00:00:00 ◼ ► There is in the show notes document, um, there is something that's pre-show colon. Casey has something that's about 60 seconds barring tangents. Now this is us, right? Well, no, I think Casey's talking about himself. He causes his own tangents in the middle of his own thought and that leads to a long digressions.
00:00:20 ◼ ► You know, that reminds me, no, I'm just kidding. Um, so I, I have to bring us to our favorite, our mutual, the three of us, our collective favorite corner, which is, uh, anniversary corner, because today as we record is March 11th of 2026.
00:00:35 ◼ ► Can you, I think we should, you should force us both to guess. Cause I have no idea what this is the anniversary of Marco. You have any idea?
00:00:40 ◼ ► Is it, I mean, it could be our show. We started at some time in the early part of the year, so it could be the show. I'm going to say the show.
00:00:55 ◼ ► I'm going to go look it up, but I'm, I'm forcing myself not to, but I honestly have no idea what this is the anniversary of Casey. Please tell us.
00:01:00 ◼ ► All right. So, uh, I will put a link in the show notes. Uh, but this is a tweet from the 11th of March, 2013 from Casey Liss.
00:01:08 ◼ ► Listen to Marco Armand, Syracuse and I talk tech. If cars, isn't your thing, the accidental tech podcast at ATP.FM.
00:01:22 ◼ ► I believe that's right. I'd have to look. I think that's right. Yeah. Hold on. We have really good URLs, so it won't be too long.
00:01:35 ◼ ► All right. My bad. So, but that was, it was an easy URL. It was atp.fm slash one. You never double checked it.
00:01:42 ◼ ► Well, no, because if you recall, the first few were actually on SoundCloud or something like that.
00:01:52 ◼ ► That's right. But anyway, episode four was released the 11th of March, 2013, and is a scant one hour, 18 minutes and 47 seconds.
00:02:17 ◼ ► You had talked last week about one of your post-breaking containment. I don't know if we would go so far as to say it went viral, but it certainly got some attention.
00:02:28 ◼ ► And Thomas Dixon was, I guess, the first person of many to point out, oh, people probably don't know that the Mac Pro exists and assumed you were talking about the MacBook Pro, which starts at $1,700.
00:02:41 ◼ ► Yeah, this is my post that broke containment, being seen by an audience that has no context for me or my deal or anything.
00:02:48 ◼ ► And so when I posted about comparing the MacBook Neo's performance to the Mac Pro's performance in a single-threaded and the price of the two of them and yada, yada, people misinterpreted it in various ways.
00:03:00 ◼ ► And I got a lot of people correcting me on the price because I said that Neo is whatever, $600, and the Mac Pro is, what is it, $7,000 or something?
00:03:16 ◼ ► And I thought most of them were confused because when I wrote MacBook Neo, they were reading MacBook Pro because $1,700 is the price of the MacBook Pro.
00:03:24 ◼ ► Lots of people wrote in telling me they thought people were confused, not that MacBook Neo was being misread as MacBook Pro, but rather that Mac Pro was being misread as MacBook Pro.
00:03:36 ◼ ► Because some people call the MacBook Pro the Mac Pro because I touch, you know, people will just, and it's no confusion for them because they have no idea that a computer called the Mac Pro exists.
00:03:59 ◼ ► But two people did say specifically that they read Mac Pro and thought I meant MacBook Pro.
00:04:06 ◼ ► And I think I have heard people in real life say, oh, I don't have a Mac Air or I don't have a MacBook Air or whatever.
00:04:18 ◼ ► And a couple of people pointed out that one thing that certainly doesn't help, even for people who are kind of into Apple, is that at this point, Apple stores just do not have the Mac Pro at all anymore, like on display.
00:04:30 ◼ ► I mean, I think if you showed most people a picture of the current Mac Pro, they would be like, what is that?
00:04:45 ◼ ► I had lots of discussions on other podcasts and YouTube channels and stuff about the colors, about, you know, that people were happy that you could see the colors on, like, on the MacBook Air.
00:04:56 ◼ ► But some people wanted them to be sort of more saturated, more forceful, and a lot of the discussion centered around the things that Apple has rumored to have said or whatever they're like.
00:05:05 ◼ ► Maybe they tested it, and when the colors are really bold, that it just gets tiring to look at that all the time.
00:05:12 ◼ ► And I get where people are coming from, and I get the idea that, you know, maybe you might think you want, like, a bright red laptop, but after a while, it'll become wearing on you.
00:05:24 ◼ ► But I never heard anyone mention this, and it's my immediate thought when I saw these, and I understand why they didn't do it, which I'll get to in a second.
00:05:30 ◼ ► Apple has done this with the iMac, where they use bold, saturated colors on the back, but on the front, in the chin, where you can see it, decidedly more muted.
00:05:43 ◼ ► So they went with extremely bold, saturated colors in the iMac, so it's great, and product shots look great from behind.
00:05:48 ◼ ► But if Apple is concerned that staring at a bright red or bright green or whatever thing is going to wear on your eyes, don't worry.
00:05:54 ◼ ► When you're looking at the front of your iMac, you don't see that saturated red or green or whatever.
00:05:59 ◼ ► Well, with a laptop, you could make the thing bold and saturated on the top and bottom.
00:06:08 ◼ ► Now, one of the reasons they probably didn't do that is that would be more expensive to do, like, two different anodizations on a single solid chassis.
00:06:17 ◼ ► But for future reference, Apple, on perhaps a more expensive laptop, if you ever do decide to do colors, make it as bold and as red or as green or as yellow as you want on the outside.
00:06:28 ◼ ► And then when you open it up, have it be a more muted color so it's not screaming in our face.
00:06:51 ◼ ► That's a really good point that because we're Americans and tend to think only about America, I don't think any of the three of us considered.
00:06:57 ◼ ► The rest of the world is real excited about the Nioh because we were comparing it to the M1 MacBook Air Walmart for 650, which is still a great deal, especially if you like that design.
00:07:09 ◼ ► But if you never had that deal because you don't have a Walmart, then the Nioh is great.
00:07:19 ◼ ► I mean, in a lot of different countries around the world, the idea of spending, even for the base model MacBook Air all these years, which is always like around $1,000, maybe $900 through certain channels are on sale.
00:07:35 ◼ ► You know, maybe at the absolute lowest, maybe you'd see something for like $8,000 or $8,500.
00:07:39 ◼ ► In a lot of places, either that amount of money directly or what the price ends up being after all the, you know, import duties and taxes and everything.
00:07:53 ◼ ► And so this will open and, you know, by cutting it roughly in half, this will open up a lot more customers to Macs that were just that they were just inaccessible before.
00:08:05 ◼ ► That's a really big deal as the Nioh reviews have come out and more people are doing analysis and more people are chiming in with their thoughts and their opinions and, you know, what's going on in different markets.
00:08:42 ◼ ► I mean, not to get ahead of ourselves, but can you imagine if the iPhone company suddenly became the iPhone and Mac company again?
00:08:58 ◼ ► No other change they could have made to significantly boost the market share of the Mac from where it already was.
00:09:29 ◼ ► You know, what we mean as low cost as privileged people in the U.S. is very different from what many places around the world and what many markets need for their low cost.
00:09:51 ◼ ► And if anything, you know, I think Apple's marketing angle of like, look at what PC laptops give you for similar prices.
00:09:59 ◼ ► That's a smart play because when you look at what PC laptops give you for similar prices, it's not good.
00:10:07 ◼ ► And, you know, certainly Chromebooks and other PC laptops are available for less, but not that much less.
00:10:16 ◼ ► So this, again, like nothing else they could have done could have expanded the market the way this did.
00:10:22 ◼ ► But by roughly cutting the price in half by going to, you know, a $600 entry price, that's really good.
00:10:30 ◼ ► And I think when you compare the NIO to other things in that price range, it's going to compare really well for a lot of people's needs.
00:10:44 ◼ ► There were all these statements that the M chips provided silicon that simplified the job of Rosetta.
00:10:52 ◼ ► But we're going to talk about this among other things in overtime this week as it turns out.
00:10:58 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm pretty sure that, you know, I remember that when Apple was talking about that, like with the M1, that it had stuff that the phone chips don't.
00:11:09 ◼ ► I talked about last episode that, like, it's kind of clear that Apple didn't build the A18 Pro with the Mac in mind based on how difficult it was to add a second really slow USB port.
00:11:20 ◼ ► It's clear that Apple wanted to add a USB port, but it had, you know, it had limited options.
00:11:35 ◼ ► So it's clear that the A-chips, at least the A18 Pro anyway, are not ideal for the Mac in terms of the, you know, peripherals and stuff.
00:12:06 ◼ ► But the thing is, like, all those differences between the M and A were emphasized when the M first appeared.
00:12:11 ◼ ► But we've had so many A's since then, I feel like most things have trickled down, except for stuff that is really of no use to the phone.
00:12:29 ◼ ► Remember, we heard back when we were first discussing the rumors of what became CarPlay Ultra, we had heard that the way that was implemented was basically a virtualization layer on the phone that ran the, like, gauge cluster version of CarPlay in, like, a virtualized real-time OS.
00:13:00 ◼ ► But if that was true, then recent iPhones would have had to support hardware virtualization on the processor.
00:13:10 ◼ ► But anyway, even if that's not true, if that was, like, the direction they might have gone or a direction they were experimenting with, they would have added that support if it wasn't already there.
00:13:21 ◼ ► And I'm assuming this stuff that Rosetta needs is, like, you know, some instructions that make certain things faster or whatever.
00:13:31 ◼ ► Anyway, we'll find out if someone gets these in their hands or someone discovers, I tried to run an Intel app on my MacBook Neo and it didn't run at all.
00:13:40 ◼ ► I would bet that if it is supported, I bet most Intel apps run faster on the Neo than they did on the last Intel Macs.
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00:16:04 ◼ ► The keyboard case for the iPad Air, and I think also for the regular iPad, has a moving trackpad and no backlight, just like the MacBook Neo.
00:16:17 ◼ ► My iPad Pro, which I'm using the original Magic Keyboard, the original cantilevered Magic Keyboard from way back when,
00:16:27 ◼ ► So, I had this from, you know, whenever it came out originally sometime during the pandemic.
00:16:39 ◼ ► But it's an interesting point that they're, maybe not literally, but kind of sort of recycling the iPad keyboards in trackpads for the...
00:16:48 ◼ ► It's just pointing out that Apple, I think I had said in the last episode that Apple hadn't shipped a physical moving trackpad in a while.
00:17:10 ◼ ► And, John, you've been kind enough to put a table in here for us, which is in our internal show notes.
00:17:15 ◼ ► The long and short of it is MacBook Neo, the 256-gig version anyway, will read and write 1.7 gigabits per second.
00:18:01 ◼ ► And it turns out it's about half the speed of the M1 MacBook Air, which is a shame and not ideal for a Mac.
00:18:07 ◼ ► But I think it's another place where the 18 Pro is not really designed for a Mac because the bandwidth we expect out of a Mac and the size of the SSDs and how much IO goes on and so on and so forth, the expectations are different on a Mac.
00:18:20 ◼ ► So I do wonder if that will change in the A19, A20, or whatever, you know, as the Neo evolves, I'm going to keep an eye on this because this is, you know, quite a regression in SSD speed from the Walmart M1 MacBook Air, which had twice as fast speeds.
00:18:35 ◼ ► And then also to note, I mean, we didn't make much of this when we talked about it, but like when the M5 MacBook Pro came out, the plain non-suffix M5 MacBook Pro came out a while ago, it was noted that the SSD speeds basically doubled because I guess they doubled the bus width or whatever they did.
00:18:51 ◼ ► Anyway, the M5 MacBook Air benefits from that as well, as does the M5 Max and M5 Pro MacBook Pro.
00:19:01 ◼ ► Peter Puglio writes, with regard to John talking about the cost savings for the embossed Apple logo on the MacBook Neo and the more expensive inlaid alternative, Peter writes, I wonder if he was actually, if John was actually thinking about the iPhone 5 intro video where Johnny Ive explains how they used high-powered cameras to determine which glass cutouts best fit the inlay of the device body.
00:19:23 ◼ ► I did not remember this until I watched the video, and either Peter or John was kind enough to put a timestamp link in the show notes, which we will put in our show notes.
00:19:35 ◼ ► I swear I saw one for the Apple logos as well, but who knows, I could have been mixing it up with this.
00:19:43 ◼ ► So with regard to our dear friend Jason Snell over at Six Colors, he writes, the Apple logo on the top has changed too.
00:19:49 ◼ ► It's still a separate part, but made of anodized aluminum rather than polished steel with a slightly different color shade than the rest of the device's body.
00:19:56 ◼ ► So this answers the question I saw a lot of posts saying, oh, the MacBook Neo, it's not a separate piece.
00:20:10 ◼ ► I don't know if that saves any money because I was saying the embossed logo is a money-saving thing because it's cheaper to just carve a little apple shape in it than it is to, you know, have those computer-controlled cameras match up the parts and do the inlays.
00:20:24 ◼ ► Maybe that makes it easier because they expand and contract at the same rate because they're both aluminum or something, but Apple going to Apple, they could not bear to not have their extremely precisely inlaid Apple logo.
00:20:36 ◼ ► Next time you're looking at the top of your laptop, when you're cleaning the fingerprint smudges off the shiny Apple logo on the back of your laptop, look how well it fits.
00:20:53 ◼ ► Yeah, and speaking of that fingerprint magnet polished Apple logo on the other laptops, I wouldn't mind if that, you know, got a different finish in a future design because it's a fingerprint magnet and any little tiny scuff or scratch, you will see that there forever.
00:21:07 ◼ ► Something a little bit more brushed or textured like what they did on the Neo, I think that would be a welcome change for future redesigns.
00:21:15 ◼ ► Dave2D, the YouTuber, did a pretty good and relatively short review of the Neo, but among other things, Dave took off the back cover.
00:21:26 ◼ ► Additionally, Dave mentioned that the Neo takes up to 30 watts from a charger, although it only comes with a 20 watt charger in the box.
00:21:35 ◼ ► But under the back cover, you can see that there's a bunch of different like components, but it's not nearly as jam packed.
00:22:00 ◼ ► But then to the left and the right of the trackpad, instead of there being more battery, there is...
00:22:06 ◼ ► Plastic space fillers, I'm going to say, because there's no way the speakers are filling all that space.
00:22:12 ◼ ► If you look at the design of modern iPads with good speakers, this is kind of similar to what they do, where they have like a big internal cavity that works as like a speaker, you know, sound channel.
00:22:30 ◼ ► And I'm sure one of the biggest reasons the battery does not fill the whole thing is cost.
00:22:35 ◼ ► So I think they had space and I think they chose to use that space of like, let's make good speaker acoustic channels in here.
00:22:50 ◼ ► I know there's lots of different ways you can make sort of a winding tube inside a speaker body to enhance space and stuff like that.
00:22:58 ◼ ► If you look at how the much better speakers in the MacBook Pros, how little space they take up.
00:23:12 ◼ ► But the point is, on all Apple's other laptops in recent years, every ounce of space is filled with battery.
00:23:20 ◼ ► You know, it has a smaller battery because it can get away with a smaller battery and still have comparable battery life.
00:23:42 ◼ ► Like, there were literally, I think, 15 screws or something like that around the battery.
00:23:46 ◼ ► But what was fascinating about this teardown was there was almost no adhesive anywhere in this thing.
00:23:52 ◼ ► It was pretty much all screws top to bottom, which is extremely unlike any other Apple product teardown I've ever seen, which is very cool.
00:24:06 ◼ ► Oh, and speaking of the trackpad, the Day 2D video shows some of that as well, if you're wondering how it works.
00:24:26 ◼ ► And so wherever you press on the trackpad, it presses down the entire metal H, which presses down the center thing, which presses the buttons in the center.
00:24:36 ◼ ► And then there's these two kind of leaf springs on the left and right in the spaces of the H to push the thing back up.
00:24:42 ◼ ► Again, I don't know if that's also how it works on the iPad ones, but Jason says it is.
00:24:50 ◼ ► If you look at the, what do you call it, frequency response lines, this shows the MacBook Pro versus the MacBook Air versus the Neo.
00:24:58 ◼ ► Suffice it to say that what you actually want to see here is essentially a straight line from left to right.
00:25:08 ◼ ► And yeah, the Neo is not as good as the Air, which is significantly worse than the Pro.
00:25:23 ◼ ► Obviously, it demonstrates that the Neo does have less battery life than the MacBook Air, which has a battery that's one third bigger.
00:25:32 ◼ ► And then the MacBook Pro, this is the M5 Max version, gets worse battery life than the Air, which you would expect because of the bigger power demands.
00:25:43 ◼ ► And also you can see the thing that we've talked about in the past, where if you max out the max chip, it will use a huge amount of power and drain your battery very quickly.
00:25:54 ◼ ► So the heavy load time, the M5 Max gets the slowest heavy load time because it has the most machinery to use energy.
00:26:07 ◼ ► So, yeah, that really demonstrates, although it's kind of not a fair fight because what they're doing is we're going to run you under heavy load until you run out of battery power.
00:26:14 ◼ ► Whereas if you have a fixed workload, the M5 Max will use more power, but it will get it done more quickly, you know, and then be idle again, the race to sleep phenomenon.
00:26:25 ◼ ► It doesn't mean that you will get worse battery life from your M5 Max than either the other computers doing a specific task.
00:26:30 ◼ ► But it does mean if you just run a benchmark and leave it running until the battery drains, it'll drain first on the M5 Max.
00:26:38 ◼ ► Also, before we leave the Neo, going back to the repairability angle and the design of the repairability, I think that is also like more important than ever for this type of price category.
00:26:51 ◼ ► Because when you have a less expensive product, you're going to sell it to, first of all, like kind of fleet users, you know, think like, you know, schools and stuff like that, that have a whole bunch of them.
00:27:01 ◼ ► And those need to be repairable oftentimes like, quote, in the field, like the school IT department sometimes does that themselves and they need to be able to make simple repairs.
00:27:15 ◼ ► But then also when you look at different markets around the world that these are sold, there's a lot of places out there that rely on much like lower, like less equipped or lower cost repair networks.
00:27:29 ◼ ► So when you think about like if there's a country that doesn't have Apple stores or that doesn't have a lot of Apple stores or if you live many hours from one or, you know, you're relying on a network of third party repair shops or, you know, kind of more local options.
00:27:43 ◼ ► As a result of that, the simpler the product is to repair, you know, first of all, you know, you need the product to be cheaper usually to sell to a lot of those markets.
00:27:51 ◼ ► But then the simpler is to repair also over time that makes it more accessible to more people.
00:28:04 ◼ ► And this is, again, like a huge step forward for making Macs more accessible to more places around the world.
00:28:15 ◼ ► For what it's worth, I did go to the Apple store earlier today in order to look at the Neo and the displays.
00:28:21 ◼ ► And I don't have that much to say about any of them, but I will say I did like the colors.
00:28:25 ◼ ► I don't love the color matched keyboards personally, but that's because I'm a bit of an old man.
00:28:35 ◼ ► See, I love that they matched the color, the keyboards to it because like that's, again, like when you're, when you look at like what brought us all to Apple in the first place, it was little delightful attention to detail kind of things like that.
00:28:49 ◼ ► And even if you don't like the, you know, the, the P color keyboard or whatever it is, like, you know, even if you don't like the colors they chose, I'm glad they did exactly that.
00:28:58 ◼ ► You know, that when apparently also like they, they pre-configure Mac OS by default to use the tint color of the, of the hardware, like of the case, like that's a great idea.
00:29:13 ◼ ► And that's how you win over new people to like, oh, I'm so delighted by this Apple product.
00:29:17 ◼ ► You know, people who've never had a Mac before, if they go for this, all those little delights, they're going to be seeing those for the first time.
00:29:39 ◼ ► Also, before we leave the, you know, the Neo too much here, I wanted to briefly mention, briefly comment on like, there's been a couple of videos out here and there.
00:29:48 ◼ ► Our friend Tyler Stallman did a great one about basically like pushing what the Neo can do.
00:29:55 ◼ ► You know, people often assume that low-end computers can't do, you know, some kind of perceived to be high-end task.
00:30:11 ◼ ► Then this has been a thing that we've been, we've been saying that, you know, oh, we, you need a, you know, insert high-end model here to do video editing.
00:30:36 ◼ ► But when the M1 came out, it, when it was the high-end chip, you know what people did on their computers?
00:30:48 ◼ ► That was a common task that you would advertise the capability of doing on high-end computers of the time.
00:30:58 ◼ ► So today, when the M1 is the low-end model, it didn't become less able to edit 4K video in the intervening time.
00:31:32 ◼ ► And, like, our kind of, you know, hardware-needs-Overton window shifts forward as hardware gets better.
00:31:56 ◼ ► But I think it is wise for us to not assume or state that a product can't handle some high-end application unless we've tried it.
00:32:06 ◼ ► Or unless we've seen somebody who's tried it and seen the results and actually compared them.
00:32:11 ◼ ► Actually look at benchmarks or actually look at tests that actually do exactly that thing.
00:32:27 ◼ ► It might not, you know, I think the RAM is probably the most limiting factor for a lot of those things.
00:32:37 ◼ ► Like, most things can be done that most people will want to do, including photo editing, video editing, all those things that we think of as high-end that you need a big computer for.
00:32:56 ◼ ► Like, even low-end hardware these days is so good that it can do almost everything, just maybe more slowly.
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00:35:27 ◼ ► Brendan Shanks writes that's new in Xcode 26.4 beta 3, CPU family ARM Sotra, which is H17S, that contains P cores and M cores.
00:35:51 ◼ ► And I remember that rumor was like, oh, there's a bunch of these codenames in a new version of whatever OS it is.
00:36:06 ◼ ► It's between the E efficiency cores and the P, which are not the performance cores, but are the super cores now.
00:36:12 ◼ ► This is, can we just like, I'm just going to adopt this, the nomenclature of just like small, medium, and big.
00:36:18 ◼ ► Because that's what they are, like, there's the big cores and, you know, they call them super now.
00:36:45 ◼ ► I mean, I don't know if they meant medium or whatever, because it's not like it's large and small.
00:36:51 ◼ ► We'll see if the E cores ever gets phased out, because the plane M5 has them, but maybe, like, the plane M6 won't.
00:37:16 ◼ ► Additionally, citing Baidu leakers with regard to the cores, the super cores are 4.61 gigahertz with 10 wide decoding.
00:37:43 ◼ ► They also inherit the dual operating mode of the efficiency cores, which is to say that they can drop to a low power state for background tasks.
00:38:01 ◼ ► So, the width is not that much wider than the efficiency core, but the clock speed, it can go up to 4.38 instead of 3.0.
00:38:07 ◼ ► So, it seems like the clock speed increase alone is the main source of, you know, what makes an M core faster than an E core.
00:38:17 ◼ ► And you can see how it's within, you know, shouting distance of the 4.6 gigahertz of the big super cores.
00:38:39 ◼ ► It's interesting that in cache, the medium is closer to the small than it is because it's the largest twice as much.
00:38:46 ◼ ► So, that's like, what makes a super core super, one of the things is they just spend more transistors and more space on cache.
00:38:51 ◼ ► The minimum clock speed, we were just talking about maximums, but the minimum clock speed for performance, or super, excuse me, is 1,300 megahertz, 1,308 megahertz.
00:39:09 ◼ ► Yeah, so the medium ones don't go as slow as, they actually don't even, the big cores actually go slower than the medium cores, and they don't nearly go as slow as the efficiency cores.
00:39:18 ◼ ► Although, I do wonder if this is the thing that Quinn posted about inheriting the dual operating mode to go to a low power state.
00:39:36 ◼ ► I think the green surface is probably smaller, so we'll put a link to this in the show notes.
00:39:41 ◼ ► But suffice to say, it appears to me that the CPU die is pretty much the same across the M5 Pro and M5 Max,
00:39:49 ◼ ► but the GPU die is quite a bit different, and there's some sort of interposer-like thing connecting the two.
00:39:55 ◼ ► I put this in here because I wanted to, you know, someone was just coming up with like,
00:40:05 ◼ ► It's clear that like when they just chop off half the GPU, that's, it's going to look like half the GPU is chopped off.
00:40:11 ◼ ► But I don't think there is a, you know, those green strips, those interposer things, I don't think that's how they're doing it.
00:40:18 ◼ ► The whole point with the new TSMC process of the 2.5D stacking thing, SOIC MH, is that it doesn't have that.
00:40:30 ◼ ► But if you want to get an idea of like what kind of stuff is in the chip, even if this is not how it's arranged or how it's connected to each other, this, which is basically a repurposing of die shots of earlier M series chips, gives you an idea of what the difference is between these two chips and how, and the relative sizes of the parts.
00:40:58 ◼ ► For the M5 or M5 Pro, this was accompanied by a 100-pound increase to the base models, previously a 200-pound build-to-order.
00:41:06 ◼ ► In effect, this means that the price for storage is 100 pounds cheaper across all storage configs than the last gen, but the gaps between storage tiers remains the same.
00:41:14 ◼ ► Yeah, I asked how he was figuring this out because when I was trying to get this info for the review, I made the mistake of missing the deadline to check Apple's website for the upgrade prices.
00:41:27 ◼ ► Anyway, I couldn't go to apple.com and actually use the configurator for the old things.
00:41:34 ◼ ► So I did what I usually do, which is go to archive.org to use the configurator as it existed before the new products came out.
00:41:40 ◼ ► But archive.org cannot handle whatever JavaScript redirect stuff the Apple Store does, and I could not get to the screen where I could choose the storage size options.
00:41:54 ◼ ► And he said it was based on the Mac Studio storage prices, which you can still go and configure because that hasn't been updated to the M5 yet.
00:42:05 ◼ ► But yeah, it's tracking the price delta changes across generations is made extremely difficult when archive.org fails me.
00:42:13 ◼ ► The next time I'll have to remember to get all of the upgrade prices before the machines come out.
00:42:47 ◼ ► Also, we are aware, as Dan writes, that this has been the case outside the United States for some time, but it's also the case here now, too.
00:42:56 ◼ ► It's not like, you know, it's like they're saving money by not having to localize those or whatever.
00:43:16 ◼ ► So if someone is looking in the menu and seeing a keyboard shortcut, they're like, what key is that telling me it is?
00:43:23 ◼ ► I'm not sure you had to remove the word because, you know, command and option and stuff have both the symbol and the word.
00:43:29 ◼ ► But that's because command, option, and so on and so forth are sometimes spelled out in Apple's own documentation.
00:43:51 ◼ ► You know, say I want something akin to the studio display or even the XDR, but I don't want to pay Apple pricing.
00:44:07 ◼ ► But at this point, it's best to wait until all the CES announced displays are actually shipping and have been reviewed.
00:44:16 ◼ ► So, rather than, you know, sort of go through a list of good alternatives now and say this information will be out of date in a month, we might as well just wait until all the displays that were announced at CES are released and then we'll come back to it.
00:44:29 ◼ ► All right, and then Dan Boyle writes, I'm listening to the studio display XDR discussion, and there was a comment about third-party monitors missing integration features that Apple monitors have.
00:44:38 ◼ ► I've been using a Mac as my primary computer since around the turn of the millennium and haven't used an Apple-branded standalone display for probably two decades.
00:44:46 ◼ ► What have I been missing on the integration side, aside from not burning a couple hundred extra dollars with each purchase?
00:45:02 ◼ ► So, like, the panel on the studio display – this is the OG studio display – is better than the panel on the two LG 5Ks that I have.
00:45:20 ◼ ► Now, I haven't used any of my computer monitor speakers in, like, a year, thanks to my Sonos setup.
00:45:37 ◼ ► I did at the very beginning when the studio display had a little bit of software quirks to it.
00:46:10 ◼ ► Now, all of that is true of my LG 5Ks, but what I didn't consider is stuff like True Tone and Night Shift and all that sort of junk.
00:46:17 ◼ ► If there's adjustments in system settings that adjust things like when should the monitor dim, when should it not, should we use Night Shift, should this, should that.
00:46:39 ◼ ► But if you get Apple displays, I mean, again, like the Asus advertising was talking about at CES, if you open up your Mac laptop screen and look at that screen, and then you connect an Apple screen to the laptop, the external screen is going to match the built-in screen on the laptop in terms of color and all that other stuff.
00:46:57 ◼ ► And Asus was advertising that they can do the same thing because they have a color profile that matches it.
00:47:05 ◼ ► I'm not even sure if the studio display actually has a different panel than your LG, but it's clear that it looks better than your LG, possibly just because it's calibrated better and has more sophisticated circuitry driving it.
00:47:16 ◼ ► But it's mostly stuff like, like you were saying, does it wake up when my Mac wakes up?
00:47:29 ◼ ► Do the sound keys on my keyboard not change the volume of the speakers that are in the thing?
00:47:38 ◼ ► And like you said, if there's a camera built in, you said your LG has a camera and it works with macOS, but maybe a new version of macOS doesn't support it and you have to install a third-party driver.
00:47:52 ◼ ► The problem is most third-party display makers do not care enough about the Mac to support the features in their monitor in macOS.
00:48:01 ◼ ► Or maybe they support the features in their monitor in macOS when the monitor was released.
00:48:05 ◼ ► And then as years go on, they're like, oh, we're never going to make new drivers for that.
00:48:12 ◼ ► It's that Apple cares enough about the Mac to make sure all the features in its monitor work when you buy it and continue to work when future versions of macOS come out.
00:48:23 ◼ ► Imphaz asks, would you recommend getting a new studio display XDR or a used 32-inch Pro display XDR for around the same price?
00:48:31 ◼ ► I am going to give you the correct answer to this question, and then these two knuckleheads will give you the wrong answer.
00:48:57 ◼ ► So what John was just saying about how, you know, third-party monitors and what Casey was just saying, like all the things that make third-party monitors not very good with, you know, of an experience using with Macs, you are better off having an Apple monitor.
00:49:13 ◼ ► But if you, once you go 6K, once you expand your monitor, going up in monitor size is glorious.
00:49:28 ◼ ► So stick with your 27-inch 5K size and get the best one that now exists, which is Apple's new studio display XDR.
00:50:30 ◼ ► Apparently, as per MacRumors, the Studio Display has an A19 with 8 gigs of RAM and 128 gigabytes of storage.
00:50:41 ◼ ► The Studio Display XDR, the A19 Pro, has 12 gigs of RAM and 120 gigs of storage as well.
00:50:48 ◼ ► Yeah, it's kind of a shame that you can't boot macOS on these things because, let's be honest, like, as someone was saying, like, this is vastly more powerful than the 5K iMac was.
00:51:00 ◼ ► Like, now I know that that A19 Pro in there is doing, presumably doing stuff for the monitor.
00:51:23 ◼ ► I'm sure some will figure out some way to hack it someday, maybe when these things are old.
00:51:30 ◼ ► Probably because it's just those are the chips they had left over that didn't work in phones or something, and they just came with 128.
00:51:38 ◼ ► Like, I don't even know, like, is it, is it less, is it less expensive to get 128 than it would be to manufacture a 64 or whatever?
00:51:45 ◼ ► Because remember the, you know, these are phone chips with like integrated storage, not integrated, but like it's, they're manufactured with, with, for use in phones.
00:52:01 ◼ ► And if it was, it wasn't going to, it's not going to be filling 128, but that's what's in there.
00:52:06 ◼ ► A fairly powerful Mac caliber chip that is more powerful than, and has more RAM in the case of the Studio Display XDR than the MacBook Neo.
00:52:15 ◼ ► And speaking of the XDR, I went to the Apple Store today, as I said briefly earlier, and I checked out the Neo and I checked out the Studio Display and the Studio Display XDR.
00:52:44 ◼ ► And there weren't that many people in the store at like two o'clock in the afternoon on a Wednesday.
00:53:05 ◼ ► And honestly, to my eyes, in a bright Apple store on a very sunny day in Virginia on a Wednesday afternoon, the only way I could tell that the XDR was the XDR was that the 120 hertz scrolling.
00:53:19 ◼ ► I can tell immediately in the same way that, you know, people who believe in Celsius say, oh, you can't tell one degree of Fahrenheit difference.
00:53:28 ◼ ► In the same way, I can tell the scrolling, even just using Safari, I could see the difference in scrolling between the 120 hertz studio display XDR and the 60 hertz studio display.
00:53:40 ◼ ► That being said, for my admittedly crap eyeballs, in terms of like blooming and stuff like that, I really couldn't tell the difference.
00:54:02 ◼ ► And by the way, this brings up another aiming problem, a naming problem that we're going to have.
00:54:06 ◼ ► We have been referring to my and Marco's 6K monitor as the XDR for short, and that doesn't work anymore because there's two Apple displays that have XDR at the end of them.
00:54:19 ◼ ► But I guess as our displays have been discontinued and fade from history, XDR will start to mean the studio display XDR.
00:54:28 ◼ ► And remember also we talked about that Safari, there's some setting in Safari that makes it only do 60 hertz unless you flip the setting and let it go higher.
00:54:41 ◼ ► Obviously, it didn't really make a difference on the non-XDR studio display on the studio display plane.
00:54:51 ◼ ► Yeah, because to be clear, that extra setting was only to update the content of the web page at more than 60 hertz.
00:54:58 ◼ ► The scrolling of the web page, which I think is where you notice it the most, is already 120 hertz.
00:55:11 ◼ ► I didn't think I would even have time to go to the Apple store today had I realized I was going to have time.
00:55:18 ◼ ► So if I had had the time, I would have better prepared for this experience and I would have, like, you know, figured out some video to watch or, like, figured out a good YouTube example, whatever the case may be.
00:55:34 ◼ ► But I was not as impressed by the mini LED portion of it as I expected in my extremely unscientific test.
00:55:58 ◼ ► So there are some videos of the studio display XDR, video reviews of the studio display XDR.
00:56:03 ◼ ► MKBHD notes that the power cable remains non-removable, just like the OG studio display.
00:56:09 ◼ ► Although I have to think, I haven't looked this up, but I have to think it is non-removable,
00:56:33 ◼ ► It's just not a standard connector, and it's very difficult to get out, but it can actually
00:56:39 ◼ ► In theory, but having yanked the power cable out of a big HomePod, I can tell you it is
00:56:49 ◼ ► Kevin Sleich writes that the studio display XDR technology white paper goes into a lot of
00:57:10 ◼ ► Yeah, there's just a few things I pulled from the document that I thought were interesting.
00:57:17 ◼ ► So when Apple puts stuff like this in here, they're always like, this part of the monitor
00:57:36 ◼ ► The panel makers often offer various options for things they can put on in front of the
00:57:47 ◼ ► Did they just give a bunch of specs and say, we want a polarizer that does X, Y, and Z?
00:57:50 ◼ ► But suffice it to say that Apple claims that the thing on the front of their monitor that
00:58:02 ◼ ► Again, as another potential thing of like what makes a difference between an Apple on a third
00:58:16 ◼ ► you may remember the abbreviation acronym T-CON, which stands for timing controller, which is
00:58:31 ◼ ► We made a special timing controller that because you have to basically run two displays and
00:58:40 ◼ ► As they say in the document, timing controllers are used to control the timing and display of the pixels on an LCD panel.
00:58:50 ◼ ► With four processing pipelines, five embedded microcontrollers and a local frame buffer.
00:58:55 ◼ ► The T-CON controls the LED and LCD layers of the display separately, treating them as two distinct displays with custom algorithms to seamlessly synchronize them into the final image.
00:59:03 ◼ ► So what they're saying is like, there's the LED backlight, which has like whatever, 2,300 little LEDs.
00:59:15 ◼ ► Continuing from the document, it also stores and applies calibration data to the pixels and the individual light characteristics for each of the 2,304 LED zones.
00:59:24 ◼ ► Local dimming is controlled at eight times the display's maximum refresh rate to ensure seamless synchronization between the LCD pixel switching and LED modulation.
00:59:32 ◼ ► So I think what they're saying is that they can turn on and off the backlight at eight times the refresh rate.
00:59:40 ◼ ► So eight times 120, which in theory would make sure that the backlight isn't ever lagging behind the LCD.
00:59:49 ◼ ► Anyway, continuing the T-Con continuously monitors the brightness histogram and performs machine learning based content analysis to understand the content's blooming potential on the display, then adjust the lighting to minimize bloom.
01:00:01 ◼ ► The T-Con also detects certain patterns that may be difficult for the LCD panel to display and optimizes the display at the pixel level to minimize artifacts.
01:00:09 ◼ ► This is the kind of crap that you have to do when you have, you don't have per pixel lighting control.
01:00:14 ◼ ► The TV makers have been doing this forever, which is like, I've got all these backlights.
01:00:31 ◼ ► And they're coming up with, always coming up with better and better algorithms to figure out what is the right at any given moment at apparently eight times the screen's refresh rate.
01:00:39 ◼ ► Which LEDs should be on and how bright should they be based on what I know is coming in the screen that's going through our T-Con controller?
01:00:46 ◼ ► So, I mean, that's reason number a million why I'm always in favor of pro pixel lighting control because all these problems go away when you don't have to do this.
01:01:00 ◼ ► It's hard enough just to figure out just turning on the pixels, but now you've got to add this into the mix.
01:01:04 ◼ ► So, they have had to do, and I'm sure they did this on the MacBook Pros as well, so I'm not sure why they didn't tout it there.
01:01:10 ◼ ► But, like, any mini LED backlight screen has to do this type of stuff to figure out how to minimize blooming, essentially.
01:01:17 ◼ ► And the early, very primitive mini LED backlit TVs did, like, a really primitive job of this.
01:01:25 ◼ ► They would just look at the image and say, okay, well, based on the brightness of the image, this is where it should be.
01:01:34 ◼ ► Mostly, we've gotten better at controlling the backlights to minimize blooming based on what's on the screen.
01:01:38 ◼ ► But challenging situations, like, say, star fields, are always going to be challenging because you want pinpricks of light on a fully black background.
01:01:51 ◼ ► On the topic of calibration, they're touting this, Apple displays undergo a state-of-the-art calibration process.
01:01:56 ◼ ► However, as new display technologies, including KSF LED backlight, I don't know what the KSF stands for, QD conversion sheet, that's quantum dot conversions, and OLED have emerged,
01:02:06 ◼ ► even displays calibrated to identical targets using current standards can exhibit significantly different appearances.
01:02:13 ◼ ► This has revealed limitations in the standard colorimetric system derived from CIE-1931 color matching function, or CMF, widely used in the industry for display calibration.
01:02:33 ◼ ► So, basically, they're saying, the standards that we use for calibrating monitors aren't sufficient anymore to, because if you calibrate two monitors using it,
01:02:42 ◼ ► and they're like, oh, okay, they're both calibrated, then you just look at both monitors, they're not the same.
01:02:45 ◼ ► And so they've come up with their own calibration standard that is presumably better and takes into account all these new technologies,
01:02:53 ◼ ► And, of course, they named it after themselves, the Apple CMF 2026, and that's what they'll be using on their displays going forward, I would imagine.
01:03:17 ◼ ► And I'm sure it's a standard that predates mini-LED backlighting and OLEDs and quantum dot conversion of colors.
01:03:23 ◼ ► And finally, and I think most interestingly or strangely, they talk about display optimization modes.
01:03:34 ◼ ► The default mode optimizes for lower latency to balance image quality and responsiveness, resulting in performance similar to other local dimming LCDs from Apple.
01:03:44 ◼ ► So, the default mode is basically it will behave like your MacBook Pro's mini-LED display.
01:03:49 ◼ ► Reference modes optimize for higher quality, prioritizing temporal image quality and frame timing precision over maximum responsiveness.
01:04:00 ◼ ► In this mode, incoming frames are delayed by a small amount to perfectly synchronize the LCD with the backlight.
01:04:11 ◼ ► This added delay is also used to reduce the stutter that can occur from maintaining front of screen quality as the refresh rate varies.
01:04:25 ◼ ► But they have this reference mode where it's trying to avoid situations where the screen isn't behaving quite the way you want, especially in situations where the refresh rate is changing because the adaptive refresh can go up to 120 and down to, like, 47 and everything in between.
01:04:40 ◼ ► But if you're watching, if you're, like, using it for video and you want to see 24 frames per second video, you want it to refresh at 24.
01:04:45 ◼ ► So, the diagram they give is trying to show, like, here's when frame one is ready, here's when frame two is ready, and here's when frame three is ready, and then here's what's actually put out on the display.
01:04:54 ◼ ► And the optimized for lower latency one, you can see that in the little timeline in the diagram, if you love the document, it shows a one, a two, and a three.
01:05:13 ◼ ► The system had already re-displayed frame one again because frame two wasn't ready yet.
01:05:20 ◼ ► So now the actual gap between when frame one is displayed and when frame two is displayed is longer than the gap between two and three.
01:05:32 ◼ ► But it's optimized for a lower latency, which is like, look, as soon as it's ready, put it out as ASAP.
01:05:42 ◼ ► And it shows them being spaced out such that two becomes ready, but it's like, oh, you're ready, but we're not going to display you.
01:05:52 ◼ ► Anyway, the diagram is very confusing, but it's basically like a tradeoff that I think would only be important to, like, I guess, video or anything else where it is really important that you see the actual frame rate and not get any weird stuttering that is a result of the display changing refresh rates or the display.
01:06:11 ◼ ► It's not the same as V-Sync, where it's like, I won't display this frame until the electron beam goes back to the top, but it's similar in a similar idea.
01:06:22 ◼ ► There's no electron beam here, but it's like deciding, should I display this frame ASAP or should I delay it to make an equal cadence?
01:06:34 ◼ ► I don't know if the application tells the OS that it wants this mode or if it only works in full screen or something like that, but it does remind me a lot of the modes that are possible in gaming displays, which have different goals, obviously.
01:06:47 ◼ ► But there's a million modes and technologies to try to make games look better and play better, and this seems more about fidelity to media.
01:06:55 ◼ ► But this is apparently only a feature on the Studio Display XDR, and like the calibration stuff, only of interest to people who are willing to spend $3,000 on a monitor because they want the highest color quality and the highest possible fidelity.
01:07:08 ◼ ► And also, this whole thing is dealing with, as they say, temporal artifacts that can occur with local dimming displays.
01:07:15 ◼ ► Those OLED displays can't come soon enough, and by soon enough, I mean, I guess in another six years?
01:07:28 ◼ ► You know, a thoughtfully built wardrobe comes down to pieces that mix well and last, and that's where Quince shines.
01:07:33 ◼ ► Premium fabrics, considered design, everyday essentials that feel effortless to wear and dependable, even as the seasons change.
01:07:42 ◼ ► It was like 80 degrees or 25 degrees in your bananas units, and I got reminded of the Quince linen pants that I got sent way, way at the end of last summer,
01:07:53 ◼ ► so I barely got to put them through their paces, and I'm really excited to try them on again and give them another go.
01:07:59 ◼ ► Obviously, I'm a dude, and I'm talking about, you know, kind of sort of dude clothing, but Quince is so much more than that.
01:08:33 ◼ ► You're just paying for quality clothing, and, you know, if linen stuff isn't your bag, then their cashmere is 100% Mongolian,
01:08:49 ◼ ► Everything is built to hold up to regular wear and still look good, so stop overcomplicating your wardrobe.
01:08:58 ◼ ► So, if that sounds appealing to you or a loved one in your life, and it should, what are you going to do?
01:09:47 ◼ ► But anyways, so Formula 1 is, you know, a bunch of pretty rich people spending money going around the world racing pretty big, you know, pretty and fast cars.
01:10:01 ◼ ► And there's been a lot of F1 news, particularly for Americans, over the last month or two, because Apple has taken over rights to broadcast all of the Grands Prix.
01:10:12 ◼ ► I think I have that right, basically all the races here in America through Apple TV, which is super-duper exciting.
01:10:19 ◼ ► And I think we talked about it very briefly when that news had first landed here on the show.
01:10:44 ◼ ► First of all, right before the season started, I think it was early last week, there was genuinely bombshell news that Apple had arranged with Netflix, of all people, to do kind of a content exchange where Netflix is going to air a couple of the Grands Prix or races.
01:11:13 ◼ ► But interestingly, Apple TV, you can now use your Apple TV or Apple One or what have you account to play the Netflix show Drive to Survive, which is fascinating and extremely cool because Drive to Survive is basically like a drama documentary about the prior Formula One season.
01:11:35 ◼ ► They have a new five to ten episode run every year, typically coming out shortly before the season starts.
01:11:44 ◼ ► If you are curious about F1 and really want to get into F1, I cannot recommend Drive to Survive enough.
01:11:51 ◼ ► And you can now watch it on Apple TV, which is really cool because I canceled Netflix like three years ago.
01:11:59 ◼ ► And as it turns out, for reasons that are not exceedingly important, last season was very, very interesting and very, very exciting.
01:12:10 ◼ ► And we'll probably talk about or hopefully get to get to talk about why here in a second.
01:12:15 ◼ ► Drive to Survive is a great way to do a recap of last season and kind of understand who the players are and the drivers are, I should say.
01:12:22 ◼ ► But also, you know, the team principal, which is kind of like the coach and all the different teams and understand what made last year so interesting.
01:12:31 ◼ ► And I got to tell you, it is weird whiplash going into the Apple TV app, which I rarely use to begin with, going into Drives to Survive, and then immediately being presented with a Netflix dun-dun, like from the Apple TV app.
01:12:50 ◼ ► It was just the weirdest feeling that somehow I'm watching Netflix via the Apple TV platform.
01:13:02 ◼ ► I'll put a link to a, like, I think it's a 20-minute video that they've created or perhaps Formula One has created that you can watch on Apple TV.
01:13:09 ◼ ► Just to give a very quick pitch for the 2026 F1 season, every five to ten years, I think it's like five-ish years, there's a set of regulation changes that define how you build your race car.
01:13:22 ◼ ► And this year, in 2026, we have a new set of regulations around not only the car, but the power unit, which is a combination of a gasoline and electric motor.
01:13:32 ◼ ► And so the cars are smaller, and they're not as long, they're not as wide, which means on certain tracks, there's likely to be more passing just from a space perspective.
01:14:06 ◼ ► Okay, yeah, they're like, you know, in the same way that there's, you know, Double-A baseball, Triple-A baseball, etc., which probably doesn't matter anything.
01:14:17 ◼ ► I did know about Triple-A because the Columbus team, the Columbus Clippers, when I was growing up, was a Triple-A baseball team.
01:14:24 ◼ ► As somebody who likes, you know, hot dogs and having fun, but doesn't care about professional sports, that was a great combination, because you could go to a baseball game, which we did all the time, like on school trips and stuff.
01:14:41 ◼ ► You know, it's not nearly as hard for, like, you know, parking and tickets and, you know, all the prices of everything and, you know, the crowds.
01:14:54 ◼ ► But anyways, so the new season, they have different regulations with regard to aerodynamics, different regulations with regard to basically the engine.
01:15:05 ◼ ► And so this is an incredibly good time to get into F1 because all of the people that have been winning for years, it is unlikely they will keep winning.
01:15:14 ◼ ► Basically, every time they do regulation changes of either aerodynamics slash body styles or power units, usually the entire grid gets switched up and the people who sucked suddenly become good.
01:15:31 ◼ ► So if you were even lightly interested in F1, I cannot stress enough, now is the time to jump in, particularly if you're American, because you can get F1 for quote-unquote free as long as you're an Apple TV subscriber.
01:15:44 ◼ ► They made a lot of noise, Apple did, about how there will be quad box, which is Jason Snell's favorite thing.
01:15:50 ◼ ► I like it as well, which is to say, when you're watching an F1 race, when you're watching it live, and we'll get there in a second, you can do like one main feed and a trio of feeds off to the side.
01:16:01 ◼ ► So let's say you have the main race feed, kind of front and center, and then off to the side you have maybe your three favorite drivers.
01:16:11 ◼ ► Or maybe you have a map of the racetrack and the state of the tires and one of your favorite, you know, your absolute favorite driver.
01:16:17 ◼ ► And allegedly, there's also, in actually reading from Jason Snell's coverage, there are 30 extra feeds, including a racetracker, driver data, podium channels as well, that show the video of whichever cars are in the first, second, and third places, which is very clever.
01:16:39 ◼ ► And so you can watch the race from the perspective of your favorite driver, if that's what you want to do.
01:16:46 ◼ ► And I've been living this world over the last couple of years, which we talked about, you know, several episodes ago, through the really genuinely excellent F1 TV, which is Formula One's first party TV package that they use everywhere else in the world.
01:17:01 ◼ ► And is available here in America, but you can't pay for it anymore directly with F1 as you used to be able to do, and as I did, to the tune of like $120 a year.
01:17:11 ◼ ► But now, if you're an Apple TV subscriber, you can link, and I'll put a link in the show notes of how to do this, you can link up your F1 TV account with your Apple account, and then you get the super mega ultra baller version of F1 TV with full 4K feeds and the whole rigmarole for quote-unquote free, which is really great.
01:17:29 ◼ ► And this is incredibly important right now for Americans, because the Melbourne Grand Prix was at like, I think, 11 p.m. local time, so I stayed up to watch the first like three laps that I passed out.
01:17:40 ◼ ► The Chinese Grand Prix, I think it's at like one in the morning this coming Sunday or something like that, I forget exactly when.
01:17:45 ◼ ► Obviously, as they move to Europe and then to America, these races become a much more tenable time of day for Americans, but it's not great right now.
01:17:53 ◼ ► Well, I decided to watch the race replay on Apple TV on Sunday morning after I'd woken up, and I quickly realized that on Apple TV, you can't do multi-view when you're doing the replay.
01:18:13 ◼ ► So a lot of people really like the Sky Sports Crew, which is a British TV channel, I guess a cable channel, if I'm not mistaken.
01:18:20 ◼ ► And when we got these things on ESPN, we would get their commentary, which was hilarious, as has been mentioned on Upgrade many times, because you'll hear these commentators say,
01:18:29 ◼ ► and on your Sky Sports box, hit the red button to do blah, blah, blah, blah, sysboomba.
01:18:39 ◼ ► But a lot of people really like those commentators, despite the fact that they're deeply, deeply biased for anyone British.
01:19:05 ◼ ► And it's funny, because you can switch over to the F1 TV app, which is genuinely pretty good.
01:19:10 ◼ ► And you can get the replay with multicam, with the Sky Sports commentators, and the whole rigmarole.
01:19:14 ◼ ► The other fascinating thing, and I would love for anyone who's listening to try this, even if you could not possibly care less about F1.
01:19:21 ◼ ► When I did the race replay, first of all, it included like an hour of pre-show, which in the F1 TV app is separated into its own thing.
01:19:50 ◼ ► Well, I mean, I think Apple has been very, very clear that Apple will put ads that it wants to put wherever it wants on all of its products, on all of its services, usually for its services.
01:20:05 ◼ ► But Apple has already, you know, by their actions over and over again over many years, has already said, eh, we don't care about showing people ads.
01:20:27 ◼ ► That they don't care about showing you ads and promos as much as they want when it suits them.
01:20:43 ◼ ► So, I would presume, well, certainly the multi-view thing will get better in the live race.
01:20:47 ◼ ► I don't know if there's going to be a, like, pre-roll ad or something like that in the live race.
01:20:52 ◼ ► But the other thing that's kind of chapped my bottom is that in the upper right-hand corner, on and off throughout the race, it said in, like, a little, like, half opaque, you know, fade, not faded,
01:21:04 ◼ ► but, for lack of a better word, faded display in the upper right-hand corner, broadcast presented by American Express, Pipe, Apple TV.
01:21:15 ◼ ► I don't have to see any of this bullshit on F1 TV, but I have to see it on the, oh, the special Apple.
01:21:50 ◼ ► I know you haven't been watching F1 that long, but you were talking about the driver cameras and how you couldn't switch through them in the replays and so on and so forth,
01:21:58 ◼ ► I can't think of any other sporting event where such an integral part of the broadcast is attached to the competitors.
01:22:09 ◼ ► I know in other sports, like, they have the camera that flies over the football field and the NFL and the wires.
01:22:20 ◼ ► Like, I don't – I think maybe in the NFL they put, like, helmet cams on for something.
01:22:26 ◼ ► They're not an integral part of the broadcast where if – especially if people get used to this, the expectation – first of all, it's the expectation of the producers of the show that they can choose any driver to show at any given time to build the broadcast.
01:22:36 ◼ ► But second, with these apps, now the viewer also gets to choose, I want to see my favorite driver or whatever, right?
01:22:43 ◼ ► So this leads me to think, all right, what happens if the camera on whoever, like, the first or second place person is fails in the middle of the race?
01:22:54 ◼ ► Do they treat it like, you know, whatever, like accident on the track, everyone goes slow, and they, like, fix the cameras or something?
01:23:03 ◼ ► The camera broke, but we're not like we're going to tell him to stop because that would really screw up the race because, you know, he's in the lead now.
01:23:09 ◼ ► And, I mean, I guess – I mean, all I know about F1 is from the F1 movie with Brad Pitt, so God knows what I know.
01:23:14 ◼ ► But, like, there are things that can happen on the track that can really mess things up for you if you're in the lead because, like, if there's a crash, it's a safety concern.
01:23:33 ◼ ► Well, so as an example, when I've been watching the F1 TV app, there will often be a crash.
01:23:39 ◼ ► And there was a couple of years ago before I was an F1 TV subscriber where Roman Gross John, his car caught on fire.
01:23:56 ◼ ► It's worth looking into if you're interested in that sort of thing because you know that it worked out all right.
01:24:00 ◼ ► But before I realized how dire it was when they were still assessing the situation, or I guess it wasn't that crash.
01:24:08 ◼ ► But you could go back and look at the perspective of that driver as they're about to crash.
01:24:13 ◼ ► And again, in the four or five years I've been watching F1, this Gross John one was the only time that I genuinely thought this man is either dead or severely injured.
01:24:30 ◼ ► So anyways, when a crash happens, what you can do is you can flip over to that camera and watch their perspective of the crash.
01:24:38 ◼ ► And then you'll see the driver get out of the car because the camera's like over their shoulder.
01:24:48 ◼ ► And then at some point, one of the directors or whatever for F1 TV will be like, well, that's enough.
01:24:56 ◼ ► If you go to that camera perspective, you just see a logo for like Red Bull or whatever.
01:25:17 ◼ ► The reason I'm thinking about it is because like, oh, who team could sabotage their own
01:25:22 ◼ ► camera and, you know, make it break at an opportune time for them such that blah, blah.
01:25:31 ◼ ► But it is a challenge because if you're a viewer and the person who's in first place, like first
01:25:52 ◼ ► And if one of those cameras break, don't worry, there's plenty of other cameras like they'll
01:26:12 ◼ ► To answer that a little bit, I've forgotten that as you're talking, it reminded me that
01:26:24 ◼ ► They have one that's really down low on the front wing of the car and one that's pointed
01:26:29 ◼ ► And so I would assume that if one of the three of those cameras fails, they would just lock
01:26:50 ◼ ► But yeah, I mean, as negative as I am about the advertising, which obviously I'm a touch
01:26:55 ◼ ► negative, I do think that this is, on the whole, really great for Americans, really great to
01:27:25 ◼ ► I also didn't mention that on the Vision Pro, I think you get five camera angles instead of
01:27:35 ◼ ► I mean, I'm not certain that that's going to happen, but I presume it will at some point.
01:27:39 ◼ ► But sitting here now, I'm kind of meh on the experience, but I do think it has incredible
01:27:51 ◼ ► It's just I can't tell because I'm here in America where, you know, the races are on in
01:27:56 ◼ ► But again, I can't stress enough for the two of you and for anyone listening, if you're even
01:28:02 ◼ ► vaguely interested in technology, in engineering, in cars going fast, in the drama of, you know,
01:28:15 ◼ ► And another thing that the F1 TV app does, and I'm pretty darn sure, yes, Apple TV does
01:28:22 ◼ ► So if you wanted to dip your toes in several hours after the race ends, they'll do a 30-minute
01:28:33 ◼ ► 30 or so of the 50-ish laps that they raced were really good and really, really exciting.
01:28:42 ◼ ► There's plenty of content out there, both within Apple TV and elsewhere, where you can check
01:28:52 ◼ ► And if you are an American Apple TV subscriber, you really owe it to yourself to just give it
01:28:59 ◼ ► Especially when I can tell you at some point, multi-view is good, or excuse me, replays
01:29:13 ◼ ► But I think especially the race in 30 might be interesting enough to you to give it a shot
01:29:23 ◼ ► So in the last week or two, I forget exactly when it was, Samsung had their big announcement
01:29:40 ◼ ► But I'm really glad that which John or whoever put this in the show notes because I really
01:29:48 ◼ ► If you're listening to this in a situation where you can watch a video for a few minutes,
01:29:52 ◼ ► I strongly suggest you pause me for a moment and go watch Samsung's announcement video starting
01:30:08 ◼ ► So I have some friends, some dear friends that live locally, you know, right around the corner
01:30:17 ◼ ► I'm sure you've seen this before, where you can only see what's on the screen, basically
01:30:28 ◼ ► It is annoying as hell when they show me their phone because they want me to see something
01:30:42 ◼ ► And that's, you know, that's not even taking into account the fact that the color is all
01:30:58 ◼ ► But I always assume it's a thing that you attach, that you lay on top of your screen, like a
01:31:27 ◼ ► But what the net effect is, is that you have software control over whether or not the privacy
01:31:35 ◼ ► So you can control via software on the Samsung Galaxy S26, or I presume there's maybe a subset
01:31:58 ◼ ► You can, with software, say, hey, anytime I open the Wells Fargo app, blank the screen,
01:32:04 ◼ ► or not blank the screen, you know, make the whole screen privacy mode so that anytime you
01:32:17 ◼ ► Then they have, I don't know the specifics about it, but they showed like a notification
01:32:50 ◼ ► If someone is shoulder surfing you, it is very possible for them to be pretty much as perpendicular
01:33:14 ◼ ► Especially like, I mean, if you've ever spied at someone's computer or phone screen, like
01:33:19 ◼ ► on a, for example, on a plane where often you have a view that is fairly direct angle at
01:33:25 ◼ ► And you're looking through like the crook of their, their ear and their shoulder and their
01:33:35 ◼ ► So just don't, uh, if you get a privacy display, you know, like a, a stick on thing or this
01:33:41 ◼ ► technology, don't assume it literally makes it invisible because people can still shoulder
01:33:48 ◼ ► If you have a numeric passcode or something like that, or see your messages or whatever.
01:34:06 ◼ ► So what they've done, if you, the video is to be believed, the video is, you know, computer
01:34:11 ◼ ► It's not, it's not showing like microscopic images of the screen, which I have, I haven't
01:34:22 ◼ ► According to this video, who knows if that's true and it's more complicated, but anyway, every
01:34:27 ◼ ► pixel has an RGB sub pixel and they basically checkerboarded it like a, like a checkerboard,
01:34:43 ◼ ► OK, hat, let's say the red squares on the checkerboard are regular pixels with huge wide
01:35:03 ◼ ► And that means that the only light that leaves those pixels is the light that is going straight
01:35:12 ◼ ► So basically 50% of the pixels are normal pixels and 50% of the pixels are quote unquote privacy
01:35:19 ◼ ► When they enable privacy mode, what they do is turn off all the pixels that are not privacy
01:35:34 ◼ ► For example, some of the reviews said, hey, when I turn on privacy mode for the whole screen,
01:35:53 ◼ ► And by the way, it also essentially halves the effective resolution or whatever, however
01:36:00 ◼ ► So the PPI is cut in half for any region of the screen that is in privacy mode, because
01:36:06 ◼ ► some pixels are the regular wide angle pixels are just plain turned off and only the privacy
01:36:12 ◼ ► And the way they show it in the video is literally the privacy pixels are a regular pixel, but
01:36:16 ◼ ► then floating over it is a screen with four little holes in it for the art or three little
01:36:26 ◼ ► But if you put a huge piece of paper in front of it and cut a tiny little hole, now the
01:36:31 ◼ ► only light that comes out of that piece of paper is the light that's going straight through
01:36:34 ◼ ► that little hole and all the rest of the light just hits the piece of paper and bounces back.
01:37:05 ◼ ► So in the regular mode, half of your pixels have a wide viewing angle and half your pixels
01:37:11 ◼ ► So even that I feel like has got to hurt the viewing angle of regular mode because you're
01:37:18 ◼ ► But the worst, obviously, is privacy mode where half of your pixels are literally turned
01:37:23 ◼ ► But I'm not sure I'd want an iPhone with this feature because I don't think I first of all,
01:37:30 ◼ ► Second, if I didn't the protection it provides, I'd think very hard about whether I should be
01:37:35 ◼ ► using my phone at all, because I think this type of feature gives some people a false sense
01:37:41 ◼ ► of security, because if someone really wants to shoulder surf you, they just need to move
01:37:53 ◼ ► If you can possibly avoid doing things that need to be private in a public place, do that
01:38:13 ◼ ► This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about the future of x86 instructions running
01:40:09 ◼ ► This group called the Shorewalkers arranges something called the Great Saunter, which is a 32-mile walk around the perimeter of Manhattan in one day.
01:40:27 ◼ ► It kind of started as a tribute when I lost my dog this past summer and, you know, kind of walking in his honor.
01:40:34 ◼ ► And then it just kind of grew from there into, oh, I want to do this crazy thing, which happens in May.
01:40:40 ◼ ► And so, you know, you don't go from, you know, a routine of one or two-mile dog walks to be able to walk 32 miles in one day without, hopefully, you know, some intervening steps in the middle of, you know, training for longer walks.
01:40:55 ◼ ► And so, what I've been doing is, over the last couple of months, like, slowly ramping up, you know, the amount I've been able to walk.
01:41:06 ◼ ► But, you know, of course, being the nerd, I'm like, obviously, I need to optimize the gear for this.
01:41:24 ◼ ► And thanks to a tip from our friend underscore David Smith, I've been using those toe socks, the thin version of those toe socks with an outer sock so that you get even more cushioning in a nice wide shoe.
01:42:03 ◼ ► You know, over the course of the day, you have time for maybe an hour and a half total of breaks throughout the day.
01:42:14 ◼ ► Anyway, so, you know, I can stop and, you know, top off an Apple Watch with a charger, you know, a couple times throughout the day if I need to.
01:42:28 ◼ ► And literally, like, two days after I had said on our show that I was annoyed at the Apple Watch's workout redesign, I went on a very long, like, a 17-mile practice walk.
01:42:53 ◼ ► And at one point, I had, like, you know, I'd gone into, like, a coffee shop to get some coffee in the morning.
01:43:03 ◼ ► And then, I know you can turn that off, but every so often, the Apple Watch resets all of my notification settings, and I don't know why.
01:43:09 ◼ ► And so I start to get reminded to, like, stand every so often, which is fun when you're on a flight.
01:43:15 ◼ ► Or, you know, you get the notification saying, like, it looks like you've been walking.
01:43:24 ◼ ► Or it'll say, you know, if you stop for a second while you're on a walk, you should pause the workout.
01:43:53 ◼ ► It could be so much better if they put more effort into it, but they seem like they're fine mostly not doing that.
01:44:15 ◼ ► And that's, look, and for the three of you inside Apple who get to work on the Apple Watch and who are trying very hard, more respect to you.
01:44:51 ◼ ► In retrospect, that model was probably a little too small for this particular use, like, battery life-wise and feature-wise.
01:45:35 ◼ ► But what I was looking for was something that was small enough to be comfortable and not look too ridiculous on my wrist.
01:45:57 ◼ ► So, the reason why this is important is for, you know, most GPS receivers that we grew up with over time, with most phones and most smartwatches until relatively recently, was single-band GPS.
01:46:11 ◼ ► Apple first started talking about it with the Apple Watch Ultra, which is the only Apple Watch that has support for dual-band GPS.
01:46:19 ◼ ► When you have dual-band GPS, you generally get more accurate GPS and faster locks and faster and better tracking, especially in places like Lower Manhattan, where you have very tall buildings that are very close to the street.
01:46:39 ◼ ► And it's hard for GPS signals to get properly recognized and received by little receivers, you know, on your wrist or in your pocket.
01:46:53 ◼ ► And I even had a thought, like, why don't apps like Google Maps on the phone use the GPS in Apple Watch Ultra when you have it on to get dual-band support?
01:47:04 ◼ ► And then I did a bit of research and quickly learned that, actually, iPhones also now have dual-band GPS.
01:47:23 ◼ ► So, all current 17-ish model iPhones, I don't know about the E, actually, I didn't look that up.
01:48:18 ◼ ► Like, the whole, like, so first of all, the experience of managing a Garmin in particular.
01:48:23 ◼ ► Garmin has, like, two or three different apps that you have to use for different things.
01:48:30 ◼ ► Like, there's one that connects to the watch, but there's a different one that you use if you want to buy watch faces and stuff and apps.
01:48:38 ◼ ► When you put the watch on, you know, you quickly notice, oh, Apple Watch bands are really nice.
01:48:48 ◼ ► And it's, like, it's something that, like, if you had never worn an Apple Watch, you would think other smartwatch bands were fine.
01:48:57 ◼ ► But Apple, like, one thing the Apple Watch has gotten right since the start, they have really good bands compared to the entire rest of the watch business.
01:49:34 ◼ ► So, you can put third-party bands on it from the rest of the watch world, but you're missing out on the nice Apple straps.
01:49:40 ◼ ► The charging situation, it has a proprietary charger, again, just like the Apple Watch.
01:49:48 ◼ ► Like, one of those, like, kind of custom, like, couple of prongs on the end of a black thing.
01:50:06 ◼ ► But little things about Android that bother iPhone users, like there's no scroll bounces on the end of a scroll view, that kind of thing.
01:50:17 ◼ ► And you don't realize when you're not used to, you know, when you're used to the Apple Watch.
01:50:21 ◼ ► And also, watches have very small screens relative to other computing devices and relatively few buttons, but they usually have some kind of buttons.
01:50:34 ◼ ► And you don't realize how much, like, muscle memory you have for navigating the Apple Watch until you have to try a different kind of watch.
01:50:40 ◼ ► And when you go from an Apple Watch to a Garmin, the navigation of everything works differently.
01:50:47 ◼ ► From simple stuff to, like, you know, what direction you, like, do you swipe up or down?
01:51:18 ◼ ► I was going to say this when this came up, when we talked about it before, but we moved on to something else.
01:51:22 ◼ ► But, like, round is totally the Apple shape for a smartwatch because it is impractical.
01:51:45 ◼ ► Apple made it rectangular because they knew that most of the content besides the watch face was going to be, like, text and buttons and other stuff that's used to being a rectangular screen.
01:51:53 ◼ ► So, despite YouTube both complaining, oh, do you believe, you know, Apple doesn't make a round display or whatever.
01:51:57 ◼ ► If Apple had made a round display, all three of us would be saying, why didn't they just make a rectangular?
01:52:06 ◼ ► Because, like, when you think about when the Apple Watch was designed, this was, like, peak, you know, Johnny Ive had the least editing and had his head furthest up his own butt at that time.
01:52:26 ◼ ► But, yeah, like, if there was a time when Apple would have done something totally over the top for the sake of design, you know, purity,
01:52:34 ◼ ► the Apple Watch, the original Apple Watch design was the time for Johnny Ive to do that.
01:52:40 ◼ ► And it took only a couple of minutes of using the round watch for me to say, oh, yeah, this is the wrong choice.
01:52:56 ◼ ► As you're looking at anything, scrolling anything, going through lists of anything, reading text from notifications, which I'll get to in a second, like, doing all of those actions, everything you would commonly use a smartwatch for, a round screen was worse than a rectangular screen.
01:53:26 ◼ ► And any time there's any text, it just hurts because you just feel like you're fighting the hardware just to do the most basic thing of reading text on the screen.
01:53:40 ◼ ► I would say otherwise, like, the available watch faces, they're a little loud visually, for my taste.
01:54:11 ◼ ► But, so I decided I wasn't going to, like, you know, start buying watch faces for two bucks each to look at them.
01:54:29 ◼ ► And we'll see if some of, like, the, you know, the regulatory stuff, especially in the EU, we'll see if this changes things much.
01:54:35 ◼ ► But the biggest things you notice when you don't have an Apple watch, when you have a third-party watch, are you don't have watch access for Siri, which is, it turns out I do that a lot.
01:54:48 ◼ ► A lot of times, the reminders that I create for myself through Siri, a lot of those I do from the watch.
01:54:56 ◼ ► Also, speaking of reminders, another restriction is you can't respond to notifications, including you can't, like, use the extra buttons that show up on a notification.
01:55:09 ◼ ► So, when I get a reminder alert and I want to hit snooze, I can't do that on a third-party watch.
01:55:34 ◼ ► Like, I realized, like, I would take it off, but if I didn't turn, if I didn't power it off, if it was just off my wrist, like, sitting on my desk, you know, if I wasn't using it, every notification that came out of my iPhone, the Garmin watch would buzz, it would vibrate.
01:55:55 ◼ ► And literally every, even though it is off my wrist, so it knows, you know, it has a sense, like the Apple Watch, it knows I'm not wearing it, but it still chooses to vibrate on every single one.
01:56:06 ◼ ► I didn't get that far with it, but it just became very obvious to me, oh, yeah, this is, this is not, this is not working for me.
01:56:25 ◼ ► You know, just, just to, like, how many paper cuts am I going to tolerate on this other platform that is really optimized for very different things than what I care about?
01:56:34 ◼ ► How many paper cuts will I endure there to spite the Apple workout app for that one big paper cut of how, you know, starting a workout is clunky now?
01:56:48 ◼ ► So, instead, I, I went back to the Apple Watch and for, I did, let's see, one or two more practice walks since then.
01:56:59 ◼ ► And I, there was a couple, there's an app, people were, obviously, you know, there's third-party apps that you can use.
01:57:06 ◼ ► And I first asked our friend, David Smith, I said, hey, should I be using Workouts++ for this?
01:57:31 ◼ ► I would say if you are looking for something like Workouts++ that is still being made, that's something to look at.
01:57:46 ◼ ► If you remember, like, old Downcast, like, back before I made Overcast, the podcast app I used on my phone was Downcast.
01:58:00 ◼ ► And that's part of what I liked about it was, like, it had the options I wanted, but it was an intense app in terms of, like, settings configuration.
01:58:11 ◼ ► If you want something super custom, you can probably build it with Workout Doors' options and stuff.
01:58:20 ◼ ► And then I remembered, oh, yeah, underscore added a whole bunch of, like, long hike options to Pedometer.
01:58:33 ◼ ► I just didn't, like, there's a whole, like, like, walking mode, like, a hike mode of it that I just hadn't really explored before.
01:58:51 ◼ ► So as I was walking around Manhattan this past weekend, I was able to, it showed a little arrow on the screen.
01:58:59 ◼ ► When the screen was in, like, dim mode on the Apple Watch, it shifts to red, which probably saves somewhat on energy, but at least looks cool.
01:59:08 ◼ ► It was, like, the experience of using Pedometer++ as my walk tracking app was way nicer than the built-in Apple Workouts app.
01:59:27 ◼ ► I recognize that, like, the Garmin and that world, again, they have a lot of needs they cover that Apple doesn't cover.
01:59:34 ◼ ► You know, if you're going to be on a hike somewhere for multiple days, you don't want an Apple Watch.
01:59:45 ◼ ► You know, or if you're going to be doing some kind of extreme sports that need that kind of physical characteristics that the Garmin's have, that's going to be better for you.
02:00:13 ◼ ► For these long walks, I'm using the Ultra, you know, for battery life and for that dual-band GPS.
02:00:19 ◼ ► And for that purpose, I think Pedometer++ with the Apple Watch Ultra is going to be my, you know, my ongoing setup now.
02:00:29 ◼ ► And when I do the real Great Saunter, the real 32-mile walk in a couple of months, I'm going to use that, I think.
02:00:55 ◼ ► From what I have heard from people in this world, I think the next thing I would try would probably be the Suunto.
02:01:00 ◼ ► Like, they have a model called the Race S that looks like it would be a reasonable size and it would have the dual-band GPS that I'm looking for.
02:01:10 ◼ ► But it also just seems to me like the experience of using a non-Apple smartwatch with an Apple platform just has too many paper cuts and limitations that I don't think any of them will be necessarily worth it for me.
02:01:24 ◼ ► Now, again, if I had like a need for some of their physical differences that the other brands offer, I would consider that.
02:01:37 ◼ ► I will, based on what people are saying, if I want like, you know, full GPS and full heart rate for the entire walk, which I might not necessarily need the full heart rate, but if I want that for the entire walk, the Ultra might not last long enough.
02:01:54 ◼ ► I'm sure I can, you know, charge it at the halfway point when I stop for like, you know, a drink of water and a meal for a few minutes.
02:02:08 ◼ ► But yeah, I think you would, I think you would, you would hit all the same paper cuts and I think they would, they would irritate you just as much.
02:02:14 ◼ ► And, and I think you'd be very disappointed in the reality of using a round screen smartwatch.
02:02:27 ◼ ► Just today, I was scrolling through the workouts app and I found the workout I wanted, which was not dead center.
02:02:33 ◼ ► It was one off from dead center and I tapped on that workout and started the actual workout that was dead center because as I went to tap it, the stupid play button came up.
02:02:51 ◼ ► Like if every day you wake up and you, and you do outdoor run and you, and you do an outdoor run every morning and that's all you do with it.
02:02:59 ◼ ► It's when you have to, when you change between, like I mentioned, you know, I do my workouts with my trainer.
02:03:21 ◼ ► Like the first thing I'm doing is navigating to a different type, but even that like, and, and, oh, and people also have mentioned, including people in our chat are saying now, like you can just also start workouts via Siri.
02:03:34 ◼ ► That also works kind of frustratingly slowly and about 80% of the time in my experience, but not a hundred percent.
02:03:44 ◼ ► Like I usually just, I keep the workout complication on the face as, as one of my main complications.
02:03:51 ◼ ► But, um, there is no like, you know, good, reliable, fast option that is anywhere near as fast as just older versions of the workout app were.
02:04:00 ◼ ► Um, also, you know, I mentioned earlier the thing where, where the, I got mad because it, it, you know, I forgot to resume it when I left the coffee shop and I lost a mile of my workout, you know, from being tracked.
02:04:11 ◼ ► The Apple watch, when it started out a thousand years ago, it had to be really careful with battery.
02:04:18 ◼ ► Now it still has to be careful, but it has to be a lot less careful because we have way bigger batteries.
02:04:41 ◼ ► So one thing they do, for instance, is when you, when you have the feature enabled that it prompts you to start workouts.
02:04:47 ◼ ► If it, if it detects that you're doing one, if you leave your house and start walking on the block and a half a block later, it says, Hey, it looks like you're walking.
02:05:01 ◼ ► Once it figured out that it looks like you're working out, it starts recording that data.
02:05:05 ◼ ► That's great because what that means is if you mess up in some way, like if you start a walk without starting the workout, you have like an, like an undo.
02:05:22 ◼ ► So first I think anything, any pause, it should like, once you start, like if I have a walk and I pause the walk because I have stopped moving.
02:05:34 ◼ ► Once I leave the location I am at, it should be smart enough to say, Hey, you know what?
02:05:44 ◼ ► So when you say, yes, I did in fact leave, you, you can patch that data in or stop or keep recording it in the first place.
02:05:54 ◼ ► Um, you know, obviously with limits over time for battery life, but like if I'm only pausing it for a few minutes and I forget to unpause it, like you could record that for an hour afterwards and be fine, especially on the larger model watches.
02:06:07 ◼ ► So I would love to have like a little bit of more forgiveness there, like spend some of the power budget to build in forgiveness so that people don't, so people have more of those opportunities to save themselves from their own mistakes.
02:06:23 ◼ ► And right now I think none of it is, for instance, I am terrified that on this walk, I will accidentally end the workout early and I want it to be one big one.
02:06:33 ◼ ► I can just do another one, but right now, like you can't, like, I guess maybe some app might exist that can take two workouts and merge them, but Apple's doesn't do that.
02:06:43 ◼ ► And, you know, so like the workout app right now, if you accidentally end the workout, you can't undo that.
02:06:50 ◼ ► If you accidentally hit some button that adds like a segment or something, you can't undo that.
02:07:02 ◼ ► So there's so much about it that I, that I, I wish was, this is true of the whole Apple watch platform.
02:07:16 ◼ ► The Apple TV compared to its competitors is the best of its category for most people, but it could be so much better if they just put more effort into it.
02:07:27 ◼ ► And it seems like they took their foot off the gas with the Apple TV because it's fine.
02:07:41 ◼ ► I think it is, it is the best smart watch for almost all iPhone users needs, but it could be so much better if Apple just put more effort into it.
02:07:52 ◼ ► They just seem to think they don't need to, or they, or like the things they do to it are things no one's asking for and things that we keep asking for, they just ignore.
02:07:59 ◼ ► One of the many things that can make it better is just some attention to some of those workout mechanics.
02:08:04 ◼ ► Like, first of all, obviously fix the horrible UI regressions that made it much harder to use and more error prone and take longer to start up.
02:08:12 ◼ ► But also consider fixing some of those problems of just like, yeah, let's make this thing a little more humane and a little smarter.
02:08:19 ◼ ► And let's give people opportunities to do what they want, to save themselves from mistakes, to prevent mistakes in the first place and to save their data.
02:08:29 ◼ ► Like, if you track your workouts and you just lose some of it, that is very demotivating to a lot of people.
02:08:36 ◼ ► That can make somebody like, you know, quote, fall off the wagon or whatever and like stop working out.
02:08:39 ◼ ► Or if, you know, if you lose a streak, if you break a streak, like those have real psychological, you know, implications for a lot of people.
02:08:58 ◼ ► So if you, if they like have some kind of discouraging problem, like losing a workout or losing progress somewhere, that can make them stop doing that or, you know, can really demotivate.
02:09:09 ◼ ► So anyway, that's what I want to see with the Apple Watch is like, we, we are in a new era now with the Apple Watch where you have so much more power available to you because the hardware is so much better than it used to be.
02:09:31 ◼ ► But one of the things that drives me freaking crazy and is just another perfect example of how broken the workouts app is, is that on the weekends, Aaron and I will go on walks of our neighborhood together.
02:09:54 ◼ ► And so typically Aaron and I will, for the weekends, you know, for our exercises of the weekend, we'll go on a walk together and, you know, the kids will come for at least a portion of it and we'll do the full 5k, about three miles.
02:10:06 ◼ ► And if it's raining or if it's extremely cold, instead, what we'll do is we'll use our elliptical that we have in the house.
02:10:12 ◼ ► That's a very unremarkable, very not impressive elliptical, but it does the job, right?
02:10:16 ◼ ► And depending on how much time I have and whether or not I've been fairly active already during the day, I might go anywhere between 20 and 30 minutes on the elliptical.
02:10:33 ◼ ► And if you just tap on the icon for elliptical, which is what I would do by default in order to get more details about the workout I'm about to do, it does nothing.
02:10:45 ◼ ► So in the northeast corner, there is, or at least on my watch right now, there is something that looks like a timer.
02:11:05 ◼ ► So in the corner of this little button that says time 25 minutes, there's a little pencil icon.
02:11:23 ◼ ► So I'm going to go back to 20 minutes, let's say, and I'm presented with the two spinners for hours and minutes.
02:11:41 ◼ ► And I'll give you one guess what is on the prior screen because it goes, you know, navigates, pops, pops up to the prior screen.
02:11:53 ◼ ► Would you like to guess after I hit the done button, after changing the spinner to 20 minutes, what this prior screen shows?
02:12:02 ◼ ► So what I need to do is instead, I need to go back in and I make this mistake every time.
02:12:35 ◼ ► See, that overall feeling, a lot of times, a lot of the details about the Apple Watch, I think like, you know, Apple historically has had really talented people who have really great taste.
02:12:48 ◼ ► You know, I started with Steve, and then of course, you know, he instilled that culture among the company and people who had that kind of great taste were attracted to work there.
02:12:55 ◼ ► So you have all these people who have really great sensibilities for like what a good experience is, what good design is, how things should work in clever, delightful, useful, helpful ways.
02:13:07 ◼ ► And every single Apple employee that I have ever seen outside of the company wears an Apple Watch.
02:13:16 ◼ ► But it's like, I don't get the impression when I'm using the Apple Watch that a lot of those people in Apple who have those opinions, who like, are they being listened to with the Apple Watch?
02:13:31 ◼ ► Do they have the resources that they need to make the Apple Watch that good of an experience?
02:14:11 ◼ ► They're still like, I still, when I look around the built-in complications for so many things that just aren't there, like, why is there no, like, sunrise and sunset complication for this certain size?
02:14:28 ◼ ► Like, there's so many little things, like, when you try to, when you look around what complications are available from Apple for their built-in apps and features, they're just so half-assed and limited.
02:14:40 ◼ ► And the watch faces themselves, like, that's a whole thing, where that's a whole half-assed situation as well.
02:14:45 ◼ ► And it's just like, are they, do all those people who care and see these problems and limitations, like, what do they need to make the Apple Watch better?
02:15:18 ◼ ► You know, once you are dominating a category, like, that doesn't mean you should stop making good stuff.
02:15:43 ◼ ► Speaking of platforms that are best in category, but that Apple is not improving at the rate we wish it was.
02:15:56 ◼ ► Like, you know, the Mac is, like, a mature platform that already does everything we want it to do.
02:16:05 ◼ ► Like, you know, the Mac is able to have questionable leadership and resources now because in the past, it had all the resources.