A Series of Terrible Magic Tricks
Marco:
All right, so show of hands, who knew what BGP was before this week?
Casey:
Me.
Casey:
Ooh, no, I don't think I did.
Marco:
Yeah, I didn't either.
Marco:
I knew John would.
Marco:
Of course John did.
John:
If you've done anything like server-side development in a big company context for enough years, you know what BGP is.
John:
Not that I know it and I'm not a networking engineer, but it's the thing that you run across.
Marco:
It's the kind of thing that I probably should have run across at Tumblr, but
Marco:
i like we were always just in a in a data center host that was like hosting our servers for us like you know we were like when i left there was like 120 servers but they were all still at what was then called the planet uh which was then later became soft layer which later became part of ibm uh
Marco:
But it was a dedicated host where you lease servers.
Marco:
They took care of the networking gear, the routers and everything.
Marco:
I had no idea about any of that stuff.
Marco:
That was all kind of not at the level I was working at.
Marco:
So I probably should have been exposed to this at some point, but it wasn't.
John:
Well, I think it depends on if your company runs its own data center, which I guess is probably even more rare now because everyone just uses public cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud or Azure or whatever.
John:
But yeah, back in the original dot-com days, almost everybody ran their own data center.
John:
So even if you had some rinky-dink little company with not a lot of employees, you'd still have a rack or two in some data center, and then you'd have to hire someone who knew how to set up your stuff in that rack.
John:
And if your company got a little bit big, then...
John:
you'd be hiring network engineers, set up your network in the data center and on and on from there.
John:
And obviously Facebook is, you know, runs its own stuff because it's Facebook and you know, it's kind of, it's actually kind of surprising that Facebook doesn't have its own, uh, public cloud thing by this point, but maybe I shouldn't encourage them.
John:
Although maybe, maybe that's a business where they can do less damage.
Um,
John:
But anyway, yeah, if you run your own data centers, if you end up hiring network engineers, then that's where this comes up.
John:
But it sounds like Tumblr was born late enough to be able to take advantage of hosting by other things and that you left before they became potentially a big enough company where they decided they want to run their own data centers.
Marco:
Yeah, totally.
Marco:
I mean, I think I'm kind of lucky in that way that I didn't have to deal with that.
Marco:
And if you're at the point where you have 120 servers, I don't think you should be operating your own routers.
Marco:
That, to me, that's like jumping the gun on the level that you're operating at.
Marco:
I do think this whole Facebook outage thing, which I guess we're going to talk about now...
Marco:
Sorry.
Marco:
I'm chief derailer in chief.
Marco:
It was interesting.
Marco:
So, first of all, the response from average people, I think, has been really interesting.
Marco:
I don't know if you've talked to any non-nerds in the last few days, but everyone knows about it, obviously, because everyone uses either Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or multiple of those.
Marco:
So that's, you know, problem number one.
Marco:
But also, like, the opinion seems to be split between people who thought it was a hack based on, you know, just...
Marco:
whistleblower leak or something, or that it was specially timed for Congress and everything.
Marco:
It's kind of like conspiracy theory-torial.
Marco:
But also, a lot of people pointed out how disruptive it was.
Marco:
And it's not...
Marco:
It's not disruptive in the way that like, oh, I couldn't post on my Instagram, boo, you know, poor me.
Marco:
It's disruptive in ways like I couldn't book an appointment with my hairstylist because they only book stuff over Instagram.
Marco:
Or I couldn't buy something from like a friend's business or something because they only have a Facebook page, not a website.
Marco:
It really revealed quite how dependent the world is on Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp.
Marco:
I'm not part of a WhatsApp using community, but I know that it's a massive messaging app and is the primary messaging app for many parts of the world.
Marco:
Imagine if iMessage was down for six hours for us.
Marco:
That's a pretty big problem.
Marco:
And especially if that's like how you communicate with almost everyone, you know, that's a huge problem.
Marco:
And so when you bring in like the business side of it too, like how disruptive it was for businesses that might operate primarily or only on Facebook owned properties, that's a, that's a pretty big,
Marco:
big deal and it was like the scene in independence day where their computers are all broken so they have to switch back to morse code they're like what what kind of old technology can we dust off to communicate with each other because our computers are down that morse code was like you know those of us like dusting off our blogs or like you know going back to twitter or whatever like hey how do we have maybe we should make a website for our business after all who knew but it really shows like how
Marco:
just how dependent everyone is on this stuff in ways that go beyond just the superficial need for social likes.
Casey:
Yeah, for me, I didn't talk to most anyone about it.
Casey:
Like, I briefly talked to Aaron about it, but we just happened to have a busy day.
Casey:
What was it, yesterday?
Casey:
So it didn't affect either of us a whole lot.
Casey:
Like, I'll glance at Instagram maybe a few times a day, but, you know, I was busy, and so maybe the one or two times I had the time to glance at it, I just, it didn't.
Casey:
uh and aaron similarly like she she's heavier into facebook than instagram but looks at both and i think again like she didn't really think a whole lot of it i don't think it crossed her mind that it was a hack and it didn't cross my mind that it was a hack i i think we both assumed it was some sort of oops and it seems as with any of these kinds of major outages it was actually a series of oopses that
Casey:
It caused the problem.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I didn't get any conspiracy theories, nor were our lives particularly disrupted by it.
Casey:
But yeah, the thing that really strikes me and kind of, I don't know if scares is a bit dramatic, but scares me a little bit, is from what I understand, their entire, and I think you said this a second ago, entire continents, if not countries, that basically live on WhatsApp in the same way that China lives on something.
Casey:
I can't remember what it is now.
Casey:
WeChat.
Casey:
WeChat.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
For an entire continent or country or what have you to basically be crippled on account of somebody oopsing on a router in Facebook.
Casey:
I don't know what to say about it other than that it's undesirable.
Yeah.
Marco:
I didn't think it was a hack because, honestly, a hack usually is not that big an instant of a problem.
Marco:
To take down Facebook's entire network for six hours, that's not a hack.
Marco:
That's an oops.
Marco:
You can tell.
Marco:
I've been there.
Marco:
Normally, I try not to take pleasure in companies having server problems because I've been there.
Marco:
I've caused those server problems.
Marco:
I know what it's like to be on the other side of that, and it sucks.
Marco:
And to be the engineers who have to be responsible for that and be fixing all this stuff under immense pressure, that does suck.
Marco:
But it's also really hard to feel sorry for Facebook.
Marco:
You know, I do take a little bit of joy that it happened to an absolutely awful company.
Marco:
But certainly, I do feel for the individual engineers who I would suggest maybe not working for that company in general.
Marco:
But overall, I feel bad for you individual engineers having to work on that.
Marco:
But yeah, that was quite a thing.
Marco:
The impact, it's ridiculous how much of an impact that had.
John:
I don't think there's going to be any lesson learned out of this, though.
John:
You're right that it did affect huge numbers of people.
John:
But I feel like the reaction is going to be kind of the same reaction that happens when, like, the power goes out.
John:
Like, imagine if the power to an entire country went out.
John:
Like, we would all agree, oh, this has far-reaching effects.
John:
Like, without electricity, so much of our life depends on electricity and businesses and people and health care and just, boy, we really need that electricity.
John:
But the reaction is we should really make sure that electricity stays on.
John:
That's, you know, they don't say we should not have electricity.
John:
And I feel like Facebook is, or, you know, WhatsApp or whatever, like they're in that category where people just become adamant to like, well, we don't want that to happen again.
John:
We've got to make sure Facebook stays up forever.
John:
And that's like, that's not the lesson we want people to take from this.
John:
Like, hey, maybe you shouldn't be so dependent on what is in fact a private company run by one douchey guy.
John:
But that's not the lesson people take from it.
John:
They just want their Facebook to work.
John:
And so...
John:
I feel like nothing will come of this.
John:
And the main reason I think it didn't have any thought didn't even enter my head that this is any kind of hack is because hacks seek to either extract money or do damage or both.
John:
And this was not that.
John:
This was like accidentally turning off the light switch.
John:
Right.
John:
And then people having to drive to a building to turn it back on.
John:
It's terrible and everything.
John:
But like.
John:
It's like no harm done.
John:
They didn't erase everything.
John:
They didn't like ransomware every piece of data that Facebook owns, right?
John:
They didn't burn the buildings down.
John:
They didn't delete all their source code and backups from the repo.
John:
Like that's what hacks do, right?
John:
This is just, yeah, it's someone who made a very bad mistake.
Casey:
I know that it is now October.
Casey:
I know that we are not really talking about St.
Casey:
Jude anymore, but hey, guess what?
Casey:
I want to talk about St.
Casey:
Jude for one more minute.
Casey:
First of all, I wanted to thank everyone, including you, the listener, assuming you donated, which you should have done.
Casey:
I want to thank everyone, including you, the listener, for getting Relay and the entire community over 700
Casey:
$100,000.
Casey:
This actually happened as we were recording Analog, which will be out later this week, that Mike got the news that we had crossed $100,000.
Casey:
Additionally, that means that we, over the entire lifetime of the Relay and St.
Casey:
Jude partnership, have raised $1.5 million.
Casey:
Basically half of which was this year, which is utterly bananas.
Casey:
But still, $1.5 million in three years, $700,000 in one year.
Casey:
I am extremely proud of all of us.
Casey:
Also, we talked last episode about the absolutely bananas donation of $26,922.05, which was one cent more than Agile Bits.
Casey:
The donor has reached out to me and they would like to remain anonymous, but wanted to note that the donation was in honor of Shang Ling, Jennifer Lin's parents.
Casey:
And so I am honoring their wishes by announcing that to everyone.
Casey:
So thank you for your donation.
Casey:
And thank you to this wonderful lady's parents for being awesome enough to justify a $26,000 donation.
Casey:
I have not yet had the chance to mail stickers, but all the stickers will be mailed shortly.
Casey:
So I wanted to put that on record.
Casey:
Now,
Casey:
If you would like to donate to St.
Casey:
Jude, feel free to do so, except we don't have our fancy URL anymore because the campaign is closed.
Casey:
But hey, it can't hurt.
Casey:
Moving right along in the spirit of taking your money.
Casey:
Hi, it's us.
Casey:
We'd like to take your money.
Casey:
So we have just launched an on-demand merch store.
Casey:
So this is a little different than normal.
Casey:
Normally, the way it works is it's kind of in the spirit of Kickstarter where...
Casey:
We'll do a run for a couple of weeks where we take orders for a couple of weeks, and then our friends at Cotton Bureau print, or whatever the correct term is, print the shirts and ship them out for us.
Casey:
And then there's no further sales other than pins, which we can't seem to sell out of, and maybe other stuff that's left over.
Casey:
We're going to do things a little differently.
Casey:
For now.
Casey:
What we've decided is we're going to sell three different things in our on-demand store.
Casey:
The first thing is the pin that we can't get rid of, no matter how hard we try.
John:
And a little update on that.
John:
I think you'll remember on a past show, we're like, hey, pins finally sold out.
John:
But then we got told by the Cotton Mirror folks, like...
John:
Actually, we still have a few more pins, so we just can't get rid of these pins.
John:
We're really down to scraping the bottom of the barrel, but we always hold back some merchandise in case something gets damaged in shipping or we need to replace it or whatever.
John:
Now we're just really scraping the bottom of the seemingly endless pin barrel.
John:
So there's not a lot of pins left, but there are pins left.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
So if you want a pin with the fancy locking backs, please get on that sooner rather than later.
Casey:
Additionally, we have some leftover pint glasses.
Casey:
We always order, when it comes to glasses and mugs, we always order a little bit too much on purpose just to make sure if there's damage in shipping or whatever.
Casey:
We have some amount of pint glasses left over, so if you'd like to grab one of those, they are excellent.
Casey:
They are my primary drinking glass now.
Casey:
I love them.
Casey:
uh please check that out we don't have a tremendous amount of those either but the the potential star of the show is that we have brought back sort of kind of the m1 shirt asterisk so this is the multi-color rainbow m1 shirt that we had sold and during the last run however
Casey:
we are not printing anything on the back.
Casey:
So if you were smart and beautiful and fancy enough to get your shirt already, you have the outline of the M1 on the back of your shirt.
Casey:
These shirts that we're selling on demand, you do not get anything on the back.
Casey:
It's just blank on the back.
Casey:
However, to make up for that, we do have additional sizes.
Casey:
So we have a onesie for infants.
Casey:
We have a tank top that I don't think John realized is available, but- I saw it, it's fine, whatever.
Casey:
All right, thank you.
John:
I thought it should just be t-shirts.
John:
We accidentally have a tank top.
Casey:
We accidentally have a tank top.
John:
That's the beauty of the on-demand stuff.
John:
If one person order one, they'll make one.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
And then we have tees in men's, women's, youth, and toddler sizes as well.
Casey:
So if you would like, you can go to atp.fm slash store.
Casey:
I don't think we're going to announce this regularly since it's not a limited time thing, but we'll make a stink out of it now and then let it go.
John:
atp.fm slash store you can get an m1 shirt you can get a pint glass or you can get an enamel pin let me explain a little bit of the background to like why are we even doing this like there's there is basically one reason um and that is that uh a a prominent youtuber has been wearing our m1 shirt in some of his videos and every time it's quinn nelson by the way snazzy labs uh i forget what his actual youtube channel is but just look for snazzy on uh on youtube it's a great channel um lots of great videos
John:
But every time he would wear the M1 shirt, like the one that we sold during the past, you know, the one with the printing on the back of the course, you can't see it because he doesn't turn around.
John:
But anyway, he wears M1 shirt and his comments would fill up with, oh, I love your shirt.
John:
Where can I get a shirt like that?
John:
Right.
John:
And then what would happen is people would see those comments and they would like copy and paste our graphic onto a random T-shirt on some random website and they would say, oh, you can buy it here.
John:
And then we would have to go to those random websites and file a copyright takedown and say, that's not your shirt.
John:
That's our shirt.
John:
No, you can't sell it to people.
John:
And then the site would take down their thing.
John:
And after doing that multiple times on multiple videos, and then also not being able to say, well,
John:
I want that shirt, so where can I get it?
John:
We didn't have an answer.
John:
So we didn't want other people selling our shirt for obvious reasons, right?
John:
But we also felt bad for those people who saw the shirt and wanted it.
John:
And by the way, those people have no idea who we are.
John:
They have no idea what ATP is.
John:
They just see like it's cool.
John:
You can get the joke without knowing ATP, right?
John:
So we felt like, is it possible for like the next time we take down one of those...
John:
Can we say, you know, don't buy it there.
John:
That's a rip off.
John:
Buy it from us.
John:
And so now we can say that.
John:
That's why that's like we were just going to do that one product.
John:
Like here's just the M1 shirt solely.
John:
So we have something to give people who don't know who we are, but just want the shirt.
John:
And so we can shut down the rip off people without feeling bad.
John:
Right.
John:
But then we found out, oh, well, you have a couple of pint glasses left and you have a couple of pins left.
John:
So this is not a new way of selling things.
John:
This is just us trying to drain more merchandise.
John:
And the very special case of the M1 shirt, which seems to be very popular among people who have no idea who we are, who watch YouTube videos.
John:
So that's it.
John:
That's the purpose of this.
John:
Also, these are on demand shirts.
John:
So the printing process is different in ways I don't understand because I'm not a printing person.
John:
Right.
John:
So it's not going to be the same as the ones like I'm saying is if you want like the quote unquote real M1 shirt, you got it on the last sale.
John:
It's got the printing on the back.
John:
It's probably better, slightly better printing quality all around.
John:
Like that's the one to get.
John:
The other thing to keep in mind is that, you know, we have the if you if you look at the the very carefully lawyer, not really, we have no lawyers, very carefully worded text on our member page that says, hey, if you become a member, you get an automatic 15 percent off on our time limited sales that was carefully worded from day one to specify when we do those sales where we take a bunch of orders and make a bunch of stuff.
John:
That's where you get 15 percent off.
John:
So if you are a member, you don't get 15% off on any of these on-demand things because these aren't a time-limited sale.
John:
We just run this forever for the M1 shirt because every time someone orders one, they make one and then it just sits there again, right?
John:
So my advice to you if you're listening to this is we're going to have a holiday sale sometime, you know, fall holiday season sale or whatever.
John:
And in that sale, there'll be a bunch of stuff.
John:
you will get your discount during that sale if you're a member i suggest saving your money for that sale especially since this is an m1 shirt any day now if you're listening apple apple could release a new computer that doesn't have an m1 in it maybe it'll have a better chip with more cores and more gpu and all that other stuff and then the m1 shirt is essentially obsolete right but the m1 shirt is the one that's in all the youtube videos we wanted to have some link to provide to people so
John:
um i'm not telling you not to buy this if you if you are wearing out one of your m1 shirts or if you never did like the chip on the back and just wanted it on the front or if you want a onesie or a tank top by all means go for it it's actually a little bit cheaper because it doesn't have the printing on the back so that's one less printing pass to do so it's almost like you're getting a discount just for being a cheaper shirt so anyway that's why we're doing this once we're out of pint glasses and pins we'll just be down to the m1 shirt if some youtuber wears another one of our shirts
John:
We'll probably find us back in the same position and you'll see some other on-demand thing be added to the list of stuff.
John:
But in general, we're still going to concentrate on the normal sort of time-limited sales with member discounts and all that other good stuff.
Casey:
So thank you for the we would love your money portion of the show.
Marco:
So in conclusion, John, you're a terrible salesman.
John:
I'm not selling to the people who listen to the podcast.
John:
This shirt solely exists to sell to people who have no idea who we are and have never heard this podcast.
John:
That's why this shirt exists.
John:
It's just great.
Marco:
It's like what you basically just told people is don't buy this shirt and don't become a member.
John:
What I said is become a member and wait for the time-limited sale that's going to happen around the holidays.
John:
That's where it's your time to shine.
Casey:
Oh, my.
Casey:
We're a mess.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's just get into the stuff we're good at.
Casey:
Let's talk about some follow up.
Casey:
There was a really good post, several page long post on Anantek about the A15.
Casey:
And we've pulled out a series of quotes with regard to it or that came from it.
Casey:
And I'm just gonna go one by one.
Casey:
And if you gentlemen have something you would like to add, please feel free to jump in.
Casey:
Let's start with this is again.
Casey:
These are all quotes from the N and Tech article compared to the competition.
Casey:
The A15 isn't 50 percent faster, as Apple claims, but rather about 62 percent faster.
John:
Not sure how they come up with that quote, consider it all boils down to what what you think of as, quote unquote, the competition.
John:
But this is a theme you'll see throughout this article is that Apple was sort of underselling the A15.
John:
Indeed.
Casey:
Compared to the A14, it continues, the new A15 increases the peak single-core frequency of the two-performance core cluster by 8%, now reaching up to 3.2 GHz compared to the 3 GHz of the previous generation.
Casey:
When both performance cores are active, their operating frequency actually goes up by 10%, both now running at an aggressive, well, also basically 3.2 GHz, compared to the previous generation's 2.9 GHz.
Casey:
So yeah, they're a little faster too.
John:
There was a little bit of some rumors about these things being clocked higher.
John:
Also rumors of them being clocked higher on the Pro versus the non-Pro.
John:
But this is just compared to the previous generation.
John:
Basically, the A15 is able to achieve higher clock speeds than the A14 was.
Casey:
Apple's frequency increases here are quite aggressive, given the fact that it's quite hard to push this performance aspect of a design, especially when we're not expecting major performance gains on the part of the new process node.
Casey:
The A15 should be made on an N5P node variant from TSMC, although neither company really discloses the exact details of the design.
Casey:
TSMC claims a plus 5% frequency increase over N5, so for Apple to have gone further beyond this would have indicated an increase in power consumption.
John:
so we said that like the a15 is quote unquote five nanometers just like the a14 but within the five nanometer process node there is an improved version of the tsmc has called n5p or whatever that's supposed to give you oh you get five percent more clock speed even though you're still quote five nanometers it's a better process and you can clock higher but apple has gone above and beyond that and clocked it even higher than what they would get out of the processing increase so
John:
a reasonable portion of the things that are good about the a15 are essentially good because of that p stuck on the whatever it stands for stuck on the end of the process this is the newest version of tsmc's five nanometer thing and this new version has small amounts of what you would get with a node shrink you know like oh i can just clock it higher i just get that for free out of the process um but you know apple's pushed beyond that by saying yeah we get that for free out of the process but we're going to go with an eight or ten percent clock speed increase to push it even farther
Casey:
The A15's efficiency cores are also massively impressive.
Casey:
At peak performance, efficiency is flat, but they're also 28% faster.
Casey:
So they're using about the same amount of power, but they're about 30% faster.
John:
Yeah, if you read the article, you'll see they added execution units to the efficiency cores.
John:
The quote-unquote efficiency cores, I think I made this point a couple shows back, like don't think that means they're slow.
John:
They're not slow.
John:
They were already fast, and they're getting even faster.
John:
They do some embarrassing comparisons where they compare like the efficiency cores of the A15 to like
John:
the non-efficiency cores of quote-unquote competing ships, and it's very embarrassing for the rest of the industry.
John:
The efficiency cores are, I mean, they're still efficiency compared to the power cores, but they're pretty darn good cores on their own.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
Apple's A15 performance cores are extremely impressive, writes Anantak.
Casey:
Usually increases in performance always come with some sort of deficit in efficiency, or at least flat efficiency.
Casey:
Apple here instead had managed to reduce power while increasing performance, meaning energy efficiency is improved by 17% on the peak performance states versus the A14.
Casey:
So you're getting more stuff and you're spending less power to do it.
Casey:
In terms of peak performance, the new A15 GPU is absolutely astonishing and showcasing, again, improvements that are well above Apple's marketing claims.
Casey:
So not only are the CPUs better, the GPUs are way better, too.
John:
Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff about thermal throttling in there as well, because for the things that are much better, like the power cores and the GPU, given the...
John:
Thermal constraints of the phone.
John:
They don't achieve that peak performance for very long But even the what they call the sustained performance actually when they throttle down because they get too hot That performance level is still above the peak performance of other phones, right?
John:
So it shows that there's a lot of headroom on the a15 if it was put in if these same course were put into a situation where they're not in a tiny little fanless phone or had or even if they're unlike as we saw on the iPad mini someplace where they are better able to spread the heat I
John:
There is, you know, there's a lot of headroom.
John:
Like if you look at the bar chart, what is the peak performance of the A15?
John:
The quote unquote sustained performance is so much lower than that.
John:
The peak performance like sticks out of the graph like by an extra 50%.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And so, and the GPU, again, if you compare it to its competitors, even when it's thermal throttling, it's still amazing, but it, it bodes well for the,
John:
Higher end chips that use some of the same technology in applications where there is more cooling.
John:
And Anatech has a lot of harsh things to say about how the cooling works in the iPhones, like basically which side of the board the chip is on and what it's pressing against and how much it's able to dissipate its heat.
John:
and the fact that the like the cell modem is on the other side of the soc so two very hot parts are right next to each other so apparently the thermal environment of the phone is not great i mean but what can you really do like i think i feel like they made that trade-off to make sort of the motherboard or whatever they call it inside a phone as small as possible to make room for more battery and honestly i think that's the correct trade because people aren't running benchmarks on their phone all the time they just want to use it and battery life is the way to go there but
John:
It speaks to the potential of the design of the A15, whether it be the individual cores or just the A15 itself or an M something chip derived from the A15.
John:
An M2 MacBook Air next year that uses an A15 derived M2 freed from the constraints of a tiny little phone, but just put into a fanless MacBook Air, which has considerably more cooling because of all that aluminum surface area, is going to be a fairly amazing performer.
Casey:
I'm really excited for whenever we get new computers, hopefully sometime this month or next.
Marco:
I think that because we are finally making our M1 shirt available again, that means that tomorrow Apple will release the M1X or M2 based computers.
Marco:
What it took was us to finally invest more heavily in the M1 name.
Marco:
That's what they were waiting for.
John:
But the good thing is the people who watch YouTube don't know that and maybe don't even realize what the M1 is about.
John:
They just think it's a cool looking shirt.
John:
So when the M1X or M2 or whatever the heck they're going to call it comes out, someone is still going to watch a Snazzy Labs video with him wearing an M1 shirt and they're going to say, hey, where can I get that shirt?
John:
And they're just going to buy it and not have any idea that the M2 is out.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite place to host all of my servers.
Marco:
Visit linode.com slash ATP and see why Linode has been voted the top infrastructure as a service provider by both G2 and TrustRadius.
Marco:
And if I knew what that meant, I would rate at the top that whatever too, because I love Linode for running my servers.
Marco:
I have done so much server hosting in my career and my personal life over the last...
Marco:
I've been with a lot of different web hosts of a lot of different kinds.
Marco:
Linode is what used to be called a modern VPS host.
Marco:
Now it's just called a cloud company because everything's cloud now.
Marco:
But if you need one of those hosts, if you want to run server instances, you want to run them at Linode.
Marco:
Of course, you have full root access on your servers, install whatever software you want.
Marco:
your own app backends or Git repositories or whatever you want to run a server for.
Marco:
Linode can help you.
Marco:
And they have all sorts of great add-on services as well.
Marco:
Things like block storage, Kubernetes, an upcoming bare metal release.
Marco:
And all this comes with not only great support,
Marco:
And great performance, but also amazing value.
Marco:
This is why I've stuck with them for so long, because I run a lot of servers.
Marco:
The price matters.
Marco:
It adds up at the numbers that I'm running.
Marco:
And they just have the best value in the industry.
Marco:
I've never found another website that could undercut them on even a temporary basis, let alone a sustained one.
Marco:
And as technology gets better, they offer more for your money.
Marco:
So it's just a great web host.
Marco:
Again, the support is great if you ever need it.
Marco:
I use it sometimes, and it's been wonderful every single time.
Marco:
Their control panel is nice.
Marco:
They have an API.
Marco:
They have all sorts of specialty plans, high memory plans, GPU compute plans, dedicated CPU plans.
Marco:
So they have your needs covered.
Marco:
And again, the value and the support are fantastic.
Marco:
So Linode.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Create your free account there and you get $100 in credit.
Marco:
Once again, Linode.com slash ATP for $100 in credit.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my servers and sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Brian Peterson writes, during episode 450, Marco ran through the math of 4K video data rates.
Casey:
This math was correct for display, but three times too high for a camera.
Casey:
Each pixel in a display is full RGB color.
Casey:
Each pixel in a camera sensor is only red or green or blue.
Casey:
And they're arranged in a Bayer, Bayer, Bayer, whatever, filter pattern of 50% green, 25% red and 25% blue.
Casey:
And the raw conversion algorithms convert them to full color pixels.
Casey:
So Marco's one and a half gigabytes per second figure should be about 500 megabytes per second.
Marco:
Yeah, I didn't know.
Marco:
I mean, I had heard the term Bayer filter or Bayer, you know, sensor thrown around, but I never really knew what that meant.
Marco:
And I had no idea that, yeah, apparently and I verified this.
Marco:
Yeah, this is this is all correct.
Marco:
Apparently that most camera sensors, each pixel only has red or green or blue.
Marco:
And exactly what they said, you know, there's twice as many greens as the other two because I think because our eyes are more sensitive to green and our eyes actually works kind of similarly to this, I think.
Marco:
And so a raw dump off of a camera sensor is not RGB.
Marco:
Each pixel has one of those colors.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I don't need to have three different colors at each pixel site.
Marco:
I have one color at every pixel site when doing my math.
Marco:
So that's pretty cool.
Marco:
And 500 megs per second for my quick 4K math at 8 bits per, I guess, pixel is still a ton of data, but it certainly makes it a little bit easier to process.
Casey:
At least a little bit.
John:
It was a good article that I just found the URL for.
John:
I don't know why I couldn't find it before.
John:
Apparently, I can only do it under pressure.
John:
Back last year, when ProRAW first came out, and there was this article at Lux.camera by Ben Sandofsky called Understanding ProRAW.
John:
And it basically goes... It's talking about Apple's ProRAW feature, which I introduced last year.
John:
But it goes through sort of the process of, you know, what...
John:
what comes off the sensor and then what happens to it next or whatever and you can see the step where they go for they call demosaicing where they go from uh the the actual sensor which with its 25 red 25 blue and 50 green sensors and that they demosaic that into rgb pixels right and then step solve that so if you want to see a graphical representation of that and a
John:
A nice explanation.
John:
And then also learn about ProRoy.
John:
We'll put that link in the show notes.
Casey:
Oh, this looks good.
Casey:
I hadn't seen this before.
Casey:
This is the folks that do Halide, right?
John:
Yeah, I think so.
John:
That's how I Googled for it.
John:
I did Halide blog demosaic.
John:
That's what I Googled for to find that link.
John:
Apparently, I couldn't come up with that previously.
John:
Oh, and we got some other feedback about what is...
John:
uh you know sort of raw uncompressed or losslessly compressed video like how does that manifest on disk and in many different applications of that technique i'm you know i don't remember the particular names but the way they actually do it is they just fill folders with a series of of uh you know losslessly compressed uh frames so it's just a
John:
Yeah.
John:
Frame one, frame two, frame two as, as literal images.
John:
And then like an XML file to weave it all together.
John:
Like that's how they store it because, you know, if you, if you are trying to do sort of uncompressed or losslessly compressed, the sort of deltas that you do between frames in a lossy format, like H.264, that doesn't exist.
John:
Like you're not doing that.
John:
So just, they just save a bunch of images, which seems ridiculous, but that's, that's one way to do it and it'll work.
Yeah.
Casey:
Now we're breaking a personal rule of mine and we're going to talk about destiny on the show.
Casey:
I'm sorry, everyone.
Casey:
John, tell me about destiny and motion sickness, please.
John:
What was the motion sickness thing?
John:
It was, how did we, I think with regard to 120 Hertz.
Casey:
Oh, that's right.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Why?
John:
Yeah.
John:
We talk about 120 Hertz and tracking animations with your eyes and turning your eyes off when things go on.
John:
And a lot of people ask me,
John:
um all right so you have this motion sickness thing and you had to use reduce motion and so on and so forth uh but how do you handle gaming like doesn't playing first-person shooters and everything make you sick like how do you do any video game um and i answered a bunch of them on twitter but i figured it was worth talking about here if only so i can relink the same destiny article
John:
from 2015.
John:
So, yeah, first-person shooters, some of them do make me sick.
John:
In particular, the Half-Life series has always made me a little queasy.
John:
One thing that helps with, I still played it, but like, you know, one thing that really helps with queasiness for me is increasing the field of view.
John:
So that's, like, how wide... If you think of, like, the in-game viewport as a camera, and if it was very narrow, it would be, like, looking through, like, a, you know, a cardboard, you know, paper towel tube, and very wide would be, like, a bullhorn, right?
John:
So how wide a view displays on the screen?
John:
Like, the most extreme would be, like, a 360-degree view where on your monitor you could see both in front of you and behind you, or a 180-degree view where you could see all the way to your left and all the way to your right, right, and also dead in front of you.
John:
Anyway...
John:
If you have a very narrow field of view, I find I get motion sick much easier.
John:
Thankfully, the Half-Life games do have an adjustable field of view, and I just crank it up to the maximum, which I think is like 90 or something like that.
John:
I forget what it is.
John:
So that helps.
John:
Not having the screen entirely fill your field of vision helps.
John:
Like, you're basically doing your own field of view thing.
John:
So if you're sitting on a couch and watching ATV, that is better than sitting two inches from a huge monitor that extends past your peripheral vision in terms of motion sickness.
John:
But finally, this is the motion sickness in first person games.
John:
This is a thing that game developers know about because again, everybody gets motion sickness just a matter of degree and no game developer wants to make a game that makes some substantial portion of their potential customer base feel nauseated because that's not good.
John:
They won't buy your games.
John:
They won't play your games.
John:
especially if you have a game where you want people to like either pay a monthly subscription or constantly play um and so there's an article back from 2015 about a year after destiny was launched i think uh that explains it's a polygon article explains the work that destiny's developers did to try to prevent people from getting motion sick while playing their game and it is fascinating if you've never thought that this is something that game developers consider and do it totally is um and the upshot is after many thousands of hours playing destiny i don't get motion sick playing it um and that's good
Casey:
Hooray.
Casey:
I'm even more remiss to talk about this than I am the one we just finished, but here we are, everyone.
Casey:
Somebody put in the show notes, Marco's pants update.
Casey:
Tell me, Marco, about your pants.
Marco:
Okay, so, first of all, I did get the Apple silicone case.
Marco:
I've been using it for the last couple of days.
Marco:
I'll get to that in a moment.
Marco:
But first, I wanted to address, this is in regards to my plea to the listeners and you last week of...
Marco:
Where am I supposed to put my iPhone in my pants?
Marco:
Because it doesn't really fit very well anywhere.
Marco:
Now that I have back to the regular pro size, the middle size of phone again, I am missing the pantsability of the iPhone mini.
Marco:
I don't want to go back to the mini because I'm telling you, I'm getting some amazing pictures out of this camera system.
Marco:
And I really am enjoying the 3X lens and the macro and ProMotion.
Marco:
Those are all really nice.
Marco:
So I don't want to go back because I don't want to lose these features.
Marco:
But I'm still trying to figure out how to carry this phone in a comfortable and non-ridiculous looking way.
Marco:
And I still haven't found that yet.
Marco:
So a lot of people did write in to recommend...
Marco:
lines of pants that have like special pockets that kind of go like along the leg a little bit lower um the most commonly recommended brand for this was cool kuhl and they have i think like almost all of their pants or all of them and they have a huge line of different pants they have this like little like extra pocket that is made specifically for smartphones so that it kind of drapes it a little bit lower and totally on the side of your leg as opposed to you know the
Marco:
the phone is always going to be kind of like a little bit in the front side of your leg.
Marco:
And that's, that's what I was trying to get away from.
Marco:
Like it will look better if it's on the side and a little bit more in the line of the pants, you know, as opposed to this big block that keeps shifting over towards the front of my leg.
Marco:
Anyway, there are these pants like cool and other ones that have these extra pockets.
Marco:
The problem with that is,
Marco:
is that I mentioned this before, and I mentioned it really fast last week.
Marco:
Even though I am right-handed, I keep my phone in my left pocket.
Marco:
And that's just a fluke of my history that I grew up in a time when I was carrying a wallet and keys long before I had a phone.
Marco:
And so once I had a phone, the wallet and keys were already occupying my right pocket.
Marco:
And so I put the phone in the pocket that was free, which was the left pocket.
Marco:
And I've kept it there ever since.
Marco:
And I pick up and use my phone mostly with my left hand.
Marco:
Any kind of one-handed phone operation for me is my left hand.
Marco:
If I were to switch to one of these special kinds of pants that has a phone pocket on the right, which as far as I could tell, all of them are on the right.
Marco:
I couldn't find anywhere it was on the left.
Marco:
So if I switch to one of those on the right, I would have to totally change not only all of my pants, which is a non-trivial ordeal.
Marco:
I have many pants.
Marco:
And some of which I like a lot, which I don't want to get rid of.
Marco:
But also, I would have to change what hand I hold my phone in.
Marco:
That's a very big life change.
Marco:
And I feel like I don't necessarily want to change my life quite that much just to accommodate a bigger phone.
Marco:
So if that's my only option for carrying this phone comfortably, I probably should go back to the Mini.
Marco:
But I think what I'm going to do instead is just learn to tolerate this.
Marco:
That being said, if anybody has any pants recommendations where that extra pocket is on the left side, please let me know.
Marco:
So regarding the case situation now, I did get my Apple silicone case in the intervening days since last episode.
Marco:
And Casey, you liked yours a lot, right?
Marco:
You still like it?
Casey:
Well, I don't have it on my phone.
Casey:
It's Aaron's case.
Casey:
But in the brief time that I spent with it, I did think it was vastly improved.
Casey:
But I have not spent meaningful time with it because it's on Aaron's phone, not mine.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So I would say I mostly agree with what you said.
Marco:
I think the improvement to the outside coding is not as significant as you said.
Marco:
But it did feel that way on day one.
Marco:
So I think it might have just been like when it was new.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
it felt like, oh, this isn't sticking to my pocket as much.
Marco:
But now that I'm a few days in, oh, it sticks just as much.
Casey:
Oh, interesting.
Marco:
I don't think that's meaningfully better or at least not enough to matter.
Marco:
The Nudiant case, I think I might switch back to because it is both thinner and less tacky than the Apple Silicon case.
Marco:
I don't like the buttons on either one.
Marco:
Neither one of these has great feeling buttons because...
Marco:
What I want is the Apple Leathercase buttons, like those nice steel.
Marco:
Those are really nice.
Marco:
Yeah, neither case offers buttons that nice.
Casey:
Well, the Nudiant doesn't have buttons.
Casey:
However, the cutouts, I am getting used to them, but I don't love them.
Casey:
I feel like the cutouts...
Casey:
feel as though they're 30 feet tall even though this case is actually quite thin like i don't understand how it ended up this way i don't know maybe they need a little more like dead space around the actual physical button but one way or another i feel like the buttons they're exposing the iphone's own buttons which is what i'm trying to say but i don't love the way it's been handled plus the branding on the back like it's not obvious but i feel like it i can it's embossed or whatever letter pressed
Casey:
So I feel it all the time, which is very frustrating.
Casey:
Like, I still think the Nudian case is certainly sufficient, but I don't love it.
Casey:
That's for sure.
Marco:
Yeah, that's how I feel about it as well.
Marco:
I think I'm going to switch back to it out of the two that I have, but I also think my search is not over yet.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's very possible I might end up just going back to the Apple leather case, even though, again, I live a very wet lifestyle out here.
Marco:
And so that's not going to be great in certain ways.
Marco:
But I'll tell you what, though, I have also considered just going back to caseless or trying other options like the the peel cases have strong recommendations, but they don't have they don't have their own magnets.
Casey:
No, they do.
Casey:
Check me on this, and I'm not going to bother checking as we're talking, but I could swear I had seen that Peel has just added their own MagSafe magnets to their cases.
Casey:
But again, I might be lying to you by accident.
Marco:
I'll look into it.
Marco:
Thanks.
Marco:
But yeah, so I'll try that.
Marco:
But ultimately, I will say I do like...
Marco:
having a case again because yeah i like being able to like toss the phone onto a countertop and know it's not going to slide off or like a surface like you know just throughout the day like you know i put it on the counter a lot when i'm doing stuff like around the sink or washing dishes or whatever or cooking or chopping or whatever or like you know when i take a shower i
Marco:
i i bring the phone into the shower and like stand it up on a ledge it's not not like in the water stream but like the ledges on might have a few drops of water on it if anyone else took a shower recently because that's how water works and so like i like being able to like kind of toss it onto a surface and have it grip the surface itself without me having to worry about am i scratching up the back of it like hell or is it going to slide off and break
Marco:
And that's one thing that, you know, I have felt that the last year using my mini caseless.
Marco:
That was a thing I always had to be aware of.
Marco:
And so going back to the case lifestyle, I do really like the way it interacts with services better.
Marco:
So I do think I want a case.
Marco:
I just don't think I have found that case yet.
Casey:
So real-time follow-up, it appears that there exist Peel MagSafe cases.
Casey:
However, they are all for the iPhone 12 line.
Casey:
I do not think they've been updated for the 13 line as yet.
Marco:
Well, I'll keep an eye on it.
Casey:
But I've heard the Peel ones are good, and I would like to try them as well.
Casey:
But as with you, I want to have a case that has little MagSafe magnets internal to it.
Casey:
So I hear you.
John:
Yeah, I just looked at my brand and they apparently still don't have a 13 case, but it sounds like just what's up, you know, Marco's alley.
John:
Like I can highly recommend not having a bottom lip and otherwise it's a very thin leather case that has pretty close to Apple style buttons, little metal things that transfer through.
John:
In particular, the reason I like this case so much is it does what the Apple leather cases do, which is
John:
the place where the buttons are like the volume buttons there's a like an indentation in the leather case and in that indentation are the secondary metal buttons that push on the actual primary metal buttons and so that what that means is that the metal buttons don't stick out that far from the case they stick out a little bit but they don't stick out as far as they would if they started from just the edge of the case right
John:
And same thing with the power button or whatever.
John:
No branding on the back of it.
John:
And like I said, it's held up.
John:
It's just they don't make a 13 or a 13 Pro case at this time.
John:
And also there's no MagSafe, which I consider a feature, but it sounds like you want the magnet transfer thing.
John:
But I'll keep an eye out.
Marco:
I definitely want the magnet.
Marco:
Maybe I could be wrong about this, but anything that would reduce the effectiveness of it sticking on my car mount would be a fatal flaw for any case for me, because even though I don't use my car incredibly frequently where I live right now... But you can just use CarPlay, so why do you even need a mount?
Marco:
oh i i have some car follow-up if we ever get to that but anyway that's different story different night probably um but you know ever since i switched to the um the the magsafe car mount from pro clip usa it's such a quality of life improvement to not have to like dock it into something to be able to just stick it there that's so nice that i don't want to give that up either so
Marco:
I don't know that maybe if I use something like a peel case that doesn't have its own magnets in it, I don't know if maybe it would be too weak then.
Marco:
That extra millimeter or two of case, maybe that would make the magnet weak enough that it might not stick on the car mount reliably.
Marco:
That's the main reason why I insist on having its own magnets in the case.
Marco:
Otherwise, if it's just for charging on my bed stand, I don't care.
Marco:
It's not going to get bumped or moved anywhere, so that would be fine.
Marco:
But it's the car mount that I'm worried about there.
Casey:
Makes sense.
Casey:
Man, if only you had CarPlay, wouldn't that be amazing?
Casey:
Do you want to just do your car follow-up now?
Casey:
We are right at the end of follow-up.
Casey:
Now's the time.
Marco:
I don't know if I want to deal with this now.
John:
You're not a safe enough driver to get full self-driving.
Marco:
Oh, I haven't even tried that.
Marco:
I would never do that.
Marco:
No, I might have gotten myself in the pre-order list of a different vehicle.
John:
Lucid Air.
John:
520 mile range.
John:
Really?
John:
I have so many questions.
John:
I'm assuming it's not the Lucid Air.
Casey:
Are we really just going to drop this bomb and then walk away?
Marco:
How do we feel about Apple stuff?
Marco:
You like Apple stuff?
Marco:
How about phones?
Casey:
You have to tell us the car now.
Casey:
Come on, man.
Marco:
Well, so there is not a large chance, but there is a small chance I might get a driving permit on the sand this coming winter.
Casey:
Oh, so you went for that ridiculous pickup then.
Casey:
Ford Bronco.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
What is it?
Casey:
The Rivian?
John:
He doesn't like gas-powered things, I know.
John:
Is that stupid Rivian?
John:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Not the truck, the SUV one.
John:
That doesn't make it better.
Casey:
I didn't realize they were doing an SUV.
John:
It's the same as the truck, but it doesn't have a bed.
John:
yeah i saw quinn nelson's video on the truck and i'm like that actually sounds kind of like exactly what i would need and want best out here so i mean you don't need that to drive on the sand but yes i can see you well no need yeah but like because because it's not like like that's for you're going up like mountain trails or whatever you're going a very short distance on the sand
Marco:
Well, it's a five-mile drive across very uneven, rough, wet terrain that is oftentimes being torn up by other drivers who don't air down their tires.
Marco:
And so there's some rough areas.
Marco:
That's why ground clearance is the number one thing you need for a vehicle to do this.
Marco:
So anyway, I placed the deposit to get in line because their deliveries allegedly are starting in January.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And if I get a permit this year, it would be sometime near January.
Marco:
So chances are, I'm not even going to get a permit.
Marco:
And chances are, if I did, my review wouldn't even be delivered on time anyway, so I'd have to get something else.
Marco:
So this is not a likely outcome.
John:
But you don't have to get something else.
John:
Would you just wait for the truck to arrive if you got the permit, or would you have to have a gap filler car?
Marco:
I would have to have a gap fill a car.
Marco:
They don't give you a permit unless you have a car to apply it to.
John:
Just go out there and make car noises like, look at me, I'm driving with my permit.
Marco:
Vroom, vroom.
Marco:
And if this permit ever comes in, this is not the kind of thing you say no to or give them any reason not to give it to you.
Marco:
So, again, it's probably not going to be this year.
Marco:
And even if it is, it probably wouldn't be in time to get this Rivian monster, but it is kind of everything I would want.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
What would most likely happen is some kind of quick purchase of a used Jeep or something.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
One of us.
John:
You should get a Ford Bronco, I'm telling you.
Marco:
Are those really widely available yet?
John:
I don't even know.
John:
I'm seeing them pretty much every day now.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It's got to be more widely available than a Rivian electric truck.
Marco:
Well, yeah, but – and there's the other question, too, of, like, whether for this kind of use, whether I should just get something cheap and used and just beat it to hell on the sand because the sand will destroy whatever it is.
Marco:
So that's, like – what I really should do is, again, just buy, like, an old Jeep of some kind and –
John:
You're being a pioneer and an early adopter because we don't know how good Rivian is at building cars.
John:
As Tesla has shown, building cars is actually kind of difficult.
John:
Who knew?
John:
You're correct to point out that setting aside how well Rivian builds its cars, most cars don't stand up well to a saltwater environment.
John:
The very first electric car from a brand new company splashing around in the salt and sand was
John:
How well is that going to hold up?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I mean, especially if you lease it, who cares?
John:
If it rots out in two years, your lease is up and, you know, whatever.
John:
But you are entering, you know, that's some, what do you call it, uncharted territory for sure.
John:
Oh, totally.
John:
I would love to see the result of this experiment.
Marco:
oh yeah especially since i don't even know if they're offering leases um but this is why like the only reason i put this deposit down is that it's completely refundable so i'm like all right i i'll put myself in line but i i don't expect it to pan out speaking of leases oh my god getting tesla to give me my car so they're not good at building cars and they're also not very good at selling them or collecting money for them
Marco:
i don't want to get too too far into the weeds on tesla's bs here but let me just say that ending the lease was almost as hard as beginning i still don't have my title i gave them a big lump of money like a month ago oh my god i would be furious every time you call up they say who are you
Marco:
It took me, okay, so this is not going to be a big deal.
Casey:
I'm here for this.
Casey:
I'm ready.
Marco:
Just the quick version.
Marco:
When you want to end a lease in a way that is not you returning the vehicle, like I wanted to buy it.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So you go in their leasing portal and you can say, all right, send me a buyout quote and you hit submit.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
And then about a month later, you get an email saying your buyout quote option has expired.
Marco:
Try again.
Marco:
okay so go fill out the form again like okay well it's you know I still had a few more months left in the lease fine just give me a bio quote fine and you hit submit and then it says all right well you know a team member will contact you and then another month goes by and it says your buyer requests been canceled
Marco:
And this happened for four months in a row, at which point I eventually just called them.
Marco:
And look, I'll do a lot of things to avoid a phone call, but just call them.
Marco:
Please, I'm trying to buy my car from you.
Marco:
Somehow, can you please make this happen?
Marco:
And the person, the impression I got from that call was that when I was submitting those requests, it was basically just like creating a ticket in some system.
Marco:
And after a month, they just expire.
Marco:
And nobody apparently checks those tickets unless you call and bug them.
Marco:
Oh, my gosh.
Marco:
And the person was like, oh, oh, yeah, I'll put that on my list for today.
Marco:
And then sure enough, like, you know, a day later, I had everything.
John:
So what does this person do with their day if people don't call?
John:
Do they just not look at the ticketing queue and whatever software they're using and say, I'll wait for a phone call.
Marco:
I forgot to.
Marco:
So they send me eventually.
Marco:
First, I send back these forms.
Marco:
You've got to sign it, sign a few places.
Marco:
And then one of the forms is like, where should we send the title?
Marco:
It was like one of those DocuSign web interface things where you just like click to sign, but you can't freeform edit anywhere in the document.
Marco:
You can only edit the places they've marked as fields.
Marco:
But the place where it says where should we send the title was not editable.
Marco:
They just hadn't put fields there.
Marco:
Like there was like lines from the PDF they'd scanned, but they weren't.
Marco:
So I downloaded the PDF and I emailed it back to the person and I said, these fields weren't editable, but I went ahead and did it like on the PDF.
Marco:
Here's the signed version of the PDF with these fields that I did like in preview.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So again, I hear nothing.
Marco:
Three weeks later, I get an email back saying, sorry, the version of the form we had you fill out was not complete.
Marco:
Please fill out this new version.
Casey:
Oh my gosh.
Marco:
So at this point, they already have the money.
Marco:
I still don't have my title.
Marco:
They're like, we need this to release your title.
Marco:
Whoops.
Marco:
So, everything I've done with Tesla leasing, it makes it feel like I'm the first person to have ever done that.
Marco:
Like, that no one here has ever done their job before.
Marco:
No one here is trying very hard or thinking about, how does this actually work?
Marco:
And
Marco:
I cannot tell you how perfect it was to have even this be so difficult with Tesla.
Marco:
Again, I still love their car.
Marco:
I'm going to do a lot of driving in it in a few days because I have some errands to run.
Marco:
I still love their car, but dealing with the company is such a train wreck at every single turn.
Marco:
I hope nothing breaks on this car because now it's really mine, and dealing with that is so bad.
Casey:
Yeah, you're really selling it well.
Casey:
This is what John sounded like, except for you, it's Tesla.
Casey:
And for John, it was us.
Casey:
But that's okay.
Marco:
It's a great car.
Casey:
It is.
Casey:
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
Casey:
Goodness.
Casey:
Well, you know, I'm just happy to know that the entire internet will tell you that Tesla is going to show those old car companies how to do it right.
Casey:
Because those old car companies definitely don't understand how to do a lease quickly and easily.
Marco:
here's the thing the old car companies do so much stuff terribly that tesla does really well no that is true that's and that's why i put up with all this crap because yeah tesla's a mess you know what so is apple apple's a mess and we put up with all their stuff because we like their products right apple's a train wreck in so many areas and yet you know we we're able to look past those even though we complain but like we it's not like we're going you know all switching back to pcs or anything
Marco:
Like, you know, it's we still choose to use the products, even though the company has a bunch of areas in which they're terrible.
Marco:
Like that's that's just that's what happens.
Marco:
You know, nobody's perfect all the way across.
Marco:
You weigh the pros and cons and you go with what you know, what has more stuff that's important to you.
Marco:
And with cars, most of the time that you own a car, you don't have to deal with the company that made it.
Marco:
Most of the time you own a car, you're driving the car.
Marco:
And that's what I prioritized here.
Marco:
It's a fantastic car to drive.
Marco:
I absolutely love it as long as I don't have to deal with the company that made it.
John:
To be fair, Apple is way better at the important things that Apple needs to be good at than Tesla is because Apple is really good at building its products physically.
John:
They're good at that.
John:
That's one of their core skills.
John:
They're also, I think, pretty good at selling them and collecting your money.
John:
In fact, we just saw a thing recently.
John:
So when we were all ordering iPhones, there was that glitch where like,
John:
within a minute of the time where you could order, all of a sudden everyone who was trying to use their Apple card was getting rejected.
John:
And so lots of people were impatient.
John:
They said, all right, well, whatever the hell the problem is with Apple card, I'll just buy it on my Visa card or something, right?
John:
And I know at least one person who got an email from Apple after ordering their phone on a non-Apple card and says, hey, we noticed that you tried to order your phone with the Apple card so you could get 3% back, but that failed due to a problem on our end and you completed your purchase with a different credit card.
John:
Here's the 3% cash back onto your Apple card that you would have gotten.
John:
yeah that's great that is super cool so not only is apple pretty good at collecting your money pretty good we've talked about taking returns and customer service in their stores and not being sleazy when they sell you things and you know doing warranty repairs and like you know there are but in general the things that a computer company has to be good at they're pretty good at software is another thing but i feel like in the software side of things tesla doesn't really have any high ground there either but and software is weird and difficult and we're all programmers we understand that that's a special case right
Marco:
I would also say on the Apple's side of things, I think design recently, UI design, I think has... I mean, I know this is a big thing with Safari tabs.
Marco:
I think UI design is now one of those areas with Apple where actually the software quality in the last two years or so has been significantly better.
Marco:
iOS 14 and 15 have been pretty good releases quality-wise.
Marco:
Same thing with watchOS 7 and 8.
Marco:
On the Mac, Big Sur, quality-wise, I think is...
Marco:
Fine, it's good.
John:
A step up from its predecessor.
John:
Still gaps, but it's going in the right direction.
Marco:
Yeah, was Catalina the one right before this, or was there one between?
Marco:
Because Catalina was a disaster.
Marco:
Catalina's terrible.
Marco:
iOS 13 was terrible.
Marco:
But the ones that have come after that, quality-wise, have been great.
Marco:
I have many design nitpicks with Big Sur.
Marco:
I haven't tried Mono right yet.
Marco:
But it seems like, actually, that Apple mostly has fixed their software quality issues of yesteryear.
John:
I don't think they fixed them, but they're going in the right direction.
Marco:
Okay, that's fair.
Marco:
But yeah, I agree that things are significantly better now in the quality area than they were two or three years ago.
John:
And I think mostly, how did they do that?
John:
Mostly by choosing those ship things.
John:
Which, as we predicted when we used to complain about this even more, the world doesn't end.
John:
Oh, a feature's not ready?
John:
Yeah, it's disappointing that SharePlay isn't ready to go, but please, by all means...
John:
Hold it back until it's ready.
John:
Don't just ship it because it's 15.
John:
Every major release of everything has basically had features that end up MIA, like either because Apple pre-announces that they're not going to be included or because in between the time they did some kind of, you know, keynote presentation and the time the thing ships, they're like, oh yeah, that's not ready yet.
John:
So yeah, just hold it back.
John:
Or like doing mid-year releases like the Catalina 0.5 release that had, or, you know, the iOS 0.5 releases that have a whole bunch of features in it that were announced when the major OS was released.
John:
I mean, obviously, we would like to have them sooner, but this is the right choice.
John:
If it's not ready, don't ship it.
John:
So I think pretty much all of the improvement is attributable to that new policy, and I endorse it.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Really, I think it has worked.
Marco:
We are seeing the results of that.
Marco:
When you make a policy shift or a strategy shift like that or a process shift, you don't see the results instantly.
Marco:
You see them over time.
Marco:
And I think...
Marco:
We actually have seen that in the last couple of years, Apple software quality is better than it was before.
Marco:
Again, you're right.
Marco:
We're not out of the woods totally in certain areas yet especially.
Marco:
And I think on the Mac, I think it's worse than other platforms.
Marco:
But the direction we're heading is a positive one there.
Marco:
Now most of my concerns are about design.
Marco:
I still can't believe that the Big Sur notifications are the same in my way.
Marco:
That to me is amazing.
Marco:
And of course you can do Safari and everything.
Marco:
We're definitely to the point now where if Apple says we've redesigned insert thing that you rely on
Marco:
There's no more excitement there.
Marco:
Now you're just like, oh, crap.
Marco:
Yeah, it's like, how did they ruin it?
Marco:
That's where your mind goes instantly because you know that's probably the bigger concern than, ooh, what's new?
Marco:
And that's a bad place to be.
Marco:
I think they've certainly, they have some problems with their design high ground these days, especially software design.
Marco:
Hardware design seems fine.
Marco:
Software design is still a mess in certain areas, and it seems like the process that
Marco:
that should weed out directions or decisions that don't work.
Marco:
Things that like, hey, you know what?
Marco:
This thing that we tried in the labs or that we had the design idea for, we built it and it turns out it's not usable and so let's not ship that.
Marco:
That process is clearly broken in a really big way.
Marco:
So design-wise, they're way off in the woods and they have problems, big problems that need to work out.
Marco:
But quality-wise,
Marco:
It's substantially better, and I'm very happy to see that.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Their instructions are really nice, and it's exactly what they promise it is.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
So HelloFresh.com slash ATP14, promo code ATP14.
Marco:
Thank you so much for sponsoring our show to HelloFresh, America's number one meal kit.
Casey:
We heard rumors a few weeks ago, and we haven't had time to talk about it, that the upcoming potential 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pro display resolutions may have been revealed in the latest, at that time, macOS Monterey Beta.
Casey:
So somebody had found that there are two new display resolutions found in the Monterey Beta 7.
Casey:
They're listed at 3456 by 2234 Retina and 3024 by 1864 Retina.
Casey:
And as per MacRumors... 1964.
Casey:
Sorry, 1964.
Casey:
They do not correspond to resolutions of the built-in displays of any current or previous Apple products.
Casey:
So, based on the resolutions themselves and their relationships to each other, it seems likely that these new resolutions are for the upcoming MacBook Pro.
Casey:
The current 16-inch MacBook Pro has a native display resolution of 3072 by 1920.
Casey:
while the current 13-inch MacBook Pro's native resolution is 2560x1600, giving both machines a pixel density of about 226 or 227 pixels per inch.
Casey:
If these new resolutions were indeed for the upcoming MacBook Pro models, they would represent an increase in pixel density to around 250 pixels per inch, which notably would allow for native 2x Retina as the default setting for these new machines.
Casey:
So with the apparent increased pixel density of these upcoming MacBook Pro models, a true 2X retina setting would fall right in the sweet spot for most users.
Casey:
With the 16-inch model yielding a looks-like resolution of 1728 by 1117 and the 14-inch at 1512 by 962.
Casey:
So I just said the 14 is 1512 by 962.
Casey:
982.
Casey:
982.
Casey:
God, I can't read.
John:
You've got to get your glasses fixed.
John:
No.
Casey:
Actually, I am down one contact right now for uninteresting reasons, so that would be why.
Casey:
So my 13-inch MacBook Pro that I have right now, it defaults to 1440 by 900, and I run it at the quote-unquote more space resolution, which is 1680 by 1050.
Casey:
And again, they're saying the native, the 2X native for the 14-inch would be 1512 by 982.
Casey:
Okay.
John:
so this is uh continuing the the trend and the rumors of the upcoming macbook pros of basically being complete wish fulfillment for all of our complaints about apple's laptop for the past like five years it's gonna have an hdmi port it's gonna have an sd card slot it's gonna have mag safe it's gonna be smaller lighter and you know faster and better battery life it's gonna have 2x retina like i don't think they've missed like practically anything in the rumors of what this thing is going to be and by the way we didn't mention this before i kept mentioning the uh
John:
A15 cores and the M2 and the MacBook Air or whatever, I'm pretty sure all the current rumors and all our past discussion and my current thinking continue to think that when these things come out, they're not going to have A15 cores inside them.
John:
It's not going to be an M2.
John:
It's going to be an M1X, meaning it's
John:
the a14 derived cores that are in the m1 just more of them with a much bigger gpu like that's been the rumors for all these machines and if we get that that'll be an awesome thing like so you know there's i don't think there's been any rumors that say oh yeah fully expect these new macbook pros to have a15 drive things they're not going to it's just going to be the big m1s that's why the rumored name is m1x
John:
um so but that's great like that's still great the m1 is an amazing chip and if you made it with more cores and more gpus even better and put it in put in a big battery and put it in a 16 inch thing i think maybe the only thing they're missing is there we never i mean this is getting not just into like here's what's wrong with your laptop so it's sort of like what we would like to have no face id rumors and i don't think there's any oled rumors just mini led rumors for the screens maybe yeah i believe that's correct
John:
yeah but but other than that like this is you know and those are sort of like things we didn't dare to even hope we just wanted them to have a keyboard that worked and then we had other complaints about it um and this again if rumors are too believed in theory sometime you know in the fall apple could have an event that rolls out the official release of monterey and these two new laptops with their amazing chips in them and they'll be awesome and we'll love them um if all the rumors come true and if they don't
John:
If we get like 50% of what's rumored, they'll still be great.
John:
Again, assuming they don't re-break the keyboard, but I think they learned that lesson.
John:
One would hope.
Marco:
What I like about all the rumors about this computer so far, these computers so far, is that they all seem like they're pretty plausible and they all seem to be pretty well supported by certain sources in the industry that tend to be reliable or certain analysts tend to be reliable.
Marco:
And so it does kind of seem like these computers are out there to settle all debts.
Marco:
settle all old business or whatever the phrase is that I'm trying to reference you should watch those movies and you'll be able to get the quotes better yeah so anyway like I love that these really by all accounts seem to be
Marco:
laptops designed after Apple has heard everyone's complaints with the previous generation.
Marco:
They fixed the keyboard a couple years back because that was really on fire.
Marco:
But that was a fix that otherwise didn't really change anything else about those computers.
Marco:
Now, this is going to be the first total design update for the entire computer all around since 2016, really, for most of these models.
Marco:
To throw in the possibility that they might also make the retina screens in the laptops true to X for the first time, that would be so great.
Marco:
I would love that so much.
Casey:
So tell me why.
Casey:
Why is that so important to you?
Marco:
Apple spends a lot of time and money and resources making really great displays in all of their products.
Marco:
They invest so heavily in it, not because their customers necessarily always care, because they care.
Marco:
You know, this it's the kind of thing like, you know, Steve Jobs is always super obsessed with like display quality and and would push for features like this where, you know, even though your customers aren't asking you to make the screen super high res or to make the things certain, you know, having certain color accuracies or, you know, investing heavily in HDR stuff or, you know, things like True Tone.
Marco:
That's the kind of thing that customers don't ask for.
Marco:
And oftentimes, the market doesn't reward you for it as much as you put into it.
Marco:
But you do it because you just want your things to be really great.
Marco:
You want to have really great screens that have really great image quality, even if 90% of the customers won't even notice.
Marco:
You do it because it's right and because it's good.
Marco:
The era of Retina, to date...
Marco:
has only had the top quality on the desktop retina screens, which there haven't been very many.
Marco:
So most people using Macs are using laptops, and those laptops mostly these days, ever since 2016, I believe, or 2015 at least, or somewhere around there, have shipped by default.
Marco:
The default resolution is not true 2x of the pixels.
Marco:
It is a scaled resolution.
Marco:
The pixels are a little bit less than that.
Marco:
It's like if you drop it down one notch, then that's the true 2x resolution.
Marco:
But the default has been a little bit more than that.
Marco:
And it renders it into a buffer and it scales it to the physical pixels.
Marco:
And it makes everything a little bit blurry.
Marco:
And it's not a huge difference.
Marco:
Most people don't notice.
Marco:
but i notice and i can't be the only one because my eyes aren't even that great anymore obviously i know other people notice and like it's the kind of thing that when you compare the visual quality of the screen the sharpness of the pixels when you compare that between the true 2x mode and the default scaling mode of one notch up you can see the difference and you might you can decide whether you care or not that's up to you but if you look for that difference you will see it
Marco:
and there's a reason why on apple's other products it for almost all of them except for the retina laptops um with occasional like you know low-end phones here and there but for the most part most of apple's other products have true 2x or 3x multiplied pixels at their default resolutions like they don't usually pull this trick on anything else they've been pulling on the
Marco:
I don't really know why, except I assume like, you know, economy or battery life or whatever.
Marco:
But now that they have a chance to fix it and the rumor is that they might be in addition to fixing all these other shortcomings of the laptops for the last five years.
Marco:
Oh, that would just be so wonderful.
Marco:
I really, really hope that they finally are going to give us the screens in the laptops that are as good as they say they are.
Marco:
Because, you know, they talk all the big talk about how great their screens are.
Marco:
But as long as they're shipping them in default scaling modes that make everything a little bit blurry, they're not living up to their potential.
Marco:
And a lot of that effort, I think, is is oversold or wasted.
Marco:
So to have truly sharp, awesome quality screens in our laptops that that live up to their promises and their ideals would be great.
Marco:
And so I really hope this rumor is true.
John:
Yeah, I remember initially part of the sort of excuse from, you know, people making excuses for Apple because Apple didn't really say this too much themselves, at least not in public, was that if we native, you know, native res by default, it would use more battery, right?
John:
Because it's more pixels and, you know, it costs more power to do that.
John:
So, hey, this is our very first Retina MacBook Air.
John:
And no, we can't.
John:
Although you said they'd never done native 2x.
John:
The original Retina MacBook Pro also wasn't native 2x.
Marco:
It was native in the setting that it shipped in, but it was that 1440 across.
John:
But it was lower effective resolution than its predecessor.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
The predecessor before was 1680 across at its highest level.
Marco:
Yep, yep.
Marco:
So yeah, it's 1440 across point-wise on the 15-inch retina, and where it stayed, and the 16-inch is a little bit more because they made the screen a little bit bigger, but it's that same scale.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Or the same density rather yeah, but it was but but that was the excuse it was like well it would you know There's so many more pixels give us a break like yes There is a downgrade in apparent resolution, but you know, it's very interesting But as the years wore on that excuse became less and less convincing as you know Tons of competitors had high-res screens and and then at a certain point you could say like okay Even if it costs more battery like on the big one, you know 16-inch just do it or offer it as an option Let people decide to make that trade-off
John:
But with the advent of Apple's ARM chips, we know that battery life is phenomenal now and there's power to spare.
John:
And yes, please spend some of that, you know, again, based on the assumption that this screen actually does use more power than the previous one.
John:
Who knows?
John:
I mean, I did.
John:
especially if it's mini led there may be some variants with like the super bright hdr backlight with the mini led stuff or whatever i don't actually know how it comes down in terms of comparing with its compared to its predecessor in total power draw but if we've got battery power to spare please spend it on the screen when someone buys the 16 inch top of the line laptop now there's no more 17 inch thing uh at the very least give them the option for this and if they can make it standard across the board uh that's great too and if you look at the apparent resolution it is
John:
i mean as casey pointed out it would be for him a downgrade from his more space setting that he has it on to go into native 2x but you know at least he can still make that trade off and it also means that if he does go to these sort of scaled up factor perhaps there would be less apparent blurring because the dpi of the screen is just higher although again in casey's case especially when he's rocking one contact it probably doesn't matter to him this is true this is true
Casey:
So more generally, how do you guys see the laptops coming?
Casey:
Because, John, you mentioned this a minute ago.
Casey:
If you believe some of the rumors, they're supposed to have SD card slots.
Casey:
They're supposed to have HDMI.
Casey:
They're supposed to have MagSafe.
Casey:
They're supposed to be getting rid of the touch bar.
Casey:
All of these things that we've all, to some degree, been begging for.
Casey:
I think some of us more than others, in different orders than others.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
You know, if you were to believe the hype, all of these ills are getting fixed.
Casey:
So do we think, gentlemen, that this is really happening?
Casey:
Like, to my eyes, I would be slightly surprised if we got MagSafe again.
Casey:
Honestly, I'd be more than a little surprised if the touch bar went away.
Casey:
I would be moderately surprised if HDMI ended up on there without some sort of adapter.
Casey:
I think the only thing that wouldn't surprise me is if the SD card slot came back.
Casey:
That's thin and I don't think it takes up a whole lot of room.
Casey:
That makes sense to me.
Casey:
But everything else...
Casey:
I find mildly surprising.
Casey:
I guess for me, the next least surprising thing would be some flavor of MagSafe.
Casey:
And then maybe HDMI would be pretty surprising, but not totally surprising.
Casey:
But I think getting rid of the touch bar, I would be very surprised if it happened.
Casey:
And I don't have strong feelings about the touch bar one way or the other.
Casey:
I don't actively dislike it, but I definitely don't actively like it either.
Casey:
So whatever.
Casey:
But
Casey:
But like, Marco, how do you feel?
Casey:
Let's take those four, SD, HDMI, MagSafe, and Touch Bar.
Casey:
Do you think that any or all of these are realistic?
Casey:
And what would you be most or least surprised about if they actually showed up?
Marco:
sd i think i would be very surprised i want i'm one of the people who actually would use it and i want it and when i don't have it would you use it you just told me that you never use your big camera last week i do use audio recorders i also yeah but do you actually pull things off the sd card when you do that occasionally use a drone i occasionally do use the big camera when was the last time when was the last time you flew your drone come on
Marco:
when I crashed it off the roof of my neighbor's house earlier in the summer.
Casey:
Well, it's still a couple of months.
Marco:
I said occasionally.
Marco:
I occasionally have to put some ROMs on a flash cart for something.
Marco:
It's a weird thing.
Marco:
When you're a nerd, you use SD cards in unexpected ways at unexpected times.
Marco:
I occasionally have to use an SD card.
Marco:
So I hope they bring that back, but I think the SD card would actually be the most surprising thing for me if they did, because it seems like that is the thing that is...
Marco:
Even though I would find a lot of value and many other people would find a lot of value, including almost everyone who they pitched the ProLaptops to in their marketing materials, all the video producers.
Marco:
And all the audio.
Marco:
If you look at the people who use Apple's products in Apple's own marketing materials, all of them would use the SD card slot.
Yeah.
Marco:
but i also that that seems like it is like the the most like old thing in this list that i think apple would try to find a way not to have um it's also it would take a decent amount of of you know width on this on the side of of the computer i don't know if they won't be willing to spit to spare the space for it um so that i hope they add the sd card but i would be surprised to see it and
Marco:
HDMI is something I would probably never use myself, but I recognize is a very, very common use, especially for people in businesses who plug into projectors and stuff like that.
Marco:
That's a very, very common use.
Marco:
And so I think if they can fit an HDMI port on a laptop, they definitely should have one.
Marco:
Because I've always been – I've been saying for five years now, ever since the dongle generation –
Marco:
Most people should not need a dongle.
Marco:
If most people need a dongle for their laptop, then the laptop should probably have had that port in the first place.
Marco:
So most people who buy these computers should not need any dongles.
Marco:
They should be for occasional or specialized use, not everyday use.
Marco:
And I think what most people use dongles for is USB-A, HDMI, and SD cards.
Marco:
And if you remove the need for most or all of those things in some way, and I think time has mostly solved the USB-A need for most people.
Marco:
Time and cables.
Marco:
You can always just buy a cable that ends in USB-C and then has whatever you need on the other end.
Marco:
So USB-A, the need for that is very low, I think, in a modern laptop design these days.
Marco:
But
Marco:
certainly the need for HDMI and SD cards really hasn't gone away.
Marco:
So if they can do that, that's great.
Marco:
MagSafe, I hope they bring back just because I think it would be cool.
Marco:
But I also hope these laptops can still charge over USB-C if you plug them into one because...
Marco:
i love having ubiquitous charging on either side of the computer like that's one thing i miss with my air is i only have the ports on one side i'm eyeing the 14 inch hard here for myself and probably the 16 for tiff actually because she's using my 16 and it's starting to get a little weird
Marco:
but um so magsafe i i think it would be cool but um i don't know how realistic that is usbc charging is has been great for me in most ways the charger is not as nice but that's apple's fault not usbc's fault so like magsafe i think would be nice to have but it's not super important and i would give it a medium likelihood because of the weirdness it would introduce with like okay now we have two different ways to charge this computer and what is this new kind of port and do we have space for it and everything um and then the touch bar
Marco:
Obviously, you know I hate the Touch Bar, and I'm so happy on my MacBook Air that it doesn't have the Touch Bar but does have Touch ID.
Marco:
It's such a great combination.
Marco:
And, you know, Apple, as I was mentioning earlier, their design process has often seemed broken in the feedback loop and how and if they correct things.
Marco:
The hardware design team, for all of their fault with the butterfly keyboard, they did eventually correct it.
Marco:
I think Apple, if you look at Apple in general, over time, they do tend to correct bad product decisions, whether it's design or hardware.
Marco:
They do tend to correct their mistakes.
Marco:
Sometimes it just takes way too long.
Marco:
And the butterfly keyboard was certainly one of those cases.
Marco:
They did correct it.
Marco:
probably three years longer than it probably should have taken them to correct it, but they did correct it.
Marco:
I think the touch bar is going to have that similar kind of outcome, where it's clear that they were very stubbornly adamant that it was pretty great from the beginning, but at some point, and a very soon point after they released it, they stopped, no pun intended, touching it.
Marco:
Nothing changed about the touch bar pretty much since it was introduced.
Marco:
If you look at what they unveiled in 2016,
Marco:
and then look at what it can do today, there's basically no difference.
Marco:
They have done almost nothing to it, except continue to ship it in all of their Pro laptops.
Marco:
And I think they knew back then, you know what, maybe this isn't going well.
Marco:
But their timeline for making hardware direction changes on the Mac in particular is a very slow, long timeline.
Marco:
Again, I don't know why, and I don't think this is right.
Marco:
But in the case of the butterfly keyboard, I think they accelerated their plans.
Marco:
not fast enough but they did but maybe they decided the touch bar wasn't a bad enough problem to have to like change their five-year plan for this laptop design or whatever so i'm guessing the touch bar being gone is true they won't even talk about it it'll just be like hey here's a new laptop look at all these cool things they touch bar will just not be mentioned at all it will be gone and they will have corrected their mistake just after a very very long wait
John:
John?
John:
Yeah, so if these rumors that have been building up over time have any truth to them whatsoever, which is always, you know, a question, but if they do have any, it makes me think, like Marco said, that this is a rethinking of the hardware with more respect for things that the users want to do, that the proposition put forward by the laptops where they said it's just going to have a bunch of USB-C-shaped holes on the side and that's it,
John:
that design that they gave they gave that the old college try again way too long than they should have and they've reconsidered and if they've reconsidered i see almost no reason that we shouldn't get all this on the 16 inch because there's just so much room like the the arm chips that are going to be in this are a lot of the reason why i feel like there's no excuse to not get all this stuff because you just have so much more
John:
headroom like you've got you could you have room to cut into your battery space because the battery life is going to be phenomenal we know that we've seen the m1 things that are out there and the 16 inches so much bigger you can put really big batteries in there shaving off a little bit of room for
John:
even something as big as an sd car slot on hdmi on the 16 inch you've got that room on the 14 inch it's questionable like we know what things will come but i see no reason not to get all of this stuff with the possible exception of mag save just because the rumors that i've seen about it have been like it's really hard to tell if something is mag safe from a blurry drawing you know
John:
that could like, it's, it's hard to tell what you're seeing on the side of the computer in terms of like, is that, is that a MagSafe thing or is that some other, I don't know.
John:
That's the only one I have that's questionable in terms of, is the rumor even remotely accurate about what you're getting?
John:
Right.
John:
But every other one of those things you could have and,
John:
And so, again, if these rumors have any credibility, I see no reason why we shouldn't just get all of them.
John:
Because Apple has shipped them all before in laptops in a much more difficult environment where their battery life was terrible.
John:
Granted, the laptops were a little bit thicker then, too.
John:
But the battery life was terrible.
John:
You had Intel chips on them.
John:
You had fans.
John:
Everything was hot.
John:
And they still came with HDMI and SD card slot and MagSafe and, you know, all that other stuff.
John:
And the touch bar is the easiest thing in the world.
John:
You just, you know, like Marco said, just don't mention that again.
John:
You know, oh, touch bar.
John:
You won't see him no more.
John:
like just it goes it goes away it's real easy and that by the way that also saves you power and space and complexity and all sorts of other stuff right so i'm still on board with saying look if these rumors are true why do we have to be like oh well like like like what you're asking is like which one of these things seems like outside the ethos of apple that like okay
John:
well they'll do this but they won't do that because that's a bridge too far but i feel like the entire the the premise of these computers the premise of the rumors is they've changed the ethos and once you change the ethos to i'm not trying to make a machine with just one kind of uniform shaped hole on the outside and the new ethos is like marco said let's find out what people actually want and try to make it so most people don't have to use a dongle that's this set of stuff
John:
And so I don't think someone would come into the room and say, yeah, but what about the ethos of where we just want everything to be smooth?
John:
And I was like, no, we're not doing that anymore, right?
John:
So we don't have to look at this and start bargaining away one of these things.
John:
Again, depending, you know, I'm not saying this is the set of ports, but whatever the set they decided is that basically this is the set where most people won't have to use a dongle.
John:
This is the set that we think will sort of hit the fat part of the bell curve, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
that that set should just ship as is and there shouldn't be any sort of whittling down and bargaining down because again to what end like say they come up with a set of features and said this is the this is the sweet spot right are they going to have a knockdown drag out fight to remove just one more it's like no we already decided this is the sweet spot based on probably actual metrics in terms of port use surveys stuff like that like they're rather than just saying
John:
people want what they want but i'm going to tell them what they want and what they want is a laptop with just one port on the side of it's like no people don't want that right and same thing with a touch bar we really think people are going to like this just to get used to it and i think the answer is i mean it's not some people like it some people think it's okay but in the grand scheme of things is it war is it worth the design cost is it worth the parts cost the design cost maintaining it doing the weird you know the way it interacts with the rest of the os and all that other stuff
John:
Maybe not.
John:
So I I not I think that mindset of but can we get closer to that ideal is not a mind that old ideal is not a relevant mindset.
John:
All the only thing that's relevant is what set of features has Apple decided?
John:
you know serves the most customers right and i don't and maybe this is too much maybe one of these is like is like too much is outside the realm of what people want um i can see them saying especially on the 14 inch like i can see the 16 inch having more slots in the 14 inch just because it's bigger and you got more room for everything in there uh but i i'm not ready to i i'm not ready to start bargaining away any of these things i want at this point i want everything on this list and i think it's reasonable to get everything on this list
Casey:
When you were still working at an office, were you plugging into projectors or anything frequently?
Casey:
I know we've talked about it, but I can't recall.
Casey:
Yeah, all the time.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So HDMI would be useful for you.
John:
I lived through Dongolgeddon already when our whole company had to switch.
John:
And it became, I can tell you, what it came to is...
John:
when you came into a meeting at whoever still had one of the quote-unquote old laptops they were the you know the the highest and mightiest in the room it was like oh you're so lucky you still have one of the old laptops you can just plug right into the projector and all of us were they did the thing where like they tried to give everyone dongles but then people would lose them and then they'd write their names on them so if they left in the room someone steal and then they then they started like essentially chaining the dongles with one of those little like
John:
metal wire thingies kind of like the the skinniest version of like a bike lock you know they would just chain it to the to the cord that it attaches to and so every conference room had sort of like a not a cinder block chain but like a like a chained dongle to the thing but then if that dongle broke then people would write broken on it and have to bring their own like
John:
It was something for like, you know, more than half of my time at my current company was just like, oh, you come to the room and you plug into the projector, which I thought was barbaric.
John:
And we should all just attach Apple TVs and do all AirPlay.
John:
But unfortunately, there's a bunch of PC laptop users in the company who didn't agree with that.
John:
But either way, at least you could just plug right into the projector.
John:
And it would happen of like, this is what we would do in the days before, like sophisticated software for changing who is projecting.
John:
If one person was projecting, the other person might project, you just go yank, throw the cord over to them, they plug it in, and now they're up, right?
John:
That's how, that's the sort of the hardware way of like handing off what we do in Zoom now.
John:
Like, oh, I'm going to share my screen.
John:
I'm going to share my, like, this is all in-person stuff.
John:
And as soon as the dongle books came out, it was just such a mess.
John:
And it was like the first five minutes of every meeting was just complaining about dongles.
Casey:
but it made them look better, I guess.
John:
And again, that's the question, like the non-computer people in the company, it would just be like, why did they change them like this?
John:
Everyone hates it.
John:
And people would nod and say, yeah, I don't understand it.
Marco:
By the way, see also new Safari.
Marco:
You talk to any non-nerds about new Safari?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Not popular.
John:
The worst part is I hear, I mean, obviously we hear this because there's way more iOS users than Mac users, but so many people, more people I've heard complain about the iOS and the iOS one you can fix to be back to normal.
John:
And they don't know that.
John:
Like, I don't blame them for not knowing it because the default is weird and people with...
John:
Without direction, most people will just simply complain and never find that you can switch iOS Safari back to normal.
John:
But, yeah, because there's so many more iOS users, that's what they're complaining about.
John:
And I feel like, be glad you're not looking at the Mac version.
John:
But, yeah, we said this before.
John:
The Mac version hasn't shipped yet.
John:
I know it's shipped on Big Sur.
John:
Yes.
John:
But the Monterey version.
John:
Monterey's a beta.
John:
Technically hasn't shipped.
Casey:
I know.
John:
Yeah, whatever.
John:
But the Monterey version technically hasn't shipped yet.
Casey:
It counts.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
What they're doing in Big Sur, which, by the way, I still refuse to run that software update, right?
John:
What they've done in Big Sur by inflicting it upon people is terrible.
John:
But Big Sur is, in theory, going away.
John:
And when Wanderer comes out, they do still have one remaining chance to repent like they did in iOS and say, you know what?
John:
This was a mistake.
John:
And even though we shipped that weird thing on Big Sur,
John:
Forget about that.
John:
Bygones, we're going to fix it in Monterey.
John:
So Apple, you still have a chance to do that.
John:
Monterey has not yet shipped.
John:
Please change something because it's terrible.
Marco:
Yeah, go back to the laptops for a second.
Marco:
Like I think, you know, to kind of sum up, I think what I'm most looking forward to with all these rumors for these new laptops is that the, and I apologize, I've said this before over the last five years, but the 2016 forward generation of laptops is
Marco:
was a product that forced the users to adopt to it, rather than adopting to what users needed.
Marco:
It was telling people, this is better, you fix your life so it works with this.
Marco:
Whereas the rumored changes to this laptop are, hey, we're making a product that is actually what you wanted, and will actually fit into your actual needs, and require you to adopt less to it, and it will adopt to what you want.
Marco:
And that, I think, is...
Marco:
a it's it's a shift from an arrogant attitude to a humble one and that's very important for good product design you know people people always glorify the like the arrogance of like we're going to make this firm decision and we're going to you know take away all the all the you know old ports on the iMac and we're going to
Marco:
make amazing stuff and like that works sometimes you know it's sometimes occasionally right but you can't lose sight of all the times that it's not and you know you very quickly start you know loving the smell of your own farts too much to recognize when when your decisions are actually not as good and when you actually should listen to your users
John:
And I think the, uh, you know, the move to arm, like this is one of the benefits, not to say that they couldn't have fixed their laptops without it, but in any kind of internal debate about this change of philosophy that you just described of like, let's, you know, we, we thought we had an idea of what the future of laptops were going to be like, and we were wrong and let's be humble about that and let's revisit.
John:
Right.
John:
And then when you say, okay, what should they look like now?
John:
Let's look on this and see what do people actually use their laptops for?
John:
Which things we thought were going away haven't gone away and all that stuff.
John:
When all that stuff comes up and they say, okay, you end up with this list on the whiteboard of like, are we really going to add all this stuff back?
John:
And someone starts pushing back and saying, yeah, but like that's going to take up so much space and it uses power and complexity.
John:
And it's like...
John:
you have this giant windfall of increased performance and decreased, you know, power consumption to say, this is like a fraction of the windfall we've gotten from Apple Silicon.
John:
Let's use it.
John:
Let's spend it to make our products better.
John:
It'll still have way better battery life.
John:
It'll still be way faster.
John:
It'll still be quieter and cooler.
John:
And we get all this stuff like, like this, let's, let's not just, you know, in some respects when they did, you know, the M1 MacBook Air and all the other things, they just took their existing things, ripped out the insides and just made them like,
John:
magically super powered oh now it's silent and cool and the battery lasts twice as long and it's twice as fast like it was just phenomenal but the philosophy represented by the outside that stayed the same i really want to see them spend those gains to make their products better and i hope that's why these rumors have a higher chance of success is because any pushback based on technical constraints is saying like
John:
I see where you're coming from, but do you realize what a surplus we have now?
John:
Please, let's use that to fully embody this philosophy in the same way that the previous ones tried their very best to fully embody the philosophy of there's only one size hole in the outside of this thing, minus headphone, but ignore that.
John:
And that's our philosophy, and we're going to really adhere to that as best we can.
John:
I hope they are just as strongly adhering to the new philosophy, which is
John:
Let's consider what people actually do with their laptops and give them the tools to do that, especially on our biggest, most expensive, supposedly pro laptop.
Marco:
I mean, in some ways also, you know, if this again, this is a big asterisk.
Marco:
If most of these or all these rumors are true, it would represent a profound shift in attitude from ultra minimalism and in the way of like, what's the least we can give you?
Marco:
If you look at so much of this generation of laptops that is hopefully now outgoing, so much of that is defined by what is the least we can get away with giving you in terms of number of ports, types of ports, different hardware capabilities, how nice the power brick can be.
Marco:
We're going to remove the light-up logo and the battery indicators.
Marco:
There was so much removed.
Marco:
Because there was this ridiculous, over-the-top obsession with minimalism.
Marco:
In many ways, this is actually the problem of the current software design ideology of Apple is over-obsession with minimalism to a fault.
Marco:
Trying to sell the idea of less is more way to the extreme.
Marco:
trying to basically tell us, hey, we're going to take stuff away and you're going to be thankful and actually pay more for it.
Marco:
That's a problem now in the software side.
Marco:
But if the laptops go in this new direction, then that will represent a profound change in the hardware side.
Marco:
You know...
Marco:
Part of whenever we criticize things that Apple does or says, we hear from a lot of Apple fans who strike back at us, some of whom are also Apple employees.
Marco:
A common attitude is basically people who jump to defend Apple product decisions
Marco:
By basically yelling at me or other critics saying, like, you don't actually need that thing.
Marco:
Or, why should Apple cater to your needs?
Marco:
You're, you know, you're just XYZ, whatever that is.
Marco:
Just a developer, just a podcast, you know, whatever.
Marco:
Ignoring for the fact that, you know, developers are their biggest pro audience.
Marco:
And podcasters are certainly not small in number.
Marco:
But anyway, you know, there's been this attitude among Apple defenders for so long of...
Marco:
obsessing over removing things and glorifying apple when they remove things as if that is itself inherently a good thing if there's a feature on a laptop that these people don't use they consider it a problem like they that attitude what what that what that worldview results in is this attitude of like i don't need you know whatever it is an sd card slot whatever i don't need an sd card slot so they should just remove it
Marco:
okay well a you aren't everyone and b what harm is it doing being there you know and and it seems like that attitude permeated apple's design and and hardware choices for so long that they were they were just looking to see what else can we get rid of what else can we like for its own sake but i remember like when i bought my g4 power book and you know forever ago my first mac
Marco:
There were tons of hardware capabilities of that machine that I never used.
Marco:
But I wasn't upset they were there.
Marco:
It had a PCMCIA slot of some kind.
Marco:
I never put a single thing in that slot.
Marco:
But they should have had that slot because lots of people did use it.
Marco:
And when I buy a laptop or a computer, like I want the things I buy to be versatile.
Marco:
I want them to be able to do lots of stuff, even if I don't do those things.
Marco:
I just said 20 minutes ago, I want them to add an HDMI port to the laptops again, even though I personally will probably never use it.
Marco:
Because I want that capability there for everyone because enough people do use it that it's worth having it in the product.
Marco:
And again, and for all the Apple defenders who are going to yell at me like they always do, yeah, you know, go ahead, do your worst.
Marco:
But I'm just glad to see that Apple seems to be going in this direction, that they have finally realized, like, okay, maybe they've realized that minimalism for its own sake is...
Marco:
Frankly, bullshit.
Marco:
Taking stuff away is not its own inherent gain.
Marco:
It might result in other gains.
Marco:
Maybe taking stuff away can make something less expensive or more reliable or thinner and lighter.
Marco:
But if you're not actually achieving all those goals, then taking something away is just taking something away.
Marco:
Now you just have less.
Marco:
Congratulations.
Marco:
Now your computer can just do less.
Marco:
Or there's now more cases where you're going to need some kind of external hardware or dongle or adapter or whatever.
Marco:
And so to put out a line of laptops that goes in the other direction that adds back things that not everyone is going to need, but some people will sometimes, that's a great direction to go.
Marco:
And that, I think, would represent...
Marco:
maturity in and and you know humbleness certainly but but also just like that will represent their design team getting better and moving past the just like minimalism for its own sake fallacy and into something that actually makes better products for their customers
Casey:
Yeah, it seems to me, and I don't know the right words to verbalize this, which is unfortunate on a podcast, but here we go.
Casey:
It seems to me that pro machines for the last several years especially have meant to some degree more depth rather than more breadth.
Casey:
So like a pro machine means you're doubling down on USB-C ports or you're getting more RAM or more SSD, but you're not getting a variety of anything.
Casey:
And I think what we're all asking in various ways with various words is, yeah, we do want more depth, but we would also like more breadth.
Casey:
I would like to have an SD card slot.
Casey:
I mean, personally, I mean that both in a figurative and literal sense.
Casey:
Like me personally, I would like to have an SD card slot.
Casey:
And although I don't use them...
Casey:
all the time.
Casey:
I use them probably a couple of times a month.
Casey:
I wouldn't use an HDMI port more than maybe when I travel at most.
Casey:
But I agree with what you're saying, Marco.
Casey:
Like, even though it's not necessarily something that would dramatically change my life, it would dramatically change a lot of people's lives if and when we ever go back to the office.
Casey:
So I'm all in on an HDMI port.
Casey:
Like, I want more breadth...
Casey:
Not necessarily more depth.
Casey:
I don't want any additional depth.
Casey:
I think the depth we've got is pretty good for the most part.
Casey:
I'd like more RAM, you know, hypothetically, says the guy with an Intel MacBook Pro, nevertheless.
Casey:
But in principle, I think the amount of depth is mostly good, but I want a lot more breadth.
Casey:
And we haven't really had that in a long time since we really went all in or since Apple really went all in on USB-C.
Casey:
And I don't think it's unreasonable to get some of that back.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
Johnny Oliver writes, do you think Apple should do better in the ergonomic computer accessory space?
Casey:
Personally, I find the Magic Mouse to really strain my wrist, and the Magic Keyboard is very flat with no adjustments available.
Casey:
I think Apple could lead in designing and producing ergonomic accessories, which could introduce more users to alternatives, which may help them avoid RSI and other injuries later in life.
Casey:
Also, the iMac screen should be height-adjustable.
Casey:
You know, I agree with all of this.
Casey:
I don't see the Apple that we know today doing much of this.
Casey:
But if we really do get a more humble Apple, I forget which one of you just said that a minute ago.
Casey:
But if we really do get a more humble Apple, then yeah, absolutely.
Casey:
I'd love to see this.
Casey:
I really enjoyed the Magic Mouse, but comfortable it was not.
Casey:
And that's part of the reason why I now use a trackpad, even though I swore I would never do that in a million years.
Casey:
But I haven't used a Magic Mouse for more than a few minutes in probably a couple of years now.
Casey:
So I would love to see more ergonomic stuff.
Casey:
I'd love to see Marco buy an Apple-produced split keyboard.
Casey:
And you know what?
Casey:
Maybe I would buy one too.
Casey:
But I don't see that happening in today's Apple, but maybe in tomorrow's.
Casey:
What do you think, John?
John:
I mean, this is another example where the minimalism that Marco was just talking about has infected their design.
John:
And a lot of their hardware design focus heavily on sort of minimalism of form, the
John:
The mouse is very small and slight.
John:
The minimalism manifests in the iMac not having a height-adjustable stand because a non-height-adjustable one is more simple and minimal.
John:
Look, it's just a bent piece of minimal.
John:
Look how simple and straightforward it is.
John:
You don't have to have any kind of mechanical mechanism to raise and lower that is more complicated and less sort of straightforward, right?
John:
And so they try to just sort of say, this is what we want to make and we don't want it to
John:
look awkward or lumpy or have lots of weird moving parts or be complicated we want to be simple and elemental and so on and so forth and that is very very often exactly the wrong thing to do for hardware and the worst part about this is two really bad parts one apple didn't used to be like this apple did make an ergonomic split keyboard way before anyone else was making it granted it was back when everything apple made was even more expensive than it is now and it wasn't a very good split keyboard but it was a split keyboard um
John:
And so, like, it's not as if Apple has never been on this page.
John:
And then the second terrible thing is that within modern Apple, making computer ergonomics better for users is exactly right up the middle of Apple's stated values in terms of...
John:
health safety accessibility like everything about doing things well ergonomically fits with every aspect of apple's ethos and the only thing that is countering it is people in the design group who want the mouse to be as minimal as possible and you know maybe the cost cutting of like an adjustable stand would be more expensive and less durable and
John:
You know, all that other stuff.
John:
Right.
John:
But I do wish this is an area where Apple would revisit older philosophies because it is so in keeping with what Apple does.
John:
And I'm not saying Apple has to start making, quote unquote, weird accessories that look strange to normal people and confuse people.
John:
Why does the mouse look like that?
John:
I'm scared and confused.
John:
Like, I'm not not saying they should do the most radical thing.
John:
But.
John:
I always talk about OXO Good Grips or whatever.
John:
You can make products that concentrate heavily on ergonomics while still being good products for literally everybody.
John:
OXO's products ostensibly...
John:
concentrate heavily on being more accessible to people with more motor difficulties or whatever.
John:
But you don't have to know that.
John:
If I just throw you the OXO can opener and you use it, you're like, oh, this is a good can opener.
John:
You have no idea it was designed that way so that people with arthritis can open cans.
John:
You don't know that.
John:
You don't care about that.
John:
You just see it as a good can opener, right?
John:
And it doesn't look super weird.
John:
You're not confused.
John:
I can't figure out how to use this can opener.
John:
It's a can opener.
John:
Just every aspect of it is slightly better.
John:
than your average can opener it is more comfortable it's easier to use you feel like you have more leverage you have to apply less force like it it's easier to grip it doesn't slip out of your hand there are no sharp parts right apple should be dealing with literally every piece of hardware they have on the laptops and stuff like that you're constrained because like you do want it to be thin and light and you don't have much leeway for other aspects and in general i think that the ergonomics of their laptops are reasonable they're kind of slippery they're kind of sharp-edged but
John:
limitations of the form but for things like let's try to sell computers so that when people sit at a desk they the the monitor is at the right height and the keyboard is you know the right way for them and the mouse you know supports their hand in a way that we think is ergonomic like there are just a few minor things you could do to apple's current line to make it better if not making the imax height adjustable then perhaps saying have we chosen the right
John:
stand height for this because i think they haven't i think they're all a little bit too low if you look at the average height of a desk that someone sits at and then you add to that the height of the stand and the average height of a person or whatever i think the imax non-adjustable stand is a little bit too low so i'm not saying you have to suddenly the imax have to have this amazing ergonomic height adjustable stand that can accommodate very small and very tall people
John:
But maybe they just have missed the mark on what the, you know, the non-adjustable height is, right?
John:
And the mouse, I'm not saying there's anything particularly wrong with the ergonomics of the mouse, but it only does fit one style of mousing in terms of how you put your hands on it.
John:
And if you don't use that style and try to use the Apple mouse, those are the people who don't like it.
John:
They say, I try to hold it the way I want to hold the mouse, the way that's comfortable for me to do it.
John:
And this little tiny slippery piece of sushi just doesn't cut it for that, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And then the keyboards, this person's complaint, you know, is saying that the keyboard is flat with no adjustments available.
John:
Unfortunately, decades of computer use has mostly trained people to the idea that the way a keyboard should adjust is by getting higher in the back.
John:
Like they used to, you know, the Apple Extended 2 keyboard did that.
John:
It was slanted up to begin with and it had an adjustable foot that would come down to make it even higher in the back.
John:
That is exactly the opposite direction.
John:
You want your keyboard to slant.
John:
You do not want it to be higher in the back and lower in the front.
John:
If anything, you want it to either be totally flat or lower in the back from an ergonomics standpoint.
John:
But this does get into the area of weird things, right?
John:
Of like, well, you don't want to make the keyboard too weird because if you're not used to a split keyboard, it can be off-putting.
John:
but you know apple can offer more than one keyboard like they already do oh my god right like there's enough room in a trillion dollar company to have more than one keyboard so offer a split one and in your regular one i like the idea that these are mostly flat even though they are technically a little bit higher in the back than the front
John:
that's just kind of an education opportunity to maybe convince people that uh keyboards that go up in the back are not good i don't know how to to get on this but just to start by saying let's offer some keyboards of you know that are now not you know it's not weird to see a split keyboard like it's a thing that lots of manufacturers sell some people like them apple should make one and sell it and they should make and sell a good one and if apple really wants to spend some of the trillions and trillions of dollars whatever they have
John:
Like, you can do research into what makes a good, comfortable keyboard, mouse, and display setup.
John:
Just like I really hope, and I'm pretty sure, that Apple is currently doing research on how do we make a comfortable, ergonomic AR or VR goggle thing that people can wear...
John:
with different size and shaped heads and be comfortable and not get sweaty and not, you know, mess their hair too much and not hurt their head.
John:
Like that's ergonomics, right?
John:
And they're doing that because like, oh, AR VR, it's also new.
John:
But there are known things in the world of ergonomics that Apple could be doing with its personal computer hardware that they're just simply not doing because the design group has said it's more important for our mouse to look like a beautiful piece of sculpture than for it to be comfortable for the most number of people.
Marco:
Did you see the amazing patent filing from about a month ago?
Marco:
This must have made people's heads explode who don't like the magic mouse.
Marco:
It was like a laptop where the mouse popped out the side.
Marco:
You could either stash it in the laptop and you'd pop it out.
Marco:
Quote a mouse that would look like it was about the size of a USB thumb drive kind of thing.
John:
oh my goodness have you seen the microsoft uh the microsoft bendy mouse my wife uses it she's got it with her surface thingy from work have you seen that one i don't know is that the one that's like a an arc it's like a parabola yeah so it's so it it it flattens it goes flat for like storage and that it's so that it is basically the thickness of like a macbook right just imagine just a flat thing basically the
John:
But then when you use it, you take it out of your bag or whatever, you bend it.
John:
So it becomes like a, you know, a V shape.
John:
And it's like, you can see, like, it's a travel mouse.
John:
It's like, can we make it so small for travel?
John:
But the problem with a lot of travel mice is like, oh, who wants to use a tiny thing that's easy to travel?
John:
Because it just feels too low and whatever.
John:
It just makes me think of the Apple mouse.
John:
But when you bend that thing up, the reason it bends up is because it's more comfortable to use that way than a thing that is like, you know, a centimeter tall and totally flat all the way across.
John:
Not that I'm saying this is the world's greatest mouse.
John:
It's just at least someone thought about
John:
We want to make a travel mouse.
John:
It's small.
John:
It's light.
John:
It's easy to stow in any kind of bag.
John:
And when you use it, it doesn't feel like you're trying to push around like this, you know, half a deck of cards.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Moving right along.
Casey:
Michael Hagen writes, when using Safari with sites like Squarespace, YouTube, Facebook, and other not unpopular sites, I often get this alert saying, quote, this website is using energy and may be reloaded, quote.
Casey:
Any way to get rid of this?
Casey:
Thoughts on this?
Casey:
Not only is it annoying, but doing literally the same thing in other browsers like Brave, Chrome, or Firefox does not affect my total system performance at all.
Casey:
As far as I can tell, Apple has set the bar really low with what triggers this alert.
Casey:
I want to use Safari for Touch ID passwords, but it only takes one editing session in Squarespace to get reloaded without saving to keep me from using it long term.
Casey:
I don't see this very often in any of the browsing that I do, but I've certainly seen it.
Casey:
I don't know if there's anything that can be done on the user side to really stop it from showing, is there?
John:
I don't know if there's a PLUS hack for this, but for people who don't know, when this person says, oh, I do the same thing in other browsers and it doesn't affect my total system performance, we know for a fact that those other browsers are not as energy efficient as Safari.
John:
And part of Safari's energy efficiency story is that
John:
safari is trying to essentially blame the website and not you know so that the user knows what's going on here is because you went to facebook.com and they're running some javascript that's grinding away in the background that's killing your battery and i know you want to go to this website but we want you to to blame to blame the right thing to don't blame safari or don't blame your mac it's this specific website that's currently eating your battery and so it puts up that banner now
John:
I understand the philosophy there, but any kind of feature like this where it's trying to catch bad behavior, the key is in the thresholds.
John:
How do we decide at what point we throw up that banner?
John:
Obviously, you wanted to throw up that banner if some JavaScript got injected into a site and now it's doing Bitcoin mining in the background or something and killing your battery.
John:
That's an easy one, right?
John:
But it seems like what has happened with this feature over time is a lot of
John:
quote unquote, non malicious websites like regular websites that are not trying to do anything wrong and generally aren't really badly behaved just through the typical march of quote unquote progress.
John:
And, you know, the increase in features, let's say, of those websites, more JavaScript being used on websites, richer JavaScript, more client side applications, more single page applications.
John:
more and more legitimate things are running afoul of this limit.
John:
And I think that's mostly the fault of Apple not sort of keeping up with the times and saying, when we set these limits, this all seemed reasonable and no real legitimate website tripped them.
John:
But now, many years later, it seems like we haven't adjusted the limits and lots of websites people use every day throughout this banner.
John:
And I've experienced it as well.
John:
And it's like, there's no recourse as a user.
John:
You can either just not go to that website or constantly hit the little X to dismiss that message.
John:
um so uh unfortunately michael i'm not aware of any way to disable that there may be some hidden plist key i don't think there is a an exposed gui thing to get it not to complain about that and yeah we don't like you don't like feeling good about like i'm using this website and i get this banner and it has a warning or sometimes it'll even just like
John:
you know as the as the warning as worded in this uh sktp says threatened to like reload the page or reload the site to say it's just gotten out of hand it's using too much memory much cpu and i'm just going to reload it and if that was like the normal expected functionality of the site it makes you want to use another browser so in safari in its effort to encourage good behavior and apportion blame where it is more rightful to go is has resulted with this feature being neglected over many years
John:
essentially with people saying well i'm just going to abandon safari and i'll go to a browser that doesn't complain because in the end it's the job of the computer to do what the user wants and if the user wants to use youtube or facebook and they keep getting that banner in safari now it's a safari problem like what's more what's more likely that people are going to stop using youtube or stop using safari it's pretty easy people are going to pick youtube every time so apple needs to get on it and either
John:
Add a GUI preference to disable that feature for people who don't care, or at the very least, readjust the thresholds for the modern world.
Casey:
And finally, Yoni writes, when, if ever, will the S-series chips get powerful and efficient enough to enable CarPlay on watchOS?
Casey:
I don't ever see that being a thing, to be honest, but it is an interesting idea.
Marco:
Yeah, so I think it's interesting to consider, well, what is CarPlay?
Marco:
Like, what exactly would this mean?
Marco:
As far as I can tell, what CarPlay actually is today is mostly the phone beaming a video stream to the car head units.
Marco:
Like, the CarPlay is like the car head units basically giving Apple a window to play arbitrary video content into.
Marco:
and then providing some kind of interaction hooks, whether it's touchscreen or the dial and button kind of controls.
Marco:
But for the most part, the phone is rendering that screen and is sending it over to the car as a video stream.
Marco:
So it's worth thinking about, okay, well, if the watch is doing this,
Marco:
I assume what this means is like the CarPlay in the car would be able to control watch apps, basically.
Marco:
So you wouldn't need your phone to be involved or even to have a phone necessarily.
Marco:
So, okay, interesting question.
Marco:
But what this would mean, first of all, is that the watch would have to be constantly streaming video over presumably local Wi-Fi to the car.
Marco:
So, number one, that's going to be a pretty significant power draw for the watch to basically be streaming video constantly, wirelessly.
Marco:
So that's that's problem number one.
Marco:
Also, I think that transmitting data over Wi-Fi, I think, uses more energy by a noticeable amount than receiving it.
Marco:
So, you know, the watch already takes a lot of power to use Wi-Fi at all, even when it's mostly receiving data like in a download.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
If it's in a mostly transmitting mode, that would probably be a pretty power-hungry operation.
Marco:
So that alone, just the transmitting, not to mention the rendering of the video stream on the little tiny GPU on the watch, we're talking non-trivial amounts of power there.
Marco:
But then when you consider, well, what exactly are you controlling with CarPlay?
Marco:
What CarPlay is on the phone is a remote interface to control iPhone apps that are constantly running, whether it's a navigation app or an audio app like Overcast or maybe it's messages coming in from messaging apps, that kind of stuff.
Marco:
Most of those apps are things that are constantly running, whether it's an audio app playing audio or navigation doing turn-by-turn.
Marco:
So you'd have to then say, all right, well, how good is the watch at constantly running apps, some of which are high-power users like streaming audio or navigation directions?
Marco:
And I just don't see it being a thing that Apple ever enables because...
Marco:
I think the actual question that Yanni is asking here of like, when will the S-Terry ships get powerful and efficient enough?
Marco:
I think they're probably powerful enough today, but I don't think they have the power budget, like the battery life budget, to actually provide a useful CarPlay experience without probably draining your watch battery.
Marco:
Because also keep in mind that when your phone is in CarPlay mode...
Marco:
it's either plugged in with a cable to the car directly to do that at all, in which case it is being charged continuously, or if in one of the more modern wireless CarPlay setups, you're very often putting the phone on a Qi charger in the car or something while you're doing that, just because it's convenient and you don't want to drain your phone battery.
Marco:
The watch is not going to be doing that.
Marco:
You're not going to take your watch off your wrist in your car to plug onto a dock to charge it continuously while it's doing this.
Marco:
I don't think this is ever going to be a thing.
Marco:
Even if the chip is ostensibly powerful enough to do it,
Marco:
I don't think constantly streaming a video stream off the watch, plus audio over Bluetooth, plus running the apps continuously in the background for potentially hours if you're doing a long drive, I don't think that's ever going to be a thing that the watch power envelope is really good at or that Apple would ever enable.
John:
This is a good infinite timeline example because it gets to a nuance of a lot of these arguments.
John:
But first, you mentioned the current S-series is probably powerful enough to do it today if it had a giant battery attached to it instead of the dinky little watch battery.
John:
I think the limit of the current ones is they don't have enough RAM.
John:
They can't run iPhone caliber apps because they just have enough RAM.
John:
So even if the battery was a giant car battery on the floor hooked up to your watch, it still can't do it because you can't literally run.
John:
You can't run ways in the amount of RAM that the watch has.
John:
CPU-wise and capability-wise, yes, you could totally do it because the watch is as powerful as an iPhone from several years ago probably at this point, especially if it had a giant battery hooked up to it and didn't have to sit battery and you could set aside all the other limits of the watch thing.
John:
But anyway, the infinite timeline thing, eventually, if you look at what you can do with a phone in CarPlay today, yeah, the watch will eventually, probably in our lifetime, be able to do that.
John:
with within the constraints of the watch power envelope right the problem is by that time doing what you can do today will be seen as primitive because it'll be 20 years from now i'll be like well but i don't want to run ways from 2021 i want to run ways from 2040 and ways from 2040 is ar vr 3d like who knows what like
John:
the the bar for what you want out of carplay doesn't stay still so you can look at what you can do with carplay today and i think the watch will eventually conquer all of that it will have enough ram it will be fast enough and it will even have enough battery power for a reasonable length car ride to run today's iphone caliber app and display it on the screen
John:
but it'll be 20 or 40 years from now and nobody will want to do that because it would be like playing in an NES game.
John:
You can do it in an emulator and it's cute and everything, but when they say when we'll be able to play games, they don't mean play an NES game from 40 years ago, 30?
John:
I don't know how time works.
John:
Anyway, so that's the problem with infinite timeline things is that hardware keeps getting more powerful, but we also, our expectations of what we get from it keeps raising.
John:
And the only time we ever really catch up with that is the thing I've talked about in several past shows is,
John:
when we reach the limits of human perception right uh streaming audio if all you want to do is stream audio from your watch to your car the current technology we have has more or less good enough auto audio quality especially in a noisy environment like a car that
John:
we're basically there and you know 40 years from now it's not like the audio quality is going to be you're going to have 40 times more information or something it's like it's fine like we can you can do that and you'll still be able to do it and there will be no further expectation because human hearing is not changing particularly rapidly so once we sort of saturate the needs of human hearing we're there but for applications as in
John:
you know, software that can do arbitrary things on a screen, we are nowhere near the limits of what we might possibly want to do.
John:
And so for the rest of our lifetimes, for sure, though the watch will eventually be as powerful and capable as the phone today, no one will care because the phones alongside it will be so much more powerful and capable and will still be using wireless CarPlay or, in Marco's case, not.
Marco:
Yeah, actually, it's funny.
Marco:
The Rivian does not have CarPlay either.
John:
Oh my God, are you serious?
John:
That's the worst part in the reviews.
John:
They did their own software stack.
John:
It is really... I applaud them for bravely going their own way on that and trying to be like Tesla, but boy, it looks like...
John:
it looks like an android tablet from like the debut of the ipad it looks so janky and slow and it's like oh like how could you like it's such an expensive car could you just like doubled the budget for like cpu and gpu power just to make your ui because the ui itself if you saw screenshot it looks fine but in motion it's like three frames per second so it's tough i like they have you know kudos to them for trying to do the thing but
John:
Yeah, it fits right into Marco's car philosophy, which is janky first-party UIs that you can't change.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
No, but I think, you know, going back to the question for a second, too, I think the whole idea, when the Apple Watch first came out, there was this assumption by a lot of tech fans, like, oh, maybe the watch someday will get powerful enough to replace phones, and we won't even be carrying phones anymore.
Marco:
And I think that's just never going to happen.
Marco:
You know, A, what I always say, don't bet against the smartphone.
Marco:
people love their phones for so many other reasons and use them for so many other reasons.
Marco:
And just the form factor difference is so big.
Marco:
The power difference is so big.
Marco:
Even if watches get better and better as technology progresses, phones are gonna get better at the same rate.
Marco:
So, you know, when your watch is able to do certain things,
Marco:
Well, the phone has a screen that's like eight times bigger and a battery that's 10 times bigger.
Marco:
The phone's going to always be able to do way more than the watch can just because it is not a little bit bigger.
Marco:
It's a lot bigger.
Marco:
And that enables like an order of magnitude of complexity and abilities and everything that.
Marco:
So people are always going to have their phones and they're always going to be way more powerful than their watches.
Marco:
A lot of people are not going to have a watch, but everyone is going to have a phone.
Marco:
The world where the watch has to become the primary device, I don't think that world is ever going to come.
Marco:
I think phones are the primary device.
Marco:
We're going to have something that is roughly hand-shaped that we keep in our pocket as our computing device that we bring with us everywhere probably for the rest of our lifetimes.
Marco:
The details will change, but that general form factor I think is with us to stay because it's so compelling.
Marco:
Something that lives on our wrist, that's strapped to our wrist, is always going to be so much smaller and therefore more resource constrained and more interaction constrained.
Marco:
This difference will always exist.
Marco:
We are never going to stop carrying phone-like objects and therefore the watch doesn't need to become the primary device and doesn't need to take over primary roles like this.
Marco:
I don't think there's a big market of people who want to go driving without their phone.
Marco:
So I think...
Marco:
This is never really going to happen for many reasons, including the fact that nobody really wants it, but many other good technical reasons as well.
John:
They get a few too many absolutes in there because you can't say never because there is the possibility that a thing replaces the phone, but the thing that replaces the phone will also not be in the same constraints as the watch.
John:
Say we get really good ways to display images onto our retinas in 100 years or something or whatever.
Yeah.
John:
Then you would just need a phone size and shape thing that is on your person somewhere, but you wouldn't need to hold it anymore because the display would be basically into your eyeballs through your magic glasses or contact lenses or whatever.
John:
And the interface to it could be waving your hand around in front of you.
John:
There are ways to sort of get rid of the idea that you have to hold a rectangle in your hand.
John:
But what wouldn't change is whatever that thing is,
John:
the power envelope of it would still continue to be better than the power envelope of the thing on your wrist, because especially if you don't need to hold it in your hand, you can make an equal volume of stuff, of computing stuff, and put it literally anywhere on your body.
John:
Put it on a belt clip, because we know you love those.
John:
Put it in your pocket.
John:
Sew it into your clothing.
John:
But if you just have to take this volume of computing stuff, it's still a way bigger volume than you have on your wrist, right?
John:
And so there'll still always be that delta.
John:
And the only way you ever...
John:
get past those things is if you reach some kind of limit of human perception or ability and for the foreseeable future things that we can do with software projecting you know bit mapped images into our eyeballs and interacting with them there's no limit out in the distance for what we might want to do with that right
John:
every you can think of things today that will absorb all the computing power that anyone can ever imagine in the next hundred years and then some because literally everything we do even something as simple as like i want to render something in 3d right like oh we've already done that we have so much computing power it's fine we've reached the limits no we haven't we can't even do trivial straightforward ray tracing because it's too computational expensive if you know how actual 3d graphics work
John:
It's a series of terrible magic tricks that compromise everything about how we do it.
John:
And if we just do it in the straightforward way, if we had like a billion times more computing power, whole new types of software that are not possible today would open up because we wouldn't have to do these terrible tricks and have these terrible limitations.
John:
That's just one example, right?
John:
So there is no foreseeable future where, because software is just so arbitrary.
John:
It's like,
John:
If you can imagine it, you can do it.
John:
It's not like audio or like moving pictures where it's like, well, our ears work as well as they do.
John:
And once you can give them sound that is at the limits of their perception, there is no more you can go with that.
John:
You can make different sounds.
John:
I'm not saying we're at the end of music, but in terms of the job of getting audio into our ear holes,
John:
We can do what we need to do right now.
John:
Whereas in terms of putting pixels in front of you that you can interact with to do an arbitrary thing, that's not going to run out for a really, really long time.
John:
So the delta between watch and phone volume thing will continue to exist.
John:
Even if we're not, quote unquote, holding a phone in our hand and it's some VR thing or, you know, neural implant, whatever it is, if there has to be some amount of volume of computing stuff, having a phone volume of computing stuff is always going to stomp all over having a watch volume of computing stuff.
John:
And that will be true until and unless we reach the limits of like we can't think of anything else to do with projecting images and interacting with them.
John:
But don't hold your breath for that.
Marco:
Well, but then once we reach that point, we'll all switch over to web technologies and everything will just become 10 times more bloated and use all the resources.
John:
Ideally, we will be in a future in which everyone does all their computing on a platform that is not owned by any one company.
John:
But that is definitely an idea.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, HelloFresh, and Linode.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join, despite John's sales pitch earlier, at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Marco:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They did it.
Casey:
You guys ordering watches this Friday?
Casey:
Yeah, I am.
John:
I have to use my DTK discount.
Casey:
So you're going to get yourself a watch that you're never going to wear?
John:
That's not my watch.
John:
It's my house getting a watch.
John:
She was planning on getting a watch anyway, but this is what we're going to use it for.
John:
It's because, you know, we didn't want to deal with the phone hassle stuff.
Casey:
That's fair enough.
Casey:
Yeah, and I'm not planning on getting one, which means I'm going to get one probably 10 minutes after pre-order's open.
Marco:
I'm telling myself the same thing.
Marco:
Yeah, we'll see how that goes.
Casey:
Actually, really and truly, I'm very, very close.
Casey:
This is recording Wednesday night.
Casey:
I'm very close to pre-order time, and I still have zero intention of getting a watch.
Casey:
But as I am saying these words, the embargoes have not dropped.
Casey:
Nobody's told me that it's the second coming and so on and so forth.
Casey:
So...
Marco:
sitting here now i am not planning on it by next week it's anyone's guess what i say in the next episode of this show but we'll see yeah i i've never been less excited about a watch update than the series 7 because it really does seem like the the screen changed in a decent way but in a way that i don't think it's going to affect my life very much as a user of the watch although as a developer it will i'll get to that in a second but um but
Marco:
but I also like, you know, nothing else changed, you know, except for the faster charging, which is mostly for sleep tracking, which I don't do.
Marco:
Um, so it's like, I don't really need that.
Marco:
That's not really solving anything for me.
Marco:
And that's, that's about it.
Marco:
Like there's no really new abilities to it.
Marco:
If you look at Apple's marketing page for the series seven, uh,
Marco:
you could tell they're really grasping at straws.
Marco:
Most of the benefits they tout for the Series 7 are not exclusive to the Series 7.
Marco:
They're benefits that apply to everything or that were also true in the Series 6 or that are part of watchOS 8 more than the actual Series 7 hardware.
Marco:
There's not a lot of reason to this for me as a Series 6 owner, as a user.
Marco:
unfortunately the screen trick so what's interesting is you know as we discussed when about when they announced the series seven um the screen as it gets towards the edges the screen goes far enough under the crystal that you can display things on the screen they're actually going to be like near the curving edges of the crystal so
Marco:
So they actually addressed this in the human interface guidelines for the watch, and they have new layout guides.
Marco:
So not only do you have a safe area inset to put stuff away from the corners if you need it to not be cut off by the rounding of the corners, but now there's also a different inset if you want something to be aligned so it's not going to be under a potentially curved area of the screen.
Marco:
And they're saying don't put text under the curved areas, but do let buttons extend into them and stuff like that.
Marco:
And any kind of like, you know, screen size, like big elements can extend into the curvy screen areas, but text shouldn't.
Marco:
So now I'm thinking, well, crap.
Marco:
I should probably have one of these to physically see and test on so I can make sure my designs look good on this unique new screen attribute.
Marco:
But at the same time, as a user, I could not be less excited about this update.
Marco:
I was going to skip it entirely.
Marco:
So I haven't decided what to do.
Marco:
I was thinking maybe I could use it as an excuse to switch materials or colors.
Marco:
Maybe I should get the black steel or the titanium or something else.
Marco:
And I...
Marco:
Even that, I'm like, you know what?
Marco:
No, I just want this deal like I always get.
Marco:
I love this deal.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
I don't have any excitement about this update, but I feel like as a developer, I need to be able to design my screens of my app with this new screen curvature in mind.
John:
I think with the watch, because it has such a tiny battery, like my wife has a Series 5 now, so she's going two generations.
John:
And not that she has particular complaints about her watch batteries, but after two years, your watch battery, especially if you really heavily use your watch, it's probably a little bit tired.
John:
And like you said, maybe it's not that big of an upgrade over the 6, but it's a little bit of a benefit if you just have a 5.
John:
so you know the screen thing aside even if it was just like slightly faster than the five and had a fresh battery it would probably be worthwhile for my wife because she she wears her apple watch every day she's 100 on board with the apple watch lifestyle we were buying her new apple watches every single year but she skipped the six year because it just didn't seem like that big of an upgrade but now i mean i feel like this is the most normal piece of this relationship with apple hardware it's like oh i just got one this year i don't need to get one next year but eventually it's two years your watch your battery's getting a
John:
The new one comes out.
John:
It's got a bigger screen.
John:
It's brighter.
John:
You know, it's got maybe a couple new features and, you know, then you end up getting one.
John:
So that's that's why she's getting one.
John:
Like she, you know, I'd happily get her a new watch every single year if she wanted it because she uses it a lot.
John:
It's like this is an important device in your life.
John:
It's practically more important than your phone, although.
John:
Now, half the time when I see my wife, she doesn't... She has her phone, but if you see her in real life, she's often wielding two to three iPhones, kind of like Marco, but on purpose, because she Pokemon Go's on multiple iPhones.
John:
Like, recent iPhones that we got, instead of being handed down to the kids, they get handed down to her.
John:
She's using my old phone.
John:
She's using my XS.
John:
And I think she's, I don't know what other phone she's using.
John:
She's got some pretty good, but she doesn't want, you don't want a slow phone for Pokemon Go because it's a demanding game.
John:
So it's not like she has crappy phones.
John:
So instead we just get the kids new phones, like not the top of the line ones, but they get, you know, newly purchased mid pack iPhones so that the top of the line iPhones that I'm handing down just go to her and become Pokemon devices.