Always Get the Biggest Pizza
Marco:
It's funny, we just talked last night to record our next member special, and so I spent last night talking to you guys, I spent a good chunk of today editing that conversation, finished editing that conversation, and now, oh, we're back, talking again, and then I'll spend most of tomorrow morning editing this conversation.
Yeah.
Marco:
Good thing I really like you guys.
John:
Then you will not be here from us again until next week.
Casey:
Bad times.
Casey:
Actually, that's very apropos because you and I were together just a week ago, actually.
Casey:
A week ago today, was it not?
Casey:
It was Wednesday that we got into Manhattan.
Casey:
And we're going to talk about that at length on the after show.
Casey:
And here's what we're going to do.
Casey:
We're going to do what we in the biz like to call a teaser.
Casey:
In the after show, I can explain how in the span of an hour and a half, I murdered two of Marco's vehicles.
Casey:
And that's your teaser for the after show.
Casey:
Don't skip.
Casey:
I know there's chapters.
Casey:
Don't skip.
Casey:
You got to earn it.
Casey:
You got to earn it.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
You got to sit through all this tech BS in the meantime.
Casey:
Let's start with some follow up.
Casey:
And we have some follow up with regard to our prior member special about other people's code, which, by the way, those of you who reached out and said really anything, but we heard a lot of really, really kind words about that.
Casey:
And I don't think we mentioned on the show that that was very kind of you to take your time and say so.
Casey:
So thank you.
Casey:
But we have a related piece of optional homework.
Casey:
John, can you tell us about this, please?
John:
Yeah, it's kind of timely.
John:
I mean, the thing we're talking about is a members special that we did where it talked about me working on the CMS that runs ATP that Marco originally wrote.
John:
And it was partially framed as, look at me playing with PHP, but also it was about other people's code.
John:
And there is a great talk about other people's code that I happen to see on YouTube by Laura Savino.
John:
And I posted about it on Mastodon this week and we'll put a link to it in the show notes if you want to see a vastly expanded and much more professional and non-PHP focused example of that.
John:
Lots of good information in there.
John:
A lot of it resonated with me after my long career editing other people's code.
Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then throwback to ATP 541.
Casey:
We were talking about solid-state cooling.
Casey:
I think it was in the context of follow-up.
Casey:
It doesn't really matter.
Casey:
But we were talking about solid-state cooling, and there was a company that – I don't remember if it's the name.
Casey:
It's the Frore, F-R-O-R-E is the name of the company, and they make a product called Airjet, which is a physically very, very, very thin, apparently solid-state, not a fan, but a thing that moves air.
Casey:
And there was an article in The Verge a week or two ago.
Casey:
wherein the Ferrari or whatever you call them people, the Airjet people, retrofit a MacBook Air.
Casey:
And I mean, it was a pretty involved, pretty kind of gross retrofit, but they put a series of these fans in there.
Casey:
And wouldn't you know, when you put active cooling in a computer, it actually performs way better.
Casey:
Who'd have thunk it?
John:
yeah and this is not a great demo for them because it was very invasive to the point where they had to mill out part of the case because obviously the macbook air is not designed to have active cooling in it so they had to make a lot of room they removed a lot of parts from the computer and milled out the case and put their little air jet things in there they look kind of like really flat uh like uh pc mcia cards but of course inside them inside there are these little tiny
John:
little tiny mechanical like micro level things that swish the air out of them and make a whooshing noise.
John:
It's kind of like a fan, but with nothing rotating.
John:
They're weird.
John:
But I've seen people take earlier iterations of the like, I think it was the M1 MacBook Air and just put like better passive cooling in, not active cooling, but just like a better heat sink.
John:
They also put a better heat sink in this, by the way.
John:
But if you just put a better heat sink and better thermal paste, you can also get some mileage out of it.
John:
I'm still I mean, I guess they're doing this as a, you know, hey, a marketing stunt for their product.
John:
Like, look, you know, Apple, your computers could be better if you bought these things from us.
John:
Wouldn't that be great?
John:
I kind of hope that Apple doesn't put these things in the MacBook Air because I like having the low end laptop not have a fan at all, despite the thermal throttling.
John:
and as casey pointed out like yeah if you if you put active cooling in a machine that didn't have it it thermal throttles a lot less uh but i feel like that's the that's the trade-off of this thing it's totally silent there's no fan whatsoever it will also thermal throttle sometimes and that is a trade-off i think should that should be in the product line for people who want it i mean that same trade-off exists in the 14 inch macbook pro right casey
Casey:
You know, the amount of trash that you've given me about my 14-inch apparently utterly crippled MacBook Pro is approaching the amount of trash I've given you about your, well, I was going to use a descriptive term that's not kind about your car.
Casey:
But as we'll learn later on, here's another teaser, folks.
Casey:
As we'll learn later on, I have sworn off making fun of your car.
Casey:
I'm not doing it anymore.
John:
I would like to stand out with a gigantic breadbox Volvo you drive around in.
Casey:
That's not mine.
John:
You keep saying it's not yours.
John:
It's parked in your driveway.
John:
And you drive it frequently, I think.
Casey:
No, I don't drive it.
Casey:
I mean, I do drive it maybe once a week at most.
Marco:
That's pretty frequent for a car that you're saying is not yours.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I'd say it's once a month is a better description.
Casey:
But anyways, it doesn't matter.
Casey:
It's a pretty car.
John:
We'll get to that later.
Casey:
It's a pretty car.
Casey:
I don't care what you two say.
Casey:
I genuinely think the Volvo is a pretty car.
Casey:
And granted, I'm biased.
Casey:
I have priors, if you will, to use a Merlinism.
Casey:
I really think it's pretty.
Casey:
But again, we'll bicker about that later.
Marco:
And by the way, to be clear about the thermal throttling, what's interesting about this is that even if you jump through substantial hoops to add a pretty complicated cooling setup to a MacBook Air,
Marco:
Yes, it makes it faster because it doesn't throttle anymore, but it doesn't make it a ton faster.
Casey:
Yeah, that's fair.
Marco:
And the same thing with the difference between the 14 and 16-inch M3 Max MacBook Pros.
Marco:
It's not a big difference.
Marco:
So even when these chips throttle...
Marco:
It's not like the olden days of the very first generation MacBook Air that thermal throttled a lot, severely, all the time.
Marco:
It's nothing like that.
Marco:
When we say thermal throttling, look, iPads and iPhones do it too, and no one ever says anything because it matters so little in most ways.
Marco:
That's how this is.
Marco:
MacBook Air, ever since they went to the Apple Silicon generation where they went totally fanless,
Marco:
I think they've always throttled.
Marco:
It took a while before you get there.
Marco:
Even then, what you see is maybe 5% or 10% slower on long sustained loads than something with a fan.
Marco:
It's not a huge difference.
Marco:
It isn't half as fast or a quarter as fast.
Marco:
It's a very small difference.
Marco:
If anything, it speaks to
Marco:
how little anything like this would be necessary in a product like the MacBook Air.
Marco:
That it really, it is doing just fine without any fan at all.
Marco:
And for the vast majority of workloads, not only does nobody even notice for the vast majority of workloads, but I would even say there isn't even a difference in the vast majority of workloads that you have to be doing some fairly specific things before you're going to see these chips throttle.
Marco:
And even when they do, the performance difference is not massive.
Marco:
So this is not like the thermal throttling.
Marco:
We make a big deal of it on tech podcast because it is a difference and it is something worth knowing if you have one of those workloads.
Marco:
But in reality, in almost all usage, it is totally not a thing and you shouldn't worry about it at all.
Marco:
And it certainly doesn't need hardware modification to take care of.
John:
There's also the question of the power draw of these things.
John:
I was looking at the article that we're going to link in the notes.
John:
I don't think they say the power draw, but I thought I remember someone saying they were taking like five watts or something, which is a lot.
John:
That's how much the SOC takes, but I don't know if that was accurate.
John:
I might just be misremembering.
John:
I also don't know how much power the fans take in Apple's laptops that have fans.
John:
But anyway, if this company is actually going to pitch Apple on licensing their technology for use in, let's say, a future 14-inch or something,
John:
They have a long way to go because they have to show not only does it cool things by blowing air, but, you know, can it be as quiet or as pleasantly quiet as the existing weird asymmetrical fan things?
John:
How much power does it draw?
John:
How much cost does it add?
John:
How much space does it take up?
John:
Yeah, it's a long way to go.
Marco:
Even like how many can they even supply?
Marco:
Like, you know, this is a small startup company.
Marco:
Like, can they even make enough to be a component of the next MacBook Pro or MacBook Air?
Marco:
Probably not.
John:
Well, if Apple gives them a few billion dollars, they can.
John:
It's the same way everybody makes enough of anything.
John:
Apple gives them a lot of money and sometimes buys a lot of machines for them.
Casey:
Yep, that's what it is.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
Zed writes that keycap replacements are free at the Apple store as long as the mechanism below the keycap is functioning and parts are still available to order.
John:
if you have a vintage mac go to a store that opened before your mac became vintage and it hasn't been remodeled since then that's a tall order but i'll go with it and odds are they will still have at least some of the keycaps left this is a nice thing uh this later when we talk about uh one of the main topics this may come up but i feel like apple should advertise this more if it is true which you know multiple people have worked at apple stores said yeah we we've got keycaps and doesn't matter if everything is under warranty
John:
Doesn't matter how old it is.
John:
If you come in, you've got a damaged key cap.
John:
It's basically just a cosmetic issue that the switch underneath works fine.
John:
We'll just take it in the back, see if we have one spare, snap it in and give it to you.
John:
And we've all had experiences like that at the Apple store where we what we assume is like someone's discretionary, you know, nicety, like they'll do something for us that they don't have to do.
John:
that maybe it's not official policy but it's just nice like they'll swap something for you or give you a replacement because they happen to have one and this uh builds brand loyalty and if you know if the key cap represent really is a policy apple should talk about it more if it's
John:
not a policy maybe they just want it to be like a secret menu in and out where like oh you don't know if you can go to the apple store you can get new keycaps because i don't think a lot of people know this you see you see people with laptops with not just the ones where the where the people's fingers wear through the keycaps but just keycaps that are weird or broken or have something wrong with them or some sort of cosmetic damage if you told them hey you can just take that to the apple store and they'll just give you one like well i bet they'll charge me for it well no it's free oh mine's not under warranty like
John:
people don't know and it will make them happier if they have it done now now that i know this if i have a keycap problem i'm definitely gonna do that i wish i could have done that for my apple extended too that i dropped my pocket knife onto and it put a big gash in the uh i think it was the f5 key it was very disappointing to me i wish i could have just brought that to an apple store but they didn't exist
John:
well but if you can find one that hasn't been remodeled since 1975 or whatever maybe they'll have one of those in the back apple extended to 1990 no 1989 87 i don't know yeah that's what i said
Casey:
When you said, you know, you dropped it on the keyboard, I assumed that there was going to be, you know, like the E key or something like that.
Casey:
But no, it was the commonly pressed F5 key.
John:
Well, it was on, it was like the shelving units were over like where my computer desk was and the pocket knife was on the shelf and it tumbled off.
John:
So it just, you know, could have been dangerous.
John:
I think it just had like the flathead screwdriver part out.
John:
So it didn't have like the blade out or anything, but the flathead screwdriver, you know, falling from a height and landing just right on the key cap of the F5 key really gouged it.
Casey:
I'm so sorry.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Moving along.
Casey:
Speaking of Apple stores, apparently they'll price match.
Casey:
This was broken or discussed at least on macworld.com.
Casey:
And apparently up to two weeks from the date you received your device, it will price match against, and this is the key, any authorized Apple reseller.
Casey:
And the person who wrote this article, who I don't have their name in front of me, apparently did it over the phone.
Casey:
So they just refunded them over the phone, which is kind of cool.
Casey:
So yeah, that's a thing.
Casey:
I didn't know that
John:
either again if you would think that lots of stores advertising their advertise their price match to get you to shop there you would think apple would advertise this maybe they don't want to give people free money but i think sometimes people do feel more comfortable buying from the apple store than having to battle everyone in best buy to try to get someone to you know uncage your apple product for you or whatever um and by the way apple extended to 1990 i was close
Casey:
You were close.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And continuing right along, uh, Abe White writes in episode 562, a listener asked about photographing their kids art.
Casey:
My latest side project was making kid art an app to solve that exact problem for myself and only myself as it sits unnoticed in the app store.
Casey:
You know, this is my kind of self-promotion.
Casey:
It's self-promotion wrapped in self-deprecation.
Casey:
This is huge Casey energy.
Casey:
Anyway, Abe continues.
Casey:
It has some niceties like organizing by artists in age, and it can use the vision framework to auto crop.
Casey:
Very cool.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
This is basically a KC app.
Marco:
This is like, it's a bespoke app that deals with photos and children in a way that is like exactly what one person needed.
Casey:
You're not wrong.
Casey:
I can't find the lie.
Casey:
So Abe continues, it has some nice, he's like organized by artist stage.
Casey:
It can use the vision framework to autocrop.
Casey:
But most importantly, it stores in your photos library.
Casey:
So you're never locked into the app.
Casey:
And we will put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
This sounds really good.
Casey:
And I got to give this a shot.
Casey:
John, tell me about Thunderbolt 5 and 80 versus 120 gigabits per second.
John:
Yeah, this is what happens when something sits in the show notes too long.
John:
That Thunderbolt 5 thing had been in the show notes for weeks and weeks, maybe multiple months.
John:
I don't remember how long it was there.
John:
But one part of it talked about this bandwidth boost mode where you get 120 gigabits per second for display purposes.
Yeah.
John:
And as soon as I saw the explanation, I realized I had known this in the past, but forgot.
John:
How does it get 120 gigabits per second when normally it's only 80 gigabits per second?
John:
And 80 is twice what Thunderbolt 4 is.
John:
So that's already great.
John:
Thunderbolt 5, double the speed of Thunderbolt 4.
John:
Thumbs up.
John:
Where's the 120 come from?
John:
Well, it's just four lanes of 40, and they just change the direction of one of the lanes like it's rush hour on a bridge or something.
John:
So it's three...
John:
three lanes of 40 in one direction for 120 and only 40 in the other direction.
John:
So when it's in the mode where you're driving a display, if you want more bandwidth, they just send, you know, three out of the four lanes at a single direction.
John:
That is the explanation.
Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
That was easy.
Casey:
With regard to ECC RAM, at this point, friend of the show, Joe Lyon writes, after reviewing the LPDDR5 data sheets, I am happy to see that when link ECC is enabled, the overall bandwidth or throughput is not impacted.
Casey:
This is because the regular data is transferred on the standard data I.O.
Casey:
pins, but the ECC data is transmitted on this pin that is not normally used during the write and read accesses.
Casey:
There's a slight penalty in latencies when ECC is enabled because of the extra time required to calculate the ECC data, same as in the quote-unquote sideband, system-level ECC from the Xeon days, but at least you're not taking a memory bandwidth hit when ECC is enabled.
Casey:
Also somewhat interesting is that Link ECC can be enabled separately for write and read accesses.
Casey:
So a controller could choose to disable Link ECC for writing data to DRAM, but enable it for reading data from the DRAM and vice versa.
Casey:
Again, how the M3 chip actually chooses to use these features is unknown to the outside world, unless Apple decides to tell us.
John:
Kind of disappointed nobody from Apple wrote in to tell us because this is, you know, we're so close to just getting at the truth because now we know in the abstract, right?
John:
So LPDDR5, it's got the array, something like array ECC inside it for correcting errors inside the chip.
John:
And it could, in theory, use link ECC for the very short journey from the RAM chips to the actual M3 or whatever processor.
John:
We don't know if it does that.
John:
And apparently there's not a really easy way to tell.
John:
So someone from Apple should just tell us.
Casey:
are you using link acc all the time some of the time on reads on writes every other read every other right only on wednesdays let us know inquiring minds want to know and there's apparently john and joe lyon so the two of them would like to know all right apple uh i think it was last week
Casey:
or excuse me, announced expanded partnership with Amcor, A-M-K-O-R, for advanced silicon packaging in the U.S.
Casey:
This is an Apple press release, and I will read from there.
Casey:
Apple will be the first and largest customer of the new Amcor manufacturing packaging facility being developed in Peoria, Arizona.
Casey:
Amcor will package Apple silicon produced at the nearby TSMC Fab, where Apple is also the largest customer.
Casey:
So basically, when you have a gazillion dollars or a hojillion dollars, like you were saying earlier, John, then things can happen, turns out.
John:
Yeah, this is vaguely related to our recent discussions of silicon packaging.
John:
They talk about advanced packaging, this, that, the other thing.
John:
They say Apple silicon, but I'm assuming when they say advanced packaging, they just mean, yeah, stuff that Apple's already doing elsewhere and not any of the newer type of things that Apple isn't currently doing that we were discussing.
John:
And when they say Apple silicon...
John:
Maybe they're making, like, H2 chips for the new headphones or something.
John:
Like, this is years in the future.
John:
I'm not entirely sure that they're going to be manufacturing, you know, weird chiplet-based M4 Extreme chips in Arizona.
John:
But baby steps.
John:
Getting any amount of...
John:
and if anything remotely close to cutting edge silicon fabrication in this country is great intel uh is working on that intel recently got some money from the u.s government to help with that tsmc uh is not a u.s company but having them in the u.s uh and trying to sort of build the expertise in our country is one of the biggest problems is not that it's uh expensive to do here or whatever it's that we don't have people who can work in those factories so it's kind of a a personnel supply supply problem but
John:
You can solve that chicken and egg dilemma with lots of money.
John:
If you build a giant factory and say we're hiring a bunch of people, hopefully that will motivate people to learn this trade and start working in those factories, which are presumably offer some, you know, good high paying jobs because this is cutting edge stuff.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
You can nourish your body all holiday season long with flavorful meals made with clean ingredients.
Marco:
You can choose from over 80 weekly options that change every week featuring delicious, nutritionist-approved recipes.
Marco:
And you can mix and match meals to meet your lifestyle needs.
Marco:
So, for instance, if you want some stuff to be keto, some stuff to be plant-based, some stuff to be gluten-free or calorie-smart, you can mix and match to whatever you need in your household or your diet.
Marco:
It is wonderful.
Marco:
You can eat clean the delicious way this December 2021.
Marco:
with flavor-packed recipes like buttery lemon garlic shrimp, harissa apricot chicken, maple butternut squash risotto, and so much more.
Marco:
Green Chef is the number one meal kit for eating well with dinners that work for you, not the other way around.
Marco:
And you can feel your best with fresh seasonal recipes.
Marco:
They have certified organic fruits and vegetables, organic cage-free eggs, sustainably sourced seafood, and so much more.
Marco:
They offset 100% of their delivery emissions, as well as 100% of the plastic in every box.
Marco:
And nearly all packaging materials are curbside recyclable in most of the U.S.
Marco:
Green Chef is great.
Marco:
And also, if you've previously used HelloFresh, Green Chef is now owned by HelloFresh.
Marco:
And with a wider array of meal plans to choose from, there is something for everyone.
Marco:
You can switch between the brands freely, and it's awesome.
Marco:
So go to greenchef.com slash 60ATP.
Marco:
And use code 60ATP to get 60% off plus 20% off for your next two months.
Marco:
Once again, it's greenchef.com slash 60ATP and code 60ATP for 60% off plus 20% off your next two months.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Green Chef for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
So even though Apple has infinite money, there are some things they cannot do.
Casey:
And apparently what they cannot do is generate or create a custom bespoke 5G modem.
Casey:
Because allegedly...
Casey:
They are canning that process, and they are no longer working toward making their own 5G modem.
Casey:
Maybe there's conflicting reports here.
Casey:
So, reading from MacRumors, according to the operator of the news aggregator account, YEUX1122, the well-known YEUX1122, on the Naver blog...
Casey:
Yeah, probably.
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
Supply chain sources related to Apple's 5G modem department's claim that the company's attempts to develop its own modem have failed so far, which I think we knew, and that Apple's in the process of winding down its years-long investment in the project.
Casey:
Separately, the leaker known as TechReve today said that they heard similar reports from a Japanese supply chain source.
Casey:
This is pretty loosely sourced.
Casey:
I don't know how much to make of this, and it sounds like, Marco, you are not buying it.
Marco:
I'm not.
Marco:
I mean, so there's a lot of words in here that matter.
Marco:
So keep in mind, number one, supply chain sources.
Marco:
From what we've heard, it is pretty clear that Apple is trying to build a modem.
Marco:
There's a lot of value for them to build their modem, as we've talked about whenever this rumor comes up.
Marco:
The cellular modem in a phone is a pretty large and pretty complex and substantial chip that's in there.
Marco:
And so if they can do their own, not only does that potentially give them a lot of control over how it's done, and maybe they can do better than Qualcomm, maybe not, who knows, but they're certainly going to try.
Marco:
Keep in mind, there was a time when it was considered outrageous that Apple would ever make chips better than Intel for their CPUs, but here we are.
Marco:
I think it's possible for them to do a better job if they have the talent and the resources and everything.
Marco:
But anyway, it also gives them the ability to possibly integrate it into the package of the main chip.
Marco:
And that could have all sorts of benefits for things like efficiency, certainly space inside the devices, and of course costs.
Marco:
So there's a lot of motivation for them to do this.
Marco:
and also the whole Tim Cook doctrine of wanting to control the key technologies behind your products.
Marco:
The cell modem is a key technology behind their most important product.
Marco:
So it makes sense why they want to do this, and that's why they've been apparently spending a lot of money, and they've made some acquisitions in this area, some pretty big ones.
Marco:
Allegedly, they have this big thing.
Marco:
So when we hear a rumor that says supply chain sources say that they're just going to bail out on making a 5G modem,
Marco:
What that probably means, what we've heard so far in recent weeks and months, is that Apple's cell modem project is behind schedule, and it missed whatever target they had set initially.
Marco:
They wanted it done by Timex.
Marco:
Apparently, they have missed that target, and so they're going to keep working on it.
Marco:
Well, supply chain sources, if Apple was talking to them and saying, hey, we're going to maybe need you to build a whole bunch of these for us, or we're going to need all these parts to make these, or whatever goes into it, we're going to need these for, say, 2025.
Marco:
And if Apple missed their target, they don't need those for 2025 anymore.
Marco:
And so the supply chain sources might be told something like, scrap that.
Marco:
That doesn't mean Apple's not making a modem.
Marco:
That just means Apple's not making that modem at that time.
Marco:
And keep in mind the supply chain also.
Marco:
There's a lot of parties in the industry who really want Apple not to be making a modem and who would possibly benefit from Apple not making a modem.
Marco:
Like, for instance, their current modem supplier.
Yeah.
Marco:
So, you know, there's when when people want a rumor to be true or they want they want to be true, like a lot of times, you know, it spreads through human nature or malice or, you know, usually just human nature.
Marco:
And so I would take this with a grain of salt.
Marco:
There is still tons of reason for Apple to make a cell modem.
Marco:
And I believe, I think as Jason pointed out on Upgrade this week, if Apple actually canned this whole project, they would probably be laying off hundreds of people.
Marco:
You would feel it in other ways, not just somebody on Twitter or whatever.
Marco:
You would feel it in big ways.
Marco:
So I bet Apple is very much still working on a modem.
Marco:
It just isn't ready yet.
Marco:
And that means they're not ready to manufacture it yet.
Marco:
And so the supply chain was probably told, hey, that thing we told you we wanted for next year, we don't need it anymore.
John:
i mean if that's the case this is a real uh trailing indicator considering on past episodes we discussed the uh the actually fairly old story that apple signed another long multi-year deal with qualcomm you don't do that if you got your own modem chips you know or you have any expectation of and it's many it's not like just like oh we'll use qualcomm for next year i think it was like a three-year deal four-year deal or whatever yeah but that's that's
John:
not many years like you know if it was a 15-year deal i'd say oh boy maybe they're not doing it but if it's it's only a few years that probably just means they need a few more years to finish theirs i know but like if the idea is if this supply chain is saying this now because they sort of canceled their orders for whatever as soon as that deal was made they're like well i guess they're not i guess there's not going to be any apple 5g modems next year because they just signed a three-year deal yeah um i mean i it's possible that like the rumors have always been like uh
John:
the the first year they have one of these say they eventually you know succeed and make one it's not like they're going to put it in the flagship iphone immediately even back when they did the intel modems in like half the iphones that was not a great experience so the rumors are like that they would put the first apple modem chip in like the iphone se4 or something like some lower volume not as big a deal thing and it would be a slow rollout over many years so
John:
If they haven't canceled the car project, they're sure as hell not canceling the cell motor project because it is really important for them to do this.
John:
They did buy the Intel's business.
John:
And honestly, considering they make so many other things, not just the SOC, but as I mentioned before, like the H chip, the R1 chip, like...
John:
They're good at making silicon.
John:
Obviously, cell radio stuff is different in that first you've got the radio part of it, which is not just, you know, digital logic, but it's analog radio technology.
John:
So I understand that's a whole other can of worms.
John:
But Apple has lots already, lots of the right talent and experience to get this done.
John:
And as you said, Marco, cell phones, an important part of cell phones is the cell modem.
John:
And hey, if they put it in the SoC, maybe, just maybe, it could appear in a Mac.
John:
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
Because, you know, on the Mac, they really don't have enough room to put it anywhere else.
John:
Whenever we bring this up, people bring up the thing of, like, oh, Qualcomm charges their percentage of purchase price.
John:
We went through this many years ago around in circles in this, and I believe the resolution of this was that cost is not a reasonable reason for them to keep it out of the MacBooks because it's not a percentage of the price.
John:
Like, oh, I have to buy a $7,000 MacBook.
John:
I have to pay Qualcomm $700 because they get 10% of the purchase price or something.
John:
when that was true even if it is still true but when it was true i believe the upshot was that there was a limit and pretty much everything apple sells would be at that limit so it's not like it goes up and up forever and it's just a percentage of the price uh and also we have no idea what kind of deal apple has with qualcomm like when they make these multi-year deals with qualcomm we don't know all the terms uh apple buys a lot of modem chips presumably they can get fairly favorable terms um but yeah cost when you're making it yourself you don't have to pay make a deal with yourself and pay yourself weird profit margins or whatever so it'll be cheaper
John:
and better for apple to have its own chips they are almost certainly continuing this process uh but it is possible that they've said you know what we plan to make a 5g modem and at this point we blew it uh by the time because the lead times on these are so long they could know that like look by the time we're done we need to have a 6g modem so the 6g modem project that we've had
John:
running for several years now that's our new main focus take everybody off the 5g modem put them on the 6g modem which of course will also be able to do 5g because it has to uh so that could be going on but you know again product titan has been rebooted a million times and that's something we're not even sure apple should ever make apple should definitely make a cell modem
Casey:
Yeah, so they're apparently doing 6G.
Casey:
That's a thing.
Casey:
And MacRumors reports Apple's work on implementing 6G cellular connectivity in its devices appears to be ramping up, according to Mark Gurman.
Casey:
6G is not expected to emerge on consumer devices until around 2030, for goodness sakes.
John:
That's not that long from now.
John:
Take a look at the calendar.
John:
The year number keeps going up.
Yeah.
Casey:
As long as I'm still here for it, that's all I care about.
Casey:
But yeah, it's yikes.
Casey:
I mean, it's not yet.
Casey:
I just feel like that's both forever away and tomorrow.
Casey:
But that's neither here nor there.
John:
Long lead times on silicon.
John:
But yeah, the 6G obviously isn't, you know, it's dependent on whatever the, you know, for us, the countrywide rollout of 6G.
John:
If it goes as well as 5G, it might be well.
John:
indeed john uh dare i ask what's going on with your window snapping window dragging bug what's the latest this has been in the notes so long i have to update it this just says beta 4 but beta 5 came out like what two days ago or something yeah this is mac os 4 no one else is keeping up with the mac os mac os 14.2 beta and why do i keep installing the new mac os betas because i'm always looking to see if my window dragging bug has been fixed and for the past couple of betas
John:
so here here's the deal i first of all the feedback item one of my feedback items had a status update that seemed to indicate that the fix was in some build i forget what the details were it wasn't a reply it wasn't a comment but up in the header part of the feedback it says like fix possibly implemented in build blah blah i haven't gotten that thing that you get sometimes which says we believe this is fixed please verify it or your bug will be closed blah blah i haven't gotten that on it yet but i did get that status update
John:
And I've been loading the, you know, the 14.2 betas and testing them out.
John:
And my reproduction on my specific computer setup with all of my hardware was very straightforward.
John:
You just log in two users, open 25 text edit windows, drag sticky.
John:
Real easy to do.
John:
It's not subtle.
John:
It's not like you have to look for it real hard.
John:
I have plenty of videos doing it.
John:
And by that yardstick, my window dragging bug is fixed in the Mac OS 14.2 beta, right?
John:
Because if you open 25 windows and drag it sticky, it's fine.
John:
Nothing wrong with it.
John:
But now I know too much.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
Now I know that, like, well, I know that...
John:
As you open more windows, things get worse.
John:
So, I mean, I guess I'm kind of like, you know, what I would think is that computer is powerful.
John:
The computer is powerful.
John:
We have today with hardware, uh, compositing and the window manager and, uh,
John:
You know, what am I asking you to do?
John:
Move an opaque rectangle around on top of a bunch of other opaque rectangles.
John:
It should be perfect all the time, shouldn't it?
John:
Like there should be no degradation as I open more windows.
John:
I'm not running out of RAM.
John:
The CPU isn't pegged.
John:
The GPU isn't pegged.
John:
Like nothing is stressed.
John:
Nothing is happening on the system.
John:
Nothing is running.
John:
They're just empty, white, opaque windows, and they're just rectangles.
John:
And I just want to be able to drag one around.
John:
Should it matter if there's 100 or 200?
John:
And the answer in macOS is it still does.
John:
In 14.2, if you open 200 windows...
John:
It's laggier when you're dragging that little sticky window around than it is when you have 25, right?
John:
And you can hold on the option key to stop the window snapping thing from going.
John:
No, wait, hold on.
Marco:
What's your baseline from previous versions of Mac OS before this bug was there?
John:
That's the question.
John:
Because before, I wasn't looking for this.
John:
I never noticed anything having to do with window dragging.
John:
Ever since Quartz Extreme in whatever that was, Mac OS 10.4 or 5 or whatever...
John:
Tiger or Leopard or something, whatever Quartz Extreme came out.
John:
It was the thing where they did GPU accelerated compositing.
John:
As soon as they did that, window dragging was fine, right?
John:
And when we're talking about compositing in the original versions of Mac OS X, when you had to draw a window with its fuzzy drop shadow...
John:
they had to calculate the transparency of, okay, we're laying a drop shadow over what's behind it.
John:
Now what's behind it?
John:
And blend that together with whatever the color gray is at that point with that transparency level.
John:
And they would do that on the CPU.
John:
Every single pixel, they'd do the math.
John:
They would go to the CPU and say, okay, now take this pixel and blend it with that one and tell me the result.
John:
Take this pixel and blend it with that one.
John:
Incredibly slow, right?
John:
Once they moved it onto the GPU, which is designed to do that and they can do it much faster and in parallel,
John:
window dragging was like oh the problem solved i can drag the window around it never lags behind setting aside window resizing which has to do with the content but just dragging that's done by the window server the application doesn't even know that it's happening right it's never been a problem only when i started encountering this bug which was obvious and noticeable to anybody
John:
Did I start even noticing window dragging?
John:
And now that I know that apparently, you know, macOS 13 and 14 have this thing where as you open more windows, window dragging gets crappier.
John:
I'm always looking for... All right, well, now what does it take for it to get crappy?
John:
How many windows do I need to open for me to notice that it's crappy?
John:
And what I mean by crappy is you'll grab the title bar...
John:
and you'll move the window around and the the the pointer will not stay on the title bar as you move the window around obviously when i had the bug if you look at my videos i can pull the pointer three inches off that title bar in slow motion and i can watch the stickies window move across the screen real slowly trying to catch up with my pointer and my pointer is moving real slow and it's like catch up with me sticky you can catch me catch up with me right super bad right now on 14.2 if i open 200 windows and i move it around
John:
I can get the pointer maybe a centimeter off the title bar before, but it catches up real fast.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
But there's a difference between when I have 200 windows open and when I have 100 and when I have 25, right?
John:
There's a difference.
John:
And I don't understand what the difference is.
John:
But anyway, I'm going to close this bug as fixed once 14.2 comes out, assuming it continues to work like this.
John:
Because, hey, the bug was 25 windows open.
John:
It looks like molasses.
John:
That doesn't happen anymore.
John:
25, it's as good with 25 as it is with zero, right?
John:
It's just, it is what it is.
John:
But now I have this little bug in my head about, but why is it not perfect?
John:
Like what is it that's not, you know, what would it take?
John:
Because I feel like in a video game type thing, if you had like a cursor and like, you know, sometimes they make like fake operating systems for fake computers and video games, right?
John:
If they did this in a game engine,
John:
you couldn't get the pointer to stray from the pixel it was on when you held down the mouse button you know what i mean like you grab the title bar you hold down the mouse button you move your mouse that pointer would never move from the title bar but on the mac because the cursor is controlled by something that's different than the windows server the cursor updates and it moves however your mouse moves and the window service is like wait oh the cursor it looks like the cursor moved i have to redraw the window underneath it and to the degree that they lag behind each other that's where you get separation so
John:
i'll continue to watch this but i am excited to learn that uh my uh long national nightmare of uh laggy window dragging will be gone in 14.2 so i can concentrate all my energy on our network changed which continues to plague people just today i retweeted somebody who couldn't update an extension to visual studio why because visual studio was it video studio code it just said yeah bs code
John:
Visual Studio Code uses Chromium under the covers, and they tried to do something involving extensions, and it just failed, and they looked in the output, and lo and behold, why did it fail?
John:
Their network changed over and over again.
Casey:
I'm seeing it semi-frequently now, and it's one of those things, I forget the term for it, but once you're aware of it, you see it all the time, all of a sudden.
John:
Or when stuff doesn't work.
John:
Like, I don't use Chrome.
John:
Yes, you do.
John:
You don't know you're using Chromium, but it's under everything now.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm seeing this way more frequently recently, and I am not loving it.
Casey:
So thanks, John.
Casey:
I appreciate that.
John:
I didn't make it happen.
Marco:
I've still never seen it because I don't really use Chrome-based things much at all, as far as I can tell.
Marco:
I've never seen it happen.
Marco:
I mean, you're using Slack.
Marco:
It's Chromium-based, isn't it?
Casey:
Is it?
Casey:
I believe so.
Casey:
I thought so.
Casey:
I might have that wrong, but I sure thought so.
John:
Most people are sending error messages from Discord.
John:
Slack may just be eating those errors.
John:
Discord will throw up a dialogue to let you know what it is.
John:
Like Gmail, I said before, if the app you're using is good about retrying,
John:
you it just might be hidden from you that it's making http requests they're failing and it just retries them and because it's all happening behind the scenes you never notice it but especially if there's no place you can look at an error console or something you don't know that it's happening uh but honestly that's preferable if vs code was better about retrying this person wouldn't have had that problem but you know
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Trade Coffee, a wonderful coffee subscription service that sources the best coffee across the country and brings it right to your doorstep.
Marco:
Trade Coffee is a great service for you, and it's also a really great gift idea for this holiday season.
Marco:
A subscription to Trade is the perfect gift for any coffee lover.
Marco:
You just choose how much to spend, and Trade will help your recipient personalize the coffee to their preferences.
Marco:
And Trade's gift subscriptions cut out the worry around shipping deadlines,
Marco:
as the digital subscription is just delivered instantly to their inbox.
Marco:
It is a great idea.
Marco:
I would love that personally.
Marco:
Trade is the destination also for your better coffee at home.
Marco:
You can experience the best curated-for-you coffee delivered to your door when and however you want it.
Marco:
Whether you already know what you like or you're new to nerdy coffee, you might need some help.
Marco:
Trade makes it easy and convenient to discover new coffees.
Marco:
So here's how this works.
Marco:
They've built relationships with over 55 local roasters across the U.S.
Marco:
so you can enjoy their craft coffee from the comfort of your home.
Marco:
And they profile all these different roasts and they work with the roasters so they know how everything tastes and what's available and what's fresh.
Marco:
And so there's a constant variety of new coffee available on trade and they make sure you get it however you want it.
Marco:
You know, if you need to like get a certain amount one week, different amount the next week, you got to pause it when you go on vacation or whatever.
Marco:
It's super easy.
Marco:
It is a great service.
Marco:
I've used trade myself for a long time and I just love the variety that it sends.
Marco:
You know, the hit rate is really good.
Marco:
And I can have some weird taste and they they nail it.
Marco:
You know, whatever whatever I tell them to send, they send.
Marco:
The feedback is great.
Marco:
The service is great and the coffee is great.
Marco:
Fresh roasted coffee is key to making great coffee at home and get trade to give it to you.
Marco:
It's it's wonderful.
Marco:
Give the gift of better coffee at home, whether it's to you or somebody else.
Marco:
From now through December 25th, Trade is offering a 15% off all gift subscriptions at drinktrade.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Shop now through Christmas Day to save.
Marco:
That's drinktrade.com slash ATP for 15% off all gift subscriptions through Christmas Day.
Marco:
drinktrade.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thanks to Trade for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Let's talk about – we're going to do another tease apparently for the after show.
Casey:
Why was it and how was it possible for me to destroy two of Marco's vehicles in the span of 30 minutes?
Casey:
Or maybe 90 minutes, whatever it was.
Casey:
Well, that's because Marco and I were both in Manhattan basically a week ago.
Casey:
And we were there for the Vision Pro Developer Lab.
John:
and i would like to at this time tell you everything i that marco and i are allowed to tell you about the vision pro lab so buckle up wait you just did i just shoot you're right i just did all right uh that's all we got we attended a lab that is all we are allowed to say about it i think you were telling me before that like you can't even characterize it no yeah so you're just like oh i can't tell you about the lab well can you just tell me if it was good or bad that would be characterizing it and you're not to do that either so a lab was attended
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
A lab was attended.
Casey:
So there we go.
Casey:
I would like to levy a brief complaint.
Casey:
Marco and I were trying to rendezvous at the hotel we were staying at in Manhattan, and Marco hit apparently 17 walls of traffic all at once and did the thing that one would expect a good friend of yours to do.
Casey:
And what Marco did was he said, all right, rather than having me update you or you requesting an update of my location every five minutes—
Casey:
How about I'll just share my location with you?
Casey:
So far, so good.
Casey:
How is it five or 10 or however many years and find my friends?
Casey:
When somebody shares their location with you, unless I missed it, which I'm pretty sure I didn't.
Casey:
When somebody shares their location with you, it says Marco is sharing his location.
Casey:
Would you like to share yours?
Casey:
So far, so good.
Casey:
But the thing is, how long is Marco sharing his location for?
Casey:
Because if he was sharing his location for, I think the option is like the rest of the day, or maybe it's like an hour.
Marco:
It's like one hour, rest of day, and forever.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So what if Marco was sharing his location just for an hour, which was enough time, in theory, for him to reach our mutual meeting point?
Yeah.
Casey:
spoiler alert i did i did do it just for an hour thinking it would be enough time and it definitely was not enough time thanks to long island traffic fair enough but here it is you know so you share for an hour and then captain thirsty over here is like yes forever yes
Casey:
And then I look like a dork because you were trying to do what you thought was necessary.
Casey:
Nothing wrong with that.
Casey:
And here I am like, sure, stalk me forever.
Casey:
Why not?
Casey:
And I just wish that Apple would make it clear what the other person has done.
Casey:
Is this like a privacy thing that I just can't wrap my arms around?
Casey:
They have to be so careful with this stuff.
Casey:
I do.
Casey:
Yeah, I get that.
Marco:
Think about all the possible ways that this could potentially be abused by creepy people or jerks.
Marco:
They are so careful with this.
Marco:
And even if they go a little bit too careful on some of these features that are, like, about location sharing, I would say that's fine.
Marco:
Be extra careful.
Marco:
Be overly, you know, overly cautious in this.
Marco:
Because, you know, even metadata being shared can be abused by someone somewhere.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
i don't i don't i can't think right off the top of my head of you know why it might be bad to tell someone how long you have shared location for but i i think it's best in this case like be as careful as possible and so you know and maybe you want to avoid the situation like maybe you're being pressured to share location with somebody through you know some kind of you know work obligation or some kind of societal norm or just some other kind of pressure and you're like all right fine i'll share location and then you're like yeah but for one hour
Marco:
And then maybe you can get out of that situation in some other way in the meantime, and then you're not sharing a location with them forever.
Marco:
And they don't know that until you're long gone or whatever.
Marco:
You've got to figure, how could this be abused?
Marco:
And chances are, every little detail of any kind of location based anything on iOS has been abused.
Marco:
considered to death by people inside of apple thought to death pushed to death experimented with to death and unfortunately you know hacked to death by anybody on the outside who's trying to get around it so um you know they're being cautious here probably for very good reasons oh totally i totally agree i just wish it was clearer to me and maybe this is my own failing like
Casey:
what the threat model is.
Casey:
What specifically do they think they're preventing?
Casey:
Because I agree with you.
Casey:
Be precious about it.
Casey:
And I don't mean that flippantly.
Casey:
Be precious about it and don't leave an avenue for this to be abused.
Casey:
I just wish I understood it because this doesn't happen to me often, but on the occasions it does happen, I always feel so guilty that I don't know how to reciprocate appropriately.
Casey:
What if you shared your location forever and I'm like, eh, screw you, one hour?
Casey:
eat it.
Casey:
You know, like it's not a big deal.
Casey:
I just wish it was more clear.
Casey:
And, and that's why when I send these, what I always do is I say, I'm about to send you my location for you blank.
Casey:
You know, I'm about to send you my location for the next hour, or I'm about to send you my location, you know, forever or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
And it shouldn't, I shouldn't have to do that.
Casey:
It should be clear what the situation is.
John:
You're overthinking this, but you just pointed out why they would want to keep it private.
John:
Because if it's, if it's implemented the way it is now, or neither one of you knows, um,
John:
uh then you don't have to worry about you can just make your own decision right i know you what you want is i want to reciprocate i want to know so i can so i can make a decision based on what they did but the flip side of that is you are free to make your own decision without declaring it to the other person you know what i mean because just like you said it's like
John:
well if he's shared it forever and you share one hour he might be insulted but knowing that both of you don't know it's not automatically sent to each other you can make your decision in isolation if that's what you want to do what your complaint is i can't make my decision not in isolation but of course you can because you can just ask marco how long did you share it for and in the same way when you don't want to make it in isolation on your end you send the information i just shared it with you for an hour so the current system probably is a better bet than the other one
John:
Although you could have used the check-in feature if you could figure out how to do that, I suppose.
Casey:
Oh, that's true.
Casey:
I didn't think about that.
Casey:
That would have been a really good time for it.
John:
I don't even know how to activate that.
John:
I see it advertised occasionally.
John:
I'm like, why don't you do that?
Casey:
If memory serves, what you got to do is, I'm going to try right now, you go into messages, you go to send a message, you hit the little plus, and then I believe if you scroll down, yes, the icon is a yellow checkbox and it says check in.
Casey:
And then I think there's like a prompt or a wizard or what have you.
John:
I think it's only just like, is that one way or two way?
John:
I don't know how that works, but
Casey:
I think it's one way.
Casey:
I think in this case... You should try it.
John:
I think it's more for like when you're on your way home so they know, or if a kid is going somewhere, you want to know whether they got there or whatever.
Casey:
It is, but I think that would have been a perfectly valid use.
Casey:
And now I kind of regret that we didn't think to use it, but it would have been a perfectly valid use case here.
Casey:
But yeah, that's my complaint for the day.
Casey:
So please and thank you.
Casey:
Breaking news a day or two ago, just a couple of days ago, Beeper Mini, which I had heard of Beeper before, and I think it's been under several names, several different flavors of Beeper, Beeper this, Beeper that.
Casey:
But Beeper Mini brings iMessage to Android.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure it does.
Casey:
We've heard this many times before, and many times before we've seen what that means is there's some sort of like VM that's running Mac OS that you're supposed to send your credentials to, and then it sits in messages and it forwards all your stuff back and forth and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And it's gross.
Casey:
It's gross.
Casey:
It's a huge threat to your security.
Casey:
It's just everything about it top to bottom is disgusting.
Casey:
Except that's not what this is doing.
Casey:
What this is doing is apparently it is legitimately talking to Apple servers and
Casey:
and having you present your phone number as an iPhone, and it will allow you to register for honest-to-gosh first-party iMessages, and it will communicate with Apple's, you know, APNS servers directly.
Casey:
There is a proof of concept written in Python by a high schooler
Casey:
that is still on GitHub last I looked.
Casey:
And I have not played with the code myself, but a friend of the show, Quinn Nelson over at Snazzy Labs, he put together a really, really great like 10 minute video on it, wherein he has a Linux laptop.
Casey:
This is not an Apple laptop running Linux.
Casey:
It's an honest to goodness, like system 70, system 76, I forgot what it was called.
Casey:
Linux laptop.
Marco:
Wait, people actually have and use Linux laptops?
Casey:
Well, apparently YouTubers do.
John:
It's a laptop with Linux on it.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Is System76 specifically dedicated to Linux laptops?
Casey:
I think that's correct.
Casey:
Maybe I'm wrong, but I believe that to be correct.
John:
I mean, otherwise nothing would work on it, right?
John:
No Wi-Fi, no sound.
John:
Great laptop.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Well done.
Casey:
Well done, gentlemen.
Casey:
But anyways.
John:
I know Linux has gotten better.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Has it?
Casey:
Has it though?
Casey:
But anyway, so yeah, so this legitimately seems to work.
Casey:
I don't know what specifically Apple could do in order to shut this all down, but I am stunned that this has lasted more than five minutes.
Casey:
And I do think as an engineering exercise, this is extremely cool.
Casey:
I don't know how I feel about it more broadly than that, but as an engineering exercise, I cannot believe anyone was able to do this, much less a high schooler operating on his own.
Casey:
Incredibly cool.
John:
I believe it, because I think Quinn had the exact right analogy in his video.
John:
It's like Hackintoshes.
John:
It's almost exactly like that, right?
John:
So here's the thing.
John:
If Apple's running the iMessage service, the problem for Apple is, how do I know that the thing using the iMessage service isn't a real Apple device?
John:
An iPhone, a Mac, whatever, right?
John:
that's actually a pretty hard problem um and hackintoshes have the same problem you saw you want to run mac os on this computer mac os is like wait a second how do i know this computer is a mac and not like a pc that you're tricking me it's really difficult to do that there's only so much you can do with the hardware to make it appear authentic and most of that stuff it's kind of like drm right
John:
the information about the authenticity of the hardware has to be sent to apple like you have to leave the machine and go to apple and say i am legitimate uh and there's stuff you can do with secure enclaves and things like that but for the most part what apple has done and the reason hackintosh is
John:
exists is they do lots of stuff with like oh you need a legitimate serial number i need to be able to look it up on my apple database and that's that's a lot of how hackintosh stuff works and that's that's how this works right so high school student doing it that's really cool and everything but it's the same as the people who figure out how to get mac os on pc hardware you just have to convince whatever apple things that you are a legitimate piece of hardware that you're supposed to be installing on uh and the push notification servers apparently can be convinced that
John:
not with not too much difficulty right you just need to know have some fake essentially fake credentials that you can send uh and you know the the thing quinn says in the video is well why doesn't apple just block the fake credentials because in the github repo there's one set of fake credentials that like makes it masquerade as a serial number of like a legitimate phone or why don't they just block that problem solved right um
John:
But then you just get another one.
John:
Right.
John:
As he was showing a Hackintosh tool where you can essentially randomly generate like Mac serial numbers for Hackintoshes until you find one that's a real one, because Apple has services that you can, you know, look up your serial number with or whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
It's actually kind of annoying for Apple to deal with this.
John:
There are possible solutions to get increasingly draconian involving, again, the secure enclave and cryptographically secure stuff.
John:
But like all security stuff, the other side of the security coin is convenience.
John:
And the more difficult Apple makes this for Hackintosh people and for this messaging things, the more spillover there is in possible inconvenience for their legitimate customers.
John:
And practically speaking, it seems like
John:
There's probably not going to be a ton of these customers.
John:
What's Apple's best tool to get rid of this?
John:
It's not technical.
John:
It's always legal.
John:
Lots of things may be technically possible, but Apple has a lot of lawyers and lots of things that you can technically do.
John:
Apple may not want you to do and can stop you from doing legal.
John:
We'll see if it raises to that level of concern.
John:
There are also technical things they can do, but why do the cat and mouse game?
John:
Why does Apple do the cat and mouse game with hackintoshes?
John:
They do it, but in a kind of a half-hearted way.
John:
Hackintoshes are still possible.
John:
They're harder than they used to be, but there's not that many people making hackintoshes.
John:
Apple's not super-duper concerned.
John:
Those people probably weren't going to buy Macs anyway.
John:
So they do do things to thwart hackintoshes year after year after year, but they're not dedicating billions of dollars to it, right?
John:
It's not that important.
John:
We'll see what happens with this.
John:
I feel like with this thing, like...
John:
I have to imagine that when you use any legitimate Apple product, there's some screen that none of us reads that says you agree that you only use official Apple devices to talk to, let's say, our iMessage servers.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
That's got to be in there somewhere.
John:
So they're probably already in violation of some agreement where like, because, you know, they're using Apple servers.
John:
They're sending messages.
John:
Beeper also has servers, by the way, because the Beeper servers, like when your phone is off, the Beeper servers are listening to Apple servers.
John:
But anyway, bottom line is,
John:
they're using apple servers they're sending data to them they're receiving data from them that's not free right and that's a service that apple provides to augment its products and almost guaranteed there's something in some agreement that you have to agree to when you get an apple id for instance or do anything that says hey you're only allowed to use apple servers if you you know have a legitimate apple device or whatever so this is way better than the thing where you run a mac mini at a data center and sign into it and give strangers access to all your data uh
John:
And it may survive a lot longer than those, especially if it stays kind of like obscure that only tech nerds know about it and not many people use this app.
John:
But considering Beeper is charging $2 a month for this service and they probably want to grow their business, I'm not sure how obscure it's going to stay.
John:
So I think this is interesting, but I would not bet a lot of money that it's going to take over the world and continue to be a real thing that people rely on in a year or two.
Marco:
Whenever you're dealing with any kind of hack like this, I'd say the same thing about Hackintosh, as you said.
Marco:
It's a good example.
Marco:
It's a fun thing to experiment with, but I wouldn't buy new hardware for it that you wouldn't otherwise buy.
Marco:
I wouldn't make long-term plans about assumptions that it will work in the future.
Marco:
And I sure as heck wouldn't build a business on it.
Marco:
That's for sure.
Marco:
It is a wonderful technical feat that people figure out ways around this stuff.
Marco:
That's great.
Marco:
And I kind of love the whole hacker mindset that makes people want to do this kind of thing.
Marco:
That's great.
Marco:
But I think what makes it even riskier than a Hackintosh is a Hackintosh might work just fine for you on your desk indefinitely as long as you don't do software updates that might break it or whatever.
Marco:
But iMessage is a service that can break at any time.
Marco:
And yeah, you know, what John said was right.
Marco:
Like it would probably be a pain in the butt for Apple to kind of play cat and mouse and try to intentionally keep breaking this thing.
Marco:
But the reality is like when you're talking to a service that is that is out of your control.
Marco:
Apple can do a lot of things on its end that can break you at any time.
Marco:
And, you know, unlike a Hackintosh, like, you know, you can control when your Hackintosh turn, you know, does its software updates, you can turn off auto update, and you can be careful with what you do and everything.
Marco:
And maybe you can get it to run for a while.
Marco:
But with this, you don't control when your thing keeps running or breaking, it is out of your hands.
Marco:
So
Marco:
I would strongly recommend if you want to experiment with this, like, cool, have fun with it.
Marco:
But like, I wouldn't, for instance, you know, buy dedicated hardware for this that you can't afford to lose or make any assumptions that you can't afford to have broken for you unexpectedly.
John:
And honestly, the reward is you get to use iMessage, which is probably not the best of all the cross-platform messaging services.
John:
So, yeah, I mean, I guess if you're in high school and all your friends have iPhones and you feel left out, by all means, install it on your Android phone and run it for... It'll probably last through junior year or whatever.
John:
But, you know, for regular people, like, I don't... I'm not sure there's an appetite that everyone's like, oh, finally, I can get iMessage on my Android phone.
John:
Like, people have Android phones who...
John:
are not caught up in the status of blue bubbles which i have to imagine is most people with android phones because a lot of people have android phones are already using whatever the most popular cross-platform messaging app is in their whatsapp line we chat whatever all that stuff
John:
And, you know, and for my own kids, I can see my own kids.
John:
It's not like they're dedicated to one messaging platform.
John:
They use like for some people, they have to use WhatsApp for some people.
John:
I don't know if they use line or they use all sorts of things.
John:
They use iMessage for something.
John:
Some people it's SMS through iMessage, green bubbles, blue bubbles, WhatsApp.
John:
It's it's not like anyone lives a life of such purity that you can somehow choose a single messaging service and only use that unless you're one of those people who refuses to talk to anyone unless they're using signal or whatever.
John:
But that's not the way most people work.
John:
Some people in your life, some things that you have to do, you have to use messaging app, whatever.
John:
You know, someday maybe your kids will be in school and you'll have to go to a Facebook page.
John:
It happens to everybody.
Marco:
We are brought to you this week by Collide.
Marco:
If you work in security or IT and your company has Okta, this message is for you.
Marco:
Have you noticed that for the past few years, the majority of data breaches and hacks that you read about have something in common?
Marco:
It's employees.
Marco:
Hackers absolutely love exploiting vulnerable employee devices and credentials.
Marco:
But it doesn't have to be this way.
Marco:
Imagine a world where only secure devices can access your cloud apps.
Marco:
In this world, phished credentials are useless to hackers, and you can manage every OS, even Linux, from a single dashboard.
Marco:
Best of all, you can get employees to fix their own device security issues without creating more work for IT.
Marco:
The good news is, you don't have to imagine that world.
Marco:
You can just start using Collide.
Marco:
Collide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and it ensures that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps.
Marco:
Visit collide.com slash ATP to watch a demo and see how it works.
Marco:
That's collide with a K, so it's spelled K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash ATP.
Marco:
That's collide with a K, collide.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Collide for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, so a couple months ago now, John did something unheard of.
Casey:
You blocked for like the third time this year or something like that.
Casey:
I don't know what to make of this.
Casey:
Are you feeling okay?
John:
Yeah, I'm doing average.
John:
Last year I did, let's see, four months out of the year I blogged some of them.
John:
This year I'll end up doing four again.
John:
You know, it's average.
John:
I promise at least one post a year on average across multiple years, and I'm holding up that end of the bargain.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right, so let's talk about this.
Casey:
What is Apple's Blue Ocean?
John:
This is something I had in mind for a while, and I kept thinking about writing this, and it was just too nebulous, so I tried to focus it.
John:
The Blue Ocean thing is something we've talked about on the show before.
John:
It's not a very long article, so you can read it, but I summarized it in the article.
John:
Blue Ocean is a thing that I first heard about related to the Nintendo Wii.
John:
So I'm getting it already secondhand.
John:
I believe it was like a business book or some business paper or something big thing in the business world that business people are now mad that everyone else is, you know, getting a more pop culture reading on it.
John:
But mine is the pop culture reading on it.
John:
And the reason it came up in the context of the Wii is the Wii was Nintendo's console with had the big remote control thing that you wave around to play games.
John:
But the whole thing about the Wii is that was the generation of console when all of the other console competitors were growing high definition.
John:
Instead of standard definition television, it was HDTV.
John:
And Nintendo did not.
John:
which seems like a terrible decision everyone else is going high def every other console generation before it had been all about you know nintendo's 64 64 is bigger than 32 we have more bits we've got blast processing we've got 3d like everything is about uh graphics power and technology that's how you sell game consoles and then nintendo says we're not even going to do high definition everybody else is doing it but we're not
John:
That was their example of the blue ocean strategy because the red ocean is over there where all the sharks are just eating the fish and blood is filling the water.
John:
We're trying to kill each other to get all these fish, right?
John:
That's saying we got to have better and better graphics, better and better technology, faster CPUs, faster GPUs, more memory, bigger hard drives, more, you know, more, more, more.
John:
That's the red ocean of game consoles that existed for pretty much the entire history of home game consoles, starting with the Atari.
John:
It was a red ocean based on competition over who can make the most powerful console that still is a reasonable price that people would buy, right?
John:
Blue ocean was...
John:
While all those sharks are over there filling the water with blood and eating everything in sight, we're going to go way over here where there's nobody.
John:
And believe me, there was nobody over in the let's make a game console that standard definition with a weird remote control, TV remote control that you wave around.
John:
That was a blue ocean.
John:
Now, the blue ocean purists who say that's not what blue ocean is.
John:
Blue ocean is actually about making new markets.
John:
And we did not make a new market.
John:
It was the game console market or whatever.
John:
But that's what I meant when I say the pop culture definition of blue ocean is like...
John:
Let's go compete along an axis that our competitors aren't interested in.
John:
Microsoft and Sony were not interested in making a standard definition game console that costs a lot less money that was the size of three DVD cases on top of each other that had a motion control.
John:
There was nobody over there.
John:
It was a blue ocean, no blood in the water, Nintendo's all by itself.
John:
Now, obviously, doing something that none of your competitors want to do is really easy.
John:
Often they don't want to do it because it's a dumb idea.
John:
We turned out not to be a dumb idea.
John:
So that's the trick of the blue ocean strategies to go to a place where your competitors are not and also have it be a good idea.
John:
So in the context of Apple, what I've been thinking about is what is Apple's Blue Ocean?
John:
Because Apple has done a lot of Blue Ocean-y kind of moves.
John:
No, they haven't made entirely new markets, so arguably they've come close with things like the iPhone and, hey, maybe the Vision Pro, we'll see.
John:
But they've done a lot of things that their competitors were not interested in doing that ended up being successful.
John:
Like, you know, even something making a candy colored computer with no floppy drive.
John:
Their competitors were not interested in doing that.
John:
They had plenty of opportunity to do it.
John:
There's no technical innovation in the iMac that anyone else couldn't have done.
John:
You can make a PC with no legacy ports that's all in one that's teal and shiny and plastic.
John:
In fact, everybody did do that after the iMac came out.
John:
But that was an example of Apple going where, you know, other people aren't.
John:
And there's other things they've done like that.
John:
I think examples of the articles making a smartphone without a physical keyboard.
John:
Other people actually had done that.
John:
They just did a crappy job of it.
John:
You know, the iPod, something that was probably technically possible for any company to do.
John:
It's not like there was any special Apple sauce in there, especially since Apple at that point was not very good at making tiny little consumer electronics like that.
John:
But Apple did do it.
John:
The competitors were much larger and bulkier and competed along different axes.
John:
Anyway, the reason I've been thinking about this is one specific thing that I keep thinking that Apple could do that would be Blue Ocean-y that I think would work pretty well.
John:
And I think the window of time, this is not something I wrote in the article, but the window of time for them to do it is...
John:
finite so this article you know we'll look back on this article at 2030 when we have our 6g modems in our max and we'll say oh they didn't age well right there's for any of these things there's a time limit based on the technology and i'll explain that in a second so the thing i'm suggesting is that apple start selling products with removable batteries
John:
Which sounds ridiculous.
John:
Never happening.
John:
Arguably, one of Apple's blue ocean moves was getting rid of the replaceable batteries.
John:
Everybody had replaceable batteries in their cell phones, right?
John:
And in their laptop computers.
John:
And in both those cases, Apple said, you know what?
John:
We're not going to do that.
John:
We're going to sell you a laptop.
John:
The battery's sealed in.
John:
You can't even remove it.
John:
And there was nothing stopping anybody else from doing that.
John:
It's not a technological innovation where no one could figure out how to seal a battery inside a case.
John:
But Apple chose to do it and stuck to their guns.
John:
And that ended up being a good move.
John:
And a lot of PC laptops do that these days as well.
John:
Same thing with cell phones.
John:
You used to be able to take the batteries out of them.
John:
Now you can't.
John:
so why would they ever go back on that what would be the point because the advantage of the sealed in baddie where you talked about it when whatever the powerbook 17 came out 17 inch came out the first one to seal the batteries and i think um obvious advantages it makes your devices smaller more reliable you can fit more battery inside them they're lighter like just you know up and down disadvantages have also always been obvious and pretty much everyone has decided yeah but the advantages that way the disadvantages um
John:
So don't worry about it.
John:
And the disadvantages are, you know, the battery dies.
John:
It's harder for you to replace.
John:
You have to bring it in to get service to get a new battery.
John:
You can't take extra batteries with you and just swap them in.
John:
So we have all these battery packs that we connect with USB or MagSafe.
John:
Right.
John:
We've come up with all these solutions.
John:
No one thinks about this.
John:
No one thinks it's a big problem.
John:
Right.
John:
But.
John:
There is a window of time with current battery technology where Apple could be out in a new part of the ocean where there are no competitors selling its products based on a feature that no one else has because it's too hard to do well.
John:
And as Johnny Saruji said, when it gets really hard, that's where Apple excels because it's so hard that only Apple can do it.
John:
I don't know if that's true, but if that's the spirit, they should give it a try.
John:
What would the advantages be of removable batteries?
John:
We know the ones I just described, but the big advantage is
John:
that is increasingly important to apple has to do with their environmental initiatives lots of electronic stuff gets thrown out because the battery is no longer good and it's too annoying or expensive or both to replace you can replace a battery in an iphone you can replace a battery in a laptop can't really do it in airpods that's a bummer
John:
but like people don't do it because like oh it doesn't seem worth it because you have to take it in to get serviced and how much is it going to cost and apple doesn't let third parties do it because then you get like a thing that complains it's not legitimate batteries you have to pay apple's prices and how much does it cost to replace a battery in an ipad it costs how much and people don't do it and they just end up recycling it right if you're lucky they recycle it if you're unlucky they gets thrown in a garbage somewhere or whatever
John:
you can make a device that lasts longer as in has a longer useful life if it's easy to swap out that battery and that is related to battery technology because the rechargeable batteries we have now they wear out in a not too long period of time we have all had devices that we say well this would still be good as like a kid ipad or a phone that i would give to my youngest child or something but the battery's dead and it costs me 80 plus an annoying trip to somewhere plus a trip to get it back to get it replaced
John:
So I'm not going to bother and I'll just find something else, right?
John:
At the high end, if we could sell you an iPhone that you say, like, my iPhone is fine.
John:
It's not slow.
John:
I got a top of the line one.
John:
But three years into using it all day, the battery is going.
John:
And now I have to wear a battery case or bring a battery pack with me.
John:
And it's just, you know, same thing with the Apple Watch.
John:
Well, that's a harder sell because it's a lot harder to get a removed battery.
John:
We'll talk about that in a second.
John:
if you can make a device last longer that's better for the environment and people are more satisfied with their product and this is a a business model like we're talking about the keycap things that fits well with premium brands uh you know nordstrom taking the exchange of your snow tires buying something from an expensive luggage company or buying these stupid expensive chairs that we're all sitting on that have like 12 year warranties like if anything breaks in those 12 years
John:
You paid so much money for this chair.
John:
Don't worry about it.
John:
We'll fix it for free for 12 years, which is unheard of.
John:
That's why the chairs cost so much money, right?
John:
But people are satisfied with that.
John:
You're selling a premium product.
John:
There should be a premium experience.
John:
I just heard the very Scottish CEO of Volvo on the Decoder podcast doing an interview essentially saying...
John:
What they're trying to sell rather than subscriptions to heated seats are services that make the ownership experience of a Volvo better.
John:
Like, hey, we'll come and it was like in Sweden or whatever.
John:
It's mandatory that you change the snow tires in the winter.
John:
So since everybody has to do it, don't worry.
John:
Nintendo knows that you have Nintendo.
John:
I'm reading.
Yeah.
John:
Wow.
John:
Volvo knows that you have to switch the snow tires.
John:
They will, for a price.
John:
Come to your house, swap your snow tires, take your summer tires, store them for you, and bring them back later.
John:
That's awesome.
John:
And then you don't have to worry about making an appointment to get them swapped, and can you get it in, or figuring out what... Like, Volvo will do it for you, right?
Casey:
You know, for what it's worth, in the States...
Casey:
it started during COVID.
Casey:
And as far as I know, it's still a thing.
Casey:
They do something called, they were calling Volvo valet and they would come to your house, pick up your car, bring it to the service center, service it, bring the car back and have you sign something and, you know, do whatever payment you need to do.
Casey:
And then they take off and that's that.
Casey:
So you have not really interacted or you've never left your house.
Casey:
You've interacted with somebody once or twice, I guess, for like five minutes each and that's it.
Casey:
And
Casey:
We haven't done it in a long time because the car only goes in once a year.
Casey:
And even then, we've brought it in the last couple times.
Casey:
But we did do this once or maybe twice.
Casey:
And it was amazing.
Casey:
And it was, to the best of my knowledge at the time anyway, completely free.
Casey:
Now, granted, the servicing of European cars is a fortune.
Casey:
But there was no obvious added cost and no line item for the Volvo Valet service.
John:
Well, that's the thing.
John:
If you can provide additional value, you can charge more money.
John:
Right.
John:
If you like and I mentioned this in the article, it's like all these these these benefits of replaceable batteries, environmental benefits, the satisfaction with your product, getting a longer life out of it.
John:
All those things go against one of the one of the goals of Apple, which is their financial, you know, their financial goals, which is like.
John:
if you don't buy a new iphone we don't make money so doesn't apple want you to keep buying iphones that's the balance that all these premium brands have to make if apple makes a product that that lasts longer that is better for the environment they can charge more money for it if people are more satisfied with the product that's that whole chasing the the you know up the price ladder which apple loves to do those services the volvo provides whether they're free or not evolve also wants to provide like insurance and everything like
John:
Don't worry, Volvo's getting their money somehow.
John:
These services, like you said, the service itself at the dealership is expensive.
John:
The cars themselves have higher margins, right?
John:
There's a way to get that money as long as you're delivering the value.
John:
Now, the reason I can't bring up replaceable batteries as a possibility is because...
John:
Like, it's hard to do.
John:
It's hard to do that well.
John:
There are lots of obvious problems with replaceable fires.
John:
What about waterproofing?
John:
What about starting fires?
John:
What about when the battery starts to swell?
John:
What about taking the battery out and the thing turns off?
John:
Like, you know, and you have to have a battery inside it to keep it going while the battery is removed from it.
John:
What about how ugly it is?
John:
Everything gets bigger.
John:
Everything gets heavier.
John:
Lint gets caught inside there.
John:
You have like tons of problems.
John:
And that's why this is why this is a possibility for Apple to do.
John:
If they can figure out how to do replaceable batteries well and deliver the benefits with fewer of the drawbacks, they will be the only one out there doing that.
John:
And it will be harder for people to follow them.
John:
A lot of the innovations that Apple has done have been quickly followed by their competitors.
John:
Unlike Nintendo, who has had more durable benefits, like no one was chasing them to do standard def consoles.
John:
People didn't really chase them into motion controls, right?
John:
and it's really hard to chase them well let's just make a game as good as legend of zelda that's hard to copy right i think a good replaceable battery would also be difficult to copy um so like this is this is my suggestion to apple it's like i'm not it's not a prediction as i said in the article it's not a prediction it's a suggestion and there's a time limit on it because if and when battery technology improves and
John:
and batteries wearing out after three years is no longer a thing, you missed the window for this, right?
John:
This is only relevant now because so many products that we have end their life prematurely because of the battery going bad.
John:
And...
John:
Again, with the 2030 thing and the carbon impact of all their products or whatever, having products with a longer, useful life is valuable.
John:
It's valuable to Apple and it's valuable to customers.
John:
And I feel like there has to be a way for them to handshake on that value and come up with something that is beneficial to both.
John:
And then Apple can brag about it like crazy.
John:
Our computers last three years longer than average because we have these replaceable.
John:
And they can pick a product.
John:
just do it on the phone just do it on the ipad just do it on the watch just do it on the mac it's like you need to do it across all of them but figure it out find out a way to do it make it a big selling point how they kind of sort of already have replaceable batteries for the headset so maybe they're going in that direction because there is no battery in the thing the one battery you have is easily replaceable so you could just swap it for another one uh of course the whole thing turns off when you unplug it so they'll have to work on that but uh
John:
Yeah, that's my thoughts about this.
John:
And I know it flies in the face of what everyone thinks, because especially in the Apple world, like when Apple does something, they get rid of the floppy drive, they get rid of the optical drive.
John:
Like, you know, they make these moves and eventually Apple fans say, well, that's just the way it has to be.
John:
We complained about it in the beginning, but it was obviously the right thing to do.
John:
And we're never going backwards.
John:
Why would we ever go back to that?
John:
We're not going to re-add optical drives.
John:
We're not going to put floppy drives back on.
John:
But replaceable batteries, I think, are different.
John:
especially because the environment of the environmental animal because the benefits of them never went away and batteries still have the problem where they wear out and so many of our things are battery powered and we use them so so much that so many of us experience essentially battery death as the end of the life of our products i can think of pretty much every one of my iphones
John:
Like, my only dissatisfaction with it when I got a new one and I'm on a two-year cycle was that the old phone's battery is kind of wonky.
John:
And, yeah, I should have just got the battery replaced instead of getting a new phone.
John:
But I've got a tech podcast, so I've got to get a new phone every two years.
John:
I'm so sorry.
Casey:
Yeah, I know.
Casey:
It's a hard life.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But, yeah, that's –
John:
I feel like this is a common experience of batteries going bad.
John:
That's why I feel like this is not just like some weird tech nerd thing.
John:
Replaceable batteries, who cares?
John:
Everybody has experienced the pain of batteries going bad in a device that's otherwise good.
John:
And I think most people alive today remember what replaceable batteries and things were like just because so many things still have replaceable batteries.
John:
Our phones don't, but other things in our lives do have replaceable batteries.
John:
Replaceable batteries are good.
John:
Apple can make a really good version of replaceable batteries.
John:
Give it a stupid branded name that we would make fun of, but make it really, really cool.
John:
And I'm here for it.
Marco:
Obviously, one of the big naysayer arguments against something like this, assuming even if Apple could do a really good job designing a battery door, a battery module, whatever it would be that would make this easier and better and effectively give replaceable batteries, even if they could do a good job of that, I think the cynical take here that's most obvious is
Marco:
they make a lot of money from sales of new devices that maybe wouldn't have been sales of new devices.
Marco:
Yeah, no, I covered that.
John:
Yeah, but- Of course.
John:
Of course that's against our financial interest, but it's the same thing with everybody who sells anything that lasts longer, like our stupid chairs that we're sitting on.
John:
You figure out how to make the math work.
John:
How much do I have to charge for this stupid chair to provide a 12-year warranty, right, to make the math work out?
John:
And the only way you can charge more is to deliver additional value.
John:
So you have to put something in the product that people are willing to pay more for, and then you charge more for it, and it all works out.
John:
Like the expensive luggage that if anything breaks on it, they'll replace the zipper for 50 years or whatever.
John:
Like, it's not easy, but it's a thing that lots of products do, including current Apple products, I would argue.
Marco:
I mean, one argument against having any kind of replaceable battery thing, one of the biggest arguments that was given throughout the history of this transition of going to permanent batteries is basically we're able to make the product better this way in the sense that it's better in ways people will care about and therefore buy more.
Marco:
So, for instance, one kind of argument would basically go something like, well, if we made this laptop have a replaceable battery –
John:
then it would be a little bit bigger and a little bit thicker and therefore nobody would want that and i think that is probably true at some point to some degree well it would be bigger and thicker but the nobody would want it is difficult because they i mean they did just make the laptops bigger and thicker and nobody cared like because that's that's the amount we're talking about a few millimeters like that your laptop that you have now is thicker than they were back when johnny ive had designed the case nobody cares
Marco:
It's important for Apple to not assume that whatever lesson they think they might have learned 10 years ago would still apply today or in the future.
Marco:
Because what happens is over time, people's priorities change, device and tech and consumer product fashion changes.
Marco:
And so as we go forward in time, I think more and more people are getting environmentally conscious.
Marco:
More and more people are kind of having a backlash against the most extreme consumerism and rampant waste.
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, and especially people who don't have tech podcasts, who aren't tech enthusiasts, they don't want to buy a new phone every three years because the battery went bad.
John:
They're happy with their phone as it is.
John:
They don't want the hassle of replacing it.
John:
They don't want to pay for it to replace, and they don't want to buy a new phone.
John:
They just want their battery to be like it used to, right?
John:
They're not interested in getting a new phone constantly, right?
John:
And that's from the tech enthusiasts like, well, I'm going to buy a new device anyway.
John:
What do I care?
John:
But regular people aren't like that.
John:
If you're not into tech, you just want a phone that works.
John:
And if it continues to work...
John:
like it's less disruption of your life to just keep using your phone but again like the hard part is like how do you get apple to be willing to to take a risk like that when it would most likely result in fewer unit sales down the road yeah now that's they have to they have to figure out like because obviously the value delivered by removable batteries is not equal across their product line they have to figure out where is it the most valuable right it's probably not the most valuable in the watch maybe
John:
because it's so tiny who'd want to even mess with that little tiny battery or whatever although i'll tell you what though the watch is where where you need it pretty well that's i know that's you know that's the problem with current battery technology it's where you need it the most but also nobody wants to be fiddling with like can you imagine trying to make a replaceable battery in the watch that is probably the hardest problem and you'd lose them like the kids would swallow them right and you know see also airpods too like i i would say the watch and airpods are probably where this is needed the most
Marco:
Because they have the smallest batteries that I think I think last the shortest time before it becomes hard to use the product.
John:
When we talked about when the AirPods first came out, the idea of like having the stems be screw on and unscrewable and have that essentially be the battery part of it.
John:
But that's not how they've I think of the new AirPods, the battery isn't even in the stem anymore.
John:
So it doesn't even matter.
Marco:
And there are definitely some legal or regulatory challenges here too.
Marco:
So for the batteries, if they are removable, if they are consumer replaceable, what you just said, a kid might swallow it.
Marco:
They have to think about that.
Marco:
There are certain regulations.
John:
AirTags are a good example because they use standard button batteries, but they're not like the watch because the AirTag batteries last a long time unlike the watch.
John:
Yes.
John:
i mean that's the reason they did replace little batteries on the air tags is like it's untenable to make a product that price was sealed in batteries and it's way it would be wasteful right uh so you know most of the mass of that product is the battery and it's a standard battery they didn't even make their own they didn't even come with the great solution i don't even particularly like how they do the battery on the air tags we have to twist that thing and never feels quite right to me uh but they did it so i mean that's that's one end of the spectrum i'm thinking uh something you know for the more expensive products but i i don't know where to deliver the most value obviously
John:
people have their individual needs like i wish i had this on my phone or i wish it had on my laptop ipad would be really weird i talked about this in the article like if you make the battery on the ipad replaceable the structural integrity of the product disappears like where you take a battery out of an ipad it's like okay so now it's just like a two millimeter thick screen or something um
John:
there are hard problems here for sure but i you know that's that's why i'm asking alex uh apple not my son i'm asking apple to rise to rise to the challenge you know and i would be excited by how they would brand it like if they came up with the good solution and gave it some you know dorky name and some weird kind of like mag safe you know not that you know connecting things with magnets was an amazing innovation but they branded it works really well people loved it so much that when they took it away we complained until they brought it back uh and as you said like the
John:
There is an ebb and flow to technology market.
John:
And that's that's the that's the beauty of the strategy.
John:
Everyone else is like, well, sealed in batteries are at whenever we're going back to the other way.
John:
And Apple could be like, you know what?
John:
Let's not close the door on that.
John:
Let's look, you know, until and unless we get solid state batteries last for years and don't die after three years.
John:
This is the time for us to potentially find a little section of blue ocean where nobody else is even trying this and see if it's a good idea.
John:
And, you know, if it's not a good idea, like try it on a low profile product and retreat.
John:
They did it with a touch bar, right?
Casey:
I hear what you're saying, and my first knee-jerk reaction is, no freaking way, because I can't fathom a way to do this that isn't trash.
Casey:
And yes, I know that that's like the whole point, right?
Casey:
You know, is that Apple waves its magic wand over this problem, and suddenly it's all.
John:
How do you feel about the AirTags, though, speaking of a way to do it that's not trash?
John:
Because I think it's kind of trash, I think.
Casey:
Oh, I actually think the AirTag approach is fine.
Casey:
Like, it's not terribly Apple-y.
John:
It's a very... But does it feel... How many of those batteries have you replaced?
John:
Does it feel good to replace them?
John:
I can never tell if it's like... They last about a year, I would say.
John:
Yeah, but I can never tell if I've got the new battery in securely because you have to press in and like twist and...
Marco:
I will say, I recently had to restore an AirTag to its unpaired status so I could pair it to a different account.
Marco:
Have you ever had to do that?
Marco:
You know what the process is?
Marco:
Is there a pinhole somewhere?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
You basically just pop the battery cover on and off five times in a row.
Marco:
You basically boot it up five times in a row and then it plays a different sound effect and then it shows up on the phone.
John:
I don't know if I could accomplish that.
John:
It's so hard to twist that little thing.
John:
It's so slippery.
John:
It's like smooth metal or whatever.
Casey:
To answer your question, I don't think it's a premium feel, but it doesn't actively bother me or anything like that.
Casey:
It's fine.
John:
I feel like that's the bottom of the barrel.
John:
What I'm envisioning is the premium experience, not magnets, but imagine the battery equivalent.
John:
of mag safe i mean the best comparison is probably power tools you know they all have some standardized crappy battery that they have for like your you know dewalt power tool your makita power they all sell their own bespoke you can only buy this type of battery because it fits into these that's like the fisher price kind of like big tough toy thing imagine that but an apple techie version
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, again, I think I'm struggling getting past the vision of how does this, what does this look like?
Casey:
And something where there is no extra space anywhere.
Casey:
But let's assume it's possible to make it work, even though I'm very skeptical about that.
Casey:
The thing that the Trump card that you have, I really got to stop saying that.
Casey:
But anyway, the ace in the hole that you have.
Marco:
God, he ruined so many things.
Marco:
Like red hats.
Marco:
Really?
Marco:
I'm still sorry about the hats.
Casey:
I am still sore about the hats.
Casey:
Still sore.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I think the ace in the hole that you have, though, is that Apple really cares about the Earth's blue oceans.
Casey:
See what I did there?
Casey:
And I really think that the environmental impact is the way in which this starts to make a lot more sense.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
everything else i can think of i'm not sure i'm with you on this john but the environmental side i get it and yes i actually that's not fair i do agree with you that if they could make it work you know if we could wave our magic wand and make it work and make it work nicely that is a competitive advantage and that is something that would bring people to the to their products and their platforms but i just find that hard to believe and they could sell apple branded batteries and prevent third parties from selling
John:
Yeah, of course.
John:
Got a lot of Apple synergies in there.
Marco:
But I think you're right, though, Casey.
Marco:
The climate angle is, if you look at Apple as a company, what's important to them?
Marco:
And number one seems to be...
Marco:
Well, between money and making good products, you know, they're really good at making money and they are, you know, when they have to choose between being stingy to make more money or giving away a little too much, they're stingy to make more money every time.
Marco:
They always choose very consistently on that point.
Marco:
And so it's hard for us to look at something like this and say, how could they possibly ever make a choice that would result in possible lower sales?
Marco:
But I think the environmental initiative is one of those areas that actually is powerful enough that it might actually push them to sway in that direction sometimes.
Marco:
And they're not going to sway in that direction all the time.
Marco:
Of course, they're a big company.
Marco:
They're really good at making a lot of money.
Marco:
That is one area that they also care very much about, up to the highest levels of the company.
Marco:
And therefore, if you're going to get through Tim Cook's spreadsheets to make him make less profit, what can do that?
Marco:
Health and environmental stuff.
Marco:
Those can do that.
John:
Well, I bet environmental stuff, though, I don't think you have to go through his spreadsheets because I think they believe and I think they're right.
John:
That environmental stuff...
John:
is good for the the spreadsheets in the long run and i i would make the same argument about this it's like look this is not we're not doing this as a charity project even though in the short term you're gonna see like you're gonna take some losses and there's gonna be r&d and so on and so forth the whole idea is that you're gonna be out there in the blue ocean in the same way that the wii was the best-selling console in that generation it was standard definition it had a remote control on it the idea is you're gonna make more money
John:
Like that's the whole point of the blue ocean.
John:
There are no competitors.
John:
You're the only one out there.
John:
No one else thought this was even an idea worth entertaining.
John:
So of course, when you come out with a thing, everyone's laughing at you.
John:
It's like, what a dumb idea.
John:
And then it sells a whole jillion of them, right?
John:
Again, you got to pick the right one.
John:
It's easy to do something none of your competitors are doing and flop on your face.
John:
But what I'm saying is I think this is potentially one of the right ones.
John:
So if you're going to sell it to Sam Cooke, you don't have to say, well, because you care about the environment so much, you should do this, but it'll make you less money.
John:
No, it will also make you more money.
John:
I think that's part of the reason they do this environmental stuff.
John:
In the end, Apple converting itself to use all renewable energy and all of its data centers and all of its headquarters and all of its factories, that's good for Apple financially.
John:
In the long run, because everyone's going to eventually do that.
John:
And if you're ahead and you've done it first, you reap the benefits before everybody else.
John:
Setting aside all the PR angles, they're going to be a more modern company that pays less money to run itself.
John:
That stupid donut that they made with it being like, how much does it cost to heat and cool that the way they did it, which cost them bazillions of dollars up front?
John:
Over the years, that's going to make its money back because the old dumb buildings that are heated and cooled the dumb way cost so much more money per square foot or per person.
John:
Right.
John:
That's the pitch.
John:
You don't go to Tim Cook and say, lose a little money to be good for the environment.
John:
You say, be good for the environment and also make more money.
John:
And I think that's how most of these things work.
John:
Not that all they care about is money, but it's like it's win-win if you do it the right way.
John:
And the real kicker for the environmental stuff is all the things they can do with the environmental stuff.
John:
recycling, using renewable energy, carbon offsets, all that.
John:
In the end, as many people point out, and as Apple itself knows, the only real way to make a dent in this stuff is to do things like use less packaging.
John:
like oh we're using recycled cardboard no just use less whatever you're using use less of it make the box smaller take boats and not planes right and so how do you make a dent in the big picture keep products for longer like don't throw them away don't recycle them don't don't don't initiate that churn in the whole machinery of like now we have to re-harvest the cobalt from those batteries and send it through a factory and reset like
John:
slow that down make the products last longer in the customer's hands that makes apple less money then you got to figure out a way to charge more like that's that's the pitch the pitch is like you're never going to make a dent in the environment by just like using a better plastic for your cables right but having everyone keep their iphones for one extra year would make such a
John:
huge impact on the environment that it would just like if they have some environmental goals that they want to get to that's the only way you really move the needle like making the boxes smaller and selling fewer of them for more money should do the jerry mcguire code uh casey do you know this one jerry mcguire please i can't ask marco he doesn't know i i've seen it once a long time ago but show me the money john no that's the part everyone remembers but the part i remember from it is remember he writes a a memo to the company and sends it to the whole company it's not a memo he says it's a mission statement do you remember that
Casey:
I don't know.
John:
Anyway, his pitch, he's a sports agent, Marco.
John:
You've heard of this comment.
John:
Tom Cruise is playing the lead.
John:
He's a sports agent, and this company is like they sign all the big name athletes and take a percentage of their money or whatever.
John:
It's sports agents, right?
John:
His memo, here's the pitch in his memo.
John:
Fewer clients, less money.
John:
I may be misquoting it, but as you can imagine, that pitch does not go over well in HQ.
John:
What I'm saying to Tim Cook is fewer products, but more money.
Marco:
Oh, my word.
Marco:
Thank you to our sponsors this week, Trade Coffee, Green Chef, and Collide.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
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 So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental
Casey:
Tech Podcast, so long.
Casey:
which we cannot talk about.
Marco:
Wait, I think I can say I'm very happy that Apple brought these to New York so I didn't have to fly to California.
Marco:
I was dreading, like, when they announced the labs in, I believe, early fall, they announced, you know, the locations, or late summer.
Marco:
No, I think it was still in the summer.
Marco:
It was early.
Marco:
They had labs in, like, a few places around the world, but the closest places to the East Coast were either California or, I think, London was, like, not that much further.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And that was it like there was nothing anywhere on the East Coast.
Marco:
So then they later in the fall added New York City labs.
Marco:
And I'm very, very thankful for that because I would all fall like, you know, I had this all this stuff going on in my life with the move and everything.
Marco:
And I'm like.
Marco:
The last thing I need is to have to fly to California this winter, like it's for some few day span here and there to get, you know, an unknown amount of unknown experience with this unknown device.
Marco:
Like, you know, it was that was a big I was dreading having to do that.
Marco:
And I was I was afraid, you know, of that eventuality.
Marco:
And by moving by having options in New York, that made everything dramatically easier for those of us on the East Coast.
Marco:
So thank you, Apple, for that.
Casey:
Yep, indeed.
Casey:
And so we both registered for labs on the same day.
Casey:
This was, I think, Thursday the 30th or something like that, somewhere around then.
Casey:
And sure enough, we both got selected, so we got to go to the lab.
Casey:
I got there by doing the most un-American thing that I have done in a long time.
Casey:
I took a train.
Casey:
And did you know?
Marco:
Did you like watch soccer on the way?
Casey:
No, I should have.
Casey:
Excuse me, sir.
Casey:
It's football.
Casey:
Thank you very much.
Casey:
But no, I did not watch any soccer on the way.
Casey:
But did you know that trains are actually freaking great?
Casey:
Who knew?
Casey:
Why didn't the Europeans say something about this?
Casey:
We should have been told.
Casey:
We should have been told.
Marco:
Well, their trains are great.
Marco:
I don't know how great ours are.
Casey:
Well, it's funny you say that because I dedicated an entire day to traveling up and then an entire day to traveling back.
Casey:
And I got on the train here in Richmond and I got off the train in Penn Station and then reversed the trip two days later.
Casey:
And I got to tell you, it was pretty freaking great.
Casey:
When I travel via plane, I am a ball of stress...
Casey:
charitably from the moment I leave the house, but realistically from the moment I open my eyes in the morning.
Casey:
I am just a walking stress ball.
Casey:
And when I took the train, I left the house.
Casey:
I got a ride from a friend because Aaron was dropping the kids off at the school at the time.
Casey:
And I walked into the train station, waited a few minutes, and I walked on the train.
Casey:
And then I walked around the train when I wanted to walk around the train.
Casey:
I went to the cafe car when I wanted to go to the cafe car.
Casey:
And then eventually I got to New York.
Casey:
Now, admittedly, I did get there like 90 minutes late.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I got to New York and it was pretty freaking great.
Casey:
I know that, you know, a lot of the reason that we can't have good trains here is because we are not, say, compared to, you know, Great Britain.
Casey:
We are not a wee island nation.
Casey:
But nevertheless, in the areas where there are trains, they're pretty great.
Casey:
And that's pretty awesome.
Casey:
So, Marco and I, we arrive in Manhattan.
Casey:
And Marco, what is the one obvious thing that you and I should do if we're in Manhattan around dinnertime?
Marco:
Well, I mean, I think it's only fair that I have to figure out, I have to try this amazing, life-changing, wonderful pizza that you are constantly raving about is the best pizza in New York and changed your life.
Marco:
you already tried it we already tried it yeah but did you know i mean it's a little bit frozen but you know yeah so non-members might not know that we for we we did actually try casey's pizza frozen on a member special uh shipped to us via gold belly uh and you can listen to the member special at join uh to hear how that went um but but i will spoil it slightly and say i don't think it went super well for casey's pizza
Casey:
Yeah, I think that's fair to say.
Casey:
And honestly, even myself and my family who had had, like Aaron's had Johnson Bleeker many times.
Casey:
And the kids have had, once they had had mail order pizza that a friend had gifted me, which was very kind.
Casey:
But even we said, you know what, the ones that were sent for the member special were okay.
Casey:
Like they were still good in our opinion, but they were not stellar.
Casey:
And so, uh, what did we do?
Casey:
We went the two of us to John's a bleaker and I, I genuinely don't know, although I have a theory.
Casey:
Uh, I don't know if Marco just put on the happy face when he was there or if he legitimately legitimately thought it was good, but I think it's the latter.
Casey:
I think you, and I'm going to give you a chance in a second.
Casey:
I feel like you legitimately thought it was good.
Casey:
But one way or another, we had Johnson Bleeker.
Casey:
There was a brief question as to whether we should get the larger of the available sizes or the smaller.
Marco:
There was no question.
Casey:
Well, there really wasn't.
Casey:
I thought there was a question, and you immediately said, get the larger one.
Marco:
You had a question.
Marco:
I had an answer.
Casey:
Exactly right.
Marco:
You always get the biggest pizza.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Exactly right.
Marco:
No one ever says, I wish you ordered less pizza.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Always get the biggest pizza.
Casey:
So that's what we did.
Casey:
And it was a critical decision on Marco's part because between the two of us, we ate the entire pizza.
Casey:
And for me, and I promise I'm gonna give you a chance here.
Casey:
For me, it was just...
Casey:
Perfect.
Casey:
I mean, it is the same restaurant it's always been.
Casey:
I mean, I think they, strictly speaking, changed the entrance a little bit or added an entrance, if you will, because we went in not the normal entrance that I'm used to from literally a decade ago.
Casey:
But in spirit, it is effectively the same restaurant.
Casey:
The pizza was the same.
Casey:
I remembered it.
Casey:
It was so...
Casey:
So, so good.
Casey:
And I am so glad that whatever you thought on the spectrum, I'm so glad that at least you got to experience it the real way, the proper way.
Casey:
So to Marco's credit at the time, of course, I interrogated him about it.
Casey:
And he very much put on the happy face to the point that it seemed legitimate to me that you genuinely enjoyed it.
Casey:
Now that I am no longer within arm's reach, so I can't punch you in the face if you say you don't like it, what did you actually think?
Marco:
I liked it, but... Oh, come on!
Marco:
I think the environment, like the actual restaurant, you know, it's this classic old East Village restaurant.
Marco:
It has, like, there's stuff all over the walls.
Marco:
It's like, you know, there's pictures of all the celebrities who have been there.
Marco:
Everyone's, like, carved their initials into the wooden benches and everything.
Marco:
So there's, like, there's a lot of personality in the actual restaurant.
John:
Call that ambiance.
Marco:
Yeah, and when you see something like this, that's always fun.
Marco:
No matter where you find that kind of personality in any kind of restaurant, that's always fun when you find that, when it's genuine, when it isn't just like some Chili's has created this across America artificially.
Marco:
It's not that.
Marco:
It's the real thing.
Marco:
You could tell this place had real history.
Marco:
I like that it's a Manhattan small restaurant, crammed full of tables.
Marco:
I like that it was crammed so full of tables that our neighboring table to us was actually just a foot away.
Marco:
So we could totally hear everything they were saying.
Marco:
They could totally hear everything we were saying.
Marco:
We actually talked to them for part of the meal.
Marco:
I like that kind of thing where you're kind of forced to be communal with the people around you because it's just that crammed in.
Marco:
See, also the Hofbrauhaus that we went to in Munich.
Marco:
I really enjoyed it for that reason, too.
Casey:
Yes, that's true, actually.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
But anyway, so I really enjoyed the place and the atmosphere, the experience of it.
Marco:
It is an experience.
Marco:
The pizza was good, but first of all, it is different from what most New York-style pizza tends to be these days.
Marco:
Mainly, it does not have the same crust style.
John:
yeah we noticed that when it was frozen the crust was not like the usually expected to be flat flat pizza and then like a rounded crust that's traditional new york style yeah yeah yeah and we could tell that it was flatter than that it's more of a what they call like coal-fired type of pizza where it's got the leopard spotting on the bottom yeah it's it's like a it's like a like a wood oven like you know that like the yeah it's that that kind of pizza it's almost like a large personal pizza you know
Marco:
Um, and even their biggest pie was by most pizza places in New York, I would call it a medium or, you know, that's probably fair.
John:
And by the way, uh, what do you call it?
John:
Frank Pepe's is also like this.
John:
If you ever had their pizza, it is also not New York style.
John:
Obviously it's not New York style.
John:
It's not New York pizza, but like it, it has the same crust profile.
John:
I realized that because we get, we have a local instance of, and I get pizza from there occasionally.
John:
I'm like, you know what?
John:
This, this reminds me of the, not the taste.
John:
It doesn't taste like John's obliger, but the shape of the crust is like it.
Marco:
yeah but anyway it was better than the frozen version by by a decent margin like i would hope so yeah um but you know it was it was not perfect they did burn part of the crust i noticed that some some people like that yeah it's a choice you know um but i i just i enjoyed the atmosphere this is a place that you go for the atmosphere and the history first and the food second but that doesn't that isn't meant to be an insult the food was good but not super memorable
Marco:
But the atmosphere and everything around the experience was very memorable.
Marco:
So that was really great.
Marco:
I really appreciated that.
Marco:
It was very fun.
Marco:
I would totally go back.
Marco:
We are our current time-wasting TV show is Friends.
Marco:
And in some of the B-roll in Friends, it showed the East Village and it showed the old John's Oblicker sign.
Marco:
I'm like, oh, I know where that is now.
Marco:
Oh, that's awesome.
Marco:
But anyway, so it was a great experience.
Marco:
I would absolutely go back there.
Marco:
But the pizza itself, it was good.
Marco:
But if you're in New York, you can get good pizza every 15 feet.
Marco:
And so it wasn't better than everyone else's pizza.
Marco:
It was just good New York pizza in a really great experience.
Casey:
I appreciate that.
Casey:
And I think that that's a fair characterization.
John:
It was good pizza in New York, but it wasn't, as you pointed out, it wasn't like stereotypical New York pizza.
John:
That's true.
John:
I feel like that's a change in my lifetime is that there is more non-New York pizza in New York City.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like different kinds of pizza, more sort of like, again, the sort of, you know, coal fired, artisanal leopard spotted bottom.
John:
That's not traditional New York pizza.
John:
And there's way more of that now than there used to be.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
Yeah, I'll give you that too.
Marco:
If what you're picturing is New York pizza, this is not the style of pizza you're picturing.
Marco:
It's close, but it's not the same thing.
Marco:
And what you're picturing by New York pizza, usually with those words, is what slice places serve.
Marco:
The big puffy crust, the pretty large slice with the very even cheese.
Marco:
That's what you're picturing.
Marco:
That's not what they serve there.
Marco:
But what they serve there is good.
Marco:
But like for me, I'm I would go there for the experience first.
Marco:
Not you know, not not that I have to have that particular pizza.
Casey:
I think that's fair, but I'm glad I'm genuinely glad that that you got to go.
Casey:
I'm glad that you don't associate John's oblique or with the admittedly subpar frozen meal experience that costs so much money.
Casey:
So I'm glad that that, you know, your opinion has changed for the better.
Casey:
But yeah, so after that, you know, we went back and had a drink at the hotel bar, which was weird, but fun.
Casey:
And then, you know, we went to the lab, which we cannot speak of.
Casey:
And then Marco had had the idea a few days or I guess a week or two before.
Casey:
Hey, we're going to be so close.
Casey:
Why don't we stay at the beach house after the lab?
Casey:
And so that's what we did.
Casey:
And we took the subway up to Grand Central, which, by the way, I had yet to experience express transit.
Casey:
And that was super cool.
Casey:
The last time I'd been in Manhattan, I needed to go and buy myself a MetroCard.
Casey:
Then you had to do the arithmetic to figure out whether or not you wanted like an unlimited card or a single fare or what have you.
Casey:
And I just swiped my phone and it was great.
Marco:
Yeah, it was awesome because now all of the entire New York subway system now has just regular phone Apple Pay kind of support and that express transit thing where you don't even have to activate it first.
Marco:
It was so nice to have that because it took them a while to build it out to all the stations.
Marco:
And that was a very nice change.
Casey:
Yeah, it was really great.
Casey:
So then we went to Grand Central, then we got on Long Island Railroad, and then we arrived at the car, which I know this isn't unique to an electric car, but it is pretty delightful.
Casey:
And Aaron's car can do this.
Casey:
John's cars can't, my car can't, because you can't do this with a stick.
Casey:
But it is pretty delightful getting into a car that is already heated on a cold day.
Casey:
Like, I cannot do that in my car, and John, you can't either, because they would roll away if you started them remotely because you leave them in gear.
Casey:
But it is pretty nice.
Casey:
And that was quite delightful.
Casey:
So where do you go if you find yourself on Long Island for, in my case, the first time in 20-ish years?
Casey:
Well, obviously, you go to Emilio's.
Casey:
That's what you do.
Marco:
Which should be, for listeners, that's John Syracuse's favorite pizza place.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
We went to Emilio's, which is John's beloved pizza place from his youth.
John:
One of two.
John:
One of two beloved pizza places.
Casey:
Okay, fair enough.
Casey:
And so we went to Emilio's.
Casey:
It looked to me as though this place had been freshened up sometime in the last 60 years, but it did not appear to me that it had been meaningfully changed in the last 60 years.
John:
It has been changed multiple times when I lived there and multiple times since I've gone.
John:
So yes, physically the place has changed a lot.
Casey:
Well, either way, we went in and we got some slices, which is the thing you cannot do at John's.
Casey:
And we got a corner piece, a Sicilian corner piece.
Casey:
We got, what else did we get?
Casey:
Shoot.
Casey:
We got some garlic knots, which I am very grumpy, by the way, Marco, I didn't tell you this.
Casey:
Very grumpy that I didn't either steal those and take them home or at least have one in the morning.
Casey:
And you had gotten them out for me, if I'm not mistaken.
Marco:
Yeah, I got them out for breakfast.
Casey:
And then I completely forgot about it.
Casey:
And I'm very grumpy that I didn't have any more of them.
Casey:
But that's my fault, not yours.
Casey:
So we got garlic knots.
Casey:
We got the Sicilian slice.
Casey:
I should just pull up the picture.
Casey:
We got a slice that Tina was very enthusiastic about us trying.
Casey:
The Crostini?
Casey:
Crostini?
Casey:
Yeah, something like that.
John:
Crispino.
John:
That's it.
John:
She's a big fan of the Crispino.
John:
You found out the dangers of the Crispino by buying it.
Marco:
Yeah, it's basically like fresh sliced tomato, fresh mozzarella dollop, and some sweet red peppers.
John:
On a crust that's supposed to be crispy, but you just put a lot of watery stuff on it.
John:
Yes, exactly.
Marco:
So it quickly fell apart.
Casey:
Yeah, and then a couple of slices of traditional triangular pizza.
Marco:
I don't even remember what specifically it was, but it was all... Like a margarita style, but with some basil in it, so yeah.
Casey:
I think I came to this the way Marco came to John's, which isn't a bad thing, but I don't have 20, 30 years of nostalgia powering me in this experience.
Casey:
It was unquestionably very, very good.
Casey:
The Crispino or whatever, it was a little soggy, like you had said, you know, but both of you gentlemen have said it was, you know, trying a little too hard to keep away all of that moisture and it just lost the fight.
John:
I mean,
John:
and especially if you're getting crispy if you're buying it by the slice that's been sitting there for a while so you what you really want it it needs to be fresh honestly it's very to get pulled off but that's fair yeah so but it was very very good i mean i'll take john's any day of the week and twice on sunday but you're also fighting and i and i would have said speaking of the garlic knots if you can get one of those sicilian slices don't even eat it just bring it home wrap it in foil and then reheat it in your toaster oven the next day so good so good
John:
I don't have to.
John:
I can just go there every day if I want to.
John:
It's great.
John:
It's like lasagna in that way.
John:
I feel like it is better reheated at home.
Casey:
Oh, there's not a lot like that, and I'd buy it.
Casey:
I would definitely buy that this is one of those things.
Casey:
It was very, very good.
Casey:
I would take John's, but you're fighting 20 years of nostalgia.
Casey:
There's no way – or 30 years of nostalgia.
Casey:
There's no way you're going to beat that.
Casey:
But it was unquestionably extremely good.
Casey:
It was very fast.
Casey:
People there were very nice.
Casey:
I would absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, go back.
Casey:
If I find myself going to Fire Island again anytime soon, I will probably ask Marco to facilitate either a takeout order or have us eat in at Emilio's because it was really good.
John:
they do have a restaurant there as well like so the restaurant i so the restaurant had a couple of interesting dishes that i remember vaguely fondly from my youth but the restaurant is weird like that's it so the the other thing so there's amelio's and there's branchinelli's and this is weird family history between them but the bottom line is the pizza at least the sicilian pizza is the same in both of them which is super weird but not that far from each other and again there's there's a family relation or there's some kind of falling out about ownership anyway
John:
the restaurants branchinelli's has a sit-down restaurant and emilio's has a restaurant restaurant and those restaurants are nothing like each other and the branchinelli's restaurant i could mostly endorse for straight up the middle very you know bog standard old style italian restaurant and emilio's has always wanted to be a little fancier as you can probably tell from the decor they just felt like they've been a little bit fancier they put some sun-dried tomatoes in your pasta in 1994 oh a big deal sun-dried tomato who heard of you know
John:
That's what Emilio's is.
John:
There's still some good stuff in that menu, I think, but it's definitely different.
John:
So if you're going to sit down, if you want to go to a sit down Italian place, go to Branchinelli's across from my old high school and try that.
John:
But the pizza is pretty much the same in both places.
John:
No Crispino at Branchinelli's though.
John:
It probably fell apart on the way there.
Casey:
But no, it was good.
Casey:
It was definitely good.
Casey:
I'm definitely glad we did it.
Casey:
And it was a lot of fun.
John:
You're making me so hungry with all this pizza talk.
John:
You're killing me.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
You could have had some, as I said to Tina.
John:
Speaking of something you would probably keep, freeze that Sicilian and ship it to me, Gold Belly.
John:
Where are you?
Casey:
I said to Tina, who I enlisted numerous times to try to convince your sorry pain in my butt to come and visit us.
Casey:
It's not going to happen.
Casey:
You're the worst.
Casey:
But I said to her the following day, I think the day I got home, you know, John could have been having leftover Emilio's right now.
Casey:
He could have, but he chose not to.
Casey:
And that's on you, John.
Casey:
That's on you.
John:
I'll be down there this summer.
Casey:
so anyway so we go to bed that night uh we actually i don't think we have time to talk about it now but marco did something truly terrible and a good friend would not have done this but i asked him to play for me uh sonos era 100s and eventually sonos era 300s and we don't have time to belabor it right now but my god i regret having listened to both of those because holy crap they sound so good and you are a terrible human for having indulged me in that so thank you but no thank you sir you're
Marco:
You're welcome.
Casey:
But nevertheless, they're really phenomenal speakers.
Casey:
I'm really stunned by them.
Casey:
And I know Sonos pretty well at this point.
Casey:
I'm still stunned.
Casey:
But the next day we wake up and I was treated to a very beautiful sunrise, which was lovely.
Casey:
And Marco and I chatted and we had breakfast.
Casey:
I made myself some scrambled eggs.
Casey:
And then Marco insisted that I put some Boom Boom sauce on it.
Casey:
And I got to tell you, it's
Casey:
It's pretty tasty on the scrambled eggs.
John:
Wait a second.
John:
You skipped over.
John:
When you went to his house, he drove you across the sand, right?
John:
Wasn't that fun?
Casey:
It was, but it was dark.
John:
That's even more fun to see the deer jumping out in front of you.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
But yeah, I mean, it was enjoyable and it was not as terrible as I expected.
Casey:
Actually, I should say, when you had talked, Marco, about driving on the sand, I think I said this to you that night, what I envisioned was the sand of a summer beach.
Casey:
where it is flat and there's like maybe one set of tracks from like the quad or whatever vehicle is used to collect trash.
Casey:
But this is not a summer beach, Marco.
Casey:
This is a winter beach.
Casey:
And the winter beach is nothing but ruts as far as the eye can see.
Casey:
And that I did not expect it.
Casey:
Again, once you think about it for even a flash, it's quite obvious that's what's going to happen.
Casey:
But I did not expect that.
Casey:
And it was funny watching Marco try to navigate it.
Casey:
Or I shouldn't say try to navigate it.
Casey:
That implies you're bad at it.
Casey:
But to say, oh, well, it would be a little easier over here.
Casey:
But there's a small chance you get sucked into the ocean.
Casey:
So you probably don't want to do that.
Casey:
And so it was fun.
Casey:
And it was informative and interesting.
Casey:
But because it was so damn dark, there wasn't but so much I could really do other than bounce my way across the sand.
Casey:
So we get up the next morning.
Casey:
We decide we're going to do a biking tour of the town.
Casey:
And, you know, Marco has his bike.
Casey:
And he said, hey, you know, would you be cool with using Tiff's bike?
Casey:
I was like, yeah, of course.
Casey:
You know, and it's approximately the correct height.
Casey:
And I only need it for, what, 15 minutes?
Casey:
So, yeah, absolutely.
Casey:
So Marco starts taking me on this tour.
Casey:
Everything is going well.
Casey:
And we are, from my recollection anyway, at basically the extreme end of the tour at approximately the time in which we would turn around.
Casey:
And Marco had gotten slightly ahead of me because I haven't ridden a bike in years for more than three feet.
Casey:
So I was giving the bike a little bit extra chutzpah in order to catch up.
Casey:
And all of a sudden I realized, well, that doesn't feel right.
Casey:
This particular bike is belt-driven, but you could think of it as chain-driven.
Casey:
It's the same basic principle.
Casey:
And it appears that somehow I have popped the belt off of the rear sprocket.
Casey:
So here it is.
Casey:
I have borrowed Tiff's bike, and I've now broken her bike.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
And so we pull over.
Casey:
I mean, we were on like a deck or a walking path or something like that.
Casey:
We pull over.
Casey:
We quickly ascertain that, yes, this is presumably repairable, but nevertheless, it is broken.
Casey:
And I'm thinking to myself, well...
Casey:
This is undesirable because I do need to, at some point, get to a train station.
Casey:
And although I thought we had more than enough time to walk the bikes back to his house, we are, after all, at the extreme end of the journey.
Casey:
And that's going to take a lot more time than I think either of us had allotted for this particular extravaganza.
Casey:
But that's okay.
Casey:
So Marco and I fiddle with the belt a little bit, and we were able to get it on enough.
Casey:
for me to, you know, basically limp at home.
Casey:
That works out just fine.
Casey:
We get to Marco's Beach House.
Casey:
We make a, I was going to say a half-hearted attempt.
Casey:
It was a full-hearted attempt, but over extremely short amount of time to repair the bike.
Casey:
And we were not successful, unfortunately.
Casey:
So the bike is, as per our discussion before we got on the show, still in a state of disrepair, and it is still my fault.
Casey:
And I still feel really bad about it.
Marco:
To be clear, I said it was no big deal.
Marco:
This bike is a very old belt-driven Priority Coast bike.
Marco:
It's probably a 10-minute fix.
Marco:
Yeah, I think you're right.
Marco:
I don't yet have the time to give it those 10 minutes, and it isn't that pressing, but literally the belt just fell off the rear thing.
Marco:
We couldn't put it back on by fingers because I have to probably move the rear thing to let the belt get back onto it, but that's fine.
Marco:
It'll take me like 10 minutes.
Casey:
Yeah, but I still feel bad.
Casey:
I felt bad.
Casey:
I feel bad.
Marco:
Look, I don't talk about bikes much, but I tell you what, the priority bikes and bikes with belts in general are amazing.
Marco:
And I can strongly recommend, unless you have a reason you need a chain, and there are some instances where chains are still better, unless you have a reason you need a chain,
Marco:
Go belt next time you have to buy a bike.
Marco:
It's so nice.
Marco:
And I can strongly recommend priority bikes in general.
Marco:
We have a whole bunch of them, and they've been wonderful.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
So apologies again, public apologies this time to Tiff for at least temporarily breaking her bicycle.
Casey:
That was certainly not my intention.
Casey:
I don't think it was from negligence or anything like that.
Casey:
It was just a crummy set of circumstances.
Casey:
But here we are, and I do feel bad about it.
Casey:
It's fine.
Casey:
And to Marco's credit, he has been super chill from the moment it happened until this very moment, super chill about the whole thing.
John:
It's not his bike.
Casey:
It's not his bike, right, right.
Casey:
Well, about that.
Casey:
So ostensibly, it was not the point for me, but I think a lot of the point for Marco, for us going back, all the way back from Manhattan to the beach, only for me to return the following day, like 12 hours later, was for me to have an opportunity to drive his truck on the beach.
Casey:
And so now it is daytime.
Casey:
We have left behind a lightly broken bicycle, but nevertheless, we set off.
Casey:
Marco says to me in a very kind way, I think it's for the best if I drive us from the house to the sand.
Casey:
I think I would have lasted five feet if I was in the driver's seat before I said, no, actually, I'm good.
Casey:
You take care of this because the clearances for a freaking Rivian are not great.
Casey:
Great.
Casey:
driving around your wee little beach town.
Casey:
It gave me all the shivers watching you very deftly, but nevertheless, it gave me all the shivers watching you navigate out to the beach.
Casey:
But nevertheless, we get to the beach, we switch drivers,
Casey:
And next thing you know, I am heading to the beach.
Casey:
And I guess there's several different places that you can hop from like the kind of more inland area onto the beach.
Casey:
And Marco, please interrupt me when you're ready.
Casey:
And we had aimed for one and we didn't look closely at the tides or the calendar or anything like that.
Casey:
And as we rose or crested over the hill to eventually go down the dune onto the beach, Marco says, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Casey:
And I was not looking more than like 10 feet in front of the car, so I didn't really understand what the issue was.
Casey:
But Mark says, hold on, hold on.
Casey:
And I look out, and I realize, oh, there's not much beach there, as it turns out, because it was high tide.
Casey:
And as much as I would have loved to bombing up the water and down the beach and so on and so forth, that did not seem like a good way to start my first beach driving experience.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
You know, we reversed our way back.
Casey:
We went through the inland area a little bit further, and then eventually we wound up on the beach proper.
Casey:
We get to the beach proper.
Casey:
The Rivian is laughing at everything, as am I, actually.
Casey:
It's laughing at everything that is being put in front of it.
Casey:
Everything is going swimmingly.
Casey:
I am behaving...
Casey:
I have not at this point started trying to do drifts or anything like that.
Casey:
I haven't tried to, you know, fishtail on purpose or anything of that nature.
Casey:
At this point, I'm just trying to get us up the beach because it is not challenging, but it is certainly more challenging than one would expect.
Marco:
You have a lot less control than you think you would.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Yeah, I guess the best analogy I can give is imagine if you were driving in quite deep snow, but thicker or perhaps heavier or just more resistive anyway.
Marco:
Like sand.
Casey:
Than snow.
Casey:
Like sand, if you will.
Casey:
Than snow typically is.
Casey:
Right?
Casey:
And so, yeah, that's kind of what it was like.
Casey:
And once you end up in a rut...
Casey:
Which, you know, that's not a bad thing if you're following somebody else's tracks from earlier.
Casey:
But once you end up there, it takes a surprising amount of torque and energy and strength, if you will, to get the car out of that rut.
Casey:
And you could arguably, I guess that's actually the closest this car will be to truly self-driving is because you could have taken your hands off the wheel and not even thought about it at that point.
Casey:
But anyway, so we're like two-thirds of the way down the beach, which I don't know, how many miles would you say that is, Marco?
Casey:
Like three or four or five?
Casey:
So let's call it two miles down the beach.
Casey:
I'm getting to the point that I'm trying to eyeball a place that's maybe a little less ruddy and a little flatter so I can start doing a little bit of fishtailing and burning out and so on and so forth.
Casey:
I haven't started yet, but I'm eyeballing it.
Casey:
And I noticed at a glance, there's some sort of dialogue.
Casey:
And I quickly read it aloud, and I don't remember the exact words it said, but it said something along the lines of... Air network changed?
Casey:
Air network changed.
Casey:
That's it.
Casey:
How did you know?
Casey:
So it says something along the lines of, you know, there's a fault, reduced power.
Casey:
I'm sorry, what?
Casey:
And so I said, well, I said to Marco, oh, I just read this.
Casey:
And then sure enough, somewhere on the dash, it says, you know, reduced power, top speed, I think it was 19 miles an hour.
John:
It probably deactivated some of the cylinders.
Casey:
Yeah, that's what happened.
Casey:
It's at least two of the eight cylinders, right?
Casey:
So, yeah.
Casey:
So, next thing I know, the car is now in, as I later found out from a friend who works at Rivian, actually, that's colloquially referred to as turtle mode.
Casey:
And so, I'm now in turtle mode and limited to 19 miles an hour.
Casey:
Now, on the sand, 19 miles an hour is sufficient.
Casey:
Like, I didn't really need to go.
Casey:
I wasn't really going more.
Marco:
Yeah, that's about as fast as I go most of the time.
Casey:
Right, exactly.
Casey:
So, so far, no big deal.
Casey:
At some point, we need to leave the sand.
Casey:
And as I said, getting out of a rut requires a surprising amount of torque, which means a surprising amount of depth, if you will, to the accelerator pedal.
Casey:
I don't know what's going on.
Casey:
Marco doesn't know what's going on.
Casey:
I said to him at the time, well, later I said to him, and I will say again now publicly, I am so thankful that
Casey:
that it was Marco's car in Marco in Marco in the passenger seat for this, because had the roles been reversed, I would not have been chill like Marco was because Marco was extremely chill.
John:
Shatter that windshield in a second with your phone.
Casey:
Marco was extremely chill, extraordinarily chill.
Casey:
And I,
Casey:
I, first of all, I'm already dying.
Casey:
And second of all, if this was my car, I don't know if I would have been better or worse.
Casey:
Like it, I, it was, it would have been terrible.
Casey:
So thankfully Marco had the presence of mind and to, to just chill because I was probably enough stress for both of us.
John:
Did you just reboot in safe mode?
John:
Well done the shift key on the steering wheel.
Casey:
Would you slow down?
Casey:
This is my story, John, and you're ruining it because that's exactly what we did.
Casey:
As soon as we got off the sand.
John:
So tech skills come in handy again.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So we pull off into the area where I guess, Marco, you had told me at the time that people will reinflate their tires or what have you.
Casey:
So we figure out how to reboot the thing.
Casey:
We reboot the thing.
Casey:
And at this point, I am dying because this is Marco's effectively brand new car that I have now broken.
Casey:
Not to mention the fucking bike that I just broke half an hour ago.
Casey:
So this is not a good morning for your guy.
Casey:
I am not happy.
Casey:
This is something like I have had such a wonderful time with one of my best and oldest friends for the last 48 hours.
Casey:
And this is how I'm leaving him is, well, Marco, enjoy your broken bike and broken car.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
also not only that also you're gonna miss your train right that's exactly what i was gonna say not only that we have to go on what i would call an interstate i think marco would call it a highway you weirdo californians call it a freeway we have to go on one of those things where you're supposed to be doing like 65 70 miles an hour yeah that that was my biggest worry because like at the time like all right you know it was saying like you know contact rivian service you know
Marco:
And I'm like, okay, well, if my car can only ever go 20 miles an hour until I go get it serviced somehow, first of all, you have to get it serviced off the beach.
Marco:
The Rivian mobile service vans can't come onto the beach.
Marco:
They don't have a permit.
Marco:
So I would have to get it off the beach anyway.
Marco:
But to get it off the beach requires going over a couple of bridges and highways.
Marco:
And so I'm like, okay, first I have to get through that at 20 miles an hour, probably very much angering everybody around me and possibly being a safety hazard.
Marco:
And then second of all, like, well, then where do I go?
Marco:
So I'm like, I really hope I don't have to bring this to a service center.
Marco:
And it would be a logistical challenge to do that.
Marco:
But then second of all, we had timed this all out for you to make this train at a train station that is 10 minutes away at 60 miles an hour.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
But, you know, how are we going to get there now in some kind of reasonably safe way at 20 miles an hour?
John:
Right.
John:
This is why you needed me here.
John:
You're planning trips without enough, you know, safety margin for you to get a flat tire or whatever.
Casey:
Well, and normally I do have that kind of margin, but this was a hyper-compressed trip, and so I was doing my best to try to do everything and yet, you know, have enough time for almost nothing.
Casey:
I also should mention I skipped a step.
Casey:
As Marco and I are discussing how to proceed with, you know, turtle mode,
Casey:
Marco says to me very sternly, very politely, but very sternly, please don't stop.
Casey:
Because if you stop, then there's a very good likelihood we're going to need a tow.
Casey:
And that ain't going to happen anytime soon.
Casey:
Like you were saying a moment ago, you're not exactly going to find a tow truck that is going to want to, or perhaps even begin
Casey:
capable of getting onto the beach.
Casey:
So that was advice that I took to heart quite seriously and quite immediately and very much made sure that no matter what happened, I was always making forward progress.
Marco:
Yeah, that was really weird.
Marco:
I'm like, you know, whatever error code the car is throwing or whatever subsystem is failing, if you stop, it might not let you start again.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So, again, Marco was extremely chill, and I'm so very thankful that you were, because I was, and to some degree, to a large degree, remain a walking ball of stress about all this.
Casey:
But anyway, we do the reboot, we take off, and it's clear immediately, things are still not right.
Casey:
And I am really starting to want to crawl in a hole and die.
Casey:
And we had made it, I don't know, a few hundred feet, I don't know, maybe a quarter mile at most.
Casey:
I feel like all of a sudden it felt like you had pressed the accelerator harder.
Marco:
Yes.
Casey:
And I knew that you didn't.
Casey:
And about that same time that I was like, oh, then you looked down or looked at me or whatever and said, oh, oh, oh, we're back.
Casey:
Next thing you know, we're back and better than ever, baby.
Casey:
And we were able to make it to Babylon train station, no problem.
Casey:
And life was good.
Casey:
outside of the fact that i murdered tiff's bike and i almost murdered marco's brand new car i had a very enjoyable trip and i'm really glad that i went but oh my word that morning was something it was something else it was not your day it's not the ribbons either what's what was the problem with the car
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
So I actually called Rivian because when I did the reboot and when it showed that message, a brief message appeared on screen that says something like, captured diagnostic.
Marco:
I figured the car took a cyst diagnose, right?
Casey:
So put it on the feedback.
Marco:
Yeah, so I figure, you know, okay, well, that probably means it's being uploaded somewhere, maybe, because it's a very connected car.
Marco:
So I gave it, like, you know, a few days, and I called them.
Marco:
Like, hey, by the way, this thing happened on this day at this time.
Marco:
It said it captured a diagnostic.
Marco:
Can you tell me anything more about, like, what actually the problem was so maybe I can, like, avoid something in the future?
Marco:
Like, you know, maybe did the motors overheat?
Marco:
Did the suspension overheat?
Marco:
Like, you know, what could this have been?
Marco:
Right.
John:
I mean, that's related to Casey, you know, like, blaming himself and saying, well, Casey, but you were just driving the car, right?
John:
It's an off-road vehicle, and you were off-road, and you were driving it in a straight line.
Marco:
Yeah, and by the way, since this happened, I have driven across the sand on the same route
Marco:
probably seven or eight times and it's been fine and i'm not like babying the car more than necessary i'm i'm doing everything exactly the same that i always do it and it's been 100 fine so i don't know what happened
Casey:
Yeah, it was something.
Marco:
But anyway, I called Rivian and they basically said they can't really look at it remotely.
Marco:
They don't have access.
Marco:
I have to bring it to a service center to figure out what actually happened.
Marco:
So I'm not going to do that.
Marco:
But if it happens again, obviously then I will.
Marco:
Because other than that one little weird thing that happened when Casey was driving, it's been an amazing sand vehicle.
Marco:
It has been amazing.
Marco:
a ridiculously good off-roader for this context like and like the the land river defender was a very very good off-road vehicle this for the sand i can't speak to other off-road needs but for the sand the rivian's even better by by a significant margin that's saying a lot because the defender was really good um but the rivian as a sand vehicle is awesome the
Marco:
It is so good.
Marco:
It has so much power, so much traction.
Marco:
It is just a ridiculously good sand vehicle.
Marco:
And that's why I want to know what happened.
Marco:
Because if whatever happened was like, oh, I made the motors too hot,
Marco:
it shows you the motor temperature on the off-road extra gauge cluster thing.
Marco:
So I can watch that.
Marco:
Actually, I have been watching that since then.
Marco:
I've been watching to see, all right, if I drive it kind of harder in the sand, this temperature goes up to 190 degrees.
Marco:
Is that too much?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I haven't seen the error case happen again, so I can't tell you.
Marco:
But who knows?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I wish I knew what happened, but nothing bad has happened since then, so okay.
Marco:
I guess.
Casey:
Right, right.
Casey:
I wish I knew.
Casey:
I don't know if maybe like a chunk of sand lodged itself somewhere.
Casey:
The other interesting piece, which probably was unrelated, but the only other thing I saw or that we saw, the auto hold feature where you come to a stop and the car holds the brakes for you.
Casey:
You can take your foot off the brake, but you don't move.
Casey:
It explicitly said that that was disabled, which made me wonder...
Casey:
A, it could be like the air suspension or something like that, like Marco had said a minute ago, or perhaps is there something with the brakes that got upset and it just didn't want to get this 900,000 pound vehicle going more than 20 miles an hour?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Nothing about the brakes felt wrong to me when I was driving it, but I mean, I wasn't really getting on the brakes much because I didn't want to freaking stop.
Marco:
But generally on the sand, you don't want to use a lot of breaking because it makes you dig in and get stuck.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So it seemed fine to me.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
As it turns out, it appears that everything worked out, you know, Tiff's bike, at least at the moment, notwithstanding.
Casey:
But that was it was not my morning, y'all.
Casey:
Not my morning.
Marco:
Well, thanks for visiting.
Marco:
Thanks for hosting.
Casey:
I'm very glad I did.
Casey:
But yeah, it was really lovely to spend time in New York, which I hadn't done in quite some time.
Casey:
It was lovely to spend time with Marco, which I haven't... I mean, we hadn't been together since 2019, which is criminal, I tell you.
Casey:
But nevertheless...
Casey:
It was great to see the beach house.
Casey:
It was great to get the tour of the beach town.
Casey:
And I'm so glad that even though I went up on a Wednesday, came down on a Friday, and probably should have figured out a way to spend more time both with you and up north in general.
Casey:
Nevertheless, I'm really glad it worked out.
Casey:
And I'm really glad that we were able to make it happen for both of us.
Casey:
And hopefully sometime in less than four freaking years, I can get back there.
Marco:
And we ate a lot of pizza.
Casey:
And we ate way too much pizza and I have no regrets.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
There is no such thing as too much pizza.
Marco:
The system works.