00:00:13 ◼ ► If you've done anything like server-side development in a big company context for another year, you know what BGP is.
00:00:19 ◼ ► Not that I know it and I'm not a networking engineer, but it's the thing that you run across.
00:00:24 ◼ ► It's the kind of thing that I probably should have run across at Tumblr, but we were always just in a data center host that was hosting our servers for us.
00:00:35 ◼ ► When I left, there was like 120 servers, but they were all still at what was then called the planet, which later became software, which later became part of IBM.
00:00:50 ◼ ► They took care of the networking gear, the routers and everything. I had no idea about any of that stuff.
00:00:55 ◼ ► That was all kind of not at the level I was working at. So I probably should have been exposed to this at some point, but wasn't.
00:01:01 ◼ ► Well, I think it depends on if your company runs its own data center, which I guess is probably even more rare now because everyone just uses public cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud or Azure or whatever.
00:01:13 ◼ ► But yeah, back in the original .com days, almost everybody ran their own data center. So even if you had some rinky-dink little company with not a lot of employees, you'd still have a rack or two in some data center.
00:01:23 ◼ ► Then you'd have to hire someone who knew how to set up your stuff in that rack. If your company got a little bit big, then you'd be hiring network engineers to set up your network in that data center and on and on from there.
00:01:32 ◼ ► And obviously, Facebook runs its own stuff because it's Facebook. It's actually kind of surprising that Facebook doesn't have its own public cloud thing by this point, but maybe I shouldn't encourage them.
00:01:43 ◼ ► Although maybe that's a business where they can do less damage. But anyway, if you run your own data centers, if you end up hiring network engineers, then that's where this comes up.
00:01:52 ◼ ► But it sounds like Tumblr was born late enough to be able to take advantage of hosting by other things and that you left before they became potentially a big enough company where they decided they wanted to run their own data centers.
00:02:02 ◼ ► Yeah, totally. I think I'm kind of lucky in that way that I didn't have to deal with that. And if you're at the point where you have 120 servers, I don't think you should be operating your own routers.
00:02:16 ◼ ► That to me, that's like jumping the gun on the level that you're operating at. I do think the Facebook outage thing, which I guess we're going to talk about now. Sorry. I'm chief derailleur in chief.
00:02:29 ◼ ► It was interesting. So first of all, the response from average people I think has been really interesting. I don't know if you've talked to any non-nerds in the last few days, but everyone knows about it, obviously, because everyone uses either Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or multiple of those.
00:02:45 ◼ ► So that's problem number one. But also the opinion seems to be split between people who thought it was a hack based on the whistleblower leak or something, or that it was specially timed for Congress and everything.
00:03:01 ◼ ► It's kind of like conspiracy theory-torial. But also a lot of people pointed out how disruptive it was. And it's not disruptive in the way that like, "Oh, I couldn't post on my Instagram. Poor me."
00:03:16 ◼ ► It's disruptive in ways like, "I couldn't book an appointment with my hair stylist because they only book stuff over Instagram." Or, "I couldn't buy something from a friend's business." Because they only have a Facebook page, not a website.
00:03:30 ◼ ► It really revealed quite how dependent the world is on Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp. I'm not part of a WhatsApp-using community, but I know that it's a massive messaging app and is the primary messaging app for many parts of the world.
00:03:48 ◼ ► Imagine if iMessage was down for six hours for us. That's a pretty big problem. Especially if that's how you communicate with almost everyone you know. That's a huge problem. And so when you bring in the business side of it, too, how disruptive it was for businesses that might operate primarily or only on Facebook-owned properties.
00:04:07 ◼ ► That's a pretty big deal. And it was like the scene in Independence Day where their computers are all broken so they have to switch back to Morse code. They're like, "What kind of old technology can we dust off to communicate with each other because our computers are down?"
00:04:21 ◼ ► That Morse code was like those of us dusting off our blogs or going back to Twitter or whatever. Maybe we should make a website for our business after all. But it really shows how dependent everyone is on this stuff in ways that go beyond just the superficial need for social likes.
00:04:41 ◼ ► For me, I didn't talk to anyone about it. I briefly talked to Erin about it, but we just happened to have a busy day. What was it yesterday? So it didn't affect either of us a whole lot. I'll glance at Instagram maybe a few times a day, but I was busy and so maybe the one or two times I had the time to glance at it, I just didn't.
00:05:02 ◼ ► And Erin similarly, she's heavier into Facebook than Instagram, but looks at both. And I think again, she didn't really think a whole lot of it. I don't think it crossed her mind that it was a hack. And it didn't cross my mind that it was a hack.
00:05:15 ◼ ► I think we both assumed it was some sort of oops and it seems as with any of these kinds of major outages, it was actually a series of oopses that caused the problem. But nevertheless, I didn't get any conspiracy theories nor were our lives particularly disrupted by it.
00:05:33 ◼ ► But yeah, the thing that really strikes me and kind of, I don't know if scares is a bit dramatic, but scares me a little bit is from what I understand, like their entire, and I think you said this a second ago, entire like continents, if not countries that basically live on WhatsApp in the same way that like China lives on something. I can't remember what it is now.
00:05:53 ◼ ► WeChat, weChat. Yes, thank you. That's right. For an entire continent or country or what have you to basically be crippled on account of somebody oopsing on a router and Facebook. Like that's that. I don't know what to say about it. Other than that, it's undesirable.
00:06:09 ◼ ► Yeah, I couldn't, I didn't think it was a hack because honestly a hack usually is not that big an instant of a problem. You know, like to take down Facebook's entire network for six hours. That's not a hack. That's an oops. You can tell like I've been there and this is normally I try not to take pleasure in companies having server problems because I've been there.
00:06:37 ◼ ► I've caused those server problems. I like I have I know what it's like to be on the other side of that and it sucks and to be like, you know, the engineers who have to like be responsible for that and be fixing all this stuff under immense pressure like that does suck.
00:06:53 ◼ ► But it's also really hard to feel sorry for Facebook. You know, I do take a little bit of joy that it happened to an absolutely awful company. But but certainly I do feel for the individual engineers who I would suggest maybe not working for that company in general.
00:07:08 ◼ ► But overall, I feel bad for you individual engineers who haven't having to work on that. But yeah, that was that was quite a thing. The impact. It's ridiculous how much of an impact that had.
00:07:20 ◼ ► I don't think there is going to be any lesson learned out of this, though. Right. You're right that it did affect huge numbers of people. But I feel like the reaction is going to be kind of the same reaction that happens when like the power goes out.
00:07:32 ◼ ► Like, imagine if the power to an entire country went out like we would all agree. Oh, this is far reaching effects like without electricity. So much of so much of our life depends on electricity and businesses and people and health care and just boy, we really need that electricity.
00:07:44 ◼ ► But the reaction is we should really make sure that electricity stays on. That's the you know, they don't say we should not have electricity. I feel like Facebook is our you know, WhatsApp or whatever, like they're in that category where people just become adamant like, well, we don't want that to happen again. We want to make sure Facebook stays up forever.
00:08:02 ◼ ► And that's like, that's not the lesson we want people to take from this like, hey, maybe you shouldn't be so dependent on what is in fact, a private company run by one douchey guy. But that's not the lesson people take from it. They just want their Facebook to work. And so I feel like nothing, nothing will come of this.
00:08:20 ◼ ► And the main reason I think it didn't didn't have any thought didn't even enter my head that this is any kind of hack is because hack seek to either extract money or do damage or both. And this was not that this was like accidentally turning off the light switch, right. And then people having to drive to a building to turn it back on.
00:08:35 ◼ ► It's terrible and everything but like, it's like no harm done. Like didn't they didn't erase everything. They didn't like ransomware every piece of data that Facebook owns right. They didn't burn the buildings down. They didn't delete all their source code and backups from the repo like that's what hacks do right. This is just yeah, it's someone who made a very bad mistake.
00:08:54 ◼ ► I know that it is now October I know that we're not really talking about St. Jude anymore. But hey, guess what I want to talk about St. Jude for one more minute. First of all, I wanted to thank everyone, including you the listener assuming you donated which you should have done. I want to thank everyone including you the listener for getting Relay and the entire community over $700,000.
00:09:19 ◼ ► This actually happened as we were recording analog which will be out later this week that Mike got the news that we had crossed $700,000. Additionally, that means that we over the entire lifetime of the Relay and St. Jude partnership have raised one and a half million dollars, basically half of which was this year which is utterly bananas, but still, one half million dollars in three years $700,000 in one year I am extremely proud of all of us.
00:09:45 ◼ ► Also, we talked last episode about the absolutely bananas donation of $26,922 and five cents, which was one cent more than agile bits. The donor has reached out to me and they would like to remain anonymous but wanted to note that the donation was in honor of Xiangling Jennifer Lin's parents.
00:10:03 ◼ ► And so I am honoring their wishes by announcing that to everyone. So thank you for your donation. And thank you to this wonderful ladies parents for being awesome enough to justify a $26,000 donation. I have not yet had the chance to mail stickers, but all the stickers will be mailed shortly. So I wanted to put that on record.
00:10:21 ◼ ► Now, if you would like to donate to St. Jude, feel free to do so except we don't have our fancy URL anymore because the campaign is closed. But hey, it can't hurt. Moving right along in the spirit of taking your money. Hi, it's us. We'd like to take your money.
00:10:34 ◼ ► So we have just launched an on demand merch store. So this is a little different than normal. Normally the way it works is it's kind of in the spirit of Kickstarter where we'll do a run for a couple of weeks where we sell it where we take orders for a couple of weeks and then our friends at Cotton Bureau like print or whatever the correct term is print the shirts and ship them out for us.
00:10:56 ◼ ► And then there's no further there's no further sales other than pins which we can't seem to sell out of and maybe other stuff that's left over. We're going to do things a little differently for now. What we've decided is we're going to sell three different things in our on demand store.
00:11:13 ◼ ► The first thing is the pin that we can't get rid of no matter how hard we try and a lot that on that I think you'll remember on a past show we're like hey pins finally sold out but then we got told by the cotton mirror folks like actually we still have a few more pins. So we just can't get rid of these pins were really down to scraping the bottom of the barrel like they always hold back some merchandise in case something gets damaged and shipping or we need to replace it or whatever.
00:11:33 ◼ ► Now we're just really scraping the bottom of the seemingly endless pin ballot barrels so there's there's not a lot of pins left but there are pins left. Indeed so if you want a pin with the fancy locking backs please get on that quicker rather than or sooner rather than later.
00:11:48 ◼ ► Additionally we have some leftover pint glasses we always order when it comes to like glasses and mugs we always order a little bit too much on purpose just to make sure if there's like damage and shipping or whatever.
00:11:57 ◼ ► We have some amount of pint glasses left over so if you'd like to grab one of those they are excellent. They are my primary drinking glass now I love them.
00:12:05 ◼ ► Please check that out we don't have a tremendous amount of those either but the potential star of the show is that we have brought back sort of kind of the M1 shirt asterisk.
00:12:17 ◼ ► So this is the multicolor rainbow M1 shirt that we had sold and during the last run. However we are not printing anything on the back so if you were smart and beautiful and fancy enough to get your shirt already.
00:12:34 ◼ ► You have the outline of the M1 on the back of your shirt. These shirts that we're selling on demand you do not get anything on the back it's just blank on the back.
00:12:43 ◼ ► However to make up for that we do have additional sizes so we have a onesie for infants. We have a tank top that I don't think John realized is available but I saw it it's fine whatever.
00:12:56 ◼ ► I thought you'd just be t-shirts we accidentally have a tank top we accidentally have a tank top that's the beauty of the on demand stuff if one person order ones will make one.
00:13:04 ◼ ► Exactly. And then we have tees in men's women's youth and toddler sizes as well so if you would like you can go to ATP.fm/store I don't think we're going to announce this regularly since it's not a limited time thing but I will make a stink out of it now and then let it go.
00:13:20 ◼ ► ATP.fm/store you can get an M1 shirt you can get a pint glass or you can get an enamel pin. Let me explain a little bit of the background to like why we even doing this like there's there's basically one reason, and that is that a prominent youtuber has been wearing our M1 shirt in some of his videos.
00:13:38 ◼ ► And every time, this is Quinn Nelson by the way Snazzy Labs I forget what his actual YouTube channel is but just look for Snazzy on YouTube. It's a great channel, lots of great videos, but every time he would wear the M1 shirt like the one that we saw during the past you know the one with the printing on the back of the course you can't see it because he doesn't turn around but anyway he wears M1 shirt and his comments would fill up with "Oh I love your shirt where can I get a shirt like that?"
00:13:59 ◼ ► And then what would happen is people would see those comments and they would like copy and paste our graphic onto a random t-shirt on some random website and they would say "Oh you can buy it here."
00:14:10 ◼ ► And then we would have to go to those random websites and file a copyright takedown and say "That's not your shirt that's our shirt no you can't sell it to people."
00:14:19 ◼ ► And then the site would take down their thing and after doing that multiple times on multiple videos and then also not being able to say "Well I want that shirt so where can I get it?"
00:14:29 ◼ ► We didn't have an answer so we didn't want other people selling our shirt for obvious reasons right but we also felt bad for those people who saw the shirt and wanted it and by the way those people have no idea who we are.
00:14:38 ◼ ► They have no idea what ATP is they just see like it's cool you can get the joke without knowing ATP right.
00:14:43 ◼ ► So we felt like is it possible for like the next time we take down one of those can we say you know don't buy it there that's a ripoff buy it from us and so now we can say that that's why that's like we were just going to do that one product like here's just the M1 shirt.
00:14:58 ◼ ► Solely so we have something to give people who don't know who we are but just want the shirt and so we can shut down the ripoff people without feeling bad right.
00:15:06 ◼ ► But then we found out oh well you have a couple of pint glasses left and you have a couple of pins left right so this is not a new way of selling things this is just us trying to drain more merchandise and the very special case of the M1 shirt which seems to be very popular among people who have no idea who we are who watch YouTube videos.
00:15:23 ◼ ► Also these are on demand shirts so the printing process is different in ways I don't understand because I'm not a printing person right so it's not going to be the same as the ones like all I'm saying is if you want like the quote unquote real M1 shirt you got it on the last sale it's got the printing on the back it's probably better slightly better printing quality all around like that's the one to get.
00:15:41 ◼ ► The other thing to keep in mind is that you know we have the if you if you look at the the very carefully lawyer not really we have no lawyers very carefully worded text on our member page that says hey if you become a member you get an automatic 15% off on our time limited sales that was carefully worded from day one to specify when we do those sales where we take a bunch of orders and make a bunch of stuff that's where you get 15% off.
00:16:06 ◼ ► So if you are a member, you don't get 50% off on any of these on demand things because these are on a time limited sale like we just run this forever for the M1 shirt because every time someone orders one, they make one and then it just sits there again right.
00:16:17 ◼ ► So, my advice to you if you're listening to this is, we're going to have a holiday sale sometime you know fall holiday season sale or whatever, and that sale will be a bunch of stuff.
00:16:29 ◼ ► You will get your discount during that sale if you're a member, I suggest saving your money for that sale especially since this is an M1 shirt.
00:16:36 ◼ ► Any day now if you're listening Apple, Apple can release a new computer that doesn't have an M1 in it.
00:16:49 ◼ ► But the M1 shirt is the one that's in all the YouTube videos so we wanted to have something to provide to people so I'm not telling you not to buy this if you are wearing out one of your M1 shirts or if you never did like the chip on the back and just wanted it on the front or if you want a onesie or a tank top.
00:17:05 ◼ ► It's actually a little bit cheaper because it doesn't have the printing on the back so that's one less printing pass to do so it's almost like you're getting a discount just for being a cheaper shirt.
00:17:18 ◼ ► If some YouTuber wears another one of our shirts we'll probably find us back in the same position and you'll see some other on demand thing be added to the list of stuff.
00:17:25 ◼ ► But in general we're still going to concentrate on the normal time limited sales with member discounts and all that other good stuff.
00:17:42 ◼ ► This shirt solely exists to sell to people who have no idea who we are and have never heard this podcast.
00:17:48 ◼ ► It's like what you basically just told people is don't buy this shirt and don't become a member.
00:17:52 ◼ ► What I said is become a member and wait for the time limited sale that's going to happen around the holidays.
00:18:19 ◼ ► And if you gentlemen have something you would like to add, please feel free to jump in.
00:18:26 ◼ ► Compared to the competition, the A15 isn't 50% faster as Apple claims, but rather about 62% faster.
00:18:34 ◼ ► Not sure how they come up with that quote, consider it all boils down to what you think of as quote unquote the competition.
00:18:40 ◼ ► But this is a theme you'll see throughout this article is that Apple was sort of underselling the A15.
00:18:46 ◼ ► Compared to the A14, it continues, the new A15 increases the peak single core frequency of the two performance core cluster by 8%,
00:18:54 ◼ ► now reaching up to 3.2 gigahertz compared to the 3 gigahertz of the previous generation.
00:18:59 ◼ ► When both performance cores are active, their operating frequency actually goes up by 10%,
00:19:03 ◼ ► both now running at an aggressive, well, also basically 3.2 gigahertz compared to the previous generation's 2.9.
00:19:26 ◼ ► Apple's frequency increases here are quite aggressive given the fact that it's quite hard to push this performance aspect of a design,
00:19:32 ◼ ► especially when we're not expecting major performance gains on the part of the new process node.
00:19:48 ◼ ► so for Apple to have gone further beyond this would have indicated an increase in power consumption.
00:19:58 ◼ ► but within the 5 nanometer process node there is an improved version of it that TSMC has called N5P or whatever
00:20:04 ◼ ► that's supposed to give you 5% more clock speed, even though you're still "5 nanometers".
00:20:11 ◼ ► But Apple has gone above and beyond that and clocked it even higher than what they would get out of the processing increase.
00:20:16 ◼ ► So a reasonable portion of the things that are good about the A15 are essentially good because of that P,
00:20:33 ◼ ► You know, like, "Oh, I can just clock it higher. I just get that for free out of the process."
00:20:36 ◼ ► But Apple has pushed beyond that by saying, "Yeah, we get that for free out of the process,
00:20:57 ◼ ► Yeah, if you read the article, you'll see they added execution units to the efficiency cores.
00:21:08 ◼ ► They do some embarrassing comparisons where they compare the efficiency cores of the A15
00:21:13 ◼ ► to the non-efficiency cores of "competing ships," and it's very embarrassing for the rest of the industry.
00:21:31 ◼ ► "Usually increases in performance always come with some sort of deficit in efficiency, or at least flat efficiency.
00:21:41 ◼ ► meaning energy efficiency is improved by 17% on the peak performance states versus the A14."
00:22:09 ◼ ► given the thermal constraints of the phone, they don't achieve that peak performance for very long.
00:22:16 ◼ ► But even what they call the sustained performance, essentially, when they throttle down because they get too hot,
00:22:28 ◼ ► If these same cores were put into a situation where they're not in a tiny little fanless phone,
00:22:33 ◼ ► or even if they're, as we saw on the iPad Mini, someplace where they are better able to spread the heat,
00:22:52 ◼ ► The GPU, again, if you compare it to its competitors, even when it's thermal throttling, it's still amazing.
00:22:59 ◼ ► But it bodes well for higher-end chips that use some of this same technology in applications where there is more cooling.
00:23:07 ◼ ► And Anatec has a lot of harsh things to say about how the cooling works in the iPhones,
00:23:15 ◼ ► and how much it's able to dissipate its heat, and the fact that the cell modem is on the other side of the SoC,
00:23:27 ◼ ► What can you really do? I feel like they made that trade-off to make the motherboard, or whatever they call it inside a phone,
00:23:34 ◼ ► And honestly, I think that's the correct trade, because people aren't running benchmarks on their phone all the time.
00:23:42 ◼ ► It speaks to the potential of the design of the A15, whether it be the individual cores or just the A15 itself,
00:24:00 ◼ ► freed from the constraints of a tiny little phone, but just put into a fanless MacBook Air,
00:24:04 ◼ ► which has considerably more cooling because of all that aluminum surface area, is going to be a fairly amazing performer.
00:24:09 ◼ ► I'm really excited for whenever we get new computers, hopefully sometime this month or next.
00:24:24 ◼ ► What it took was us to finally invest more heavily in the M1 name. That's what they were waiting for.
00:24:30 ◼ ► But the good thing is, the people who watch YouTube don't know that, and maybe don't even realize what the M1 is about.
00:24:54 ◼ ► Visit linode.com/ATP and see why Linode has been voted the top infrastructure-as-a-service provider by both G2 and TrustRadius.
00:25:03 ◼ ► And if I knew what that meant, I would rate it the top that whatever too, because I love Linode for running my servers.
00:25:09 ◼ ► I have done so much server hosting in my career and my personal life over the last 15, 20 years.
00:25:18 ◼ ► Linode is what used to be called a modern VPS host. Now it's just called a cloud company, because everything is cloud now.
00:25:24 ◼ ► But if you need one of those hosts, if you want to run server instances, you want to run them at Linode.
00:25:30 ◼ ► Of course you have full root access on your servers, install whatever software you want, your own app backends or git repositories or whatever you want to run a server for.
00:25:46 ◼ ► And all this comes with not only great support and great performance, but also amazing value.
00:25:56 ◼ ► Because I run a lot of servers. The price matters. It adds up at the numbers that I'm running.
00:26:04 ◼ ► I've never found another website that can undercut them on even a temporary basis, let alone a sustained one.
00:26:54 ◼ ► Brian Peterson writes, "During episode 450, Marco ran through the math of 4K video data rates.
00:27:02 ◼ ► Each pixel in a display's full RGB color. Each pixel in a camera's sensor is only red or green or blue.
00:27:08 ◼ ► And they're arranged in a Bayer, Bayer, Bayer, whatever, filter pattern of 50% green, 25% red, and 25% blue.
00:27:22 ◼ ► Yeah, I didn't know. I mean, I had heard the term Bayer filter or Bayer, you know, sensor thrown around.
00:27:28 ◼ ► But I never really knew what that meant. And I had no idea that, yeah, apparently, and I verified this.
00:27:33 ◼ ► Yeah, this is all correct. Apparently that most camera sensors, each pixel only has red or green or blue.
00:27:42 ◼ ► And exactly what they said, you know, there's twice as many greens as the other two because I think because our eyes are more sensitive to green.
00:27:52 ◼ ► And so a raw dump off of a camera sensor is not RGB. Each pixel has one of those colors.
00:28:00 ◼ ► So I don't need to have three different colors at each pixel sight. I have one color at every pixel sight when doing my math.
00:28:06 ◼ ► So that's pretty cool. And 500 megs per second for my, you know, my quick 4K math at 8 bits per, I guess, pixel is still a ton of data.
00:28:22 ◼ ► It was a good article that I just found the URL for. I don't know why I couldn't find it before.
00:28:35 ◼ ► And it basically goes, it's talking about Apple's ProRaw feature which I did just last year.
00:28:39 ◼ ► But it goes through sort of the process of, you know, what comes off the sensor and then what happens to it next or whatever.
00:28:45 ◼ ► And you can see the step where they go for, they call it demosaicing, where they go from the actual sensor with its 25% red, 25% blue, and 50% green sensors.
00:29:21 ◼ ► That's what I Googled for in that link. Apparently I couldn't come up with that previously.
00:29:25 ◼ ► Oh, and we got some other feedback about like, what is, you know, sort of raw, uncompressed, or losslessly compressed video?
00:29:32 ◼ ► Like how does that manifest on disk and in many different applications of that technique?
00:29:38 ◼ ► I don't remember the particular names, but the way they actually do it is they just fill folders with a series of, you know, losslessly compressed frames.
00:29:57 ◼ ► You know, if you are trying to do sort of uncompressed or losslessly compressed, the sort of deltas that you do between frames in a lossy format like H.264, that doesn't exist. Like you're not doing that.
00:30:08 ◼ ► So they just save a bunch of images, which seems ridiculous, but that's one way to do it and it'll work.
00:30:15 ◼ ► Now we're breaking a personal rule of mine and we're going to talk about Destiny on the show. I'm sorry, everyone.
00:30:30 ◼ ► Yeah. We talk about 120 Hertz and tracking animations with your eyes and turning your eyes off when things go on.
00:30:35 ◼ ► A lot of people ask me, all right, so you have this motion sickness thing and you had to use reduced motion and so on and so forth.
00:30:41 ◼ ► But how do you handle gaming? Like doesn't playing first person shooters and everything make you sick?
00:30:48 ◼ ► And I answered a bunch of them on Twitter, but I figured it was worth talking about here, if only so I can relink the same Destiny article from 2015.
00:31:02 ◼ ► One thing that helps with I still played it, but like, you know, one thing that really helps with queasiness for me is increasing the field of view.
00:31:17 ◼ ► And if it was very narrow, be like looking through like a, you know, a cardboard paper towel tube and very wide would be like a bullhorn.
00:31:25 ◼ ► Right. So how wide how wide a view displays on the screen, like the most extreme would be like a 360 degree view where on your monitor you could see both in front of you and behind you or a 180 degree view where you could see all the way to your left and all the way to your right.
00:31:45 ◼ ► Thankfully, the Half-Life games do have an adjustable field of view and I just crank it up to the maximum, which I think is like 90 or something like that.
00:31:54 ◼ ► Not having the screen entirely fill your field of vision helps like you're basically doing your own field of view thing.
00:32:00 ◼ ► So if you're sitting on a couch and watching a TV, that is better than sitting two inches from a huge monitor that extends past your peripheral vision in terms of motion sickness.
00:32:10 ◼ ► This is a thing that game developers know about because, again, everybody gets motion sickness just a matter of degree and no game developer wants to make a game that makes some substantial portion of their potential customer base feel nauseated because that's not good.
00:32:22 ◼ ► They won't buy your games. They won't play your games, especially if you have a game where you want people to like either pay a monthly subscription or constantly play.
00:32:29 ◼ ► So there's an article back from 2015, about a year after Destiny was launched, I think, that explains the work that Destiny's developers did to try to prevent people from getting motion sick while playing their game.
00:32:43 ◼ ► And it is fascinating if you've never thought that this is something that game developers consider and do.
00:32:47 ◼ ► It totally is. And the upshot is, after many thousands of hours playing Destiny, I don't get motion sick playing it. And that's good.
00:32:55 ◼ ► Hooray. I'm even more remiss to talk about this than I am the one we just finished. But here we are, everyone. Somebody put in the show notes, "Marco's pants update." Tell me, Marco, about your pants.
00:33:09 ◼ ► Okay, so, first of all, I did get the Apple silicone case. I've been using it for the last couple of days. I'll get to that in a moment. But first I wanted to address, this is in regards to my plea to the listeners and you last week of, "Where am I supposed to put my iPhone in my pants?"
00:33:27 ◼ ► Because it doesn't really fit very well anywhere. Now that I have back to the regular pro size, the middle size of phone again, I am missing the pantsability of the iPhone mini.
00:33:40 ◼ ► I don't want to go back to the mini because I'm telling you I'm getting some amazing pictures out of this camera system. And I really am enjoying the 3x lens and the macro and ProMotion. Those are all really nice.
00:33:54 ◼ ► So I don't want to go back because I don't want to lose these features. But I'm still trying to figure out how to carry this phone in a comfortable and non ridiculous looking way. And I still haven't found that yet.
00:34:08 ◼ ► So a lot of people did write in to recommend lines of pants that have special pockets that go along the leg a little bit lower. The most commonly recommended brand for this was KUHL. And they have almost all of their pants or all of them. And they have a huge line of different pants.
00:34:26 ◼ ► They have this little extra pocket that is made specifically for smartphones so that it drapes it a little bit lower and totally on the side of your leg as opposed to the standard 5 pocket, jean pocket design.
00:34:40 ◼ ► The phone is always going to be a little bit in the front side of your leg and that's what I was trying to get away from. It will look better if it's on the side and a little bit more in the line of the pants as opposed to this big block that keeps shifting over towards the front of my leg.
00:34:54 ◼ ► Anyway, there are these pants like KUHL and other ones that have these extra pockets. The problem with that is that I mentioned this before and I mentioned it really fast last week. Even though I am right handed, I keep my phone in my left pocket.
00:35:09 ◼ ► And that's just a fluke of my history that I grew up in a time when I was carrying a wallet and keys long before I had a phone. And so once I had a phone, the wallet and keys were already occupying my right pocket.
00:35:24 ◼ ► And so I put the phone in the pocket that was free, which was the left pocket and I've kept it there ever since. And I pick up and use my phone mostly with my left hand. Any kind of one handed phone operation for me is my left hand.
00:35:36 ◼ ► If I were to switch to one of these special kinds of pants that has a phone pocket on the right, which as far as I can tell, all of them are on the right. I couldn't find anywhere that was on the left.
00:35:46 ◼ ► So if I switch to one of those on the right, I would have to totally change not only all of my pants, which is a non-trivial ordeal. I have many pants. And some which I like a lot, which I don't want to get rid of.
00:35:59 ◼ ► But also I would have to change what hand I hold my phone in. That's a very big life change. And I feel like I don't necessarily want to change my life quite that much just to accommodate a bigger phone.
00:36:11 ◼ ► So if that's my only option for carrying this phone comfortably, I probably should go back to the Mini. But I think what I'm going to do instead is just learn to tolerate this.
00:36:20 ◼ ► That being said, if anybody has any pants recommendations where that extra pocket is on the left side, please let me know.
00:36:26 ◼ ► So regarding the case situation now, I did get my Apple Silicon case in the intervening days since last episode. And Casey, you liked yours a lot, right? You still like it?
00:36:38 ◼ ► Well, I don't have it on my phone. It's Aaron's case. But in the brief time that I spent with it, I did think it was vastly improved. But I have not spent meaningful time with it because it's on Aaron's phone, not mine.
00:36:50 ◼ ► Okay. So I would say I mostly agree with what you said. I think the improvement to the outside coding is not as significant as you said. But it did feel that way on day one.
00:37:03 ◼ ► So I think it might have just been like when it was new. It felt like, oh, this isn't sticking to my pocket as much. But now that I'm a few days in, oh, it sticks just as much.
00:37:12 ◼ ► I don't think that's like meaningfully better or at least not enough to matter. The Nudiant case, I think I might switch back to because it is both thinner and less tacky than the Apple Silicon case.
00:37:26 ◼ ► I don't like the buttons on either one. Neither one of these has great feeling buttons because what I want is the Apple leather case buttons, like those nice steel. Those are really nice. Yeah, neither case offers buttons that nice.
00:37:42 ◼ ► Well, then the Nudiant doesn't have buttons. However, the cutouts, I am getting used to them, but I don't love them. I feel like the cutouts feel as though they're 30 feet tall, even though this case is actually quite thin. Like I don't understand how it ended up this way.
00:37:58 ◼ ► I don't know. Maybe they need a little more like dead space around the actual physical button. But one way or another, I feel like the buttons, they're exposing the iPhone's own buttons, which is what I'm trying to say. But I don't love the way it's been handled. Plus the branding on the back.
00:38:14 ◼ ► Like it's not obvious, but I feel like it's embossed or whatever, letter pressed. So I feel it all the time, which is very frustrating. Like I still think the Nudiant case is certainly sufficient, but I don't love it. That's for sure.
00:38:29 ◼ ► Yeah, that's how I feel about it as well. I think I'm going to switch back to it out of the two that I have, but I also think my search is not over yet. And it's very impossible. I might end up just going back to the Apple leather case, even though, again, I live a very wet lifestyle out here. And so that's not going to be great in certain ways.
00:38:44 ◼ ► But I'll tell you what, though, I have also considered just going back to caseless or trying other options like the peel cases have strong recommendations, but they don't have their own magnets.
00:38:55 ◼ ► No, they do. I thought that I think I check me on this and I'm not going to bother checking as we're talking, but I could swear I had seen that peel has just added their own mag safe magnets to their cases. But again, I might be lying to you by accident.
00:39:09 ◼ ► I'll look into it. Thanks. But yeah, so I'll try that. But ultimately I will say I do like having a case again because I like being able to like toss the phone onto a countertop and know it's not going to slide off or like a surface like, you know, just throughout the day.
00:39:28 ◼ ► Like, you know, I put it on the counter a lot when I'm doing stuff like around the sink or washing dishes, whatever, or cooking or chopping or whatever, or like, you know, when I take a shower, I bring the phone into the shower and like stand it up on a ledge.
00:39:41 ◼ ► It's not not like in the water stream, but like the ledges on might have a few drops of water on it if anyone else took a shower recently because that's how water works.
00:39:49 ◼ ► And so like, I like being able to like kind of toss it onto a surface and have it grip the surface itself without me having to worry about am I scratching up the back of it like hell or is it going to slide off and break?
00:40:02 ◼ ► And that's one thing that, you know, I have felt that the last year using my mini caselists. That was a thing I was always I always had to be aware of.
00:40:08 ◼ ► And so going back to the case lifestyle, I do really like the way the way it interacts with services better. So I do think I want a case. I just don't think I have found that case yet.
00:40:22 ◼ ► So real time follow up. It appears that there exist Peel MagSafe cases. However, they are all for the iPhone 12 line. I do not think they've been updated for the 13 line as yet.
00:40:33 ◼ ► I've heard the Peel ones are good, but I would like to try them as well. But as with you, I want to have a case that has little MagSafe magnets internal to it. So I hear you.
00:40:45 ◼ ► I just looked at my my brand and they apparently still don't have a 13 case, but it sounds like just what's up, you know, Marco's alley.
00:40:52 ◼ ► Like I can highly recommend not having a bottom lip. And otherwise it's a very thin leather case that has pretty close to Apple style buttons, little metal things that transfer through.
00:41:01 ◼ ► In particular, the reason I like this case so much as it does what the Apple other cases do, which is the place where the buttons are like the volume buttons.
00:41:08 ◼ ► There is a like an indentation in the leather case. And in that indentation are the secondary metal buttons that push on the actual primary metal buttons.
00:41:17 ◼ ► And so that what that means is that the metal buttons don't stick out that far from the case. They stick out a little bit, but they don't stick out as far as they would if they started from just the edge of the case.
00:41:27 ◼ ► And same thing with the power button or whatever. No branding on the back of it, you know, and like I said, it's held up.
00:41:33 ◼ ► It's just they don't make a 13 or 13 pro case at this time. And also there's no MagSafe, which I consider a feature, but it sounds like you want the magnet transfer thing.
00:41:43 ◼ ► I definitely want the magnet because so one thing I I mean, maybe maybe I could be wrong about this, but anything that would reduce the effectiveness of it sticking on my car mount would be a fatal flaw for any case for me,
00:42:03 ◼ ► Oh, I have some car follow up if we ever get to that. But anyway, that's different story. Different night probably.
00:42:12 ◼ ► But, you know, ever since I switched to the the MagSafe car mount from ProClip USA, it's such a quality of life improvement to not have to like dock it into something to be able to just stick it there.
00:42:28 ◼ ► So I don't know that maybe, you know, if I use something like a peel case that doesn't have its own magnets in it, I don't know if maybe it would be too weak.
00:42:36 ◼ ► Then, you know, that extra millimeter or two of case, maybe that would make the magnet weak enough that it might not stick on the car mount reliably.
00:42:43 ◼ ► So that that I have that's that's the main reason why I insist on having its own magnets in the case.
00:42:49 ◼ ► Otherwise, if it's just for charging on my on my bed stand, I don't care. It's not going to get bumped or moved anywhere.
00:43:03 ◼ ► Do you want to just do your car follow up now? We are right at the end of follow up. Now's the time.
00:43:33 ◼ ► I'm assuming it's not the Lucid Air. Are we really just going to drop this bomb and then walk away?
00:43:44 ◼ ► Well, it's so there is a not a large chance, but there is a small chance I might get a driving permit on the sand this this coming winter.
00:44:07 ◼ ► I didn't realize they were doing an SUV. It's the same as the truck, but it doesn't have a bed.
00:44:10 ◼ ► Yeah. I saw Quinn Nelson's video on the truck and I'm like, that actually sounds kind of like exactly what I would need and want best out here.
00:44:23 ◼ ► Because it's not like like that's for you're going up like mountain trails or whatever. You're going a very short distance on the sand.
00:44:29 ◼ ► Well, it's you know, it's a like, you know, five mile drive across very uneven, rough, wet terrain that is oftentimes being torn up by other drivers who don't air down their tires.
00:44:40 ◼ ► And so there's like you got it. There's there's some rough areas like that's why ground clearance is like the number one thing you need for a vehicle to do this.
00:44:49 ◼ ► So anyway, I just I placed the deposit to get in line because their their deliveries allegedly are starting in January.
00:45:02 ◼ ► So chances are I'm not even to get a permit and chances are if I did my review and wouldn't even be delivered on time anyway.
00:45:14 ◼ ► You don't have to get something else. Like would you just would you just wait for the truck to arrive if you got the permit? Or would you have to have a gap filler car?
00:45:21 ◼ ► I would have to have a gap filler car. They wouldn't they don't give you a permit unless you don't unless you have a car to apply it to.
00:45:30 ◼ ► And like and like if this permit ever comes in, this is not the kind of thing you say no to or give them any reason not to give it to you.
00:45:38 ◼ ► So again, it's probably not going to be this year. And if even if it is, it probably wouldn't be in time to get this Rivian monster.
00:45:47 ◼ ► But it does it is kind of like everything I would want. So what would most likely happen is like, you know, some kind of quick purchase of a used Jeep or something.
00:45:56 ◼ ► So, yes, one of us you should get a Ford Bronco. I'm telling you are those really widely available yet.
00:46:08 ◼ ► Well, yeah, but and there's the other question too of like whether for this kind of use whether I should just get something cheap and used and just beat it to hell on the sand because the sand will destroy whatever it is.
00:46:20 ◼ ► So that's like what I really should do is again just buy like a you know, an old Jeep of some kind and you're being a pioneer in an early adopter because we don't know how well how good Rivian is at building cars as Tesla has shown building cars is actually kind of difficult.
00:46:34 ◼ ► And you know and how the you're correct to point out that setting aside how well Rivian builds its cars.
00:46:45 ◼ ► The very first electric car from a brand new company, you know, splashing around in the salt and sand.
00:46:54 ◼ ► I don't know. I mean, especially if you lease it who cares if it rots out in two years your lease is up and you know, whatever but you are entering you know, that's that's some what you call uncharted territory for sure.
00:47:09 ◼ ► Oh, yeah, especially since I don't even know if they're offering leases, but this is why like the only reason I put this deposit down is that it's completely refundable.
00:47:16 ◼ ► So I'm like, all right, I'll put myself in line but I don't expect it to pan out speaking of leases. Oh my God getting Tesla to give me my car.
00:47:27 ◼ ► So they're not good at building cars and they're also not very good at selling them or collecting money for them.
00:47:45 ◼ ► I still don't have my title. I gave them a big lump of money like a month ago. Oh my God, I would be furious.
00:47:53 ◼ ► Are you cool every time you call up this a who are you it took me? Okay, so this is not going to make you I'm here for this.
00:48:02 ◼ ► Just the quick version when you want to end a lease in a way that is not you returning the vehicle like I wanted to buy it. Okay.
00:48:18 ◼ ► So I'm in the email saying your bio quote option has expired. Try again. Okay, so they go fill out the form again like okay, well, it's you know, I still had a few more months left in the lease fine. Just give me a bio quote fine.
00:48:32 ◼ ► And you hit submit and then it says, all right, you know, a team member will contact you. And then another month goes by and it says your buyer request been canceled.
00:48:40 ◼ ► And this happened for four months in a row at which point I eventually just called them and look, I'll do a lot of things to avoid a phone call, but just call them.
00:48:56 ◼ ► And the person the impression I got from that from that call was that when I was submitting those requests, it was basically just like creating a ticket in some system and after a month, they just expire and nobody apparently checks those tickets unless you call and bug them.
00:49:21 ◼ ► So what does this person do on the with their day? If people don't call, do they just not look at the ticketing queue and whatever software they're using?
00:49:33 ◼ ► First, I send the I put I send back these forms. You got to sign it, you know, sign a few places. And then one of the forms is like, where should we send the title?
00:49:41 ◼ ► It was like one of those DocuSign web interface things where you just click to sign, but you can't freeform edit anywhere in the document.
00:49:47 ◼ ► You can only edit the places they've marked as fields. But the place where it says where should we send the title was not editable.
00:49:53 ◼ ► They just hadn't put fields there. Like there was like lines from the PDF they had scanned, but they weren't.
00:49:58 ◼ ► So I download the PDF and I emailed it back to the person and I said, these fields weren't editable, but I went ahead and did it like on the PDF.
00:50:11 ◼ ► So again, I hear nothing. Three weeks later, I get an email saying, sorry, the version of the form we had you fill out was not complete.
00:50:30 ◼ ► So everything I've done with Tesla leasing, it makes it feel like I'm the first person to have ever done that.
00:50:36 ◼ ► Like that no one here has ever done their job before. No one here is trying very hard or thinking about how does this actually work.
00:50:44 ◼ ► And I cannot tell you like how perfect it was to have even this be so difficult with Tesla.
00:50:51 ◼ ► Like, again, I still love their car. I'm going to do a lot of driving in a few days because I have some errands to run.
00:50:57 ◼ ► I still love their car. But dealing with the company is such a train wreck at every single turn.
00:51:04 ◼ ► I just I hope nothing breaks on this car because now it's really mine and dealing with that so bad.
00:51:12 ◼ ► Yeah, you're really selling it well. This is what John sounded like, except for you, it's Tesla and for John, it was us. But that's OK.
00:51:23 ◼ ► Goodness. Well, you know, I'm just happy to know that the entire Internet will tell you that Tesla is going to show those old car companies how to do it right.
00:51:32 ◼ ► Because those old car companies definitely don't understand how to do a lease quickly and easily.
00:51:36 ◼ ► Here's the thing. The old car companies do so much stuff terribly that Tesla does really well.
00:51:44 ◼ ► And that's why I put up with all this crap, because, yeah, Tesla's a mess. You know what? So is Apple.
00:51:49 ◼ ► Apple's a mess. And we put up with all their stuff because we like their products. Right.
00:51:53 ◼ ► Apple's a train wreck in so many areas. And yet, you know, we were able to look past those, even though we complain.
00:52:03 ◼ ► Like, you know, we still choose to use the products, even though the company has a bunch of areas in which they're terrible.
00:52:14 ◼ ► You weigh the pros and cons and you go with what has more stuff that's important to you.
00:52:18 ◼ ► And with cars, most of the time that you own a car, you don't have to deal with the company that made it.
00:52:35 ◼ ► To be fair, Apple is way better at the important things that Apple needs to be good at than Tesla is, because Apple is really good at building its products, like physically.
00:52:42 ◼ ► Like, they're good at that. That's one of their core skills. They're also, I think, pretty good at selling them and collecting your money.
00:52:48 ◼ ► In fact, we just saw a thing recently. So when we were all ordering iPhones, there was that glitch where, like, within a minute of the time where you could order,
00:52:59 ◼ ► And so lots of people were impatient. They said, "All right, well, whatever the hell the problem is with Apple card, I'll just buy it on my Visa card or something." Right?
00:53:05 ◼ ► And I know at least one person who got an email from Apple after ordering their phone on a non-Apple card and says,
00:53:11 ◼ ► "Hey, we noticed that you tried to order your phone with the Apple card so you could get 3% back, but that failed due to a problem on our end and you completed your purchase with a different credit card.
00:53:24 ◼ ► So not only is Apple pretty good at collecting your money, pretty good at, we've talked about taking returns and customer service in their stores and not being sleazy when they sell you things and, you know, doing warranty repairs.
00:53:37 ◼ ► And like, you know, there are, but in general, the things that a computer company has to be good at, they're pretty good at.
00:53:42 ◼ ► Software is another thing, but I feel like on the software side of things, Tesla doesn't really have any high ground there either.
00:53:47 ◼ ► But, and software is weird and difficult and we're all programmers and we understand that that's a special case, right?
00:53:52 ◼ ► I would also say on the Apple's side of things, I think design recently, UI design, I think has, I mean, I know this is a big thing with Safari tabs.
00:54:00 ◼ ► I think UI design is now one of those areas of Apple where actually the software quality in the last like two years or so has been significantly better.
00:54:31 ◼ ► iOS 13 was terrible, but like the ones that have come after that quality wise have been great.
00:54:37 ◼ ► I have many design nitpicks with Big Sur. I haven't tried Mona Ray yet, but you know, but it seems like actually that, that Apple mostly has fixed their, their software quality issues of, of yesteryear.
00:54:53 ◼ ► Okay. That's fair. But yeah, I agree that like things are significantly better now in the quality area than they were two or three years ago.
00:55:00 ◼ ► And I think, and I think mostly like, how did they do that? Mostly by choosing not to ship things, which, you know, as we predicted when we used to complain about this even more, like the world doesn't end.
00:55:09 ◼ ► Oh, a feature's not ready? Yeah, it's disappointing that SharePlay isn't ready to go, but please, by all means, hold it back until it's ready.
00:55:15 ◼ ► Don't just ship it because it's 15.0. Every major release of everything has basically had features that end up MIA, like either because Apple pre announces that they're not going to be included or because in between the time they did some kind of, you know, keynote presentation and the time the thing ships, they're like, oh yeah, that's not ready yet.
00:55:30 ◼ ► So yeah, just hold it back or like doing mid, mid year releases like the Catalina 0.5 release that had, or, you know, the iOS 0.5 releases that have a whole bunch of features in it that were announced when the major OS was released.
00:55:42 ◼ ► I mean, obviously we would like to have them sooner, but this is the right choice. If it's not ready, don't ship it. So I think like pretty much all of the improvement is attributable to that new policy and I endorse it.
00:55:53 ◼ ► Yeah, like that really, it's, I think it has worked. Like we are seeing the results of that. You know, when, when you make a policy shift or a strategy shift like that or process shift, you know, you don't see the results instantly.
00:56:04 ◼ ► You see them over time. And I think we actually have seen that in the last couple of years, Apple software quality is better than it was before.
00:56:13 ◼ ► Again, it's, you're right. Like it's not, we're not out of the woods totally in certain areas yet especially, but, and I think on the Mac, I think it's worse than the platforms, but the direction we're heading is a positive one there.
00:56:26 ◼ ► Now most of, most of my concerns are about design. Like most, you know, they, I still can't believe that the Big Sur notifications are the same in modern day. That to me is amazing.
00:56:37 ◼ ► And of course you can do Safari and everything like, you know, we're, we're definitely to the point now where if Apple says we've redesigned, you know, insert thing that you rely on, there's no more excitement there.
00:56:48 ◼ ► Now you're just like, Oh crap. Yeah. It's like, what, what, how did they ruin it? Like that's, that's, that's where your mind goes instantly because you know, that's, that's probably the bigger concern then.
00:56:58 ◼ ► Ooh, what's new? And that's, that's a bad place to be. I think they've certainly, you know, they've, they have some problems with their design high ground these days, especially software design is really like Harvard.
00:57:08 ◼ ► It seems fine. Software design is, is still a mess in certain areas. And it seems like the process that, that should weed out like directions or decisions that don't work.
00:57:21 ◼ ► Things that, things that like, Hey, you know what, this thing that we try in the labs or that we had the design idea for which we built it and it turns out it's not usable.
00:57:29 ◼ ► And so let's not ship that that process is clearly broken in a really big way. So design wise, they have, they're way off in the woods and they have problems, big problems that need to work out.
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00:59:30 ◼ ► So HelloFresh.com/ATP14, promo code ATP14. Thank you so much for sponsoring our show to HelloFresh, America's number one meal kit.
00:59:45 ◼ ► We heard rumors a few weeks ago, and we haven't had time to talk about it, that the upcoming potential 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pro display resolutions may have been revealed in the latest at that time Mac OS Monterey Beta.
01:00:00 ◼ ► So somebody had found that there are two new display resolutions found in the Monterey Beta 7. They're listed at 3456 by 2234 retina and 3024 by 1864 retina.
01:00:13 ◼ ► And as per Mac rumors, 1964, sorry, 1964. They do not correspond to resolutions of the built in displays of any current or previous Apple products.
01:00:22 ◼ ► So based on the resolutions themselves and their relationships to each other, it seems likely that these new resolutions are for the upcoming MacBook Pro.
01:00:30 ◼ ► The current 16 inch MacBook Pro has a native display resolution of 3072 by 1920, while the current 13 inch MacBook Pro's native resolution is 2560 by 1600, giving both machines a pixel density of about 226 or 227 pixels per inch.
01:00:47 ◼ ► If these new resolutions were indeed for the upcoming MacBook Pro models, they would represent an increase in pixel density to around 250 pixels per inch, which notably would allow for native 2x retina as the default setting for these new machines.
01:01:00 ◼ ► So with the apparent increased pixel density of these upcoming MacBook Pro models, a true 2x retina setting would fall right in the sweet spot for most users.
01:01:08 ◼ ► With the 16 inch model yielding a looks like resolution of 1728 by 1117 and the 14 inch at 1512 by 962.
01:01:31 ◼ ► So my 13 inch MacBook Pro that I have right now, it defaults to 1440 by 900 and I run it at the quote unquote more space resolution, which is 1680 by 1050.
01:01:42 ◼ ► And again, they're saying the native, the 2x native for the 14 inch would be 1512 by 982.
01:01:48 ◼ ► So this is continuing the trend and the rumors of the upcoming MacBook Pros of basically being complete wish fulfilling for all of our complaints about Apple's laptops for the past like five years.
01:02:00 ◼ ► It's going to have an HDMI port, it's going to have an SD card slot, it's going to have magsafe, it's going to be smaller, lighter, faster, and better battery life.
01:02:10 ◼ ► I don't think they've missed practically anything in the rumors of what this thing is going to be.
01:02:20 ◼ ► I'm pretty sure all the current rumors and all our past discussion and my current thinking continued to think that if these when these things come out, they're not going to have A15 cores inside them.
01:02:31 ◼ ► It's going to be an M1X, meaning it's the A14 derived cores that are in the M1, just more of them with a much bigger GPU.
01:02:41 ◼ ► I don't think there's been any rumors that say, oh yeah, fully expect these new MacBook Pros to have A15 drive things. They're not going to.
01:03:03 ◼ ► I think maybe the only thing they're missing is that we never, I mean, this is getting not just into like, here's what's wrong with your laptop.
01:03:12 ◼ ► And I don't think there's any OLED rumors, just mini LED rumors for the screens, maybe.
01:03:18 ◼ ► But other than that, like this is, you know, and those are sort of like things we didn't dare to even hope.
01:03:26 ◼ ► And this, again, if rumors are to be believed, in theory, sometime, you know, in the fall,
01:03:32 ◼ ► Apple could have an event that rolls out the official release of Monterey and these two new laptops.
01:03:38 ◼ ► But there are amazing chips in them and they'll be awesome and we'll love them if all the rumors come true.
01:03:43 ◼ ► And if they don't, if we get like 50 percent of what's rumored, they'll still be great.
01:03:47 ◼ ► Again, assuming they don't re-break the keyboard, but I think they learned that lesson.
01:03:51 ◼ ► What I like about all the rumors about this computer so far, these computers so far, is that they all seem like they're pretty plausible.
01:03:59 ◼ ► And they all seem to be pretty well supported by like, you know, certain sources in the industry that tend to be reliable or certain analysts that tend to be reliable.
01:04:07 ◼ ► And so it does kind of seem like, you know, these computers are out there to like, you know, settle all debts, like just settle all old business or whatever the phrase is that I'm trying to reference.
01:04:20 ◼ ► Yeah. So anyway, like, I love that these really by all accounts seem to be laptops designed after Apple has heard everyone's complaints with the previous generation.
01:04:35 ◼ ► Like they, you know, they fixed the keyboard a couple of years back because that was like really on fire.
01:04:40 ◼ ► That was but that was a fix that otherwise didn't really change anything else about about those computers.
01:04:46 ◼ ► Now, you know, this is going to be the first total like design update for the entire computer all around since 2016, really, for most of these models.
01:04:56 ◼ ► This to throw in the possibility that they might also make the make the retina screens in the laptops true 2x for the first time.
01:05:14 ◼ ► Apple spends a lot of time and money and resources making really great displays in all of their products.
01:05:24 ◼ ► They invest so heavily in it, not because their customers necessarily always care because they care.
01:05:30 ◼ ► You know, this it's the kind of thing like, you know, Steve Jobs is always super obsessed with like display quality and and would push for features like this where, you know, even though your customers aren't asking you to make the screen super high res or to make the things certain, you know, having certain color accuracies or, you know, investing heavily in HDR stuff or, you know, things like true tone.
01:05:53 ◼ ► That's the kind of thing that customers don't ask for. And oftentimes, the market doesn't reward you for it as much as as is as you put into it.
01:06:02 ◼ ► But you do it because you just want your things to be really great. You really want you want you want to have really great screens that have really great image quality, even if 90% of the customers won't even notice you do it because it's right and because it's good.
01:06:15 ◼ ► The era of retina to date has only had the top quality on the desktop retina screens, which there haven't been very many.
01:06:26 ◼ ► So most people using Macs are using laptops and those laptops mostly these days ever since 2016 I believe or 2015 at least or somewhere around there have shipped by default. The default resolution is not true to X of the pixels.
01:06:45 ◼ ► It is a scaled resolution. The pixels are a little bit less than that. They're like, it's like if you drop it down one notch, then that's the true to X resolution. But the default has been the like, you know, a little bit more than that.
01:06:59 ◼ ► And it it renders it into a buffer and scales it to the physical pixels and it makes everything a little bit blurry. And it's not a huge difference. Most people don't notice.
01:07:09 ◼ ► But I notice and I can't be the only one because my eyes aren't even that great anymore. Obviously, I know other people notice and like it's the kind of thing that when you compare the visual quality of the screen, the sharpness of the pixels.
01:07:23 ◼ ► When you compare that between the true to X mode and the default scaling mode of one notch up, you can see the difference and you might you can decide whether you care or not.
01:07:33 ◼ ► That's up to you. But if you look for that difference, you will see it. And there's a reason why on Apple's other products it for almost all of them except for the retina laptops with occasional like, you know, low end phones here and there.
01:07:48 ◼ ► But for the most part, most of Apple's other products have true to X or three X multiplied pixels at their default resolutions like they don't usually pull this trick on anything else.
01:07:58 ◼ ► They've been pulling on laptops. I don't really know why except I assume like, you know, economy or battery life or whatever. But now that they have a chance to fix it and the rumor is that they might be in addition to fixing all these other shortcomings of the laptops for the last five years.
01:08:14 ◼ ► Oh, that would just be so wonderful. I really, really hope that they finally are going to give us the screens in the laptops that are as good as they say they are because they talk all the big talk about how great their screens are.
01:08:29 ◼ ► But as long as they're shipping them in default scaling modes that make everything a little bit blurry, they're not living up to their potential. And a lot of that effort, I think, is oversold or wasted.
01:08:38 ◼ ► So to have truly sharp, awesome quality screens in our laptops that live up to their promises and their ideals would be great. And so I really hope this rumor is true.
01:08:51 ◼ ► Yeah, I remember initially part of the sort of excuse from, you know, people making excuses for Apple because Apple didn't really say this too much themselves, at least not in public, was that if we native, you know, native res by default, we'd use more battery, right? Because more pixels and, you know, it costs more power to do that.
01:09:09 ◼ ► So, hey, this is our very first retina MacBook Air and no, we can't. Although you said they'd never done native 2x. The original, the original retina MacBook Pro wasn't also wasn't native 2x?
01:09:26 ◼ ► Yes, the predecessor before was 1680 across at its highest level. So, yeah, it's 1440 across point wise on the fifth unit retina and where it stayed. And the second unit is just a little bit more because they made the screen a little bigger, but it's that same like scale or the same density rather.
01:09:42 ◼ ► Yeah, but but but that was the excuse. It was like, well, it would you know, there's so many more pixels. Give us a break. Like, yes, there is a downgrade in apparent resolution. But, you know, it's very interesting.
01:09:51 ◼ ► But as the years wore on, that excuse became less and less convincing as, you know, tons of competitors had high res screens.
01:09:57 ◼ ► And and then at a certain point, you could say like, OK, even if it costs more battery, like on the big one, you know, 16 inch, just do it or offer it as an option.
01:10:04 ◼ ► Let people decide to make that tradeoff. But with the advent of Apple's ARM chips, we know that battery life is phenomenal now.
01:10:17 ◼ ► You know, again, based on the assumption that this screen actually does use more power than the previous one. Who knows?
01:10:23 ◼ ► I mean, especially if it's many led, there may be some variance with like the super bright HDR backlight with the many led stuff or whatever.
01:10:30 ◼ ► I don't actually know how it comes down in terms of comparing with it compared to its predecessor and total power draw.
01:10:41 ◼ ► When someone buys the 16 inch top of the line laptop, know there's no more 17 inch thing.
01:10:46 ◼ ► At the very least, give them the option for this. And if they can make it standard across the board, that's great, too.
01:10:50 ◼ ► And if you look at the apparent resolution, it is I mean, as Casey pointed out, it would be for him a downgrade from his more space setting that he has it on to go into native to access.
01:10:59 ◼ ► But, you know, at least he can still make that trade off. And it also means that if he does go to the sort of scaled up factor, perhaps there would be less apparent blurring because the DPI of the screen is just higher.
01:11:10 ◼ ► Although again, in Casey's case, especially when he's rocking one contact, it probably doesn't matter.
01:11:14 ◼ ► This is true. This is true. I know. So more generally, how do you guys see the laptops coming?
01:11:23 ◼ ► Because, Jon, you mentioned this a minute ago, like this is there if you believe some of the rumors, they're supposed to have SD card slots, they're supposed to have HDMI, they're supposed to have MagSafe, they're supposed to be getting rid of the touch bar.
01:11:35 ◼ ► Like all of these things that we've all to some degree been begging for. I think some of us more than others in different orders than others.
01:11:49 ◼ ► So do we think, gentlemen, that this is really happening? Like to my eyes, I would be slightly surprised if we got MagSafe again.
01:11:59 ◼ ► Honestly, I'd be more than a little surprised if the touch bar went away. I would be moderately surprised if HDMI ended up on there, like without some sort of adapter.
01:12:09 ◼ ► I think the only thing that wouldn't surprise me is if the SD card slot came back. Like that's thin and it's not. I don't think it takes up a whole lot of room. That makes sense to me.
01:12:17 ◼ ► But everything else I find mildly surprising. I guess for me that the next least surprising thing would be some flavor of MagSafe.
01:12:25 ◼ ► And then maybe HDMI would be pretty surprising, but not totally surprising. But I think getting rid of the touch bar, I would be very surprised if it happened.
01:12:35 ◼ ► And I don't have strong feelings about the touch bar one way or the other. Like I don't actively dislike it, but I definitely don't actively like it either.
01:12:42 ◼ ► So whatever. But Marco, how do you feel, let's take those four SD, HDMI, MagSafe and touch bar. Do you think that any or all of these are realistic?
01:12:57 ◼ ► SD I think I would be very surprised. I want it. I'm one of the people who actually would use it and I want it. And when I don't have it.
01:13:28 ◼ ► SD Yeah, I saw it occasionally. Yeah, I occasionally have to like, you know, put some ROMs on a flash cart for something. Like, it's a weird thing when you're a nerd.
01:13:39 ◼ ► You use SD cards in unexpected ways, unexpected times. I occasionally have to use an SD card.
01:13:44 ◼ ► So I hope they bring that back. But I think the SD card would actually be the most surprising thing for me if they did.
01:13:50 ◼ ► Because it seems like that is the thing that is, even though I would find a lot of value and many other people would find a lot of value.
01:13:57 ◼ ► Including almost everyone who they pitched the ProLapPops to in their marketing materials, all the video producers.
01:14:03 ◼ ► But it's... and all the audio. It's like, if you look at like the people who use Apple's products in Apple's own marketing materials, all of them would use the SD card slot.
01:14:16 ◼ ► But I also, that seems like it is like the most like old thing in this list that I think Apple would try to find a way not to have.
01:14:27 ◼ ► It's also, it would take a decent amount of, you know, width on the side of the computer. I don't know if they would be willing to spare the space for it.
01:14:40 ◼ ► HDMI is something I would probably never use myself, but I recognize is a very very common use.
01:14:48 ◼ ► Especially for people in businesses who plug into projectors and stuff like that. That's a very very common use.
01:14:54 ◼ ► And so I think if they can fit an HDMI port on a laptop, they definitely should have one.
01:15:00 ◼ ► Because I've always been, I've been saying, you know, for five years now, like ever since the dongle generation.
01:15:05 ◼ ► Most people should not need a dongle. If most people need a dongle for their laptop, then the laptop should probably have had that port in the first place.
01:15:30 ◼ ► And if you remove the need for most or all of those things in some way, and I think time has mostly solved the USB-A need for most people.
01:15:41 ◼ ► That, time and cables. You can always just buy a cable that ends in USB-C and has whatever you need on the other end.
01:15:48 ◼ ► So USB-A, the need for that is very low, I think, in a modern laptop design these days.
01:15:58 ◼ ► So, if they can do that, that's great. MagSafe, I hope they bring back, just because I think it would be cool.
01:16:19 ◼ ► I'm eyeing the 14 inch hard here for myself, and probably the 16 for Tiff actually, because she's using my 16 and it's starting to get a little weird.
01:16:33 ◼ ► USB-C charging has been great for me in most ways. The charger is not as nice, but that's Apple's fault, not USB-C's fault.
01:16:48 ◼ ► Like, okay, now we have two different ways to charge this computer, and what is this new kind of port, and do we have space for it and everything.
01:16:53 ◼ ► And then the Touch Bar, obviously you know I hate the Touch Bar, and I'm so happy on my MacBook Air that it doesn't have the Touch Bar, but does have Touch ID.
01:17:04 ◼ ► And, you know, Apple, as I was mentioning earlier, their design process has often seemed broken in the feedback loop, and how and if they correct things.
01:17:16 ◼ ► The hardware design team, for all of their faults with the butterfly keyboard, they did eventually correct it.
01:17:24 ◼ ► I think Apple, if you look at Apple in general, over time, they do tend to correct bad product decisions, whether it's design or hardware.
01:17:43 ◼ ► They did correct it, probably three years longer than they probably should have taken them to correct it, but they did correct it.
01:17:49 ◼ ► I think the Touch Bar is going to have that similar kind of outcome, where it's clear that they were very stubbornly adamant that it was pretty great from the beginning.
01:17:58 ◼ ► But at some point, and a very soon point after they released it, they stopped, no pun intended, touching it.
01:18:10 ◼ ► If you look at what they unveiled in 2016, and then look at what it can do today, there's basically no difference.
01:18:17 ◼ ► They have done almost nothing to it, except continue to ship it in all of their pro laptops.
01:18:30 ◼ ► But their timeline for making hardware direction changes, on the Mac in particular, is a very slow, long timeline.
01:18:52 ◼ ► But maybe they decided the Touch Bar wasn't a bad enough problem to have to change their five year plan for this laptop design or whatever.
01:19:07 ◼ ► They won't even talk about it. It'll just be like, "Hey, here's a new laptop. Look at all these cool things."
01:19:11 ◼ ► The Touch Bar will just not be mentioned at all. It will be gone, and they will have corrected their mistake just after a very, very long wait.
01:19:22 ◼ ► Yeah, so if these rumors that have been building up over time have any truth to them whatsoever, which is always a question, but if they do have any, it makes me think, like Marco said, that this is a rethinking of the hardware with more respect for things that the users want to do.
01:19:40 ◼ ► That the proposition put forward by the laptops where they said it's just going to have a bunch of USB-C shaped holes in the side of that's it.
01:19:46 ◼ ► That design, they gave that the old college try again way too long than they should have, and they've reconsidered.
01:19:54 ◼ ► And if they've reconsidered, I see almost no reason that we shouldn't get all this on the 16 inch because there's just so much room.
01:20:02 ◼ ► The ARM chips that are going to be in this are a lot of the reason why I feel like there's no excuse to not get all this stuff.
01:20:08 ◼ ► Because you just have so much more headroom, like you have room to cut into your battery space because the battery life is going to be phenomenal.
01:20:18 ◼ ► We know that. We've seen the M1 things that are out there, and the 16 inch is so much bigger.
01:20:22 ◼ ► You can put really big batteries in there, shaving off a little bit of room for even something as big as an SD card slot on HDMI on the 16 inch.
01:20:30 ◼ ► You've got that room. On the 14 inch it's questionable, like we know what things will come.
01:20:34 ◼ ► I see no reason not to get all of this stuff with the possible exception of MagSafe just because the rumors that I've seen about it have been like,
01:20:46 ◼ ► It's hard to tell what you're seeing on the side of the computer in terms of, "Is that a MagSafe thing or is that some other..."
01:20:57 ◼ ► That's the only one that's questionable in terms of is the rumor even remotely accurate about what you're getting.
01:21:07 ◼ ► Again, if these rumors have any credibility, I see no reason why we shouldn't just get all of them.
01:21:12 ◼ ► Because Apple has shipped them all before in laptops in a much more difficult environment where their battery life was terrible.
01:21:19 ◼ ► Granted, the laptops were a little bit thicker then too, but the battery life was terrible.
01:21:28 ◼ ► And the Touch Bar is the easiest thing in the world. Like Marco said, "Just don't mention that again."
01:21:38 ◼ ► And by the way, that also saves you power and space and complexity and all such other stuff.
01:21:41 ◼ ► So I'm still on board with saying, "Look, if these rumors are true, why do we have to be like, 'Oh, well..."
01:21:47 ◼ ► What you're asking is, "Which one of these things seems like outside the ethos of Apple?"
01:21:58 ◼ ► But I feel like the entire premise of these computers, the premise of the rumors is that they've changed the ethos.
01:22:04 ◼ ► And once you change the ethos to, "I'm not trying to make a machine with just one kind of uniform shaped hole on the outside."
01:22:10 ◼ ► And the new ethos is, like Marco said, "Let's find out what people actually want and try to make it so most people don't have to use a dongle."
01:22:18 ◼ ► And so I don't think someone would come into the room and say, "Yeah, but what about the ethos of where we just want everything to be smooth on the outside?"
01:22:29 ◼ ► Again, I'm not saying this is the set of ports, but whatever the set they decided is, that basically this is the set where most people won't have to use a dongle.
01:22:44 ◼ ► And there shouldn't be any sort of whittling down and bargaining down because, again, to what end?
01:22:56 ◼ ► It's like, "No, we already decided this is the sweet spot based on probably actual metrics in terms of port use, surveys, stuff like that."
01:23:03 ◼ ► Rather than just saying, "People want what they want, but I'm going to tell them what they want."
01:23:21 ◼ ► Some people think it's okay, but in the grand scheme of things, is it worth the design cost?
01:23:25 ◼ ► Is it worth the parts cost, the design cost, maintaining it, doing the weird, you know, the way it interacts with the rest of the OS and all that other stuff?"
01:23:42 ◼ ► The only thing that's relevant is what set of features has Apple decided, you know, serves the most customers.
01:23:59 ◼ ► Like, I can see the 16-inch having more slots than the 14-inch just because it's bigger and you have more room for everything in there.
01:24:11 ◼ ► At this point, I want everything on this list, and I think it's reasonable to get everything on this list.
01:24:15 ◼ ► When you were still working at an office, were you plugging into Projectors or anything frequently?
01:24:27 ◼ ► I lived through Dongle Geddon when our whole company had to switch, and it became -- I can tell you, what it came to is,
01:24:34 ◼ ► when you came into a meeting, whoever still had one of the "old laptops," they were the highest and mightiest in the room.
01:24:43 ◼ ► It was like, "Oh, you're so lucky, you still have one of the old laptops, you can just plug right into the projector."
01:24:47 ◼ ► And all of us, they did the thing where they tried to give everyone dongles, but then people would lose them,
01:24:51 ◼ ► and then they'd write their names on them, so if they left it in the room, someone would steal it.
01:24:54 ◼ ► And then they started essentially chaining the dongles with one of those little metal wire thingies,
01:25:03 ◼ ► They would just chain it to the cord that it attaches to, and so every conference room had sort of like a --
01:25:09 ◼ ► not a cinder block chain, but like a chained dongle to the thing, but then if that dongle broke,
01:25:16 ◼ ► It was something for like, you know, more than half of my time at my current company was just like,
01:25:22 ◼ ► "Oh, you come into the room and you plug into the projector," which I thought was barbaric,
01:25:25 ◼ ► and we should all just attach Apple TVs and do all AirPlay, but unfortunately there was a bunch of PC laptop users
01:25:29 ◼ ► in the company who didn't agree with that. But either way, at least you could just plug right into the projector.
01:25:33 ◼ ► And it would happen if like, this is what we would do in the days before sophisticated software
01:25:38 ◼ ► for changing who was projecting. If one person was projecting, the other person wasn't projecting,
01:25:42 ◼ ► you just could yank, throw the cord over to them, they plug it in, and now they're off, right?
01:25:46 ◼ ► That's how -- that's the sort of the hardware way of like handing off what we do in Zoom now.
01:25:50 ◼ ► Like, "Oh, I'm going to share my screen. How I'm going to share my --" like, this is all in-person stuff,
01:25:57 ◼ ► And it was like the first five minutes of every meeting was just complaining about dongles.
01:26:05 ◼ ► And again, that's the question, like the non-computer people in the company, it would just be like,
01:26:09 ◼ ► "Why did they change them like this? Everyone hates it." And people would nod and say, "Yeah, I don't understand it."
01:26:21 ◼ ► The worst part is I hear -- I mean, obviously we hear this because there's way more iOS users than Mac users,
01:26:25 ◼ ► but so many people -- more people, I've heard, complain about the iOS on the iOS one you could fix to be back to normal.
01:26:30 ◼ ► And they don't know that. Like, I don't blame them for not knowing it because the default is weird.
01:26:34 ◼ ► And people -- without direction, most people will just simply complain and never find that you can switch iOS Safari back to normal.
01:26:41 ◼ ► But yeah, because there's so many more iOS users, that's what they're complaining about, and I feel like,
01:26:45 ◼ ► "Be glad you're not looking at the Mac version." But again, we said this before, the Mac version hasn't shipped yet.
01:27:02 ◼ ► What they're doing in Big Sur -- which, by the way, I still refuse to run that software update, right?
01:27:06 ◼ ► What they've done in Big Sur by inflicting it upon people is terrible, but Big Sur is, in theory, going away.
01:27:13 ◼ ► And when Monterey comes out, they do still have one remaining chance to repent, like they did in iOS,
01:27:18 ◼ ► and say, "You know what? This was a mistake, and even though we shipped that weird thing on Big Sur, forget about that.
01:27:24 ◼ ► Bygones. We're going to fix it in Monterey." So, Apple, you still have a chance to do that.
01:27:33 ◼ ► Yeah, going back to the laptops for a second, I think, to kind of sum up, I think what I'm most looking forward to with all these rumors for these new laptops is that --
01:27:43 ◼ ► and I apologize, I've said this before over the last five years -- but the 2016 forward generation of laptops was a product that forced the users to adopt to it,
01:27:56 ◼ ► rather than adopting to what users needed. It was telling people, "This is better. You fix your life so it works with this."
01:28:06 ◼ ► Whereas the rumored changes to this laptop are, "Hey, we're making a product that is actually what you wanted, and will actually fit into your actual needs,
01:28:20 ◼ ► And that, I think, is a shift from an arrogant attitude to a humble one. And that's very important for good product design.
01:28:29 ◼ ► People always glorify the arrogance of, "We're going to make this firm decision, and we're going to take away all the old ports on the iMac, and we're going to make amazing stuff."
01:28:40 ◼ ► And that works sometimes. It's sometimes occasionally right, but you can't lose sight of all the times that it's not. And you very quickly start loving the smell of your own farts too much to recognize when your decisions are actually not as good,
01:28:57 ◼ ► And I think the move to ARM, this is one of the benefits. Not to say that they couldn't have fixed their laptops without it, but in any kind of internal debate about this change of philosophy that you just described,
01:29:10 ◼ ► "We thought we had an idea what the future of laptops were going to be like, and we were wrong. Let's be humble about that and let's revisit."
01:29:16 ◼ ► And then when you say, "Okay, what should they look like now? Let's look on this and see what do people actually use their laptops for, which things we thought were going away haven't gone away," and all that stuff.
01:29:28 ◼ ► When all that stuff comes up and they say, "Okay, you end up with this list on the whiteboard of, 'Are we really going to add all this stuff back?'"
01:29:34 ◼ ► And someone starts pushing back and saying, "Yeah, but that's going to take up so much space, and it uses power and complexity."
01:29:39 ◼ ► And it's like you have this giant windfall of increased performance and decreased power consumption to say, "This is like a fraction of the windfall we've gotten from Apple Silicon.
01:29:51 ◼ ► Let's use it. Let's spend it to make our products better. It'll still have way better battery life. It'll still be way faster. It'll still be quieter and cooler, and we get all this stuff."
01:30:00 ◼ ► In some respects, when they did the M1 MacBook Air and all the other things, they just took their existing things, ripped out the insides, and just made them magically super-powered.
01:30:11 ◼ ► "Oh, now it's silent and cool and the battery lasts twice as long and it's twice as fast." It was just phenomenal.
01:30:16 ◼ ► But the philosophy represented by the outsider that stayed the same. I really want to see them spend those gains to make their products better.
01:30:24 ◼ ► And I hope that's why these rumors have a higher chance of success is because any pushback based on technical constraints is saying, "I see where you're coming from, but do you realize what a surplus we have now?
01:30:36 ◼ ► Please let's use that to fully embody this philosophy." In the same way that the previous ones tried their very best to fully embody the philosophy of, "There's only one size hole in the outside of this thing."
01:30:48 ◼ ► Minus headphones, but ignore that. And that's our philosophy, and we're going to really adhere to that as best we can.
01:30:55 ◼ ► I hope they are just as strongly adhering to the new philosophy, which is, "Let's consider what people actually do with their laptops and give them the tools to do that, especially on our biggest, most expensive, supposedly pro laptop."
01:31:08 ◼ ► In some ways also, if this is all big asterisk, if most of these rumors are true, it would represent a profound shift in attitude from ultra-minimalism.
01:31:22 ◼ ► And in the way of, "What's the least we can give you?" If you look at so much of this generation of laptops that is hopefully now outgoing, so much of that is defined by, "What is the least we can get away with giving you?" In terms of number of ports, types of ports, different hardware capabilities, how nice the power brick can be, we're going to remove the light-up logo and the battery indicators.
01:31:49 ◼ ► There was so much removed because there was this ridiculous, over-the-top obsession with minimalism.
01:32:01 ◼ ► The ideology of Apple is over-obsession with minimalism to a fault, trying to sell the idea of less is more way to the extreme.
01:32:12 ◼ ► Trying to basically tell us, "Hey, we're going to take stuff away and you're going to be thankful and actually pay more for it." That's a problem now in the software side.
01:32:20 ◼ ► But if the laptops go in this new direction, then that will represent a profound change in the hardware side.
01:32:27 ◼ ► Whenever we criticize things that Apple does or says, we hear from a lot of Apple fans who strike back at us, some of whom are also Apple employees.
01:32:49 ◼ ► Or critics saying, "You don't actually need that thing." Or, "Why should Apple cater to your needs? You're just XYZ."
01:32:59 ◼ ► Ignoring the fact that developers are their biggest pro audience and podcasters are certainly not small in number.
01:33:06 ◼ ► There's been this attitude among Apple defenders for so long of obsessing over removing things and glorifying Apple when they remove things as if that is itself inherently a good thing.
01:33:21 ◼ ► If there's a feature on a laptop that these people don't use, they consider it a problem. What that worldview results in is an attitude of, "I don't need an SD card slot so they should just remove it."
01:33:51 ◼ ► And it seems like that attitude permeated Apple's design and hardware choices for so long that they were just looking to see what else can we get rid of, for its own sake.
01:34:03 ◼ ► But I remember when I bought my G4 PowerBook, my first Mac, there were tons of hardware capabilities of that machine that I never used.
01:34:14 ◼ ► But I wasn't upset they were there. It had a PCMCIA slot of some kind. I never put a single thing in that slot.
01:34:22 ◼ ► But they should have had that slot because lots of people did use it. And when I buy a laptop or a computer, I want the things I buy to be versatile. I want them to be able to do lots of stuff even if I don't do those things.
01:34:35 ◼ ► I just said 20 minutes ago, I want them to add an HDMI port to the laptops again, even though I personally will probably never use it. Because I want that capability there for everyone because enough people do use it that it's worth having it in the product.
01:34:52 ◼ ► And again, and for all the Apple defenders who are going to yell at me like they always do, yeah, you know, go ahead, do your worst. But I'm just glad to see that Apple seems to be going this direction that they have finally realized like, okay, maybe they've realized that minimalism for its own sake is, frankly, bullshit.
01:35:12 ◼ ► Taking stuff away is not its own inherent gain. It might result in other gains, you know, maybe taking stuff away can make something less expensive or more reliable or thinner and lighter.
01:35:24 ◼ ► But if you're not actually achieving all those goals, then taking something away is is just take something away like you. Now you just have less congratulations. Now your computer can just do less or there's now more cases where you're gonna need some kind of external hardware or dongle or adapter or whatever.
01:35:40 ◼ ► And so to put out a line of laptops that goes in the direction that like, adds back things that not everyone is going to need. But some people will sometimes that's a great direction to go.
01:35:53 ◼ ► And that, I think would represent maturity and, you know, humbleness, certainly, but also just like, that will represent their design team getting better and moving past the just like minimalism for its own sake fallacy and into something that actually makes better products for their customers.
01:36:15 ◼ ► It seems to me, and I don't know the right words to verbalize this, which is unfortunate on a podcast, but here we go. It seems to me that pro machines for the last several years, especially, have meant to some degree, more depth rather than more breadth.
01:36:31 ◼ ► So like a pro machine means you're doubling down on USB C ports, or you're getting more RAM or more SSD, but you're not getting a variety of anything. And I think what we're all asking in various ways with various words is, yeah, we do want more depth, but we would also like more breath.
01:36:52 ◼ ► I would like to have an SD card slot. I mean, personally, I mean that both in a figurative and literal sense. Like me personally, I would like to have an SD card slot. And although I don't use them all the time, I use them probably a couple of times a month.
01:37:04 ◼ ► I wouldn't use an HDMI port more than maybe when I travel at most. But I agree with what you're saying, Marco. Like, even though it's not necessarily something that would dramatically change my life, it would dramatically change a lot of people's lives if and when we ever go back to the office.
01:37:19 ◼ ► So I'm all in on an HDMI port. Like, I want more breath, not necessarily more depth. I don't want any additional depth. I think the depth we've got is pretty good for the most part. I'd like more RAM, you know, hypothetically, says the guy with an Intel MacBook Pro, nevertheless.
01:37:35 ◼ ► But in principle, I think the amount of depth is mostly good, but I want a lot more breath. And we haven't really had that in a long time since Apple really went all in on USB-C. And I don't think it's unreasonable to get some of that back.
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01:39:44 ◼ ► Alright, let's do some Ask ATP. Johnny Oliver writes, "Do you think Apple should do better in the ergonomic computer accessory space? Personally, I find the Magic Mouse to really strain my wrist and the Magic Keyboard is very flat with no adjustments available.
01:39:59 ◼ ► I think Apple could lead in designing and producing ergonomic accessories which could introduce more users to alternatives which may help them avoid RSI and other injuries later in life.
01:40:11 ◼ ► You know, I agree with all of this. I don't see the Apple that we know today doing much of this, but if we really do get a more humble Apple, I forget which one of you just said that a minute ago, but if we really do get a more humble Apple, then yeah, absolutely, I'd love to see this.
01:40:27 ◼ ► I really enjoyed the Magic Mouse, but comfortable it was not. And that's part of the reason why I now use a trackpad, even though I swore I would never do that in a million years.
01:40:36 ◼ ► But I haven't used a Magic Mouse for more than a few minutes in probably a couple of years now. So I would love to see more ergonomic stuff.
01:40:43 ◼ ► I'd love to see Marco buy an Apple-produced split keyboard. And you know what? Maybe I would buy one too. But I just I don't see that happening in today's Apple, but maybe in tomorrow's. What do you think, John?
01:40:54 ◼ ► This is another example where the minimalism that Marco was just talking about has infected their design. A lot of their hardware design focuses heavily on minimalism of form.
01:41:04 ◼ ► The mouse is very small and slight. The minimalism manifests in the iMac not having a height adjustable stand because a non-height adjustable one is more simple and minimal.
01:41:13 ◼ ► Look, it's just a bent piece of metal. Look how simple and straightforward it is. You don't have to have any kind of mechanical mechanism to raise and lower that is more complicated and less straightforward.
01:41:24 ◼ ► So they try to just sort of say this is what we want to make and we don't want it to look awkward or lumpy or have lots of weird moving parts or be complicated.
01:41:35 ◼ ► We want it to be simple and elemental and so on and so forth. And that is very, very often exactly the wrong thing to do for hardware. And the worst part about this is two really bad parts.
01:41:43 ◼ ► One, Apple didn't used to be like this. Apple did make an ergonomic split keyboard way before anyone else was making it. Granted, it was back when everything Apple made was even more expensive than it is now.
01:41:51 ◼ ► And it wasn't a very good split keyboard, but it was a split keyboard. And so like it's not as if Apple has never been on this page.
01:42:01 ◼ ► And then the second terrible thing is that within modern Apple, making computer ergonomics better for users is exactly right up the middle of Apple's stated values in terms of health, safety, accessibility.
01:42:16 ◼ ► Like everything about doing things well ergonomically fits with every aspect of Apple's ethos.
01:42:22 ◼ ► And the only thing that is countering it is people in the design group who want the mouse to be as minimal as possible. And maybe the cost cutting of an adjustable stand would be more expensive and less durable and all that other stuff.
01:42:33 ◼ ► But I do wish this is an area where Apple would revisit older philosophies because it is so in keeping with what Apple does.
01:42:41 ◼ ► And I'm not saying Apple has to start making quote unquote weird accessories that look strange to normal people and confuse people.
01:42:47 ◼ ► Why does the mouse look like that? I'm scared and confused. I'm not saying they should do the most radical thing.
01:42:53 ◼ ► But you know, I always talk about OXO good grips or whatever. You can make products that concentrate heavily on ergonomics while still being good products for literally everybody.
01:43:08 ◼ ► OXO's products ostensibly concentrate heavily on being more accessible to people with more motor difficulties or whatever.
01:43:15 ◼ ► But you don't have to know that. If I just throw you the OXO can opener and you use it, you're like, "Oh, this is a good can opener."
01:43:20 ◼ ► You have no idea it was designed that way so that people with arthritis can open cans. You don't know that. You don't care about that.
01:43:25 ◼ ► You just see it as a good can opener. And it doesn't look super weird. You're not confused. "I can't figure out how to use this can opener."
01:43:31 ◼ ► It's a can opener and just every aspect of it is slightly better than your average can opener. It is more comfortable. It's easier to use.
01:43:38 ◼ ► You feel like you have more leverage. You have to apply less force. It's easier to grip. It doesn't slip out of your hand. There are no sharp parts.
01:43:44 ◼ ► Apple should be doing with literally every piece of hardware they have. On the laptops and stuff like that you're constrained because you do want it to be thin and light.
01:43:52 ◼ ► You don't have much leeway for other aspects. In general, I think the ergonomics of their laptops are reasonable. They're kind of slippery. They're kind of sharp-edged.
01:44:00 ◼ ► But, limitations of the form. But for things like, let's try to sell computers so that when people sit at a desk, the monitor is at the right height and the keyboard is the right way for them.
01:44:11 ◼ ► And the mouse supports their hand in a way that we think is ergonomic. There are just a few minor things you could do to Apple's current line to make it better.
01:44:20 ◼ ► If not making the iMac's height adjustable, then perhaps saying, "Have we chosen the right stand height for this?" Because I think they haven't. I think they're all a little bit too low.
01:44:29 ◼ ► If you look at the average height of a desk that someone sits at and then you add to that the height of the stand and the average height of a person or whatever, I think the iMac's non-adjustable stand is a little bit too low.
01:44:38 ◼ ► So I'm not saying you have to suddenly, the iMac's have to have this amazing ergonomic height adjustable stand that can accommodate very small and very tall people.
01:44:45 ◼ ► But maybe they just have missed the mark on what the non-adjustable height is. And the mouse, I'm not saying there's anything particularly wrong with the ergonomics of the mouse, but it only does fit one style of mousing in terms of how you put your hand on it.
01:45:00 ◼ ► If you don't use that style and try to use the Apple mouse, those are the people who don't like it. They say, "I try to hold it the way I want to hold the mouse, the way that's comfortable for me to do it, and this little tiny slippery piece of sushi just doesn't cut it for that."
01:45:11 ◼ ► And then the keyboards. This person's complaint is saying that the keyboard is flat with no adjustments available.
01:45:19 ◼ ► Unfortunately, decades of computer use has mostly trained people to the idea that the way a keyboard should adjust is by getting higher in the back.
01:45:27 ◼ ► The Apple Extended 2 keyboard did that. It was slanted up to begin with and it had an adjustable foot that would come down to make it even higher in the back.
01:45:35 ◼ ► That is exactly the opposite direction. You want your keyboard to slant. You do not want it to be higher in the back and lower in the front.
01:45:41 ◼ ► If anything, you want it to either be totally flat or lower in the back from an ergonomic standpoint.
01:45:46 ◼ ► But this does get into the area of weird things. You don't want to make the keyboard too weird because if you're not used to a split keyboard, it can be off-putting.
01:45:55 ◼ ► But Apple can offer more than one keyboard. They already do offer more than one keyboard. There's enough room in a trillion dollar company to have more than one keyboard.
01:46:04 ◼ ► So offer a split one. And in your regular one, I like the idea that these are mostly flat, even though they are technically a little bit higher in the back than in the front.
01:46:12 ◼ ► That's just kind of an education opportunity to maybe convince people that keyboards that go up in the back are not good.
01:46:19 ◼ ► To start by saying let's offer some keyboards that are now not weird to see a split keyboard.
01:46:27 ◼ ► It's a thing that lots of manufacturers sell. Some people like them. Apple should make one and sell it. And they should make and sell a good one.
01:46:33 ◼ ► And if Apple really wants to spend some of the trillions and trillions of dollars, whatever they have, you can do research into what makes a good, comfortable keyboard, mouse, and display setup.
01:46:43 ◼ ► Just like I really hope, and I'm pretty sure, that Apple is currently doing research on how do we make a comfortable, ergonomic AR/VR goggle thing that people can wear with different size and shape heads and be comfortable and not get sweaty and not mess their hair too much and not hurt their head.
01:47:05 ◼ ► But there are known things in the world of ergonomics that Apple could be doing with its personal computer hardware that they're just simply not doing because the design group has said it's more important for our mouse to look like a beautiful piece of sculpture than for it to be comfortable for the most number of people.
01:47:21 ◼ ► Did you see the amazing patent filing from about a month ago? With it had, this most of many people's heads exploded on the Magic Mouse, it was like a laptop where the mouse popped out the side, like you could stash it in the laptop and you could pop it out.
01:47:36 ◼ ► And it was, quote, a mouse that would look like it was about the size of a USB thumb drive kind of thing.
01:47:43 ◼ ► Have you seen the Microsoft Bendy mouse? My wife uses it. She's got it with her Surface thingy from work. Have you seen that one?
01:47:54 ◼ ► Yeah, so it flattens. It goes flat for like storage and it's so that it is basically the thickness of like a MacBook, right? Imagine just a flat thing, basically the length of a mouse, but the thickness of a MacBook.
01:48:06 ◼ ► But then when you use it, you take it out of your bag or whatever, you bend it so it becomes like a V-shape.
01:48:12 ◼ ► And it's like, you can see, it's a travel mouse. It's like, can we make it stow small for travel? But the problem with a lot of travel mice is like, oh, who wants to use a tiny thing that's easy to travel because it just feels too low and whatever.
01:48:24 ◼ ► It just makes me think of the Apple mouse. But when you bend that thing up, the reason it bends up is because it's more comfortable to use that way than a thing that is like, you know, a centimeter tall and totally flat all the way across.
01:48:32 ◼ ► Not that I'm saying this is the world's greatest mouse. It's just at least someone thought about, we want to make a travel mouse. It's small, it's light, it's easy to stow in any kind of bag.
01:48:39 ◼ ► And when you use it, it doesn't feel like you're trying to push around like this, you know, half a deck of cards.
01:48:45 ◼ ► All right, moving right along. Michael Hagen writes, "When using Safari with sites like Squarespace, YouTube, Facebook, and other not unpopular sites, I often get this alert saying, 'This website is using energy and may be reloaded.'"
01:49:00 ◼ ► "Any way to get rid of this, thoughts on this? Not only is it annoying, but doing literally the same thing in other browsers like Brave, Chrome, or Firefox does not affect my total system performance at all.
01:49:11 ◼ ► As far as I can tell, Apple has set the bar really low with what triggers this alert. I want to use Safari for Touch ID passwords, but it only takes one editing session in Squarespace to get reloaded without saving to keep me from using it long term."
01:49:23 ◼ ► I don't see this very often in any of the browsing that I do, but I have certainly seen it. I don't know if there's anything that can be done on the user side to really stop it from showing, is there?
01:49:35 ◼ ► I don't know if there's a plistack for this, but for people who don't know, like this is, like when this person says like, "Oh, you know, I do the same thing in other browsers and it doesn't affect my total system performance."
01:49:45 ◼ ► We know for a fact that the other browsers are not as energy efficient as Safari, and part of Safari's energy efficiency story is that Safari is trying to essentially blame the website, so that the user knows, "What's going on here is because you went to facebook.com and they're running some JavaScript that's grinding away in the background. That's killing your battery."
01:50:06 ◼ ► And I know you want to go to this website, but we want you to blame the right thing. Don't blame Safari or don't blame your Mac. It's this specific website that's currently eating your battery, and so it puts up that banner.
01:50:17 ◼ ► Now, I understand the philosophy there, but any kind of feature like this, where it's trying to like catch bad behavior, the key is in the thresholds. How do we decide at what point we throw up that banner?
01:50:29 ◼ ► Obviously, you wanted to throw up that banner if like some, you know, some JavaScript got injected into a site and now it's doing Bitcoin mining in the background or something and killing your battery, right?
01:50:38 ◼ ► That's an easy one, right? But it seems like what has happened with this feature over time is a lot of quote-unquote non-malicious websites, like regular websites that are not trying to do anything wrong and generally aren't really badly behaved,
01:50:51 ◼ ► just through the typical march of quote-unquote progress and, you know, the increase in features, let's say, of those websites, more JavaScript being used on websites, richer JavaScript, more client-side applications, more single-page applications.
01:51:06 ◼ ► More and more legitimate things are running afoul of this limit, and I think that's mostly the fault of Apple not sort of keeping up with the times and saying, "When we set these limits, this all seemed reasonable and no real legitimate website tripped them."
01:51:20 ◼ ► But now, many years later, it seems like we haven't adjusted the limits and lots of websites people use every day throughout this banner, and I've experienced it as well, and it's like there's no recourse as a user.
01:51:30 ◼ ► You can either just not go to that website or constantly hit the little X to dismiss that message.
01:51:34 ◼ ► So unfortunately, Michael, I'm not aware of any way to disable that. There may be some hidden plist key. I don't think there is an exposed GUI thing to get it not to complain about that.
01:51:45 ◼ ► And yeah, you don't like feeling good about, like, "I'm using this website and I get this banner, and it has a warning," or sometimes it'll even just, like, as the warning is worded in this SKDP says, threaten to reload the page or reload the site to say, "It's just gotten out of hand. It's using too much memory, too much CPU, and I'm just going to reload it."
01:52:03 ◼ ► And if that was, like, the normal expected functionality of the site, it makes you want to use another browser.
01:52:09 ◼ ► So Safari, in its effort to encourage good behavior and apportion blame where it is more rightful to go, has resulted, with this feature being neglected over many years, essentially with people saying, "Well, I'm just going to abandon Safari and I'll go to a browser that doesn't complain,"
01:52:24 ◼ ► because in the end, it's the job of the computer to do what the user wants, and if the user wants to use YouTube or Facebook and they keep getting that banner in Safari, now it's a Safari problem.
01:52:34 ◼ ► Like, what's more likely, that people are going to stop using YouTube or stop using Safari? It's pretty easy. People are going to pick YouTube every time.
01:52:41 ◼ ► So Apple needs to get on it and either add a GUI preference to disable that feature for people who don't care, or at the very least readjust the thresholds for the modern world.
01:52:51 ◼ ► And finally, Yoni writes, "When, if ever, will the S-series chips get powerful and efficient enough to enable CarPlay on watchOS?" I don't ever see that being a thing, to be honest, but it is an interesting idea.
01:53:04 ◼ ► Yeah, so I think it's interesting to consider, well, what is CarPlay? Like, what exactly would this mean? As far as I can tell, what CarPlay actually is today is mostly the phone beaming a video stream to the car head units.
01:53:20 ◼ ► Like, the car head unit is basically giving Apple a window to play arbitrary video content into, and then providing some kind of interaction hooks, whether it's touch screen or the dial and button kind of controls.
01:53:35 ◼ ► But for the most part, the phone is rendering that screen and is sending it over to the car as a video stream.
01:53:41 ◼ ► So, it's worth thinking about, okay, well, if the watch is doing this, I assume what this means is, like, the CarPlay in the car would be able to control watch apps, basically.
01:53:51 ◼ ► So you wouldn't need your phone to be involved or even to have a phone, necessarily. So, okay, interesting question.
01:53:56 ◼ ► But what this would mean, first of all, is that the watch would have to be constantly streaming video over presumably local Wi-Fi to the car.
01:54:05 ◼ ► So, number one, that's going to be a pretty significant power draw for the watch, to basically be streaming video constantly, wirelessly.
01:54:13 ◼ ► So that's problem number one. Also, I think that transmitting data over Wi-Fi, I think, uses more energy by a noticeable amount than receiving it.
01:54:24 ◼ ► So, you know, the watch already takes a lot of power to use Wi-Fi at all, even when it's mostly receiving data, like in a download. If it's in a mostly transmitting mode, that would probably be a pretty power hungry operation.
01:54:38 ◼ ► So, that alone, just the transmitting, not to mention, you know, the rendering of the video stream on the little tiny GPU on the watch, we're talking, you know, non-trivial amounts of power there.
01:54:49 ◼ ► But then, when you consider, well, what exactly are you controlling with CarPlay? You know, what CarPlay is on the phone is a remote interface to control iPhone apps that are constantly running.
01:55:01 ◼ ► Whether it's a navigation app or, you know, an audio app like Overcast, or, you know, maybe it's messages coming in from messaging apps, that kind of stuff.
01:55:10 ◼ ► Most of those apps are things that are constantly running, whether it's an audio app playing audio or a navigation doing like turn by turn.
01:55:17 ◼ ► So, you'd have to then say, alright, well, how good is the watch at running, constantly running apps, some of which are high power users like streaming audio or navigation directions?
01:55:28 ◼ ► And I just don't see it being a thing that Apple ever, ever enables because I think the actual question that Yanni's asking here of like, when will the S3 chips get powerful and efficient enough?
01:55:43 ◼ ► I think they're probably powerful enough today, but I don't think they have the power budget, like the battery life budget to actually provide a useful CarPlay experience without probably draining your watch battery.
01:55:56 ◼ ► Because also keep in mind that when your phone is in CarPlay mode, it's either plugged in with a cable to the car directly to do that at all, in which case it is being charged continuously.
01:56:06 ◼ ► Or if in one of the more modern like wireless CarPlay setups, you're very often putting the phone on like a Qi charger in the car or something while you're doing that just because it's convenient, you don't want to drain your phone battery.
01:56:18 ◼ ► And the watch is not going to be doing that. You're not going to take your watch off your wrist in your car to like plug onto a dock to charge it continuously while it's doing this.
01:56:28 ◼ ► So I don't think this is ever going to be a thing, even if the chip is ostensibly powerful enough to do it.
01:56:37 ◼ ► I don't think constantly streaming a video stream off the watch plus audio over Bluetooth plus running the apps continuously in the background for potentially hours if you're doing a long drive.
01:56:50 ◼ ► I don't think that's ever going to be a thing that the watch power envelope is really good at or that Apple would ever enable.
01:56:57 ◼ ► This is a good Infinite Timeline example because it gets to a nuance of a lot of these arguments.
01:57:02 ◼ ► But first, you mentioned like the current S series is probably powerful enough to do it today if it had a giant battery attached to it instead of the dinky little watch battery.
01:57:11 ◼ ► I think the limit of the current ones is they don't have enough RAM. They can't run iPhone caliber apps because they just have enough RAM.
01:57:17 ◼ ► But even if the battery was a giant car battery on the floor hooked up to your watch, it still can't do it because you can't run ways in the amount of RAM that the watch has.
01:57:27 ◼ ► CPU wise and capability wise, yes, you could totally do it because the watch is as powerful as an iPhone from several years ago probably at this point.
01:57:35 ◼ ► Especially if it had a giant battery hooked up to it and didn't have to sip battery and you could set aside all the other limits of the watch thing.
01:57:42 ◼ ► But the Infinite Timeline thing, eventually if you look at what you can do with an iPhone in CarPlay today, yeah, the watch will eventually, probably in our lifetime, be able to do that within the constraints of the watch power envelope.
01:57:58 ◼ ► The problem is, by that time, doing what you can do today will be seen as primitive because it will be 20 years from now and be like, "But I don't want to run ways from 2021, I want to run ways from 2040 and ways from 2040 as AR, VR, 3D, who knows what."
01:58:13 ◼ ► The bar for what you want out of CarPlay doesn't stay still, so you can look at what you can do with CarPlay today and I think the watch will eventually conquer all of that. It will have enough RAM, it will be fast enough, and it will even have enough battery power for a reasonable length car ride to run today's iPhone caliber app and display it on the screen.
01:58:33 ◼ ► But it will be 20 or 40 years from now and nobody will want to do that because it will be like playing an NES game. You can do it in an emulator and it's cute and everything, but when they say, "When will we be able to play games?" they don't mean play an NES game from 40 years ago, 30, I don't know how time works.
01:58:50 ◼ ► So that's the problem with different timeline things, is that hardware keeps getting more powerful, but our expectations of what we get from it keeps raising and the only time we ever really catch up with that is the thing I talked about in several past shows, is when we reach limits of human perception.
01:59:03 ◼ ► Streaming audio, if all you want to do is stream audio from your watch to your car, the current technology we have has more or less good enough audio quality, especially in a noisy environment like a car, that we're basically there.
01:59:19 ◼ ► And 40 years from now, it's not like the audio quality is going to be 40 times more information, it's fine. You can do that and you'll still be able to do it and there will be no further expectation because human hearing is not changing particularly rapidly.
01:59:34 ◼ ► So once we saturate the needs of human hearing, we're there. But for applications, as in software that can do arbitrary things on a screen, we are nowhere near the limits of what we might possibly want to do.
01:59:48 ◼ ► And so for the rest of our lifetimes for sure, though the watch will eventually be as powerful and capable as the phone today, no one will care because the phones alongside it will be so much more powerful and capable and will still be using wireless CarPlay or in Marco's case, not.
02:00:13 ◼ ► It is really, it's like I applaud them for bravely going their own way on that and trying to be like Tesla, but boy it looks like an Android tablet from the debut of the iPad. It looks so janky and slow.
02:00:28 ◼ ► It's like, oh, how could you, it's such an expensive car, could you just double the budget for CPU and GPU power just to make your UI? Because the UI itself, if you use a screenshot, it looks fine, but in motion it's like three frames per second.
02:00:43 ◼ ► So it's tough. Kudos to them for trying to do the thing. It fits right into Marco's car philosophy, which is janky first party UIs that you can't change.
02:00:56 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. I think, going back to the question for a second too, I think the whole idea, when the Apple Watch first came out, there was this assumption by a lot of tech fans, like oh, maybe the Watch someday will get powerful enough to replace phones and we won't even be carrying phones anymore.
02:01:14 ◼ ► And I think that's just never going to happen. A, what I always say, don't bet against the smartphone. But people love their phones for so many other reasons and use them for so many other reasons and just the form factor difference is so big, the power difference is so big.
02:01:29 ◼ ► Even if watches get better and better as technology progresses, phones are going to get better at the same rate. So when your watch is able to do certain things, well the phone has a screen that's like eight times bigger and a battery that's ten times bigger, the phone's going to always be able to do way more than the watch can.
02:01:46 ◼ ► Just because it is not a little bit bigger, it's a lot bigger. And that enables an order of magnitude of complexity and abilities and everything like that. So people are always going to have their phones and they're always going to be way more powerful than their watches.
02:02:03 ◼ ► A lot of people are not going to have a watch, but everyone is going to have a phone. The world where the watch has to become the primary device, I don't think that world is ever going to come. I think phones are the primary device. We're going to have something that is roughly hand-shaped that we keep in our pocket as our computing device that we bring with us everywhere, probably for the rest of our lifetimes.
02:02:25 ◼ ► The details will change, but that general form factor I think is with us to stay because it's so compelling. Something that lives on our wrist, that's strapped to our wrist is always going to be so much smaller and therefore more resource constrained and more interaction constrained.
02:02:40 ◼ ► This difference will always exist. We are never going to stop carrying phone-like objects and therefore the watch doesn't need to become the primary device and doesn't need to take over primary roles like this.
02:02:51 ◼ ► I don't think there's a big market of people who want to go driving without their phone. So I think this is never really going to happen for many reasons, including the fact that nobody really wants it. But many other good technical reasons as well.
02:03:04 ◼ ► I think there are a few too many absolutes in there. You can't say never because there is the possibility that a thing replaces the phone, but the thing that replaces the phone will also not be in the same constraints as the watch. Say we get really good ways to display images onto our retinas in 100 years or something.
02:03:25 ◼ ► Then you would just need a phone size and shape thing that is on your person somewhere, but you wouldn't need to hold it anymore because the display would be basically into your eyeballs through your magic glasses or contact lenses or whatever.
02:03:37 ◼ ► And the interface to it could be waving your hand around in front of you. There are ways to sort of get rid of the idea that you have to hold a rectangle in your hand.
02:03:47 ◼ ► But what wouldn't change is whatever that thing is, the power envelope of it would still continue to be better than the power envelope of the thing on your wrist.
02:03:56 ◼ ► Because especially if you don't need to hold it in your hand, you can make an equal volume of stuff, of computing stuff, and put it literally anywhere on your body. Put it on a belt clip because we know you love those.
02:04:06 ◼ ► Put it in your pocket and sew it into your clothing. But if you just have to take this volume of computing stuff, it's still a way bigger volume than you have on your wrist.
02:04:15 ◼ ► And so there will still always be that delta. And the only way you ever get past those things is if you reach some kind of limit of human perception or ability.
02:04:26 ◼ ► And for the foreseeable future, things that we can do with software projecting bitmapped images into our eyeballs and interacting with them, there is no limit out in the distance for what we might want to do with that.
02:04:39 ◼ ► You can think of things today that will absorb all the computing power that anyone can ever imagine in the next hundred years and then some.
02:04:47 ◼ ► Because literally everything we do, even something as simple as like, I want to render something in 3D.
02:04:52 ◼ ► Like, oh, we've already done that. We have so much computing power, it's fine. We've reached the limits. No, we haven't.
02:04:56 ◼ ► We can't even do trivial, straightforward ray tracing because it's too computationally expensive.
02:05:00 ◼ ► If you know how actual 3D graphics work, it's a series of terrible magic tricks that compromise everything about how we do it.
02:05:09 ◼ ► And if we just do it in the straightforward way, if we had like a billion times more computing power, whole new types of software that are not possible today would open up because we wouldn't have to do these terrible tricks and have these terrible limitations.
02:05:20 ◼ ► That's just one example, right? So there is no foreseeable future where, because software is just so arbitrary.
02:05:26 ◼ ► It's like, if you can imagine it, you can do it. It's not like audio or like moving pictures where it's like, well, our ears work as well as they do.
02:05:34 ◼ ► And once you can give them sound that is at the limits of their perception, there is no more you can go with that.
02:05:39 ◼ ► You can make different sounds, I'm not saying we're at the end of music, but in terms of the job of getting audio into our ear holes, we can do what we need to do right now.
02:05:48 ◼ ► Whereas in terms of putting pixels in front of you that you can interact with to do an arbitrary thing, that's not going to run out for a really, really long time.
02:06:01 ◼ ► Even if we're not quote unquote holding a phone in our hand and it's some VR thing or, you know, neural implant, whatever it is, if there has to be some amount of volume of computing stuff,
02:06:12 ◼ ► having a phone volume of computing stuff is always going to stop all over having a watch volume of computing stuff.
02:06:18 ◼ ► And that will be true until and unless we reach the limits of like, we can't think of anything else to do with projecting images and interacting with them.
02:06:28 ◼ ► Well, but then once we reach that point, we'll all switch over to web technologies and everything will just become 10 times more bloated and use all the resources.
02:06:35 ◼ ► Ideally, we will be in a future in which everyone does all their computing on a platform that is not owned by any one company.
02:08:15 ◼ ► Yeah, and I'm not planning on getting one, which means I'm going to get one probably ten minutes after pre-order's open.
02:08:43 ◼ ► Bye next week. It's anyone's guess what I say on the next episode of this show, but we'll see.
02:08:48 ◼ ► Yeah, I've never been less excited about a watch update than the Series 7, because it really does seem like...
02:08:55 ◼ ► The screen changed in a decent way, but in a way that I don't think is going to affect my life very much as a user of the watch.
02:09:04 ◼ ► But, I also like, you know, nothing else changed, you know, except for the faster charging, which is mostly for sleep tracking, which I don't do.
02:09:12 ◼ ► So, it's like, I don't really need that. That's not really solving anything for me, and that's about it.
02:09:20 ◼ ► If you look at Apple's marketing page for the Series 7, you can tell they're really grasping at straws.
02:09:26 ◼ ► Like, most of the benefits they tout for the Series 7 are not exclusive to the Series 7.
02:09:31 ◼ ► They're benefits that apply to everything, or that were also true in the Series 6, or that are part of WatchOS 8 more than the actual Series 7 hardware.
02:09:48 ◼ ► So, what's interesting is, you know, as we discussed when they announced the Series 7, the screen, as it gets towards the edges,
02:09:57 ◼ ► the screen goes far enough under the crystal that you can display things on the screen that are actually going to be, like, near the curving edges of the crystal.
02:10:07 ◼ ► So, they actually addressed this in the human interface guidelines for the watch, and they have, like, new layout guides.
02:10:14 ◼ ► So, not only do you have a safe area inset to put stuff away from the corners if you need it to not be cut off by the rounding of the corners,
02:10:21 ◼ ► but now there's also a different inset if you want something to be aligned so it's not going to be under a potentially curved area of the screen.
02:10:30 ◼ ► And they're saying, "Don't put text under the curved areas, but do let buttons extend into them."
02:10:37 ◼ ► Stuff like that. And any kind of, like, you know, screen size, like, big elements can extend into the curvy screen areas, but text shouldn't.
02:10:45 ◼ ► So, now I'm thinking, "Well, crap. I should probably have one of these to physically see and test on, so I can make sure my designs look good on this unique new screen attribute."
02:10:57 ◼ ► But at the same time, as a user, I could not be less excited about this update. I was going to skip it entirely.
02:11:03 ◼ ► So, I haven't decided yet what to do. I was thinking, like, "Maybe I could use that as an excuse to, like, switch materials or colors.
02:11:15 ◼ ► And I, even that, I'm like, "You know what? No, I just want this steel like I always get. I love this steel. It's great."
02:11:20 ◼ ► I don't have any excitement about this update, but I feel like as a developer, I need to be able to design my screens of my app with this new, you know, screen curvature in mind.
02:11:31 ◼ ► I think with the watch, because it has such a tiny battery, like, my wife has a Series 5 now, so she's going two generations.
02:11:38 ◼ ► And not that she has particular complaints about her watch batteries, but after two years, your watch battery, especially if you really heavily use your watch, it's probably a little bit tired.
02:11:46 ◼ ► And so, like you said, maybe it's not that big of an upgrade over the 6, but it's a little bit of a benefit if you just have a 5.
02:11:53 ◼ ► So, you know, the screen thing aside, even if it was just, like, slightly faster than the 5 and had a fresh battery, it would probably be worthwhile for my wife.
02:12:02 ◼ ► Because she wears her Apple Watch every day. She's 100% on board with the Apple Watch lifestyle.
02:12:06 ◼ ► We were buying her new Apple Watches every single year, but she skipped the 6 year because it just didn't seem like that big of an upgrade.
02:12:11 ◼ ► But now, I mean, I feel like this is the most normal piece of her relationship with Apple hardware. It's like, "Oh, I just got one this year. I don't need to get one next year."
02:12:18 ◼ ► But eventually, it's two years, your battery's getting a little tired, the new one comes out, it's got a bigger screen, it's brighter, you know, it's got maybe a couple new features, and you end up getting one.
02:12:28 ◼ ► So that's why she's getting one. Like, she, you know, I'd happily get her a new watch every single year if she wanted it, because she uses it a lot.
02:12:36 ◼ ► It's like, this is an important device in your life. It's practically more important than your phone, although now half the time when I see my wife, she doesn't.
02:12:43 ◼ ► She has her phone, but if you see her in real life, she's often wielding 2-3 iPhones, kind of like Marco, but on purpose.
02:12:51 ◼ ► Because she Pokémon Go's on multiple iPhones. Like, recent iPhones that we've gotten, instead of being handed down to the kids, they get handed down to her.
02:12:58 ◼ ► She's using my old phone, she's using my XS, and I think she's, I don't know what other phone she's using, she's got some pretty good,
02:13:04 ◼ ► but she doesn't want, you don't want a slow phone for Pokémon Go, because it's a demanding game, so it's not like she has crappy phones,
02:13:09 ◼ ► so instead we just get the kids new phones, like not the top of the line ones, but they get, you know, newly purchased mid-pack iPhones,