00:00:00 ◼ ► I think I've mentioned this once on the show, but the key to getting an Ask ATP answered
00:00:08 ◼ ► is generally speaking to have tweeted it Wednesday mornings. Now obviously today's not Wednesday, so this is...
00:00:16 ◼ ► Actually, well, so that, okay, let me back up a half step. It used to be that I was the one who chose and volunteered to do all the Ask ATPs. The last couple of months...
00:00:27 ◼ ► Well, maybe not all of the Ask ATPs, but I feel like there was a long stretch of time...
00:00:35 ◼ ► Anyway, I feel like I did the lion's share of the Ask ATP, and I'm not complaining about that. I think that's perfectly reasonable.
00:00:47 ◼ ► Give it a false premise, Casey. Anything follows. So I'm just trying to keep you on track.
00:00:50 ◼ ► Whether or not it's invented, whether or not it's true, my feelings that you cannot f***ing argue with are that I did the overwhelming majority.
00:01:01 ◼ ► Alright, so normally we would start with follow-up, but I should make it plain that we are recording on Sunday the 18th of August, and we are doing that because your two favorite hosts in the show...
00:01:14 ◼ ► That's not true, but whatever. Two of the hosts of the show are going to be in San Francisco this week, so we needed to record early. We're going to be in San Francisco because Relay FM turned five this very day on the 18th of August.
00:01:25 ◼ ► So congratulations to our friends, Steven and Mike, and everyone else at Relay, including the three of us.
00:01:31 ◼ ► Congratulations for turning five. That's a very, very cool achievement, and I am glad that the three of us have had a very small part in it.
00:01:39 ◼ ► That aside, we should start with follow-up, and Nate Liman had something to say, but I don't care, so let's move on.
00:01:45 ◼ ► Steven Howell writes, "Regarding Apple laptop..." Are you really letting me get away with this? I'm very surprised.
00:01:52 ◼ ► I should have just soldiered on, but I felt guilty. Nate Liman writes, "Store brand Velveeta is 'smooth-melting cheese loaf.'"
00:02:02 ◼ ► I couldn't even say it with a straight face. "Is smooth-melting cheese loaf at Safeway, which is a grocery store here in the United States."
00:02:16 ◼ ► Whether it's beloved Velveeta, actually, whether there was a, like, cheap imitation or store brand version of Velveeta,
00:02:22 ◼ ► and there actually apparently is, at Safeway, named "smooth-melting cheese loaf," which...
00:02:29 ◼ ► I mean, Velveeta itself is already pretty inexpensive, pretty crappy. How do you make Velveeta cheaper?
00:02:40 ◼ ► My main question is, how are they allowed to call it "cheese loaf," because don't they have to call Velveeta, like, cheese food?
00:02:50 ◼ ► Because if this is called "cheese loaf" and there's no modifier, is there, like, an asterisk next to cheese?
00:02:55 ◼ ► Velveeta, which, remember, the tagline is "liquid gold," which, again, you can't even say with this great face,
00:03:14 ◼ ► That's really something. Also, who has decided that the word "loaf" is a good thing most of the time?
00:03:34 ◼ ► No one thinks a type of food that is a loaf that is not bread, no one associates that with quality or even anything appetizing.
00:04:09 ◼ ► So, on rare occasions, especially if we're having like a party of some sort that is themed around football,
00:04:19 ◼ ► When we're watching American football, or maybe like the Super Bowl, for example, that's a great example,
00:04:34 ◼ ► And it's really honestly, just, well, I can't say this because the two of you are going to jump all over me.
00:05:04 ◼ ► You know, cheese and sausage, granted Velveeta is a little weird, I'm not going to deny that,
00:05:07 ◼ ► but on the surface, cheese, sausage, tomatoes, and chilis, I think all three of us can agree,
00:05:16 ◼ ► Well, the thing of it is, is that if you let this Velveeta cheese sit after it has been heated up,
00:05:26 ◼ ► So one of the most terrible things I've ever witnessed is the remainder of the sausage and cheese dip
00:05:33 ◼ ► And you look at this thing in a bowl that's like congealed into a solid that is unbreakable by even diamonds.
00:05:40 ◼ ► And you wonder, "Hmm, what did my life lead to to make me think that this was a good idea to consume this?"
00:06:03 ◼ ► And that's the question I have with myself that I ask myself every single time and it's kind of grossing me out.
00:06:11 ◼ ► To be fair, making some kind of cheese dip with Velveeta that you dip chips into is indeed really good.
00:06:31 ◼ ► I mean, if you recall, people who have listened to Analog, I sent Mike, or I purchased on Amazon.co.uk,
00:06:39 ◼ ► a Velveeta shells and cheese box and had Mike make it and he was utterly disgusted by it.
00:06:55 ◼ ► So when visiting the armaments, they made a Velveeta in Rotel, in sausage, or a rough equivalent dip,
00:07:01 ◼ ► and Mike reported back on the show saying, "Oh my gosh, it's actually quite delicious," as you were just saying, Marco.
00:08:45 ◼ ► Alright, Stephen Howell writes, "Regarding Apple laptops that turn on with any key press or trackpad click,
00:08:49 ◼ ► one solution I've found to clean my keyboard is by using an app called Keyboard Clean Tool for exactly this purpose.
00:08:56 ◼ ► When you open the app and click the 'Start Cleaning' button, the entire keyboard stops responding to input.
00:09:09 ◼ ► The lock screen overrides whatever API the app is using, so you can still type your password."
00:09:16 ◼ ► That's mostly a solution, but part of the reason I've always wanted my computer to be off before I clean the keyboard is just in case there's some kind of moisture going on there.
00:09:27 ◼ ► I mean, really, you shouldn't let the moisture in the computer at all anyway, and it's probably just mostly superstition.
00:09:32 ◼ ► But it is that extra bit of safety, you know, that some tiny molecule of water can't work its way in there and hit a contact.
00:09:40 ◼ ► Honestly, especially with today's keyboards and the way they're laptop designed, it doesn't really make any sense, but it always makes me feel better if it's actually off.
00:09:55 ◼ ► Let's move on to our main topics. I'm going to go take a power nap because we need to talk about PlayStation 5 hardware.
00:10:03 ◼ ► It's not really about PlayStation 5 hardware. It's about, I mean, there's a bunch of stuff in the notes about PlayStation 5, which is old news.
00:10:08 ◼ ► I forget how old. I don't know. I guess I could look at the date on this article and find out.
00:10:22 ◼ ► Yeah. We mostly talked about this in the context of, like, Nintendo and whether they should still make hardware in light of iOS games.
00:10:31 ◼ ► Remember we had that discussion, like, before the Switch came out, and one of my more strident positions was that as long as there remains a market for devices that, for hardware devices that mostly just play games,
00:10:47 ◼ ► And the question was, like, all right, well, but is there still a market for devices that aren't personal computers that mostly just play games, or will tablets and smartphones and everything take over for them or whatever?
00:10:58 ◼ ► So, I mean, I feel like that was long enough ago that the verdict is in, certainly for this generation and probably for the next, that, yeah, people still want to buy game consoles, basically.
00:11:09 ◼ ► The PS4 has sold very well. The Xbox is in a strong second place, and the Switch has done surprisingly well for Nintendo.
00:11:16 ◼ ► So not only is there a market for more or less dedicated game hardware, but it's actually big enough to support three large players, and none of them is, you know, going down the tubes.
00:11:26 ◼ ► Like, all three of those three players I mentioned seem like they're doing okay. Obviously, Xbox is massively subsidized by the rest of Microsoft's business, but I think they're doing fine there, too, even though they were firmly in second place in this generation.
00:11:38 ◼ ► And I think that's going to continue, because I don't see any market forces with the possible exception of the streaming gaming stuff that we talked about when Stadia was announced that are really going to change the landscape in the near term.
00:11:54 ◼ ► Like, I think the next generation of consoles is going to come out, and I think they're going to sell in similar numbers to the current generation, which means that, you know, that iOS and smartphone games and tablet games and whatever you want to put in there has not dethroned the game console quite yet, nor has the PC replaced it or whatever, whatever scenario you might imagine.
00:12:13 ◼ ► So, it got me thinking, like, why do I care about game consoles at all? Because I do, and I realized this when the PS5 announcement came out, like, Sony came out and said, "Here's what we're planning to do for our next console, and here's a bunch of specs and blah blah blah."
00:12:28 ◼ ► They didn't, you know, show any hardware or announce a name or anything like that, I just wanted to talk about the next hardware.
00:12:34 ◼ ► And I got excited about it, and I'm like, why am I excited to buy this thing that is like, like it's always been true of game consoles, especially in the past few generations, that they're basically like PCs but not as good.
00:12:45 ◼ ► Especially, you know, they have x86 CPUs, they have hard drives, they have memory, and they have a GPU, and all of those things are less powerful than the equivalents in PCs. And of course PCs cost way more, so it's like, well great, so I can buy for, it's like a $500 gaming PC or something.
00:13:04 ◼ ► I mean, to be fair, it isn't just that PCs cost a little bit more, it's like, most game consoles, the entire console has to be sold for less than what a decent PC graphics card costs.
00:13:17 ◼ ► Yeah, it's a different price class, and you could say, well it's pretty amazing what they do for price performance, but honestly, you could probably build a gaming PC for similar to console prices and get close to the same power maybe if you bought a bunch of stuff you used.
00:13:33 ◼ ► And it would be, you know, a terrible shambling mess or whatever, and obviously that's, the experience of a game console is way different than cobbling together your own gaming PC, especially if you're trying to do one for like $500 or $600.
00:13:44 ◼ ► But still, it seems like it should be hardware that is not exciting, so it, well first, before I talk about why I'm still excited by console hardware and why I think a lot of people are, let's just briefly go through what Sony announced back in April about the, presumably we call it the PS5.
00:14:03 ◼ ► So the CPU is, it's going to be AMD Ryzen, you know, it's 7nm, so the game console, or Macs won't have 7nm CPUs in them, but all these game consoles will, that's great.
00:14:18 ◼ ► The big deal is it's going to have an SSD, which I think most people would have predicted, like it's not surprising, I actually have an SSD connected to my PS4 now, just because it reduces load time.
00:14:29 ◼ ► But this was really pushed by Sony, the idea that, yeah, it's got an SSD, but it's not like connecting an SSD to your PS4.
00:14:44 ◼ ► Anyway, he says, "I've got a PlayStation 4 Pro, and then I put an SSD that costs as much as the PlayStation 4 Pro, and it might be one third faster."
00:14:50 ◼ ► Because if you have a terabyte hard drive, and you connect a terabyte SSD, and back when he wrote this, you know, a $400 or $500 terabyte SSD, that's doubling the price of your game console just for the storage.
00:15:05 ◼ ► So it's a huge investment, and it's worth it for me, because one third faster is a significant decrease in load times or whatever.
00:15:11 ◼ ► But it's not great bang for your buck. So what they're trying to do with the next generation console is say, "Okay, we're going to have an SSD, but kind of like Apple did.
00:15:21 ◼ ► Like, it's going to be built in, and we're going to build the system around it, and it's going to be way faster than if you connected an SSD to like USB 3.0 external bus or whatever."
00:15:31 ◼ ► So the figure they put out is like 19 times faster than the Spangos, which again, shouldn't be hard with the SSD, but they're going to use PCIe 4.0, and the SSD is going to be built in, and it's not optional.
00:15:42 ◼ ► There is no hard drive version. Every next generation PlayStation will have solid state storage, and it will be like an integral part of the system.
00:15:51 ◼ ► They even talk about possibly using it for, you know, it'll be so much faster for swap that it'll make it seem like you have more RAM, and many more things, or many more options are open.
00:16:01 ◼ ► One of the examples they showed was like the Spiderman game, where there used to be 15 seconds to do like fast travel from one place to the other, and they reduced that down to less than a second.
00:16:11 ◼ ► So the 10 to 20 times faster, depending on what you're doing, is apparently a real figure, at least for PS4 games. I mean, PS5 games are a little bit different.
00:16:20 ◼ ► The next interesting fact about it is that it will still accept physical media, which I'm assuming will just be another optical disc, Blu-ray, whatever, which is kind of surprising, because I have never inserted a plastic disc into my PlayStation 4, and sometimes I forget that it even takes discs.
00:16:38 ◼ ► That's just not how I use it. I download everything. There's plenty of storage for the amount of games that I play, and if I run out of storage, which my son has on his PlayStation 4, you can just delete a game and then re-download it later, and with cloud saves, like it's not a big deal.
00:16:53 ◼ ► But apparently they still want to have discs. I'm sure there are a bunch of reasons having to do with bandwidth, and you know, how far broadband goes out into the potential customer base, and just how much easier it is to ship people plastic discs or whatever, but
00:17:07 ◼ ► we're not away from physical media quite yet, which is interesting because the Xbox One has a model called the Xbox One S, O-N-E, space, capital letter S.
00:17:21 ◼ ► Yeah, I can't wait to see what the next generation Xbox is going to be called. Xbox Two? Who knows?
00:17:26 ◼ ► Well, it's the fourth? Yeah, so you have the Xbox One, which is not the Xbox One. You have the Xbox One back in 2001, which made sense, right? Then you had the Xbox 360, which is the second one, because of course it's named the number beginning with three.
00:17:41 ◼ ► And then you have the Xbox One, which is not the Xbox One, but it's the Xbox One that's the third one. And then you have the Xbox One S, but it's not number one S, it's spelled out one, but not the spelled out S. So the Xbox One S, and now they're making more?
00:18:06 ◼ ► Yeah, X was the one... Actually, I don't... Yeah, it's not pronounced ten. It was the more powerful one. And so the new one that is relevant to this discussion about media is the Xbox One S All Digital.
00:18:18 ◼ ► So it's the... Xbox One is like the "this is this generation" thing. They just put suffixes on it, right? So you've got Xbox One with no suffix, and you've got S, X, and now you have S All Digital. So it's the Xbox One SAD. Xbox One S-A-D. It's the S All Digital.
00:18:36 ◼ ► But anyway, it's $250, and All Digital means it doesn't have an optical drive. And hey, you save money and it's less complicated, and you can make the case... you have more room in the case for cooling. Like, getting rid of the optical drive is an advantage. But apparently it's still...
00:18:51 ◼ ► Not a thing that Sony's going to commit to for their introductory flagship console, but Microsoft is already offering one model that's like that. It's the cheap model. $250 late in the generation of Xbox One, so now they have all these different variants and stuff like that.
00:19:04 ◼ ► Anyway, I can't wait for the optical disc to go away entirely, because as far as I'm concerned, I'm just paying for it with both my money and space that could be used for cooling or storage, or just making the box smaller. And I'm not even going to use that feature, but whatever, it's fine.
00:19:20 ◼ ► So that's the new PlayStation. They did a bunch of figures on GB or whatever, but yeah, it's going to be less powerful than a PC, surprise. It's probably going to be like $500 or $600. It's going to have a really, really fast SSD and an optical drive.
00:19:34 ◼ ► And so why is this... why do I care about console hardware at all? Because I did. When I was reading about this, I was excited. I was excited about the kind of stuff I'm going to see in PlayStation 5.
00:19:46 ◼ ► And it's because consoles still have this... I mean, I guess it's an advantage. There are disadvantages to it, but advantage, even in today's world where they release pro versions of consoles and S versions and X versions and X/S version, all digital, of being a fixed hardware target.
00:20:07 ◼ ► Even if there's a couple of variants, in general, it is a fairly fixed hardware target for game developers, which means... and these generations lost a lot of time.
00:20:18 ◼ ► The game developers have a long time to get used to the hardware. When they test their game, they know that how it runs for them is how it's going to run for you.
00:20:28 ◼ ► And they can safely optimize the game using optimizations that will only work on the target hardware and wring every last bit of power out of the hardware because they know this is our target and we can spend time optimizing for this specific GPU because this is the one and only GPU that will be in this model of console and millions of people will buy this model of console.
00:20:51 ◼ ► And that's how you get games like, you know, an Uncharted 4 or something for the PlayStation 4 that look really, really good, even though they're running on, by PC standards, incredibly underpowered hardware.
00:21:05 ◼ ► Part of it is art direction. Part of it is artistic skill. I always think back to Metroid Prime running on the GameCube. The GameCube is an incredibly underpowered console compared to PCs of the time, but Metroid Prime looked amazing, even though it was like low polygon, short draw distance,
00:21:20 ◼ ► low res textures, art direction can go a long way. So part of it is talent, but part of it is also that if you're, you know, especially the games towards the end of a generation, if you have a game engine that's very well optimized for the console, you really just use every part of the buffalo.
00:21:36 ◼ ► You're getting every execution unit firing at the same time. You're not wasting any memory. You're using all the GPU. You're multi-threading the whole game thing. It's very difficult to do that on a PC game or even like a phone game because phones, there's so much variability in what generation of phone you have.
00:21:54 ◼ ► Whereas on consoles, you make a game and it's for the PlayStation 4. And even though there's two variants of the PlayStation 4, you know, they're not that different from each other and it is a very fixed target.
00:22:06 ◼ ► And what that means is that the kinds of games that you see on consoles differ materially from the kinds of games you see on PC, the kinds of games you see on iPads, on phones.
00:22:17 ◼ ► It's just a different genre of game. Even if it's the same "genre", it's a different sort of class of game. And the expectations are different, especially when a new console generation comes out.
00:22:28 ◼ ► You have this expectation that there's going to be a generation of games that are going to show off the new hardware. And maybe they'll be a little bit clumsy and maybe they won't be that great, but like every part of a console generation has something to recommend it.
00:22:38 ◼ ► In the beginning, you say, "Here's the game that you couldn't imagine seeing before because it would never run on the PlayStation 4. Here's on the PlayStation 5."
00:22:47 ◼ ► And you say, "Why would I be excited about that? I could have seen that game on the PC."
00:22:52 ◼ ► It's like, "But you didn't see that game on the PC because these people either don't make games for the PC or they don't make this game for the PC. If they made it for the PC, it wouldn't look like this except for on some super-duper rig that you don't own anyway because you're not into PC gaming."
00:23:05 ◼ ► So I find that prospect exciting. When I see hardware like this, I'm not excited like, "Wow, they put an SSD in. I'm so excited by SSDs."
00:23:12 ◼ ► What I'm excited by is the games I'm going to see on this console, that all those people who make games that I love, what will they be able to do with more hardware to work with?
00:23:22 ◼ ► Because I don't have a big gaming PC, and Naughty Dog is not making PC games. So if I think about, "Here's what Uncharted 4 looked like on the PlayStation 4," imagine what the big flagship Naughty Dog game in the Uncharted vein will look like on the PlayStation 5.
00:23:39 ◼ ► Because it looks so amazing on the PlayStation 4, and the PlayStation 4 is a tiny baby compared to the PlayStation 5 hardware-wise, even though PlayStation 5 hardware-wise is a tiny baby compared to a gaming PC.
00:23:49 ◼ ► So I find myself getting much more excited about a new console generation of hardware than I am about a new top-end video card for PCs or anything like that because the advancements in the PC world don't come along with a giant new crop of games that you know are going to take advantage of it.
00:24:07 ◼ ► It takes a while for games to take advantage of it, and very often it's just playing the same games that you have at ever greater resolutions, or 200 frames per second instead of 120, and that just doesn't get me excited. I'm excited about The Last of Us 2, which is going to be a PS4 game, I think.
00:24:23 ◼ ► Or even a next-generation Nintendo console, like what could Breath of the Wild be like with twice as much power? I'm excited about that prospect, even though twice as much power as the Switch is probably still not as fast as our phones.
00:24:35 ◼ ► So that's a great example. How can a game like Breath of the Wild exist on a Switch when the Switch is so underpowered compared to any... it probably has less power than the AirPods. That's exaggerating.
00:24:46 ◼ ► The Switch is incredibly underpowered, but they made this amazing game for it, so I always think of what could those same people do with much more freedom, much more power.
00:24:56 ◼ ► Anyway, that's why I'm excited, and why I think a lot of people are excited about consoles all out of proportion with the supposed specs or whatever.
00:25:07 ◼ ► It's the way people always talk about it in an idealized manner. It's like you shouldn't care what kind of camera they use to make a movie, you should only be excited about the movie itself.
00:25:17 ◼ ► Well, in the console world, I think more than any other technology platform, people are excited about the games. And with good reason, because history has shown many really great games have come hand in hand with new advances in consoles.
00:25:31 ◼ ► That's of course why you two should also be excited by consoles, but you're not really that excited by games at all.
00:25:49 ◼ ► Yeah, I think Mike told us to play it. It's kind of Stardew Valley-like, which is probably why I like it so much.
00:26:05 ◼ ► Yeah, it's extreme. When you see the anime, if you're watching someone else play the game or if you're watching a video of it, it seems like the entire thing is manic. Like how much it's... everything is moving. Every action you do shakes the screen. It seems crazy. When you are playing it, it doesn't seem crazy.
00:26:23 ◼ ► But yeah, so far it's pretty fun. It's pretty delightful. It's kind of like Stardew Valley, but without any of the socialization aspects.
00:26:31 ◼ ► Yeah, it's more focused on combat and resource collection and building and stuff. It's simplified in some ways, but then expands greatly in other directions.
00:26:42 ◼ ► What I like about Overstardew is that it a lot more becomes automatable. And so it's less manual, over and over again, work and a lot more automation over time as you level up.
00:26:55 ◼ ► But it doesn't give me feelings the way Stardew Valley did. Stardew Valley is an incredible work of art and it has way better story, way better interpersonal stuff, way better music. God, I love the Stardew Valley music.
00:27:08 ◼ ► But this is a different... it's a more different game than what it initially appears to be. Forager is. But Forager is very much its own thing. And what it is is similar enough that if you like Stardew Valley, you'll probably like Forager. But it is really fun. It's really great.
00:27:28 ◼ ► Another example of hardware power. You think, well, this whole hardware power discussion is irrelevant to games like Stardew Valley and Forager. But that's not actually true. So these games are sort of a retro feel. They're top-down 2D game wave of sprites. You're like, well, that could have been made in the SNES era. But as you noted...
00:27:49 ◼ ► If you look at these games, they are actually using, not obviously all of the power of the hardware, but there's no way these would be possible because, yes, they use sprites. But very often they have lighting effects and weapons effects that would absolutely be impossible on those consoles.
00:28:04 ◼ ► And then they add things like screen shake and warp and other filter things that you just absolutely could not do. Like those machines were like sprites and color palettes and very, very limited.
00:28:11 ◼ ► So this is like taking the aesthetic, the sort of art direction and game design from that era, but applying all the modern technologies, all the cool GPU effects, all sorts of things that actually affect the gameplay and change how the game looks.
00:28:27 ◼ ► So you're looking at it and you're like, this looks like a retro 2D game, but it doesn't. It looks better. I use this example a lot and it's perhaps increasingly problematic, but it's like Quentin Tarantino when he takes all of his influences from movies that he liked and remixes them into a modern invention that is so much higher budget and nicer and better done than those things.
00:28:51 ◼ ► But you can clearly see the influence. That's what these games are like. Forager is like, you love those 2D games? Now imagine somebody making that who has played all those 2D games, but also has access to modern hardware and game development practices. You can make it way better and way cooler.
00:29:06 ◼ ► In many ways, it's kind of like, forgive me for this incredible tangent, but I was a huge nerd about these things back then. This is kind of like the direction that Sega went with the Saturn. And unfortunately, that was a terrible time to do it.
00:29:22 ◼ ► Basically, the market at that time with the PS1, the N64, the market was pushing into 3D. Sega had a lot of problems back then, but they were coming off the Genesis, which was an incredibly successful system.
00:29:37 ◼ ► And the direction they went with the Saturn, instead of making a system that was good at 3D, they made a system that was really good for doing really rich stuff with 2D stuff. And unfortunately, the market didn't follow. The market wanted 3D, and so the Saturn became a crappy 3D system in practice.
00:29:53 ◼ ► But it was really designed to be an incredible 2D system and do a bunch of stuff like this. So at the time, unfortunately, that's not what the market wanted. But anyway, this style of game I find very delightful because it really is, like you said, it really is taking the style of game that I grew up with and that I really loved, and now basically having no constraints whatsoever.
00:30:17 ◼ ► For doing this style of graphics and this style of gameplay, modern hardware is effectively infinite. Even the Switch, which as Jon said, is not a very powerful console by modern standards. But it's powerful enough for stuff like this, and it's a lot of fun.
00:30:31 ◼ ► And it's really cool to see, instead of trying to do photorealism 3D stuff, which would probably not look very good on the Switch, instead you do a really awesome job of something that is a totally different ballgame.
00:30:51 ◼ ► That controller was so ergonomically awful. Probably the worst controller, ergonomically speaking, ever released for a console. For a popular console.
00:31:01 ◼ ► So at the time most of these came out, I grew up with the Genesis, I couldn't afford the Saturn when it came out. And a couple of times I actually rented a Saturn from Blockbuster. You could rent entire systems. It was some crazy price, like $30 to do it.
00:31:16 ◼ ► But I splurged a couple of weekends and got myself a Saturn for the weekend. And in retrospect, I'm very glad I never got one because eventually what happened was, later, after college, I bought one on eBay when it was ancient and cheap for something like $100 for the Saturn and a bunch of games.
00:31:34 ◼ ► And I realized, wow, this really isn't a very good system actually. I lusted after it for so long and I couldn't buy it. And in retrospect, it was a good thing I couldn't buy it because had I spent $400 on it because of what it originally cost, I would have regretted that, I think.
00:31:53 ◼ ► So I was working at a Babbage's when I was in high school and early on in college, and this would have been in high school for me, and I remember trying to hawk Dreamcast like it was my job. And I was successful in getting a bunch of people to buy Dreamcast.
00:32:10 ◼ ► And I might have been the only person that can say that because it did not sell well. And it was amazing, though. It was amazing.
00:32:17 ◼ ► To be fair, to clarify and to keep myself from getting too many horrible emails from Dreamcast lovers, the Dreamcast was actually a really great system but just such a massive flop and had such a short life because of a combination of both incredibly poor market timing and also incredibly poor marketing.
00:32:32 ◼ ► And also at that point, Sega fans being so burned from the series of Sega CD 32X Saturn. The series of those three systems just destroyed Sega's fan base and the loyalty.
00:32:48 ◼ ► And at that point, there was very strong competition, especially from, depending on what you were looking for, if you were looking for quality and playability and fun, the N64 and then later the GameCube just killed it.
00:33:04 ◼ ► And if you were looking for more mainstream stuff, that was the heyday of the PS1 and 2. And if the Dreamcast would have come out from a different company at a different time, it would have been much more successful. But unfortunately, it was too little too late.
00:33:24 ◼ ► Ah, that's too bad. Alright, anything else about the PlayStation 5? You gonna get one? Me? No, of course not. Don't be ridiculous. Destiny 3 and PS5, I'm all excited. I can wait another six years until it comes out on a platform I actually care about.
00:33:40 ◼ ► Destiny's never gonna come out on a platform you care about. Oh no, I'm sorry, when you said Destiny, you absolutely said Destiny, I heard Journey in my head, though. The implication was, "A game I'll care about on a platform I care about."
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00:35:51 ◼ ► A couple of months back, actually no, it was just last month, I'm sorry. It just feels like forever ago. There was an article on MacRumors saying Apple's rainbow logo may return to some new products as early as this year.
00:36:01 ◼ ► As someone who lived with the Macintosh from day one, gentlemen, I cannot be more... No, actually, I am excited about this, but this has no significance to me like it does to you, Jon. Jon, how do you feel about this?
00:36:14 ◼ ► Well, it has aesthetics against all of us and if this comes to pass, we may be faced with these devices with the rainbow logo, but it made me think about when it went away. Was that before your time? Before both of your time?
00:36:33 ◼ ► My recollection is that it went away when Jobs returned roundabout and my recollection is that even though we don't know how these decisions get made, the prevailing theory was that it was, like everything that happened at Apple back then, that it was because Jobs either decided that he didn't want the rainbow one or was okay with it going away.
00:36:58 ◼ ► So in my mind, I have it as a Jobs, Jonny Ive kind of joint agreement decision that we're going to break with the past. I mean, I think different campaigns still had the rainbow, but I feel like when the iMac came along and they did the glossy one, I think that was around the time when I really should have looked this up ahead of time.
00:37:17 ◼ ► But my recollection is that it was after Jobs had been back, around maybe '98, '99 was when the rainbow logo disappeared after the Think Different campaign, basically.
00:37:33 ◼ ► And it kind of makes sense in the sort of what Apple was doing aesthetically at that time because there was the teal glossy stuff. Remember when they used to do... This should have been in your time maybe.
00:37:47 ◼ ► The ads and the slides and presentations would have like a shiny glossy silver or teal Apple logo. Do you remember seeing that?
00:38:03 ◼ ► No, I mean like... Yeah, but it would be on a slide. It would be like at a Macworld presentation. There would be a slide up there that would show an Apple logo and instead of it being just a solid color of an outline, it would be like a 3D rendered medallion made of glossy translucent plastic.
00:38:19 ◼ ► They treated the Apple logo a little bit like that. You'd see it on Mac OS X versions and like startup screens and intro movies and stuff like that.
00:38:28 ◼ ► Before they went to totally like it's monochrome, it's a single color, it's flat, there is no sort of shading to it whatsoever.
00:38:35 ◼ ► But you know, that was sort of like... The rainbow went away, but they hadn't totally settled down into absolutely flat silhouette colors, whether it be gray or black.
00:38:45 ◼ ► But all of that sort of fits with the break from the past, yes, but also an aesthetic transition.
00:38:52 ◼ ► Because if you think about aesthetically what Apple hardware looked like and evoked, you know, there was the Snow White design language, which was sort of the Mac 2, the SE and that sort of era.
00:39:05 ◼ ► But even before that, we had the yellowish beige boxes of the Apple 2 and the original Mac.
00:39:24 ◼ ► And it was sort of part of the design was it would be a very monochromatic look, very understated and elegant.
00:39:30 ◼ ► And with the little sparkle of color would be the Apple logo, which would always feature, not super prominently, but it would be on the front of the machine somewhere, right?
00:39:40 ◼ ► And they would spend a lot of money to, A, make that logo, which is apparently very expensive to manufacture, and B, eventually they started fitting the case around the logo better.
00:39:49 ◼ ► Like on the Apple 2, it was like the little rounded rectangle, and in that rectangle would be a rounded square, rather.
00:39:59 ◼ ► So it would be like a square, then another piece of plastic, and then a raised Apple logo on that.
00:40:03 ◼ ► But eventually, once they started making the fancier Macs, they fit the case right around the Apple logo, which was also tricky to do.
00:40:18 ◼ ► Their computers started to be teal and grape colored and green, and if there was a rainbow Apple logo there, it just would have clashed with all of that.
00:40:28 ◼ ► And then eventually, in the later Johnny Ive era, when everything had to go super simple and minimalist, and he was in his white room, and all the hardware lost all the ports and all external features and all buttons, having a rainbow logo sort of flew in the face of that.
00:40:47 ◼ ► They didn't even make their phones in colors for the longest time, if you recall. It was always just, you know, there was the one iPhone, and there weren't alternate models, and there weren't a lot of color choices, but eventually there were color choices, and it was not many of them.
00:41:03 ◼ ► But in the modern day, where you can get phones in all sorts of colors, and certainly cases in all sorts of colors, the Macs are still pretty monochromatic, and the iPads, meh, in between.
00:41:14 ◼ ► But I feel like the door is open, aesthetically speaking, for the rainbow logo to come back and not be completely out of step with what Apple is doing.
00:41:25 ◼ ► Both because, like I said, they're more open to colors on the hardware these days, and also on the models where they're not open to color, it would fit right in in the same way it used to, where if you have a completely silver MacBook Pro that's very monochromatic and doesn't really have any different shades or variations of color,
00:41:43 ◼ ► having just one spark of color on the thing, I think, would look good, as evidenced by a lot of the mock-ups that you see, or if you see somebody who has a MacBook and they take a rainbow Apple logo and they stick it over the Apple logo that's on the back of their lid.
00:41:56 ◼ ► I mean, it doesn't look great that it's a sticker, but if you look at it, I mean, maybe it's just me, maybe it's because I have nostalgia for it, but I look at it and I say, "That design works," because it is just featureless gray with the rainbow.
00:42:08 ◼ ► And on the flip side, if you have a rainbow candy-colored phone, and say the phone is like the product Red Phone or whatever, and that red matches the red in the Apple logo, putting a rainbow Apple logo on a candy-colored red phone, I think also works and looks nice.
00:42:22 ◼ ► So I'm not desperate for this vaguely unsourced rumor to be true, but I can imagine really cool, fun, exciting-looking hardware coming from a return to the rainbow logo, because it's not like Apple ever sort of disowned it.
00:42:41 ◼ ► They just stopped using it in their hardware and all communications, but it's still their logo. No one else has taken it, so it's right there waiting for them to pick it back up and reincorporate it into their designs.
00:42:55 ◼ ► And I'm not trying to pin it on the departure of Johnny Ive, but I have a feeling that, well, I can't even say if he was still here they wouldn't do it.
00:43:04 ◼ ► I think if he stayed on with the company and was going to stay on for another 20 years, he would eventually have brought it back too, just because these things go in cycles.
00:43:11 ◼ ► And so we went away from it, we went as far away as we possibly can, we stayed really far away from it a long time, and now I think it's an appropriate time for it to return.
00:43:19 ◼ ► I just wish this rumor had more foundations and maybe think it was more than just wishful thinking.
00:43:25 ◼ ► Do you both have, I think we mentioned in the sticker show, does at least one or both of you have the rainbow colored Apple logo sticker somewhere on your hardware?
00:43:39 ◼ ► If it was, I know they wouldn't do this, but if it was an option, I would definitely take it.
00:43:45 ◼ ► But honestly, just overall on this, I'm with you in that I don't think we have good information about this actually happening or not.
00:43:54 ◼ ► But I really hope it does. I really hope they do bring this back because not only do I want more color in Apple's products and more humanity to return to their industrial design,
00:44:08 ◼ ► because so much of it has been stripped out in the Johnny Ive era, but also just imagine the statement it makes in today's political climate to have these immensely popular computers,
00:44:20 ◼ ► to have all of them all of a sudden have a rainbow logo. That would be amazing. I really hope they do it.
00:44:27 ◼ ► I wouldn't assume this is an incredibly likely thing to happen, but man, would it be cool if it did. So I really hope they do.
00:44:35 ◼ ► The support for it, and they put it in the article and everything, is that Apple has been using these rainbow colors more often than they had in the past.
00:44:43 ◼ ► So that stage they built on their campus for Lady Garuda singing or whatever is the Apple logo colors. It's not a rainbow Apple logo, but for many years,
00:44:51 ◼ ► not only was the logo no longer rainbow striped, but you would never see those colors anywhere and anything having to do with Apple.
00:44:56 ◼ ► And now they're building gigantic structures made literally out of that rainbow. I have some more pictures in the article.
00:45:02 ◼ ► So it shows that Apple is not averse to evoking the old Apple logo in things that it does itself in an official capacity.
00:45:11 ◼ ► So I feel like that opens the door. The rainbow has always been. The whole stick with the rainbow logo was that it was the colors of the rainbow,
00:45:21 ◼ ► which at the time Apple was founded, or the time Apple came up with this logo, which was after they were founded,
00:45:26 ◼ ► didn't have the LGBT whatever connotations it has today, at least not in a widespread fashion that people would know it,
00:45:36 ◼ ► but the whole idea was that it was the colors of the rainbow and rainbows are good and everybody loves them. And there was a diversity angle,
00:45:42 ◼ ► but also that the colors of the rainbow were all mixed up because it's not the same order that the colors are in the rainbow.
00:45:47 ◼ ► So there was a bit of sort of 60s era anarchy in the mixed up rainbow. That was sort of the original pitch for Apple's rainbow logo.
00:46:02 ◼ ► But also they're all mixed up because we're wild, man. We don't wear shoes to work. That was the 70s Silicon Valley.
00:46:10 ◼ ► And today, yes, there's a much clearer political connotation, which Apple absolutely embraces.
00:46:22 ◼ ► So it makes a statement, but I feel like it's a fairly safe statement as far as corporate America goes,
00:46:30 ◼ ► which is why they built a giant rainbow college stage on their campus and invited Lady Gaga to play there.
00:46:36 ◼ ► So I feel like that's right up the middle for the company. If they're not going to do it and they never do bring back the rainbow Apple logo,
00:46:44 ◼ ► it won't be for political reasons. It'll just be purely aesthetic. But honestly, I don't know what direction,
00:46:51 ◼ ► what's next for Apple's aesthetic direction, because we still kind of have the carryover of the Ive era.
00:46:57 ◼ ► And even like new stuff like the Mac Pro fits perfectly in with the Johnny Ive design era.
00:47:05 ◼ ► And I don't think we've seen really any hardware that we would be that doesn't fit with the Johnny Ive era.
00:47:16 ◼ ► But every piece of hardware that has been announced by Apple today, we look at and say, yeah, that totally makes sense.
00:47:22 ◼ ► I would be excited to see a product from Apple that would surprise us aesthetically in the same way that the iMac did.
00:47:30 ◼ ► Something with a rainbow Apple logo could do that, but it's probably hard to recapture that sort of lightning in a bottle because everyone's tried anything now.
00:47:41 ◼ ► Apple sort of opened the floodgates. Now everybody is willing to try any kind of design. So anything that Apple does, I'm sure will have some precedence.
00:47:47 ◼ ► Again, aesthetically speaking, not design-wise. But yeah, I would be excited to see that.
00:47:53 ◼ ► You have Apple logo stickers on your stuff, but I guess they're not rainbow. I don't know why I thought you would even have access to rainbow colored stickers.
00:47:59 ◼ ► I mean, you can get people on Etsy making like exactly die-cut ones that can fit the lid logo.
00:48:08 ◼ ► I think one other reason this has some potential to be good or realistic is that timing-wise, fashion changes, obviously.
00:48:22 ◼ ► And this is, of course, everyone's top fashion podcast, so obviously we are the experts in this area.
00:48:27 ◼ ► 70s stuff is really in right now. 70s style design, but like a modern take on 70s style design is very in.
00:48:50 ◼ ► Also, if you think about the time that this logo came from, you mentioned the whole 60s hippie era thing, 70s coming up.
00:49:01 ◼ ► If you look at the world politically today, not only are we fighting literally some of the exact same fights that we are still, or again, fighting.
00:49:14 ◼ ► But I feel like we're in kind of a dark place. And they were in kind of a dark place back then, too.
00:49:31 ◼ ► And I feel like that color, the use of color and the kind of resistance against the corporate world or the government world back then,
00:49:41 ◼ ► this was kind of like a resistance movement against that and trying to break free and bring some light to a dark world.
00:49:47 ◼ ► I think we need that right now in today's world. We really need a lot of that, actually.
00:49:53 ◼ ► And so maybe this is one small way in which this massive corporation, which is very hard for a massive corporation to have that kind of statement or attitude.
00:50:08 ◼ ► It's very, very hard because it's so big and so commercial. It's one thing when Apple was the small upstart of rebels.
00:50:20 ◼ ► But to whatever degree they could maybe do this, the timing would be right. And I think the world could use some things like this.
00:50:28 ◼ ► They've had campaigns like this in the past with Think Different that I already mentioned, but even stuff like the iPod campaigns where the message was like, "Hey, isn't music great?"
00:50:38 ◼ ► Those kind of sort of right up the middle, heartfelt, everybody-love-each-other kinds of messages can be corny when done poorly,
00:50:50 ◼ ► but when done well, I think are kind of universal and sort of feel-good and definitely the Rainbow Apple logo could be incorporated into a campaign like that.
00:51:00 ◼ ► Is Apple still capable of campaigns like that? Obviously, Think Different is not a campaign that today's Apple can probably get away with.
00:51:09 ◼ ► They're not the underdog. There's no melancholy about their potential financial fortunes there was then, but the iPad campaign is great.
00:51:21 ◼ ► We're not saying we're an underdog. We're just saying we love music and you love music, so let's love music together.
00:51:27 ◼ ► That can still work. I don't know. We could do it for TV. We love TV. You love TV. I'm not sure how it would work, but I can see that working.
00:51:39 ◼ ► I don't know. You know, the thing is, is I agree wholeheartedly with what you guys were saying that it would be a very bold statement,
00:51:51 ◼ ► a statement I would encourage and I would be overjoyed to see if Apple added a rainbow which has connotations to the LGBTQ community.
00:52:03 ◼ ► I would be all in on that. 100,000%. However, taking off the "What Casey Wants" hat and putting on the "Casey the Business" dweeb hat,
00:52:15 ◼ ► I don't see them ever doing it because there is too much of the world that finds, that takes issue with that community unfairly.
00:52:26 ◼ ► I'm not saying I agree with it. It's awful to take issue with someone just living the life that they want to live.
00:52:31 ◼ ► I could not speak ill about it strongly enough. But you look at the iPhones, which the iPhone sales have just sagged in the most recent quarter, have they not?
00:52:42 ◼ ► And then you're going to make this kind of political statement on a product line that is both deeply important and also sagging a little bit.
00:52:53 ◼ ► I just don't see it happening. I am all in on it happening. Casey, the person, all in. 100,000% in. But Apple as a corporation, I don't see it happening.
00:53:03 ◼ ► Can you imagine the backlash that they would get, which is, again, totally bogus, totally ridiculous, but I just don't see it happening.
00:53:10 ◼ ► I don't think they'll get it. I think there's enough cognitive dissonance that people will be like, "Oh, it's the old Apple logo they're bringing back."
00:53:16 ◼ ► And even if you point out to them, "Isn't it kind of neat that it's kind of like the pride rainbow colors?" They'd be like, "Oh, no, it's just the old Apple logo."
00:53:23 ◼ ► I don't think most iPhone owners know it would be the old Apple logo. And I also agree with Casey that, yeah, it's stupid to rage against this and horrible.
00:53:30 ◼ ► And I am way outside of my comfort zone. I'm trying to talk about these things without offending people.
00:53:36 ◼ ► Because there would also be angles such as co-optation that you might want to think about. But ultimately, I don't think they would do this on the iPhone.
00:53:47 ◼ ► I think they would do it on the Mac. And the stakes would be very different there. The risk would be a lot lower if people are going to have a problem with it.
00:53:56 ◼ ► Although, honestly, screw those people. But if people are going to have a problem with it, I feel like they could take that risk on the Mac and maybe the iPad.
00:54:03 ◼ ► But on the phone, they've just been so incredibly conservative with even offering any color at all on the phone that I would be shocked if they did it on the phone.
00:54:23 ◼ ► I'm not sure where it's likely to happen. I think it has more to do with the people who are designing those products and less to do politically. But honestly, I think that politically Apple would absolutely put this logo where the hell they wanted to put it for whatever reasons they wanted to.
00:54:38 ◼ ► I think there is possibility of some backlash, but this is a company led by a gay man who's the CEO. They're just going to do it because it's the right thing to do. I don't even think they're cynically going to do the math to see if they can get away with it.
00:54:54 ◼ ► Because the guy at the top is not going to shy away from this. Not to say they're going to put it on all their stuff or even if this rumor is true, but I absolutely feel like they would do this and just take whatever lumps they were going to get.
00:55:11 ◼ ► Which if they got any lumps, it would be awful, but we live in an awful world. It's hard to say.
00:55:17 ◼ ► It's really hard to take that risk with the iPhone. Casey's right. But I can't make myself that cynical. I can't see them coming up with an idea and then nixing it internally for this reason. I just can't imagine that happening.
00:55:29 ◼ ► The iPhone, I mean one thing actually, I'm kind of coming around to the idea now because I'm thinking like one of the biggest problems Apple has with the iPhone design cycle is when you get into the second or third year of a design, you have to visually distinguish it somehow such that people want to upgrade to it and be seen with the new phone.
00:55:51 ◼ ► Especially in certain markets where that matters more. Where it matters more to be seen with the newest thing. And maybe this is a way to do that going into what is going to almost certainly be the third year of the same industrial design on the iPhone 10 line.
00:56:05 ◼ ► So maybe that would be a good reason to do it this year especially because it would be a clear obvious way to see like, "Oh, I have the new one."
00:56:14 ◼ ► Yeah, like I said, I'm not predicting they're going to do it for the phone or for any of their products. I just honestly can't bring myself to believe that if they chose not to do it, that would be the reason. I think the reason they would choose not to do it is because the iPhone design language is still more or less what it has been and they're sort of evolving in that direction. It just doesn't fit with what they're planning to do.
00:56:32 ◼ ► And I can imagine it being on the Mac first just because maybe the design direction of the Mac is changing while the iPhone is going off in a different direction. But man, can you imagine? We see lots of interviews with Apple executives as much as they give. I think if they give them, we tend to see them.
00:56:47 ◼ ► Can you imagine them like ever like they retire from the company and someone asks them about like they bring back the rainbow logo but they don't bring it back to the iPhone and in an interview they say, "Yeah, we thought about bringing it back to the iPhone but we were afraid of backlash so we didn't." Like I can't imagine them ever giving that interview and saying that.
00:57:04 ◼ ► Mostly because I can't imagine it being true. You just can't. I don't know. It's hard to say. I'm sure there are people within Apple who would take that sort of cautious attitude for say cowed middle managers who have been incentivized to do the safe thing at all times.
00:57:23 ◼ ► Tim Cook for all of his sort of steady leadership and just sort of doing the Tim Cook thing and keeping products on the shelves for a long time because people are still buying them.
00:57:38 ◼ ► I really hope that we do actually get interviews with all these great people once they leave Apple because I would like to hear tales from the inside. By the time we hear them, the only people who will be interested will be like old timers like us but I'd still like to hear them.
00:57:56 ◼ ► I would love, setting aside the iPhone question because I don't know what the answer is, just thinking about this logo coming to the Mac, can you imagine the symbolism of this new rainbow logo showing us the light, rescuing us from the era of the butterfly keyboard and finally returning the MacBook Pro to greatness?
00:58:19 ◼ ► Well they don't light up anymore. Maybe it would. I don't know. I don't think they would ever do a backlit rainbow logo because it's really hard to make that look good. I think it would have to just be solid. That's probably true, yeah.
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01:00:18 ◼ ► Let's move on to some Ask ATP and we start with friend of the show Mark Bramhill who did the, and I guess is technically still doing, the unbelievably great show Welcome to Macintosh.
01:00:32 ◼ ► Mark Bramhill writes, "What techniques or tools have you found most helpful in combating or preventing RSI pain?" RSI being repetitive stress injury or something like that.
01:00:43 ◼ ► Strain. Strain, thank you. Stretches, ergonomic keyboards, mice, apps to remind you to stretch or take a break, going to physical therapy. Where do I start? So can we help Mark out? Mark's a really good guy. What can we do here?
01:00:56 ◼ ► So I'll go first because John's going to have the right answer. I had some relatively minor RSI issues early on when I first started doing like, you know, full 40 hours a week work on computers and you know, like in my 20s and I've mostly fixed them.
01:01:14 ◼ ► I don't feel any RSI problems really ever anymore. And what I have found to help most was a combination of some like basic ergonomic desk changes. So things like making sure you have a desk that is the correct height and a chair that brings you to the correct height such that you don't have to reach your arms up to reach it.
01:01:37 ◼ ► You know, they always say like your elbow should be pretty much at a right angle or at a more oblique angle than that even. Not a more acute angle. So not less than 90 degrees.
01:01:48 ◼ ► And so you shouldn't be like reaching up and then having your wrist then tilt down or whatever to get to your keyboard or tilt up. It's really, yeah, you don't want any of that.
01:01:57 ◼ ► So I fixed all that, you know, I've read all that stuff like, you know, 15 years ago and fixed all that. And then I also switched to split ergonomic style keyboards and I've used a bunch of them.
01:02:08 ◼ ► By far my favorites have been the Microsoft ones. First the old Natural 4000 and more recently the Natural Sculpt ergonomic. Not the Surface ergonomic. If it is gray, wrong.
01:02:23 ◼ ► That one, not only does that really have a lot of problems working with Macs, but it's actually ergonomically worse in significant ways than the old black Sculpt version.
01:02:37 ◼ ► But more generally than that, I have found there's all sorts of things that maybe temporarily solve the problem for some people sometimes. And I would put into this category almost any kind of physical product that is made specifically for RSI.
01:02:56 ◼ ► I would include a huge one here, any kind of wrist brace. I've used them before, I've known lots of people who have used them. As far as I can tell, they do nothing.
01:03:06 ◼ ► If you are to that point, the best thing you can do is to try to take a break, first of all, from the activity that is causing the problem.
01:03:13 ◼ ► And then fix your ergonomics in other ways so you don't create more flavors in the future. And John will have a lot more to say about that I'm sure.
01:03:19 ◼ ► But ultimately I have found most of those things to be ineffective. What has ultimately fixed it for me besides fixing my ergonomics to not have a problem in the first place,
01:03:28 ◼ ► is strengthening my wrist muscles in various exercises. The one product that did seem to help was the Dynaflex, which is this gyroscope ball thing that you spin in a certain way that exercises your wrist.
01:03:45 ◼ ► Any kind of, just basically getting your arms in shape, I have found ever since I started doing regular workouts and strength building and stuff like that, all the RSI problems I had in my wrists disappeared.
01:03:59 ◼ ► I have not had a single problem since that. I can look back at the times that I had RSI issues and those were times when I was the least in shape in my life. And so I would be surprised if there was not a strong correlation for people in that way.
01:04:17 ◼ ► So I would strongly suggest first fixing your ergonomics of your setup and everything. And then really consider basically getting in shape in a useful way that will affect your arms and wrists in particular.
01:04:33 ◼ ► John? So I did an entire episode of a podcast about this. I was on the Pragmatic podcast a long time ago. I'll put a link in the show notes. Episode number 50 called "Accentile Clicking." You can listen to that and it is almost two hours of me talking about this.
01:04:49 ◼ ► I can't get into that kind of detail here because I probably have more than two hours to talk about. But the most important points I think I would bring up from that thing are, it depends on what state you are.
01:05:03 ◼ ► This is combating/preventing. You know, learn about the ergonomics and get your thing set up right. But combating is like you're already suffering from it. I feel like the two most important hurdles to overcome it because there are many hurdles.
01:05:20 ◼ ► The first is finding a doctor who actually can help in literally any way with RSI is surprisingly difficult. This is one of the major hurdles that you will face, at least in the United States.
01:05:34 ◼ ► Because if you go to your doctor and discuss it, you're just going to get some sort of "Oh, here you go. Take out your proven rest more. Use ice. Put on braces at night or splints at night." There's all sorts of sort of immobilized, anti-inflammatory, blah blah blah.
01:05:52 ◼ ► Now I'm not saying that won't help, but that is a very shallow understanding of what the potential issues could be. You really need to find a doctor who understands exactly what the deal is.
01:06:04 ◼ ► Repetitive strain injury is an umbrella term that encompasses a huge host of problems that you could be having. Like basically the cause is you're doing something repetitively, typing, using the mouse or whatever for a long time.
01:06:17 ◼ ► But what that can cause is all sorts of dysfunction injuries over your entire body. And they're connected in very strange ways. For example, you may feel the pain in your wrist, but the problem may be in your neck or shoulder.
01:06:29 ◼ ► Because it's all connected, right? You need to find a doctor who understands this. What kind of doctor is that going to be? I don't know. It's probably not going to be a general practitioner.
01:06:39 ◼ ► It might be a physical therapist. It might be an occupational therapist. I don't know what kind of doctor it will be. Find an actual person with a medical degree, though, who treats people with these problems successfully.
01:06:57 ◼ ► This is the kind of thing... Look, I trust modern medicine with a lot of things. It is almost always the right move for lots of different things. But when it comes to back problems and this kind of RSI thing, it's the kind of thing that the way most doctors are trained to operate and the way the system kind of makes them work, it really results in oftentimes pretty poor outcomes.
01:07:28 ◼ ► Yeah, no, that's what I'm saying. It's going to be difficult to find a doctor who actually understands it. But here's the thing. If you are combating it, if you are already injured, finding your way out of it on your own is going to be very difficult. If you can find a medical professional, medical professional, I am stressing this again, they can help you come out of it with actual things that treat your body.
01:07:51 ◼ ► It depends on what your injury is, how many injuries you have, what they may be. It may just be a bunch of stretching exercises and weight training. It could be physical therapy. There's all sorts of things. If they're just... put it this way. If they're just giving you medicine, it's probably not going to help.
01:08:07 ◼ ► I can probably... having experience, too, there's going to be something that you have to do with your body and very often there are things that other people can do to your body to help you out of this. But the thing is you need to find someone who understands exactly what you're going through. You find someone who says, "Oh, you should just type less." They're not going to help you. And it's very difficult.
01:08:25 ◼ ► I say this because I've seen people who are very injured try to muddle through and get an ergonomic mouse. It's not going to save you. If you have nerve damage and you've already injured yourself, you need someone who understands, who can figure out exactly what is wrong with you and understand how you can safely work your way back from it.
01:08:45 ◼ ► This is probably the first hurdle you're going to find, especially if you're already injured. Because, like I said, in the U.S. it's very difficult to find this. So look for that. I'm not even sure you'll be successful. I went to many different doctors. I found two people who have ever helped me in any way and a lot of people who didn't help me at all.
01:09:03 ◼ ► But you should try it. Just have it as a background task, continuing to try to find a medical professional who actually understands this. It's difficult. Second thing, sounds like mumbo jumbo, but it isn't.
01:09:17 ◼ ► And that is, especially for younger people, and especially for people under computers, very often you will do things like using the computer for hours and hours at a time, getting really into the zone and you're programming or playing video games or whatever it is.
01:09:34 ◼ ► I'm not going to say it without thinking about it, but you don't have the right relationship between your brain and what your body is doing. That if you were to step out of your body and observe and take notes and measurements, you'd be like, this subject is sitting in the same position for four hours with stress hormones coursing through their body and repeatedly doing the same action.
01:10:00 ◼ ► And the entire time it hurts a little bit. Why aren't they stopping? You need to become more aware of your body. When you're in there, when you're doing the thing, your wrists are, or whatever part of you is hurting, is actually hurting and sending signals to you.
01:10:25 ◼ ► But people, again, especially young people, are amazingly good at literally ignoring that feeling. If you're able to ignore it, if it's below the background threshold of, yeah, I feel something, but whatever.
01:10:39 ◼ ► You need to turn that around and get to the point where you become aware of what your body is telling you. It's not telling you complicated things. It's telling you, this kind of hurts, kind of doesn't feel great, kind of sore, I don't want to keep doing this.
01:10:54 ◼ ► And you're just like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like you're not even yeah, yeah, yeah. Like it just gets completely disappears. And the reason you have to become more aware of your body is as you're working your way out of these problems, all these things about, oh, take more breaks, have an app to remind you or whatever.
01:11:09 ◼ ► Those are all good things, but they are all substitutes for you being aware of what your body is telling you. And you respecting what it's telling you and not saying, trust me, body, I've got this, you're fine. It doesn't even hurt. I can feel my wrists feel different than, you know, I feel them more, but everyone's wrists feel like that, right?
01:11:26 ◼ ► Like that's probably just what everyone's wrists feel like when I type, it doesn't actually hurt, I can keep going. That's how people injure themselves. Because you go until one day you wake up and you literally can't type anymore. And you're like, how did I get to this point? And the months leading up to it, your body was yelling, it's kind of hurting over here. Seems like you're doing bad things to me. I don't feel good. And it's like a boiling the frog thing because it comes on slowly. And you just like, don't even consciously but unconsciously convince yourself that this is just whatever this it's fine. Like, yeah, I didn't have any problems.
01:11:55 ◼ ► Like, yeah, I didn't have an intense coding session for seven hours last night. But whatever, that's just what it's like to be a programmer. Like, this is terrifically normal. Everybody feels this until all of a sudden, you're like, Oh, my God, this isn't normal. I can't do anything with my hands anymore. What happened? What happened is you just ignored everything that your body was telling you. So you need to change the relationship with your body and be aware of your body in a way that you are not like, I don't know how else to say it. It's, it sounds like new wave mumbo jumbo, but it really like, yeah, your
01:12:24 ◼ ► ability to completely ignore signals from your own body is amazing. And that's how people get massively injured because it creeps up on you slowly. And you're doing it to yourself over a long period of time. Everything else I feel like beyond those two things, you will find your way to like, get the ergonomic sorted, like you figure out which devices like like, how would you tell how would you tell if you get like, should I get an ergonomic keyboard? Should I get an ergonomic? How can you tell when you get one of those things, whether it's helping you? Well, if you're aware of what your body is telling you, and if you get one of those things, you'll be able to tell
01:12:54 ◼ ► immediately, does this help? Or does it hurt? Or does it is it neutral? Does it change anything about you know, how I feel or how long I can go before I start feeling something if you never stop until you are in crippling pain, all devices are the same because it's been like, I can use a regular mouse. And then eventually I feel crippling pain, I use an ergonomic mouse and eventually feel crippling pain. And you know, is the amount of time different, like, there is no magic solution that will make it so that you don't repeatedly
01:13:24 ◼ ► injure yourself if you keep doing the same thing. All there is is just, you know, a series of different ways for you to injure yourself. The only surefire way to not have repetitive strain injury is to not repeatedly do an action with your body. Right? Like that, that's what it is. Because even if you do all the working out and have perfect ergonomics or whatever, you can give yourself repetitive strain injury if you really try hard enough, no matter what, just do the same very difficult action at a very awkward angle over and over and over again, no amount of ergonomics and exercise and stretching will prevent that like
01:13:54 ◼ ► you can always injure yourself. It's just the question of being aware of when you're approaching that and finding ways to get yourself to back to a healthy state, be maintained, a healthy state, you know, getting stronger and using better using the bigger muscles instead of the smaller muscles like this tons of stuff you can do, but it all comes back to. So how do I know when I'm screwing myself again? You have to know that it's like it's the feedback loop. The feedback loop is it's like trying to write a program and never see being able to see the execution or any of the errors, right? You need to be aware of what your body is actually
01:14:24 ◼ ► doing before you can fix it. So anyway, I said that in probably a more concise way, but hopefully a more clear way in this podcast. And I talked about different devices and ergonomics and all things you can do. So listen to that. I have one book to recommend. It is a super old book because I'm an old person. A lot of it is silly and out of date. The thing I like about this book is the attitude that it tries to impart on the reader. It sounds kind of corny. Like there's stuff in it that like describes like, listen, this is what you're doing when you're at the
01:14:54 ◼ ► computer all day, even though it seems like you're not doing anything particularly strenuous, you are actually doing many small physical actions a huge number of times. And that actually is a thing that you need to, to Marco's point, strengthen your body for and train for. And no, just doing it is not training for it. Like the same reason that athletes don't say I just need to play the sport forever and ever. I don't need to do any training anywhere else. No, they go do things that are not the sport. They lift weights, they run, even if their sport is not weightlifting or running.
01:15:22 ◼ ► You need to do that to be able to use the computer eight hours a day, as they say in the book, and you will roll your eyes until they go back in your head. But hopefully by then you'll be convinced you are a computer athlete. It sounds so dumb. It sounds so dumb.
01:15:36 ◼ ► No, but it makes sense. You need to get your head in that space and computer athletes do not become better just by using computers. You have to actually do exercise with your body to train to be a computer athlete and you have to be able to do it in a way that is safe for your body. So anyway, this book is called Repetitive Strain Injury, a computer user's guide by Emil Pascarelli and Deborah Quilter.
01:15:57 ◼ ► I would also add, before we leave the mumbo jumbo area, not only should you listen to your body and everything else, but also this is one of the many things that nobody wants this to be the solution.
01:16:09 ◼ ► Nobody wants, everybody wants the solution to be you need to go and buy some cool gear and that will solve your problem.
01:16:18 ◼ ► Right, or they want to know that you can go to your doctor and they'll give you a magic pill and it will fix the problem. Those are the two things that everybody wants to be the solution, but the actual solution are things that you don't want to be the answer, but they are.
01:16:39 ◼ ► That's like the eat less version of dieting, but it's like, you know, if you eat less and exercise more, you'll probably lose weight and if you type less, your wrist will feel slightly better.
01:16:55 ◼ ► And I will, and unfortunately, one of the answers to this, I mentioned earlier that, you know, honest exercise is one of the biggest answers to this.
01:17:05 ◼ ► Any kind of exercise that can strengthen like the upper part of your body, especially in the lower arms and shoulder areas.
01:17:12 ◼ ► Those will probably benefit people for RSI reasons, but also hate to tell you diet can also help because we don't want to get too far into this because it's hard to find good science on it, but diet affects inflammation.
01:17:34 ◼ ► There are dietary choices you can make that it can be more or less inflammatory and RSI is mostly an inflammatory problem.
01:17:42 ◼ ► So if you can make dietary changes that can reduce inflammation and help your body better deal with it, that will almost certainly help RSI.
01:17:52 ◼ ► So again, I hate to tell you the answer is diet, exercise and gradual long term habit change.
01:18:02 ◼ ► Like, you know, my natural keyboard, I think, bought me a few more years until it was a bigger problem.
01:18:07 ◼ ► And unfortunately, I never got to that point because I was also making those changes in the meantime.
01:18:13 ◼ ► But all the different gear can do is buy you a bit more time before you have to really address the root problems.
01:18:22 ◼ ► One of the other pieces of bad news is that if you have one of the various strains of repetitive strain injury that causes permanent injury, you could be out of luck.
01:18:30 ◼ ► Like, for example, if you have nerve damage, it's very it's much more difficult to come back from that.
01:18:35 ◼ ► You can really screw yourself over if you go too far before you like, oh, I should I should do something about this.
01:18:39 ◼ ► It may be that you can never get back to the level of activity you were able to just like an athlete who like breaks their femur.
01:18:48 ◼ ► They're probably not going to be a world class sprinter again, like or whatever, whatever the sporting equivalent might be.
01:18:53 ◼ ► A really bad ACL injury for someone, you know, like depending on how badly you are injured and depending on the exact nature of your injury.
01:19:00 ◼ ► And maybe you can't get all the way back like so that's that's part of being injured is to understand how can I come back from this?
01:19:16 ◼ ► So that's that's that's why it's important to that's why I say it's important to seek out a medical professional, because are you going to tell you're going to diagnose in yourself whether you have nerve injury?
01:19:25 ◼ ► They can do nerve conduction tests on you, which are not fun, by the way, but they can do them to find out, hey, do you have nerve?
01:19:34 ◼ ► Find an actual medical professional who can help you figure out exactly how badly you are injured and what screwed up with you.
01:19:40 ◼ ► And even for the strength training stuff, like they can tell you which muscle groups to work on.
01:19:47 ◼ ► You can make your injury worse if you strengthen up muscles that are already in a section of your body that is too constricted.
01:19:53 ◼ ► And like if you're strength, if you're if you're hunched over, like all of us hunched over computer people and you strengthen all the muscles in the front of your chest, but none of them on your back and you have like thoracic out this syndrome, you're going to be crushing everything in there.
01:20:06 ◼ ► Even worse, as you make these big strong muscles on the front of your body and these wimpy muscles on the back like so you have to know which parts to work out and how and a medical professional can help you with that.
01:20:15 ◼ ► Yeah. And one one very common thing that at least at least is a big part of American medical culture.
01:20:27 ◼ ► Like you basically decide before you even go like I want to get this prescription drug and you go to the doctor and they can tell immediately what you're there for, what what you really want.
01:20:39 ◼ ► Here's the you know, they'll go through their diligence and they'll just give it a prescription that you want.
01:20:43 ◼ ► If you're going to do that for to solve problems like this, get yourself a prescription for physical therapy.
01:20:52 ◼ ► Physical therapy is to when dealing with issues like this or by the way, this all applies to back problems as well.
01:21:00 ◼ ► Physical therapy is generally a much more useful remedy than most medication can be for this kind of problem.
01:21:08 ◼ ► And physical therapists, at least when you find good, properly trained ones, physical therapists are very good at what John just said, at being able to tell you like, you know, do this specific exercise and then they will do it with you.
01:21:23 ◼ ► This specific stretch, stuff like that, like they physical therapy is one of the most effective options in the medical complex that we have today for this kind of problem or back problems.
01:21:35 ◼ ► One more mumbo jumbo bit, which is in line with Marco's inflammation related food stuff.
01:21:44 ◼ ► If you're under stress, even like momentary stress of like stress of debugging a particular problem and you're stressed about that problem or it's the end of the day and you have to get something done before you leave.
01:21:54 ◼ ► You can injure yourself more in like the last stressful 15 minutes of the day than the whole rest of the day combined, because being under stress makes you type harder, makes you tense up more and can make you injure yourself more.
01:22:19 ◼ ► You may not realize your muscles are tensing up, but in a repetitive strain injury situation when you're on like the, you know, the edge of messing yourself up and all of a sudden everything gets more tense and tighter and you start typing harder.
01:22:47 ◼ ► You'll know you've reached a level of awareness of your body when you realize exactly how much pressure you're applying when you're typing.
01:22:54 ◼ ► And am I typing this email slightly harder than I should because I'm angry about it or something?
01:23:05 ◼ ► So I haven't, I've been lucky enough not to really suffer from RSI in any meaningful way that I'm aware of as yet.
01:23:18 ◼ ► But Casey, now I know someone who ostensibly doesn't, which probably just means that you're not aware of it.
01:23:41 ◼ ► But I mean, I was exaggerating saying that it's like everybody, but it's a lot of people that we know, right?
01:23:47 ◼ ► When I think of all the computer people I know, it's hard to think of one who hasn't had some kind of RSI issue at some point.
01:23:52 ◼ ► So in that vein, I wanted to call attention to the show Fun Fact, which we've name dropped a couple of times recently with our friends,
01:24:04 ◼ ► And Alan has been going through some RSI issues and he's been talking about some of the ways he's been trying to treat it.
01:24:11 ◼ ► And it's a pretty funny journey because he's apparently tried everything under the sun.
01:24:21 ◼ ► It's just that he's kind of thrown a million things at the wall and hope that something is stuck.
01:24:28 ◼ ► Also in the vein of Listen to Your Body, Mike, my co-host on Analog and one of the founders of Relay FM, he had a catastrophic back injury that was entirely Marco and Tif's fault, or at least that's the story he told me.
01:24:53 ◼ ► And apparently his doctor, who is a British doctor, which means they're probably really good at what they do because they actually have good medicine over there.
01:25:00 ◼ ► His British doctor told him, and I'm going to butcher the retelling here, but apparently the doctor told him, avoid pain.
01:25:16 ◼ ► But what it boils down to is if your body says, wow, this hurts, then maybe don't do it, which is exactly what John and Marco both were saying, particularly John was saying earlier.
01:25:55 ◼ ► I mean, it kind of doesn't matter whether the iPhone goes USB-C or not, because A, lots of Android phones have already gone USB-C, and that's a pretty big part of the market, especially people who buy Jeep Wranglers.
01:26:05 ◼ ► And B, you want to take a bet on what the most popular phone platform is for people who buy Jeep Wranglers?
01:26:13 ◼ ► Well, let me tell you, Marco, since you brought it up, I know two Jeep Wrangler owners and both of them use Android.
01:26:30 ◼ ► I think the majority of cars, over 50% of cars that are shipped in whatever year have a USB-C port within them.
01:26:54 ◼ ► So all the power adapters, all the plugs on airplanes, like, I feel like they'll all go together or not at all.
01:27:00 ◼ ► So not at all would be like, there's some new standard after that that they go to and they just skip USB-C.
01:27:05 ◼ ► But assuming they're ever going to go USB-C, I feel like it will happen in pace with the rest of the USB-A world.
01:27:15 ◼ ► Although it's hard for me to get, other than the Jeep Wrangler, I can't think of an instance where I saw a USB-C, like this end of the USB-C.
01:27:28 ◼ ► But the other side, like the charging side, essentially, I can't think of time I've actually seen that.
01:27:35 ◼ ► But I feel like the cars will not be ahead of the rest of the world, nor will they lag behind it.
01:27:46 ◼ ► But again, hard to judge because I just honestly don't see USB-C anywhere in the world.
01:29:16 ◼ ► All right, so we got one more Ask ATP question that I wanted to make the after show because
01:29:24 ◼ ► So James, last name withheld, writes, "Speaking of non-Apple tech, it's been about three and
01:29:39 ◼ ► What does Marco look for in a watch these days, and what are his favorites or wish list
01:29:47 ◼ ► That actually is the most interesting question to me, but feel free to take these in whatever
01:29:56 ◼ ► So I'm not going to go into too much because this is-- it's a very hard thing to talk about,
01:29:59 ◼ ► and this is why I mostly don't share my watch world online because it's awkward if I buy
01:30:21 ◼ ► they represent best bang for the buck or really nice design in that category or whatever else.
01:31:51 ◼ ► Most of what I look for in a design is about having a very nice, aesthetically pleasing
01:31:59 ◼ ► I am all about dial design, especially nice dial service finishes like a sunburst finish
01:32:08 ◼ ► I'm a sucker for nice applied indexes for the hours, like applied markers, which basically
01:32:32 ◼ ► To answer the question of what it would take for me to regularly wear an Apple Watch, I
01:32:40 ◼ ► I think the answer there is nothing, because the reason I like watches is ways in which
01:32:55 ◼ ► The Apple Watch can never have nice materials on the dial and fancy finishes and the way
01:33:03 ◼ ► One of my favorite things to do with a nice watch is just kind of move my hand a little
01:33:41 ◼ ► For the most part, what I love about watches, the Apple Watch can't do by its own nature.
01:33:51 ◼ ► I just set it and I reset it for accuracy purposes maybe every few weeks and it's fine.
01:34:00 ◼ ► Going on to more specific recommendations, I tend not to talk about this stuff much and
01:34:26 ◼ ► You have to change the battery every couple of years if it isn't solar and usually under
01:34:50 ◼ ► If it ever needs batteries or service, anybody anywhere can service those watches because
01:35:12 ◼ ► You can start to get mechanical movements in this price range, but mechanical movements
01:35:42 ◼ ► Also at this price range, usually you're not getting some of the more useful amenities.
01:35:46 ◼ ► Things like hacking seconds, which means when you pull the crown, the seconds hand stops
01:36:16 ◼ ► Mechanical watches under about $600 or $700, they have these inexpensive movements that
01:36:41 ◼ ► They have a new line called the Khaki Field Watch that I think is very nice, very modern,
01:36:59 ◼ ► They tend to specialize in the solar quartz area, which is the eco drive line that they have,
01:37:05 ◼ ► where it's quartz, but you almost never have to do anything to it because it has an internal,
01:37:22 ◼ ► So moving up, if you're willing to spend between $700 and $1500, this tends to buy you nicer
01:37:53 ◼ ► They're one of the biggest brands in the world and they have surprisingly good bang for the
01:38:07 ◼ ► These are like dressier Seiko options that have really amazing finishes and amazing dial
01:38:41 ◼ ► I would also say this is kind of where Nomos' entry level models live, like in the $1500
01:38:48 ◼ ► I'm less into Nomos in recent years because they've pushed very much up market in price
01:39:03 ◼ ► I'm now both too small for many of their watches that I would actually want and also they've
01:39:16 ◼ ► Also before we leave the $1500-ish price range, I also want to mention German brand Junghans,
01:39:23 ◼ ► They make this wonderful iconic line called the Max Build line about the famous Max Build
01:39:41 ◼ ► And also in this price range, you get some nice utilitarian models from SIN and Damasco.
01:40:31 ◼ ► Some micro brands I would take a good hard look at are Halios, which Halios watches are
01:41:01 ◼ ► And also a brand that I like a lot is Oak and Oscar, which they also do some cool designs.
01:41:17 ◼ ► This is where you start to get the big brands that you've heard of that are nice brands.
01:42:10 ◼ ► They specialize in very intricate dial patterns and extremely sharp and well polished hands
01:42:33 ◼ ► It basically is a mechanical power source that has the same kind of automatically wound
01:42:40 ◼ ► But instead of having an escapement that ticks back and forth with the balance wheel, it's
01:42:49 ◼ ► Instead of having that, it kind of uses like a magnetic brake controlled by a quartz crystal
01:42:55 ◼ ► and so you get incredibly precise timing and it moves in a continuous motion instead of
01:43:34 ◼ ► So you have this continuous smooth sweep and it is more accurate than almost any mechanical
01:43:41 ◼ ► Because it's using a quartz crystal for regulation, it is basically quartz-like accuracy.
01:43:50 ◼ ► So Grand Seiko, especially Spring Drive, in the $4,000 to $5,000 range, you're not going
01:44:11 ◼ ► Omega is probably the best overall value in the watch business because what you get, you
01:44:26 ◼ ► Those have a new generation of movements that's incredibly nice and accurate and practical.
01:45:14 ◼ ► You can buy either of these used, but it's a lot easier to find used Omegas because there's
01:46:09 ◼ ► If I could only wear watches from one brand for the rest of my life, today I would choose
01:46:15 ◼ ► Omega to be that brand because they're just so practical and so good and span such a wide
01:46:25 ◼ ► I know this is hard in most of the world because of location issues, but you really should
01:46:49 ◼ ► Sometimes there will be one that is amazing in person that doesn't photograph well online
01:46:53 ◼ ► or more often you'll find amazing photos of one online and then in person it doesn't look
01:47:17 ◼ ► It's very hard to figure out by numbers alone whether a watch will fit and look good on
01:47:24 ◼ ► And finally, I will close this by saying while I could never follow this advice because of
01:47:29 ◼ ► the kind of person I am and how much I love this kind of thing, the ideal number of watches
01:48:00 ◼ ► I don't have any of those concerns and I have money that you wouldn't have if you bought
01:48:05 ◼ ► It sounds like I could play back all of the talk you gave probably on neutral, maybe on
01:48:21 ◼ ► Well, I know you're familiar with them, but are you like very familiar with movement because
01:48:34 ◼ ► Movement strikes me as a very affordable, I'm talking between one and $300, reasonably aesthetically
01:49:06 ◼ ► But anyway, there's this massive category of what the watch people call fashion watches,
01:49:21 ◼ ► This includes things like Fossil and MVMT, Danny Wellington, Shinola, which has a whole
01:49:32 ◼ ► And by the way, I'm fairly cool on Houdenki these days because they are basically a hype
01:49:40 ◼ ► machine and anything they shine their light on gets immediately ruined by their audience.
01:49:48 ◼ ► So it's like anything that Houdenki says is awesome becomes impossible to get basically
01:50:36 ◼ ► Once you start crossing that point when you're in this kind of quality level, you're not
01:50:56 ◼ ► is jewelry and it's all irrational and it's all based on spending money for things that
01:51:20 ◼ ► Well the thing is, I have a lot of thoughts about this but I don't share them in my online
01:52:33 ◼ ► they have like three subdials or two subdials somewhere in the middle, oftentimes they will
01:52:45 ◼ ► It's really hard to fit a date on a chronograph any other way besides that and that's why
01:52:54 ◼ ► That's why if I'm going to buy a chronograph, I want one with no date at all because there's
01:52:57 ◼ ► no good place to put one and have it fit in a reasonably sized dial, except diagonally,
01:53:08 ◼ ► I want to be able to quickly tell the time and certain color combinations or metal combinations
01:53:13 ◼ ► or finishes, make it so that like in certain light, you don't have a lot of contrast with
01:53:19 ◼ ► Or like the markers aren't distinguished enough or, you know, there's all sorts of potential
01:53:54 ◼ ► I, it's funny because, and I feel like we've talked about this several times on the show.
01:54:01 ◼ ► Exactly half of me thinks this is the most self-indulgent, preposterous, wasteful hobby
01:54:30 ◼ ► Like you can buy like, you know, a basic economic car that isn't any fun to drive and doesn't
01:54:37 ◼ ► have any and isn't very nice and doesn't have any cool features and it's not that fast.
01:54:49 ◼ ► So like the people who really care blow massive piles of money in order to get something that
01:55:05 ◼ ► But if you have the money, it's a way that you can make yourself really happy, you know,
01:55:24 ◼ ► And even Pagani is, that's not fair to Pagani because like the terrible value of fancy cars
01:55:32 ◼ ► is a terrible value, but the value like the fraction that gets that terrible value usually
01:55:39 ◼ ► And in watches, it doesn't because the best performance is like the quartz watch and all
01:56:05 ◼ ► But if you cared about performance, the one job that the watch has to do is to tell accurate
01:56:17 ◼ ► There's a transition from really, really good at telling time and then crap at telling time.
01:56:28 ◼ ► Well, I mean quartz, like you mentioned the expensive watches that actually have quartz
01:57:08 ◼ ► I don't care if it's new, if it's used, it's, but you have $100 million to blow on a watch.
01:58:04 ◼ ► I used to not get the appeal of a lot of very popular watches and as I've gotten more into
01:58:16 ◼ ► worn them sometimes and like as I've gotten more into it, my tastes have changed and expanded
01:58:31 ◼ ► More recently there have been a few that I've been like, hmm, I wouldn't mind trying that
01:58:41 ◼ ► They're made to look ridiculous and yet when you see them, they're kind of nice and maybe
01:58:48 ◼ ► one time you see them and you don't think they're kind of nice but maybe two years later
01:59:06 ◼ ► There's lots of things back then that I thought, who would ever buy that and then like two
01:59:17 ◼ ► for this $850,000 watch and I find it hilarious that in the lower right corner I got one of
01:59:59 ◼ ► Even if I were to somehow get one of those, I don't think I could ever actually wear it.
02:00:13 ◼ ► Like I don't, and even like, this is a problem that I think has come out of like hooded culture.
02:00:37 ◼ ► They'd have the Twitter parent, you know, the, uh, has Jeff Bezos decided to end hunger
02:00:47 ◼ ► And every day that there's a Twitter account that checks whether he's decided to end world
02:00:51 ◼ ► That's like once you start wearing a million dollar watch on your wrist, you get one of
02:01:02 ◼ ► Like I wouldn't want to wear something that people will be able to recognize as something
02:01:20 ◼ ► I'm genuinely asking because it's, as an outsider who really doesn't understand this stuff,
02:01:54 ◼ ► Like it's, I just like the design, which is basically the worst possible reason to ever