet trying to be smart and trying to guess what I want.
If it guesses right, I can tap that top button, and I have saved no taps.
I have saved no time.
I've just been kind of like jarred, kind of interrupted, because what I was expecting to happen, which happens most of the time, this was different this time.
So I would say that's not a clear benefit, actually.
It's at most a lateral move.
if you think about the even worse case which is for me the more common case which is it guesses wrong now you've interrupted me you've jarred my flow and i have to do now an additional tap than i would have had to do before to say like you know other or whatever that button is and then i have to pick my folder that wasn't the thing it guessed and by the way it never learned i'll make the same mistake tomorrow
and so this is a feature where like yeah it sounds like a good idea on paper and it does have some kind of potential benefit to somebody maybe if you know if you think about it but in practice the downsides should outweigh that and the downsides are like clearly like okay when this guess is wrong it's really bad when a guess is right it's only kind of good so that feature should be removed i don't know why it's still there it should be removed it's been there for probably two or three years
You just need to improve that because the Apple is just bad at doing those features.
But I love apps that keep track of what I do and give me the most common things.
But like if you do it badly like that, where it's a two tiered system and also it guesses wrong, of course, that's just terrible.
But like just to give a simplified example, if you just did it based on recency and sorted by recent usage and had a single list and everything was on the list.
the only difference would be what's sorted to the top you would never need to go to another screen to find another one and if it was working well the ones that you do use would be at the top so you know like like that type of feature can be done better but yeah i get what you're saying that this is a feature that has downsize that way the benefits in the case of sent with siri i mean it really depends about how you feel about all the things that we just outlined what how much value do you apply to keeping it a secret that you sent with siri and uh
you know having ads thrown in your face versus the benefits of maybe this will teach people how to use the phone better versus like the you know even stuff like that with the learning this is the tricky part about learning learning features once you know that your phone can do this you should never have to see that message again from somebody else but how does the phone know that you know your phone can do this like that's why it's difficult to make those kind of features and not have them annoying uh but i would guess that most people don't even know this feature exists because they never even look at that text
Right.
And also, I would assume, I've only seen the Sent with Siri thing a couple of times.
And I don't know if that's because my friends don't usually use Siri, or if it has some kind of time-based throttling, where maybe it only shows it once a day from a given recipient or something like that.
Or it could be like those annoying things.
These drive me nuts in macOS, where when you first install like a new version of macOS, it's like learn about the new features of Big Sur.
And the only way to make it shut up is to click like the link, click through it and say, fine, open the web page for right.
And now I want to see you again.
So I do wonder if you hit learn more once, does that make it go away?
This is also, by the way, for people who don't know, I'm pretty sure the solution to most of the terrible ads in Apple stuff for you to sign up for their services and crap is to click through them and sort of begin the process, but then bail.
And then you can usually make the thing go away, which is terrible.
I'm not promoting this.
I'm just saying, like, if you want to solve the annoyance problem on your phone, like people just like leave it on their setting screen forever and they just get angry about it.
Go into it.
Set up Apple Wallet.
Set up Apple Wallet.
But I don't want to set up Apple.
Just start the process and then bail.
And usually it will stop bugging you in the same way that when it wants to tell me about Big Sur, I have to click show.
Let it open a page in Safari and then hopefully never have to see it again.
So Casey just sent us a test message.
And what's interesting, I see it on my phone running the iOS 14.4 RC.
And it says sent with Siri, but it does not say learn more.
No way.
Are you serious?
Yeah.
I have sent with Siri and learn more.
So I think I did once tap on that to see what the heck it's doing.
I'm going to learn more now.
Oh, no, don't learn more.
now i'm gonna learn more all right uh it's a tiny single page it just says uh this message was sent using siri and then it tells how to use siri blah blah blah but that's it and there's just a done button so now i've hit done all right uh it still says learn more i'm back on the messages screen let me go out of the out of the conversation and back in
It still says learn more.
You want to send me another message, Casey, and I'll see if it... Send a message to John Syracuse and Marco Arment.
What would you like the message to say?
Hello, fellas.
Period.
Would you like me to search the web for hello, fellas?
You're the worst.
Yeah, see, I got it again.
Same thing.
All right, so now the previous message just says sent with Siri, but the learn more only appears on the newest message.
Oh, that's weird.
So it says sent with Siri, and the next one says sent with Siri, learn more.
What if you force quit messages and go back in?
We're not reflexively force quitting our apps anymore, Casey.
Yes, I know.
Anyway.
I go back.
I just did that at no change.
Okay, it's worth a share.
Anyway, the point is this...
I do not think this is an appropriate use of this kind of thing.
I don't think that the messages stream is an appropriate place for Apple to inject any kind of promo.
And I don't think this type of unintended information disclosure is a good idea or appropriate for iMessage.
regardless of whether the benefits that this feature has of possibly excusing typos and everything else by the way i mean when you type a message in messages it's full of typos because autocorrect sucks so like people are used to that right there are different kind of typos like because siri really can just be completely not even close to what you said in a way that autocorrect at least like the letters are probably near on the keyboard but siri is just
in the wilderness sometimes and you get things that look like someone's having a stroke it's like a mark off chain right and i never see that kind of failure mode with typos you see you know maybe one or two words you can guess what they were trying to type but i don't know i i think this feature is very much like uh read receipts or read receipts depending on how you want to pronounce it and that i think it should be
Something that people can opt out of if they want.
But in the case of sent with Siri, I think the default should be on kind of like in the new versions of the OS is it's not that they default read receipts to be on, but they prompt you.
like so there's i think there's no way to set up a new phone or a new mac without and use messages without it asking you hey do you want to sell it send read receipts and you having to at least answer that question i wouldn't prompt people for the scent with siri i think it should just be a setting but i think kind of think the default should be yes just because until they can make their transcription better like that should be their goal make a transcription better enough that that feature of this is no longer useful and then it shouldn't be on by default but you know it really like it really depends on on how you value
What values you place on the various aspects of this feature.
It has upsides.
It has downsides.
Marco clearly puts way more weight on the downsides and so thinks it shouldn't be there.
I bet most people are neutral on it because they don't care about this crap.
I fall slightly in favor of leaving sent with Siri to explain the inexplicable messages by default.
what if it said sent from the iphone 13 pro max but but as casey said it doesn't it doesn't say that like it's a slippery slope argument right it says what it says that's true well what if what if the feature that it was advertising was only available on the newest phone
Yeah, no, it could be worse.
Like, I don't disagree that it could be worse.
Like, and there are, as you point out, there are things that are worse.
Like, hey, sign up for Apple TV Plus and add stuff to Apple Wall.
Those are worse, like unequivocally, right?
And more annoying to get rid of.
But that's why I think I'm mostly okay with this one because it's not worse.
Yeah, I mean, we could find a million ways where I would find it to be really gross.
But the thing is, it just says, you know, sound with Siri, learn more.
it is another data point in the trend though like because it could because because they basically have opened the door to doing this to like putting in little messages under messages uh you know slip this over argument say once they've done this one thing they don't think they do the most terrible thing but there is some argument to be made that they have coded up the ability to communicate this sideband data and display it in little messages that makes it ever so slightly easier for them to do something else so it's worth watching
Yeah, I mean, as soon as this is possible to use for more direct promotional, like financial gain ways, I think this increases the odds they'll do it.
I mean, the other aspect of it is like I talked about, like, you know, the learning aspect is absolutely true.
And I think that is actually...
That's something they should do in the OS.
Like when you send someone money, the question with Apple Pay Cash or whatever, they'd be like, how did that work?
How did that happen?
That's a question a new user is likely to have.
And just-in-time info that says, hey, you just figured out how to receive this money.
from this person, you can send them out to other people too.
Click here to learn more.
Like right there at the time it happened when you might have that question, that's a, you know, again, you have to strike the right balance, but I think that's a useful thing that the OS should do to teach people who are using it what it can do for them.
at the right time in the right context.
And I think that something like this qualifies.
Like, I'm not against having decorations on messages, you know, because Apple Place happens in messages, to explain the features.
It's just that you can't nag people about it.
You don't want it to seem too spammy.
You don't want to disclose information that you don't have to, so on and so forth.
So the Apple Place cache is a cleaner case, and it's like...
you know sent with apple pay cash you know they sent it with apple pay cash you're using apple pay cash right but maybe you have no idea what what apple pay cash is and you think it's cool and would like to use it and you want to learn more that's the time little blue link right yeah so it's tricky OS design is tricky you don't want you don't want to seem creepy but you also want the to progressively disclose functionality to people who otherwise wouldn't show it and you do want to explain your ridiculous typos
And it's funny to me because there are two examples of things that I don't think are promotional, but I find to be far more frustrating, both with regard to messages.
First of all, I have the feature that I think came out a couple of iOS's ago, the feature where it'll announce incoming text messages if you have AirPods in.
So it'll say, you know, message from Marco Arment.
Hey, man, how's it going?
Does that work reliably for you, by the way?
No, it does not.
I have that on.
And it seems at first, like, you know, it seems like it'll read about one to two thirds of the messages I get.
And the other ones, it just won't read.
And I can't figure out why.
It's like some of them are short.
Some of them are long.
Some of them have pictures.
Some of them don't have pictures.
I can't figure out the pattern.
Have you, like, had it explained to you that it's bailing, that it's not going to read it because the message is super long?
I think it's been very consistent for me because I get, for whatever reason, I get a lot of messages when I'm, like, doing dishes, right?
So I have my AirPods in and 100% of them are announced in some form.
But sometimes I think there's one, like, phrasing or line where it's like, you got a message from this person and I'm not going to read it because it's super long.
So if you want to read it, go to your phone.
Like, that's obviously not what they say, but that's the gist of it, right?
And it...
So I kind of appreciate that because I don't want a giant long message to be read, but it's been pretty consistent.
The only time it totally messed up is I got a message the other day, and Siri does this not just in the context of messages being announced in your AirPods, but just in general.
You know all the videos of Siri...
getting caught in a loop or something.
This happened.
It was reading a message and then Siri just started saying C, C, C, C, C, C, C. I've never seen that.
For a very, very long time.
And I went and looked at the message and it had an E with an accent on it.
You know, like the little E with a little accent aigu or whatever on the thing.
It's the only weird character in the message.
It was a short message.
It did not have the letter C, the word S-E-E or any word that sounds like that anywhere in it.
And just Siri said C, C, C for, I don't know, a good minute.
I've never had that happen.
But the thing that happens to me constantly, and this is what I was starting to bring up.
Can I guess real fast?
By the way, did you know you can reply by saying reply?
Oh my God, it's so annoying.
It's so annoying.
Like the first time, the first time I was genuinely like, oh, I didn't know that.
I have now learned more.
This is excellent.
But it happens all the time.
And what's even worse to me is that
In like one session, like, you know, I've put my AirPods in, I've received several text messages, and then I will later take them out.
In that one time, between the time I've put in the AirPods and the time I've taken them out, I'll receive that frigging prompt like four or five times.
And it's so annoying.
I've got it.
It's like learning more about Big Sur.
You have to maybe once say, did you know that?
Answer and say, yes, I did know that.
Yeah.
Or just actually reply.
But like, no, I'm with you, Casey.
I get this all the time.
Or do it once.
Yeah.
It like sets me on fire every time because usually what has happened is I'm walking somewhere.
My hands are in pockets in the winter or they're pulling a wagon full of stuff or something.
So I can't easily like operate the controls.
And I'm trying to listen to a podcast.
Yeah.
And so all I want when I'm hearing it, try to read out like the automated message that my bank is sending me that like a bill pay check went through.
So, by the way, I will never need to respond to the contact that is like the, you know, five digit code or whatever that my bank texts me from.
But it always says, by the way, you can reply.
And I'm like, you just read out this huge long message that I don't even need to hear.
And now you're adding this long promo to the end of it.
I just want to get back to the podcast I was listening to.
Yeah, that's an example of trying to explain functionality gone terribly wrong.
Because it is good for people to know that once or maybe twice, but not constantly.
And the other problem with it is if we're complaining about Siri.
My major complaint with Siri recently has been Siri refuses to disengage.
uh siri will activate uh because i will try to summon my sweetie and that unfortunately sounds like siri and uh i didn't i i in fairness i chose the pet name for my wife long before siri existed unfortunately it sounds a lot like siri and so siri often activates in my home and i cannot get siri to disengage because
Whatever I said after that, Siri's off to the races with like, oh, let me tell you about, you know, the restaurants near your house or whether the haircutting place is open.
Or it's like, I don't know what Siri heard or whatever.
But it goes off on this thing.
And it's like, do you want me to, you know, it tells me at a restaurant.
Do you want me to call this restaurant and make an order or whatever?
And it's like...
i want you know it's the it's the classic uh i don't even want to say if it's uh dubai friday or back to work alexa stop right i just want to end the interaction i want i want just cease desist no more i did not summon you go away and i cannot figure out what to say to siri to make that happen siri stop siri okay i don't want to have to engage and say like no not that restaurant because then she'll read the next restaurant and
I know I just I need to like that was something I admitted that might have been Google.
I forget which one of the one of the voices in my house misheard something and was giving me a litany of things to choose from.
And I couldn't figure out how to bail out of there, too.
And it's like, do I have to now order food from a restaurant to make this stop?
Like, is there no way to to say I'm not going to pick any of these?
I wasn't you're you misheard me.
So operator.
Yeah.
There needs to be like command period for voice assistants of just like, whatever, escape.
No more.
Like, I did not summon you.
You have misheard me.
I'm talking to my wife.
Whatever it is that you're doing, stop it immediately.
To be fair, most voice assistants, including Siri, are pretty good about like they're playing audio and you just want them to stop.
But if they're trying to engage you in what they think is this useful interaction about whatever the heck they thought you said, I can't make them stop.
Please, Siri, disengage.
Have you tried asking, learn more?
Oh, God.
Yeah, like, I mean, that's what I said.
Maybe I just have to order food.
It's like, oh, well, that's the rules.
You got to order food now.
Just pick one of these restaurants in your area and buy food from it.
That's it.
So my favorite thing with the did you know you can reply is that oftentimes the failure mode for a reading out in incoming text messages, new message from Aaron Liss.
did you know you could reply?
Like it skips the actual message.
And so it's like, yes, that's wonderful that I can reply, but I don't know what I'm replying to.
Unfortunately, Aaron probably doesn't listen to the program, but if she did, I would tell her the next message you send to your husband should be, did you know you can reply to someone?
make that the text of your message.
And then you get like double bonus points if Siri inserts that declaration before reading the message, which contains the same text as that declaration.
Oh my God, it's so bad.
Maximum trolling.
Then really quickly, the other thing that drives me nuts that's message-related but not Siri-related is, as I've mentioned a couple of times on the show, I am in several group conversations with, you know, mixed phone OSes.
So, you know, some Android users, some iOS users.
And
I understand why this is the way it is, but oftentimes I will find myself doing a tap back in these mixed mode conversations.
And so instead of, well, I guess if I recall correctly, my phone will parse the tap back correctly.
So if I like some other message, it will show the little thumbs up on it.
But everyone else in that conversation, including other iPhone users, will see Casey liked some other message, blah, blah, blah.
And it's so frustrating.
If tapbacks aren't a thing in SMS and MMS, that's fine.
But don't give me the freaking option.
I get it's consistency or whatever, but I don't want the option.
It's so frustrating.
And it's especially bad when you're sending images back and forth in a group chat and you'll see, Aaron List liked an image.
Well, that's great.
Which freaking image did she like?
Oh, God, it's so frustrating.
The worst part about the text version of that is because what you did in your UI was you pressed the menu or whatever and picked a picture, which was a thumbs up.
And then their system is saying, I know you picked a picture.
But I think I know the words that represent the feeling that you meant when you picked that picture.
So I'm going to send those words, which is so dumb because there's a thumbs up emoji.
So just send the thumbs up emoji.
It's the same picture, more or less.
Imagine if when you typed emoji, when that appeared on Android, it was just the emoji names replacing it.
Oh, God, that'd be so bad.
right especially with emojis that we use in contexts that don't match the names right because of what they look like i mean that's the danger of emoji in general so you don't know what it's going to look like on the other person's computer why are you always talking about peaches and eggplants but yeah tap backs tap backs are useful but like i feel like the text iteration of tap backs could be much closer especially in cases where there's a very similar emoji
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Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, 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-N-T.
Marco Arment.
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
It's accidental.
Accidental.
They didn't lose.
I'm clearly a little punchy tonight, and so I think the only way to make myself feel better is for the three of us to agree that whatever these pictures are that flew by my screen right as we started recording of the new Model S interior...
holy crap they're bad holy crap what's going on here's the thing i what we're all talking about and why we're all moaning i think is 90 something percent about the steering wheel everything let's ignore the steering wheel for a second and just look at the rest of this interior
It's got a big screen in the middle of the dashboard.
It's landscape instead of portrait, but otherwise does not look that ridiculously different than the Model 3.
And in fact, not really that different from the Model S. It's got a little instrument cluster in front of the steering wheel that looks like a regular instrument cluster over the screen.
It looks fine.
And everything else in the interior looks...
not that radical.
It's got a center armrest.
It's got places for like phones to go.
It's got a, you know, a rear view mirror on the windshield.
Everything looks pretty much normal.
So am I, is it fair to say that we are entirely moaning about the steering wheel or is there something else about this interface that you think is awful?
I don't like that it's landscape, I don't think.
Now, it's a little unfair of me, more than a little unfair of me to make this declaration, because although I have driven Model 3s and I have driven Model Ss, including back-to-back, I haven't driven either in at least a year, I don't think.
But I think I much prefer the portrait operation of the old Model S like Marco has than I do the landscape operation of the Model 3, because it feels to me more like everything is nearby.
And maybe that's my own hang up.
I don't know.
But it feels like everything's nearby.
Whereas within landscape, it feels like there's that crap way over on the other side of the car.
And then there's the crap by me.
Marco, is it just a steering wheel?
I know you don't like the Model 3 and you like the Model S better, but again, ignoring the steering wheel, would you pitch a fit over the landscape screen or is it mostly just a steering wheel that's freaking you out?
First of all, I think wheel is a generous term.
I think it may be the steering bucket.
All right, we're not getting there yet.
We'll get there.
We'll get there.
We'll talk about the steering bucket in a minute.
But the things I didn't like when I test drove the three were not necessarily because the screen was landscape.
That being said, I do like the portrait screen of the Model S. And I think the only reason they're doing this is for, again, reasons that benefit them, but not necessarily the drivers.
So you can play Witcher on it because Witcher doesn't run portraits.
Yeah, and, like, I love, like, you know, the game.
They're showing if you can play games in this.
One of them is Stardew Valley.
Yeah, I love Stardew Valley.
I would never play it in my car.
I'm not going to, like, sit in my car for hours on end playing a deep, involved game.
Well, when you're at the supercharger killing time and because you have kids in the car, that's why there's a screen in the backseat.
Like, I understand why they're advertising gaming as a feature, although I think it is absurd to have the promo shot for your car to show games.
Like, it's great that they can do that, but this isn't a minivan or a camper.
Yeah, I think the reason that they are moving the Model S to a landscape screen is for reasons that benefit them specifically, so that they can share more of the UI and stuff between the Model 3 and the Model S, because the Model 3 has a landscape screen.
I think that's the main reason they're doing this.
It's not because it's better.
What they're doing is basically making everything be able to share the same UI and parts, regardless of whether it's the better choice for that vehicle or not.
And so I see why they're doing it.
It makes sense for them to do it.
It doesn't mean it does anything for me.
As for the actual being landscape instead of portrait, the stuff that's going to be on the far right of that screen is going to be very hard to reach.
Stuff on the left is closer.
Yeah.
That being said, this is not going to be a...
like i'll get used to it but i'm not going to like it for the for the first little while if i ever get one of these and that's i'll get to that in a little while um but uh the main reason i don't like the three so much is the lack of having the directly in front of the driver screen and this fortunately i was afraid they would get rid of that second screen on the s um well first first i was afraid they would never make another s and they would discontinue it
Because they sell so many more threes that the S really is not a higher priority for them.
It's their Mac Pro, basically.
So I didn't think, I thought there was a reasonable chance that the S would never get redesigned and would eventually stop being made in favor of their higher volume cars.
So I'm glad they're working on it.
uh i'm very glad they're working on it and i'm glad that they have put in the effort to make it you know new in some way even if it does look like that they are trying to by doing this redesign trying to reduce the amount of work that they are putting into it by doing things like giving it the same you know screen layout and stuff as the three
um anyway that being said so glad they're working on it glad they're updating it um and i'm very very glad that it retained that directly in front of the driver second screen because i find that screen very important and one of the things i don't like about the three is how much you have to do on the center screen because there isn't that second screen and how much you have to look at that center screen again because there isn't that second screen so by having the second screen at all i'm very happy about that um
The rest of it, John, you're right.
This looks largely like the current Model S in many of the general themes.
Again, leaving us at the steering bucket for a minute.
One thing I'm disappointed that they didn't change, apparently.
Every Tesla so far.
has done something stupid with opening the doors the model s has its pop-out door handles the model 10 has the whole gullwing thing the model 3 has its weird handles where it's like if you if you push it the way that it looks like you should push it it yells at you that you pushed it wrong and that you might have heard it
Tesla makes amazing drivetrains, and they have a lot of really good ideas.
But it seems like they are desperate to prove their innovation in areas that we don't really care about, like doors and door handles.
And when they do that, they make problems for drivers because the way they choose to do that is usually finicky or unreliable or unintuitive or all three.
The Model S, I've had two now.
The only problems I've ever had with the Model S are mostly door handle problems.
The first one, I had, I think, two of them, like, just die and have to be replaced.
Even the current one, which is about three years old, almost three years old, the current one, I haven't had any failures with the door handles, but I will often have the thing that every Model S winner has at some point had happen where, like...
You're walking around the car like maybe you're loading it up.
And so it unlocks itself because the key is nearby.
And then as soon as you go to grab the handle to get in, it's about to retract them.
And so you grab the handle and it kind of bounces back out because it's like it's like canceling the retraction that it was about to do.
And then you get stuck in this loop where you just grab it and it just bounces.
And you grab it and it just bounces.
And you kind of have to lock the car from the key in your pocket, let it retract all the way, then unlock it, open it back up again.
It's just... Oh, and by the way, they don't work in the ice.
That's another fun thing.
Ice freezes them over so that it makes them work a lot less.
Similar problem with the auto-folding side mirrors.
And used to be a problem on the charging door.
It's a little bit less of a problem there now.
Anyway...
So they have this cool door handle that makes it look really cool and futuristic a little bit, I guess, but it makes problems in practice for owners of it.
It makes it less reliable, less predictable, and it causes problems in extreme conditions like cold, like super cold weather.
And I understand that the reason why they have their retractable door handles is in part to look cool, but in part because it probably also reduces drag by some very tiny percentage.
That being said, a redesign of the car, I would expect to identify whatever significant problems existed in the previous version and try to fix them, try to address them in some way.
And I don't know how anybody who's ever owned an S could possibly ever say, keep the door handles exactly the same.
There are no problems.
I hope the next S keeps these same door handles.
Nope, never.
I don't know any owners who have not had problems with door handles at some point.
So that's the first thing I would have fixed.
Fix the door handles.
Put regular door handles on there.
I'll take the 0.5% reduction in range.
Fine.
Just put regular door handles on there.
Make them operate like regular door handles.
And I would say that about literally all of Tesla's models because they keep messing with door handles.
And I don't know what they're doing.
But you don't even need it.
You don't even need it for the aerodynamics because, like, every electric car feels they need to do that for mileage.
But, like...
You don't have to have a weird door handle for it to be smooth.
Like I was I was thinking of this.
I mean, obviously, this is not in the same price class, but there's some Ferrari that I was watching a review of and they had flush door handles like it's just entirely smooth over the surface of the door.
Nothing sticks out.
So aerodynamically, it's the same as all of the Tesla door handles.
The whole point is they're flat.
They don't stick out into the airflow.
The only difference is there was this little outline, and you basically shove your fingers into it, and it's a little door that opens inward.
And once you tuck your fingers into there, you pull on what is now the handle because you've looped your fingers over, right?
And that uses the advanced technology called a hinge.
It's not electronic.
It's a piece of metal that hinges in, right?
Unlike your gas cap or your charging cap that hinges out, right?
This one just hinges in.
It's not as good as, obviously, the thing I just posted in the chat, which is a picture of my door handle, which is the epitome of door handle.
But my door handle is not aerodynamic, so I understand, right?
But my door handle is a handle that you grab with your hand, and it works every single time.
And it is fairly resistant to ice because you have a big metal thing to grab onto, and you just yank it, and it cracks through the ice, right?
Yeah.
the the aerodynamic ones where you have to poke in i can imagine them being more vulnerable to ice but but yeah you're totally right this is not the area to innovate we talked about this many many moons ago when we were talking about tesla part of it especially in the beginning was to make the tesla seem futuristic and cool because that was part of the selling proposition it's part of what attracted buyers to it and it's part of what made you think you were cool for owning it because hey look the door handles come out but at this point
tesla needs to let go of that well like it instantly loses its cool the first time you can't open your door in public yeah yeah no i'm not i'm not saying like it is if it was 100 reliable it would still be kind of annoying but if it's unreliable it's terrible but like as far as tesla's concerned they've already got your money which is why they should have revised it sort of when the second round of tesla buyers were buying their next tesla because the novelty is worn off they don't want the unreliability it's like just
just put a door handle on and here's the thing like the door handle aerodynamics it's real you can measure it but it is much less significant than say the wheel covers right and tons of tesla owners pick the the less aerodynamic wheel covers because they look nicer if you could if tesla had the option to pick a normal honda cord door handle but
People will take that in a second because it's less annoying and they don't care about the aerodynamics.
Those, you know, the coolest looking wheels destroy your mileage much worse than those door handles would.
Yep.
You know, the good news is, though, Marco, since they've solved all the other low hanging fruit like, you know, panel gaps and build quality and things of that nature, I'm sure the door handles are coming next.
I mean, they took a second swing at it with the three and their solution, I think, is probably more reliable than the five store handles just because it doesn't involve electronics, but still not great.
And I think kind of weird and awkward.
So they should they should keep trying.
But apparently they're not trying.
But anyway, we need to talk about the five steering.
We'll get there.
We'll get there.
One other major change that I am very sad to see is that in the latest builds of the S, like before this change was announced, like it just recently, new build to the S, lost the ability to have a sunroof.
What?
Yeah.
The S no longer offers a sunroof.
The 3 has never offered one.
And I don't know if the 10 ever did because it has that same like solid glass roof as this.
I probably didn't.
So they no longer make sunroofs, it seems.
I don't like that at all.
Again, I love my car, which has a sunroof and is fine.
Like, I don't know why they would delete the sunroof.
I'm sure it was, again, for some kind of, you know, parts savings thing.
Like, you know, make things more uniform across the line.
Whatever benefits the, like, all glass panoramic roof has, you know, maybe.
But I love a sunroof.
And I really don't want to buy a car that doesn't have one if I can avoid it.
I use it all the time.
Been there.
Been there.
Yeah.
You know, I use it all the time.
I just use it again on this trip because it's the winter.
And a lot of times in the winter, it's too cold to have a window open right next to you.
But a little bit of ventilation from a sunroof is nice.
It's just, I don't know.
I don't know what they're doing anyway.
So that's one of the thing I was, when I heard that they, that they had stopped offering the sunroof, I was hoping that it was like a temporary thing as they, you know, cleared out inventory.
And then when they heard there was a refresh, I thought, Oh, maybe they found a way to put it back, but Nope, it's just gone.
Yeah, that's really too bad.
Very quickly, one thing that I really do like about this, and I don't know how to verbalize why I like it, but the front and rear look more like car fronts and car rears than they do like, I think it was your second Tesla, Marco, where it was just like a slab of plastic.
Yeah, that's the current, that's what I have now, yeah.
And this looks like it has a front air dam, like in the front.
That's repetitive, but you know what I mean?
It looks like it has an air dam in the front.
The back has some like lines on it that aren't remarkable, but there's enough difference to my eye that it makes it look far more appealing and far more like a car shaped car than it used to.
Yeah, I'll give you that.
Where do you have a good picture of the new S back?
I don't see the... On the Verge article, I'll put a link in there.
It's also... They have a whole configurator up.
You can go on the website and look.
And there is one up there.
I think the front is a downgrade.
I actually like Marcos front.
Because they added like...
flaps and gills and wrinkles and it looks yes i love it no it looks looks too busy the back uh the back looks like it has a bigger more emphasized sort of diffuser area but yes i mean really these are these are the type of tweaks that you would expect within a generation from model year to model year only with tesla you got to wait like five years for them to happen
i would also argue i don't think either wheel option is good uh for my needs like i don't like the default uh tempest wheels i don't like that weird kind of like you know two color weird flat design they have um and i would never get the 21s because i live in a place with winter and that i would i would break those skinny tires in a second um so because we have potholes here and bad roads so i would i would need to get 19s and these 19s are are terrible in my opinion
The arachnid wheels are very pretty, but yeah, you do not want 21-inch wheels, I don't think.
We appear to have lost my light wood interior option as well.
There's very few options here.
They've been going this direction for a while, but there are way fewer options than there used to be.
And none of them have light wood anymore.
So let's go to the steering bucket.
Why are you calling it a bucket?
Why does this resemble a bucket to you?
It doesn't look like it contains anything.
Like the U shape.
It looks like if you cut a bucket in half, like the cross section of a bucket.
That's a reach.
Anyway.
Hey, you know what?
If you guys ever wanted to drive a Knight Industries 2000, now's your chance.
Yep.
I mean, it's a little bit different than a rider one.
So this is part of the trend that kind of started with flat-bottom steering wheels from race cars.
Mine has one.
Casey, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe flat-bottom steering wheels came into race cars just because race car cockpits are incredibly cramped and it makes it easier to get the driver's body and legs under the steering wheel in tight quarters.
Does that sound true to you, Casey?
I don't know if that's factual, but that absolutely sounds true.
And my Golf R does have a flat-bottom steering wheel.
Right.
And so if my recollection of how flat-bottom steering wheels started to be a thing is correct in racing, then flat-bottom steering wheels in non-race cars is essentially skeuomorphism.
physical feature that no longer serves a purpose but is carried over just because it's done that way in race cars and it's not just skeuomorphism but it's also like aspirational like well race cars have flat bottom steering wheels so your car has one so that makes your car more like a race car when in reality if your car was as cramped as a race car you would never buy it because you would say this car has no room in the interior and i can't fit and it's ridiculous right
And so they had flat bottoms for a while and Ferrari steering wheels and supercar steering wheels have been getting even flatter bottoms.
Meanwhile, in the actual race car world, like F1 steering, quote unquote, wheels have looked unlike wheels entirely.
They don't have flat bottoms.
They are essentially flat bottoms.
fighter pilot kind of airplane yoke things that are like well there's a thing attached to a thing that you turn but it is not a wheel it is not round it's not even continuous it's more like the night rider thing of like there is a handle on the left and a handle on the right and a bazillion buttons in the middle for all your functions of your f1 car that's what race car steering wheels look like at the you know in the formula one type things now cars don't yet look like that
So the logical conclusion of constantly chasing race car steering wheels because race cars are cool is that the way F1 steering wheels look, slowly our car steering wheels start along like that.
Ferrari steering wheels do look a lot like F1 steering wheels, but they're still...
in a continuous shape in a you know you start with a circle and you squish sides of it and you make it flatter and you make it bulge here and you put some spokes on it or whatever tesla i think is the first at least the first mass market car company or close to mass market car company that has decided they're going to finally ditch
the the idea that it is a shape like a ring of any kind and instead like marco said it's more like a u so it looks like kind of like an airplane yoke only you can't push it in and out you just twist it from side to side but it's not a wheel it's not a ring it's a rectangle and the rectangle sort of extends downward from the center which is great for visibility of the instrument cluster if you're going straight because there's nothing blocking its view but
But it's bad if you have any fondness or appreciation of the utility of a wheel, which means that you can turn it hand over hand.
It can slide through your fingers as it unwinds and do all those things that cars which have a way larger distance, you know, a number of rotations lock to lock on the steering than, say, an F1 car does.
So I really, really question what it's going to be like to drive a normal car with a normal turning radius with a thing that is not a wheel and that is very rectangular and very low.
So I, having not used this thing, are giving it a tentative double thumbs down.
Agreed.
I can't imagine why this would be an improvement in any way.
And I could swear, and I can't back this up, but I could swear that I had read an interview with Hasselhofer or Stunt Driver or something like that saying that it was really dangerous to drive the Knight Rider car on account of the wheel.
and that it was so unlike anything else and it was you you would go to grab it and it wouldn't be there and and it was just terrible and i can't believe that i'm looking at a configurator where this is the wheel like i i could totally believe that some promo shots had the wheel in it like when we were looking at the verge article that'll be linked in the show notes oh yeah of course they have this ridiculous yoke whatever that's fine but marco i didn't realize that the configurator's up and i'm looking at the configurator and
And it's there and it's scaring me because this is an absolute deal breaker for me.
I mean, I would test drive one, I suppose, but unless I was bowled over by how much better and easier it was than I expect, this in and of itself is a deal breaker for me.
And to be clear, in case this wasn't clear from my earlier explanation, the reason this works in race cars is race cars, you don't have to turn the wheel like three and a half revolutions to go from full left to full right.
Their steering is...
much quicker, like you can go from all the wheels as far left as they can go to the wheels as far right as they can go without doing multiple revolutions of the wheel.
And in general, racetracks don't have lots of places where you have to do hand over hand turning.
It's mostly just twist the wheel to the right, twist the wheel to the left, two hands on the wheel the entire time, no crossing over your hands, no need to ever fully rotate a race car steering wheel.
But we don't drive race cars.
We drive regular cars with normal turning radiuses and steering ratios that often require the wheel to turn more than 90 degrees to negotiate turns in a parking lot or whatever.
So you will be, unless they've massively changed the steering ratio in a terrifying way in this car, you will be, in fact, rotating the steering wheel through...
more than 90 degrees which means like casey said maybe you'll reach for that wheel when you cross your hands over and the wheel won't be there because there is no wheel it's a rectangle and now you have to keep track of where the grabby parts of the rectangle are which is why steering wheels have utility so i you know i it's hard to say without actually driving this how terrible it's going to be but i can imagine many problems with this and
And, of course, the main problem, even if this was vastly superior, is that people are used to wheels in cars.
And so, especially for old people like us who are set in our ways or whatever, it may be difficult for people who are used to a wheel to suddenly not have a wheel.
And I do wonder how many people are going to get into accidents just because they're not used to not having a wheel.
Even this turns out to be the better design.
Like, in the future, all cars are like this.
This is a superior design.
For something like a car that's been so similar for so long, messing with the primary controls is dangerous because there is a population of people who are just used to the way it used to work.
You really kind of have to change things slowly to sort of
Allow the old people to age out and die and allow the young people to learn the new thing.
And this is not a slow change.
This is, hey, you had a wheel.
Now you don't.
Now it's a weird rectangle.
Good luck.
Well, and it gets worse, I think.
Well, actually, no, that's the worst part is the wheel shape.
However, they've also deleted the two stalks that were next to the wheel, which served a lot of functions.
Just use the touchscreen.
And, well, you see the close-up picture that the Verge has.
I'll place the link here.
The close-up picture that the Verge has suggests that there are touch controls now on the wheel for things like your turn signals.
Oh, hell no.
Speaking of Ferraris, the new Ferrari thing also has touch controls on the steering wheel.
touch controls in the steering wheel how does that get out of like the first like brainstorming session it's like your hands are all over the steering wheel especially if you're going to be crossing over on this weird rectangle of the steering wheel grasping your hands accidentally activating every capacitive touch thing all over the freaking thing touch controls the steering wheel please manufacturers just say no like what are you even thinking like your hands are all over there it's like it's like the touch bar all over again yeah and and like you know people who who see
the Model S before, but have not driven one or don't have a lot of experience with one, often think, mistakenly to date, that you have to do everything via touchscreen, and that's kind of odd and maybe unsafe and certainly not a good thing.
But the reality of driving the S up until now is that it actually has physical controls for so much of the most common stuff that you don't need to touch the touchscreen constantly during driving.
The most common need you would have to touch it would be either navigation, which I think it's fine to have that be a touch function.
It's actually better than any other car I've ever used for that purpose.
Or things like adjusting the climate control.
You do have to tap it for that.
But the common stuff like your turn signals, windshield wipers, volume up and down, track forward, track back on audio...
All of that stuff you can do now via physical controls either on the stalks that are next to the wheel or on a handful of buttons and the little scroll wheels that are on the wheel.
This gets rid of the stalks and looks like it might be moving things like turn signals to these big flat touch areas that are on top of it.
And that I really, really don't think is going to be a good move because...
Having to do everything via touch controls for a device that you're literally not supposed to or allowed to and safely can't because you might die look at while you're operating?
That's not a good idea, I don't think.
And even, you know, little stuff like...
On the S to date, you've been able to adjust the current cruise control set speed via a stock on the side.
On the Model 3, as far as I know, I don't think that was ever an option.
I don't think the 3 has enough stocks to do it.
So on the 3, you've always had to adjust the set speed, again, as far as I know, correct me if I'm wrong, please, via the touchscreen.
And when I drive with cruise control, adjusting the set speed is a very common operation for me.
Maybe that's just me.
It's very common that I make adjustments to that speed.
One of the big reasons why I'm not interested in the three is that it makes that harder.
And I don't want that to be made harder.
What this new version of the S appears to do is make tons of stuff that I do all the time, like turn, harder.
And I don't know why they would do this in a way that would result in anything that's better.
It looks like the actual controls of using this steering wheel for everything the outgoing Model S steering wheel was used for, from steering to all the controls that were on and around it,
they all appear visually to be worse with this new one.
And I have to wonder what the hell they're thinking with this.
And when I see this, this makes me not want to ever upgrade.
I don't blame you.
I'm looking at the steering wheel closer on this picture, the closeup picture.
Yeah.
And not only do the turn signals appear to be on capacitive buttons on the steering wheel, but they're both on the left side.
Yeah, isn't that great?
To be clear, turn signals on the steering wheel is fairly common in the industry now.
And it's actually pretty cool.
In some ways, it is superior to stock.
Some ways, it's worse because the stocks don't move and the signals do.
But I've never seen anybody not take the obvious design, which is button on the left of the left side of the steering wheel and button for the right turn signal on the right side of the steering wheel.
It kind of just makes sense.
But no, Tesla didn't do that.
But yeah, capacitive is just is maddening.
I'm looking at what these buttons are.
The horn is one of them.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure.
Yeah, there's a horn icon on the right side.
The horn, the turn signals, the horn, the headlights, like you just imagine it's like the Apple TV remote.
the whole part and they and they put the rotating ball except they have scroll wheels on either side which are cool hey yeah physical controls to get to those physical controls you must reach across the no man's land of the capacitive touch buttons which can turn on your turn signals yeah or or spread your windshield windshield squirter yeah people who are going to be driving this tesla are going to have one of their blinkers constantly on their lights going on and off their horn occasionally blaring and squirting going on in their window and then activating like the the hey siri microphone thing what is that in the lower right corner yeah it's their voice control thing yeah
Now, now we're just we don't know that these are capacitive.
We don't know that they're able to TV or maybe you actually have to press on them or something.
But either way, they do not have anything that lets you feel for them.
Right.
So even if they are pressure sensitive and not they won't activate when you brush across them, like maybe we're wrong about that.
To figure out where the left and the right are, you're just going to have to memorize the zones they're in because there's no ridge, there's no indentation, there's no physical way that you can feel for these controls, which is so dumb.
Like, look at the F1 steering wheels.
Not a lot of capacitive touch controls on an F1 steering wheel because they don't have time for that crap.
They need a button that they can press and a wheel that they can turn, and that's how you don't have to look at things.
if they're just where they are do you have to look to find your left and right turn signal on the stalks on your car right now no you never look at them you just use them it becomes unconscious because their physical controls this is such a terrible idea i don't see anything about this new steering wheel that makes me think oh i want to try that that looks interesting or that looks good or that looks like an improvement it looks like a hundred percent regression like it looks like they made everything worse well the one improvement is you can see the instrument cluster more clearly
i can see it now when you're going straight it provides a clearer view of the thing i can see it now there's a hole there's a big gap when you have a steering wheel between it really depends on how tall you are that's actually a tricky problem because no you can adjust the wheel that's the right but it's height adjustable just so you can adjust the wheel so it's the right distance for your arm comfort and or you can adjust the wheel so you can see the entire instrument cluster without obstruction but it's hard to do both and plus your head moves around when you're driving because you're looking for traffic so
That is the one I'm going to give that one.
The yoke style steering wheel gives you a less obstructive view of the instrument cluster.
Now, on the flip side of that, the Model 3 not having an instrument cluster gives you a slightly less obstructive view of the road, especially for people who are not tall.
So there's a benefit to not having that cluster there.
What is it?
Toyota Echo style or whatever the first car to do that was to get rid of the Saturn.
I thought a Saturn might have done it first.
No, I think the Echo.
Yeah, that might have been the first one.
Boy, that was a terrible car.
So I don't see zero benefits, but whoa, the downsides are so massive.
And some of them are just like the capacitive stuff.
Like I said, Ferrari has capacitive controls on one of their new models.
And they have a steering wheel, a regular steering wheel with a flat bottom.
But no, capacitive controls on your steering wheel are just a bad idea.
And I hope...
not too many people have to die for us to learn that both turn signals on one side is a bad idea independent of the thing and then the shape you know i feel like we all have to have an open enough mind about this that maybe the shape does have advantages that we're not seeing but right now i think it's terrible i i don't know how any model s owner can look at this and say oh i want the new one like it it just looks like it made so many things worse
Like many things in Tesla, I don't think any of us have our... It's not a mystery why this car looks like this.
The reason many things at Tesla are the way they are is because somebody important, probably Elon, thought they were cool.
the cyber truck look at half the weird look at the freaking door handles like sometimes things are the way they are a lot of the things that are good about tesla are because there's someone in charge who just you know steve job style dictates that you're going to do a thing because it's cool and clearly someone thinks this steering wheel is cool and i think a lot of buyers will also think it's cool
And maybe they'll be thinking that just as they reach for the steering wheel that's not there and hit their brand new Tesla into the corner of a building in a parking lot.
But we'll see.
To me, Tesla is more like Twitter than Apple.
They have some incredible assets, and they do certain things so incredibly well.
But it seems like they're always trying to innovate in ways they don't need to, in ways that actually don't benefit their customers, and that...
possibly suggest that they don't understand their appeal.
Maybe they don't understand why they make such good cars and why people love them so much.
Because they innovate on weird things.
They make tons of self-owned mistakes that are totally not necessary to make.
they did throw a giant uh steel ball bearing at their new car window right yeah live on stage and it shattered so that is a perfect that is a perfect i don't say it's a metaphor but it's just another instance of exactly what you're talking about no one forced you to do that tesla you threw a steel ball into your own car to try to brag about the window and it broke yeah you made this steering wheel you did to yourself like people would be excited about this car if you just made it better than the s in incremental ways but you said you know what let's screw up the steering wheel