0:00:00- Marco, you still have a Tesla?
0:00:01- I do still have a Tesla.
0:00:02I was gonna actually sell it over Christmas break,
0:00:06but because my son got the flu and that kind of delayed,
0:00:10like we had to move all of our timing of all of our travel
0:00:13and it made it so that there was no extra time
0:00:15that I was gonna be spending around the Tesla
0:00:17to get it sold, so it didn't happen yet,
0:00:19but there are two more breaks coming later this winter.
0:00:23So we'll see.
0:00:25I gotta sell it while it's still worth anything
0:00:27'cause it's certainly worth a lot less now
0:00:30than it was last summer.
0:00:31(laughing)
0:00:33It's Elon's final middle finger to me.
0:00:35It's like, fine, you leave Twitter,
0:00:36I'm gonna devalue your car.
0:00:38(laughing)
0:00:39- That's not true.
0:00:40If you're willing to discuss,
0:00:41what is your sales strategy for this?
0:00:43Are you Carvanha-ing?
0:00:44Are you gonna sell it privately?
0:00:45'Cause you're not looking to buy something,
0:00:47so a trade-in doesn't seem possible.
0:00:48Are you gonna go to CarMax?
0:00:49Like, what's the plan?
0:00:50- So, none of these things will give me a real quote.
0:00:53So, here's, when I was last home for, like,
0:00:57I'm like, "Oh, let me try to sell the Tesla while I'm here."
0:01:00So I tried Carvana and everything and they were all like,
0:01:03"Well, because of this not being a common car,
0:01:06"you need to schedule an appointment
0:01:07"and bring it in to us, la la la."
0:01:09And I'm like, "Well, that's not gonna happen
0:01:11"on Christmas Eve or whatever."
0:01:12So I'm like, "All right, well, I guess I'll do that
0:01:14"some other time."
0:01:15And then I stupid, oh, I made a mistake.
0:01:18So I went to Kelly Blue Book to see what's my current,
0:01:23I figure, you're right, I'm not buying anything new
0:01:26so that weakens my position for sure.
0:01:28But I'm like, when you go to Kelly Blue Book,
0:01:30you get the three values.
0:01:31You get the dealer trade-in at the lowest,
0:01:33then you get the private sale, which is the highest,
0:01:36and I forget what the middle one is.
0:01:38I'll take whatever, like the lowest value,
0:01:40the dealer trade-in, I would take that.
0:01:42That's fine, like at least it would be out of my hands.
0:01:44I don't wanna deal with the private sale,
0:01:45it's a pain in the butt.
0:01:46And it takes more time than frankly I ever have around,
0:01:49like I'm never there for long enough to do a private sale.
0:01:52'Cause I've done that in the past,
0:01:54and you list it somewhere,
0:01:55and you gotta wait maybe a week or two,
0:01:57and show different people the car,
0:01:59have them come around and kick the tires
0:02:01and go on a little test drive,
0:02:02and then decide not to buy it.
0:02:03It's a huge time suck, that's why I don't do that anymore.
0:02:07It's terrible.
0:02:09And I'd never had a good experience with a private sale,
0:02:11and so I'm like, all right, as a seller at least.
0:02:13As a buyer, I've had great experiences,
0:02:15but as a seller, I never had one.
0:02:18So I thought, okay, well fine,
0:02:19whatever the dealer trade in price is,
0:02:21I'd be happy to take that.
0:02:23So I go on Kelly Blue Book,
0:02:24and I get the dealer trade in price,
0:02:27and then they offer at the bottom of the screen,
0:02:30hey, get our instant cash offer price now,
0:02:33and we'll buy the car from you without you buying a vehicle.
0:02:37So I thought, okay, let me see what they'll offer for that.
0:02:41And it's one of those stupid scams
0:02:42where they're not really gonna buy your car from you.
0:02:46They give your information to 14 dealers in the region.
0:02:50- Oh, gross.
0:02:51and then you get spammed like crazy
0:02:53from these desperate vultures,
0:02:56and they're all offering like $15,000
0:02:59below the dealer trade-in value.
0:03:00- Boo.
0:03:01- So I'm like, okay, well, first of all,
0:03:04this is literally the site that just told me
0:03:07what my goals were. (laughs)
0:03:10And this is way below that.
0:03:12And second of all, now I'm gonna get spammed forever
0:03:15from these rando, desperate, used car dealers.
0:03:17Thanks a lot.
0:03:18So I can't recommend Kelly Blue Book for anything
0:03:22at this moment, for either the valuation,
0:03:24which seems to be wrong,
0:03:25or for their stupid cash offer thing.
0:03:28So I'm probably gonna go to Carvana or CarMax
0:03:31or whatever those things are and take whatever they give me,
0:03:34which is probably gonna be very, very low.
0:03:36And I'm gonna really be grumbly about it for a while,
0:03:39but at least I won't have to deal with it anymore.
0:03:42- Well, through the magic of YouTube advertising,
0:03:45I'm going to recommend something to you
0:03:46that maybe Casey will be familiar with.
0:03:49- Cars and bids?
0:03:50- Exactly.
0:03:51- No, 'cause here's the thing.
0:03:53Cars and, I like browsing cars and bids
0:03:55to see what are the Rivian's costing these days.
0:03:57But the reason I would not wanna sell on a site like that,
0:04:00that's a site that is browsed by car nerds.
0:04:05I don't wanna sell my car to a car nerd.
0:04:08- But it's like eBay though,
0:04:09like you just put pictures and then a bunch of people bid
0:04:11and they're probably gonna pay a lot
0:04:13because car nerds know what they're getting,
0:04:14Like they understand the nuances of why this is good,
0:04:16low mileage, good condition, one owner, blah, blah, blah.
0:04:19And they'd understand this is the one
0:04:20before they ruin the steering wheel, so on and so forth.
0:04:22So you'll get a lot of money for it,
0:04:24and you don't have to deal with showing people the car
0:04:26and kicking the tires and they have to like it.
0:04:27Someone's gonna win the thing
0:04:29and then they're gonna buy the car.
0:04:30And they're a car person,
0:04:31so they'll probably understand what they're buying
0:04:34and know how to go and get it from you.
0:04:36- No, Cars and Biz is the kind of place
0:04:39where Casey should sell a car.
0:04:40Because Casey's cars have been detailed and washed
0:04:44and kept in great condition.
0:04:46- No, Cars and Biz doesn't care
0:04:47that yours is a little scratched up, it'll be fine.
0:04:50- It's not gonna be, no, car nerds,
0:04:52they're gonna see things I've never seen.
0:04:54They're gonna be the panel gap people.
0:04:56- Like I said, they also appreciate
0:04:58why your car is desirable above and beyond the fact that,
0:05:02because all the Carvana or whatever,
0:05:03all they care is make, model, year, mileage,
0:05:06condition as a one to five scale.
0:05:09They don't understand the nuances
0:05:10of why this car is worth more than an uglier color
0:05:14or a model year that was worse, you know what I mean?
0:05:16I feel like you'd get way more money for there.
0:05:18And it should be just as little hassle
0:05:20because you don't have to deal with showing people the car
0:05:23and all that stuff, it's just you put up the pictures,
0:05:25people bid, you get a decent price, you sell.
0:05:27- Yeah, maybe.
0:05:28I mean, the other thing too is like,
0:05:29I also have and would want to sell with the car
0:05:33a second set of rims that had snow tires on them.
0:05:37Now the tires aren't usable anymore,
0:05:38so I'll probably have to dispose of those myself.
0:05:40But there's a second set of Tesla rims
0:05:42that's probably worth a thousand bucks or whatever.
0:05:44- The Cars and Bids people will also understand
0:05:46that those are valuable.
0:05:47- That is true, actually.
0:05:48- And be willing to buy them from you
0:05:49because they'll just resell them for more.
0:05:51- Right, so, maybe.
0:05:53But then I gotta, first of all,
0:05:54I'll have to do this not in the winter,
0:05:56'cause it'll have to look nice.
0:05:58- No, totally do it in the winter.
0:05:59I'm looking at a Ford Bronco right now,
0:06:01pictures of it in the snow.
0:06:02- No, but then I have to go get it detailed.
0:06:04It's a much greater hassle.
0:06:07- You just gotta slum it on Cars and Bids.
0:06:08You're like, "Look, I've got a car.
0:06:10"I know you want this car.
0:06:11Here's a bunch of pictures.
0:06:12I've got a car.
0:06:13You've got bids.
0:06:14Let's make it happen.
0:06:16You have a desirable car in good condition with low mileage.
0:06:19It's a slam dunk.
0:06:20Do not let Carvana buy this car for you for like $10,000
0:06:24less than it's worth.
0:06:25I also think--
0:06:27I don't know, I've really soured on Demiro over the years.
0:06:30I would also consider Bring a Trailer as a--
0:06:33It's not that different.
0:06:35It's a very similar thing.
0:06:36eBay for cars is what we're saying.
0:06:38So you don't have to deal with lots of people looking at it.
0:06:40Let's see.
0:06:40here's pretty much exactly my car with three times the mileage that sold for $10,000 more
0:06:48than what they offered me.
0:06:49That's what I'm saying.
0:06:50I'm coming around to John's point on this one.
0:06:52I hate to bring it to you.
0:06:53That's a substantial price difference.
0:06:57The things that your car has are intangibles, and those intangibles are only going to be
0:07:00appreciated by car people who know what they're getting.
0:07:04What intangibles are you thinking of?
0:07:05Previously owned by Marco Arment?
0:07:07single owner, good condition, low mileage, and it's the Model S before they screwed
0:07:11it up.
0:07:12It's the last one with a goddamn sunroof.
0:07:14And a round steering wheel.
0:07:16And a complete steering wheel.
0:07:17You get the entire steering wheel with this price.
0:07:19And it's just driven by a little old man in Westchester to church every Sunday.
0:07:25It was not flogged, it was not abused, he was not drag racing on the weekend.
0:07:30Only hit by one plow.
0:07:32- No teenager ever drove it, it's only accidents
0:07:35where like when it was parked unattended,
0:07:37like it's just, it's a good car.
0:07:39The battery's probably got tons of life left in it.
0:07:41Check the battery health thing.
0:07:42- The stock tires are not that well worn
0:07:44because I kept snow tires on it
0:07:46for like a year and a half straight.
0:07:48- And at this point you can be pretty sure
0:07:50it isn't one of those ones that's assembled
0:07:52with roofing screws, right,
0:07:53'cause it would've fallen apart by now.
0:07:55- Yeah, right.
0:07:56- So whoever built this one was not like,
0:07:57you know, just slapping it together in a tent.
0:08:00- Oh, I guess I should probably do this,
0:08:02but how that, I mean, this, oh, this sold in Texas.
0:08:04I don't, fuck.
0:08:05- It's not a thing you don't have to deal with that.
0:08:06They'll come and get it just there.
0:08:08The people who want this car are gonna want it.
0:08:10- How does, so wait, how does it work?
0:08:11They literally just like send a trailer to come get it,
0:08:13or what?
0:08:14- Yeah, usually.
0:08:15- I mean, whoever buys it is gonna do that
0:08:16if they don't, like, it's the buyer's problem.
0:08:18You say where you are, and it's the buyer's problem
0:08:20and how they're gonna get it, but it's not your problem.
0:08:22You don't have to ship it to them or something.
0:08:23- Oh, this one has a bunch of paint chips.
0:08:25Mine's in less crappy condition than this one.
0:08:27- See?
0:08:28What if I just page on like $5,000
0:08:31to just come do this entire thing for me?
0:08:33'Cause I'll make way more than that.
0:08:35- Just use it as packing material
0:08:36for some other thing you're gonna send me.
0:08:38I'll take the Tesla off your hands.
0:08:40- I'll fill the Tesla with Kindles and send it to you.
0:08:42- As you know, I enjoy stick shift cars,
0:08:46but if I'm gonna have one without a stick shift,
0:08:48it'll be electric.
0:08:49- Amen to that, brother, amen to that.
0:08:51- Yeah, you know what's better than manual transmission?
0:08:52No transmission.
0:08:53- There's still a transmission.
0:08:55- Not really.
0:08:56I mean, Tesla's a single speed.
0:08:57- I know, but it's still, anyway, whatever.
0:09:00- Is it a transmission if it can't change gears?
0:09:03- Yeah, yeah, 'cause it changes the gear ratio.
0:09:05It's not just like one to one.
0:09:07- No, I think it's, I don't think it does.
0:09:10- It does.
0:09:11- How?
0:09:12- Marco, because it transmits its power.
0:09:14- It is a fixed ratio, but it is a gear ratio.
0:09:16There are different numbers of teeth on the gears.
0:09:18- That's just called gears.
0:09:19They're just a set of gears.
0:09:21- Right, but they don't all have the same number of teeth.
0:09:22The gear ratio is not one to one.
0:09:24- No, but I don't--
0:09:25- Otherwise your back wheels would be turning
0:09:26at 20,000 RPM.
0:09:27- No, but I don't think, like, do Teslas have
0:09:31more than one gear besides forward and reverse?
0:09:34- No, I mean like actual gears, as in circular things
0:09:36with teeth that mesh with each other.
0:09:38Go look at exploded diagram of the thing
0:09:41that powers your car, you will see several gears
0:09:43that mesh with each other with different numbers
0:09:45of teeth on them. - But doesn't a transmission
0:09:46require the two like change between ratios at some point?
0:09:50- No, it just requires the power to be transmitted
0:09:53through a series of gears with different numbers
0:09:55of teeth on them unless it's just one gear ratio.
0:09:57- Okay, so then a watch is a transmission then.
0:09:59'Cause there's gears-- - Well, it's not a car, so.
0:10:02(laughing)
0:10:03Lots of things have gears that aren't cars.
0:10:05This is like robot or not.
0:10:05- Like is my hand mixer, is my electric hand mixer upstairs?
0:10:08Is that a transmission?
0:10:09- Exactly, like what about my kitchen haters?
0:10:10Does that have a transmission?
0:10:11Well, kind of.
0:10:12- Yeah. - Oh gosh.
0:10:14What have we done?
0:10:15I have regrets.
0:10:17(electronic beeping)
0:10:18All right, let's bring us back around
0:10:19and let's do some follow-up.
0:10:21Jonas writes, "I was a bit worried
0:10:22"about the time machine iCloud backup,
0:10:24iCloud photo library thing, but it seems that it's included in time machine backups
0:10:28And so I guess Jonas or maybe John found a knowledge base or whatever article about this
0:10:34So tell me about this at Apple comm so we can be pretty sure they know what they're talking about
0:10:38It says Apple says even if you use iCloud photos, it's important
0:10:42You always back up your library locally using one of the followed methods and the two methods
0:10:46They list our use time machine and it claims that will back everything up or manually copy your library to your external storage device
0:10:52I think what I was misremembering last episode was and I again
0:10:56I don't know if this is true because all we have is this vague advice from Apple
0:10:59This is hey back it up use time machine. So thumbs up on that
0:11:01Maybe I was misremembering a thing where when you use time machine, you will not back up the SQLite metadata databases
0:11:09But will only back up the photo files and the rest of the structure
0:11:12If you use iCloud photo library because it assumes it can always regenerate the SQLite databases from the iCloud photo stuff
0:11:18That's the thing now
0:11:20I don't know if it's true, but apparently you're safe using time machine if you just want to back at the actual photos
0:11:24I think and it will back up the whole thing the whole photo library
0:11:27There was just some big blow up a couple years ago people being mad that a time machine wouldn't back up some
0:11:33What they considered to be an important part of the photo library
0:11:37And the reason they don't back it up is because if you use iCloud photos
0:11:40That the that source of truth is in the cloud anyway
0:11:44So your local backup of it is just gonna get overridden with what's in the cloud
0:11:47And that's why I think they didn't pack it up
0:11:48So maybe more follow-up on this in the future, but for the main question of will it back up my photos the answer is yes
0:11:53Cool. All right, there are
0:11:55Some new monitors that we need to talk about we talked about the Samsung 5k
0:12:00Last week and actually we have some updates on that and then there's a Dell we need to talk about but tell me we have a
0:12:06Little more information about the Samsung I guess. Yeah, we talked about the camera last time. I'm like, oh, it's a 4k camera
0:12:10It's a good camera not like that crappy one on the Apple Studio display
0:12:13Well, 4K camera is about 8.3 megapixel and the studio display has a 12 megapixel camera.
0:12:19I still think the one on the Samsung is probably better because we don't know what the crop
0:12:26factor is on that 4K camera.
0:12:28Apple's super ultra wide camera that it uses on the studio display tracks you through a
0:12:33wide range of, you know, you can move all over the place, right?
0:12:37I would imagine Samsung is going to take a less extreme approach with its 4K camera and
0:12:42And when it says that it tracks you,
0:12:43I bet it crops out a portion of the 4K frame,
0:12:47but not as tiny a portion as a studio display does.
0:12:49We'll see when the thing ships,
0:12:50but that's a software question more than a hardware one.
0:12:53But just wanted to clarify,
0:12:544K is about eight megapixels
0:12:56and a studio display is 12 megapixel camera.
0:12:59- And then Dell has a new 6K monitor
0:13:02that makes your XDR look like a pile of garbage.
0:13:04- It does not, but it exists as a 6K monitor.
0:13:08So here's what's important about it.
0:13:09It is a 32 inch 6K monitor,
0:13:11which is the same as the XDR.
0:13:13It has more pixels than the XDR.
0:13:15The XDR is also 32 inches,
0:13:17but the Dell 6K monitor is 6144 by 3456,
0:13:21and the XDR is 6016 by 3384.
0:13:26Sorry for reading those numbers that way,
0:13:28but that's the way my brain works sometimes.
0:13:30So the Dell monitor has 875,520 more pixels than the XDR.
0:13:35The PPI is very similar.
0:13:40On the Dell it's 223 and on the XDR it's 215.
0:13:43So this is a Mac appropriate monitor
0:13:46with more pixels than the XDR.
0:13:49So this is looking pretty good here.
0:13:51Same size, more pixels.
0:13:53- It looks pretty good until you see it.
0:13:55- No, we'll get there, we'll get there.
0:13:58It is not a fancy display like the XDR though.
0:14:02It is an LG IPS monitor.
0:14:06It covers P3 but that's about it.
0:14:09It does 600 nits max, which is not anything close
0:14:12to the XDR 1600 nits max.
0:14:14It has the good old familiar from last episode,
0:14:18display HDR 600 certification,
0:14:21but according to Arstactica, it does have local dimming.
0:14:24It has 12 zones.
0:14:26That's not good.
0:14:27- I think I would just turn it off at that point, right?
0:14:30- Yeah, the peak brightness is less than half of the XDR
0:14:35and the XDR has 576 dimming zones.
0:14:37And even that is paltry compared to modern mini LED monitors
0:14:41that have way more dimming zones.
0:14:4212 dimming zones is not good.
0:14:45But it does claim that it has a good IPS display
0:14:48or whatever, anyway.
0:14:49Hide adjustable stand included of course with rotation
0:14:52'cause why wouldn't you have that on such an expensive model
0:14:54and that would be crazy.
0:14:55- Wait, it's not $1,000?
0:14:57- No, yeah.
0:14:58Here's the thing, I mean this is CS, this is coming from CS
0:15:00so we don't know the pricing of this.
0:15:01So we can't make fun of how badly priced Apple's things are
0:15:04'cause we don't technically know about the price
0:15:06So I'm going to say it's going to undercut Apple.
0:15:09It has a 4K dual gain HDR webcam that uses quote unquote AI to keep you in the frame.
0:15:15You know, sounds familiar, huh?
0:15:17This is apparently a dual gain HDR CMOS sensor with multi-element lens.
0:15:21The webcam has independent hardware tilt.
0:15:24So even though the camera is built into the monitor, you can apparently tilt it with your
0:15:28hand.
0:15:29It uses Dell Express sign-in technology to detect your presence when you're nearby and
0:15:32logs you in automatically, locking your PC when you walk away.
0:15:35You know I want face ID on the Mac and I would love it if it locked the screen when I walked
0:15:38away because it knew I did that because of the camera but I'm sure this is all like a
0:15:41Windows feature and not a monitor thing.
0:15:44If it works as well as the Windows face recognition thing to log in you're not missing much.
0:15:50I mean that's better than nothing I feel like but we'll see.
0:15:52It's not.
0:15:54It's worse than nothing.
0:15:55Oh well.
0:15:56If it worked as well as face ID on my iPad and my iPhone I would be happy.
0:16:00So and I feel like Apple could make that happen someday maybe.
0:16:03It has a mute and camera disabled touch sensors accessible on the front of the monitor, because
0:16:07it's nice to be able to do those things quickly.
0:16:0914 watt stereo speakers.
0:16:11Auto KVM built in.
0:16:12Let's you control two PC sources with a single mouse and keyboard.
0:16:16Viewing content from two computers with picture in picture and picture by picture modes.
0:16:20I think you can put the two monitors side by side.
0:16:23Like two images on the screen.
0:16:25Connectivity.
0:16:26Of course it has tons of ports, why wouldn't it?
0:16:28Such an expensive large monitor.
0:16:30HDMI, DisplayPort 2.1, Thunderbolt 4,
0:16:33RS calls this Thunderbolt 4 downstream.
0:16:35I'm assuming that means that's how you connect
0:16:37your computer to it, I'm not sure.
0:16:40USB-C upstream, four USB-A ports,
0:16:432.5 gigabit ethernet port,
0:16:46and a front panel with two USB-C ports
0:16:48at 10 gigabits with 15 watt power delivery
0:16:50and one USB-A port with 10 gigabits,
0:16:52and BC 1.2 power charging,
0:16:55which is apparently an abbreviation
0:16:56for USB battery charging revision 1.2.
0:16:59up to 140 watts of power delivery.
0:17:02So it's not the same specs as the XDR.
0:17:05It's kind of an XDR for people who don't need 1600 nits,
0:17:09great color fidelity, so on and so forth,
0:17:11but just want a big single monitor with tons of ports
0:17:15and lots of features and all that good stuff.
0:17:17Unfortunately, as Marco alluded to before,
0:17:20it's ugly as sin.
0:17:21(laughing)
0:17:22- It's so ugly.
0:17:23- Let me paint you a word picture.
0:17:26So imagine like a standard computer monitor
0:17:28with a ugly plastic base or stand on it.
0:17:32But as you look up, you notice that there's a forehead
0:17:37that must be a couple of inches tall.
0:17:40And that is way out of line with the bezel
0:17:42on the rest of the sides of the display.
0:17:44- And as big as the forehead is,
0:17:46is it so big because it contains the camera?
0:17:48No, it does not contain the camera.
0:17:50- No, Jon, I'm glad you asked.
0:17:52Only half of the circular camera is within the forehead.
0:17:55- Half of the huge camera.
0:17:57Like huge, just like the size of a golf ball.
0:18:01- Right, and then the other half of this golf ball
0:18:03sized camera is above the top bezel.
0:18:06It's the top of the monitor.
0:18:08It looks preposterous.
0:18:10- It looks like an enemy from Half Life.
0:18:13- It's like so ungainly looking.
0:18:15Like anything where the bezel is bigger on the top
0:18:17and the bottom always kind of looks like the monitor
0:18:18is upside down and then it's got the big thing.
0:18:21But if you look at the videos of this thing,
0:18:23the stand is tilt adjustable, height adjustable, rotates.
0:18:27So many ports on this thing, so many features.
0:18:30It's got all the stuff that you can want.
0:18:31And I bet the price is gonna be pretty good.
0:18:33And I don't think there's really any other game in town
0:18:36for, hey, I want an XDR, but I don't need,
0:18:38you know, 1,600 nits.
0:18:39Now, as I said, when we talked about this
0:18:41and kind of, you know, a few months after I got it,
0:18:44whatever, I really do, I didn't think I would care
0:18:46about the HDR, but I really do appreciate it
0:18:48because my phone, my family's phones take HDR video
0:18:52and photos, and when I view them on the big screen
0:18:56where I do my photo editing, they look HDR.
0:18:59I actually use those 1600 nits
0:19:01and so do Apple's Pro laptops now.
0:19:04So I'm kind of at the point where,
0:19:05if you had asked me before about the XDR,
0:19:08I'd be like, oh, I would just love something like the XDR
0:19:10that just doesn't have that HDR stuff
0:19:11that I don't care about.
0:19:12But now I'm kind of over the line where I think
0:19:14I don't ever wanna buy a monitor that doesn't do HDR
0:19:17for my quote unquote good monitor.
0:19:18So in that respect, this one is not to my liking,
0:19:23but I think having a 6K monitor
0:19:25for people who don't care about HDR
0:19:27that has all the features and connects to all the things
0:19:30and has a good camera built in and everything.
0:19:33If this thing is priced reasonably,
0:19:35I'm just super glad this exists
0:19:37because now we have another alternative to the Apple 5K
0:19:41and now finally we have something I never thought
0:19:42we'd have, an alternative to the XDR
0:19:44that again, assuming it's not more expensive,
0:19:47is great to just have in the market
0:19:49for people who want a big monitor
0:19:51but don't wanna pay six grand once you have the stand.
0:19:54- Yeah, and I'm guessing this is,
0:19:56I mean, not knowing anything about
0:19:58what these components cost these days.
0:20:00Apple's at six grand from a monitor
0:20:01that's now a few years old
0:20:03that has higher specs in certain areas
0:20:04and of course higher design and everything else.
0:20:06I'm gonna say this is probably gonna be
0:20:08under four grand for the Dell one
0:20:10and if I'm right about that,
0:20:12even if it's four grand,
0:20:13it's probably even gonna be less than that,
0:20:15that's gonna be a great deal.
0:20:16Like for what you're getting
0:20:17compared to what else is in the market,
0:20:19I think this is gonna be well under the XDR's price.
0:20:23maybe even half, it could be 3,000, I don't know,
0:20:26but whatever it is, it's probably gonna be
0:20:29a really compelling price, and the money you're saving,
0:20:32you can buy anything that will make you not see
0:20:35how this looks, maybe like one of those,
0:20:38if you look through one of those cartoon ninja masks,
0:20:40so you're looking through a slit,
0:20:42if you can just cut off the top and bottom
0:20:43and not see anything beyond that, I don't know.
0:20:46- You know what I do think is kind of cool?
0:20:48It's really ugly, but I like the principle of it.
0:20:51So they have some, I guess, capacitive buttons
0:20:54on the bottom left-hand side of the screen.
0:20:55Not in love with that, but at least they have a button.
0:20:58Imagine how cool it would be if your studio display
0:21:00had a power button.
0:21:01That would be amazing!
0:21:03But anyway.
0:21:03- No, you know what?
0:21:04I love hearing about everyone's studio display bugs.
0:21:08Because you know how many times I've had to unplug my XDR?
0:21:11- I'm gonna guess none.
0:21:12- Yep, correct, none.
0:21:13Oh wait, once I rewired my desk.
0:21:15- But both of these monitors should have power buttons.
0:21:19Like even the XTR, which I've also had no problems with,
0:21:21it should still have a power button too.
0:21:23- No, it's an Apple device, it's not gonna have
0:21:24a power button, their headphones don't even have
0:21:25a power button, not a chance the monitor will.
0:21:27- But they should, that's a, like, we got them to add back
0:21:30the good keyboards, SD card slot, HDMI to the laptops,
0:21:33I think we can convince them that power buttons
0:21:35are a thing that electronic devices should have.
0:21:37- I know, I tell you, I actually, for interesting reasons,
0:21:40I used someone else's 12-inch MacBook today,
0:21:43and it's the first time I've seen one of those
0:21:45in a long time, and of course, the space bar is broken.
0:21:49but it did feel really small.
0:21:51I was like, damn, I wish this size still existed,
0:21:54but wow, I'm glad this keyboard doesn't still exist.
0:21:57- Yep.
0:21:58Anyway, next to these capacitive buttons,
0:22:00there's a little like MacBook Air,
0:22:02original MacBook Air style door that drops,
0:22:04or not door, but like, I don't know,
0:22:06like column that drops down.
0:22:08- It's a USB-C hub is what it is, basically.
0:22:11- Yeah, so it has two USB-C ports on it
0:22:13and a USB-A port on it.
0:22:14And then you can shimmy it back up
0:22:16within the contents of the inside of the monitor
0:22:19and confines of the monitor, that's what I was looking for.
0:22:21You can slide it back up inside the monitor
0:22:23and it disappears.
0:22:24And I think I'm supposed to hate this,
0:22:26but I think I kinda like it.
0:22:28- No, front-facing parts, useful thing to have,
0:22:30so you don't have to constantly reach around
0:22:31behind the monitor.
0:22:32This is exactly what PC makers will do,
0:22:34is like, oh, let's just add all the features
0:22:35that we think will be useful.
0:22:36Sometimes inelegantly and sometimes they go overboard,
0:22:39but it's such a nice, that's why you need,
0:22:41Apple needs competition and you need contrast.
0:22:43The Apple's overly simplified thing is contrasted
0:22:46with this thing that has every feature
0:22:47anyone could ever think of.
0:22:49Somewhere in the middle is probably where we wanna be,
0:22:50but it's good to have the two things balancing each other.
0:22:53So if you don't like what Apple has done,
0:22:55you have an alternative.
0:22:56- Yep.
0:22:57- Do you think as you type on your desk
0:22:59that this stand will wiggle the whole monitor?
0:23:01- I think Dell usually has pretty good stands,
0:23:03and this one looks pretty sturdy.
0:23:05It's LG that can't make a stand.
0:23:06- I know, well, but I haven't,
0:23:08I used to love Dell monitors.
0:23:10Back in the pre-written days,
0:23:12I had two Dell 24 inches and they were fantastic.
0:23:15And I mean, you know, at the time when those came out
0:23:18in, you know, 2006 or whatever, those were really great,
0:23:22very competitively priced, very well performing monitors
0:23:25and they were great, but that was a long time ago
0:23:29and I, you know, I wouldn't make any assumptions
0:23:32unless I've heard otherwise that they would still be
0:23:35even, you know, the same company,
0:23:36little one making the same quality stuff.
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0:25:22- John, do you need Marco and me
0:25:27for the next like 20, 30 minutes
0:25:29or can we just take a little nap?
0:25:30- Yeah, you'll have to be my camera crew
0:25:32as I report from the CES show floor.
0:25:34(laughing)
0:25:35- My annual trip to CES that I don't actually take,
0:25:38this is it.
0:25:39So CES is going on.
0:25:41I've never actually been to CES,
0:25:43but I will be virtually reporting from there
0:25:45on the tiny amount of things
0:25:47that I actually care about at CES,
0:25:48and those are having to do with televisions.
0:25:50What's going on on the world TV
0:25:51is just a quick overview here.
0:25:53- Well, hold on, I'm curious before we begin.
0:25:56I know from being on the more computer side of things
0:26:00that CES does not have a strong correlation
0:26:04into what actually comes out on the market.
0:26:06Is that better for TVs?
0:26:07Like do TVs have a better track record
0:26:09of what's shown at CES actually then gets delivered
0:26:12to the market?
0:26:13- Yeah, yeah, so for televisions it has simply become
0:26:16the thing where like everybody,
0:26:18there's like an annual crop of televisions
0:26:20and everybody just shows, with an asterisk
0:26:22that I'll get to in a second,
0:26:23shows their TVs at CES.
0:26:25They also show stuff that isn't a TV.
0:26:28Here's something we're thinking of,
0:26:29here's something stupid, like the concept car equivalent.
0:26:31That crap is, you know, whatever, right?
0:26:33But the TVs they show, they ship them later that year.
0:26:36Unless something catastrophic happens,
0:26:38they ship them pretty reliably.
0:26:40So it's annoying that CES comes
0:26:42and you don't get prices and availability,
0:26:44but you basically know, look, this happens every single year.
0:26:46They show them in January, they're not yet ready to ship.
0:26:49Sometime during the year, probably around the middle,
0:26:51they're gonna ship them,
0:26:52we're gonna find out the pricing and availability,
0:26:54and we do it all over the next year.
0:26:55So that is very reliable.
0:26:56So it's not like, you know, they give you the names,
0:26:58the model numbers and everything, right?
0:27:00So these are real products, not, you know,
0:27:02Ignore the concept car stuffs, although I'll talk a little bit about the concept car stuff
0:27:06here too.
0:27:07So this year, the starting news is you can finally get Quantum Dot QD OLED screens in
0:27:14larger than 65 inch sizes.
0:27:16All the fancy TV people who have bigger houses than me wanted to buy my recommended TV last
0:27:21year, the Sony A95K, but like, oh, it only goes in 65 inch.
0:27:24That's the biggest size you can get, which is fine for me.
0:27:27My last TV was 55 inches and I upgraded to 65 and that's about as big as I can fit, but
0:27:32There was nothing bigger.
0:27:33So this year finally you can get a 77 inch size.
0:27:35Samsung display makes QD OLED screens.
0:27:37They are the only manufacturer that does.
0:27:40Every television that has a QD OLED screen comes from Samsung.
0:27:43Samsung announced a 77 inch television.
0:27:46Their naming scheme is not as good as LG's.
0:27:48Last year was the S95B that came in 55 and 65.
0:27:52Now you can get the S95C.
0:27:55I get it.
0:27:56You're incrementing the number.
0:27:57What is the S?
0:27:58What is the 95?
0:27:59I don't get it.
0:28:00series, which is sort of their lower end model.
0:28:03So they bifurcated their entire line.
0:28:05The S95C comes with what Samsung calls a one connect box
0:28:09that they've had on their TVs for many years.
0:28:11Do you have that on your frame as well, Marco?
0:28:13- Is that, so the frame has, you run one skinny cable
0:28:18to the TV and it goes down into this giant box
0:28:20that has all the other ports on it that you hide
0:28:22like in your entertainment center.
0:28:23- That is the one connect box and that is exactly the idea.
0:28:27It makes it easier to mount the TV
0:28:29and you don't have to, I think it's actually a fiber optic
0:28:32on the modern ones.
0:28:33One little skinny cable goes to the TV
0:28:35and there's a breakout box with everything else in it.
0:28:37The power plug, the HDMI port, it's a good idea.
0:28:40But Samsung puts it on another fancy TV.
0:28:42So the S95C has the one connect box.
0:28:44- I mean, I don't know how good, mine's buggy as hell.
0:28:46We have two frame TVs, they're both buggy as hell.
0:28:49I would never in a million years buy another one.
0:28:51And I don't know if it's because of the electronics
0:28:53being separated, probably not.
0:28:55It's probably just 'cause Samsung sucks,
0:28:56but man is it buggy as hell.
0:28:58I would never do this again.
0:28:59Yeah, I can't speak to the reliability of the One Connect box because obviously that's
0:29:02some proprietary thing that they're doing with the fiber optic cable, right?
0:29:05But in theory, the electronics that are in that box are the same as they would stick
0:29:08on the back of the TV, so if they suck, they would probably also suck on the back of the
0:29:11TV.
0:29:12But anyway, their fancy line, S95C, has the One Connect box, and it also has bigger and
0:29:17better speakers in the TV because now there's room for them.
0:29:19They basically have speakers taking up the whole back of the TV with openings on the
0:29:23back and everything for better bass.
0:29:25So that's the S95C.
0:29:27And the S90C doesn't have the One Connect box and it's more of the lower end model.
0:29:33So they've split up their QD OLED line into the good ones that have features you might
0:29:37not want like the One Connect.
0:29:39That's a good one.
0:29:40All right.
0:29:41Speaking of One Connect box, LG has a product they call the Signature Series OLED TVs.
0:29:47It's just a WRGB OLED, not a QD OLED.
0:29:50And theirs are wireless.
0:29:52There's a power plug that goes to the back of the television and there's a breakout box.
0:29:56the breakout box communicates wirelessly.
0:29:59They call theirs a zero connect box.
0:30:01Isn't that clever?
0:30:02- But it still has power, I mean, so what's the point?
0:30:05- Well, the point is, it's a lot easier
0:30:07to sort of mount the TV, like if you have to be like KC
0:30:09and mount it way too high over your fireplace or whatever,
0:30:12you just have to have power, you don't have to fish
0:30:14HDMI cables through, or like, tellers have lots of ports
0:30:17in the back of them that you might not want to connect.
0:30:18- But I'm saying, like, when you have the one cable
0:30:20that goes to the breakout box,
0:30:22the way my stupid buggy Samsung ones do,
0:30:24What's the difference if you have to run a power cable
0:30:27to the TV or this cable to the TV?
0:30:30- Right, well, lots of people have a power plug
0:30:32near their television or behind
0:30:33where they're gonna wall mount it,
0:30:35but not a lot of people have the special
0:30:37one connect fiber optic cables fished through their wall
0:30:40to the box that they're gonna buy with the TV.
0:30:41Not a lot of people have HDMI, or if they do have HDMI,
0:30:44it's not the right standard for HDMI 2.1, whatever.
0:30:47This is a silly rich person TV, right?
0:30:50It's not a serious TV, but it is a real product.
0:30:52It's 97 inches, it's probably horrendously expensive.
0:30:55I just think it's interesting because they're sending
0:30:58real full fledged, not compressed,
0:31:01like full fidelity 4K 120 hertz video signal
0:31:06to the television wirelessly up to 30 feet away.
0:31:09I don't recommend this television,
0:31:11I just think it's interesting that we've gotten
0:31:12to the point where they can do that
0:31:13on a silly rich person TV for people who, you know.
0:31:17If you look at the pictures,
0:31:19see how it's like the television itself
0:31:20is on one of those awkward stands
0:31:21that no normal person would have in their house, right?
0:31:24It's just kind of like freestanding and alone.
0:31:26That was to make fun of the fact
0:31:27that they never show any power cables or anything else.
0:31:29Well, you can see the cable in this picture.
0:31:31It's just the power cable.
0:31:32It goes down one of the legs
0:31:33and that's the only cable you need to attach.
0:31:35So finally, it's a realistic picture
0:31:37and you just gotta find someplace to hide this box.
0:31:40So there's that.
0:31:40I just thought it was silly.
0:31:41It's like the TVs, they have like a TV that rolls up
0:31:44and all the silly rich people TVs are just fun to look at,
0:31:46but they are real products they do sell
0:31:48to real silly rich people.
0:31:51More seriously from LG, their competition for QD OLED,
0:31:55'cause they kinda got trounced last year
0:31:57by having, they didn't have a QD OLED TV,
0:31:59they still don't have a QD OLED TV.
0:32:01Well, what they have now is the Micro Lens Array.
0:32:05They took their WRGB OLEDs, which are OLED TVs
0:32:08that have a red, a green, and a blue sub-pixel,
0:32:11and then also a big hunk and a white sub-pixel next to it.
0:32:14They took that TV, and on top of each pixel,
0:32:18they put tiny little microscopic lenses.
0:32:20So on a 77 inch TV, every pixel has 5,117 lenses
0:32:24on top of it.
0:32:26- Every single pixel?
0:32:27- Every single pixel.
0:32:28There's a lot of pixels on a 4K TV.
0:32:30- What?
0:32:31- Yep.
0:32:32They're micro lenses.
0:32:33It's a junior mint.
0:32:34It's refreshing.
0:32:37All right.
0:32:38You can look at some of the pictures.
0:32:39So what's the point of these little lenses?
0:32:41The point of the lenses is to take light
0:32:43that would otherwise be lost to internal reflection
0:32:45as light passes through the various glass layers
0:32:47'cause when you send light through, you know,
0:32:49Anything there, you lose some of it due to internal
0:32:52reflections of light that doesn't make it out
0:32:54to people's eyeballs.
0:32:55The micro lens array makes more of the light make it through
0:32:59without losing less of it to internal reflection.
0:33:01So you don't need to run your backlight,
0:33:03or not backlight, you don't need to run your pixels brighter
0:33:05you just get more of the light that you're producing
0:33:08out to people's eyeballs.
0:33:10And that is their competition for QD OLED.
0:33:12You also get better viewing angles,
0:33:13'cause again more light is leaving the display
0:33:16going to eyeballs and less of it is getting stuck
0:33:18inside the display, less off-axis color tinting,
0:33:21all of the things that were problems with WRGB OLEDs
0:33:24that weren't problems with QD OLEDs,
0:33:26they're combating that with the microlens array.
0:33:29So it is brighter, the estimates are it'll be
0:33:31about 1500 nits, 1500 calibrated nits on a 10% window.
0:33:35When we say that we mean make a 16 by nine box
0:33:38that is 10% the size of the TV,
0:33:40that can be probably around 1500 nits.
0:33:43Full screen, 200 nits.
0:33:44This is what TVs have been like for years by the way,
0:33:46if you don't know.
0:33:47make the entire screen white you get 200 nits right if you make a 10% window white 1500 nits
0:33:54this is relying on the fact that most real television content is not like 100% white but
0:33:58that scene in the matrix is pretty close so just keep that in mind this is an increase from last
0:34:03year's model last year's best lg model was 933 nits on a 10 window and 172 full field so this
0:34:10is a big jump in brightness thanks to all those little tiny lenses um obviously you'll have to
0:34:16have to wait for reviewers to get these TVs to compare them.
0:34:20Samsung's QD OLEDs are also brighter this year,
0:34:23so it'll be quite a competition.
0:34:26Obviously, the things QD OLEDs still have going for them
0:34:28is they don't need a bunch of little microlenses
0:34:30because they're just naturally better at putting out light
0:34:33because they have fewer layers to go through.
0:34:35And the part that produces the light
0:34:36is literally physically closer to the surface.
0:34:39They have naturally good viewing angles.
0:34:41And their brightness doesn't rely on the white subpixels.
0:34:44So while you can get some, you know,
0:34:46a 10% window at 1500 nits that's pure white,
0:34:49you cannot get a 10% window at 1500 nits that's pure red,
0:34:52because that white sub pixel
0:34:53is doing a huge amount of the work.
0:34:54If you add up the brightness of the R, G, and B sub pixels
0:34:58in a QD OLED, you get the white, you know,
0:35:00the full brightness.
0:35:01If you add up the R, the G, and the B sub pixels
0:35:04on a WRGB OLED, you get like 10% of the brightness.
0:35:06Most of it is that white sub pixel,
0:35:08which tends to wash out colors.
0:35:09So I still feel like QD OLED is the future
0:35:12and is the better technology,
0:35:13but kudos to LG for finding a way to get way more brightness
0:35:18out of their TVs and come up with a technology
0:35:22that should make, I feel like, their top end TVs competitive
0:35:25with QD OLEDs this year, we'll see.
0:35:26Second to last, Samsung's, I'm not gonna say
0:35:31like silly concept car thing 'cause these are real products,
0:35:34but they're real products for fabulously rich people.
0:35:37Micro LED, every year you see micro LED at CES
0:35:40because it is the best technology.
0:35:42This is non-organic LEDs,
0:35:45where every single pixel has a little red LED,
0:35:47a little white LED, and a little green, not red,
0:35:51red, green, and blue, right, RGB.
0:35:53Which is unlike the current ones,
0:35:56which just use a single LED that they pass
0:35:58through their color filters or quantum dots or whatever.
0:36:01No burn-in problems, instant response,
0:36:04and no white sub-pixel, amazing viewing angles.
0:36:07This is the promised land of television technology.
0:36:11it also costs like 30 grand, right?
0:36:14And the big problem with micro LED TVs has been,
0:36:17we can't make the little LEDs micro enough.
0:36:20So you see them in stadiums all the time,
0:36:21like those big screens that like a basketball game,
0:36:24those are not really particularly micro,
0:36:26but those are LED screens.
0:36:27They have red, green and blue LEDs for each pixel.
0:36:30Making them small is really, really hard
0:36:32because we can't make,
0:36:34we can't economically make a bunch of tiny little LEDs.
0:36:37So the way manufacturers have been making these
0:36:39for years and years is they make
0:36:41sort of like a sub board,
0:36:43is a micro LED thing with a certain number of pixels,
0:36:46and then they checkerboard those things together
0:36:48to make a complete TV, right?
0:36:49Because they can't make one board the size of a TV.
0:36:53They can just make a bunch of sub boards
0:36:55and put them together so you can't see the seams, right?
0:36:58And the problem has been the smallest one you get
0:37:00is 300 inches, and then the next year
0:37:02the smallest one you get was 200 inches,
0:37:04and the next year the smallest one you get was 100 inches.
0:37:06By the way, they always cost like 10 grand,
0:37:0730 grand or whatever, right?
0:37:08but you just couldn't make them small enough.
0:37:11Well, this year, Samsung was showing micro LED TVs
0:37:15in sizes from 50 inches up to 140 inches.
0:37:18Those are real TV sizes.
0:37:19So from a tech perspective,
0:37:22we can now make micro LED TVs
0:37:25in the sizes humans can fit in their homes.
0:37:28Just not at the prices humans can afford to buy them.
0:37:31I don't even think there were prices attached to these.
0:37:33You know, it's one of those kind of,
0:37:34if you have to ask, you can't afford it.
0:37:35But anyway, the sizes that come in are weird.
0:37:37It's 50, 63, 76, 89, 101, 114, and 140 inches.
0:37:42And those sizes are a result of basically the size
0:37:45of the little unit, the little checkerboard thing.
0:37:49When you stick a bunch of those together
0:37:51to make 16 by nine display,
0:37:52these are the inch sizes you end up with.
0:37:54But they're 240 hertz, they're low power,
0:37:56they have amazing color, phenomenal brightness,
0:37:59no image retention ever.
0:38:01I can't wait for this technology to arrive.
0:38:03Hopefully we will have affordable micro LED TVs
0:38:06before my eyes get so bad that I can't appreciate them.
0:38:09- Hey, wasn't there a rumor just a few days ago
0:38:11that the next, or that an upcoming Apple Watch
0:38:14will probably use micro LED?
0:38:16- Yeah, there's been micro LED Apple Watch rumors
0:38:18for about five years.
0:38:19Micro LED, I mean, it's not like all the technology
0:38:21is never gonna come, 'cause every year at CES
0:38:23the micro LED TVs get better and better.
0:38:25But yeah, the rumor that Apple's gonna use them
0:38:27in some device someday, they will eventually,
0:38:29but they don't even have OLEDs on their laptops yet.
0:38:31So let's, you know.
0:38:32- Wait, wasn't the factory that they did the,
0:38:35like they bought a factory in Arizona,
0:38:38and then the whole deal fell apart,
0:38:39and so wasn't that for micro LED?
0:38:41- I think one of those was for quartz for something,
0:38:43like the display quartz or whatever,
0:38:45but they did make a big investment in micro,
0:38:47everyone's investing in micro LED,
0:38:49everyone knows this is the next step,
0:38:51and it like, all the different things that I talk about,
0:38:53of these TVs doing stuff so they don't suck as much,
0:38:56QD OLED was the most recent big step,
0:38:59look at all the crap we don't have to do,
0:39:00no white subpixel, we don't lose light
0:39:02by cutting through color filters,
0:39:03amazing viewing angle, low power, thin,
0:39:06but you still have image retention
0:39:08and you can't get as bright as an LED backlight, right?
0:39:10So there's always caveats.
0:39:12Micro LED, the only caveats were,
0:39:15we have to make a bunch of small ones
0:39:16and stick them together so you might see the seams
0:39:18and we can't make them that small.
0:39:19And they're working on those.
0:39:20So the size, we've got it.
0:39:2250 inch micro LED 4K televisions at 240 Hertz.
0:39:26It's gonna happen, maybe in the next five years.
0:39:29Stay tuned.
0:39:31And the final item that I thought was interesting,
0:39:33second to last actually. Roku is making TVs. Roku makes those little set-top boxes and if you have
0:39:38a TCL TV it probably has Roku built in, you got a little Roku remote. Roku is making TVs but the
0:39:43TVs will be manufactured by TCL but currently a lot of the TVs that TCL makes that have Roku built
0:39:51into them are designed by Roku and Roku just basically hands TCL a design for a TV and then
0:39:56TCL makes it. So now Roku is making its own TVs which have Roku built in but they're being
0:40:01being manufactured by TCL, it's confusing.
0:40:03But it's kind of like if Netflix started making TVs,
0:40:07no, maybe not Netflix, it's our streaming service.
0:40:09But Roku is one of the few sort of competitors
0:40:11remaining standing in the software that runs your TV.
0:40:15You've got WebOS, Google TV, Apple TV, Roku.
0:40:18What am I missing?
0:40:20- Amazon.
0:40:20- Fire TV, yeah.
0:40:22Amazon is kind of losing steam.
0:40:25And then I think, didn't Amazon also make a TV,
0:40:27like an Alexa TV type thing?
0:40:28- I believe that's right.
0:40:29- I recently bought a new tailgate TV.
0:40:31So this is a TV that basically has to be not impressive.
0:40:36It just needs to be relatively light and cheap.
0:40:38- This might be, by the way,
0:40:40the most Southern thing you've ever said.
0:40:42I just bought a tailgate TV.
0:40:45- I'm flummoxed because I don't have a good retort for this
0:40:47'cause you're probably right.
0:40:49Anyway, the one we bought, I think it was like $110.
0:40:54It's like a 32 inch.
0:40:55I don't remember if it's 720 or 1080,
0:40:58'cause again, it doesn't matter.
0:40:59We're gonna be looking at it outdoors.
0:41:01But anyways, it's a Amazon Fire TV.
0:41:04I think it was, it's whatever the insignia maybe,
0:41:07which is I think the Best Buy store brand,
0:41:09and the only reason I went to Best Buy
0:41:10was 'cause it was dirt cheap.
0:41:12But yeah, so that one is an Amazon Fire TV,
0:41:15and it is not great.
0:41:17- Yeah, I feel like Amazon is kind of losing,
0:41:19losing the interest in that market,
0:41:22and Amazon's kind of consolidating a lot of stuff,
0:41:24so I'm not sure how long they're gonna be there,
0:41:26but yeah, they do have a TV OS.
0:41:28So and the final thing is Sony.
0:41:30Sony is at CES, but they're mostly
0:41:31showing PlayStation stuff and their stupid car
0:41:34that we'll talk about someday and are on the show
0:41:35because it's been in the show notes forever.
0:41:38They weren't showing TVs.
0:41:40I will put a link in the show notes to a YouTube video
0:41:42from someone who tries to explain why this is.
0:41:44They have new TVs that are coming.
0:41:46The theory of this person is,
0:41:49and probably an informed theory is,
0:41:51they just didn't feel like talking about them at CES
0:41:53because they fancy themselves being in the Apple position.
0:41:57Apple famously does not go to CES, hasn't for decades at this point, because Apple doesn't
0:42:03have to.
0:42:04Apple doesn't need to be at a place where media attention is focused, they just make
0:42:08their own events and tell people to show up and that's all.
0:42:11Sony apparently doesn't feel like they have to show their televisions here because they'll
0:42:15just show them in a couple weeks and then when that happens they'll be the only story.
0:42:20Instead of just being slotted in with 50 other stories about what's going on at CES it'll
0:42:23be "Oh, the new Sony TVs are out now."
0:42:25I think this is the first year Sony has tried that move so we'll see how it works out.
0:42:29The bad news is that I don't get to know what new TVs Sony has but the good news is that
0:42:34they don't make their own panels.
0:42:36They sell QD OLED TVs.
0:42:38They're going to have one of the new QD OLED panels.
0:42:41Panasonic already has TVs announced with the new QD OLED panels and people are testing
0:42:44those and Sony's going to get the same exact panels.
0:42:47It's such a shame that Panasonic doesn't sell TVs in the US anymore because they make such
0:42:51good TVs.
0:42:52I might have bought a Panasonic if they still sold here because their tastes tend to align
0:42:55with mine. But yeah, Sony is just trying to, you know, be its own story at some point in
0:43:05a few weeks rather than announcing at the show, which is kind of weird. And it's also
0:43:09weird that they showed a car, but again, we'll talk about that in a future program.
0:43:12So does this make you regret your semi-recent TV purchase? Is there something that you see
0:43:16here that you think you could feasibly, that you would feasibly purchase if it was available
0:43:21today?
0:43:22It actually makes me glad because in particular Samsung splitting its line
0:43:26Into like the the best stuff is only on the thing with the one connect box with the weird
0:43:31You know
0:43:31Like I don't I don't like that they split the line like that because last year the TV is the best TVs
0:43:37We're just like normal person TVs. No weird breakout box. No weird super thin design, you know
0:43:42Not the one that's sold without a stand, right?
0:43:44They were just regular TVs with regular TV features and this year
0:43:48Samsung splitting the line it would make it hard for me to choose among them and maybe Sony will do the same thing
0:43:53Whereas last year it was easy Sony a95k if you have my set of values of what you want out of TV
0:43:59That was the one to get I'm sure when Sony comes out with new TVs
0:44:03They'll have one that is better than my TV, but not enough for me to want to upgrade like I'll you know
0:44:08Considering how long I get my plasma
0:44:10I'm gonna be riding this a95k probably until something goes terribly wrong with it
0:44:14And then maybe I'll replace it with a micro LED
0:44:17But no I'm interested in the market because display technology is super important and it will affect all of our devices eventually
0:44:23I just feel like Apple is
0:44:25Not that they're lagging behind because the displays on the laptops in particular are phenomenal like those mini LED screens have amazing specs and look
0:44:32Great, and I think are the right choice
0:44:34Especially for a computer screen where I just think OLED
0:44:37You know OLED is not great because you got image retention and in particular QD OLED with its
0:44:42The sub pixels are arranged in a triangle it screws with like text display
0:44:47Even if you don't do some pixel ID aliasing which Apple doesn't it just doesn't quite look right on a computer display
0:44:52It looks a little bit weird. So I
0:44:54Don't know what the answer is. But all this all this television technology will eventually affect all of our devices
0:45:00Already we've got OLED screens on our phones and that's been pretty great. I think I want an OLED screen on my iPad someday
0:45:07will have micro LED screens on all our Apple devices.
0:45:10The TV world is kind of a preview of that
0:45:12in terms of manufacturability pricing and what they can do.
0:45:15So even though I'm not in the market for a TV
0:45:18and none of these TVs particularly tempt me,
0:45:20I do like keeping up on it.
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0:47:08- All right, there's been some new news
0:47:14over the last few days that apparently,
0:47:17Qi 2 is being worked on, and I guess it's just MagSafe?
0:47:22That's what everyone seems to be saying
0:47:24from an article from The Verge.
0:47:26With the blessing of competitors,
0:47:28Apple is about to change the Qi wireless standard itself.
0:47:32It's contributing a new version of Qi that works much like MagSafe, magnets, authentication,
0:47:37and all.
0:47:38It's called Qi 2, and yes, it effectively means that MagSafe is coming to Android for
0:47:41better or for worse.
0:47:42Samsung and Apple are both expected to put Qi 2 certified products on the market, wireless
0:47:45power consortium spokesperson Paul Golden tells The Verge, and he says there's no reason
0:47:50to think future Qi 2 certified chargers wouldn't work with both.
0:47:53There's also no reason to think a future Qi 2 charger wouldn't work seamlessly and identically
0:47:57with both Android and iPhones, he says when I ask.
0:48:01That's because Apple, a WPC "steering member" and a chair of the board of directors, is
0:48:06contributing essentially the same magnetic power profile as MagSafe to the new Qi 2 standard.
0:48:10I also read somewhere in here though that the magnets, apparently the arrangement is
0:48:14ever so slightly different.
0:48:15I don't have a pull quote for you right off the top of my head, but I guess the magnet
0:48:18array is, or arrangement is slightly different on Qi 2, which makes me and The Verge wonder,
0:48:24does that mean it won't be compatible with the iPhone that we have today?
0:48:27Like how is that going to work? Nobody knows, but I think it just might be an
0:48:30improvement, like a 2.0. Like if you look at one of the points that is made in
0:48:34this article is that a kind of unlike, well, maybe it's not unlike, you know,
0:48:37they, they made for iPhone thing where you'd have a lighting connectors and
0:48:40stuff where you had to like do it the right way.
0:48:42You had to sort of get the lighting connectors through Apple or certified
0:48:46battle or whatever, but you could also say, ah, we don't care about that.
0:48:49We can figure it out. Let's just make something that works in the lightning
0:48:51Right, but here we're making a charger. We don't want to pay whatever Apple is charging to use the the official lightning thing
0:48:57With mag safe that has happened even more. It's a ring of magnets cheap case manufacturer
0:49:04Like look, I don't whatever you have to do to like certify that your mag safe compatible and use the like
0:49:09Let's not do any of those just put a ring of magnets and it you can find it. Does it work?
0:49:13It more or less works like the car mount that I have. I don't think that's mag safe certified
0:49:18it was like a $20 car amount.
0:49:20It's a circle with magnets in it
0:49:21that's roughly the size that it has to be.
0:49:24I think if they make changes to the magnet arrangement,
0:49:26it's gonna be like that where,
0:49:28yeah, it is different, but it's close enough
0:49:31and it'll work and your thing will stick to it.
0:49:34And we know from the battery packs
0:49:36and stuff that you buy for phones,
0:49:37some of them attach more strongly than others
0:49:39'cause they use maybe bigger magnets,
0:49:40thicker magnets, stronger magnets.
0:49:43Additional magnets, layers of magnets,
0:49:45it's not the type of thing where
0:49:48like a wire protocol where either it works or it doesn't,
0:49:51you just kinda have to have the magnets
0:49:52in the neighborhood.
0:49:54So I think whatever Qi2 ends up being,
0:49:57I would expect it to work well enough
0:50:00with all of our existing MagSafe stuff.
0:50:02- I mean, it can't be that much worse than Qi1, right?
0:50:04I mean, I think this is good news in the sense
0:50:09that MagSafe really was and is an improvement over Qi.
0:50:15Now, Qi charging has a lot of upsides,
0:50:18but it has a couple of really big annoyances.
0:50:20Number one is that it's super slow,
0:50:22and I guess number one be that it's also super inefficient,
0:50:25which maybe should be a number two.
0:50:27This is why we run a show called Top Four
0:50:29that never has four entries.
0:50:30(both laughing)
0:50:32So anyway, yeah, so it's super slow,
0:50:34it's super inefficient, and we've all had that experience
0:50:38of having a Qi charging mat next to our bed or something
0:50:41and thinking our phone is charging on it overnight,
0:50:44and you wake up and you realize,
0:50:46oh, it wasn't quite aligned right
0:50:48and my phone didn't charge overnight.
0:50:50And MagSafe improves that.
0:50:54It improves it by a decent amount.
0:50:57All of those problems are still there though.
0:51:00It is still slow, MagSafe just makes it less slow.
0:51:04Part of the reason it makes it less slow
0:51:06is that the magnets align it correctly
0:51:08much more of the time and it has that kind
0:51:10of communication mechanism where it can verify.
0:51:12Like I know we've also maybe had,
0:51:15I don't know if you've ever had the experience
0:51:16of placing a metal object on a Chi-Mat accidentally,
0:51:20coming back a little while later
0:51:22and it's maybe a little warmer
0:51:24than you would like for comfort.
0:51:25I have, that's not fun.
0:51:27And MagSafe, I think part of the reason
0:51:30why it doesn't deliver its 15 watts of max power
0:51:34to everything is that there is some kind of
0:51:36like authentication mechanism where it communicates
0:51:38and makes sure that what's on the other end of that thing
0:51:41as a device and not like a Yeti cup.
0:51:43So, I speak from experience. (laughs)
0:51:47- Cheat chargers are not coasters.
0:51:49- No, although they are cup warmers
0:51:51if your cup is a Yeti cup.
0:51:53Not recommended.
0:51:54- Don't put your Yeti cup on your induction stove either.
0:51:56This is all the same thing.
0:51:57- Yes.
0:51:57- Like electricity and magnetism.
0:51:59- Right.
0:52:00Yeah, anyway.
0:52:01So, you know, having MagSafe be incorporated
0:52:05into the Cheat, you know, we already know what this does.
0:52:07The automatic alignment of the magnets
0:52:10does enable more efficient charging,
0:52:13'cause you don't have to worry like,
0:52:14well, we can still send power to this
0:52:16even though it's only 70% in the target zone,
0:52:19we'll just kinda fudge it with induction
0:52:21and we'll lose more to heat
0:52:22and it'll charge more slowly, but oh well.
0:52:24MagSafe takes care of that to a degree.
0:52:26It also, by having the alignment,
0:52:30reduces the error rate of,
0:52:32I think my phone charged overnight,
0:52:34and then it actually didn't.
0:52:35Now, it doesn't actually eliminate that error rate.
0:52:38I know this from using a MagSafe glued to my end table,
0:52:42or double-sided taped to my end table,
0:52:45every night for the last three years.
0:52:48I know that I still occasionally have times
0:52:50where I think I feel it clip on,
0:52:53but then I wake up the next morning and oh,
0:52:54it was actually not all the way on and it didn't charge.
0:52:57But it happens way less often with MagSafe
0:53:00than it did with the flat Qi thing I had before.
0:53:03So MagSafe is better than Qi,
0:53:06and so it does make sense
0:53:08to modify Qi to incorporate magnets
0:53:11in basically the same way.
0:53:13And this is not the only time this has ever happened.
0:53:16USB-C itself was heavily contributed to by Apple
0:53:21because the PC world, we see what they do
0:53:24when they make a port without Apple's input.
0:53:27That's how you get the USB-3 Micro B plug.
0:53:32- Or USB-A, the connector everyone loves to hate.
0:53:36- Externally symmetrical, internally asymmetrical.
0:53:39It's like a cruel joke.
0:53:40- Right. (laughing)
0:53:41So anyway, so this is a good thing.
0:53:44And you're right that it does effectively
0:53:47kind of formalize what the industry
0:53:50was already unofficially doing.
0:53:52There's so many third party things that are like,
0:53:55it's magnetic charging.
0:53:57And you know, they don't say MagSafe.
0:53:59It's magnetic charging compatible with your iPhone,
0:54:01but it'll only be 7.5 watts, whatever, you know.
0:54:04those are all just imitation MagSafe things.
0:54:06So it makes sense to have this be part of the ecosystem.
0:54:09The only thing that I would pour a little bit of water on is
0:54:13this is not, this is still not gonna be better
0:54:17than wired charging in certain ways.
0:54:20We know, first of all, wired charging
0:54:22can still be higher power, it's still more efficient,
0:54:25and it's still, in some ways, safer.
0:54:28It still allows data transfer, which this doesn't really.
0:54:31So wired charging is still gonna exist
0:54:34and still be popular, it's also cheaper.
0:54:36So you know, it's still gonna exist for a while.
0:54:38But this is a good thing to formalize and unify
0:54:43what is a fairly obvious improvement to the Qi standard.
0:54:49And hopefully unify iOS and Android devices
0:54:52into using the same thing and all the benefits that brings.
0:54:56- And look, it happened without government intervention.
0:54:59And I say that both to blame the government
0:55:01and to blame Apple.
0:55:02'Cause see, Apple, if you just get off your butt
0:55:04and do what's good for the industry,
0:55:05you avoid government regulation, I would say,
0:55:07and see government eventually,
0:55:09even pigheaded companies like Apple will see the light
0:55:12and unify it on a standard.
0:55:14And on the USB-C front, like as you said,
0:55:16this doesn't, you know, is this how Apple's gonna comply
0:55:19with the USB-C, they're just gonna do MagSafe ever?
0:55:21They could, but they would have to add substantial
0:55:24data transfer to MagSafe probably,
0:55:27or have some other way to do data transfer wirelessly.
0:55:29It would be a big complication
0:55:31if they went totally portless.
0:55:32I mean, there's been rumors of that for ages.
0:55:34I don't think Chichu factors into it any more so
0:55:38than just to say that Apple is clearly very dedicated
0:55:40to the MagSafe connector and it will continue to exist
0:55:42on phones and maybe even other devices in the future
0:55:45because it's not going anywhere.
0:55:47But yeah, standardizing on it for everybody.
0:55:49It already was standardized.
0:55:52Like USB-C was everywhere except Apple.
0:55:55It's kind of like electric car connectors.
0:55:57It's standardized everywhere except Tesla
0:56:00and kind of Nissan still.
0:56:02But, you know, it's like, so we're so close.
0:56:05And so that's why all these laws
0:56:06are essentially Apple laws,
0:56:07or if there's ever a law about it for chargers in the US,
0:56:09it'll be the Tesla law, right?
0:56:11Because we don't need any law to force standardization.
0:56:13It happened on its own,
0:56:15except for one pretty darn important player,
0:56:17whether that be Apple or Tesla.
0:56:19So at least on the wireless charging front,
0:56:24we didn't have to wait for that.
0:56:25Apparently everyone got their acts together.
0:56:27And it's kind of a shame, like I said,
0:56:29Apple was heavily involved in USB-C.
0:56:31is just they did Lightning first.
0:56:33And I think they should have done Lightning first.
0:56:35We enjoyed the benefits of Lightning for years
0:56:37before the rest of the industry won USBC,
0:56:39but now it's time.
0:56:41- The other thing about Qi2 too is,
0:56:43Qi2 also, is that it presents the possibility,
0:56:48although they're vague on the details,
0:56:51and of course Apple's not saying anything,
0:56:53that maybe in the future, the Apple Watch
0:56:57and other smart watches that have non-flat
0:57:00or smaller contact areas than what we currently use for Qi
0:57:04could possibly be charged by some kind of part
0:57:06of the Qi 2 standard.
0:57:07I really hope that plays out because right now,
0:57:11the ideal case would be if you're traveling or something,
0:57:14you could have basically one type of charger with you.
0:57:18Again, you see the USB-C versus lighting debate
0:57:20for years, right?
0:57:21Ideally, you have one type of charger
0:57:23and you can use as many devices with it as possible.
0:57:25Smart watches throw a whole wrench in that
0:57:28because they don't have any ports
0:57:29and they're so small, whether it's an Apple Watch
0:57:33or the other ones, they all have these,
0:57:35usually they have custom induction-based charger techniques
0:57:38or something or maybe little pins on the side
0:57:40that you have like little flat custom plug
0:57:43that mag saves onto them or whatever.
0:57:45So there's all these different charging techniques
0:57:47for these super small devices that are too small
0:57:49to have Qi or even oftentimes USB.
0:57:53So if Qi 2 has good provisions in it
0:57:56to allow smaller devices to maybe unify in something,
0:58:01whether it's an Apple Watch or a Fitbit
0:58:04or Garmin things or whatever else,
0:58:06that would be fantastic.
0:58:08I really, really hope that's part of it
0:58:11and I really hope Apple's on board with that
0:58:13and moves in that direction,
0:58:15but I know better than to get my hopes up too far on that.
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0:59:34Thank you so much to Collide for sponsoring our show.
0:59:37- All right, we got email a few days back,
0:59:43maybe a week or two back, I forget exactly when this was,
0:59:46Kevin Chen, who has spent some time looking at how rewind.ai works. To remind you, rewind.ai
0:59:54is John's favorite thing. LIFESTREAM! And it's the thing that will record everything that happens on
1:00:01your Mac, and it will let you search for it, and so on and so forth. So Kevin spent some time
1:00:05going through and figuring out how it works. Now, I can't confirm or deny anything that Kevin said,
1:00:10but it rings true to me based on what I know about these sorts of things. It sounds like this is
1:00:15is accurate. So we're not going to read Kevin's post. It is worth reading for the record,
1:00:20but I'm just going to kind of quickly hit the highlights. What ends up happening is
1:00:25Rewind uses accessibility APIs to identify the front-most window, and it stores the timestamps
1:00:31of I guess when the window changes in a SQLite database in the user's library folder. I wonder
1:00:36if they're using Blackbird. You never know. It takes a screenshot of the screen that contains
1:00:41the front-most window, and if there are multiple screens, only the currently focused screen
1:00:45will be captured.
1:00:46A new screenshot is created every two seconds.
1:00:50And then it uses Screen Capture Kit, which we'll put a link in
1:00:53the show notes, to hide disallowed windows, including
1:00:57private browser windows and a user-defined exclusion list.
1:01:00Then it will OCR the screenshot on device using
1:01:04Apple's Vision Framework, the same pipeline that powers live
1:01:07text, and masquerade as well.
1:01:09And then it'll store the inference results to a SQLite
1:01:12database.
1:01:13it then periodically compresses the screenshot sequence into an h.264 video with what, gentlemen?
1:01:19They have incredibly, well, I'm not gonna say incredibly inefficient, yeah, FFmpeg,
1:01:23and I was surprised to see that because Apple has tons of libraries to compress video. Maybe they
1:01:30don't have ones that take images as input, but there was a question I think in the blog post
1:01:34from some people, "Does FFmpeg use the h.264 hardware in all of Apple's computers?"
1:01:41- I just thought it did.
1:01:42I'm not certain about that, but I thought it did.
1:01:44- I think it probably does too,
1:01:46or at the very least it has an option
1:01:47that you don't remember to do that.
1:01:49- There are various modules and options,
1:01:51I mean, 'cause FFmpeg is not just one set of things,
1:01:54it's like there's a whole bunch of different optional things
1:01:55that can be bundled into it or whatever else,
1:01:57and some of those things do use the hardware acceleration.
1:02:00- Yeah, the more, I mean, this is, you know,
1:02:03it's not an MVP, but this is the first version of a product,
1:02:06and using, I mean, I don't know how else you would do it,
1:02:10It just seems like they're using screen capture kit
1:02:12and Apple's vision framework.
1:02:13I would have expected to see them using
1:02:15whatever the appropriate, was it AV foundation,
1:02:17whatever the appropriate Apple library is
1:02:19to do this work rather than FFmpeg.
1:02:21But either way, it's probably pretty efficient.
1:02:25- And then additionally, if the user joins a Zoom call
1:02:28and enables transcription through rewind,
1:02:30it will transcribe the audio on device
1:02:32using the OpenAI Whisper model.
1:02:35Then it stores the transcripts and speaker information
1:02:37into a SQLite database.
1:02:38And so then Kevin did some benchmarks and whatnot.
1:02:41So CPU usage when recording on his 14-inch MacBook Pro
1:02:45with an M1 Pro processor,
1:02:47Rewind uses about 20% of the CPU continuously.
1:02:52- Not good. - And then Rewind Helper,
1:02:55which is I think the thing that does the transcoding,
1:02:58or manages the transcoding and whatnot,
1:02:59spikes over 200% CPU every time the temporary PNG images
1:03:03are compressed into an H.264 video.
1:03:06That's really not good.
1:03:07- Now wait, hold on, do we know whether
1:03:09that's efficiency cores or the high power cores?
1:03:12- Oh, that's an interesting question
1:03:13and I don't think we know.
1:03:15- That's the problem with CPU percentages
1:03:16'cause remember 100% CPU is not all of your CPU,
1:03:20it's all of one core according to the way
1:03:22that Apple's activity monitor does stuff.
1:03:23So 20% sounds like a lot, but on a laptop,
1:03:27like you don't, you really, when it's idle,
1:03:29you want it to be idle.
1:03:30And if it's using 20% of even just one core continuously,
1:03:33that's not great for battery life.
1:03:35But again, you know, what are you getting for it?
1:03:37you're getting live streams, right?
1:03:38So I think it is being as efficient as it can be,
1:03:41modulo a few things, like later in the article,
1:03:45Kevin goes into some suggestions
1:03:47for how this could be improved,
1:03:48like not writing out pings,
1:03:50but instead of going straight to the H.264,
1:03:52or I would say like if they're shelling out the FFmpeg
1:03:55versus statically linking with the library,
1:03:57that would be something to look into,
1:03:58but again, it's version one.
1:04:00- I would say too, though, I mean, just for CPU load-wise,
1:04:02like when you're running an M1 or M2-based Mac,
1:04:07If you run something like iStat Menus,
1:04:09like Casey and I and definitely not John do,
1:04:12you will see your efficiency cores are running
1:04:16at what on Intel machines would be
1:04:19kind of an alarmingly high percentage.
1:04:22Mine right now, the efficiency cores are hovering around,
1:04:25looks like about 75% use, and that's kind of constant.
1:04:28And one of those things is Zoom, but oh well.
1:04:30The other thing is just Windows Server though,
1:04:32which again, Zoom.
1:04:34But it's fairly common for me in fairly idle use
1:04:38to look up at my menu and see my two efficiency cores
1:04:42being used very heavily by kind of just regular
1:04:45system activity or background things like photo indexing
1:04:48and everything.
1:04:48And from what I understand, and I think this matches
1:04:50my anecdotal experience so far, from what I understand,
1:04:53the kind of real noticeable battery life cost
1:04:58to one of the efficiency cores being maxed out
1:05:01is basically nothing.
1:05:03It's very different from the high power cores.
1:05:05If you're maxing out your high power cores,
1:05:06that's a different scenario.
1:05:07But the efficiency cores with a battery
1:05:11the size of a modern laptop battery,
1:05:12I get the impression that you're basically
1:05:15using those for free.
1:05:16- Interesting.
1:05:17Continuing on with the rewind stuff from Kevin Chen,
1:05:20the storage usage.
1:05:22So the screen recordings are chunks
1:05:25of about 180 megs an hour.
1:05:27The metadata OCR results in call transcripts,
1:05:29which are, again, the SQLite database
1:05:31are about 26 megs an hour, console logs about 4 megs an hour. With regard to security, Rewind
1:05:37currently doesn't encrypt data at rest. Any app with full disk access and any attacker
1:05:42who encounters an unlocked computer has the ability to read recordings from all time,
1:05:46including soft deleted clips. That's also not stupendous. And then other notable things,
1:05:51resources/pavacons. There's a directory of 912 pavacons for popular websites stored as
1:05:59There's PNG images, examples include Amazon,
1:06:01Dropbox, YouTube, et cetera.
1:06:03These are used in the timeline view
1:06:04when the front most app is a web browser
1:06:06instead of showing the browser's app icon,
1:06:08which is kind of cool, though I don't know--
1:06:10- That's such a 1.0 thing, it's like,
1:06:12we just need to ship this, don't worry about it.
1:06:14What do we do about the icons for the things?
1:06:16- Just, we'll just ship a thousand of them.
1:06:18Like, I mean, obviously you would think,
1:06:20why don't you just go to the web and get them?
1:06:21Oh, then you gotta make a network request
1:06:23and it's all complicated.
1:06:24They love that they just, just ship them all.
1:06:26Like, just, our app bundle will be bigger,
1:06:28Marker would never do this.
1:06:29We're just going to ship 912 of what we think are the most popular websites, PNG images
1:06:35of all their, I would say, favicons.
1:06:38I just thought that was funny.
1:06:40So it's implemented in a pretty straightforward way, in an explicable way, with a lot of 1.0
1:06:46stuff.
1:06:47The data not being encrypted at rest is not great, because it's bad enough when someone
1:06:50gets access to your computer, but that is a treasure trove.
1:06:53It's already OCR text, and you've got all the screen images.
1:06:58This is the problem of like, well, if it never leaves my device and it's not using cloud
1:07:01transcription and so on and so forth, everything's done locally, it's nice and secure.
1:07:04It's like, yeah, but now you've just made, I don't know, like the equivalent of like
1:07:08collecting evidence against yourself and putting it in a little box and wrapping it up with
1:07:11a bow.
1:07:12Not that you're doing any bad things, but in terms of privacy, you probably don't want
1:07:15anyone getting at that because they could just sort of go through that and see what
1:07:18you've done for the past day, two days, week, month, year.
1:07:23It's up to you to kind of be studious about like, well, I want to exclude private windows,
1:07:27show it when I go to my bank website,
1:07:28like whatever you want to do,
1:07:29but with great power comes great responsibility.
1:07:32But anyway, it's implemented in what I think
1:07:34is a fairly straightforward way,
1:07:35and I thought this was a really interesting examination
1:07:38of how it works and what it takes.
1:07:40And your point, Marco, about the efficiency course
1:07:42is important because that's kind of what they're there for.
1:07:44It's not like when you write a program,
1:07:45you can, well, you can specifically target things,
1:07:47but there's, scheduling on macOS is really weird,
1:07:50but there are, suffice to say,
1:07:51there are APIs when you run code in a Mac application
1:07:55that you can tell the OS and the threading job service
1:08:00that you're using through whatever API you're using,
1:08:02what priority you want.
1:08:03And if you say something like low background,
1:08:06like all different words for the priorities,
1:08:07you'll end up running on the efficiency cores
1:08:09pretty much exclusively.
1:08:11There's also some other details about core affinity
1:08:13of whether your job stays in the same core,
1:08:15bounces around and how that infects cache or whatever.
1:08:18But I think everything this is doing
1:08:19is sort of below the level of notice
1:08:22of a modern M class processor, because it's not,
1:08:26you know, the stuff that it's doing that's complicated,
1:08:28like the text kit thing, the vision framework
1:08:31of parsing text, that's gotta be optimized to hell and back.
1:08:34Like the Apple did that work for you already.
1:08:36That's already efficient, it's already gonna be fast.
1:08:38You don't need the results in real time, right?
1:08:40So it can be, it's asynchronous in the background
1:08:43and you're not in a big hurry.
1:08:44So I bet that does pretty well.
1:08:46Screen capture kit, again, Apple optimized that
1:08:48to be able to capture your screen without destroying
1:08:50your Mac and making it slow and unresponsive.
1:08:52So that's great.
1:08:53F of MPEG, I feel like is a weak point here
1:08:55because as optimized as it may be,
1:08:57I have to think that any Apple framework
1:08:58would be even more optimized.
1:09:00Even if the F of MPEG thing is just calling
1:09:02into the Apple framework, it still seems like.
1:09:03- I believe that is exactly what it's doing.
1:09:06If you configure it properly, like Marco was saying,
1:09:08and it's video toolbox is the,
1:09:10I don't know why it's called video toolbox.
1:09:11Maybe that's an Apple thing.
1:09:12Maybe it's an F of MPEG thing, but that's what they're,
1:09:15that's what F of MPEG calls the like front end Apple APIs.
1:09:18And I actually did, just for grins and giggles,
1:09:20look through the video toolbox code a year or two back,
1:09:24and it looks like, if memory serves,
1:09:26and again, this is a year or two ago,
1:09:27I'm pretty sure it's just calling into AV Foundation.
1:09:29I don't think it's doing anything you wouldn't expect.
1:09:31- Yeah, I understand the marshaling of the jobs,
1:09:36however it's dealing with threading
1:09:39or background tasks or whatever,
1:09:41in an Apple framework, you could give it a batch of work
1:09:44and let it do that in a way that is most efficient
1:09:46on your M whatever processor,
1:09:47whereas at FFmpeg you're kind of doing that manually,
1:09:49deciding how many jobs you want to run,
1:09:52how many cores you want them to use,
1:09:53even if each individual one is just using
1:09:55AV Foundation behind the scenes.
1:09:57Same thing with like, for the OpenAI thing,
1:09:59I don't know if Apple has a solution to that,
1:10:01of the transcribing speech into text.
1:10:05I think there's an Apple solution,
1:10:06but OpenAI is a popular open source one.
1:10:10I think when someone was digging into this,
1:10:11they found the OpenAI, maybe it was Kevin,
1:10:13found the OpenAI model file in the executable one,
1:10:16like the speech model file there.
1:10:18I'm not sure if they're using the OpenAI library, which
1:10:22I think is written in C++ to do it.
1:10:24But as the advertising material said,
1:10:27this is actually a good demonstration
1:10:28of leveraging Apple's platform APIs to build an application
1:10:32that you otherwise would not be able to build without Apple's
1:10:35help.
1:10:36These libraries they're using make the application.
1:10:39If you had to write all these libraries yourself from scratch,
1:10:42it would take you many more years and many more millions
1:10:45of dollars.
1:10:45But because Apple offers these frameworks,
1:10:48a company can make this product in way less time
1:10:52with far fewer people, and I think that's pretty cool.
1:10:54- Video toolbox is apparently an Apple thing,
1:10:56real-time follow-up, and we'll put a link to it
1:10:58in the show.
1:10:59- People will be familiar with it because you see it
1:11:00in the menu in Handbrake, and you know it as the thing
1:11:02that makes my encode go faster.
1:11:04(laughing)
1:11:05- Gosh, I haven't used Handbrake in forever,
1:11:07but you are not wrong.
1:11:08All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
1:11:09We got a really fascinating one from Stefan Jacobs
1:11:13about a month ago, I'd say. It's been a while. But we were trying to find some room to fit
1:11:17it in because this might be the only ask ATP we do for the day. So Stefan writes, "During
1:11:22the recent discussion about Twitter, you briefly discussed the analogy of leaving Apple platforms
1:11:26if someone at Apple made decisions of a similar nature to those being made at Twitter. The
1:11:32options are obviously not great. Neither Windows nor any of the various Linux distros offer
1:11:36anywhere near the attention to detail and polish that Apple has put into its platforms
1:11:39over the years. So here's my question. If someone were to build a third alternative
1:11:44mainstream OS that could host a hypothetical wave of Apple refugees, what are the key things
1:11:49they would need to get right? PS, optional clarifying parameters if needed. And since
1:11:54I'm talking to John Syracuse, I'm sure they are. Let's assume that Apple has a less stark
1:11:58advantage in processor hardware by the time this happens. And to begin with, the OS would
1:12:02probably need to be able to run on third-party hardware, although tight integration, a la
1:12:07would presumably be possible over time.
1:12:10John, tell me about System 76, what's the context here?
1:12:14- I don't even know what that is,
1:12:14it's the click on the link.
1:12:16- Oh, right, good. - I've seen it before.
1:12:18- Oh, it's a Linux laptop vendor, I see, okay.
1:12:21So it's Linux laptops that are supposed to be like MacBooks.
1:12:24Got it.
1:12:25- Just like every other laptop.
1:12:26- Yeah, sure.
1:12:27All right, so here's my question, I'm repeating.
1:12:30Stefan writes, so here's my question.
1:12:31If someone were to build a third alternative mainstream OS
1:12:34that could host a hypothetical wave of Apple refugees,
1:12:37What are the key things they would need to get right?
1:12:39Does anyone, would anyone like to start?
1:12:42- One thing I want to say right off the bat about this
1:12:43is because Twitter is the context of the thing.
1:12:47A key factor in this hypothetical is that
1:12:50if Apple ever went the way of Twitter,
1:12:52and there are many things preventing that,
1:12:53not the least of which is that it is not a private company
1:12:56owned or controlled by a single person,
1:12:57if Apple did go in that direction,
1:13:01the self-destruction, the implosion of Apple
1:13:05makes it possible for there to be an alternative.
1:13:09Like, I think Mastodon, for example,
1:13:12getting so much more activity and becoming more popular
1:13:16happens because Twitter is self-destructing, right?
1:13:18And so if you look at this question,
1:13:20every time we talk about it, it's like, yeah,
1:13:21but it's basically impossible to make a competing
1:13:26phone platform, desktop operating system,
1:13:28tablet, whatever you want to say.
1:13:29It's basically impossible, right?
1:13:31But if Apple self-destructed, that's a power vacuum.
1:13:34something would fill that vacuum.
1:13:36So I don't think it's entirely ridiculous to think
1:13:39if Apple did implode and just sort of, you know,
1:13:42if Apple pulled Twitter, let's say,
1:13:44it would make an opportunity for someone to fill that void.
1:13:48And I think that someone,
1:13:51if someone did succeed to fill that void,
1:13:53they would probably be vaguely Apple-ish,
1:13:55kind of like Mastodon is vaguely Twitter-ish,
1:13:58but also learning from the mistakes of Twitter.
1:14:00But, you know, kind of trying to appeal in the same way
1:14:04to sort of a small group of early adopters
1:14:06like Mastodon did or like Apple did, right?
1:14:08So, usually I complain that people's hypothetical
1:14:11is not realistic, I have to say that the implosion
1:14:14of Apple itself makes this somewhat more realistic.
1:14:18- All right, so what's important?
1:14:20- I mean, I think number one would be,
1:14:22we know there are some similar challenges
1:14:26as with social networks of chicken and egg problems
1:14:29or getting network effects going.
1:14:31And in an operating system, one of the biggest challenges
1:14:33is software compatibility, like what's gonna run on this?
1:14:36And so I think the best way to bootstrap this
1:14:40would either be to base a new operating system
1:14:43on Linux or on Android.
1:14:46And I don't love either of those options
1:14:48for lots of reasons, but what we see
1:14:51with the Mastodon explosion, as John was saying
1:14:55just in the wake of the Twitter implosion,
1:14:58part of the reason why Mastodon is so much more appealing
1:15:01to many of us nerds who care about these kind
1:15:04of distinctions, compared to something like Hive
1:15:08or Post or whatever, is, as I was saying a few episodes ago,
1:15:11like, now that we've been burned by the big closed
1:15:15ecosystem of Twitter, the idea of something being open
1:15:20and protocol based and not being in the hands
1:15:23of just one big company, it's like, okay, well,
1:15:26now we learn that lesson that one centralized big company
1:15:29is bad, so we're gonna now apply that lesson
1:15:31and not let that same mistake happen again.
1:15:34Well, we have that same problem with Apple,
1:15:37they've just been a good enough steward
1:15:39most of the time that we haven't jumped ship.
1:15:42But if Apple did go bad and cause us all
1:15:45to jump ship in some way, I would want to then
1:15:49make sure that same mistake of that big centralization
1:15:52couldn't happen again, and I would rather
1:15:55set up shop on Linux than on Windows.
1:15:57Also, I mean, it helps also,
1:15:59I might have said Windows a couple years ago,
1:16:02but in that intervening time,
1:16:04I've had more experience with Windows.
1:16:06- You've used Windows?
1:16:07- Well, you should have had as more experience with Linux
1:16:09and that might change your mind.
1:16:10- Fair enough, but Linux is, as I said many years ago,
1:16:15it's almost like going to live in the woods,
1:16:17but I think I'd rather go start my own civilization
1:16:19in the woods based on the foundation of Linux
1:16:21than to live in the hellhole that is Windows
1:16:24any more than I have to.
1:16:25And over the years, whenever we'd insult Windows
1:16:28on this show, we'd hear from people who are like,
1:16:30you know it's better now, you should try it.
1:16:31They've really made it a lot better now.
1:16:33And I was starting to believe these people.
1:16:36But now I've actually used it firsthand,
1:16:38modern versions on modern hardware.
1:16:39And I can say without a doubt, it's not that much better.
1:16:42It is a little bit better, it's not that much better.
1:16:44And it is not something I want to use still.
1:16:48So whatever the new OS would be
1:16:53that I would want to invest my time and resources in
1:16:56would hopefully be a Linux based thing.
1:17:00Android would be a little bit better
1:17:03in the sense that Android would provide
1:17:05that app compatibility, but it's not,
1:17:09Android would provide crappy app compatibility.
1:17:11And not to say that Android apps are crappy, they are,
1:17:13but for this point, it's more about,
1:17:16it's like the cross platform nature of Android apps,
1:17:20like running on a general PC operating system,
1:17:23it makes it a pretty crappy experience.
1:17:25Like if anyone's ever used,
1:17:27there are already ways to run Android apps
1:17:29on PC operating systems, and they're terrible.
1:17:32They're very clunky.
1:17:34I mean, heck, look at Catalyst on Mac OS.
1:17:35It isn't that much better.
1:17:37It's not a great experience.
1:17:38So Linux, I think, would be the best
1:17:43long-term place to invest.
1:17:45And so I think what a third-party alternative OS
1:17:50would have to be, I think, would just be a really good
1:17:54Linux distribution that invests heavily in the desktop
1:17:58and laptop user experience, which we've seen smaller
1:18:01efforts of this over time with Linux.
1:18:04None of them have ever really gone anywhere,
1:18:06but I think that's what it would have to be.
1:18:08And if there really was a big Apple implosion
1:18:11and there were all these talented, opinionated people
1:18:14who wanted somewhere to go, that I think would be
1:18:16way more likely to succeed than either Windows
1:18:20appealing to this crowd, which it never will,
1:18:23because, I mean, God, just try it, trust me.
1:18:26So either that, that's not gonna happen,
1:18:28or a whole new OS starting from scratch
1:18:31that wouldn't be able to run any of the software
1:18:34from any of the other OSes we have now,
1:18:36I think that's a no-go, because software compatibility
1:18:39is just too important.
1:18:40And the fact is, Linux actually has pretty decent
1:18:44software compatibility with a lot of stuff
1:18:46that a lot of people wanna use these days.
1:18:48It's not amazing, it's not as much as Windows
1:18:51or Mac or Android, but it's not as bad as you would think
1:18:55if you haven't tried it recently.
1:18:56So that's where I would go with it,
1:18:59is like start with Linux and just make
1:19:01a really good distribution that has a really
1:19:04significantly improved experience around key areas
1:19:07for desktop and laptop use.
1:19:08- See, but I think you're majoring
1:19:10on the implementation details,
1:19:11and I don't think that's the spirit
1:19:12of what Stefan was asking.
1:19:13I think what Stefan was asking is,
1:19:15what would you look for in an operating system that would make it feel like home or like somewhere
1:19:22you could, you know, pitch your tent, so to speak. And so when I read this question, what I was
1:19:27thinking of is like, what would appeal to me? What are some of the core things about macOS that I
1:19:33wouldn't want to give up? So some of that is, you know, kind of hand-wavy things like, well,
1:19:38attention to detail, which it's hard to get specific about that unless you're talking about
1:19:42like something you know at a micro level but in general like a good attention to detail a good
1:19:47visual design but then i started thinking okay well what about one of the things that i love
1:19:52about mac os that i never really experienced on windows and maybe maybe that's because i never
1:19:58took the time to learn but mac os has incredibly robust like keyboard shortcuts and keyboard
1:20:03support throughout the entire operating system and every app within it and you can do so much
1:20:08with the keyboard particularly when you're using the keyboard in combination with a mouse and so
1:20:12I think robust keyboard shortcuts and keyboard support is also important to me.
1:20:15I wonder if now I'm starting to get into the implementation details, kind of like you were,
1:20:20Marco, but I think a good developer story is powerful. I would argue that part of the reason
1:20:25that Macs got so darn popular in the early to mid-aughts was because the developer story
1:20:31was so good. It was a Linux computer, not too dissimilar than a lot of the web servers that
1:20:38that we were all writing code for,
1:20:39but it was a Linux computer right there on your desk,
1:20:42and you didn't have to do a VM or anything,
1:20:43it was right there.
1:20:44- What are you talking about, it was a Linux computer?
1:20:46- Well, okay, Unix, sorry, sorry, excuse me.
1:20:49- That just gave you a lot of feedback.
1:20:50You said it twice, and it wasn't just a SPECO,
1:20:53it was not a Linux computer.
1:20:54- You're right, you're right.
1:20:56I'm already getting blown up in the chat room, too.
1:20:58But anyways, so, no, you're right,
1:21:00it was a Unix computer, it's a Unix system, I know this.
1:21:02It's a Unix computer right there on your desk.
1:21:03- Wait, is BSD, like, there's gonna be somebody
1:21:06who writes in and is like, actually--
1:21:08- No, don't you remember, this was before your time.
1:21:10Apple got real, official, all-caps Unix certification
1:21:15for Mac OS X.
1:21:16- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:21:17- There's a great story you mentioned, Ed,
1:21:19about the person who led that effort.
1:21:21I'll see if I can find it for now.
1:21:22- Oh, I remember that.
1:21:23That was a good story.
1:21:24I don't know if I'll be able to find it,
1:21:25but that was a very good story.
1:21:27But anyway, but to finish kind of the thoughts I had,
1:21:30you know, having a good developer story,
1:21:32I think, is important, although maybe I'm into,
1:21:36I'm too much indexing on what's important to me and not what's generically important.
1:21:41But speaking of generically important, I think what's pretty great about Mac OS in a way
1:21:46that, say, Swift wants to be but kind of isn't, is that Mac OS does do a pretty good job with
1:21:54progressive disclosure.
1:21:55So to do basic stuff is fairly straightforward.
1:21:59To do intermediate level stuff is kind of hard, but not terribly hard.
1:22:05to do hard stuff is hard, but it's possible.
1:22:08And that's, I think, a really important thing
1:22:11that I would want to see in whatever this new operating
1:22:13system I would potentially be using.
1:22:16So I don't know if you guys have anything along those lines,
1:22:18or if you'd rather go back into the nerdy stuff.
1:22:20That's fine, too.
1:22:21But that was the sort of thing that I
1:22:23was thinking about when I was reading Stefan's question.
1:22:25I think they're kind of connected.
1:22:27When Margaret was talking about bootstrapping
1:22:29and how you've got the problem of, well, for a platform,
1:22:32you need people to make apps and everything,
1:22:33thought where you were going in case you kind of glanced off this as well is the
1:22:39developer story not in terms of what does the platform offer for developers
1:22:43but in terms of what developers are drawn to this platform like the only
1:22:47reason the Mac even still exists is because Apple bought next and part of
1:22:53that was the developers who had been developing for next an obscure platform
1:22:57that nobody cared about that sold computers to colleges right for ten
1:23:01$10,000 each, was because those developers,
1:23:05they came with the platform, because like,
1:23:07where the hell else are they gonna go?
1:23:08You gonna write objectoracies for somebody else, right?
1:23:10They came with the platform, and those are the ones
1:23:12that made the great Mac apps that defined the Mac
1:23:16for the new generation.
1:23:18There was also the classic Mac OS apps that were great.
1:23:21I mean, some of them are still around,
1:23:22and then we bring like Microsoft Office
1:23:24and Photoshop for sure, but sort of the renaissance
1:23:27of the Mac in the early days of Mac OS X
1:23:29was because Apple had essentially purchased a developer community filled with really good,
1:23:36interesting developers that share values that we have.
1:23:39So for a platform that's going to appeal to us, I think it would have to come with or
1:23:45be attractive to the kinds of developers who make the apps that appeal to us.
1:23:51So we got the Next and the AppKit Objective-C developers before.
1:23:56If it was some other platform, it would have to be like, well, what is the platform that
1:24:00those type of developers, either literally those people, because some of those people
1:24:04have been moved from platform to platform again because they're not writing next apps
1:24:06anymore, right?
1:24:08Or people like that, whatever the current equivalent of that is.
1:24:10If they're attracted to the platform and they want to make apps for it, we would be attracted
1:24:15there as users and in some respects as developers because those are the type of people...
1:24:20And the apps don't come from nowhere.
1:24:21It's not like, oh, you just have a platform and it should have good apps.
1:24:24Where do they come from?
1:24:25make them. The kind of people who made classic Mac apps when no one had heard of the Mac
1:24:31and they were really expensive. The kind of people who were making NeXT apps when nobody
1:24:34heard about NeXT. The things that appealed about NeXT and the Mac, and it's not just
1:24:38that Steve Jobs involved making both of them, those qualities, even though they were so
1:24:43very different, NeXT, BSD Unix-based system for schools, no color, grayscale screens initially,
1:24:50Objective-C, weird programming language, the user interface didn't really look anything
1:24:55like the Mac, but the sort of the things that appealed to AppKit developers are the same
1:25:00type of things that appealed to Mac developers and it was kind of a natural marriage of those
1:25:05things for the current Mac platform.
1:25:07So I think any platform that I would go to after the Mac, I would basically be following
1:25:13that muse.
1:25:15Where are those people going?
1:25:16Where are people like that?
1:25:17Where do they want to be developing stuff?
1:25:20Because that's where I'm going to live is they're going to make that a nice place for
1:25:22me to live.
1:25:23In terms of the Twitter Mastodon, like, "Don't go to a place owned and controlled by one
1:25:27company blah blah blah," don't think we have a viable model for that for computing platforms
1:25:34that involve hardware.
1:25:35Obviously there's the web, the platform no one owns, and I think the web is awesome.
1:25:39I spent my entire career programming for the web.
1:25:41I think it's great.
1:25:42But the web relies on the existence of devices that you use to view the web, whether that's
1:25:48your phone, your laptop, whatever, your television.
1:25:53Those hardware devices are made by companies
1:25:56that probably also have some kind of platform thing
1:25:58going on there.
1:26:00The web does not provide a solution to that.
1:26:02And talking about the qualities of the platform I would like,
1:26:05one of the things that is always attracting me to Apple
1:26:06is the marriage of hardware and software.
1:26:09The same company controls both of those things enough
1:26:13to make them marry together to make a single device
1:26:15that is pleasing.
1:26:16So even if we're just talking about like,
1:26:18oh, let's just say it's the web, the platform no one owns.
1:26:21Even, you're just gonna have
1:26:23a Chromebook equivalent type of thing.
1:26:24All it does is browse the web.
1:26:25That solves the platform problem.
1:26:26You don't need to have an API.
1:26:27It's all web apps, whatever.
1:26:29Someone still needs to make that hardware.
1:26:31Someone still needs to deal with power management
1:26:33and little, the neural engine and live text on the web.
1:26:36Like everything that Apple does now,
1:26:38you need some company to do that.
1:26:40And that company is going to be one single private company.
1:26:43I don't think there is a model for
1:26:46a federation of small, equally competitive companies
1:26:50working on an open platform.
1:26:51Someone's gotta own and control it enough
1:26:53to be able to make hardware that appeals to me.
1:26:56So it would have to be a single company, right?
1:27:00And they could build on an open source.
1:27:02You know, Mac OS X is built on BSD, you know,
1:27:05which, and Darwin open source,
1:27:06like this open source stuff underneath all this, right?
1:27:09We're all standing on the shoulders
1:27:10of all the giants that came before.
1:27:12But in the end, the Mac operating system,
1:27:14iOS, iPadOS, those are proprietary operating systems made and controlled by a single company
1:27:19that marries them directly to hardware that it also controls and with chips that it designs
1:27:24and all the way up the stack.
1:27:25So that is a quality of the thing that I would go to that I think it has to exist.
1:27:30Microsoft is out, not because I dislike Microsoft or think everything is bad, but they just
1:27:34have so much legacy burden, they will never get out from under that unless they literally
1:27:38burn to the ground, right?
1:27:39So they are held back by their legacy, which is also something that makes them billions
1:27:42of dollars, right?
1:27:44In some respects, that's true of Apple as well, right?
1:27:46- I don't think Microsoft would ever make something great.
1:27:49They don't have it in them.
1:27:50They don't have the right priorities.
1:27:52- Xbox is close.
1:27:53- No, I mean operating system-wise.
1:27:55- Yeah, well, Xbox has an operating system.
1:27:57(laughing)
1:27:59It does, but it's, it's debatable, right?
1:28:03There's been some great things out,
1:28:04but everything in Microsoft is held back.
1:28:07The strategy tax at Microsoft is off the charts,
1:28:09even under new leadership.
1:28:10And nowadays, Microsoft is like,
1:28:12"Oh, it's just the best place to run Linux."
1:28:14Because the Windows operating system has a Linux subsystem.
1:28:17I don't count Microsoft out and they're doing much better,
1:28:20but the legacy, the thing that makes them money,
1:28:22the thing that runs that company,
1:28:24will always necessarily make that operating system
1:28:27not appeal to me because they can't just say,
1:28:29"We don't care about our existing customers, new thing."
1:28:32Even Apple couldn't do it.
1:28:33Even Apple had to do Carbon.
1:28:35It's just that Apple was starting from a place
1:28:36I like better, so that's why I'm counting on Microsoft.
1:28:38Google is good at the web, Google is not particularly great.
1:28:44They make good phones, like the Pixel phones, they do a pretty good job there.
1:28:49Chromebooks is not a great laptop as far as I'm concerned.
1:28:53I like the idea, the implementation is not great.
1:28:56So I don't think this is an existing company.
1:28:58I think it would have to be a new company filling that power vacuum, attracting whatever
1:29:04the modern equivalent of the Mac or Next developer community, or maybe like the BOS development
1:29:10community is kind of similar, although in hindsight the Next developer community had
1:29:15more forward thinking technical ideas, right?
1:29:18Doing everything in C++ was cool and fast in the 90s, whatever the hell B was, but boy
1:29:24am I glad they were not all living on a platform that was built on a foundation of C++ at this
1:29:28point.
1:29:29Objective C was in hindsight a way better choice.
1:29:33And then Swift hopefully even better going forward, right?
1:29:35So I think the pieces are there for someone to pick up those pieces and build an operating
1:29:39system that I would like and I think that's how it would have to be.
1:29:42It would have to be marriage hardware and software, the kinds of developers that made
1:29:46the Mac what it is and all the errors of the Mac being attracted to that platform, only
1:29:51controlled by a single company with leadership that has taste.
1:29:54That's the final thing I would throw in there.
1:29:55Like when we say has taste, we mean has the same taste as us.
1:29:59That's why we like Apple things.
1:30:00It's like we like all the things we like.
1:30:02There is a particular, that's why the developers
1:30:04are drawn to there.
1:30:05Like why were developers interested in writing
1:30:07Mac software?
1:30:08A lot of them wanted to write it because the screen
1:30:10looked really nice and you had proportional fonts
1:30:12and a bitmap display with tiny little pixels.
1:30:14Who cares how big the pixels are?
1:30:16I cared.
1:30:16I cared how big the pixels were.
1:30:17I didn't even know how to program.
1:30:20But even other Apple platforms, like look,
1:30:22the Apple 2GS has a mouse and like,
1:30:23the pixels are the size of boulders.
1:30:25Oh, but it's got color.
1:30:27Have you seen the size of the pixels?
1:30:29I, I've cared so much about that
1:30:32and I couldn't understand why everybody else
1:30:34would look at like a CGA screen and they'd be so excited
1:30:36'cause theirs had color and mine didn't.
1:30:38I was like, I'll look at Dark Castle all day long
1:30:41before I look at your CGI game,
1:30:43even though your game is quote unquote in color.
1:30:45Are you kidding?
1:30:46That's the type of values and quote unquote taste
1:30:50that I'm bringing with me and I'm going to go
1:30:53where those developers with that same taste go.
1:30:56- That's a pretty good answer.
1:30:58Marco, any final thoughts?
1:30:59No, he's frustratingly correct as usual.
1:31:02Oh, a story the last 10 years, am I right?
1:31:06All right, let's see how many more we can squeeze in real quick.
1:31:09Andy Clark writes, "There seems to have been a lot more talk about RSS recently,
1:31:13probably given Twitter's troubles.
1:31:14Do you use RSS, and which reader apps do you use for iOS and/or MacOS?"
1:31:21For me, I stopped using RSS a few years ago, which has kind of faded out of my life.
1:31:27And I was using Twitter both in terms of what are people talking about and a list I specifically
1:31:31had for news.
1:31:32And I was using Twitter for that.
1:31:34Now I am feeling a little bit of a void in that department.
1:31:37So on my to-do list of something I want to explore is rebuilding an RSS list and start
1:31:43using RSS apps, reader apps again.
1:31:46I really enjoyed the app Reader, R-E-E-D-E-R.
1:31:51Last I was an RSS person, which was again a long time ago.
1:31:54But I think I would probably start with NetNewswire,
1:31:58to be honest with you, which is written
1:31:59by a few friends of ours.
1:32:01And I haven't used it in years and years and years and years
1:32:05but I see some chatter about what they're working on
1:32:08in a Slack that the three of us are in
1:32:09and it sounds like it's pretty slick these days.
1:32:12So I'd probably take a look at either of those.
1:32:14Marco, are you using RSS?
1:32:16- I never stopped using RSS.
1:32:18- Fair enough.
1:32:19- And I'm not just in the technical sense of like,
1:32:22"Well, you know, podcasts are based on RSS."
1:32:23I was like, no, that's not, I mean, you're right,
1:32:25that's correct, but that's not what anybody means
1:32:27when they say this.
1:32:28But yeah, no, I've always,
1:32:29I've never stopped using an RSS reader.
1:32:32You know, for the sync backend, I like using,
1:32:35what's the hamburger one, is it Feedbin?
1:32:37Yeah, hamburger icon, yeah.
1:32:39So Feedbin is my sync backend,
1:32:40and you can use any of a whole huge list of clients
1:32:43with some of these sync backends.
1:32:45And on the iPhone, I use an app called Unread,
1:32:50which it's one of those--
1:32:52- Oh, I used that years ago too.
1:32:53It's kind of like if you ever use the clear app
1:32:55for your to-dos or shopping lists,
1:32:57where it's very opinionated, very limited,
1:33:00and very gesture-based, it's kind of like that
1:33:03for RSS readers. (laughs)
1:33:04And I like that a lot on the phone.
1:33:06I have a lot of muscle memory there,
1:33:09and I enjoy the design of it quite a bit.
1:33:12On the Mac side of things, I've bounced around a lot.
1:33:17Net News Wire is what I should be using.
1:33:19I'm currently still, so for a while before
1:33:22when NetNewsWire was back, I used an app called ReadKit,
1:33:25which is very much in the spirit of old NetNewsWire.
1:33:30And ReadKit, they had a new version come out
1:33:35that I think is now based on Catalyst or something,
1:33:37and it doesn't fit me as well,
1:33:39like the new version doesn't.
1:33:40So I'm still on the old version, on my Macs for now,
1:33:45and then at some point I have a to-do list item
1:33:49to move to NetNewsWire, because NetNewsWire
1:33:52is the one that is I think by far under the most
1:33:56active development on the Mac.
1:33:58They also, I'm pretty sure they have also
1:34:00an iOS version now.
1:34:01I haven't looked at it yet,
1:34:02I'm so happy on iOS with Unread.
1:34:04But certainly I would, if you're starting fresh,
1:34:07I would start on a newswire and only branch out
1:34:10if you really have to from there.
1:34:11'Cause that's the one getting the most active development.
1:34:13As for RSS content itself,
1:34:15I continue to give the same advice I've given for,
1:34:20geez, 15 years, whatever it's been that I've been using,
1:34:23longer than that, that I've been using RSS readers.
1:34:25Don't just go and subscribe to the giant high-volume feeds
1:34:30from whatever the big blogs are that,
1:34:33I used to say Engadget and stuff,
1:34:35but most of those don't even exist anymore.
1:34:37But don't go at just the New York Times front page,
1:34:40the Verge front, don't just add a whole bunch
1:34:42of high-volume stuff.
1:34:43RSS is ideal in the standard RSS reader paradigm,
1:34:49and there are lots of ways to consume it,
1:34:50you don't have to do it this way,
1:34:52but the way most of them work as kind of like
1:34:53this big kind of inbox style thing,
1:34:56it is ideal for subscribing to any number you want
1:35:01of infrequently updated things,
1:35:03like John's blog, or my blog, or Casey's blog,
1:35:06all of us, I mean Casey updates more than John and I
1:35:09combined by a good margin, but it's really good at that,
1:35:13'cause there's no cost to following an infrequently
1:35:16posted blog.
1:35:19So all the blogs people have that have been kind of
1:35:22mostly abandoned or become low volume in the last decade,
1:35:26go subscribe to all of those from anybody that you know.
1:35:29And then when it comes to the high volume stuff,
1:35:34subscribe to a very small number of those
1:35:37because what you don't want to happen is the RSS reader
1:35:40to all of a sudden be this thing where there's
1:35:43thousands of items piling up unread
1:35:45and you're just not seeing them.
1:35:47And you could, if you wanted to,
1:35:48you could switch to like the river approach
1:35:50where you don't even try to like quote keep up
1:35:53and you just dip in whenever you want
1:35:55and just browse what's on top
1:35:56and then come back some other,
1:35:57come back later to see more.
1:35:59That method doesn't really work for me.
1:36:02For me, I do like the inbox slash keeping up model,
1:36:05but I shrink everything down.
1:36:06So for instance, I don't subscribe in my RSS reader
1:36:09to 9to5Mac and Bloomberg and all this stuff.
1:36:14Instead, I subscribe to MacRumors.
1:36:16And MacRumors will link out to anything
1:36:19in that broader ecosystem that I really need to see.
1:36:22And then otherwise, it's smaller volume sites.
1:36:26Like, of course, Daring Fireball, Michael Tsai's blog,
1:36:29which is awesome, Pixel Envy, Six Colors, 512 Pixels.
1:36:33That's the stuff I read in the Mac world, in my RSS reader.
1:36:37And that's all fantastic stuff.
1:36:39And then a whole bunch of small blogs and stuff.
1:36:42But it's great for that.
1:36:43And if you need any help finding feeds,
1:36:47I know NetNewswire actually comes with
1:36:49a stock default set that you can adopt if you want to.
1:36:52So that's a good place to start.
1:36:55- John.
1:36:56- I'm not in the default set though,
1:36:58I'm a little sore about that.
1:36:59(laughing)
1:37:00I need to leverage my personal connections
1:37:02to get that in there.
1:37:04So I'm a NetNewswire user from way back.
1:37:06The first time I saw NetNewswire,
1:37:09I took to it like a duck to water
1:37:11because it used the same key bindings as Tin, T-I-N,
1:37:15which was my preferred Usenet reader when I was in college.
1:37:19- Wow. - Wow.
1:37:21- And it looked kind of like Tin in terms of the arrangement
1:37:24'cause Tin was a character-based application
1:37:27that you used in a terminal window, it used curses, right?
1:37:29So it wasn't a GUI app, right?
1:37:31- Oh my God. - But it had
1:37:32the same type of thing where you'd go through the groups
1:37:33and then you'd see the message list
1:37:34and then you'd see a detail pane
1:37:36with the message you're looking at
1:37:37and NetNewsWire used the same key bindings.
1:37:40and they're like VI key bindings,
1:37:41where you just literally hit a key,
1:37:42NT spacebar, like no command strokes,
1:37:45'cause it was like VI, right?
1:37:47So I was like, wow, here's this shiny Aqua,
1:37:51Mac OS X application for reading RSS feeds,
1:37:54which are becoming really popular,
1:37:56and all the key bindings are like tin, and it's awesome.
1:37:58And I used that for so long until it kinda got bought out
1:38:01and found new ownership or whatever,
1:38:02and now this new thing is kind of like
1:38:04when Twitter for the Mac went away
1:38:06and then had a resurgence as the Phoenix project,
1:38:08NetNewswire, the original author of NetNewswire,
1:38:11our friend Brett Simmons, eventually got back the rights
1:38:13to NetNewswire and rewrote NetNewswire.
1:38:17Like it rose again from the ashes.
1:38:19Here is NetNewswire written again in a modern language
1:38:21with modern APIs by the original author
1:38:23after many years in the wilderness.
1:38:26And it is a phenomenal news reader for the Mac.
1:38:28It is a phenomenal Mac applications.
1:38:30If you use Mac applications and,
1:38:32oh, I'm gonna say if you use Mac applications,
1:38:34they feel sluggish.
1:38:35They don't feel sluggish 'cause you don't know any better.
1:38:36Until you launch and use NetNewswire
1:38:38and you realize, oh, so this is how fast
1:38:39a Mac application could be if it wasn't written
1:38:41using WebKit or whatever, you know, Electron.
1:38:44Everything is so fast and responsive.
1:38:46It is simple, straightforward, it is very understandable
1:38:48to me at least because I've been using NetNoiseWire forever.
1:38:51It still kinda has 10 key bindings,
1:38:53but they've changed the UI to be less 10-like or whatever.
1:38:55But anyway, I use that on the desktop.
1:38:58I used to use Feedbin for years and years
1:38:59when I was using various different readers
1:39:02and syncing services, so I'd be all in sync.
1:39:04But since NetNoiseWire has iCloud support,
1:39:06I finally stopped paying for Feedbin.
1:39:08I think I still paid for this year.
1:39:09Maybe it actually just expired, I don't know.
1:39:11But NetNewsWire will use your iCloud account,
1:39:14use CloudKit I'm assuming,
1:39:16and I don't have iCloud Drive disabled,
1:39:18so it works for me.
1:39:19So I don't pay for Feedbin anymore.
1:39:21Back when I paid for Feedbin,
1:39:22I also used Reader, R-E-D-R,
1:39:24like you mentioned before, on the phone,
1:39:26but there's also NetNewsWire for the phone.
1:39:27In general, on the phone, I don't use RSS.
1:39:29It's more of a desktop experience for me.
1:39:32I used to use Reader on my iPad a lot,
1:39:34but I don't know.
1:39:35I feel like Twitter has, again, Twitter has not replaced RSS for me.
1:39:40Twitter supplanted as the majority stream that I use to consume stuff.
1:39:47And now I'm not all on Mastodon, I'm like half on Twitter.
1:39:51I'm both on Twitter and Mastodon.
1:39:52So the combination at this point of Twitter and Mastodon is still ahead of RSS in terms
1:39:56of prioritization of where I find things, but then Newswire is my preferred RSS reader
1:40:01on the Mac.
1:40:02And I'm kind of a completionist, but not really.
1:40:06Like I subscribed, you know, Marko wouldn't like it.
1:40:08I subscribe to tons of things that I know have too much volume, and sometimes I just
1:40:12mark, I'm not a completionist, I just mark them all as red.
1:40:14I say, "Well, I'm too behind on that, I don't care."
1:40:17The way I would organize my feeds, and I have tons of feeds, I used to have folders for
1:40:21things like, I had a folder called "Infrequent," which was things like, this is a folder full
1:40:25of things that I do actually want to keep up with because it's blogs that post twice
1:40:29a year, right?
1:40:30I'm never gonna just mark all them as red,
1:40:32whereas these other sites that post 50 things a day,
1:40:34ah, just mark them all as red.
1:40:35And they're in subfolders,
1:40:36and you can mark an entire folder as red
1:40:38with a single keystroke, and it happens instantly.
1:40:41So I kind of, you know, I use RSS like that,
1:40:44where I don't go through the river of stuff.
1:40:47I just look at things that might be interesting,
1:40:48and then there are certain feeds
1:40:50that I read literally every single thing
1:40:52that comes out on them, because they're so infrequent
1:40:54or because I care about them so much.
1:40:56- Thanks to our sponsors this week,
1:40:57Memberful, Collide, and Sanity.
1:41:01And thanks to our members who support us directly,
1:41:03you can join at ATP.fm/join.
1:41:06And we will talk to you next week.
1:41:08(upbeat music)
1:41:11♪ Now the show is over ♪
1:41:13♪ They didn't even mean to begin ♪
1:41:16♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪
1:41:18♪ Oh it was accidental ♪
1:41:21♪ John didn't do any research ♪
1:41:23♪ Marco and Casey wouldn't let him ♪
1:41:26'Cause it was accidental, it was accidental
1:41:31And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm
1:41:36And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them
1:41:41@C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
1:41:45So that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M
1:41:50♪ Anti-Marco, Armin, S-I-R-A-C ♪
1:41:55♪ U-S-A-C, R-A-Q-S-A ♪
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1:42:08♪ So long ♪
1:42:10- So John, you've been wanting to talk about
1:42:14Mercedes brake pedals for a while, specifically the EQS,
1:42:17which apparently can be either the sedan or the SUV.
1:42:21But let me tell you, the Mercedes electric sedans,
1:42:24the EQE sedan, EQS sedan, not good looking cars.
1:42:28- Why are there so few good looking electric cars?
1:42:31Like, they should be easier, shouldn't it?
1:42:34- Everybody wants to look futuristic
1:42:37and that leads them in interesting directions.
1:42:38And of course, the BMWs don't look weird,
1:42:40they look like normal BMWs,
1:42:41but the normal BMWs now look ugly, so.
1:42:44- Yeah. (laughs)
1:42:44- I was gonna say, if you want an electric car
1:42:46It doesn't look odd.
1:42:47BMW just takes their regular cars and makes them electric because they built a platform
1:42:50that they can do that with, but they look like BMWs.
1:42:53Oh, wait, time out.
1:42:54Breaking news, breaking news from all in the chat room.
1:42:58Model S/X steering wheel retrofit, $700 available March 2023.
1:43:04Travel in luxury, enjoy the warmth of a heated wheel and the touch of a premium vegan leather
1:43:09in a traditional form factor.
1:43:10No stalks or shifters.
1:43:12Oh my God.
1:43:13- The future fit is only compatible with Model S
1:43:15and Model X vehicles configured with a yoke steering wheel.
1:43:17Purchase price includes installation through Tesla service.
1:43:19- Imagine if they just put those on the car
1:43:21when they sold them.
1:43:21- Imagine that.
1:43:23Wouldn't that be novel?
1:43:24- Flat bottom.
1:43:25- Oh, it is a very, very slightly flat bottom, you're right.
1:43:27- You cannot have a round steering wheel anymore,
1:43:29and I hate it so much.
1:43:30- Oh, quit your whining.
1:43:32- I hate it.
1:43:32- Flat bottom's not that big a deal.
1:43:34- That's huge.
1:43:35So you'll be able to order the full steering wheel again.
1:43:38- Well, it says March 2023, so probably in 2025
1:43:41you'll be able to get it.
1:43:42(laughing)
1:43:43- Yeah, never trust a date from Tesla.
1:43:46- That's incredible.
1:43:48- You can give them your money now probably though.
1:43:50- Yeah, I bet you can.
1:43:51Well no, it says email me when the item's available to order.
1:43:54- What's comforting about this is that
1:43:56the fact that they have to offer this option
1:43:59shows that just no one liked it.
1:44:01And enough people didn't like it
1:44:04that they actually were forced to offer it.
1:44:07- Tesla's having demand problems as they say.
1:44:09They're not selling as many cars as they wanted
1:44:11And I'm sure in the discussion of how can we sell more cars,
1:44:14one of the items that had to come up
1:44:15is I do hear a lot of people saying they don't
1:44:17like the yoke steering wheel.
1:44:18Imagine that.
1:44:20And we already did design a steering wheel for this
1:44:22because I remember the pictures of it before the yoke came out.
1:44:26There were official images from Tesla
1:44:27that showed a round steering wheel.
1:44:28That's why everyone thought it would be an option.
1:44:31But then Elon decided no, it's the yoke for everybody.
1:44:35Weren't there some regions where the yoke was totally illegal
1:44:37and so they had to sell it like this?
1:44:39Maybe.
1:44:40I mean, just because it's illegal doesn't mean that we're--
1:44:42- I guess that's true, yeah.
1:44:44- What do laws matter?
1:44:45- No, honestly, I'm actually not tempted at all
1:44:48by the new Teslas, in part because of Elon Musk being a jerk,
1:44:53but also in part because now that I've had a car
1:44:57for the last few months that is designed to be used
1:45:02instead of a car that's designed to look good,
1:45:05I'm actually kind of spoiled by a lot of the utility of it.
1:45:08- You're spoiled by buttons.
1:45:10- And like, there's buttons, there's handles,
1:45:12there's compartments everywhere,
1:45:15the cup holders have little rubber inserts
1:45:17so stuff doesn't slide around, like there's just,
1:45:19oh my God, it's just so designed to be used by humans
1:45:24and I mean, of course as an off-roader,
1:45:26the Defender's also very, very well designed for that,
1:45:29but just like, there's just stuff everywhere
1:45:32that helps me use it as a vehicle
1:45:35And this is why I'm actually not super tempted
1:45:38by the Rivians right now,
1:45:39because Rivians are also designed
1:45:41kind of with the Tesla mindset of like,
1:45:43let's make the most minimal interior possible.
1:45:45- I don't know about that.
1:45:45- I don't think they're in the same mindset.
1:45:48They're more electronic than you might think,
1:45:51but I think they do have a different vibe
1:45:54than Tesla. - Yep, agreed.
1:45:55- You should go sit in one.
1:45:56- I think the overall features of the car do,
1:45:59but the actual dashboard and controls
1:46:02are very, very Tesla-like.
1:46:04- No, they've got stocks and stuff.
1:46:05- Not many.
1:46:07- Just try it out.
1:46:07Go into dealership and look at one in Citadel
1:46:09and you'll see it's not as far from a--
1:46:11- There are no dealerships.
1:46:12- There's a dealership in Richmond for God's sakes.
1:46:14If Richmond has one, then almost every other city should.
1:46:18Anyway, all right, let's go back to this Mercedes stuff.
1:46:20Sorry for interrupting, but I think this is hilarious.
1:46:22And yeah, imagine people want an actual
1:46:26frigging steering wheel, but no, Elon's a genius.
1:46:28Elon knows best.
1:46:29Anyway, Mercedes EQS SUV brake pedals.
1:46:32Tell me about this, John.
1:46:34- Yeah, so this is related to when we were talking about
1:46:36how any control in a car or any other thing
1:46:41that is manipulated through a touch screen
1:46:43or other electronic means,
1:46:45it's difficult to also have a physical control for it
1:46:48because then the physical control can get out of sync
1:46:50with the electronic control
1:46:51and you have to figure out how to deal with that.
1:46:53And we started talking about how, you know,
1:46:55like the faders on a audio board,
1:46:56sometimes the faders are hardware things
1:46:58that slide up and down, but they will move on their own.
1:47:00So if you change a level through a software interface
1:47:04to make sure that the hardware always matches the software,
1:47:06the hardware will literally move.
1:47:07And there was also some car that did that
1:47:09where if you turn the volume up on the steering wheel control
1:47:12that the volume dial would turn or whatever.
1:47:14And we talked about dials that have lights around them,
1:47:17dials just spin forever,
1:47:18but they also have lights around them
1:47:19to indicate the position and all sorts of this.
1:47:22How do you have physical controls,
1:47:24but also software controls?
1:47:25Or even just how do you have a control
1:47:27that you can control in more than one place
1:47:29with physical controls
1:47:30while trying to keep them in sync.
1:47:31How do you deal with that, right?
1:47:33So Mercedes had an interesting solution here
1:47:35on their EQS SUV where they've got, like many cars,
1:47:40they have a regenerative braking function,
1:47:41which basically means when you,
1:47:45to slow the car down rather than squeezing discs
1:47:47inside the wheel wells to make heat and friction
1:47:51and slow the car down,
1:47:51instead they use electricity and magnetism
1:47:54to essentially charge the battery.
1:47:55You use the momentum of the car to charge the battery
1:47:58by regenerating energy, and as you charge the battery,
1:48:02that will slow the car down,
1:48:03because the energy to charge the battery
1:48:04has to come from somewhere,
1:48:05it's coming from your kinetic energy of the car moving.
1:48:07That's called regenerative braking.
1:48:09Cars have ways to adjust that.
1:48:12How much regenerative braking do you want?
1:48:15And you would think, well,
1:48:16we don't want all the regenerative braking,
1:48:17but what they mean is, how much regenerative braking
1:48:19do you want when you lift up on the gas pedal?
1:48:23So in a regular car, I don't know, regular car,
1:48:25or an internal combustion car,
1:48:26If you lift up on the gas pedal,
1:48:28the only thing slowing you down is wind resistance,
1:48:31rolling resistance, friction, right?
1:48:33The car doesn't start, it doesn't, you know,
1:48:36slow down due to the brakes, right?
1:48:38With regenerative braking on its maximum setting
1:48:40on Teslas and other cars,
1:48:42as you lift up on the brake pedal,
1:48:44it starts regenerative braking.
1:48:46So it doesn't just like give less power to the wheels,
1:48:49it actually starts robbing the kinetic energy of the car
1:48:52and using it to charge the battery, so your car slows down.
1:48:54I think maybe the thing people might be familiar with,
1:48:56like this is maybe the golf carts work this way, I think.
1:48:59I don't golf, so I don't know, but I think like,
1:49:01there are some other electric vehicles
1:49:03you might be familiar with, maybe like, maybe bumper cars,
1:49:05where they work the same way,
1:49:06that as you lift up on the go pedal,
1:49:09it becomes the slow pedal, right?
1:49:11Regenerative braking off means,
1:49:13oh, it works like an internal combustion car.
1:49:15You lifting up on the gas pedal does not slow the car
1:49:18in any way, the only thing slowing the car,
1:49:20friction and wind, right?
1:49:21And so if you're used to an internal combustion engine,
1:49:23you might want regenerative braking totally off.
1:49:26but if you're used to what they call one pedal driving,
1:49:28you can just drive mostly with entirely with the gas pedal
1:49:31because as you lift up on the gas pedal,
1:49:33it essentially applies the brakes,
1:49:35the regenerator brakes in proportion
1:49:37to how much you're lifting up the gas pedal.
1:49:39Now, Mercedes has the same settings.
1:49:41Do you want super duper regenerator braking
1:49:43for one pedal driving where you basically never need
1:49:46to touch the brake pedal
1:49:48unless you're doing emergency braking or something?
1:49:50Or do you want it to behave like internal combustion engine?
1:49:53But what Mercedes has decided to do
1:49:55is reflect the braking state in the brake pedal.
1:49:59So in normal regenerative braking,
1:50:02as you lift up on the gas pedal
1:50:03and it applies the regenerative brakes,
1:50:06the brake pedal doesn't do anything.
1:50:08Now your car is braking,
1:50:09but the brake pedal is in its fully up position.
1:50:12So Mercedes says, well, if we're applying the brakes at all,
1:50:15we should move the brake pedal down
1:50:17to reflect the amount of braking that we're applying
1:50:20so that if you were to take your foot off of the gas pedal
1:50:23and put it onto the brake,
1:50:24it would reflect the fact that, hey, you know what?
1:50:26The brakes are actually applied like 50% already
1:50:28because of how you let up on the gas pedal.
1:50:31So the brake pedal will be 50% depressed
1:50:33when you put your foot over there.
1:50:35Now I've never driven one of these cars, so I can't say,
1:50:38but this MKBHD did a review of it
1:50:40and he found it extremely disconcerting
1:50:42to take his foot off of the gas, the accelerator,
1:50:45and reach for the brake pedal with that same foot
1:50:48and not quite know where that brake pedal might be
1:50:51because how low will it be?
1:50:53Like there's even like this intelligent braking thing
1:50:56where it will apply regenerative brakes
1:50:57based on like how far the car is in front of you
1:51:00or how fast you're going and what the conditions are
1:51:02and in turn reflect that in the brake pedal,
1:51:04which may be in any position between completely up
1:51:07and maybe not completely down, but halfway down.
1:51:11And I think this attempt to make the physical control
1:51:14reflect what the car is doing,
1:51:15I understand the motivation,
1:51:18but I think braking in the muscle memory
1:51:20of always being able to find the brake pedal,
1:51:22especially in an emergency situation
1:51:24where you take your foot off the gas accelerator real quick
1:51:28and go for the brake pedal,
1:51:29I want that brake pedal to be in the same expected spot
1:51:32every single time.
1:51:33And I don't mind that the first two inches of travel
1:51:35doesn't do anything because that much braking
1:51:36was already being applied, because in that situation,
1:51:39you're probably slamming on the brakes anyway.
1:51:41So I think this is a pretty bad idea.
1:51:44I give them points for trying to do it
1:51:46and it's relevant to our past discussion,
1:51:48but I think the muscle memory of being able
1:51:49to always find the brake pedal is so much more important
1:51:52than correctly reflecting what the car is doing.
1:51:56- Yeah, before I address that real-time follow-up,
1:51:58new Model Ss and Xs give you the option
1:52:02to order the steering wheel or the yoke, no cost difference.
1:52:06- Ah!
1:52:07- So before everybody writes in.
1:52:08But yeah, I think, I don't know,
1:52:10do you ever have one of the old cars
1:52:13that had early versions of cruise control
1:52:15where it would do this with the gas pedal?
1:52:17'Cause I had that before.
1:52:18- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:52:18- I've driven a U-Haul moving van that did that.
1:52:22(laughing)
1:52:23'Cause when you'd hit the governor,
1:52:24it had like a governor like 55 miles an hour,
1:52:26and when you hit 55,
1:52:27the gas pedal would push back on your foot.
1:52:29That is something that Marques said
1:52:31on the video about this too.
1:52:32The brake pedal will sometimes push back on you
1:52:34in this automated weird mode too.
1:52:36Do not like.
1:52:37- Yeah, it made a little bit of sense,
1:52:39or rather it wasn't too disruptive on the gas pedal
1:52:41on those old cruise control vehicles
1:52:43because that was kind of fixed in place.
1:52:46it wasn't a dynamically responding thing.
1:52:49And I feel like the gas pedal, it's okay to not quite be
1:52:52where you expect it to be because you just lift your foot
1:52:55off or whatever, it's less damaging.
1:52:56Whereas the brake pedal, I feel like there should never be
1:53:00any moments, even a split second of, oh my god,
1:53:04where's the pedal on the brake pedal?
1:53:05It should always be where you expect it to be.
1:53:07It should always feel how you expect it to feel.
1:53:10There should never be any variation or any doubt
1:53:14in your mind that the brake pedal is where it's supposed
1:53:16to be and about to do what you need it to do.
1:53:18Anything that kind of plays with it and makes it dynamic
1:53:21is just ultimately a bad idea.
1:53:23- This is one of those things that when I read about it
1:53:26or listen to someone talk about it,
1:53:28I think to myself, okay, that makes sense.
1:53:30I can get behind that.
1:53:32But I suspect that once I got behind the wheel
1:53:34and experienced it, that I would quickly sour on it
1:53:38and sour on it real, real hard.
1:53:41So I don't know, I'd be curious to try this for sure.
1:53:44again, sitting here now, like, yeah, that makes sense.
1:53:46Why not reflect the state of the world?
1:53:48But, but golly, I have a feeling that not knowing exactly
1:53:53where the brake pedal is,
1:53:54which is the thing I need urgently,
1:53:56like you both were saying, that I need urgently,
1:53:57I need it immediately.
1:53:59And I cannot be surprised about where it is.
1:54:01I don't know if that's really gonna work.
1:54:02- Yeah, and I think when you're going for the brake pedal,
1:54:04what you want is to get in contact with that control ASAP,
1:54:08because until your foot is touching it,
1:54:10you can't do anything braking-wise.
1:54:12Like you have to get in contact with it.
1:54:14So that argues for both it always being in the same place and also for it being at the
1:54:19top of its travel before you activate it because that's the closest to you.
1:54:23You always just want to go to the brakes.
1:54:28You want to get in that contact as fast as possible.
1:54:30If it is in some position other than all the way up, A, it's going to be farther away and
1:54:35B, you've got to start hunting for it.
1:54:37And depending on how you move your foot, you could miss it entirely.
1:54:40Like if it was depressed three quarters of the way and your heel was like you're the type of person who goes to the brake
1:54:45without like moving your heel that much because your car is set up that way and you just press your foot down with your heel hinging
1:54:50in a certain spot and your toe goes all the way to the floor because you like missed it entirely
1:54:53That's potentially not a great situation now this this discussion brought up. I think it was a Quinn Nelson said somewhere
1:55:01That he was he's like
1:55:03I hate the people who buy electric cars and and
1:55:05and don't put regenerative braking on a max.
1:55:07Tesla's one pedal driving is the only way you should do it.
1:55:10You should always have,
1:55:11you should always be one pedal driving.
1:55:13The old way is for internal combustion.
1:55:15The only reason we're used to it
1:55:16is because that's how cars used to work.
1:55:17Everyone should one pedal drive.
1:55:18Regen should be on max.
1:55:20And he said, also, you're just wasting energy
1:55:23if you don't do that,
1:55:24because if you're not one pedal driving,
1:55:25you're being less efficient.
1:55:27And I was gonna reply to him, but I'm like,
1:55:29first I said, is there something I don't understand about,
1:55:32'cause it doesn't make any sense to me.
1:55:33I'm like, how would it be any less efficient?
1:55:36The way I thought it worked,
1:55:37and apparently I was wrong about this in Tesla's anyway,
1:55:40is whether you are applying braking power
1:55:44by lifting up on the gas pedal
1:55:45or applying braking pedal by pressing on the brake thing,
1:55:50you're applying braking, right?
1:55:53It shouldn't make a difference.
1:55:54It's not as if in non-regen mode,
1:55:57applying the braking doesn't do regen.
1:55:58That would be ridiculous.
1:56:00So I was like, maybe he means that
1:56:02When people drive the old way,
1:56:04they're more likely to dip into the friction brakes.
1:56:06And what I mean by that is most electric cars,
1:56:09when you press the brake pedal, it will do regen,
1:56:11but regen can't stop the car as quickly as friction brakes.
1:56:16When we say friction brakes,
1:56:17we mean the little things squeezing the discs
1:56:18or pressing against the drums in your wheel wells.
1:56:21So they have to blend regenerative braking
1:56:23with the actual old fashioned
1:56:25hydraulic brake fluid powered brakes, right?
1:56:28And I was thinking, maybe he means
1:56:29when people don't do one pedal driving,
1:56:32they tend to push the brake pedal
1:56:33and they get past the regen part
1:56:35where they push the brake pedal far enough
1:56:37where the car says, okay,
1:56:38I've given you all the regen you want
1:56:40and you still want more braking.
1:56:41Now I have to start pinching the friction brakes.
1:56:44And anytime you use the friction brakes,
1:56:45you are burning energy 'cause that's not,
1:56:47yeah, that's just going off as heat.
1:56:48You're losing that.
1:56:49It's not going back into your battery at all, right?
1:56:51So maybe he was saying like,
1:56:53you should use one pedal driving
1:56:54because with one pedal driving,
1:56:55you will never engage the friction brakes
1:56:57because that's a different pedal over there.
1:56:59and the people who don't do that
1:57:01dip into the friction brakes too much.
1:57:03But what it turns out that apparently he was talking about
1:57:05is that in Teslas, now you can correct me if I'm wrong,
1:57:07but this is my understanding from reading the thread,
1:57:10in Teslas, the brake pedals only do the friction brakes?
1:57:14That can't possibly be true, can it?
1:57:15- I always got the impression driving it
1:57:18that when you push the brake pedal,
1:57:20you are controlling the friction brakes, period.
1:57:23And that the car would decide when to regen
1:57:26if you're decelerating,
1:57:28but you don't actually push the brake yet,
1:57:31that's when I think it's actually using the regen.
1:57:34But you can turn it down in the settings.
1:57:37Now, I prefer it all the way up.
1:57:40The thing is, in the context of when Teslas came out,
1:57:47when they were designing these cars,
1:57:49when they were making all these options,
1:57:50they put in options.
1:57:51There's like the creep mode,
1:57:53where with an automatic transmission,
1:57:55when you take your foot off the brake from a stop,
1:57:58the car starts slowly creeping forward.
1:58:01Electric cars have no reason to do that.
1:58:03So electric cars, when you take your foot off the brake
1:58:05by default, nothing happens.
1:58:07Like, you know, I mean, you might start falling
1:58:09down a hill or something, but, you know,
1:58:11if your hill hold's not on, but, you know,
1:58:13electric cars, there is no automatic creeping forward
1:58:16when you stop braking, but Tesla, when they, you know,
1:58:19when they first released the Model S
1:58:20and trying to get people to drive electric cars,
1:58:23they added this option called, you know, creep mode
1:58:25or something, which sounds hilarious and fits Elon well.
1:58:28And they added this mode to basically emulate
1:58:32how automatic transmissions drive
1:58:34so that people would be less disoriented
1:58:37when they first tried an electric car.
1:58:38And I think having the regen option be adjustable
1:58:42is that same kind of thing of like,
1:58:44okay, we're still kind of bringing people along
1:58:47from the gas world to the electric world
1:58:50and we need affordances for people
1:58:54to be comfortable with the transition.
1:58:56And so turning down regen as an option
1:59:00is one of those affordances.
1:59:02- But that's not the affordance we're talking about here,
1:59:03though, the affordance is people don't understand
1:59:05one-pedal driving, so we have to make it
1:59:07that when you lift off the gas,
1:59:08the car doesn't start decelerating
1:59:09due to any kind of braking, right?
1:59:11That's the affordance to make people comfortable with it.
1:59:13But the thing we're talking about is here is,
1:59:16okay, but what happens, what decelerates the car?
1:59:20And in a Tesla, it's like, well,
1:59:22If you turn regen on max and you lift up on the gas pedal,
1:59:27we will use regen to slow the car.
1:59:29And if you press the brake pedal,
1:59:31we use friction brakes to slow the car.
1:59:33And what they could have done
1:59:35and what every other car manufacturer has done
1:59:36and what I assumed Tesla was doing,
1:59:38but apparently they're not, is how about
1:59:39for the affordance mode, you make the gas pedal
1:59:41to work just like it does in a regular car
1:59:43where you lift up and the car just coasts, right?
1:59:45You know, it slows down due to friction and air,
1:59:47but no braking is being applied.
1:59:49And then you make the brake pedal do a combination
1:59:52of regenerative and friction braking
1:59:53according to whatever weird ass algorithm you have to do.
1:59:55Like the beginning of the brake pedals all regen
1:59:57and then as you keep pressing it
1:59:59and it needs more and more braking power,
2:00:00it starts to add the friction brakes.
2:00:02That would be perfectly understandable
2:00:05to internal combustion engine driver.
2:00:07They don't have to know what portion of the braking
2:00:10that is being put in response to their brake pedal action
2:00:12is regen and what portion is friction.
2:00:14And any decent car will blend those two together
2:00:18so you don't notice.
2:00:18The first round of electric cars from new manufacturers
2:00:21It's like, oh, I can feel when it goes from regen to friction.
2:00:24But the more modern ones make that mostly transparent,
2:00:27probably because they're brake by wire at this point.
2:00:29Anyway.
2:00:30And so that's how I just assumed they all worked.
2:00:33But a car that only applies to friction brakes with the brake
2:00:36pedal is forcing you to do one pedal driving if you care
2:00:39at all about your battery life, or your range,
2:00:41as they call it in cars rather than laptops.
2:00:44Because you want to do regen.
2:00:46You want every ounce of that electricity
2:00:48you use to make this multi-thousand pound car start
2:00:51rowing down the road, as you brake,
2:00:53you want that energy back as much as you can possibly get.
2:00:56Friction brakes throw that energy away as heat, right?
2:00:58Regen braking gives you some of it back.
2:01:01So it is insane to me that when you press the gas pedal
2:01:03on a Tesla, it does not do regen braking.
2:01:05It should, and presumably it will eventually.
2:01:08- You said gas pedal, and I think you mean brake pedal.
2:01:10- I keep saying gas pedal, just substitute accelerator
2:01:12every time I say gas pedal. - Well, no, no, no,
2:01:13in this case, I think you mean--
2:01:14- Oh, it's a brake pedal. - It does.
2:01:16So in this Mastodon thread, which is I think
2:01:19what Jon was referring to, you know,
2:01:20and some interesting thoughts, but then Technology Connections entered the chat.
2:01:24And that's our YouTuber that we all really enjoy that does really genuinely fascinating and
2:01:31excellent YouTube videos about all manner of interesting engineering stuff. So Technology
2:01:35Connections, whose name I honestly don't know, wrote, I think you need to remember that this
2:01:41only makes sense in the context of Teslas, which don't do blended braking. Most other EVs will
2:01:46still regenerate more when you use the brake pedal. No matter what the lift off regen is
2:01:50set to, Tesla's not doing that is to me bonkers. Also when they can also in the conditions
2:01:56are appropriate to coast, that is more efficient because you avoid the losses from charging
2:02:00and discharging. Alec continues, like it truly boggles my mind that Tesla decided, no, the
2:02:05brake pedal only does the friction brakes and you need to get used to what region is
2:02:08like and people actually defend this position. Hybrids have had blended braking since always
2:02:13allowing people to coast when they want,
2:02:15regen when they need to slow down,
2:02:17and thus maximize efficiency without even thinking about it.
2:02:21- I'm assuming he's right because he usually knows
2:02:22what he's talking about, but I just--
2:02:23- Exactly.
2:02:24- He was my only source for this reality,
2:02:26and I just still find it hard to believe
2:02:28'cause it seems so bad, so inefficient.
2:02:31And now here, let me make my pitch
2:02:33for why one-pedal driving is bad.
2:02:34I know people love it, and it's fun,
2:02:36and it's more relaxing to not have to go
2:02:37between gas and brake.
2:02:38These are the same people who think
2:02:39you shouldn't have a third pedal,
2:02:40'cause how annoying is that?
2:02:40You gotta cut press the brakes on me.
2:02:42Obviously, all right, so I get the appeal of one pedal driving, right?
2:02:46I think it is worse.
2:02:48Again, moving on to my little safety, I think it's worse and also slightly less safe because here's the deal.
2:02:53Regen braking.
2:02:56Like, forget about regen braking. The gas pedal
2:02:59that could actually
2:03:02apply
2:03:03all the braking that your car is able to apply
2:03:06would be too annoying for anybody to use. What we're basically saying is you're pressing the gas pedal. When you lift up on the gas pedal
2:03:11it's as if you were standing on the brakes. You can't drive that car. That's too much, right?
2:03:16That's not how any car works. No one wants it to work that way. Imagine you sneeze and your foot
2:03:20lifts off the gas pedal for a second and it's as if you are applying maximum braking, you'd be
2:03:24causing accidents left and right. So what actually happens in these one pedal driving, when it's set
2:03:28to one pedal driving, is when you lift up on the gas pedal, it applies regen braking to a point.
2:03:34Even if it applies 100% of its possible regen braking, it doesn't apply the maximum braking
2:03:39that the car is capable of applying.
2:03:43And again, if there's some fantasy scenario
2:03:44where a car was able to do its full braking
2:03:47fully through regen,
2:03:48doesn't matter for the purpose of the story,
2:03:49but I think right now cars that do regen braking,
2:03:52it's not the full braking of the car, right?
2:03:55So inevitably, there will be situations
2:03:59where you need more braking than you can get
2:04:02by lifting up on the gas pedal.
2:04:03You lift it all the way up on the gas pedal,
2:04:05you're not even pressing the gas pedal anymore,
2:04:07you still need more braking.
2:04:09At that point, you need to A, realize this has happened,
2:04:13and B, switch over to the brake pedal.
2:04:15I don't like the idea that I'm doing one pedal driving
2:04:20and I'm in traffic and I'm coming up on a car
2:04:23and I feel like I'm gonna be able to come to a stop
2:04:25behind that car by lifting up on the gas pedal
2:04:27and it will be fine.
2:04:28I lift up on the gas pedal and I just realize
2:04:29when I hit the end of the travel
2:04:30that that's actually not enough braking.
2:04:32At that point, at the last second,
2:04:34I need to go to the brake pedal
2:04:35and apply a little bit more braking,
2:04:36I'd feel much better about knowing
2:04:38I'm going to need to come to a stop here.
2:04:40Let me stop being in the accelerator mode
2:04:43and put my foot over on the brake pedal
2:04:45and modulate the brake pedal to come to a nice stop
2:04:48where I intend or slow to the degree that I intend.
2:04:51I don't like the idea that,
2:04:52the whole idea of like one pedal driving,
2:04:54you can't drive with one pedal
2:04:56because sometimes you always need more braking.
2:04:58And in fact, the times when you might need more braking
2:05:00are the most biggest emergency situations.
2:05:02And if you get in the mindset
2:05:03that I just drive with my right foot on the one pedal,
2:05:05it's one pedal driving.
2:05:06you have to snap out of that at the right moment
2:05:09to go over to the brake pedal.
2:05:10It seems to me to be a more dangerous
2:05:13and more complicated situation
2:05:14than the much simpler one of,
2:05:15when I'm in go mode, I use the go pedal,
2:05:17and when I'm in no-go mode, I use the no-go pedal.
2:05:21It's very clear what mode you're in,
2:05:22and especially in situations where you're like,
2:05:24I've been decelerating for hundreds of feet.
2:05:26The whole time, my foot has been on the brake pedal,
2:05:29pressing it to varying degrees.
2:05:31I'm already in no-go mode.
2:05:32I'm in the slowing down mode,
2:05:34and if something unexpected happens
2:05:35during the slowing down thing,
2:05:36your foot's already in the right spot, right?
2:05:39- Like having driven an electric car
2:05:41with the behavior you think is the worst
2:05:44for many, many years now?
2:05:46- It's not the worst, I just think it's slightly less safe.
2:05:48- Well, I can tell you that,
2:05:50and so obviously I had a bit of context
2:05:53in the sense that the car I had before the Model S
2:05:56was the M5, and the M5, I had little flappy paddle shifters,
2:06:01and I would, being a stick driver before,
2:06:04I would downshift a lot to slow down.
2:06:06Like that was my main method slowing down, was downshifting.
2:06:08And so, and it had that giant engine,
2:06:10and so it had a lot of engine suction also,
2:06:13whenever you decelerate, and so,
2:06:15it was actually, it felt not that different
2:06:18going from that with all that engine suction
2:06:20and all the downshifting,
2:06:21to the Tesla with its aggressive regen.
2:06:24It actually felt very similar, and so--
2:06:26- Were you using your engine as your main braking thing
2:06:29so you could do one-pedal driving in the M5?
2:06:30Because, I know we've talked about this in the past,
2:06:32but I would suggest that in most cars,
2:06:34maybe not in the M5, but in most cars,
2:06:37brake pads are cheaper than clutches.
2:06:40- Not when you're leasing.
2:06:41(laughing)
2:06:43- That's a good point.
2:06:45No, I am an engine braking apologist,
2:06:50even though I know that--
2:06:51- I do engine braking too, but I would never use it
2:06:54as a way to do one-pedal driving
2:06:55so I don't have to use the brakes.
2:06:56- Well, regardless, so I'm saying,
2:06:58when I came to this house, it felt natural
2:07:01to have aggressive regen, and I just got,
2:07:03It got used to it very, very quickly and I never--
2:07:06- But getting used to it is the dangerous part though
2:07:08because you get into the mode where like,
2:07:09I just need this one pedal to drive the car, that's it.
2:07:11- No, but I think the,
2:07:13your concern that you would rely 100% on the gas pedal
2:07:19is I think unfounded.
2:07:22There was never a time when I felt like
2:07:25I was using the gas pedal exclusively
2:07:27because the engine braking, or rather the regen
2:07:31provided by the gas pedal by letting off of it
2:07:34would usually not be enough to bring the car
2:07:36to a complete stop in most circumstances.
2:07:39Sometimes you could.
2:07:40- I'm not even talking about the last two seconds
2:07:41of the complete stop.
2:07:42I'm like, and you're right,
2:07:43that I didn't wanna characterize what the regen is,
2:07:46like what percentage of the full power of the braking
2:07:48is available to regen,
2:07:49but my assumption is that the percentage of braking power
2:07:52that a car possesses that will be possible at regen
2:07:55will just increase with time,
2:07:57because for efficiency purposes,
2:07:58because you want actually the most,
2:07:59You want regen to be extremely powerful.
2:08:01You want that energy back.
2:08:03So the fact that you can't come to a complete stop
2:08:05or that it's only 20% of the full braking power of the car,
2:08:09that may be an accident of history today.
2:08:12I feel like in a golf cart, for example,
2:08:13you can come to a complete stop
2:08:14'cause they go five miles an hour or whatever.
2:08:16- Well, the other trick, though,
2:08:18that might keep this from ever becoming
2:08:21too much stronger than it is today
2:08:23is that you can't always take the regen power.
2:08:26So if the batteries are too full, for instance,
2:08:30like if you actually, if you're about to go
2:08:31on a really long trip and you charge to 100%,
2:08:33you don't have regen for the first few miles of the trip.
2:08:37- You just put that power right back on the grid
2:08:38and the other cars get it.
2:08:39(laughing)
2:08:41You watch, your odometer goes backwards when you do that.
2:08:44- Yeah, and there's also like different thermal conditions
2:08:48that the battery might be in where--
2:08:49- Yeah, I mean, there's lots of physics-based reasons
2:08:51why regen is not 100% of the power of the car.
2:08:54I just said like the trend is going to be
2:08:56the more regen power possible.
2:08:58And this whole thing of the variability
2:09:00of like sometimes you can't take it and so forth
2:09:02argues even more for there should be a go pedal
2:09:04and a stop pedal.
2:09:05And what the hell that stop pedal is doing
2:09:07depends on all sorts of variables that you don't care about.
2:09:09How much power can I regen?
2:09:10How much power am I able to regen?
2:09:11How it charges my battery?
2:09:13What temperature is it?
2:09:14But you don't care 'cause it's entirely seamless.
2:09:17The stop pedal does some combination of crap
2:09:21to slow your car down in a way that responds linearly
2:09:24you're pressing it, you know, it's like there's a braking curve and the brake pedal implements that
2:09:28and there's a going curve and the go pedal implements that and it's simple and they have
2:09:31their jobs and the car manufacturers are free to vary all that within whereas with quote-unquote
2:09:37one pedal driving i feel like you're building bad habits and it's just going to change too much from
2:09:43car to car based on all the regen stuff unless you're going to start adding friction brakes as
2:09:47you lift up the gas pedal which i suppose they could but like i said i don't think that's viable
2:09:51because I don't think you want 100% braking when you lift off the gas.
2:09:54I don't know. I have not spent a lot of time in Tesla's, but I've spent a fair bit,
2:09:58especially as someone who's never owned one. And I think there's aspects of what both of you are
2:10:05saying that are true. In my experience, I don't personally see why one pedal driving is so amazing
2:10:12as so many EV drivers seem to think, but maybe that's my own ignorance talking. But I pretty
2:10:18reasonably quickly acclimated to regenerative braking and kind of got used to basically one
2:10:25pedal driving. And I don't think it's too different than like going between a car, a three pedal car,
2:10:35where the clutch catches really low and then immediately after driving that jumping into a
2:10:39three pedal car where the clutch catches really high. And so you just have to re-acclimate
2:10:43yourself. And within the span of a few driving miles, usually you've got yourself re-acclimated
2:10:49and it's fine. And I feel like my experience with one-pedal driving was basically like that.
2:10:57Now I understand your argument, Jon, that maybe you could make an argument that it's not as safe,
2:11:02but ultimately for anyone that's been driving for any amount of time, unless you've learned to drive
2:11:08on a one-pedal car, which that time is happening and will happen, unless you're learning to drive
2:11:12on a car like that, your natural reaction from the past 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 years of driving is to reach
2:11:19for that brake when there's an emergency. You're not even going to think about it. And so I don't
2:11:24think that we're like reprogramming our brains for emergency evasion. Yeah, we are maybe reprogramming
2:11:30our brains for traffic. It's not so much the programming is that your foot would already be
2:11:34on the brake, so you don't pay the travel cost, right? Because in non-one-pedal driving, you'd
2:11:39Already be riding the brake to some degree at the point when the emergency occurs. Whereas it with one pedal driving
2:11:44You're not even on the brake yet because you're doing the one pedal driving and the emergency occurs
2:11:48You have to pay the cost of switch
2:11:49There's always gonna be situations where you'd be surprised and you have to hit the brake, right?
2:11:52But there's so many situations where normally you would be on the brake
2:11:55I think this whole thing of like getting used to it and not being a big deal
2:11:58relies on the current strength of region braking which is again some small portion of the total braking power of the car if
2:12:06If regen gets more powerful and more of the full braking power of the car is done by regen
2:12:11and that accumulates to the one pedal, it will be...
2:12:15Because I think in this situation you're saying like, you're one pedal driving but really
2:12:19you're one pedal drive for a little bit but you always have to eventually go onto the
2:12:22brake.
2:12:23So it's really just like a slight delay in what would have normally been a switch to
2:12:26the brake.
2:12:27But if regen becomes more powerful, more and more situations you never need to leave the
2:12:31gas and that's where I feel like you're building the habit that you feel like I can drive
2:12:36this entire car with the gas, which is not true,
2:12:37although you're building that habit.
2:12:38Like imagine if you didn't need to use the brake pedal
2:12:42except in emergencies, which is not true
2:12:43in any regen braking car now,
2:12:45but if that was true and people learned on that,
2:12:47they wouldn't have the habit
2:12:49to go over to the brake in an emergency
2:12:50and it would be much less safe, right?
2:12:52And then with the current cars where you're leaving
2:12:55and going over to the brake a little bit later
2:12:58than you would, you're probably fine,
2:12:59it's probably not that big of a deal,
2:13:00but I feel like the benefit is there, I see it,
2:13:03which is the same benefit as not having a third pedal.
2:13:06I don't want to keep moving my foot back and forth.
2:13:07It's annoying.
2:13:08Stop and go traffic, it's annoying to do that.
2:13:10It's more comfortable in stop and go traffic
2:13:11to not have to move my foot back and forth, right?
2:13:13That's the argument.
2:13:14That's why people find it appealing.
2:13:16I just feel like a brake pedal and gas pedal
2:13:19is not too much to ask until we get self-driving.