00:00:00 ◼ ► Who would have guessed that we would have spent so much time tonight talking about printers and the airport express?
00:00:10 ◼ ► This is why I love this show because every time I'm like, oh this is gonna take no time.
00:00:14 ◼ ► It takes six hours and every time, you know, I think this is gonna take 14 hours, then we'll have we'll say three things that'll be that.
00:00:21 ◼ ► The iMac has made it back and it appears to have made it back. I mean, I've only been using it for about an hour right now.
00:00:31 ◼ ► I managed not to get any more dust in the bag because I cleaned off the bottom vents before I put it in the bag this time.
00:00:46 ◼ ► partially remove the need for the bag. But oh well. The iMac is back. It seems to have survived the trip. I am once again
00:01:00 ◼ ► because boy did I do a lot of programming and every time I watch those CPU bars and iStat menus
00:01:06 ◼ ► max out all ten cores, I was very very happy I had this computer. And during the week that I
00:01:25 ◼ ► having the laptop with that external display and all the stupid bugs and crashes that resulted from it,
00:01:46 ◼ ► Yeah, and I the only one I ever had with the laptop was when the LG Ultrafine was connected.
00:01:53 ◼ ► When I was not using it, and that only happened I think once or twice during that week,
00:02:08 ◼ ► Mmm. Like I know I've said it before, I'll probably say it again, the iMac Pro is just so awesome.
00:02:19 ◼ ► Does that mean you don't have to buy a Mac Pro when it comes out? Because that would save me a whole lot of booze.
00:02:34 ◼ ► Really? Have you seen the artwork ever? Did I have any say in that artwork? Or last year's t-shirt?
00:02:40 ◼ ► The tyranny of the majority Casey. Yeah, that's one. Sorry. There is no way that this show is not gonna be about the Mac Pro.
00:02:49 ◼ ► It's just never gonna happen. And now you quit your job, so you're stuck with us. Yeah, I know. There's nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
00:02:58 ◼ ► it would be funny if I could somehow convince myself to buy a Mac Pro, which every time I open up Final Cut is a pretty
00:03:07 ◼ ► Anyways, how funny would it be if I was the first of the three of us with a Mac Pro? Which to be clear,
00:03:20 ◼ ► Become a single-car family. You have all this extra money. You all know what to do with. Yeah.
00:03:27 ◼ ► I know this is sacrilege to one of the hosts of the show at least, but if the iMac Pro was it,
00:03:36 ◼ ► It's awesome. Like the iMac Pro is a Mac Pro glued to a monitor. Like that's what it is.
00:03:47 ◼ ► The only reason why I would really think to get one, and this is probably what's going to drive my choice, is
00:03:59 ◼ ► and I wanted a computer that I could take with me there that could be as powerful as my home desktop and
00:04:04 ◼ ► made the most sense to have it be my home desktop. And that kind of sucked to bring it there and back.
00:04:11 ◼ ► But you know, it was inconvenient and you know, kind of a risk to bring this whole giant glass screen there.
00:04:22 ◼ ► That way I could just keep a monitor there and keep a monitor here and just bring the little tower.
00:04:30 ◼ ► But you know, and I don't expect whatever the new Mac Pro is to be that small and portable.
00:05:10 ◼ ► Things like, you know, what Xcode does when it's compiling or archiving or things like that.
00:05:22 ◼ ► So I'm actually really happy with this and I actually don't have a strong reason to get the Mac Pro right now.
00:05:50 ◼ ► Well, you can just put your hand... You put your hand like under that lip on the top and just kind of pick it up like that.
00:06:15 ◼ ► What are the chances of today's Apple doing something that makes it look worse but improves ergonomics?
00:06:42 ◼ ► But anyone who has every carrier lifted up by those handles knows they are a cruel limitation of handles.
00:06:48 ◼ ► They look like it, but they don't function like it and arguably they're like this device...
00:06:54 ◼ ► Doesn't... Not that it doesn't need handles, but they don't... It shouldn't really have them in that way because they cut into your hands.
00:07:01 ◼ ► They're very sharp edge that if you can... If you can like plank your hands underneath them so they don't touch the edges,
00:07:06 ◼ ► then I guess it's better than no handles, but that's not how you would naturally want to grab them.
00:07:17 ◼ ► Where they were out at an angle and they were rounded on the bottom, those actually didn't feel that bad.
00:07:25 ◼ ► but especially like on the Quicksilver where they were rounded, like it was rounded on both sides.
00:07:30 ◼ ► It wasn't just like sharp edges on the bottom like the the G3 and G4 was. They were relatively comfortable.
00:07:35 ◼ ► So at this point handles are kind of like the the kidneys on the grill of a BMW, right?
00:07:44 ◼ ► I didn't have to, but it's a branding thing for tower Mac computers for many many years it was.
00:07:52 ◼ ► I'm not sure this new one's gonna be anything like a tower, but if it is, it'll be really cool if it had handles.
00:08:36 ◼ ► So here's the thing. Marco genuinely... I'm not trying to be stark. I really mean this.
00:08:45 ◼ ► Your introduction is... It clarifies something for me, Kasey, because I know where you're going with this.
00:09:02 ◼ ► Almost always. Marco makes all three of us sound so much smarter and so much better than really any of the three of us are.
00:09:10 ◼ ► But every great once in a while, something hits the cutting room floor and we all have to pay the price.
00:09:20 ◼ ► Yeah. So in last week's Ask ATP, we had a listener ask us about options for extending Wi-Fi throughout their house.
00:09:30 ◼ ► And we talked about... They had asked about power line networking. And so we talked about that.
00:09:38 ◼ ► And a million people wrote in to tell us about Mocha, which is the technology that allows you to basically...
00:09:56 ◼ ► And coax has a lot of bandwidth compared to power lines and is usually a little bit better grade cable.
00:10:09 ◼ ► Because Casey spent about five minutes talking about it during his initial response to that question.
00:10:15 ◼ ► That episode was running pretty long. It was kissing that two hour mark and I tried to keep it below that.
00:10:25 ◼ ► So I thought, you know what? This Mocha diversion... Let me just cut it because this obscure technology...
00:10:31 ◼ ► Probably no one has ever heard of it. And probably it's so obscure no one's ever used it.
00:10:40 ◼ ► Which, to be fair, knowing what you knew then, I think is a reasonable conclusion to come to.
00:11:11 ◼ ► So if you need a very high bandwidth sturdy wire that goes from one room in your house to another...
00:11:16 ◼ ► Chances are good that you already have coax there. And lots of cable companies and TV companies...
00:11:21 ◼ ► And TiVo and all sorts of other things have had options to do Mocha to get faster networking around your house.
00:11:37 ◼ ► I think a friend of mine just mentioned, "Oh, you know, you could get a Mocha bridge and that will turn coax into Ethernet and Ethernet into coax.
00:11:43 ◼ ► And you can just treat your coax as though it's Ethernet." And I was like, "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What?
00:12:10 ◼ ► It is multimedia over coax alliance. And just like Marco said, it's basically just treating...
00:12:15 ◼ ► You can treat your coaxial cable that you would use for, say, cable TV, at least in the United States.
00:12:21 ◼ ► You can run network packets over it. And so you can use that, just like Marco said, as a kind of poor person's way to have your house wired for Ethernet without actually wiring your house for Ethernet.
00:12:33 ◼ ► I was going to ask you too if you could say what Mocha stood for because you could date it by the fact that the M stands for multimedia.
00:12:40 ◼ ► And then you could further criticize it by the fact that the CA isn't coaxial or anything.
00:13:01 ◼ ► If I were in the alliance, I probably wouldn't have been allowed to cut that segment from the show.
00:13:08 ◼ ► The alliance currently has 45 members, including paid TV operators, OEMs, CE manufacturers, and IC vendors.
00:13:17 ◼ ► The board of directors consists of Aris, Broadcom, Comcast, Cox, DirecTV, EchoStar, Intel, MaxLinear, and Verizon.
00:13:24 ◼ ► As soon as I had my own house, I ran Cat6 everywhere, right? But I didn't always have my own house.
00:13:32 ◼ ► Well, I've run it where I need to run it, not throughout the house, because that would be quite a task given the age of my house.
00:13:38 ◼ ► But it goes where, you know, my television is hooked up to a wire, my computer is hooked up to a wire, my Synology is hooked up to a wire.
00:13:46 ◼ ► My iMac, my iMac 5K is hooked up to Ethernet, and I have the Wi-Fi turned off on it, so it won't even try to use that.
00:13:56 ◼ ► So anyway, so yeah, so we are aware of Mocha, and now, despite Marco's best efforts, now you are too.
00:14:17 ◼ ► Nick Donnelly said, "Hey, you guys need to check out the fairly new Hades Canyon Nux from Intel, which apparently has the model designation, which is so memorable,
00:14:35 ◼ ► It's half the size of the current Mac Mini with power midway between an iMac and an iMac Pro.
00:14:44 ◼ ► Yeah, so last episode, when we were talking about Mac Minis and the topic of Nux came up, I hadn't really followed the Nux market,
00:14:50 ◼ ► but apparently there are some really fast ones recently, and they actually do go pretty high-end in roughly the $1,000 price range.
00:14:58 ◼ ► So, yeah, they are kind of right there with what the Mac Mini is trying to be or should be.
00:15:03 ◼ ► So, yeah, turns out, because I was saying something like it was kind of like netbook hardware kind of stuff,
00:15:08 ◼ ► like, you know, just super cheap, low-end, low-power stuff, or like the 5-watt family of chips.
00:15:13 ◼ ► And, nope, turns out they make really good high-end ones, too. And so that's pretty cool.
00:15:17 ◼ ► And also, I did want to point out also, you know, so these are super small, but while still having, you know, this kind of power.
00:15:25 ◼ ► And, you know, the topic came up last week during the Mac Mini discussion of like should they make it smaller.
00:15:30 ◼ ► And I was kind of leaning towards no, because I don't think it needs to be that much smaller.
00:15:36 ◼ ► You know, it could be a little smaller, but I don't think it needs to be dramatically smaller.
00:15:39 ◼ ► And if they made it dramatically smaller, they'd probably do that by cutting off a whole bunch of ports,
00:15:44 ◼ ► and that's something I really don't want them to do, because that would greatly reduce its usefulness as a kind of like patch-over edge cases machine.
00:15:52 ◼ ► But one thing that I don't think I brought up, but I regretted afterwards, is I think they should finally make it SSD only.
00:16:01 ◼ ► And this might be what that weird rumor was referring to with a pro-focus configuration only.
00:16:13 ◼ ► I was just assuming it would be SSD only. Like I'm assuming every new Mac is gonna be SSD only.
00:16:18 ◼ ► I'm assuming, like, I mean it'll be interesting to see what they do with the 5Ki Mac, but yeah.
00:16:25 ◼ ► Right, exactly. And this is an area where like, you know, in the 50 years since the last Mac Mini update happened,
00:16:32 ◼ ► SSDs have gotten even cheaper, and even with Mac Mini, you know, punitive upgrade pricing that they have on this product line,
00:16:49 ◼ ► But today I think they could offer it reasonably, even with their ridiculous margins on this machine,
00:17:01 ◼ ► And if they did that, you know, if you look at what they did with the iMac, with the iMac Pro rather,
00:17:13 ◼ ► it gave them massively more room inside for this huge cooling apparatus with the iMac Pro
00:17:23 ◼ ► So obviously taking out that spinning disk out of the enclosure made a pretty big difference.
00:17:27 ◼ ► So on a smaller scale, in a few different ways, but on a smaller scale, the Mac Mini could do that.
00:17:32 ◼ ► Taking out the hard drive, if you look at a teardown of these things, that actually opens up quite a lot of real estate.
00:17:38 ◼ ► And they could, you know, it doesn't really need to be that much quieter. It's already pretty quiet even under load.
00:17:43 ◼ ► So I think thermally they could easily fit the quad core 28 watt chips from the new Macbook Pro,
00:17:49 ◼ ► the new 13" Macbook Pro. You could easily fit those in there and have really quiet cooling
00:18:11 ◼ ► And that's for a lot of practical design reasons, one of which is that it has all the ports that it needs room for.
00:18:30 ◼ ► That's right, with that massive brick behind it. That was like a third the size of the Xbox as this external brick.
00:18:36 ◼ ► This NUC has that where the power supply is this huge rectangle that sits outside of it.
00:18:42 ◼ ► Mac Mini does, you know, the nice thing and puts the power supply in the computer such that you only need a nice thin power cable on the outside
00:18:53 ◼ ► So I would expect the Mac Mini, if it's going to have these kind of components and this class of thermals and everything,
00:19:03 ◼ ► It probably can get a little smaller and that's fine, you know, but I would not expect a huge savings in size.
00:19:11 ◼ ► But, you know, certainly some. Or they could, you know, as you said last week, John, thoroughly ruin it and give it no ports
00:19:22 ◼ ► I was saying have it a MacBook Pro class everything, but still just two USB-C Thunderbolt ports and that's it.
00:19:28 ◼ ► Like they would have the good and it would be like the MacBook Pros. Great internals trapped in a case with no holes in it.
00:19:39 ◼ ► I mean, I'm inspired by the Apple TV pucks, which have always had internal power supplies and have always been very, very tiny.
00:19:46 ◼ ► Right. That's another great thing about the Apple TV was, you know, we take that on vacation with us and stuff.
00:19:57 ◼ ► One clever thing that it does is has an AMD RX Vega GPU on the same die as I don't know if it's on the same die, but in the same package as the maybe it is the same die.
00:20:08 ◼ ► So it's got a decent GPU not made by Intel, so not Intel integrated graphics shoved into the same package, possibly also the same die.
00:20:21 ◼ ► It has six USB type A ports, three Thunderbolt 3 ports, two HDMI, two mini DisplayPort, SD card, two gigabit ethernet ports, audio front and back, including Toslink.
00:20:38 ◼ ► If you recall, we put a link to Jason Snell's article where he was showing how he replaced his Mac Mini with a NUC.
00:20:46 ◼ ► Oh, and it uses vapor chamber cooling and has room for a big quiet fan in it and is apparently VR capable.
00:20:53 ◼ ► So if I was just reading you the specs of the new Mac Pro and those were the specs about the ports, it would be like, wow, that amazing versatility and power.
00:21:08 ◼ ► Apple, the gauntlet has been thrown by a stupid thousand dollar NUC in terms of port versatility.
00:21:32 ◼ ► If you like this show that you're listening to right now, you are almost certain to like almost every episode about every episode of Tech Meme Ride Home because they talk about the same kind of stuff.
00:21:48 ◼ ► They've been kind of like a staple really of the Apple and related tech news community.
00:21:53 ◼ ► They've been around for a long time and they're really good at servicing good news throughout the day.
00:22:00 ◼ ► You know, I've been using Tech Meme for, jeez, years, since long before this show, since long before any of you had ever heard of me.
00:22:07 ◼ ► I've been reading Tech Meme and it's always considered a really nice honor whenever one of my articles or something I tweeted gets mentioned or included anything there.
00:22:16 ◼ ► And what they did with this podcast, with Tech Meme Ride Home, is they took what Tech Meme is good at and they distilled it into podcast form.
00:22:23 ◼ ► So you get the same news headlines and context and conversation around what happened today in the world of tech just in podcast form.
00:22:39 ◼ ► So it's not a huge commitment. You can really get really a dense version of the top news stories of the day.
00:22:54 ◼ ► You might know him from the Internet History Podcast, which is a four-year-old podcast.
00:23:10 ◼ ► But even if it's not, search for Ride Home and find Tech Meme Ride Home and subscribe now.
00:23:35 ◼ ► Phoenix is triumphant. A zombie is like, you know, well, I was dead and now I'm not dead, but kind of undead.
00:23:51 ◼ ► So anyway, so what happened over the last few days is that the airport express got a firmware update,
00:24:07 ◼ ► So if you recall, the airport express is a little tiny Wi-Fi, tiny is probably aggressive,
00:24:20 ◼ ► Some of them can be turned into AirPlay 2 receivers, which is really, really surprising and cool.
00:24:35 ◼ ► like you want to play audio from your phone onto your HomePod or any other AirPlay cable,
00:24:44 ◼ ► So what that means is you're going to AirPlay to the airport express and on the airport express is,
00:24:58 ◼ ► It's a way to wirelessly send sound to this little box, and this little box is presumably connected to something that plays sound,
00:25:03 ◼ ► like a set of speakers or a stereo system or an iPod Hi-Fi or whatever, in the case of Jason Snell.
00:25:13 ◼ ► I don't understand, I guess I don't have any, the only Home Apple, what the hell is it called, HomeKit?
00:25:31 ◼ ► because the airport express already does Wi-Fi, so if you need to connect to one of your devices over Wi-Fi,
00:25:50 ◼ ► But what Snell did with it was kind of ridiculous, because the iPod Hi-Fi is what, like 44 years old now?
00:26:07 ◼ ► This is so nice, because like, you know, as somebody who likes to dabble in a bunch of audio weirdness and stuff,
00:26:16 ◼ ► We have things like the Echo and the HomePod and whatever Google's air freshener is called.
00:26:21 ◼ ► Like, we have these things that if you want, like, a little integrated experience where you hate speakers,
00:26:34 ◼ ► and has only one wire coming out of its butt and you don't want to deal with anything else.
00:26:39 ◼ ► But a lot of people also have different needs or different priorities or different wants,
00:27:02 ◼ ► of these media systems that we have these days with the Amazon stuff and HomeKit and AirPlay and stuff like that
00:27:09 ◼ ► and Sonos, so often you don't have many or any options for, "Let me connect this to something else,"
00:27:38 ◼ ► It's this $300, I think, little, like, giant box that is about the size of two Mac Minis
00:27:45 ◼ ► stacked on top of each other, and that's, like, you would spend, like, $300 to have that ability with Sonos.
00:27:51 ◼ ► And that's just, that sucks, you know, or, like, I think, like, one of their big speakers,
00:27:56 ◼ ► I think the 5 series might have a line in jack on it, but, like, of course the small ones don't.
00:28:43 ◼ ► and delayed and delayed, it didn't look good for AirPlay 2. It looked like it was just never going to happen
00:28:48 ◼ ► or it was going to become, you know, even later and come out really slowly and come out, you know,
00:29:03 ◼ ► but now that it's here, it does tend to work pretty well and it's spreading really quickly.
00:29:08 ◼ ► Like, you know, the aforementioned Sonos, they have AirPlay 2 support on a lot of their speaker models that I don't own.
00:29:15 ◼ ► They, and it's coming to none of the ones I own, apparently, but that sucks for me, I guess.
00:29:21 ◼ ► But, you know, that's AirPlay 2 integration with them. There's AirPlay 2 integration, of course,
00:29:26 ◼ ► with the HomePod when it launched. The AirPlay 2 integration into iOS and into Control Center
00:29:30 ◼ ► and the music app is really good and really useful to the point where I actually like it way better
00:29:36 ◼ ► than listening to either the horrendous Sonos app ecosystem or the pretty clunky and horrible
00:29:44 ◼ ► Amazon Echo app and service for music management. It's AirPlay 2, I gotta give it credit.
00:29:51 ◼ ► It looked like I had a really bad start, but once it got out the gate, it has been spreading like crazy
00:30:01 ◼ ► Speaking of bringing things back from the dead, I have pulled an item from the way down on the bottom
00:30:08 ◼ ► of the document from four months ago into a topic titled "The End of Airport" in which I wanted to talk about
00:30:16 ◼ ► Apple deciding that it's not going to sell Wi-Fi things anymore. And looking at the little picture of the
00:30:22 ◼ ► Airport Express, Jason put a picture of it on sixcolors.com, looking at that little white box looks like
00:30:29 ◼ ► basically a little white colored Apple TV with two ethernet ports in the back, a USB-A port, and then the
00:30:35 ◼ ► audio jack and internal power supply with a little cable plugged into it. Makes me, once again, sad that
00:30:44 ◼ ► Apple has decided to narrow its business to quite the degree it has because I'm a person who used to buy
00:30:53 ◼ ► Apple Wi-Fi things because they were more expensive and they usually weren't the best you could buy, like
00:30:58 ◼ ► you get better performance out of non-Apple things, but they had good integration with Apple's technologies
00:31:03 ◼ ► of the day, whether that's like printer sharing or Bonjour or whatever. Their software for the Mac to deal
00:31:11 ◼ ► with them was nicer than going to some ugly web interface or whatever. They were very reliable for me.
00:31:16 ◼ ► And it was just another decision that I didn't have to make, that I could just buy Apple Wi-Fi and use it in
00:31:25 ◼ ► my house until the Wi-Fi standards got so old that I had to replace it and I would go for years and years with it.
00:31:30 ◼ ► That's why I didn't want to, you know, when I got rid of my old one, I didn't want to have to buy a third-party
00:31:34 ◼ ► thing. I got a bunch of new used ones on eBay and then Marco sent me his old one. I'm still using the one
00:31:39 ◼ ► Marco sent me, even though it's ridiculous. And we talked about it before with USB hubs and stuff.
00:31:45 ◼ ► Apple has never really made those, but it's making me kind of sad that Apple just wants to sell you the things
00:31:53 ◼ ► with the highest margin that sell and the highest number and is less interested in providing the sort of
00:31:59 ◼ ► overall Apple experience. Like they don't even want your money. Like I don't care how much money you give us.
00:32:04 ◼ ► It's not worth our time to upgrade the airports to be like mesh network things. Like Apple could have made Eero, right?
00:32:09 ◼ ► Eero is a very Apple-like product. Apple didn't make Eero. Apple instead let its airport line languish until they
00:32:16 ◼ ► were completely obsolete and ridiculous and then just canned the whole business. But this little box, like Marco was saying,
00:32:21 ◼ ► a little thing like this, there's plenty of third-party things you can buy that do this, but are they flaky?
00:32:26 ◼ ► Do they work with all your Mac stuff? Do they have airport 2 support? Like it was nice when Apple made these type of things.
00:32:32 ◼ ► They probably weren't big profit centers, but it's not like from a customer perspective, it's nice to be able to go into an
00:32:38 ◼ ► Apple store and say, here's the situation. I want to do X, Y, and Z. And for them to say, we have some products we can sell you.
00:32:43 ◼ ► We know they'll work with your Macs. They'll be supported apparently forever. Even after we stop selling them,
00:32:48 ◼ ► they'll get new features and they're generally reliable and sturdy and have warranties and look nice with like the reason you buy
00:32:55 ◼ ► Apple stuff. It's part of, it's a, it's a smaller version of why I was so upset about Apple not making monitors anymore.
00:33:00 ◼ ► Because obviously a monitor is way more important than USB hubs or dongles or printers for that matter.
00:33:05 ◼ ► You two don't remember when Apple made printers, but they did to varying degrees of success.
00:33:12 ◼ ► Yeah, well, see, Apple made, Apple made great printers in the beginning, then they made terrible printers, then they didn't make printers.
00:33:18 ◼ ► So most people aren't sad about Apple not making printers anymore because they just remember Apple making the terrible printers,
00:33:23 ◼ ► but they did make great printers at one time. And I'm not saying Apple needs to get back into the printer business and that Apple sold scanners.
00:33:29 ◼ ► They had CD-ROM drives, like Apple sold external hard drives, like they sold everything, right?
00:33:39 ◼ ► Oh, now Apple sells a cylinder that you can talk to, right? But the Wi-Fi stuff just seems, and not that, you know,
00:33:45 ◼ ► I love the Eero stuff, but like Eero doesn't sell anything like this Airport Express and Eero doesn't sell anything like a little,
00:33:56 ◼ ► Apple could sell a dedicated HomeKit hub for less money than an Apple TV or people who didn't want an Apple TV or people who didn't want to have, I don't know.
00:34:04 ◼ ► I just, I really miss Airport. I really miss the whole product line and everything about it.
00:34:10 ◼ ► And I'm going to be sad when my awkward skyscraper thing that Marco gave me finally dies and I have to buy some non-Apple Wi-Fi thing.
00:34:20 ◼ ► And by the way, I'm using Eero for the Wi-Fi. I'm just using the Apple thing as a router. I have the Wi-Fi turned off on it.
00:34:27 ◼ ► Why? Because all my settings are in there for all my configuration and it's nice to use the Airport utility app to manage it, even though I'm not even using the Wi-Fi in it.
00:34:35 ◼ ► That's how dedicated I am to the Airport product line. So, you know, I just wanted to follow this.
00:34:41 ◼ ► This is from April of this year, four months ago, that they killed that business and no one seemed to care except for maybe me.
00:34:48 ◼ ► No, when the, I don't remember when it was, but at some point I started using, I think it was one and then for a while, two Airport Expresses.
00:34:57 ◼ ► And I'm talking the original Airport Expresses that looked like a slightly elongated power adapter for a laptop, which is the one that's pictured in the TechCrunch article.
00:35:06 ◼ ► I used that as my only in-home Wi-Fi for a while. And I believe I was still using the Verizon router, but that was, that one or two Airport Expresses or Expresses,
00:35:16 ◼ ► those were my WAPs, my Wi-Fi access points for the longest time. Then eventually I got an Airport Extreme, one of the ones that looks like a Mac Mini.
00:35:23 ◼ ► So again, pretty old. And I used that for a really long time. In fact, I think I used that until eventually we got sent some Euro stuff for free since they were sponsoring the show.
00:35:33 ◼ ► And I think that's when I finally replaced it because I just didn't have a need otherwise. And I remember for the longest time I had, what was it, Linksys? Is that right?
00:35:42 ◼ ► Linksys routers and through college and through the beginnings of being in the house. And they were always flaky.
00:35:51 ◼ ► I remember the cool kid thing to do would be to run DDWRT or, what was it, like Tomato or something like that. This is stuff, Jon, you never bothered with.
00:35:59 ◼ ► I know about all this stuff. You're right, I didn't bother with it, but I certainly knew about it. This is part of what made me so happy to have an airport.
00:36:04 ◼ ► I'd never wanted to mess with the firmware on my Wi-Fi router and I wanted it to be an appliance. And it was. I plugged it in, I set it up, I never thought about it again.
00:36:11 ◼ ► What was it like the WRT54G or something like that that's been drilled into my head because that was the one that you could flash and...
00:36:22 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean you could do all sorts of real cool stuff with this Linksys router. You really could, but it was fiddly as crap. It was basically the Linux equivalent of a router, if you will.
00:36:33 ◼ ► Everything was fiddly, none of it works for more than 10 minutes at a time. It was rough. And so eventually I saw the light and I used airports and I loved it.
00:36:44 ◼ ► I think ultimately it is sad that Apple exited that market because they were so good for so long, but even when they were in it and even when they were current, it was still...
00:36:56 ◼ ► First of all, they were never of course price competitive, not even close. And that's to be expected really from Apple stuff, especially from accessories.
00:37:05 ◼ ► But they were also never competitive on power user features. They were originally but then not later competitive on things like range and even throughput.
00:37:17 ◼ ► I think what happened was when WiFi was less mature and earlier, very similar actually to printers, when it was like a new market that was not very mature, Apple's version could be better than everyone else's.
00:37:31 ◼ ► And then over time, the amount of effort that Apple was willing to put into it and the types of products Apple was willing to make and sell were less and less competitive.
00:37:42 ◼ ► Because the market matured, things got more sophisticated, they started moving faster and other people started making really good ones too.
00:37:51 ◼ ► And Apple just, it wasn't in Apple's DNA to keep up aggressively with that and to make the kind of products that would appeal to power users and keep the price raised to the bottom going and get updated very frequently with all these new standards and more and more antennas and things like that.
00:38:09 ◼ ► And then now, I think the WiFi market now has taken a direction with mesh systems like Eero that Apple could have competed in if they wanted to.
00:38:20 ◼ ► Like the entire span from a few years after it started until about last year, Apple didn't really have much to do.
00:38:29 ◼ ► If they wanted to put a lot of effort into this market and get back into it again, they could do what Eero is doing.
00:38:36 ◼ ► But first of all, there's a lot less need for it because even though Eero is a sponsor, here's a disclosure, systems like Eero are really good and really solid and really easy to use and have nice designs.
00:38:49 ◼ ► So there's a lot less need for Apple to do it because if you think like, "How would Apple do this?" Basically, look at Eero.
00:38:56 ◼ ► That's how they would do it. In an ideal case, it's already being done though by somebody else now, so we don't really need Apple to do it.
00:39:02 ◼ ► But also, that would require a type of investment into an accessory category that I just can't see today's Apple getting into and caring about and prioritizing that strongly.
00:39:14 ◼ ► Well, I mean, like I said, they've narrowed the line and a lot of the narrowing makes sense, but I think they've gone a little bit too far.
00:39:20 ◼ ► The HomePod and the monitor are evidence of that, of the re-expansion. HomePod is a new thing that they've never made before.
00:39:26 ◼ ► Like, now we're going to make a new kind of device. Why would Apple make it like that? Well, because we can and we have technologies that would work with it and we can integrate it with our stuff.
00:39:34 ◼ ► And the monitor. Take it away and eventually, why would we make a monitor? That's a mature market, you know, to your point about being commoditized and everything.
00:39:43 ◼ ► Well, that's the thing though. The monitor is different because as we saw with the LG, this market can't be trusted to make something great.
00:39:56 ◼ ► Yeah, we have Eero. But that's like, if we pretend Eero didn't exist, we wouldn't have that many great options.
00:40:06 ◼ ► Recommending things on Twitter, everyone's complaining about all the other alternatives that apparently have good performance and test well but are not reliable.
00:40:13 ◼ ► And if Eero goes away or if Eero suddenly makes a bad product, like, that's what we're relying on Apple to do.
00:40:18 ◼ ► It's like the USB hubs. If there was, or the power adapters. Anker is our savior there.
00:40:32 ◼ ► Now, if Apple had to pick one thing that is synergistic with its other stuff that it's doing, it should have been mesh home networks.
00:40:42 ◼ ► Every one of their devices uses Wi-Fi. That is the one thing that works with the rest of their products.
00:40:47 ◼ ► It's not CD-ROM drives or printers or scanners or external hard drives or all the other things that they used to make.
00:40:54 ◼ ► Those you should definitely leave behind. But even though a lot of those markets are commoditized, you know, or iPhone cases for that matter, talk about a commoditized market.
00:41:02 ◼ ► If you make products like that, if they work well with the rest of your stuff, you can still charge a reasonable fee just because they're color coordinated and support AirPlay 2 before anyone else.
00:41:12 ◼ ► And if they had to make an argument for one line that they shouldn't have canceled and they should have either bought Eero or been Eero.
00:41:25 ◼ ► But if like Apple could have done Eero, you know, in its best days, Apple could have done Eero the same way that Eero did.
00:41:42 ◼ ► So I don't know if they're, I'm not saying they're going to come back into this market because, you know, they probably don't see a need for it.
00:41:48 ◼ ► But I think like if Eero went away, if I didn't have Eero to recommend to my sister, as I discussed on yesterday's show, I don't know what I would have done.
00:41:57 ◼ ► Because I don't think I would have recommended a Netgear Orbi or some other mesh system because they're just not quite as nice as the Eero.
00:42:05 ◼ ► I don't think she could have set them up herself. Right? So, and I wouldn't have felt as good recommending something like that.
00:42:15 ◼ ► And they made Phyllis Shiller jump off a thing onto an air mattress or whatever. It's a lot to recommend Airport.
00:42:22 ◼ ► I think also maybe another problem of this market is it's kind of like the Teva problem of like every ISP now makes it really, like you have to really try to not use their Wi-Fi router.
00:42:34 ◼ ► Like they really push them hard because they learned, oh, we can charge another additional monthly fee if we rent you this terrible Wi-Fi router of ours.
00:42:42 ◼ ► And then we can control everything and everything else. So like now, like it's really hard to get an ISP in the U.S. at least to install something in your house that ends in an Ethernet port that you can plug your own router into.
00:42:52 ◼ ► Yeah, well, it's like you said, though, this is a time where I think we're still in that time where there is a burst of innovation during which Apple could charge a premium and have fancy products.
00:43:02 ◼ ► Eventually, all of the cable companies and ISPs are going to have mesh network stuff. Now, I bet some of them already do. But most of them don't.
00:43:10 ◼ ► Most of them, you get one Wi-Fi thing, it makes one network, it doesn't reach into your far bedroom, and then you try to find some sort of extender thing and it never quite works right.
00:43:17 ◼ ► Or you get something like Euro and turn off your thing. Like eventually mesh network Wi-Fi will be everywhere.
00:43:24 ◼ ► It'll come with all of your ISP stuff and that time of potential innovation and being able to charge a lot will be over and the only people still buying Euro will be the people who appreciate probably the better speeds and certainly the better interface to it.
00:43:37 ◼ ► But we're not there yet. So this was the time for Apple to strike and they just 100% missed it.
00:43:42 ◼ ► And if they wanted to shortcut it, they could have just bought Euro, as the quote that Panzer just retweeted earlier today says.
00:43:52 ◼ ► From time to time. Yeah, from time to time. We usually don't talk about why. But by the way, here are some Beats headphones and some Eros rebranded and put into different white cases with Apple logos on them.
00:44:11 ◼ ► Yeah, they got whatever music thing stuff. I'm reminded occasionally that I now subscribe to Apple Music because I have a HomePod. I listened to some Playlist today, tried to let it recommend stuff to me.
00:44:26 ◼ ► By the way, I used the HomePod a lot because I brought the HomePods to the beach because I figured I'd be doing Airplay 2 this summer. Spoiler, I didn't. But it turns out I had a lot of other stuff to do when I didn't get to that.
00:44:41 ◼ ► But I did end up using the HomePod a lot for music. And my opinion of the HomePod remains kind of lukewarm to positive. I still really like the way it sounds and I love the integration with my music collection.
00:44:59 ◼ ► Occasionally it's a downside because if I ask it to play, for instance, if I say play Foo Fighters, I think by default it kept playing only the Foo Fighters albums I have.
00:45:11 ◼ ► And there's some I don't have, like some of the newest ones, and it would never play those. Or I think by default it thought I was asking for my collection.
00:45:19 ◼ ► But regardless, in general, the integration of it with both my music collection and the Killer app as I mentioned earlier, it's so nice to have the Airplay 2 music controls in Control Center and be able to hand that to the music app.
00:45:35 ◼ ► Because then what you do is, so if you have an Airplay 2 session going on something, it'll show up if you go to Control Center on the phone, you scroll down, and it's like a separate little blob for each Airplay 2 group that you have going.
00:45:49 ◼ ► And if you tap on that, it opens it in the music app. And then your phone has full control over it. So you can play something else, you can skip the track, you can adjust the volume with your phone's volume buttons in your pocket.
00:46:01 ◼ ► It's so nice to have that integration with iOS. Even though Siri is still annoying, I think I'm liking the HomePod more over time because that integration with iOS and iTunes is just so much better.
00:46:31 ◼ ► So this is the Home of the Clouds tour is a once in a lifetime, all inclusive two week exploration of one of the world's least accessible yet astonishingly forward thinking countries. It's Bhutan.
00:46:42 ◼ ► Bhutan is the only place where gross national happiness is a more important factor than gross national product and tourism is actually regulated there with great care to preserve this.
00:46:53 ◼ ► So this October 16th, 2018, Gray Langer tours will return to the fascinating Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan for the third annual Royal Highlander Festival. Last year's tour was a smashing success.
00:47:07 ◼ ► Guests even got to meet the king of Bhutan. This is pretty awesome. So Gray Langer was founded by Gabriel Cubbage, former CEO of Adblock, who founded the company out of a sincere love for Bhutan and the desire to share that with others.
00:47:21 ◼ ► So availability is very limited. There's only a few slots left. This once in a lifetime adventure will include two weeks of everything Bhutan has to offer from five star lodging in Bhutan's capital city to trekking in the northernmost reaches of the kingdom where they will spend their nights as personal guests of the Laiya villagers in their homes.
00:47:40 ◼ ► So if you're into really cool travel, this sounds like something worth checking out. So to see for yourself, visit graylanger.com. It's named after the monkey. G R A Y L A N G U R dot com and look for the kingdom of the clouds tour. This happens this October 16th through 29th. Thank you so much to Gray Langer for sponsoring our show.
00:48:04 ◼ ► Do we want to get into the new iPhone stuff? That's gonna take 14 hours. Is it? Well, we don't we don't know anything like, oh, okay. I do want to get into it. I put this in there a while ago and I want to get into it at the broadest possible level because we haven't talked about it at all.
00:48:17 ◼ ► So this the context of this is a MKBHD video where some he got like physical mock ups of what the iPhones are supposed to look like from like partly parts leaks.
00:48:28 ◼ ► I'm assuming the reason I'm interested in this is because parts leaks happen all the time and they end up being really, really accurate. So these aren't actual iPhones. I don't think they're actual iPhone cases. They're like mock ups, but they're probably they're probably sized down to the micro millimeter micrometer.
00:48:45 ◼ ► Sorry. They're probably perfect. Like I 100% assume that when the iPhones come out, they will look exactly like these things plus or minus surface finishes. Right. That's why I'm interested in this video. I'm not interested in someone's idea of what an iPhone might look like, but I'm just assuming these are all, you know, stolen designs and all of the stories I've read about the phone say that this is what they're gonna come out with three phones, a really big one, one the size of the 10 and then one in between that's cheaper and not all that.
00:49:14 ◼ ► And that's all I want to talk about the idea of there being three phones, the idea of them being these sizes and these prices and what that what that means for the iPhone and whether we think it's a good, a good way to go.
00:49:26 ◼ ► So because this past year was weird where they had the 10, but it was super expensive and it was didn't have the home button and had the face ID. But then they also hedged their bets with the eight, which was much more traditional and safe, but they had the same internal.
00:49:37 ◼ ► So that was a weird year. And so we were wondering, like, what do you what are they going to do next year? Are they going to still have an eight type thing around? Are they going to all look like the iPhone 10 if they do all look like the 10? How do they how do they have a cheap phone?
00:49:49 ◼ ► Are they going to what are they going to replace the plus size with? What are they going to replace the SE with? Like, we don't know all the details, but I think I'm pretty confident that this three phones and these sizes thing is going to happen.
00:50:01 ◼ ► And I'm not sure how I feel about it. I want to hear what you guys thought about the prospect of a three iPhone 10 future. One of them not being OLED.
00:50:10 ◼ ► I watched this video two or three times. So the video in question is MKBHD. And like you said, he got mockups that, man, to my eyes, they look like they're real. I mean, they're not. I'm not saying they're real, but gosh, do they look real?
00:50:25 ◼ ► And it's hard for me to tell on this video, not because the video is bad or anything. It's just hard to tell on a video exactly how big these are in real life. That makes sense. Like, I see them in his hands, but he mentioned that he has very big hands. And it's just hard for me to visualize. And maybe that's just a Casey problem. But
00:50:45 ◼ ► Oh God, he uses pocket casts. Well, he needs it to be on Android too. So marketing, you got to get in on that. Yeah. Just do some product placement. Sure.
00:50:56 ◼ ► You know, here's the thing. I, over the last couple of weeks, have noticed that I think the iPhone 10 is too big for me. Now, given the options that Apple currently sells, the iPhone 10 is still the phone for me.
00:51:15 ◼ ► But in a perfect world, from simply a physical standpoint, I still think the iPhone 10 is a little bigger than I want. I find reaching across the screen is really difficult, frustratingly so.
00:51:27 ◼ ► And I am not willing to give up enough real estate to go down to like the SE size. Like, that's just, I'll take the discomfort over the lack of real estate. But the 10 just feels too big to me.
00:51:40 ◼ ► That being said, I will continue to buy 10s because I think it's the best overall compromise for me. Yeah, it's a little bit too big, but I love the OLED screen. I don't know if I said love Face ID, but I generally quite like Face ID.
00:51:54 ◼ ► And I do think it has gotten a bit better in iOS 12. Presumably, it will be better still with new hardware this fall. So I'm not as bothered by Face ID as a lot of people.
00:52:04 ◼ ► Well, maybe not a lot, but many people seem to be. I can't fathom wanting to go any bigger than the 10. Now, this is in contrast to all of the former Plus Club members like Mike Hurley, like Steven Hackett, like Federico Fittucci, and others that all swear by the big phones.
00:52:24 ◼ ► And that's fine for them, that's fine for them, but I just can't imagine wanting a plus-size version of the iPhone 10. But in and of itself, that makes sense, right? Because you have a bigger phone and you have a regular phone, and that's what we've had for the last several years since the iPhone 6.
00:52:39 ◼ ► What really kind of confuses me is this in-between model that apparently is bigger than the iPhone 10, but has an LCD screen and has a single camera lens. What is going on with that?
00:52:57 ◼ ► And it's, yes, sorry, you're correct. It's in between the iPhone 10 and the iPhone 10 Plus. Obviously, we're using incorrect names, none of us know what names will be.
00:53:09 ◼ ► So don't take this as any implication that we think this is what they'll be called. But for the purposes of description, there'll be, according to this video, there'll be the iPhone 10, there'll be the cheap iPhone 10, but bigger than the iPhone 10, and then the biggest still, the iPhone 10 Plus.
00:53:25 ◼ ► And that middle one just seems so peculiar to me. Not necessarily wrong, mind you, it just seems odd. So I don't know what to make of it.
00:53:35 ◼ ► So think about this. Think about, you know, the iPhone 10 is kind of between the former, like, you know, 6 and 6 Plus sizes, which are still sold. It's kind of an in-between size there. The Plus-size phone has been very successful, and it would not surprise me if the Plus phone, the current generation, so the 8 Plus, it would not surprise me if the 8 Plus outsells the 8.
00:54:03 ◼ ► I don't think Apple's ever said that, although I think they kind of alluded to it in certain data things they've noted. But it would not surprise me at all if the 8 Plus outsells the 8.
00:54:13 ◼ ► I think the fact is, like, people really like that Plus-size. A lot of the people who, you know, were holding onto the previous, you know, 8, 7, 6 size moved on to the 10.
00:54:26 ◼ ► People for whom that was too big are either tolerating it or using the SE. I don't think it's worth keeping around the 6, 7, 8 size as long as the SE is there, because people who want super small phones to hold, they use that one.
00:54:44 ◼ ► The 6, 7, 8 size is, like, big-ish, but, you know, pretty small by modern standards, actually. And, you know, now a lot of people have upgraded to the 10, which is bigger still, and a lot of people want the biggest phone size they can get, which was the Plus before, and now it's sort of the 10 in one dimension but not the other.
00:55:04 ◼ ► And, you know, when we have, like, whatever they end up calling, like, the 10 Plus and this 6.1-inch supposedly cheaper one, those are going to be the big phones to have. Those are going to be the mass-market phones.
00:55:17 ◼ ► I think, you know, we're coming at this from, like, the old perspective of the, like, you know, smallest/midsize phone they sell is the default size that sells the most, but I don't think that's true anymore.
00:55:33 ◼ ► And I think if they're only going to have one model that's kind of legacy in certain ways and trying to target a lower-cost market, I think it does make sense to have it be closer to the Plus size.
00:55:45 ◼ ► And if you, I haven't looked at all these, like, mock-ups and everything, but I would imagine the 6.1 is probably very close to the size of the Plus-size phone before. It probably just has, you know, it's a larger screen because it has the edge-to-edge design, but it's probably very similar in size to the 6 Plus.
00:56:04 ◼ ► And so I don't think that's a bad thing for them to target because that has proven to be incredibly popular. So if you look at it from that, it's like the 10 or, you know, whatever the new version of the 10 is, the base size of the 10 as we know it now, that is the new 6.7, 8 size.
00:56:20 ◼ ► That's the new, like, mid-size phone for a lot of people who don't want the biggest phone in the world but still want a nice new phone. The SE, I think, is going away. Frankly, I don't see the SE continuing. And I think if they were going to update it, they would have. I don't see that continuing.
00:56:37 ◼ ► And also, I think Steve TS or somebody uncovered something about there being like an SE with iPhone 7 internals. That sounds totally wrong to me because the SE already has iPhone 6s internals. So to bring it forward only one phone generation after, what, three years? That doesn't sound right to me.
00:56:57 ◼ ► And I certainly hope they don't do that. And honestly, I know SE people, this is going to drive you nuts. I apologize. But as a developer trying to make interfaces that work on phones that span this wide range, I can't wait for the SE phone size to be discontinued.
00:57:15 ◼ ► Because making interfaces work on that screen is horrible. Because to make the same thing work on a 6 plus size screen or whatever this new iPhone 10 plus that's like 10 inches wide is going to be, making that scale of that and also run on the tiny little iPhone SE screen, I've got it. It's a pain in the butt.
00:57:34 ◼ ► I can't wait to drop support for that screen size, however long that takes. But anyway, I think this lineup makes sense when you think about, again, just like last week's episode, the smallest model doesn't have to be the cheapest and the smallest model doesn't have to be the mass market one.
00:57:51 ◼ ► And if you look at also the rest of the market, if you're trying to get a decent phone from anybody, look at what your options are if you're not looking at iPhones. Your options are a bunch of Android phones that are all about this size.
00:58:07 ◼ ► You're not looking at things that are the size of the iPhone SE as your competition. You look at a bunch of Android phones that are all pretty cheap and have roughly 6 inch, 5 inch, whatever they are screens. And then you look at the iPhone, it's like, oh, what do you have, 400 bucks? Oh, you have this tiny little thing that looks positively ancient.
00:58:24 ◼ ► And even though it looks good, it looks ancient. And that's not very competitive when somebody's looking at Android versus iPhones. And so it does make total sense for the basic model iPhone to look a lot more like the basic model Android phones, to be more competitive with them.
00:58:47 ◼ ► So as someone who's still using a 7 now, I kind of feel where Casey's coming from. I haven't used a 10, but my wife has 10, so I have encounters with it.
00:58:57 ◼ ► And I kind of wish they had, because the 10 is not that much bigger than the 7. Like if you put them one on top of each other, you see it's mostly taller and it's just a tiny bit wider.
00:59:10 ◼ ► But if you look at it like, oh, it's basically the same size, but it just feels a little like it crosses some threshold for me with my size hands. Your mileage may vary, right?
00:59:20 ◼ ► And when I look at my 7, I think if they just made an edge to edge screen 7, right, that would be a lot more pixels. And it would be almost as much as a 10.
00:59:28 ◼ ► But anyway, you're never going to get a phone that's like exactly the right size for, you know, they don't make a phone in gradations of 1 millimeter until you pick the exact size you want.
00:59:38 ◼ ► The phone maker has to pick a couple of sizes, you know, small, medium, large, tiny, small, medium, large or whatever. You know, so I think the 10 is a reasonable compromise.
00:59:48 ◼ ► For the big giant phone, I do not think that will be the best selling one out of these three models because it's going to cost $1,300 bucks.
00:59:55 ◼ ► Yeah, right. It's just going to be too expensive. I think the reason that the 8 Plus might have been best selling is because that was the only big phone option, right?
01:00:04 ◼ ► It was the only big phone option and because it was the step down line, you know, because it didn't have the OLED and everything, it was relatively cheaper.
01:00:13 ◼ ► So it makes sense for the 8 Plus to be the best seller, but I do not think this behemoth is going to be the best seller. It will just be too damn expensive.
01:00:19 ◼ ► The one I find most intriguing though, because those all make sense to me, the X is being the new replacement for the X, the 10 being the new replacement for the 7.
01:00:26 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah, you read it all the time. And then like the big giant phone replacing the Plus. Like those models make perfect sense.
01:00:33 ◼ ► Like they're not going to make the 10 slightly smaller to satisfy my desire to keep the 7 size, right?
01:00:40 ◼ ► And of course they're going to replace the Plus with an edge to edge and that's all good.
01:00:43 ◼ ► It's the middle one that's weird to me and I don't know how it's going to work out, right?
01:00:47 ◼ ► The middle one is a size that really hasn't ever existed before. They've just had the small, big and the tiny.
01:00:56 ◼ ► Now they're going to have tiny with the SE which may be going away, regular size which is like the 10, big which is like the phone that people want big phones, and then this in-between size.
01:01:05 ◼ ► And I think to Marco's point, the in-between size of this middle phone here is the size that is the most like generic Android phone you see around, right?
01:01:16 ◼ ► Because the generic Android phones aren't giant, but most generic Android phones I've seen are also not as small as the 10.
01:01:22 ◼ ► They're the size of this middle phone and this will be cheaper. It's got a single camera instead of dual. It's got LCD instead.
01:01:29 ◼ ► But if you look at it in someone's hand, we're back to the world where all the iPhones look like iPhones and only if you know and cared, you know which one is like the fancy, you know, if you had a 6 or a 7, no one can tell unless you really know what to look for.
01:01:41 ◼ ► And now if you have any of these models, they all have notches, they all have the little, you know, they're all have the edge to edge screen, they all have face ID.
01:01:47 ◼ ► They all look kind of the same. So I don't know what this middle phone is going to do. Is this going to be the runaway best seller just because people don't want to like, why would they pay extra for the one that's slightly too small and the one that's slightly too big?
01:02:02 ◼ ► This is the perfect size. It's just right. It's in the middle and it's cheaper. Yeah, the camera is not as good, but it's still a good camera.
01:02:10 ◼ ► Or will people look at that and say, oh, just so you know, the new iPhones are out. The one in the middle is the bad one. The other two are the real ones, the real iPhone whatevers, right?
01:02:21 ◼ ► No, just just buy them, right? Because there is that thing, you know, Apple's customer base has changed a lot. But part of it, like the history of the iPhone 10 is that Apple's customers usually want the best one if they can figure out which one that is.
01:02:35 ◼ ► And they'll pay for the more expensive model. The iPhone 10 has consistently been a good seller. Like in the beginning, it was like, oh, they're not selling enough of them.
01:02:41 ◼ ► And now it's like it's been a strong seller through its entire life because it was so clearly the best iPhone. There were no other options that were in contention for the best iPhone.
01:02:51 ◼ ► Even if you liked a bigger phone, there's no one who's getting an 8 plus and thinking they got the best iPhone because the 10 is sitting right there with its OLED screen and it's edge to edge and it's reading your face and no one is confused.
01:03:01 ◼ ► But that all those advantages go out the window. So now I'm staring at these phones. Which one is the best iPhone? Not the one in the middle. We know that because it's got the one camera and the LCD screen.
01:03:10 ◼ ► Is the big one the best because it's the most expensive? Is the small one the best because it's the same speed as the big one, but it doesn't, you know, take up your entire jeans pants pocket?
01:03:20 ◼ ► I don't know. We're back to the 7 and 7 plus and 6 and 6 plus world where it's hard to tell. And then the middle one, I just feel like it's a wild card. So I guess it really depends on pricing.
01:03:33 ◼ ► If that middle one is just slightly cheaper, then I think everything will work out. If the middle one is a lot cheaper, I think that we're going to have some troubles.
01:03:42 ◼ ► And in particular, it's going to be troubles for the 10 sized one because the people who want the giant phone and the super expensive one will get it. The people who want a 10 size phone but don't want to pay as much.
01:03:52 ◼ ► Like, I mean, Casey, I don't think you could stomach that metal phone because you're like size sensitive like I am where you already think the 10 is a little bit too big.
01:03:59 ◼ ► But other people, if they look at the 10 and that, they might think, oh, this one's cheaper and the screen is slightly bigger. Yeah, I'll get that one.
01:04:06 ◼ ► So, you know, I'm sure Apple knows what they're doing and I'm sure they'll price these things right or name them right or market them in the right way.
01:04:18 ◼ ► Even more interesting than last year, leaving the 8 and 8 plus because that was explicable because they have this one new special weird phone, the 10.
01:04:25 ◼ ► Right now, instead of evening out the whole line and just doing what we expect them, you got a big one and a small one and they both look like 10s.
01:04:32 ◼ ► Pick up the metal phone and the metal phone I find fascinating or let's call BBS and the rumors are wrong.
01:04:38 ◼ ► Ultimately, I think it makes a lot of sense. And look, I'm with you guys on my own personal sizing preferences here.
01:04:45 ◼ ► Like the 10 is like I got used to it pretty quickly, but it is a little bit big for me.
01:04:52 ◼ ► I'm fine with it. You know, if if there were like a like a I don't know, 10 se that were like a similar size as the iPhone 7.
01:05:03 ◼ ► But edge to edge so that like it was like, you know, a smaller version of this. I wouldn't keep the same resolution to right.
01:05:09 ◼ ► I wouldn't switch down to it because I like like the 10, even though it feels big to me, I like it overall.
01:05:15 ◼ ► But I don't want it to be any bigger. And like when I when I look at the same KBAZ video, first of all, he must have massive hands.
01:05:21 ◼ ► Like when I compare like he's holding these side by side and I compare how the how the current 10 looks in his hand to how it looks in my hand.
01:05:29 ◼ ► Like and then when you see the mock up of the new, you know, 10 plus whatever it's going to be called.
01:05:35 ◼ ► My God, it looks massive compared to the current 10. Like, I mean, look, who knows what other capabilities that phone will have.
01:05:46 ◼ ► Like, like, you know, they mentioned, I believe it was an upgrade this week. You know, like when when we had like the when before the 10, when we just had like, you know, phone and phone plus with six, seven and eight, the plus versions always had something better than the basic.
01:06:02 ◼ ► Then, like, you know, the regular six, seven, eight versions besides just the screen size, there was always some other kind of advantage.
01:06:09 ◼ ► So originally, like, like the pluses had higher resolution screens, like they had more pixel density with that weird, like 1080p kind of screen with the way it rendered.
01:06:18 ◼ ► Like so it was like a sharper screen in addition to it being larger. And also they had better cameras in all of them and faster CPUs at some point to know higher clock speed.
01:06:29 ◼ ► No, I don't know. I don't think so. But the six plus is actually kind of a bad deal because six plus had pretty bad.
01:06:39 ◼ ► You can handle the big screen. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think Ram, they get the same amount of Ram as the as the smaller phone, but it needed more to to fill the bigger pixel buffers because it was like kind of rendering a three X kind of thing.
01:06:50 ◼ ► So, yeah, that's the thing about the plus phones. They've always been like the non-native rez has bothered me on a, you know, on a idealistic level.
01:06:59 ◼ ► But obviously in practice, it's fine. Right. The performance you mentioned of being slow. That's that's a real world thing.
01:07:10 ◼ ► And this, as far as I can tell, this is not going to have the non-native rez and presumably they've sorted out all of the performance issues.
01:07:17 ◼ ► So this may be finally the first. I'm not going to say non-compromised plus phone, because to your point, very often they also have something about them that is better, like the cameras.
01:07:26 ◼ ► But I think this will have the same cameras as the as the ten size one. I think it will have a native rez screen.
01:07:33 ◼ ► I think we'll have enough RAM and CPU to handle it. And I don't know what you were going for.
01:07:37 ◼ ► But you are you going to say like, what will it have to recommend? What what could they put in the plus to make it better?
01:07:43 ◼ ► Yeah, because like I mean, you know, again, you could you could reuse one of the previous things they've done, which is, you know, a slightly better camera in some ways.
01:07:50 ◼ ► So like previously the plus phones, they would either have like a camera that was stabilized, whether that one wasn't stabilized or they would have a better camera entirely.
01:08:01 ◼ ► Or they would have a second camera like in like in the seven series that had a second camera.
01:08:06 ◼ ► We're doing five cameras. Right. So like so, you know, what might this be if it's going to be is it just going to be like the ten, you know, the ten s whatever it's called.
01:08:17 ◼ ► Is it going to be like the ten s with the bigger screen and this weird like split view mode, which is basically what the plus phones had before, which sucked.
01:08:23 ◼ ► It was horrible. Like we're like you'd rotate the phone and then you'd have a mini iPad split view mode where you'd have a tiny little column of your emails or chat messages or chat recipients.
01:08:35 ◼ ► And the left side and also uselessly tiny right side detail view. So like to simulate the split view on an iPad and then as developers you'd have to disable that because it would break everything.
01:08:46 ◼ ► And it was horrible. Yeah. So they're going to bring that back. It sounds like from this rumor that I consider a negative, not not a feature as somebody who briefly used a plus phone that bugged the crap out of me.
01:09:00 ◼ ► But anyway, but you know, I think they're going to do something like I don't know whether it will be better camera stuff in some way, whether it will be maybe pencil support, which we can talk about if you want.
01:09:13 ◼ ► But like if it's I bet they're going to do something. They're not going to just have it be the same phone as the X. Sorry, the ten s. But it's catching.
01:09:23 ◼ ► Sorry. Yeah. Like it's not going to be the same phone as as the ten s. But bigger screen. It's going to there's going to be something else about it because Apple wants to push people who want the best of the best to get the more expensive model.
01:09:37 ◼ ► Even like even if you are totally happy with the ten size, they want people like me and our podcast or friends who want the best model. They want us buying the most expensive one in the lineup.
01:09:48 ◼ ► And they're really good at finding ways to make that happen. If I could go back in time for years or whenever this phone was being designed and tell them, here's how you do that.
01:09:56 ◼ ► Here's how you put stuff in it to make it. First of all, I would make sure that they're not doing compromise, rez and everything. And so it's an even playing field.
01:10:02 ◼ ► And now here's the extra thing you add to make this more ripe. I wouldn't actually recommend pencil support just because I don't think the world is ready for that.
01:10:12 ◼ ► But look at the Samsung note series. I know. I know. Very successful. And it has some really good ideas. I know. I meant the Apple world. I mean, the Apple world. Yeah, we'll see.
01:10:24 ◼ ► I will say, like the current Apple pencil. No, that would be ridiculous because the Apple pencil, you plug it into the lightning port to charge it. Yeah.
01:10:34 ◼ ► First of all, that is the whole thing. It becomes a thing to fend off muggers. Right. And also like the current Apple pencil, it doesn't even fit in a pocket. It's so big.
01:10:44 ◼ ► Yeah, but no, the thing I would recommend that they add is a better front-facing camera. That's interesting. Because people use front-facing cameras a lot.
01:10:54 ◼ ► Like selfies are a thing. Instagram is a thing. The front-facing camera has been improving, but always the back-facing one is better. If you want to use the extra space you have in a plus phone to some effect that people will place value on, people value the quality of the front-facing camera.
01:11:11 ◼ ► So I would say make that a better camera than in the 10 size. And that will be unambiguously superior. Obviously, they could also make the back camera better because again, they have more room.
01:11:20 ◼ ► I'm not sure how they could do that now that everything is all stabilized. Maybe they would, I mean, you could add a third camera, but it seems like that's not what they're doing. So I guess it just comes down to adding better optics, a larger sensor, you know, whatever.
01:11:31 ◼ ► But the front-facing camera is a good place to differentiate for the largest phone. And beyond that, if you have room to make the clock speed higher or add more RAM or something like that, you can always do that stuff.
01:11:46 ◼ ► But honestly, I don't think that's more of a selling point for tech nerds than it is a selling point for regular people who will be able to appreciate the extra quality of the better front-facing camera that makes their selfies look that much better.
01:11:58 ◼ ► You really rocked my world in saying that that's the size of your average Android phone because I think you're right. I'm talking about the middle one. I think that is about right. And that suddenly makes this make a lot more sense to me.
01:12:12 ◼ ► Right? Because think about like, like that's the size of both the 678 Plus, which has been very successful, and also the size of a lot of Android phones.
01:12:21 ◼ ► So that's, you know, if you think about what Apple needs from the market, like they need to do two things with the iPhone market. They need to try to grow, even though it seems fairly saturated, try to grow their market share.
01:12:33 ◼ ► So they're going to attack Android phones and they need to push the ASP, the average selling price, higher. So for their high-end buyers, which is a lot of their buyers, they're releasing these more expensive phones that go even higher end, even higher end, even higher priced.
01:12:47 ◼ ► And for the Android people, they're releasing another one that's going to attack that market. Like it makes total sense from a business perspective. Like this is literally, this is the most important part of Apple's business.
01:12:56 ◼ ► And the, and it has, you know, it has been hard to grow it in recent years as the market has matured and slowed down and saturated and everything. This is what they have to do.
01:13:04 ◼ ► Drive the average price up and somehow increase their market share. And that's really hard to do. So of course, they're going to put, first of all, a lot of time and thought into it. And second of all, they're going to try their damnedest to actually make big differences there.
01:13:18 ◼ ► So here's the question, I'm staring at these phones and making me think about it. We've been assuming obviously that the middle one will be cheaper because it's LCD, it's got one camera. You can see that you can see the cheapness right there. You just look at it and you can tell we saved money, right?
01:13:32 ◼ ► The question is, does it use the same family of system on a chip as the 10 size and the plus size? Or does it use an earlier generation?
01:13:44 ◼ ► That's a good question because with the current generation of 10, it is the same internals in almost every way between the 10, the 8, and the 8 plus. And even though there is a large price difference between them.
01:13:58 ◼ ► So it would be not surprising at all, and in fact, I'd say probably the most likely option, that all of them would have the same internals. But the purpose of the 8 and 8 plus were not to be cheap. The purpose of the 8 and 8 plus were to continue the traditional iPhone line during this period of transition and offer something at the same price it always was.
01:14:30 ◼ ► Yeah, right. And so it wouldn't be unheard of, now that the market has shown that they will accept a $1200 phone or whatever it is, it wouldn't be unheard of for Apple to say, "All right, well it's no longer necessary for us to maintain that old price point. We can move up with that."
01:14:45 ◼ ► And then maybe this other one kind of comes somewhere between the iPhone SE and the iPhone 8 pricing. You know, somewhere between like $400 and $800.
01:14:55 ◼ ► But at the same time, this is all based on rumors and leaks and stuff like that. Rumors and leaks are usually horrendously horrible at predicting pricing and marketing.
01:15:08 ◼ ► They're terrible. Even Mark Gurman and his great sources are terrible at predicting marketing and pricing. So it wouldn't surprise me at all if this is kind of like the iPhone 5C situation.
01:15:18 ◼ ► The rumors, it might even have more parallels with the colors, but the rumors of the 5C before it launched were that Apple was going to make a really inexpensive phone to compete better in Brazil and India and China.
01:15:31 ◼ ► But what ended up happening was they released a phone that was cheaper than their main flagship model by I think $100.
01:15:40 ◼ ► And it didn't make it as cheap as the rumors and analysts and everything wanted it to be. It just made it the cheapest of the new line.
01:15:49 ◼ ► That could be what this is. This could just be, you know, it's not $1200, so it's cheap.
01:15:56 ◼ ► And the rumors are all saying, "Oh, this is made to be even cheaper to maybe replace the SE or whatever." But no, I don't think so. I think this is going to be like, this is what replaces the 8 and 8+.
01:16:06 ◼ ► It takes that role in the lineup, not the role of something like the SE or something a little bit higher than the SE.
01:16:14 ◼ ► So I don't expect this to be cheap. I expect this to be the price iPhones always were until last year, plus $30.
01:16:22 ◼ ► Because that's their strategy recently. And so because of that, because they did the iPhone 8 and 8+ this past year with the same guts as the X in most ways, I think they're going to do the same thing here.
01:16:36 ◼ ► I think this phone's going to have the same guts as whatever the XS ends up being called and just with these other ways to save money, the different screen, the different camera, stuff like that.
01:16:45 ◼ ► So the reason I think I can get away with having the same internals across all three of these phones, same system on a chip I mean, is because that's not the biggest cost in the phone.
01:16:55 ◼ ► The OLED screen is the most expensive component, so they ditched that for an LCD phone, which is presumably cheaper. The cameras are expensive and they ditched those.
01:17:02 ◼ ► I mean, the system on a chip is probably a similar price to one of the cameras or something. I don't know the exact part list things.
01:17:08 ◼ ► But that's not like you don't get actually that much savings. What you do get is differentiation. But really, what I'm thinking when I look at this is, if they want to, if their goal is to sell a lot of them, they would put the previous generation system on a chip in there and sell it for a lot less.
01:17:28 ◼ ► But I don't think, to your point, I think their goal is to sell a lot of the expensive one, not to sell a lot of the cheaper one. So why wouldn't they keep the system on a chip? Because it makes the lesser phone seem more valuable, right?
01:17:41 ◼ ► That it's just as fast, but it has one camera instead of two. Like that's basically the pitch in the Apple Store would be that.
01:17:48 ◼ ► The Apple Store is not going to try to tell you about differences between OLED and LCD. And they're not going to try to tell you about the megapixel differences or if there's a RAM.
01:17:59 ◼ ► The only thing they're going to say is, you can see that there's one camera instead of two. We can all see that. But it's just as fast as the other ones. And then it can be at the iPhone 8 price, right?
01:18:10 ◼ ► Which, to your point, is not cheap, but it is less expensive than the other two phones they sell, which are the better ones.
01:18:18 ◼ ► But Apple being Apple, they could have it be expensive as the 8, but also put the cheaper system on a chip on it. And most people probably wouldn't mind.
01:18:28 ◼ ► So I don't know which direction they're going to go with that. I wish, obviously we all wish we knew the product names because the names would tell you everything about how Apple sees the positioning of these things.
01:18:37 ◼ ► But if you just have a bunch of case designs, you really have, you know, Apple can go a lot of different ways with what they stuff in those cases.
01:18:44 ◼ ► So I think that I come down with you guys that it would probably be the same system on a chip across all three phones. But let me throw a possible curveball at you. Is it the same amount of RAM across all three phones?
01:18:58 ◼ ► Hopefully the big one has more, if anything. But if not, then yeah, just because I don't see how you could get away with it. They're not exactly generous with RAM, so it's not like the 10 size one is going to have this abundance of RAM that they can skimp on.
01:19:14 ◼ ► The 10 size one is going to have enough RAM to be a 10. And the one that's slightly bigger is going to have the same amount because it needs that much RAM to be a slightly bigger than a 10 thing.
01:19:23 ◼ ► And I don't think they'd save enough money to be worth it. Like those RAM chips, again, with the parts pricing, if you were cutting in the RAM in half, yeah, maybe you'd save a couple bucks.
01:19:34 ◼ ► If you're making it slightly smaller, it doesn't make any sense. They're not going to cut it in half. They're not going to make it slightly smaller. I think they will have the same amount with the possible exception of the big one.
01:19:42 ◼ ► And it could be that that one has a little bit more. But Apple being Apple, probably not.
01:19:46 ◼ ► Also, first of all, consumers don't know what RAM is. And second of all, Apple doesn't tell them. This is not something Apple uses for marketing.
01:19:55 ◼ ► So they wouldn't be able to say, "One of the reasons you should get the bigger phone is because it has more RAM." Because Apple would never talk about the RAM.
01:20:07 ◼ ► Yeah, I don't think that's an area that they would distinguish unless they... Yeah, it's in the sense of they wouldn't make the 6.1 have less RAM as the purpose.
01:20:25 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, it could just window buffers or who knows. There could be some reason or some feature that we don't know about that requires extra RAM or keeping things in RAM more often or to do simultaneous front and back facing camera 360 degree selfies or whatever the hell they're coming up with.
01:20:39 ◼ ► You can imagine scenarios that would be exclusive to the plus size phone that would require more RAM. That's been Apple's MO for all iOS devices.
01:20:47 ◼ ► RAM is not a thing that people care about. Apple puts in what they think is enough RAM.
01:20:52 ◼ ► Apple thus far, even on the iPad Pro, which is an iOS device with Pro right there in the name, they have resisted using RAM capacity to charge pro users more money.
01:21:06 ◼ ► They could, I think, because if anyone's going to know what RAM is and what it means to them, it's somebody who does, like Vitici, who does serious work every day on an iOS device and who sees the RAM limits.
01:21:19 ◼ ► Like has lots of applications in flight at once and is frustrated when one of them gets booted out of memory.
01:21:24 ◼ ► Vitici would pay 200 extra bucks for another gig of RAM. Are you kidding? Like that's a way to make money.
01:21:29 ◼ ► You know, again, you can make money off pro users by selling them things that only they know and care about at an exorbitant price.
01:21:40 ◼ ► And they have been adding more RAM over time. But they if they are going to move in that direction, it's going to happen on like an iPad type device.
01:21:47 ◼ ► I don't think phones, you know, as much as Vitici may use this stuff, he's not like the iPad is where he probably wants more RAM, not in his phone.
01:21:55 ◼ ► So we can do seven phone thing. You can't even do the weird drag and drop multitasking stuff on the same extent on phones as you can on an iPad.
01:22:02 ◼ ► So I'm looking to the iPad line to add an extra RAM option or to add a model with tremendously more RAM for tremendously more money, because they will sell to a small number of people just like the Mac Pro.
01:22:14 ◼ ► Well, and also, you know, RAM, it costs some money, but, you know, the the amounts we're talking like, you know, one or two gigs here and there, it's not a lot of money.
01:22:22 ◼ ► It mainly costs power in devices this size. And, you know, in phones, you know, because all the RAM, you know, you have to keep RAM powered for to keep its data.
01:22:30 ◼ ► And so it's actually a non trivial amount of power drain to have more RAM added to something like a phone.
01:22:38 ◼ ► It's way less of a relative power drain compared to the battery size on an iPad, because the battery on an iPad is way, it's almost a laptop size battery on an iPad.
01:22:46 ◼ ► But it's, you know, the same chip really, or like a slightly higher powered version of the chip.
01:23:01 ◼ ► You know, the trade offs aren't like that big to do that, whereas adding it to a phone, like you have a battery trade off there that might not be worth it.
01:23:08 ◼ ► And also, like the way iOS manages RAM and manages apps not staying persistent in RAM very much.
01:23:16 ◼ ► And like it's it's so good at managing RAM that you don't need gobs of RAM the same way you do on a Mac or a PC, because, you know, the way the OS works is totally different.
01:23:36 ◼ ► And oftentimes the trade off is better to not add it if you don't need to to save the battery life.
01:23:42 ◼ ► And again, with the big phone, if you want to add it somewhere for some feature, you can afford it or the big phone because it's got the biggest battery.
01:23:47 ◼ ► So, you know, like the application where applications where it might come in handy on a phone is phone games, because people do play games on their phone and phone games are surprisingly demanding.
01:23:56 ◼ ► And phone games will eject everything else from memory like they will because they'll either leak memory or they'll just use a tremendous amount on their own.
01:24:03 ◼ ► And that's not a great experience for all these teens who are just playing what the hell is that Clash of Clans or whatever on their phone constantly.
01:24:11 ◼ ► Everything else is out of memory. And then they get a message and the notification comes up.
01:24:15 ◼ ► They got to launch messages from scratch and they do that cycle constantly back and forth from game to non-game application.
01:24:21 ◼ ► And it's launching the application fresh every single time they switch and further killing their battery as if playing the game wasn't killing it enough.
01:24:27 ◼ ► No, but they're doing it anyway because they're either launching the big social apps, which are all tremendous apps that use up all your memory because they're full of garbage.
01:24:39 ◼ ► So they're relaunching all their apps from scratch most of the time anyway, no matter what they're watching.
01:24:44 ◼ ► If iOS 13 made flicking up on your applications, kept the animation there and did exactly the same thing and only didn't have any effect on what applications were in RAM, how long would it take us to notice?
01:24:58 ◼ ► I suppose Steve Trout and Smith would figure it out eventually, but first of all, there's no way teens would notice.
01:25:04 ◼ ► It just had no effect whatsoever. Eventually there'd be rumors of like, "It seems like when I force quit things, sometimes I have to do it twice." That could be the mechanism.
01:25:15 ◼ ► The first time you do it, it does nothing except for remove the picture from your screen.
01:25:29 ◼ ► Because all they want to do is flick things up. They want to be the janitor in Steve Jobs parlance. They want to make things neat and tidy. That's the compulsion.
01:25:36 ◼ ► So let them have the compulsion. Best selling game on the iPhone. Force quit all my apps. That's fantastic.
01:25:43 ◼ ► Has anyone made that name? I guess Apple wouldn't allow it. You can't make things like that.
01:25:48 ◼ ► People would love that. A free to play game with force quitting apps on a speed trial where you have to do some activity, force quit apps, and do some activity in force quit apps. Kids would love that.
01:26:01 ◼ ► You'd have to be doing some other activity like cooking mama or something where you have some busy work activity that you're trying to do. But periodically, you have to stop what you're doing and quickly go force quit a bunch of apps and then go back to what you were doing.
01:26:13 ◼ ► And then the level loading screen, if you don't force quit all your apps when they're ready to load, it doesn't successfully load.
01:26:20 ◼ ► This is what kids have been training for. It's like the last Starfighter but for force quitting apps.
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01:28:07 ◼ ► Let's do some Ask ATP. Adam Porter writes, "John, on the last ATP, you mentioned having both Plex and Infuse installed on your Apple TV. Why both? What do you see as the pros and cons of each?"
01:28:18 ◼ ► So Plex, we don't know what Plex is. It's a server thing that organizes all your media and it serves them up with nice cover art and metadata and lets you and groups them into TV and movies and so on and so forth.
01:28:30 ◼ ► And it'll transcode on the fly and you can get to all your media from outside your house if you set it up correctly, etc., etc.
01:28:36 ◼ ► Right. And so in my application, I have Plex running on either my Synology or on my Mac, but my Synology has a wimpy CPU.
01:28:44 ◼ ► And so we can transcode some stuff, but some stuff you just can't transcode. And my Mac isn't always on or isn't always running Plex.
01:28:51 ◼ ► So it can transcode anything, but it's not always on, always available like the Synology. Right?
01:28:56 ◼ ► So I have Plex in there because it's a really nice app and that's how I like to view my stuff.
01:28:59 ◼ ► Why do I have Infuse? Infuse just wants to be pointed at a file server. So it's pointing at the SMB share on my Synology.
01:29:07 ◼ ► It's not pointing at my, you know, it can actually read stuff in the Plex thing too, I think.
01:29:10 ◼ ► But anyway, it just says, just give me a file and it pulls that file onto the Apple TV and decodes it on the Apple TV.
01:29:30 ◼ ► Plex is my preferred, but if Plex looks like it's chugging because my Synology can't transcode it, I let Infuse do it locally.
01:29:41 ◼ ► And yeah, so I basically, Plex is my first go-to. And if it's having problems, I go to Infuse.
01:29:57 ◼ ► So I don't ever really have this particular problem, but it does make sense what you're saying.
01:30:01 ◼ ► Will Fout writes, "Why are Apple's ARM chips so much faster than their competitors? Aren't they just licensing the same ARM design?
01:30:07 ◼ ► Why can't anyone license ARM manufactured with TSMC and wind up with the same performance as Apple? What gives?"
01:30:14 ◼ ► Why can't they do that? That's such a great idea. Someone should have thought about it.
01:30:18 ◼ ► ARM is an instruction set. There's lots of x86-64 compatible CPUs, lots of ARM compatible CPUs.
01:30:27 ◼ ► There's actually lots of different instruction sets within ARM that, as with your details, you don't have to worry about unless you're picking options in Xcode to build your thing.
01:30:33 ◼ ► But anyway, Apple used to license ARM chip designs, but starting with the iPhone 6, help me out here.
01:30:48 ◼ ► 5S maybe? Yeah. So starting several years ago, Apple, rather than taking an ARM CPU design from ARM the company and maybe tweaking it or modifying it or putting it in a system on top of the modules and stuff,
01:31:02 ◼ ► they started making their own CPUs that, yes, use the ARM instruction set, but otherwise share nothing with anything ARM offers to anybody.
01:31:12 ◼ ► So it is an ARM compatible CPU entirely of Apple's design. That's why they're better because Apple bought PA Semi and hired a bunch of great semiconductor engineers and spent many, many years
01:31:27 ◼ ► and have ramped up to now be basically the best mobile CPU designers in the entire world by a large margin.
01:31:41 ◼ ► No one else can buy those. It's all Apple proprietary. Apple is the only one that can make them because they've literally made the CPU design themselves.
01:31:48 ◼ ► And Apple is doing something similar with GPU. They used to license GPU designs from, what is it, Imagination Labs? PowerVR.
01:31:55 ◼ ► PowerVR and Imagination. Anyway, they're trying to go their own way with that. I forget if the current ones have all their own stuff in it. I don't remember.
01:32:02 ◼ ► I don't think we know. We know that they said that somehow or somehow we heard that they are not shipping PowerVR designs anymore.
01:32:11 ◼ ► Or at least pure PowerVR designs. But I don't think we really know what they're shipping instead.
01:32:17 ◼ ► Anyway, yeah. So they do it themselves. And it's really, really hard to do it yourself since it takes many, many years and lots and lots of money.
01:32:24 ◼ ► And that's exactly what they did. They spent lots and lots of money and took many, many years and now they're the best mobile processor designers in the entire world.
01:32:30 ◼ ► All right. Mark Iglio Leorti, I'm so sorry, Mark, writes, "What's your home printer setup? All in one slash simple? Jet or laser? Color black and white? Network, DARE printer, USB? What's going on?"
01:32:43 ◼ ► And the only reason I put this in is because I just got a printer on Saturday for the first time in probably 15 years.
01:32:50 ◼ ► I saw Declan playing in the printer box. I'm like, "What in the hell do you have a printer box?"
01:32:53 ◼ ► Uh-huh. That is the truth. I replaced a hand-me-down Lexmark Optra S1625. And you should, I will put a link in the show notes.
01:33:02 ◼ ► I don't know when this thing was new, but I genuinely think it was probably 15 years ago. It was a, it does have an Ethernet jack on it.
01:33:11 ◼ ► It was something that Dad bought for our house, I'm pretty sure back when I was in high school. So that is 18 years ago, more than 18 years ago.
01:33:20 ◼ ► And it was, it's a, the particular setup we had, it was a duplex black and white laser, and it still ran up until a few days ago when we donated it to, I think, Goodwill or something.
01:33:32 ◼ ► Anyway, the thing was a tank, and it weighed as much as a tank. And I really wanted to have a scanner at home for occasional scanning of things.
01:33:43 ◼ ► I don't do a lot of scanning, so I don't need a Fujitsu, whatever it is that Marco I'm sure will bring up in a moment, but I do occasionally scan things.
01:33:51 ◼ ► And I also wanted something that could do color on occasion, because now that I don't have an office to go to to do these things, I need to do that at home.
01:34:06 ◼ ► The Hewlett Packard LaserJet Pro M2-8 1 FDW all-in-one wireless color laser printer, Amazon Dash replacement ready, T6B828.
01:34:16 ◼ ► Okay, that was a lot. Basically it's a scanner, printer, I think it actually might even fax, yeah there was a phone line on the back, it faxes, it does all the things, and in the last five days that I've been using it, it works great.
01:34:29 ◼ ► So that's what I do. And it's a color laser, I don't know if I said it was color or not, but it's a color laser.
01:34:37 ◼ ► So I have a couple of constraints. I have space constraints, so I don't have a lot of places, convenient places to put a large thing or a little on multiple things.
01:34:46 ◼ ► So we've always gotten those all-in-one devices that are printers and scanners, because we do scan and use it as a scanner and a copier, but also as a printer.
01:34:56 ◼ ► I've had a series of these things, none of them have been particularly good. This one, I had to go to System Preferences to look up what it is because I don't even know, it's old.
01:35:12 ◼ ► I've found it very frustrating since the day I got it because this was before, what is it, AirPrint, whatever Apple's current printing simplification technology, it predates that.
01:35:23 ◼ ► So you are at the mercy of the proprietary drivers for Mac and, you know, forget about iOS, proprietary Mac drivers offered by Canon.
01:35:34 ◼ ► This printer, in theory, has the ability to do Wi-Fi printing. In practice, I got it to work like once briefly with one computer and it has never worked again.
01:35:43 ◼ ► I used to have it plugged into my airport, getting back to the airport thing, because the airport had this USB port on it that you could plug a printer into and do printer sharing.
01:35:53 ◼ ► That worked for several years and eventually stopped working completely inexplicably, or it would work, but then like every time you'd go to print after a two-day gap,
01:36:02 ◼ ► like your computer couldn't see the printer or just hang forever so you'd have to unplug the printer from the USB port and plug it back into the USB.
01:36:13 ◼ ► So at this point, this stupid behemoth printer is connected by a USB cable to my wife's iMac, which is the only computer in the house that you can print from or scan from, which is not ideal.
01:36:24 ◼ ► I really wish, you know, it's the Office Space scene all over again. I would smash this thing to bits.
01:36:32 ◼ ► The print quality and the scanning quality are actually pretty good. I've done a lot of scanning on it, a surprising amount of scanning.
01:36:39 ◼ ► And the print quality, I mean, it's an inkjet, so like, don't expect miracles, but it's fine for, you know, printing kids' documents, and it's pretty fast.
01:36:47 ◼ ► I would love for, I would love to have a thing that uses all the modern printing stuff that could be Wi-Fi printed from everywhere, including iOS devices,
01:36:56 ◼ ► that is smaller than this, that is a laser instead of an inkjet, and that has a scanning thing. So maybe I should look at Casey's thing,
01:37:08 ◼ ► It's not huge, but I'm coming from, like I said, a tank, so you may have different opinions.
01:37:17 ◼ ► No, no, it's sitting next to my desk. I'll send you a picture. Remind me, I'll send you a picture.
01:37:23 ◼ ► I'm looking at your printer now, yeah, anyway, but the thing about this one is, so far, it's been, like, it hasn't broken, which is a blessing and a curse.
01:37:31 ◼ ► It's a blessing, it's like, oh great, it must be good quality, it hasn't broken over many, many years, but now I'm kind of like, I really wish that thing would break,
01:37:37 ◼ ► so I have an excuse to get a new printer. Because it's working fine, like, there's nothing wrong with it, and it is annoying to have to print from one computer,
01:37:48 ◼ ► So, I should mention, with regard to this new printer that I got, it has both wireless and Ethernet, I have it connected via Ethernet.
01:38:00 ◼ ► I actually have it connected, in a sense, to the Synology, so what I can do is, I can use the little tiny LCD on the printer,
01:38:11 ◼ ► and say "Scan to a network drive", and I have, like, an incoming folder within the Synology that it will just drop scans, which is kind of cool,
01:38:19 ◼ ► so I can go in later and actually, you know, quote-unquote process, and by that I mean, you know, move that PDF somewhere else.
01:38:25 ◼ ► Additionally, it does support AirPrint, which I didn't think was that important, because I don't think I ever really want to print from iOS,
01:38:36 ◼ ► Erin occasionally prints from her iOS devices, or would, I should say, would like to print from her iOS devices, but can't,
01:38:43 ◼ ► and when I told her this, she was really, really excited, and I didn't even expect that in a million years, but she got really enthusiastic about it,
01:38:55 ◼ ► Apparently, my previous printer, which is shown in almost the configuration that I had it in terms of, like, extra duplex attachments and extra trays and all that,
01:39:22 ◼ ► Okay, so we're talking about a few different things here. We're talking about scanners, and we're talking about printers,
01:39:30 ◼ ► So my suggestion, which is an old, you know, like, back when productivity blogs were a thing,
01:39:36 ◼ ► one of the things I would write about would be the Fujitsu ScanSnap series of scanners.
01:39:44 ◼ ► It's only a document feeder, and it scans, they scan the top and bottom of any paper you put through them at the same time,
01:39:51 ◼ ► and they shoot them through really fast. So it's a very fast way to scan a stack of paper into a giant searchable text PDF.
01:40:00 ◼ ► And it looks pretty decent for that. Like, I wouldn't use these things for, like, scanning your family pictures
01:40:06 ◼ ► because they're not great on photos. They're made for fast, very reliable, very, you know, just kind of, you know,
01:40:18 ◼ ► I use this as kind of, you know, a paperless thing to just scan any paper that gets mailed to me that might ever be important.
01:40:25 ◼ ► I scan it, it gets indexed to a PDF by the built-in software, and it gets saved to a folder, and I don't do any other sorting of it.
01:40:32 ◼ ► It's simply by time, and if I ever need to look back, I either use spotlight searches or I just flip through when I know the time was
01:40:38 ◼ ► and just flip the flip, you know, in quick look until I find the file. And it's wonderful.
01:40:47 ◼ ► I also maintain a flatbed scanner. And I've tried, you know, because, as I mentioned, this thing is terrible for photos,
01:40:54 ◼ ► and sometimes you want to scan something that you don't want to put through a document feeder, like maybe, like, an old family photo print
01:41:00 ◼ ► that you don't trust to the rollers, or maybe something that's not quite flat that, you know, that you need to scan or something like that.
01:41:06 ◼ ► So, I've maintained flatbed scanners over the years, going through various Epson, Canon ones, and they're all garbage.
01:41:14 ◼ ► Like, they're just terrible. But, you know, occasionally I need one, and so I'll end up buying a flatbed scanner maybe every four or five years,
01:41:23 ◼ ► using it for about a year or two, and then eventually thinking, "I don't need this anymore," so I give it away, or it breaks,
01:41:35 ◼ ► And then eventually I need another one, I buy another one. But the latest one I bought, this was actually a surprisingly good deal.
01:41:43 ◼ ► It is the Epson Workforce WF7710, and the reason I bought this one is because TIFF's family had a collection of these large, like, 11 by 17, roughly,
01:41:59 ◼ ► really old family photos, like from, like, I don't know, from, like, the 30s or something, like, really old, like, you know, it looked like they were paintings,
01:42:07 ◼ ► like, they were that old, and we wanted to scan them. And they, because they were, like, roughly 11 by 17, they wouldn't fit on a regular, you know, 8.5 by 11 or 8.5 by 14 scanner.
01:42:19 ◼ ► And if you look at the market for 11 by 17 scanners, there's basically nothing under about $1,000 that's any good at all, except this Epson All-in-One that is 170 bucks,
01:42:34 ◼ ► and it's an all-in-one printer scanner fax copy or whatever. I don't know if it has a fax, but yeah, it does have a fax. God, who uses that anymore?
01:42:40 ◼ ► But it still, it has it, if you're one of the people who uses a fax, and it happens to be 11 by 17, and it has an 11 by 17 scanner in this huge printer thing.
01:42:50 ◼ ► And I should, you know, disclaim, inkjet printers are the worst. They are just terrible.
01:42:58 ◼ ► Unless you're printing photos with high quality photo paper using high quality photo ink. In that case, inkjet is the best print you can get outside of a pro photo lab, like, you know, by mail or something.
01:43:11 ◼ ► But if you want photo prints, inkjet printers, and you're willing to pay for the nice photo paper, and you're willing to use a lot of ink and pay a pretty high cost per page,
01:43:20 ◼ ► inkjets are by far the best, especially Epson inkjets, and especially the ones that aren't this one that have like the five different tanks.
01:43:28 ◼ ► And you can get, like, some of the advanced Epson ones, they have like six different ink tanks, and it's like two different shades, like there's like a light cyan and a light magenta in addition to the regular cyan and the regular magenta.
01:43:39 ◼ ► Some of them have a gray ink, so you can print grayscale, combining the gray with the black to get even better grays and blacks.
01:43:46 ◼ ► They get really advanced now, and the prints you get out of those, when they're working right, when none of the heads are clogged, when all the ink is full, and when you have the right paper and everything's aligned,
01:43:58 ◼ ► they are phenomenal and way better than you can get from even the best of the best color lasers.
01:44:05 ◼ ► That being said, inkjet is frustrating for lots of other reasons. Like, for prints, I really don't like inkjet. I hate the way paper documents look, like when you print text by inkjet.
01:44:17 ◼ ► I've never seen it look right. Like, unless it's on glossy photo paper, in which case it looks weird.
01:44:22 ◼ ► But otherwise, because of the way ink kind of bleeds into the paper a little bit, as opposed to toner, which is melted plastic on top of the paper,
01:44:30 ◼ ► it just never looks very sharp. It always looks a little bit fuzzy with inkjet. You can always tell.
01:44:36 ◼ ► And if you get a drop of water on inkjet prints, it smears immediately. Whereas, you get a drop of water on a laser print, it's fine.
01:44:46 ◼ ► So, I love laser printers. Not to mention the fact that laser printers are usually faster and way lower cost per page.
01:44:55 ◼ ► Now, the cost per page thing has gotten a little bit narrower as we've gone into both super tank inkjet printers, which I don't ever recommend,
01:45:03 ◼ ► because they clog up like crazy and they're very expensive. And also, as lasers have gotten cheaper, like we've had lower and lower end lasers,
01:45:11 ◼ ► the lasers are now playing tricks with how much toner you get per cartridge or sitting with starter cartridges.
01:45:17 ◼ ► The cost per page advantage of laser is getting smaller, basically, as time goes on, as laser printers get cheaper and smaller and worse.
01:45:30 ◼ ► Now, the downside is they're huge. And they can be fairly expensive relative to these other ones.
01:45:36 ◼ ► My current setup, which I've gotten to after a bunch of years of using crappy old smaller inkjets, you can get, sorry, lasers,
01:45:50 ◼ ► By the way, another rule, sorry, I'm all over the place with this. Another rule is no printer or scanner I buy can require software on my computer,
01:45:59 ◼ ► with the exception of the ScanSnap. That's for legacy reasons. Otherwise, I'm not buying a scanner or printer that requires software.
01:46:06 ◼ ► If the Apple built-in drivers don't support it, and if the built-in Apple scanning app does not support it, I won't buy it.
01:46:14 ◼ ► And, you know, relying on other people's software is terrible. I've been burned too many times in the past for that.
01:46:22 ◼ ► Even the Fujitsu software run on the Mac Mini under my TV, which is funny because by a various combination of Apple scripts and weirdnesses,
01:46:29 ◼ ► every time I scan a document on my ScanSnap, I know it's done because the speakers in my living room play the ding sound from Mac OS.
01:46:38 ◼ ► Anyway, so I recommend, you know, something that is networked, and whether that's Wi-Fi or Ethernet, it's up to you, don't really care.
01:46:47 ◼ ► That supports air print, which now pretty much all printers you could buy today support air prints. That's no big deal.
01:46:58 ◼ ► If you're willing to have two and you ever print photos, get an inkjet for your photo prints, but still use the laser for everything else.
01:47:06 ◼ ► If you want an all-in-one that has a built-in scanner and everything, you're probably going to be looking at an inkjet for that.
01:47:13 ◼ ► All-in-one lasers do exist, but they're pretty large, and there's not that many of them that are any good.
01:47:20 ◼ ► My printer happiness was achieved not when I had my little, like, you know, hundred dollar brother laser printer that was monochrome,
01:47:31 ◼ ► not when I had my two hundred and twenty dollar HP, I don't know, two thousand series color laser, which is fine, but not great.
01:47:42 ◼ ► It was achieved when I decided, you know what I want? I want the kind of printer that my college computer lab used to have,
01:47:50 ◼ ► because there is this wonderful experience that you have with those printers that you don't get with anything else,
01:47:57 ◼ ► and first of all, it has a big enough paper tray that you almost never need to refill it, step one.
01:48:02 ◼ ► Step two is I want to hit print on my computer, get up, walk over to the printer, which is about fifteen feet away,
01:48:11 ◼ ► and have it be done when I get there. And you can do that if you get the larger HP lasers.
01:48:18 ◼ ► So what I have now, which I've had for a couple of years, which I absolutely love, is the HP Color LaserJet M553.
01:48:30 ◼ ► I've never changed any of the supplies, because it's made for, you know, businesses and computer labs,
01:48:35 ◼ ► so it's made for heavy use, way heavier than I ever use, and I hit print, and I get up and I walk over to it, and it's there.
01:48:42 ◼ ► It's sitting in the paper tray, warm and done. And that is the most satisfying thing you could possibly get from a printer.
01:48:49 ◼ ► So I'm very, very happy with my giant four or five hundred dollar HP Color LaserJet M553 for everything but photos,
01:49:03 ◼ ► How do you tell whether it requires drivers? Because that's always the problem, is that you're looking at printers,
01:49:07 ◼ ► and I'm like, "I need to know how this will interact with all of my Macs," and I've never found a good way to tell.
01:49:15 ◼ ► If you search, I usually just search the web for this page. Apple maintains a page somewhere on their support site.
01:49:22 ◼ ► It basically lists for each version of Mac OS what scanners and printers are supported.
01:49:28 ◼ ► And so I usually just look down, yeah, I looked on that list, and usually I can find one of the ones that's on there.
01:49:34 ◼ ► And, you know, ultimately, they tend to support pretty much every printer or scanner that exists when the OS is released.
01:49:43 ◼ ► And this is a little hard to find because printers and scanners and stuff get new models all the time.
01:49:51 ◼ ► But if you look at this list, and you can usually find, like, "Oh, here's one that was maybe, like, last year's model that's still for sale,"
01:50:01 ◼ ► And occasionally, if you see one where, like, the model number is not quite a match, but it's close,
01:50:08 ◼ ► a lot of times that works anyway because, like, it was actually the same guts, but, like, this model has a duplexer or something,
01:50:18 ◼ ► But, yeah. But, yeah, no software, and nothing gets plugged into my computer via USB either.
01:50:25 ◼ ► Like, it sits on the network in a closet, and I don't see it, I don't hear it, and there's no software.
01:50:35 ◼ ► So the problem I run into with all my all-in-ones is, even if the printer is supported, does that mean it's supported only if you plug it in with USB?
01:50:44 ◼ ► Does it mean it's supported over Wi-Fi? Does it mean it's supported for printing only and not scanning?
01:50:54 ◼ ► Right, does it mean that I can print when it's connected to my Wi-Fi router, but I can't scan when it's connected to my Wi-Fi router?
01:51:02 ◼ ► So it's very difficult for me to determine. I guess I could buy it and just return it or whatever.
01:51:06 ◼ ► I can tell you my Epson WF7710, the 11x17 giant inkjet all-in-one, is totally supported wirelessly.
01:51:24 ◼ ► But the Epson one, I can tell you, is supported with no software installation whatsoever, scanning included.
01:51:29 ◼ ► Even using the paper feeder on top, which is like a small automatic document feeder on top of there.
01:51:42 ◼ ► Maybe I should buy that to replace this stupid thing, because I think it's actually smaller.
01:51:52 ◼ ► So it's not small. And keep in mind, as a printer, it's mediocre, because it's an inkjet.
01:51:59 ◼ ► Yeah, well I already have a mediocre inkjet printer, and I meant smaller in terms of height.
01:52:01 ◼ ► Length and width, it might actually still be smaller than mine, because my thing is not the size of, you know.
01:52:30 ◼ ► It's been, again, I've had it for five days, so consider, you know, what you're dealing with here.
01:52:41 ◼ ► I spent something like $330, but go ahead and hit up CamelCamelCamel and see what they say.
01:52:47 ◼ ► Because it can be up to like $500, or it can be as cheap as, you know, again, about $300.
01:52:54 ◼ ► And I'm sure it's not as nice or as fast as Marco's ridiculously awesome enterprise printer, but it isn't all in one.
01:53:13 ◼ ► and that's how I missed the days when MacWorlds and MacUserMagazine did multi-page printer reviews focused on how those printers work with the Mac.
01:53:24 ◼ ► If you're lucky, you can find some kind of WireCarter thing about, you know, the best printer for most people,
01:53:28 ◼ ► but it's not going to be focused on Macs. It's not going to have all the details that Marco was talking about.
01:53:42 ◼ ► Yep. Oh, and another thing I should point out, which is not the most reliable thing in the world, but has worked well for me,
01:53:51 ◼ ► oftentimes Amazon, like, reviews and Q&A and whatnot, which, again, it's not the best source.
01:54:01 ◼ ► But, generally speaking, if you see the same question asked 44 times, as you often do on Amazon,
01:54:06 ◼ ► and if you see the same answer 42 of the 44 times, then you're probably going to be okay.
01:54:22 ◼ ► And this is, as we were talking earlier, tying all that together to the Wi-Fi stuff earlier,
01:55:59 ◼ ► They have not, although there was one report at one point of someone seeing a bee in the house,
01:56:04 ◼ ► where I'm pretty sure it was just a big housefly, because I killed a housefly later that day.
01:56:08 ◼ ► No bees in the house, no bees outside. They are good and gone and dead, as far as I can tell.
01:56:58 ◼ ► I went to sell the car today, or at least get it appraised, and I took it to the local CarMax,
01:57:05 ◼ ► and CarMax is actually headquartered here in Richmond, and I've actually done work for CarMax in the past.
01:57:33 ◼ ► they do whatever computations they need to do to figure out how much they think the car's worth,
01:57:37 ◼ ► and they brought me the appraisal and they said, "Okay, here's what we found. It's in good shape. Blah, blah, blah."
01:57:57 ◼ ► So in July of 2015, apparently my world-class BMW dealer, Richmond BMW, on West Broad Street,
01:58:09 ◼ ► I brought the car in with something like 58,000 miles on it and got something done to it.
01:58:26 ◼ ► Apparently, the dumb people at Richmond BMW on West Broad Street decided to enter, I'm assuming,
01:58:35 ◼ ► an incorrect service entry, or enter a correct service entry but enter it against my VIN instead of somebody else's VIN.
01:58:42 ◼ ► So now the auto check, or whatever it is, it wasn't Carfax, but it was an equivalent of Carfax,
01:58:48 ◼ ► is saying, "Well, no, this car's had odometer fraud, so that dramatically reduced the value of my car."
01:58:55 ◼ ► So I drove down to BMW and very politely but very angrily said, "You need to fix this."
01:59:01 ◼ ► And the best they could do to fix it was write a repair order wherein, I wish I had it in front of me,
01:59:07 ◼ ► but it basically says, "We are certifying as Richmond BMW of West Broad Street that the correct and true mileage
01:59:26 ◼ ► I then needed to call AutoCheck to tell them to expunge, or whatever the right word is, that record on my report
01:59:39 ◼ ► Of course, however, there is no phone number for AutoCheck because turns out it's Experian.
01:59:49 ◼ ► So there's no phone number to call. I try their little automated chat. That doesn't go anywhere.
01:59:54 ◼ ► I fill out a form wherein they will eventually email me, probably in six months, to say,
02:00:02 ◼ ► And it turns out what I did was I Googled, or really, ducked, ducked, goed for their phone number
02:00:07 ◼ ► and came up with it instantly, called them and pleaded with them to fix it, and then they said,
02:00:14 ◼ ► "Sure thing." I sent them a PDF that I scanned in my fancy new printer that we just talked about.
02:00:31 ◼ ► So all is seemingly well, and I think I'm going to be bringing the car to CarMax tomorrow to sell it.
02:00:45 ◼ ► And even as I'm trying to get rid of this piece of trash, which really isn't a piece of trash,
02:00:54 ◼ ► Is the current plan to just go to one car for a while, then? Is that where you've landed?
02:00:58 ◼ ► I negotiated with a dealer in DC. I got them to a price that I think is reasonable but not stellar.
02:01:24 ◼ ► And the reason that I landed on the Volkswagen is, and I was talking to Erin about this a little bit,
02:01:29 ◼ ► I want something that is basically, basically what I want is a BMW, but I don't want another BMW.
02:01:36 ◼ ► You know, I want a sedan, I want something that's preferably four-wheel drive with the six-speed,
02:01:45 ◼ ► And John is going to start chiming in about the Accord, but I would prefer something quicker and a little bit nicer than that.
02:01:53 ◼ ► And I like European cars. I don't have anything against Japanese cars, but I like European cars.
02:01:59 ◼ ► And the only way to do that and not end up in financial ruin because of catastrophic engine failures,
02:02:06 ◼ ► like when my valve train tried to grenade itself, is to have a car with a six-year warranty.
02:02:10 ◼ ► So yes, even though Volkswagen is terrible in the sense of dieselgate, it's great in the sense of,
02:02:16 ◼ ► I would potentially have a six-year warranty, but the more I thought about it, the more Erin and I talked about it.
02:02:22 ◼ ► Sitting here tonight, I don't think I'm going to buy it because we really should just try being a one-car family for a while.
02:02:30 ◼ ► That is not at all the answer I want, which is probably why I sound deeply depressed about it, but it is the correct answer.
02:02:37 ◼ ► So by the time this episode gets posted, for all I know I might have a Golf R in the garage,
02:02:42 ◼ ► but sitting here now, my intention is to just let it go and at least wait a little while and see how bad it really is to be a one-car family.
02:03:07 ◼ ► one problem leasing puts directly on your plate is timing of when you make purchase decisions.
02:03:12 ◼ ► And because you are not leasing and you have another car, you have great flexibility in this.
02:03:25 ◼ ► You can get it out of your garage, get it off your plate, get it off your repair liabilities, get a bit of money for it,
02:03:33 ◼ ► and then just bank it and then just sit around and don't buy a new car yet and just wait and decide if you need one.
02:03:39 ◼ ► I mean, look, the cars that you're looking at are not hard to get. They're not limited production.
02:03:44 ◼ ► They're probably going to keep making them for a while and make them new ones every year, make them a little bit better every year.
02:04:02 ◼ ► I'm going so deeply back and forth about this that I'm not even sure tomorrow what's going to happen.
02:04:10 ◼ ► And I think what's going to end up kind of forcing my hand probably in the direction of not buying
02:04:17 ◼ ► is that the negotiations that I've done with this dealer in the DC area were kind of predicated on doing it before the end of the month
02:04:26 ◼ ► And Friday is Erin's birthday and I'm not about to give Erin a Golf R for her birthday present.
02:04:32 ◼ ► So basically I would need to execute tomorrow and I just don't think it's going to happen.
02:04:37 ◼ ► And that doesn't mean to your point, it doesn't mean I can never buy a Golf R ever again.
02:04:51 ◼ ► Look, every salesperson worth their salt will try to make you think that every deal they give you is a limited time offer.
02:05:01 ◼ ► You're never going to see it like this again. It's the last one in the country, whatever it is.
02:05:10 ◼ ► The real reason is they want you to act fast and create urgency so that you get convinced to do it.
02:05:16 ◼ ► But the reality is you can let this deal slip by because the conditions that led them want to offer you whatever deal they offered you are probably going to be the same, if not better, at some point in the future.
02:05:38 ◼ ► Like, you can go to them in six months or a year and spend a new two seconds to get them to give you another deal. Like, it's fine.
02:05:51 ◼ ► I mean, the most adult answer is to not do anything, which I hope is what I'll stick with, but we'll see.
02:05:58 ◼ ► The second most adult answer, if I stick within the realm of Volkswagen, you know, so if I'm eschewing, you know, Civic or in a Accord or something like that,
02:06:06 ◼ ► the second most adult answer is to get a GTI because you can freaking steal a GTI these days. It's absurd how should they are.
02:06:24 ◼ ► But I don't know. Just the more I think about it, the more I think I shouldn't, even though I desperately, desperately want to. So we'll see what I end up doing.
02:06:31 ◼ ► The even more adult option is to just keep getting review cars and try to have one every week.
02:06:36 ◼ ► And then you don't really need your own car because you're always driving someone else's.
02:06:40 ◼ ► Aaron actually pitched exactly that to me. And yeah, if you're a listener and you have any contact of any sort with the PR department of any kind of magazine, please let me know.
02:06:50 ◼ ► And I am not kidding when I say that. I would love to test any of your cars, even a piece of colossal garbage. Let me know.
02:06:56 ◼ ► But yeah, I mean, in principle, that would be magnificent and I would totally live that lifestyle.
02:07:10 ◼ ► The other side of the coin though is like how often are Aaron and I really needing to be in two places at the same time?
02:07:28 ◼ ► We'll try to live the one car life for a while and see if it makes us totally hate ourselves and each other.
02:07:35 ◼ ► And if it does, we'll fix it. And if it doesn't, then sweet. I've saved myself a whole pile of money.
02:07:46 ◼ ► Oh, you know, I forgot to mention there's there's one thing I'm excited about about these iPhone rumors more than anything else I've heard.
02:07:57 ◼ ► I didn't see this. I don't think there was a rumor a couple months back that I think has been re rumored recently that they're going to ship this with a USB C cable to lightning and that the power adapter in the box is going to be a new design.
02:08:17 ◼ ► And the reason I'm excited about this is that I have tried since getting this new laptop.
02:08:33 ◼ ► And the one thing like I have so much covered, the one thing that doesn't seem to exist is tiny USB C power bricks like the USB C version of the iPad power bricks that we've had forever.
02:08:55 ◼ ► Also, like, you know, Anchor makes what looks just like the iPad power brick, but has two USB ports in it.
02:09:04 ◼ ► It doesn't have to be massively high wattage, like just two USB C ports in one adapter.
02:09:12 ◼ ► And so I would love to just have Apple make a good little white brick that has a USB C hole on one side and a power prong on the other side and have it be smallish and have it be nicely made and reliable and not going to start fires and not going to flake out,
02:09:30 ◼ ► which I can trust Apple to do with their power stuff and I can trust no one else in my experience.
02:09:40 ◼ ► And so I'm actually more excited about the rumor that that's about to exist than I am about anything about these new phones.
02:09:48 ◼ ► I know. But like that, that would actually be more beneficial to me in a lot of contexts.
02:09:54 ◼ ► I believe that rumor because the stupid whatever they are, the five watt things are just not up to the task.
02:10:04 ◼ ► Yeah. So that's useless. And the iPad ones are old and big. So it's totally time for a new a new thing.
02:10:18 ◼ ► And even if someone else did start making it, I probably wouldn't trust them because I like my experience with third party power adapter manufacturers, even anchor, even everyone's favorite anchor has been so mediocre and so spotty.