00:00:05 ◼ ► Oh, I know why. Dumbass, your headphones aren't plugged in, and they're still not. So whatever you're saying, I can't hear.
00:00:28 ◼ ► Vince Pavlish writes in and says, "I'm a lawyer, and the feedback you got about subsequent remedial measures may have been misleading."
00:00:39 ◼ ► There are a lot of exceptions to the rule, to the point that the rule is basically pointless.
00:00:43 ◼ ► And if Apple made a statement that the old keyboard was defective, that could and would definitely be used against them.
00:00:48 ◼ ► Obviously the case would never go to trial, and this would just be for settlement value or whatever.
00:00:53 ◼ ► It's arrived a motion to dismiss. Your initial intuition was probably right, and they aren't saying it's a fix for legal reasons.
00:00:59 ◼ ► The law is complicated. I was just waiting for this email. It was so nice. It was so nicely tied up in a little bow.
00:01:04 ◼ ► So straightforward. One lawyer emails, and it's like, "Alright, now wait. Wait for it. Wait for it." And the next lawyer. Yep.
00:01:10 ◼ ► Well, and in fact, Josh Fenton, the lawyer who wrote the first one, wrote to me earlier today.
00:01:14 ◼ ► I think he didn't copy the feedback address, but he wrote to me earlier today saying basically he wanted to correct this,
00:01:20 ◼ ► that he made a mistake in not telling us that apparently this does not apply to product defect cases in California.
00:01:30 ◼ ► Specifically that. So yeah, there definitely is no reason for Apple to come out and say,
00:01:44 ◼ ► Oh, man, that's funny. And finally, since we still only added days' worth of follow-up to accumulate,
00:01:50 ◼ ► Anantek – I think that's how you pronounce it, I hope – has an article wherein they state,
00:01:55 ◼ ► "Intel 10-nanometer production update. Systems will be on shelves for holiday 2019." So no time soon.
00:02:04 ◼ ► I read that headline, and I started reading the article. I'm like, "Oh, I was going to find out when this thing was going."
00:02:09 ◼ ► And I realized midway through the article, "Wait, that says 2019." I thought I was going to be like,
00:02:14 ◼ ► "Well, we're in summer now, and by the time winter comes, they'll just be getting out their first 10-nanometer chips,
00:02:20 ◼ ► and then maybe Apple will have them in the new year." And then I go, "Wait a second. We're in 2018 now."
00:02:25 ◼ ► They mean next winter, and that means that Apple won't have anything with them in it probably until 2020.
00:02:37 ◼ ► And by the way, Intel – even when Intel is working normally, even before this 14-nanometer stall that they've had here,
00:02:45 ◼ ► they still never hit their deadlines. So the fact that if they're saying after this massive problem they've had,
00:02:59 ◼ ► If they're lucky, and as many – I think we pointed this out in the last show, but we've got more people reiterating it.
00:03:04 ◼ ► So Taiwan Semiconductor has their 7-nanometer process working right now. Right now it's working.
00:03:11 ◼ ► And yes, it's about the same as Intel's 10 and yada, yada, yada, but it's just this is bad. This is really bad.
00:03:19 ◼ ► And apparently this winter's – or this fall's iPhone is probably going to have processors made on that process, right?
00:03:26 ◼ ► Yeah, that's the expectation. And that's then, boy, what the hell are the benchmarks going to look like?
00:03:34 ◼ ► We need to keep revisiting Geekbench and see the successor to the iPhone 10 and the iPhone 8 with its A12 system-on-a-chip in it.
00:03:48 ◼ ► So I'm curious, just like ballparking here, on a John Siracusa-patented infinite timescale, I think we can probably all agree that on an infinite timescale, Max will probably not be using Intel processors anymore.
00:04:11 ◼ ► Right, okay. But one of those things – assuming Max continues to exist into infinity, which I know is wrong, but just for the sake of the thought exercise, will Max eventually switch to ARM chips over infinite time?
00:04:25 ◼ ► Specifically switching to ARM chips, I don't know. We keep getting all the fan mail from the people who are into – I'm going to forget what it is. Do you guys remember? Like the other sort of ARM-ish risk architecture that's like open source?
00:04:42 ◼ ► It's like a RISC and then like a Roman numeral or a letter? Anyway, ARM seems like the safe bet.
00:04:49 ◼ ► Again, if you're placing money on them leaving Intel and going to something, ARM seems like the safe bet because – RISC-V, I don't know if it's a five or a V, the chat room says.
00:04:59 ◼ ► Anyway, that they would go to ARM, but something like an open source instruction set or an Apple proprietary instruction set, we talked about that on a past show, those are strong second and third choices, right?
00:05:13 ◼ ► So ARM is the obvious one, but I don't think it's a slam dunk because Apple doesn't own ARM. I mean, they could just buy ARM if they wanted to, I suppose.
00:05:23 ◼ ► Well, there is a little bit. I mean, so they have an architectural license and they can kind of do what they want, but it really kind of flies in the face of owning control, all the most important technologies, yada, yada.
00:05:34 ◼ ► So yes, they are making their own stuff, but at a certain point, ARM has a certain amount of power over them.
00:05:42 ◼ ► Not that they're going to crank up their prices or whatever, but it's kind of like a Google Maps situation.
00:05:45 ◼ ► It's like, you know, I'm sure everyone's happy as long as they're happy, but if ARM makes a wrong move in their own directions, Apple's like, "We'll drop you in a second. We can make an ARM-like thing in two seconds."
00:05:56 ◼ ► Or, you know, "We'll just buy you." Like, don't even try it. Don't even think about it. So if ARM is smart, they'd just be super nice and careful with that.
00:06:02 ◼ ► And that's the obvious choice, but I wouldn't count out. I think there's a strong second or third choice of some other architecture or Apple's own architecture.
00:06:12 ◼ ► All right, so let's modify the question then. So on an infinite time scale, can we agree that assuming Macs continue to exist, they will probably switch away from Intel to an Apple-controlled or Apple-created architecture?
00:06:42 ◼ ► Right now, it's looking pretty strong. Like, right now, I would say yes. But things change pretty quickly.
00:06:49 ◼ ► And if Intel, like, you know, this is just one generation we're talking about. So say Intel blows it for 10nm and it's a big problem and they're really late, but Apple decides to tough it out.
00:07:00 ◼ ► You know, it's getting progressively harder each shrink, right? And that road's going to end eventually, too. We talked about the end of Moore's Law in a past episode.
00:07:08 ◼ ► It could be that if Apple decides to tough it out, and in the next round, Intel is back ahead of everyone else for whatever reason. They make all the right choices where previously they made all the wrong choices.
00:07:18 ◼ ► That would push the time horizon over 10 years. So I don't think it's a slam dunk, but I would give it, you know, coin toss.
00:07:24 ◼ ► I would say at a 10-year time interval, I would say they are probably not using Intel chips anymore.
00:07:30 ◼ ► And when I say Intel, I'm also including other x86 licensees, which is, you know, AMD right now. And probably no other ones ever again.
00:07:37 ◼ ► So I'm saying no Intel or AMD processor in current model Macs in 10 years. What about 5 years?
00:07:47 ◼ ► You know, it's funny you say that because as you were asking this question of Jon, I was thinking to myself, "Hmm, when do I think it would happen?"
00:07:55 ◼ ► Or even just like when, what is the time interval at which it becomes likely to be the case that they'll drop Intel? By how many years does it become more likely than not?
00:08:08 ◼ ► Yeah, and that's obviously really hard to say, but to put things in perspective, I thought to myself, "You know what? You should say that you would take the bet that it would, I think it will be in the next 5 years."
00:08:19 ◼ ► But then the second thought I had is that every time I bet anyone just a friendly wager on anything, I always end up losing.
00:08:25 ◼ ► So that means it cannot be in the next 5 years because I'm confident it probably will be.
00:08:30 ◼ ► But no, I think if I were to wager a guess, I think between 5 and 10 years is when I would, sitting here today, expect it to happen.
00:08:43 ◼ ► I think it really depends on, like, it's lumpy. It depends on if the 10 nanometer thing is enough.
00:08:49 ◼ ► If the 2020 Apple ARM rumors are true and a 10 nanometer thing is enough to get them, you know, it'll be earlier than 5 years, right?
00:08:56 ◼ ► It'll be 2020 as the rumors say, right? Because if this is what finally breaks the relationship, this current run of crappiness, then I feel like you're not going to make it to 5 years.
00:09:07 ◼ ► But if you make it to 5 years, suddenly the odds of you making it to 10 go up because that means they were going to ride out this 10 nanometer storm and then maybe the next, you know, Intel does okay with the next one, right?
00:09:16 ◼ ► So I feel like it's not, the probabilities aren't evenly distributed. Like, if 2020 comes and goes with no hint of an ARM transition, it's probably going to seem like Apple decided they're just going to ride this out, right?
00:09:29 ◼ ► And come out the other side and, you know, Intel 10 nanometer will be fine and everything like that.
00:09:33 ◼ ► And of course, it's still the Mac Pro problem, you know, that we have to talk about and everything like that. So if they make it a couple years into this, suddenly I think their odds of making it to 10 go up.
00:09:41 ◼ ► But I have no problem believing the vaguely sourced 2020 ARM rumors, right? So it's a slightly different probability curve.
00:09:52 ◼ ► All right. So now, since we're getting onto short time horizons, I think we have to separate into two questions. Question number one is when does the first ARM Mac get released? And question number two is when does the last Intel Mac get released?
00:10:06 ◼ ► Hmm. I would think they would do the transition kind of the same way they've done all their other transitions. Like, they haven't really, the overlap period hasn't been particularly long in most of the transitions. I know the wildcard factor is the Tim Cook overlap deal where, you know, Tim Cook's Apple loves to just keep selling the old one forever and ever and that could play into the transition. But I don't think that's a…
00:10:28 ◼ ► Because I'm not saying when will they stop selling the last Intel Mac. When will the last Intel Mac be released? Because they'll keep selling it for 10 years later. It'll be the Mac Mini and they'll keep selling it forever.
00:10:38 ◼ ► I don't think they'll sell them new for that long. I'm hoping they won't sell them new for that long. Yeah, I don't think they'll be that big of an overlap because they really just want to get these transitions over with for this type of transition. They used to be they wanted to get all transitions over with really fast, but that ship sailed a long time ago. But a thing like this that's developer facing, I feel like they're going to want to… Like, why would you keep them around, right? There's so much incentive. Take the MacBook Air, for example, the Mac that just won't die, right? There's tremendous incentive to switch that to ARM.
00:11:07 ◼ ► If they switch to ARM, right? Like, it just… Forget about that it's old and creaky and slow. Like, it will be so much better. Even if they just rip out the guts and keep the case… Still keep the case the same, still have a non-retina crappy screen on it. If you put ARM in that thing, the battery life would be really good and the cost would go down and just… Yeah.
00:11:25 ◼ ► Honestly, that doesn't solve problems they have in that lineup. It's already pretty inexpensive and the battery life is great. But it would be so much better and so much cheaper. Like, that Intel CPU versus how much it costs them. What are those… Like, the A11 system on a chip, which is probably about faster or as fast as what's in the MacBook Air now in both single and multi-core, that cost them like five or ten bucks or something. And the Intel CPU is like in the hundreds. It's ridiculous.
00:11:52 ◼ ► Yeah. Actually, it's funny. There actually is a profit margin for them or a profit motive rather for them to switch to their own chips because they'd be a lot cheaper. I mean, even if you include their fixed cost of designing each one, they're probably still way cheaper than buying them from Intel because Intel chips are not cheap.
00:12:10 ◼ ► And they get to spread the cost of developing them, especially on the laptop line. I'm like, "Look, we're making these chips for the phones anyway and it's not too far a stretch to go from the phone to a laptop." Figuring out how to get your money back for the Mac Pro and the iMac Pro ARM chip, that's a little bit trickier. But I guess they just charge $5,000 and who knows how much the Mac Pro will cost and that's how they make that money up.
00:12:32 ◼ ► So Casey, when do you think the first ARM Mac will be released? Like, how many years from now?
00:12:40 ◼ ► I think it'll be in the next five years. Again, based on nothing but gut. I think it'll be sooner than we think. I think it'll be sometime in the next five years we'll see the first one. Where the first one appears, I'm not sure. I'm currently inclined to say it would be the MacBook Air, you know, MacBook Adorable part of the lineup. Something portable, something... well, the MacBook Adorable's not cheap. You know what I mean? Like, the low-powered portable.
00:13:09 ◼ ► I think it'll be in the next five years somewhere in that part of the range. I don't see it being like, "Oh, we have a brand new Mac Pro and guess what? It's all ARM." You know, I just don't think that would happen. I don't think, you know, the 15-inch MacBook Pro would get it. I think it would be an Adorable or Air or something new that replaces both, one or both of those. Probably close to five years from now but within the next five years.
00:13:42 ◼ ► That's the question I was answering with the transition. Like, I feel like, you know, when I was saying that I believe the 2020 rumor is plausible that 2020 would be the first ARM Mac shipping. Or when I say that if they go past five years then suddenly ten years becomes better because they've proven they're going to stick it out for ten and maybe Intel does better the next size down, right? Then whatever, you know, 2028 or whatever would be...
00:14:04 ◼ ► Right, so it's the same as my other question. I don't see the distinction between when does the first versus when do they switch.
00:14:09 ◼ ► All right, so you're Syracuse with the question. All right, I'm going to say the first ARM Mac is... I'm going to go a little aggressive. I'm going to say it's within two years.
00:14:22 ◼ ► Yeah, and I think they... it might even be faster than that. I mean, probably not, but I think within two years is somewhat likely, if not more likely than not, that the first ARM Mac will be released.
00:14:34 ◼ ► And I agree with both of you. I think they would start at the low end because that would be the easiest ones to basically just take the same chip that goes in an iPad and put it in the smallest MacBook, whatever it's called at that point. That I think would be a no-brainer.
00:14:47 ◼ ► As for when the last Mac would be released, or the last Intel Mac, sorry, I would say that's most likely to happen within... so if I'm saying two years is when this transition starts, I think modern Apple, considering the Mac line, there's no way in hell they completely transition in a short time.
00:15:07 ◼ ► This is a long, painful transition, just like retina and just like SSD. And I'm thinking this transition happens over the course of probably three years. So I'm going to say first ARM Mac in about two years, last Intel Mac in about five years.
00:15:23 ◼ ► I think the Pro line is the thing that could... yeah, I know, as I was alluding to, like, how long does it take for them to go all SSD, all retina, like, and they still haven't done it. But I really think the Pro line is more likely to drag them out rather than just like laziness, because it could be, again, especially if they're on the accelerated timeline of like 2020, they just haven't had time to replace the Xeon with anything.
00:15:47 ◼ ► And they're just fine with saying, okay, well, the Pro line is going to be Intel until we can make a chip that can deal with Xeon, until we can, you know, like that's that's so much less of a priority than all the other things that they build, and so much more complicated than reusing and slightly enhancing phone chips, that those would be the ones to linger.
00:16:06 ◼ ► It's like, we haven't gotten around to it. Pro users don't care anyway. In fact, Pro users don't like architecture transitions. They've got to rebuy software and crap and things aren't optimized for it. And so those things would just linger. And, you know, three to five years even, where it's like, when is Apple going to replace those things in the high end, as the low end slowly creeps up on it in performance or whatever.
00:16:26 ◼ ► Although here's a question about the low end ones. So say they go ARM, you know, the laptops and stuff. The MacBook Pros have a T2 in them, which is like an A10ish thing. Did these laptops end up shipping with two ARM processors, one doing all of the SSD encryption and the Hadingus stuff and...
00:16:50 ◼ ► Well, why not? I mean, iPhones ship with the motion coprocessor thing plus the main coprocessor. That's already, you know, that's already...
00:16:59 ◼ ► But the M7 is tiny and weak, and the A10 is not tiny and weak, right? So it starts to look a little bit silly to have an A12 and an A10 inside the case. Well, that's the system CPU, and this one does touch ID, drive encryption, and Hadingus.
00:17:15 ◼ ► That seems like, hmm, hmm, hmm. Could you just, could you make like a, could you do it all on one ARM chip that's a little bit bigger, or would you shrink down? I don't know if you can shrink down the T2. Maybe it's as powerful as it needs to be.
00:17:28 ◼ ► It would be interesting to see what that architecture looks like. They could do, they could certainly make a single, even larger system on a chip that handles all those functions and just has different execution units and different things inside it. It would be interesting.
00:17:40 ◼ ► I think the delineation between the two would end up being somewhat synthetic. And what I mean by that is, I think, perhaps to start, it would literally be an A10 or whatever approximate equivalent thereof, in addition to the main CPU.
00:17:56 ◼ ► But it wouldn't surprise me if, within a couple of years, you know, it is just one system on a chip that has a completely separate subunit, subsection, you know, or something else that handles the stuff the T2 handles.
00:18:10 ◼ ► And even though it's on, you know, one, I can't think of the term I'm looking for, not a PCB, but you know, it may physically be one unit with one socket, but internal to that unit, and I think this is what you were saying, John,
00:18:21 ◼ ► it has like two very different, and I don't want to say cores, but very different pieces that only interconnect in certain ways, much like the T2 is with the Intel processor, but obviously those are not the same unit.
00:18:34 ◼ ► It would be, you know, this kind of synthetic delineation where it's all in the same socket, but it's doing two completely different things and can only talk in certain ways, because that's kind of the whole point of this, is keeping them separated.
00:18:46 ◼ ► I was thinking they'd all be on the same die just because they'd have so much more room.
00:18:51 ◼ ► I don't think they—do they still do the multi-die packages? Does Intel still have anything else? I haven't been keeping up.
00:18:56 ◼ ► I don't know if Intel does. I think Apple does, though, because don't they put like RAM and stuff in the same package as the CPU and everything, but I don't think it's on the same die.
00:19:04 ◼ ► So what happens to Thunderbolt then? Because I only have lightly paid attention to this, and I know that recently, and actually the chat room was just talking about this, they sort of kind of open-sourced—Intel sort of kind of open-sourced Thunderbolt,
00:19:17 ◼ ► and as far as I knew, it was Intel and Apple that kind of were the people who built Thunderbolt or whatever.
00:19:25 ◼ ► How does that work on a non-Intel CPU? Are there problems? And I'm genuinely asking, like, is that a problem with an ARM CPU? Would that work, or would they have to go something else?
00:19:34 ◼ ► Not a problem that money can't solve. I mean, this is related to like—so say Intel, say Apple does leave Intel. Intel obviously doesn't want Apple to leave them.
00:19:41 ◼ ► They make money off of them. They're a good customer. They buy expensive Intel parts, and you know, whatever.
00:19:47 ◼ ► Intel also wants more of all sorts of other kinds of business, and so I'm sure Intel was very happy about Apple's spat with Qualcomm, and Apple is reportedly not going to use Qualcomm chips at all in its next round of phone products, which is, you know, that's a lot of money, and what are they going to use instead?
00:20:05 ◼ ► As far as we know, Intel is the only alternative, but of course Apple's making its own radio chips eventually too, but I'm not sure if that's going to happen this year.
00:20:11 ◼ ► So if Intel still wants to make money from Apple, could they—you know, it's not like Intel's going to say, "Well, if you're not going to use our CPUs, we won't sell you anything."
00:20:19 ◼ ► What they'd say instead is, "Please buy our modems, right? Please buy our cell modems," which by the way, someone wrote in to tell us that Intel actually does use TSMC as a fab, because Intel can't do analog stuff, so all their radio chips are fabbed by TSMC, which I think is fun.
00:20:33 ◼ ► But Intel wants to sell them something, so you can make a deal with Intel and combine the Thunderbolt licensing and dealing with all that intellectual property and throw in there that you're going to get to make the cell radio chips for the next two lines of iPhones or whatever.
00:20:50 ◼ ► Like, a deal can be made. An arrangement can be come to. Money will solve this problem, no problem. Intel is not going to hold a grudge and turn down Apple's money. Apple has a lot of money, so I feel like Thunderbolt is not an issue.
00:21:03 ◼ ► I mean, I'm sure if you control the money at Apple, you have to deal with it and finesse that relationship, but boy, a mountain of money can solve a lot of problems.
00:21:12 ◼ ► Thunderbolt matters a little bit today. A few years ago, Thunderbolt didn't matter at all. A few years from now, it's logical to think that Thunderbolt might not matter then, because something else will matter.
00:21:24 ◼ ► You know, there is a need for there to be these nice high bandwidth, high speed ports on computers pretty much all the time for things like high speed storage externally, monitor connections externally, stuff like that, but it doesn't need to be Thunderbolt. It can be something else.
00:21:42 ◼ ► Apple can use USB, they can invent their own thing, they could piggyback on someone else's standard, which is more likely what they would do. There are lots of things. You can't say, "Oh, they can't make this laptop because it doesn't have Thunderbolt."
00:21:55 ◼ ► I mean, hell, already the MacBook doesn't have Thunderbolt. They already sell laptops without Thunderbolt, and they sell just fine. Technology moves. What is relevant today, what you think is required today, is not necessarily what's going to be required by tomorrow's Macs.
00:22:12 ◼ ► I mean, hell, Thunderbolt already today is everywhere, and almost no one cares. Almost no one ever uses it. The vast majority of the time, those Thunderbolt ports on those laptops are being used to take power in or send power out.
00:22:23 ◼ ► And they're also used to deal with the lack of ports. Like, that's the magic of Thunderbolts. Like, all these people with Thunderbolt docks, it is essentially their one port docking station to make up for the design of laptops. If the laptops had more ports on them, Thunderbolt would be less important. But by Apple making the choices it has made, Thunderbolt actually I think is more important than it would normally be for a lot of MacBook Pro owners.
00:22:43 ◼ ► Yeah, that's fair, actually. But again, there are other standards that could come along that will come along. You know, Thunderbolt won't be the port that everyone cares about, assuming everyone ever does, forever. It's the port that we have this year, right? And we've had it for a few years before this, and we'll probably have it for a few years after this, and then we'll use something else. And that's something else that could be something Apple controls.
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00:25:00 ◼ ► We've had this in the show notes for a couple of months at least, and this went around very briefly, I guess it was in May. Nick here writes, "I think that Apple's increasingly austere take on industrial design has made them better at shipping products that feel almost invisible. I appreciate that.
00:25:20 ◼ ► It reduces the hardware to a tool, but not an appliance. Yet I think Apple's products feel even more approachable than they used to because so much of what they make is entirely straightforward. They don't need to mask the complexity of the software with a layer of gumdrop plastic.
00:25:32 ◼ ► In many ways, the software has become simple enough that the hardware can reflect that." And this was kind of summarized as, most especially by MJ Tsai, "What happened to Apple's whimsy?"
00:25:44 ◼ ► And a gentleman by the name of Marco Arment commented on this via Twitter. He said, "It tragically passed away in 2011. We all really miss it." So what happened to Apple's whimsy, Marco? When did it go away?
00:25:57 ◼ ► You just quoted him telling you when. I have a better question. As relatively new Mac users, what are your memories? When you think about whimsy or fun or things related to that type of thing with Apple, what comes to mind? What's your earliest memory of knowing that the Mac was a whimsical, fun, delightful experience?
00:26:21 ◼ ► Well, I can absolutely murder you by telling you the first thing that jumps to mind is the iPod. And it had nothing to do with Macs at all. Which I know makes you deeply upset, but I mean it. I mean, I was aware of Macs. I'd used Macs off and on growing up.
00:26:35 ◼ ► But, I mean, they always seemed like, I don't know, the thing that those other people used. And I don't know what other people means in this context. Maybe smarter, maybe more attractive, maybe weird, maybe nerds. I don't know. But not me is what I knew.
00:26:48 ◼ ► And it wasn't until the iPod, almost said iPad, it wasn't until the iPod that I started paying attention. And I remember, and I think I told this story relatively recently, the first iPod Nano was, I think, the first Apple product I ever owned.
00:27:03 ◼ ► And I lusted after that thing so hard. And I just couldn't believe something so small could do so many things and hold so much music and be so good to use and so fun to use.
00:27:19 ◼ ► And that is my first memory of just being truly and deeply impressed by Apple. Because obviously iPods had existed for a while at that point, but I never was really that interested in them. They were big, they were clunky. I mean, they had hard drives, actual hard drives in them.
00:27:34 ◼ ► But once the Nano came around, that was the beginning of the end, or maybe the beginning of the beginning, with regard to my relationship with Apple.
00:27:44 ◼ ► Well, I didn't mean to narrow it to Mac. I just sometimes say Mac instead of Apple. But what about them was whimsical? What about them was playful?
00:27:57 ◼ ► My first Mac was a PowerBook G4. And there was a lot of that machine that was very delightful. I mean, there's so much of it that was just incredibly cool and nice. I mean, part of it was features of OS X, like much to the chagrin of old Mac people. I love things like the Genie Effect on the Dot.
00:28:31 ◼ ► Oh, yeah. Yeah, so like, you know, the Mac OS itself had a bunch of, you know, software whimsy to it. Like, that wasn't just something to serve a function. That was something that was like, you know, animation decoration, basically. It was like dessert.
00:28:48 ◼ ► This is unnecessary flourish, but it's delightful to make people smile. That, you know, it actually served anti-function. I made it slower to minimize windows, but we did it anyway because it was it was cool.
00:28:58 ◼ ► The sleep LED, though, was was interesting because it was like, here's a simple detail of this product that is that has been very, like, overly designed to serve again, overly designed to serve no, like, bullet point or like feature checklist function.
00:29:16 ◼ ► Like, does it have a sleep LED? Yes. Like, you know, making it do the pulsing thing. So it looks like it's breathing serves no purpose except to make people think it's cool and to make people smile.
00:29:27 ◼ ► And that that to me is kind of like the heart of I think what this question is asking about what a lot of us feel is missing in a lot of the recent things from Apple is not necessarily the exact same things or the exact same styles of things.
00:29:45 ◼ ► But those little details that were done that would make you smile about how it would give you the little a little moment of delight.
00:29:56 ◼ ► And they would be totally unnecessary and serve no like marketable or checklist item feature value at all.
00:30:05 ◼ ► But we're just cool and would make you think, wow, this thing is cool. I love this thing. And like, that's what got us into this platform.
00:30:15 ◼ ► That's what got us all loving Apple products so much. It's stuff like that. It's details like that. That would just give us those little moments of delight.
00:30:22 ◼ ► So let me give you a brief counterargument. What about Memoji then? I mean, is that not whimsical in the Animoji that preceded them?
00:30:30 ◼ ► We haven't gotten to debating whether Apple's whimsy has departed or decreased or what the cycle kind of is. I was just trying to think back to what was your first experience with it and what do you remember as whimsy.
00:30:40 ◼ ► Because I think it's a different depending on when you came into Apple, you might have different answers, especially if the question is, is Apple more whimsical now than it was in the past?
00:30:48 ◼ ► So your baseline, both of you, is around the same time. Is that whatever that level of whimsy was? Well, I guess you didn't get a chance to answer, Casey, but what about the nano was whimsical? Was it the colors? Was it that it was cute?
00:31:02 ◼ ► No, I think it was the, I guess the cuteness. I don't know how to verbalize it. It was just the first thing. It was the first thing that Apple made that looked like it was really and truly fun.
00:31:17 ◼ ► And maybe without compromise. Because, and admittedly, I'm recalling something that I had, what was it, like 14 years ago, but my recollection was that there was almost no compromise involved. Like it was tiny.
00:31:30 ◼ ► The battery lasted a really long time. It worked with Windows, which at the time was important to me. It held a whole bunch of music or more, way more than anything I had at the time.
00:31:40 ◼ ► And so it was something that was fun to look at, fun to hold, fun to use, and was basically without compromise. And I think, well, I was going to say early on iPhones were the same way, but no, that's not true at all. They had plenty of compromises.
00:31:55 ◼ ► So I don't know, I guess that's the best way I can describe it is that it was without compromise. But you also have not answered the question, Jon. Like, what was your first?
00:32:02 ◼ ► I was starting to think Casey was immune to whimsy, but then again, he was a PC user for a really long time. And an OS/2 user, so there may have been some permanent damage done at some point. And an IBM kid. So, boy, yeah, the deck was stacked against him.
00:32:17 ◼ ► Because you haven't really described, I mean, Marco accurately described a thing that was definitely whimsical.
00:32:22 ◼ ► The first Apple product that definitely attracted you to it, but maybe not the most whimsical. But anyway, I was asking about early appearances, because for people who are saying, oh, Apple has lost its whimsy, they're comparing it to some point in the past where they remember it being more whimsical.
00:32:38 ◼ ► And, you know, so my answer to this, like, you know, backing into the same question of like early memories, whatever, is that, again, there's some word for this, but I forget, the curse of old age, right? So I've been using Apple for so long that it's not just like there was the old times and the new times. There's many, many cycles that we've been through.
00:32:58 ◼ ► So I've seen the cycle of Apple whimsy oscillate a few times back and forth. So the current movement in whimsy is viewed in that context, and I have to compare it to like, are we really swinging so far away?
00:33:12 ◼ ► You know, are we in the deepest valley ever, or this is just another valley? And thinking back, it's always seemed to me that, and maybe this is to get us to the topic of, you know, how things have changed in recent years,
00:33:26 ◼ ► that Apple's hardware whimsy has oscillated a lot. And it never got really, really high until the jobs to error, until the iMac and the colors and branching out into different kinds of hardware.
00:33:43 ◼ ► And that I feel like was the strongest swing the hardware has made toward whimsy. Obviously we're very far away from that peak now, right? You know, with the candy-colored iMacs and everything, and now everything is, you know, glass and steel.
00:34:02 ◼ ► But the software had always never gone through a particularly deep valley. From the very beginning of the Mac to the, you know, turn the thing on and a little happy face on the computer that you're looking at comes on the screen.
00:34:15 ◼ ► From the very first thing that appears on the screen, or even just like the floppy disk with the blinking question mark.
00:34:20 ◼ ► Software has been the way that Apple has expressed, the way the whimsy of Apple has come through most strongly. And no matter what happened to the hardware, even when it was all the Snow White design language and we had the Mac 2ci thing and everything was pinstripes and buttoned up and business-like or whatever,
00:34:35 ◼ ► the software was still entirely fun and playful and the CD player came in different colors for no reason and balloon help was in there, these little, you know, cartoonish speech balloons and the control strip looked like a little zipper and slipped in and out.
00:34:49 ◼ ► That was sort of like the heart and soul of Apple. The software, you couldn't stop it. Back when people had names in the credits of the applications and they had fun about screens and there was Easter eggs and there was a little flying iguana flag flapping in 3D.
00:35:05 ◼ ► No matter what happened to the hardware, the software was there. And I feel like when the Jobs 2 era, there was this weird inversion where the hardware got very whimsical and playful and fun. Hugely so. You had the cube, you had the colors, you had all the iPod stuff.
00:35:21 ◼ ► Just very, very fun. But the software, you know, Mac OS X aside, started to shift in the direction of being slightly less playful. iLife was definitely playful and delightful and whimsical and so was the operating system. But now look what has happened over the years.
00:35:37 ◼ ► All the iLife stuff is way less playful than it used to be. Much more button down and simple and austere. Or dead. Yeah. The operating system, which used to look like Candyland, right, in the early days of Mac OS X, is slowly, slowly progressively gotten more flat, more simple, less garish, right?
00:35:56 ◼ ► And I feel like this current, you know, the hope from the Jobs 2 era until now has been, has seen the biggest, the most whimsical hardware and the least whimsical software ever. The personality of individual people does not come through in the software Apple makes and the personality in aggregate is definitely more button down.
00:36:16 ◼ ► Right up until, I think, this year with dark mode and accent colors is the first tick swing in the other direction of whimsical software. The hardware, if you look at all the hardware, not just Mac hardware, it's been hanging in there.
00:36:31 ◼ ► Like, you know, the phones come in fun colors, the watches, all the watch traps or whatever. There's still plenty of fun to be had in the hardware. So I don't feel like we're at a really deep valley. I just feel like we're not at the peak we were with the Candy iMacs, but we're not in a particular trough either.
00:36:48 ◼ ► Unless you look at a particular thing like, oh, the MacBook Pros are always super boring. Why don't they come in colors like the MacBook does or whatever?
00:36:54 ◼ ► But the software, I feel like, really has been in a big downswing in recent years and is, on the Mac anyway, just starting to tick up a little bit with a little bit more fun.
00:37:04 ◼ ► So I'm not entirely on board with the idea that Apple's whimsy has disappeared and I think if you have that impression you may be focusing too closely on one particular aspect, whether it's just the hardware and just a particular product line or whatever.
00:37:16 ◼ ► Like Casey said, or whoever brought up the emoji. If you look at a specific area, Apple looks like its old self. Like, look at this silly thing where we do these keynote things where we can put these weird emoji heads in our face and stick the tongue out and stuff.
00:37:30 ◼ ► Totally whimsical, 100%. But if you look at the design of Apple's laptops, especially the Pro laptops, they're just boring and the same.
00:37:38 ◼ ► And even the phones, if you don't look at the back, like that was one of the articles that was linked here. Look, I laid all these phones on the table and they all look like black rectangles. Yeah, flip them over.
00:37:46 ◼ ► They make all sorts of cases with holes in them and shiny red things and yellow bumblebee stuff and all the, you know, it's where you find it, right?
00:37:57 ◼ ► They're not going to put it on the screen. The whole front of the thing is a screen. But just look at the backgrounds that they have on the screen. The animated backgrounds, the weird different patterns and lock screens that they put on there.
00:38:06 ◼ ► I'm not, I do not subscribe to the theory that Apple's whimsy has disappeared and we're in a giant trough. I just think it is an oscillation and there was a big inversion between hardware and software at the start of the Jobs II era.
00:38:18 ◼ ► But I think we're, you know, I think we're just wiggling back to the normal average eventually.
00:38:24 ◼ ► I see what you're saying. I don't know. It feels as though Apple is growing up and/or is stepping into the shoes of the big guy. You know, they're no longer the also-ran. They're now the big hit on the block.
00:38:45 ◼ ► And it also just feels like more maturity. This analogy may make no sense, but it's the best I can think of. When I was 16, I had mostly used or been given my dad's Saturn SL2. And if you follow us from all the way back in neutral, this is the one where the wheel fell off when I was driving it.
00:39:07 ◼ ► It was purple. It was the weirdest thing. But anyway, the point is I, actually this is not going to help my case. I really should abandon this and beg you to cut this all out, but I know you won't.
00:39:19 ◼ ► Anyway, what I really wanted in the world as a 16-year-old, all I wanted in the world is to change the gauges in the dash from a black background to a white background.
00:39:31 ◼ ► Because I thought that was so cool. And God, I hate myself for bringing this up right now because I'm just feeding into your whole thing, Marco. But anyway, I really wanted white gauges. I just thought it looked so cool as a 16-year-old.
00:39:42 ◼ ► All I wanted in the world was white gauges. And of course, my dad, who was an adult, said, "No, you're not doing that. That's a stupid thing to do." And he was right.
00:39:50 ◼ ► And I feel like that was the 16-year-old me, whereas the 36-year-old me is horrified at the thought of doing that. And I think some of that is just growing up, right?
00:40:03 ◼ ► And I think that's a lot of what's going on with Apple. And I think that some of it is, like I was saying a moment ago, they're arguably the big player in the space now.
00:40:13 ◼ ► Granted, not by unit sales. Obviously, there's way, way, way more PCs than there are Macs. But it seems like the only people that are making any money, for the most part, is Apple.
00:40:24 ◼ ► And the only manufacturer that anyone's really interested in is Apple. I mean, yes, I know there are PC users who are very much into Windows, blah, blah, blah.
00:40:33 ◼ ► But even amongst my friends and family that do not have Macs, it seems like nobody's really a trendsetter except Apple. And so now they're playing it much closer to the vest because they're the big guy now, and they're older now.
00:40:50 ◼ ► I don't buy that one, though, because Apple has been a thought leader in design, to use that lovely phrase, for so long. In fact, they seized those reins by being extremely whimsical with hardware, which is why our irons were all teal and translucent.
00:41:05 ◼ ► So they do set the trends and directions, but it doesn't have to be away from whimsy. It can be towards whimsy. And like I said, people who subscribe to the theory that Apple's whimsy has gone away have to look selectively.
00:41:21 ◼ ► Look at everything that has to do with watch bands. All they do is come up with fun things to do, the watch bands blending into the background with the pride one with those little lines and everything. It's entirely whimsical. Almost everything on the watch is whimsical because a lot of it's just not functional. It's just about, "Hey, I want to see pictures of my kids," or "Mickey Mouse taps his foot," or whatever.
00:41:46 ◼ ► Well, you're thinking of the hardware design of the watch, not the software, though, right?
00:41:48 ◼ ► No, no. I think the watch's whimsy, especially on the software side, the software side of the watch's whimsy is almost as if Samsung tried to be whimsical.
00:41:59 ◼ ► It's not coherent. There's a whole lot of it that isn't whimsical at all, that isn't even well designed or that isn't very functional.
00:42:06 ◼ ► It doesn't have to be well designed or coherent. Whimsy is the opposite of that. It's just something, like you said, something just done for the fun of it.
00:42:12 ◼ ► It's like they're buying whimsy. It's like, "Let's pay Disney to have the Toy Story characters or Mickey Mouse on there tap his foot. Yay, whimsy, done."
00:42:29 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm with Jon. I think your mechanical watch, I don't want to use the word snobbery because that's way more negative than I mean, but your preference for mechanical things that are considerably simpler and cleaner, I think, is clouding your opinion of the watch in this case.
00:42:44 ◼ ► I don't think it has to do with the mechanical stuff. I mean, I agree that it's incoherent. I'm thinking particularly, I think of something that's not functional and kind of incoherent, but definitely whimsical, that stupid honeycomb screen on the watch.
00:42:54 ◼ ► With the apps, that is entirely whimsical and looks cool and is fun but doesn't work and is bad and they should get rid of it, right?
00:43:01 ◼ ► So whimsy and goodness do not go together. That's true of a lot of things that have been whimsical with Apple products over the years.
00:43:08 ◼ ► So, you know, and I was just thinking of the watch specifically, but again, the backs of phones, the fact they make the red ones, the facts that they change the finishes, right, and make the gold and the rose gold and the shiny black and, you know, like there's only so much room for you to do it because, again, it has to be a whole bunch of things.
00:43:23 ◼ ► Because, again, it has to be functional in a way. And then for the software, same type of thing. Like, obviously there was a big, and I'm going to get to the theory that I haven't seen anyone espouse yet in the chat room. I'm surprised. I'm sure it's in one of these articles that was like months ago.
00:44:03 ◼ ► Anyway, we can continue this with that, Marco. He'll be back in the little picket bucket. No, the theory I was referring to is the idea that when Johnny Ive took over software, all the fun went out of it.
00:44:13 ◼ ► So when the iOS 6 and 7 transition, Johnny Ive was responsible for relentlessly simplifying their hardware to take all the unnecessary features out of it to make it plain and featureless.
00:44:24 ◼ ► And when he also took over software, that was the iOS 7 transition, which definitely was less whimsical than iOS 6.
00:44:30 ◼ ► And so you could put that as the villain. And that's when it really happened because all of his hardware designs started getting more simple and featureless and plain and just the essence of the product.
00:44:40 ◼ ► It's just a screen. We don't need any buttons. It's just like the most elemental, simple form. The pencil is just a cylinder that comes to a point. There's nothing on it anywhere. Forget about trying to clip it onto something. We don't want that, right?
00:44:51 ◼ ► And the same thing with the software. And I think there was a zig in that direction, but they've zagged back in a lot of places. Does Johnny Ive love Memoji? Was he jazzed about dark mode and letting people change accents colors?
00:45:07 ◼ ► Maybe. Maybe he's come around. Maybe it was just a particular direction, but it definitely seems a hard move in the opposite direction.
00:45:16 ◼ ► So the point now where I feel like the hardware in certain product lines continues to be somewhat whimsical and fun, and the software has turned a corner and is trending in that direction.
00:45:29 ◼ ► And so, in the long view, I feel like there have been oscillations and there were some big ones and there was a definite switch between hardware and software, but if you average the whole line out, it doesn't turn into a slope that suddenly goes down or suddenly goes up.
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00:47:59 ◼ ► I would like so badly to pay attention to this conversation right now, but between the time that Jon started talking and now, a massive thunderstorm started. I had to run around and close all the windows in the house because no one else is home because they all went out drinking without me.
00:48:13 ◼ ► Some amount of water might have gotten on Gruber's $5,000 review laptop from Apple. And so I ran around and closed all the windows.
00:48:24 ◼ ► That's exactly the laptop you want water to get on, though. It's Apple review laptop. It's not yours, not your problem. Give it back to them.
00:48:31 ◼ ► And now it's water cooled so it won't overheat. And then while I finally sat back down and started listening again, and then I noticed there's a… I felt like a little splash in the back of my arm.
00:48:45 ◼ ► And I turn around and there's a wet spot on the floor. Now, Hops is in here, but, you know, I trust him. And he was sitting back there a little bit ago but isn't anymore. And I mean, now I know why because the wet spot wasn't him, turns out. Now it's dripping. Now you can actually hear the water. Hang on.
00:49:12 ◼ ► Yeah, so that's the drip now. And so I had to run out, get a Tupperware bucket container for the water to fall into. Although now I'm realizing I'm going to be hearing that sound for the rest of the podcast. So maybe I need something smaller for the water to fall into.
00:49:32 ◼ ► I've also discovered that the door upstairs that opens up onto the deck does not go all the way to the floor and water is coming under it. So the upstairs landing is a little bit damp.
00:49:51 ◼ ► Okay, so this house has been a rental for a very long time. And when you have a rental, the idea is to put as little money into it as possible over time and to just max out bedroom space. And most people who are going to use a vacation rental are going to use it for like a week and then never again.
00:50:11 ◼ ► And so it doesn't really need to be great. It certainly doesn't need to be maintained. And one of the ways they've saved money over time is by fully enclosing a four side wraparound porch and turning all those into bedrooms. That is what I'm in right now because one of them has become my office.
00:50:28 ◼ ► When you enclose a wraparound deck that's very, very old, and you make it into rooms, you kind of ignore the fact that like, deck roofs usually aren't made to the same standards as interior roofs. So that's problem number one I'm encountering right now, which is why my elbow got wet, and why Hopps temporarily had something blamed on him that was not his fault.
00:50:47 ◼ ► And the other problem that one of the reasons the deck door upstairs, let's water in, which is the same reason the front door, let's water in, because all of the wood everywhere along all four sides of the house is very, very rotten. Because one of the ways they save money over time is by not putting in any gutters, drainage or eaves anywhere.
00:51:08 ◼ ► Neat. So when it rains, as it's doing very much right now, the water simply flows down all four sides of the house. It runs off the roof and the deck and it just flows down the sides of the house. And of course gets all over, you know, we have to close the windows when it rains because you can't leave them open because there's no eaves or anything. So the rain just pours in, there's literally like a waterfall down like you can see like when it rains heavily, you can kind of see like this waterfall coming down the window, all the windows in the house.
00:51:38 ◼ ► And of course the front door has the same issue where the water, you know, falls down on the patio in front of the front door and splashes under the gap that's under the front door because the gap used to be not a gap, but it rotted out because of all the water splashing in front of it. And so we bought this for the location.
00:51:59 ◼ ► Well, I would maybe consider moving all the laptops to the like house part of the house.
00:52:21 ◼ ► So when you're not there, water is just flowing in, but it evaporates by the time you arrive?
00:52:25 ◼ ► Yeah, like I imagine if I like, you know, tear up the carpet right here where the water is landing, I imagine I'm going to find some discolored wood from all of the times it has ever rained.
00:52:35 ◼ ► Oh yeah, yeah. All right, so do we want to try to bring, do we want to come back to the whimsy conversation or are we just putting a fork in it?
00:52:43 ◼ ► The only other thing I have to add to the whimsy conversation is, you know, this kind of gets back to Marco's complaints about the watch and whimsy not being the same thing as being good.
00:52:58 ◼ ► And that good old Siri snark where you try to ask it something and Siri has a funny response and that's whimsical and people don't like it sometimes.
00:53:08 ◼ ► That's part of the reason, like, you know, the trend away from whimsy and software and stuff is like if individual people who get to put their names in the credits make the software and they do some fun thing or they have some feature or whatever, it can go too far.
00:53:22 ◼ ► And some aspect of an application can be playful in a way that people find annoying because they just want it to be utilitarian and they don't want to, you know, Apple hasn't done this for the most part, but everyone has seen applications like this where someone has an idea to make a part of the UI "fun."
00:53:36 ◼ ► Especially if you can't disable it, like it makes a honking noise or it does a little animation and it's an operation that you do all the time.
00:53:42 ◼ ► And like Siri, every time you ask it to do something, coming back with a, even if it's just a too verbose thing or being too friendly or whatever, it can be annoying.
00:53:56 ◼ ► Worst case scenario, when something is whimsical and playful, you just wish it would get out of your way and do what it's supposed to do.
00:54:02 ◼ ► And that's where Johnny Ive appears in his white world and says, "See, if we had reduced it to its essence, you wouldn't be having this problem."
00:54:10 ◼ ► Oh, my word. All right. Marco, do you have any other parting thoughts on this since you were running around the house most of this segment?
00:54:16 ◼ ► Well, what was one landing spot on the rug has now become three landing spots in the rug, and the bowl I picked is not quite wide enough to cover all three of them.
00:54:27 ◼ ► I didn't realize I should have gotten three bowls and all three of them having some kind of soft landing area so I wouldn't hear the drips.
00:54:37 ◼ ► Oh, goodness. Maybe we should make this a short show, so maybe you shouldn't have any further commentary on whimsy.
00:54:54 ◼ ► Whenever you see someone in an old shack or something in a movie and you want it to be a whimsical forest dwelling or whatever and it rains, there's a little bucket with a drip of water in it because that's fun and delightful and homey and whimsical. So you're getting the whole experience now.
00:55:08 ◼ ► I should probably install this silicone keyboard cover on my new MacBook Pro immediately.
00:55:16 ◼ ► So Pericles in the chat suggests drilling a hole in my MacBook so it can drain like my air conditioner.
00:55:24 ◼ ► Then you're going to get out the drill and go to do it and you'll see this big yellow sticker on the roof of your house that says, "Do not drill holes in this house."
00:55:34 ◼ ► That's a good amount of water that's filled that bowl so far. I would say – do you want to get another bowl? Do you want to get another bowl? We can wait.
00:55:42 ◼ ► No, it appears – I mean it's sitting on a brown gross rug so maybe it's a little bit hard to tell and it's sitting inside. But you know like the color of Rubbermaid or Tupperware containers from the '80s?
00:55:54 ◼ ► It's that color container and I'm pretty sure that container was from about the age that the roof is. Yeah, I'd say it's probably about 10 ounces of water already in that bowl.
00:56:12 ◼ ► This is giving a whole new spin to Tiff's double rainbow picture she was taking. What does it mean? You know what it means? It means you're going to have water in your house soon.
00:56:20 ◼ ► It's a flooded house. Oh, man, that's good. Not good at all. Do you need to get more bowls or can we do some Ask ATP?
00:56:31 ◼ ► We can do some Ask ATP. This Tupperware bowl has – I have it under the spot that most of the water is falling on. So there's only some small drip spots in there. I mean look, the whole floor under it has rotten anyway and I know that now. So it's like well, it gets a little bit wet.
00:56:47 ◼ ► You should count yourself lucky that this leak has the courtesy to fall someplace that is not like directly on top of your computer.
00:57:00 ◼ ► Well, it may be approaching but I'm saying like the drips usually don't care and if it was going directly on top of your computer, your options, especially on your iMac, like that's bad.
00:57:08 ◼ ► I have a sheet over in the – I mean sheets aren't – No, yeah, you should try like a garbage bag. Yeah. A tarp. You have a tarp. I might do that when I go to bed tonight actually.
00:57:18 ◼ ► When you go to bed, you bring that thing into the bedroom with you. Yeah, that's probably the better – But not someplace you'll trip over when you get up in the night to pee. Oh, my word.
00:57:28 ◼ ► Yeah, you would be overestimating how much free space we have in these bedrooms. Oh, God.
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00:59:34 ◼ ► Let's do some Ask ATP before Marco gets electrocuted. Bronwyn Erb writes, "I have many portable external drives and they keep filling up. What is the best..." Is that with water or something else?
00:59:45 ◼ ► "What is the best solution for storing large video files?" Drill holes in the pile. Drill holes in the metal. That'll do it. The Synology sounds very complicated, but is it the next best step?
00:59:55 ◼ ► I am hugely biased. So the three of us got sent one or two, depending on which one of us you're talking about, one or two Synology units several years ago now.
01:00:04 ◼ ► And I am so in love with my Synology, I cannot even begin to describe it. And I'm in love with it enough that if this thing died tomorrow, I would spend the truly obscene amount of money that it would cost to replace it, because I am that in love with it.
01:00:19 ◼ ► A while ago, I was trying to convince a friend of the show, Todd Vizzieri, to get himself a Synology. And I was writing, or I had written a post describing the bare basics of what you need to know in order to have your own Synology.
01:00:31 ◼ ► I will link that in the show notes. I don't know that that's necessarily the next step, but it is certainly a great next step.
01:00:40 ◼ ► But there's other things in the middle, like you could do something comparatively simpler like Drobo, which I've heard about half the people I know who have Drobos love them, and about half the people that I know that have Drobos friggin' hate them.
01:00:51 ◼ ► So take that for what you will. But again, Synology did send us those units. We didn't pay for them, but I love my Synology, and I would absolutely pay for it tomorrow if I had to.
01:01:03 ◼ ► John, what would you do if you had a lot of external drives that were overflowing, and what would your next step be?
01:01:10 ◼ ► So this question says that they keep buying external drives and they keep filling up. I think the next step is something like a NAS. My advice for storing stuff is, yeah, get external drives. They can be really big, and they're cheap, and that's the way to do it.
01:01:24 ◼ ► But if you keep doing that, and they keep filling up, and you're frustrated by the fact they're filling up, some kind of storage solution where you can add hard drives and especially that you can replace them with larger capacity ones, so it's having some kind of RAID or other shared data arrangement, that's the next step.
01:01:38 ◼ ► And Synology sounds complicated, and it's very capable. There's a lot of things you can do with it, but I've always been impressed by, not just Synology, any of these things, even the FreeNAS stuff or whatever. It's not as bad as you think it's going to be.
01:01:52 ◼ ► It takes a little bit to think about and set up, but once it's up and running and doing the thing that you want it to do, especially if you just want it to serve as a big bucket of bits to store stuff, you can do it. And in my experience, it's been very reliable, and you don't think about it.
01:02:12 ◼ ► The initial setup happens, and then that's that. So if you keep filling up external drives, which is a much simpler solution, the next move is some kind of box with a bunch of disks in it, and you have a lot of choices.
01:02:22 ◼ ► And yeah, you have to do research and stuff, but like Casey, I have totally come around on it, and I can't go back now. If my Synology dies, I'm buying a new one.
01:02:47 ◼ ► So you may not have opinions about overflowing external drives, but what are your opinions about external overflowing bowls?
01:02:55 ◼ ► No, so I think, I mean, if you take the question as written, how do you store even more large video files than what external drives can hold?
01:03:06 ◼ ► Then, yeah, sure, something like a Synology or other NAS-type solution is the way to do that.
01:03:13 ◼ ► But if you're filling up external hard drives, I mean, external hard drives, you can get those, what, up to like 10 terabytes now?
01:03:19 ◼ ► So if you're filling those up, you're going to fill up a Synology pretty soon too, because a Synology is just a box with like eight hard drives in it.
01:03:28 ◼ ► I guess, but like, it basically brings more problems. And the Synology, I still have the one that Casey mentioned that we all got as previews thanks to their generosity.
01:03:40 ◼ ► And, you know, I use it, I don't really think about it much. It just is there. It's like a big archive drive for me and TIFF. And it just kind of serves a couple of minor roles.
01:03:51 ◼ ► But for the most part, it's just like a big archive drive. And it's our Time Michigan host drive. And so it's nice for that.
01:03:56 ◼ ► And I don't ever really go update it, really. Like, I remember to do it maybe once a year. I'll go update the software on it, whatever, whatever.
01:04:02 ◼ ► But for the most part, it updates itself. It keeps itself going, and I don't really ever have to know about it.
01:04:07 ◼ ► I keep it in my garage. It runs there year round 24/7. And it's fine. So, you know, it isn't a whole lot of work to keep it.
01:04:18 ◼ ► But it is just like one more thing. It's one more avenue of complexity. It's one more thing that you have to buy. And, you know, these things are not cheap.
01:04:27 ◼ ► You know, I think empty, it's something like $1,000 or something like that for one with a bunch of bays in it. You know, a bunch of disks. That's probably another like 1,000 bucks for large ones, if not more than that.
01:04:38 ◼ ► So like, you're putting a lot of money into this thing. And it's another thing to manage. And it's another thing to maintain. And it's another thing that might have security issues that you need to worry about or hear about or get patched or whatever else.
01:04:49 ◼ ► It's like, you add a lot of complexity to this. And then you have this big, loud, well, yeah, it's kind of loud. You have this big box full of disks that are probably loud somewhere in your house that you have to maintain and leave on and pay for the power for and everything else.
01:05:04 ◼ ► So like, it's a pretty large solution. Instead, I would say before you jump into that, I would ask yourself, is there any way I can find a way to need to keep fewer or smaller video files forever?
01:05:20 ◼ ► Is there some other way to address this problem? And I don't know what Brahman's needs are here. It could be that they're storing source video files for video creation projects that just can't be down-resed or anything else.
01:05:37 ◼ ► But if it's the case of storing final cut working files or video project files, what format do those have to be in? Do they really have to be stored in pro res, where it's this massive, minimally compressed or uncompressed source file?
01:05:52 ◼ ► Or can it be stored as the final output file? Do you need to store all the sources? Do you need to store all the sources in the highest format? Can they tolerate compression once they're a certain age old? Things like that. Just to avoid needing to store such massive files and quite so many of them.
01:06:11 ◼ ► Because if you're going through terabytes and terabytes, those are pretty significant needs for somebody who's trying to, for not a video production company, for just one person. That's pretty substantial.
01:06:24 ◼ ► And so if there's any way to deal with just addressing the problem of do you really need to keep all these, and do they really need to be as big as they are, I would try to solve that or really take a hard look at that first.
01:06:37 ◼ ► And if you really, really can't do it, then I guess a Synology or something like that, but it's such a heavy solution. Exhaust all other possibilities first.
01:06:49 ◼ ► I don't disagree with you, but man, you should try the Synology. It's really great. It's expensive, but it's really great.
01:06:57 ◼ ► Alright, Chris Tucker-Mear writes the following, and this is verbatim. "Serious question despite the obvious jokes. How do you decide when to replace personal computers or devices?
01:07:08 ◼ ► New one every X years, fixed annual budget, keep them until they die or can't run the latest OS, gut feeling on a case-by-case basis?"
01:07:15 ◼ ► And I was thinking about this for myself, and first of all I had to stop giggling about all the jokes I wanted to make, but secondly, generally speaking, I replace computers very, very, very slowly.
01:07:29 ◼ ► Not as slowly as Jon, but pretty darn slowly. I bought my iMac that I'm using now right before I started my last jobby job, so that was the beginning of 2016.
01:07:42 ◼ ► So this is two years old now, and I think the graphics card may be going or it needs to reinstall, but that's a whole different issue. Moving on.
01:07:49 ◼ ► The last laptop I bought was the MacBook Adorable, which I bought just over a year ago. That one's a little bit of a special case because I will probably buy a new one the moment a new one comes out, just because I want that sweet, sweet speed, whatever improvement a new one would bring.
01:08:06 ◼ ► But generally speaking, before that, I hadn't bought a laptop since 2011, I think. We were talking about this last episode, actually. Whenever the Hi-Res Antiglare MacBook Pro was a thing, that was the last one I had bought.
01:08:18 ◼ ► And this was when SSDs either weren't a thing or were so prohibitively expensive that they effectively weren't a thing. So I don't buy computers very often at all.
01:08:34 ◼ ► I feel like this thing, this question, serious questions about the obvious jokes, but the jokes aren't jokes. They're actual answers. We all have, all three of us have different decision making about when we decide to replace a computer.
01:08:46 ◼ ► And that's the answer to this question. We make jokes about it because sometimes other people's habits seem silly. Whatever, me taking a long time, Marco buying everything, Casey tolerating his computers, doing bad things and not telling anybody about them.
01:08:59 ◼ ► Right? But those are literally the answers. So I feel like if you listen to the show for a long time, you kind of know how we all decide. I feel like I can answer for all three of us.
01:09:06 ◼ ► And no one way of deciding when to buy a new computer is right or wrong. What he's just asking is what they are. So anyway, for me, as I think you can tell for all these tech things in my life, I'm always trying to buy what I think is a winner product.
01:09:22 ◼ ► Like it's not the very first, it's not the very last, it's not the one that totally needs to be replaced, it's not going to be the model that everybody hated.
01:09:29 ◼ ► Like I have criteria that are important to me and I'm looking for the computer that fulfills them. And I've been waiting on my personal Mac, the one I'm using right now for a long time, because Apple just hasn't made one that feels like it's up to snuff.
01:09:44 ◼ ► And my decision making is I don't want to buy like an in-between model if I can at all help it. Like I would have been perfectly happy with a 5K iMac or an iMac Pro. Those would be great. They'd be way better than what I'm doing.
01:09:56 ◼ ► But I'm like, but you know, and especially they've kind of been leading me on with the Mac Pro thing. It's not exactly what I want. I want a computer that's like the one I have, but newer.
01:10:04 ◼ ► And if eventually it was clear that Apple was never going to make one, yeah, I would have bought an iMac Pro. Like that would have happened.
01:10:09 ◼ ► But Apple has continued to string me along. And just when I was about to give up, they had that Apple event in April and said, we're going to make a new Mac Pro. So I've been waiting for that.
01:10:17 ◼ ► But that's that's my philosophy. Same thing with televisions like I'm or even cars like I, you know, I need probably needed a new car sooner than I bought one.
01:10:25 ◼ ► But there was a generation of Honda Accord that I just didn't like. It was, you know, I had driven them as a loner. I thought they were ugly.
01:10:31 ◼ ► I didn't like how they the interior looked or felt. I felt the ride was weird, like they weren't, you know, so I waited like I will I will I would rather wait and get a product that I feel like I'll be happy with both initially and for the long term rather than by immediately.
01:10:47 ◼ ► And for other, you know, other computers in the house, like I'm not the only one who has one here. I'm mostly kind of like we do with the cars.
01:10:55 ◼ ► So use them until it's clear that they can't fulfill the needs anymore. Like the disk is too small. The thing is too slow. Like whatever. I don't I don't keep them, you know, encased in amber and say you're you're going to run, you know, Snow Leopard forever because it's the only one that that makes you fast.
01:11:11 ◼ ► I just keep operating the operating system and if it gets too slow, I buy a new computer. But for the most part, I want to get mileage out of my stuff. I want to buy a pretty good one.
01:11:19 ◼ ► I want to use it for a long time and I replace it when it's needed. And, you know, so my wife's got the 5K iMac.
01:11:26 ◼ ► I think the thing will make me replace that is it's got a one terabyte internal drive and I'm always pressing up against the edge of that.
01:11:33 ◼ ► Eventually, I'm going to have so many photos because I keep all the originals on my computer that it won't fit anymore.
01:11:43 ◼ ► So, yeah, the answer varies. But I definitely am looking for the best time to buy a computer that's going to be in for the long haul.
01:11:55 ◼ ► I mean, yeah, I basically buy a computer whenever, you know, for a desktop, I actually am fairly conservative because typically when it comes to desktops, I buy like the biggest, fastest one that I can when I need one.
01:12:15 ◼ ► And then I don't I try not to upgrade that until there's something meaningful to upgrade to from there.
01:12:22 ◼ ► You know, the high end, I mean, like most Macs these days, it doesn't move that quickly.
01:12:28 ◼ ► And when you buy super high end, you know, when you buy super fast stuff, there's a lot less need to constantly upgrade it.
01:12:34 ◼ ► Like people like Casey who own the MacBook Adorable, they always want the next one because it's barely powerful enough to function.
01:12:43 ◼ ► And so, like when the next one adds like 10 percent more performance, they're like, oh, my God, please, anything.
01:13:01 ◼ ► So like, you know, when you buy high end stuff like John's Mac Pro, you know, today we can make fun of John's Mac Pro because all of our phones are now faster than it probably.
01:13:09 ◼ ► But when John bought it 50 years ago, it was a really great computer for like five years after that. And it still was good even after that.
01:13:25 ◼ ► So there was no reason for John to buy a new Mac Pro for like the first four or five years of owning it because there really wasn't that much that was better than that one that would have been available.
01:13:34 ◼ ► And so you would have been spending a lot of money to get something only, you know, a little bit better because when you buy at the higher end, like there's not much more headroom there for products to go in the next few years.
01:13:46 ◼ ► And it's a long time before yours becomes, you know, irrelevant or prohibitively slow or prohibitively limited in other ways.
01:13:53 ◼ ► So that's what I do on the desktop. The desktop is I buy Pro desktops whenever possible and I use them for a while, you know, usually between two and four years.
01:14:01 ◼ ► The laptop side, I change fairly frequently, you know, about on average, I think I'm about once a year maybe for the laptop side.
01:14:10 ◼ ► And part of that is because I have been dissatisfied with so many of the laptops recently. I've been waffling between different ones and I try one that my needs change or then I have a different idea of how I want to use it.
01:14:23 ◼ ► And then I or I decided that I hate it because it's terrible and so I sell it and then change to a different one to see if that one will be good and will keep me out of it for a long time.
01:14:33 ◼ ► But that's obviously like, you know, not something that most people need to want to or are able to do.
01:14:39 ◼ ► So I'm not going to say that's a good strategy for anybody. It's certainly not very efficient. It's only because I've been so dissatisfied that I'm trying to find something good.
01:14:46 ◼ ► And finally, I would say that, you know, the idea, you know, what Chris asked here was like, do you buy a new one every X years? Do you have a fixed annual budget?
01:14:57 ◼ ► And I would say those aren't great approaches, because anything based on like, I will evaluate this decision every X years or I will evaluate this decision, I will apply X dollars a year to my computer pool and, you know, drain it when I feel like it.
01:15:15 ◼ ► The problem with those approaches is that that assumes that computers make linear progress over time.
01:15:21 ◼ ► And that whenever, you know, that whenever that interval comes up, you know, whether there's enough money in the pool or whether it has been your X years for your upgrade interval, that assumes that that will be a decent time to buy a Mac or to buy, you know, to buy your next computer, whatever that is.
01:15:35 ◼ ► And that's simply not how this works in practice. And of course, you know, in recent years, this has been getting even more extreme with like, you know, the duration between updates of a lot of products.
01:15:42 ◼ ► But like, that just isn't a good strategy for you know, to tie yourself to a fixed timeline in a market that doesn't follow a fixed timeline or even a remotely linear one.
01:15:54 ◼ ► So for instance, you don't want to buy something right before it's probably going to be upgraded. If you don't have a pressing need right then to have it right then like if you can wait, wait, right.
01:16:06 ◼ ► But even things like not every generation is significant. I mentioned the, you know, my desktop moves.
01:16:14 ◼ ► The last time I bought before they had my pro was the iMac 5k. I jumped the gun on a cycle I had a trash can Mac Pro and I was planning on using it for years.
01:16:23 ◼ ► But instead, the 5k came out and changed everything because it gave me desktop 5k resolution retina, which I didn't think would be possible for a few more years.
01:16:32 ◼ ► And it was so it was such a compelling package that I changed my plans and just got that and sold the Mac Pro and actually paid for the entire iMac or at least the majority of it with with the profit.
01:16:45 ◼ ► And so I jumped the gun because conditions change in the market. But then after that, I the one of the reasons I kept that 5k iMac for a little over three years is because the new ones that have come out after that weren't better enough.
01:17:01 ◼ ► It wasn't a big enough gain from what I already had because I bought this great computer until the iMac Pro came out. And the iMac Pro was so good.
01:17:09 ◼ ► And it was so much better than what I had that I could actually get something that was like two or three times faster and had had a few other benefits as well that I'm like, okay, now this is a good time.
01:17:19 ◼ ► But if I would have said, I'm going to buy a new desktop every three years, I would have bought the 5k. And then I would have bought the, you know, the version of it. That's, I think still the current version now. But I'm going to miss the iMac Pro, it would have been too early.
01:17:34 ◼ ► And so it's just, you have to pay some attention to what's actually being released, what the actual products are, like what the cycles are, if you want to optimize for it. Now, if you don't care, that's a different story.
01:17:44 ◼ ► If you don't care, first of all, you probably aren't listening to our show, because let's be honest, but, you know, that's another story. Or if you're desperate, if your computer broke, you need one, and the update isn't likely to come out for like, you know, six months, fine, then get whatever you can at the time you get it.
01:17:58 ◼ ► And you know, sometimes we all have to do that. But if you have flexibility in your timing, that's, it's way better to actually look at the market and make judgment calls based on conditions as they happen, as opposed to just saying every x year, I'm going to replace this with whatever I can find at that point.
01:18:13 ◼ ► Yeah, I think I very much agree with that. And if you need a tool with which to evaluate that, it's not great, and you miss a lot of like, context, but the MacRumors Buyer's Guide, which we will put in the show notes, that's a really good way to just kind of get a rough guess for, is it a terrible idea to buy this computer right now? Or is it an okay idea? Or is it a great time to do it? So it's worth checking that out if you've never seen it.
01:18:39 ◼ ► All right, finally, we have a bit of a throwback, which I am kind of excited about. Rob Mathers writes, "On the surface, Swift obviously addresses the spirit of Copeland 2010, but does it address the specifics? Is it really moving along the 'higher level language' progression?"
01:18:57 ◼ ► So, Copeland 2010 was an article that, Jon, you wrote in, what was it, 2005, where you said, "Hey, Apple really needs to get on this new language bandwagon and do it pretty much yesterday, or there's going to be problems." And you kind of laid out, "Here's what I think that new language needs to be able to do." So, did they do it? Are we good now? Is everyone happy?
01:19:19 ◼ ► People ask about this from time to time, and it was actually a series of articles, and then I did a follow-up article actually in 2010 about it. And I think I asked and answered in there, but those are old articles at this point, so people haven't seen them.
01:19:30 ◼ ► But, yeah, Swift pretty much hits every single point, in a surprising way. I knew they'd have to do something, but you think, "Well, maybe they'll do something that is more like an evolution of Objective-C." They wouldn't go all the way to have a very, very different language.
01:19:52 ◼ ► Not just different in syntax, but different in semantics and all sorts of new features and everything that Swift is. I think everyone was caught by surprise by what a break Swift was, despite the fact that early on they were really playing Swift up as, "It's not that different from Objective-C," before Swift came into its own.
01:20:12 ◼ ► It's like, "Ha ha, no, really, it's pretty different." It took a couple years for that. The only area, I think the reason people ask this is they think, "Well, Swift is not very dynamic, and it has these aims of extending itself down to be capable of low-level stuff as well."
01:20:28 ◼ ► And all that is true, but it still fulfills all the requirements. Definitely a new syntax, new language model. It still has the ability to have unsafe pointers and stuff like that, but they're called unsafe pointers. When you just use the language regularly, you're not dereferencing pointers. You do not have to worry about accidentally scribbling all over memory. You scribble all over memory, you're definitely doing it on purpose in Swift.
01:20:52 ◼ ► And it's not a loosey-goosey, everything is dynamic type of language like Ruby or Perl or JavaScript or something like that. And maybe that's what people think. It's not like Lisp, it's not like Smalltalk. It's more like a fancy C++, but it is higher level. It does fulfill all the criteria for the most part.
01:21:17 ◼ ► It doesn't run on a virtual machine, that's true, but it's close enough. There was never going to be a fantasy language that fulfilled all of my hopes and dreams exactly. And the fact that Swift came as close as it did is like a miracle beyond my wildest dreams.
01:21:37 ◼ ► Absolutely, it addressed all the problems of Copeland 2010. It came at a reasonable time. In my Copeland 2010 Revisited article, I explained why I thought that 2010 came and when and nothing happened and there were good reasons for it.
01:21:52 ◼ ► Yeah, so, sorry to disappoint if you're looking for some kind of controversy, but they did it. It was called Swift. It was great, I was there.
01:22:08 ◼ ► Alright, we actually have a bonus Ask ATP this week. Late breaking news. Let's see, Ted Hardy writes, "Hey Casey, how's the new Dave Matthews Band album?" Which actually came out like a month or two ago. "Hey buddy, how's it going?" I actually don't have too much to say about it. It's good.
01:22:24 ◼ ► I've listened to it more than I expected. I don't typically listen to studio albums that much, but it's good. The very first song, what was it called? "Samurai Cop" I believe, is a very rare example of a Dave Matthews Band song that's lyrically decent.
01:22:41 ◼ ► And it's also a very rare example of me paying attention to the lyrics of any song I ever listen to. I think that's very good. I'm obviously very, very biased, but "Virginia in the Rain" is also very good, although I think my favorite of all of the tracks on the album might be "Again and Again," which I just think is very, very good.
01:23:00 ◼ ► But it's weird not having Boyd on the album. It makes sense that Boyd is not on the album, but it's good. Not my favorite, not my least favorite. It's good. What did you think about it, Marco?
01:23:19 ◼ ► He loved that quote. He didn't even say "important." He said, "remains a product in our lineup."
01:23:33 ◼ ► All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Casper, Squarespace, and Simple Contacts. And we will talk to you next week.
01:23:41 ◼ ► Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
01:23:52 ◼ ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, 'cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
01:24:03 ◼ ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM. And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
01:24:18 ◼ ► That's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-S-A. It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Tech podcast so long.
01:24:42 ◼ ► Oh, my word. Do we have time for a post show, or do you have to go? What's the state of the world?
01:24:47 ◼ ► The rain has slowed to the point where the roof leak appears to be inactive. That's good.
01:24:51 ◼ ► So I think we have, and I already ran around and closed all the windows and dropped off John's laptop, so I think we're okay.
01:24:59 ◼ ► The floor upstairs is still very wet though from the door leaking water under it. But I'm choosing not to fix that right now.
01:25:09 ◼ ► Alright, so as we record, I have not yet posted my next Casey on Cars video, but by the time this episode is released, it will be out.
01:25:37 ◼ ► You took my joke from me, John. You took it. I was going to say, it's watermarked and everything.
01:25:55 ◼ ► Anyway, the next version of Casey on Cars, this has become more and more obvious as I've been tweeting and Instagramming more and more about it.
01:26:03 ◼ ► But I was given for a week a Volkswagen Golf R, which I mispronounced approximately 305 times during that video.
01:26:12 ◼ ► Yeah, Casey, Casey, you've been doing so well on the podcast. And I watched the video. I'm like, what happened?
01:26:19 ◼ ► I thought you had turned a corner. You've been practicing on the podcast. You've been nailing it every single time.
01:26:23 ◼ ► Like, ready to watch this video. He's going to nail it. And nope, you did not. You've regressed.
01:26:33 ◼ ► No, the voiceovers were better. The voiceovers were better. But anyway, listener of the show, Andrew, was able to facilitate this for me.
01:26:42 ◼ ► And I'm not sure where his Gary the Privacy Clown kind of threshold is, so I don't want to say much more than that.
01:26:48 ◼ ► But it was extremely kind of him. And I very, very, very much appreciate it. And I had the pleasure of meeting him at WWDC, which was also excellent.
01:26:57 ◼ ► So thank you very much, Andrew. Yeah, so you guys have seen the video. I have talked to you somewhat about the car. What do you want to know?
01:27:05 ◼ ► All right, so we're going to assume, we're going to spoiler gong this, whatever we're doing.
01:27:10 ◼ ► We're going to assume that people have watched the video, and we're going to talk about your conclusions and the content of the video.
01:27:22 ◼ ► So basically, if I can summarize your thoughts back to you, because obviously that's productive.
01:27:29 ◼ ► I feel like, you know, so your opinion of this car seems to basically have been, by the way, it was a good video. I really liked it.
01:27:36 ◼ ► I know, I think you were concerned about it might be a little bit long, but I think it actually worked. Like, it is long.
01:27:45 ◼ ► So the version you showed us, the screener that we received for our consideration was about 18 minutes.
01:27:52 ◼ ► When I first saw that, I thought, oh, that probably is going to be a little bit long. But it didn't feel long when I was watching it.
01:27:57 ◼ ► Like, it felt just like, oh, okay, this is Casey talking about a car. And there was never a point where I'm like, geez, how much longer is this?
01:28:08 ◼ ► Production value wise, you're getting better. You're getting a lot better. Like, it was really pretty solid.
01:28:15 ◼ ► Like, there were a few like minor things that I, you know, noticed. I'm like, oh, I wish that transition was a little bit rough or, you know, the audio in the car was, you know, not ideal.
01:28:28 ◼ ► Honestly, it's hard for me to judge you relative to other YouTube car videos. Like, I don't watch any of those things.
01:28:35 ◼ ► So I don't know, like, what the style, and I watch it embarrassingly, so I'm not a YouTube videoist, total.
01:28:48 ◼ ► But, so with that, you know, with that, like, you know, green of sand aside, with that, you know, bucket of leaked water aside, I liked it as a standalone thing.
01:28:59 ◼ ► I don't, I can't compare it to what's out there, but I can just say it in absolute terms, I liked it, and I was impressed by it.
01:29:07 ◼ ► And you continue to have a much stronger grasp on, like, narrative and story arc than I think most people do when they make videos.
01:29:19 ◼ ► But I was impressed by just, like, how coherent the whole thing was and how much sense it made.
01:29:27 ◼ ► Audio-wise, video-wise it was great, you know, video-wise there was, I don't really think I have any complaints about anything.
01:29:37 ◼ ► Audio-wise, the parts where you're standing in front of the car where you have the lav mic worked out really well.
01:29:44 ◼ ► Yeah, it was a little windy on one of the days, which was a little unfortunate, but otherwise I was pretty happy with that.
01:29:50 ◼ ► Yeah, and I heard, like, there was, like, one, like, big wind noise that you heard in one of them, but I only heard, like, I only heard one of those.
01:29:57 ◼ ► I was being kind in the sense that I was watching it on the built-in speakers of my laptop.
01:30:02 ◼ ► Because I had a busy night preparing for my house to explode and I didn't have time to, like, sit down at my computer, so I watched it on the laptop on a couch.
01:30:13 ◼ ► Which I thought, like, okay, this is a real world environment. This is how most people watch videos.
01:30:22 ◼ ► But, so, in the context of your audience, it sounded great the vast majority of the time.
01:30:27 ◼ ► The only things that didn't sound ideal were the parts in the car, which you know already, that, like, where you were clipping a little bit and it was a little bit quieter than the rest of the video.
01:30:34 ◼ ► But other than that, it was fine. And that, I do think that should be solvable by, as I mentioned last episode or two episodes ago, that should be solvable by, like, you know, gain adjustments.
01:30:46 ◼ ► Well, yeah, and actually I have purchased a Sennheiser G3 setup, which is a wireless lavalier mic, which apparently is the, like, go-to standard that everyone uses for pretty much everything with regard to lavalier mics.
01:31:02 ◼ ► I have not received it yet. It's actually, I bought it from B&H when they were having a sale, so that comes Monday.
01:31:09 ◼ ► Additionally, a different listener was kind enough to send me a Samson, shoot, I'll have to figure out what the actual make of this is, or what the model is, but it's a Samson equivalent thereof, which all happened, like, simultaneously.
01:31:28 ◼ ► Because, like you said, Marco, externally, I think it was mostly fine. I mean, it wasn't perfect, but it was mostly fine.
01:31:32 ◼ ► But in the car, I ended up using the mic off the GoPro that was closest to my head, because that was actually the best option I had, which will tell you how crummy my options were.
01:31:43 ◼ ► So I'm going to try one or both of these, and hopefully one of them will be a little better in car, because that, I think, is my weak spot right now from an audio perspective, is that in car it's just bad.
01:31:57 ◼ ► And I mean, it's a crummy environment to record, right? Like, it's not a very conducive environment to getting really clear noise-free audio out of a human's voice, or out of a human body.
01:32:09 ◼ ► But I do feel like I am getting a little bit better with regard to audio, and I do think I'm definitely getting medium better with regard to video.
01:32:21 ◼ ► I'm really happy with how the multicam setup worked out. I didn't know if that was going to go well or not, but I'm really happy with how that went.
01:32:26 ◼ ► And maybe my editing choices were great, maybe they were terrible, but I'm at least happy that I can now, I now have a new tool in the toolbox, which is having two different GoPros pointing at me and flipping back and forth between them in the edited version.
01:32:40 ◼ ► Yeah, that part actually I thought worked pretty well. Again, there were one or two cuts where I was like, "Oh, that's kind of a weird cut," but otherwise it worked really well.
01:32:46 ◼ ► And most of the time I didn't even notice that you were using multicam, which is what you want, basically. You don't want people to be noticing it, right?
01:32:53 ◼ ► And I was able to, it raises the production value, the perceived production value of the video significantly when you have multicam.
01:33:00 ◼ ► It makes it flow better, it keeps people's visual interest more, and it looks like a bigger production value result. And so I think that all worked really well.
01:33:17 ◼ ► I think I have all the same comments as I had on basically all the past videos. I did notice the video on this one looked a lot better, especially comparing to your first one, in terms of there wasn't any scenes where the highs were blown out and everything.
01:33:29 ◼ ► Everything looked very clear. The video looked crisp and just looked good. And you picked, I guess, good sunny days to do it on, so all that was great.
01:33:38 ◼ ► The audio, my main complaint in the audio is, I mean, you're going to say, "Oh, yeah, so the in-car was hard and the out-of-car was better," but I was thinking of watching it, like, would this video actually be better if all of the audio was a medium worst?
01:33:54 ◼ ► It was the inconsistency of the audio, because you'd go from the outside and be like, "Ah, pleasant. I'm listening to Casey talking." You go from the inside, it's like, "What the hell is this?"
01:34:01 ◼ ► And then you go back to the outside, and it's like, consistency. Consistency at a level 6 is better than 10.3, 10.3. You know what I mean?
01:34:10 ◼ ► And you do have to improve the audio in the car somehow. You've got to talk to Demiro, because I'm sure he's not using expensive crap, but he sounds better in the car than you do, so you've got to figure out what the hell he's doing. Is he doing it in like an hour?
01:34:19 ◼ ► I have asked in the past, and in the past he said he was just using the onboard mic on his iPhone X, but I tried that. Well, maybe that was the missing piece, I don't know.
01:34:31 ◼ ► But since I asked, and again, this was like months ago, since I asked, I've seen him using lavaliers again, so I'm not sure, and I don't, like, I'm a big fan of Demiro's. Like, everyone has their problems, I do, he does.
01:34:44 ◼ ► But, by and large, I'm a really big fan, and I'm trying not to like totally fanboy all over him and be like, "Oh, oh, oh, tell me all the stuff you do. I just want to be just like you. Please, can I be just like you, please?"
01:34:53 ◼ ► So I'm trying to like play it cool, even though I'm very not cool. So I want to try these two new lavaliers, see if they do any better, and if neither of them do, then I'm going to probably have to reach out again and be like, "Dude, please help me."
01:35:06 ◼ ► So you've got to come up with something, or you've just got to do a voiceover for it. And speaking of voiceover, the second thing, again, a consistency issue, not so much a quality issue. I think all your voiceovers were good, and all your standups were good and everything, right?
01:35:16 ◼ ► But there was a difference in like cadence and energy level between the live and the after, and even some of the after stuff were different from each other. And again, consistency, like it has to feel like an even, it has to feel like one, like the same thing.
01:35:31 ◼ ► It's kind of like if you try to insert a section into a podcast later, where like three days later we saw we need a segment and we recorded all our voices sounding a little bit different, our energy's different or whatever.
01:35:42 ◼ ► That was the same in this video. You got quieter and calmer, and then you got more animated, and it was just too much variability. And I don't know how to even that out, other than to say, and this is what everyone was trying to suggest you do or whatever, but it's like up to you.
01:35:54 ◼ ► Like one way to do it would be don't talk so much live, like just do all the talking later. That's one way you can do a video. Obviously you're not going for that, which is why I'm saying you just got to figure out a way to get it to work.
01:36:04 ◼ ► Again, I'm just repeating comments from last time, but it's worth repeating them. Stop looking at the camera when you drive, for the love of God. Just never look at the camera when you drive. Never.
01:36:15 ◼ ► No, don't glance. We don't need to see you. We're seeing you drive. Drive. I don't think that's a style trust. A, it's a safety thing, and B, you never have to look at the camera. It's fine. We're watching you drive. We're watching your hands shift. We do not need to see you glance at us all. So I think you're fine with that.
01:36:32 ◼ ► I felt like this is like, it doesn't, again, not necessarily a style thing, but I felt like I didn't see as much of the car as I wanted to, which may sound crazy because you have all this footage of this car, but I feel like, do I feel like I know what the Golf R looks like inside and out?
01:36:47 ◼ ► And maybe, you know, there was, I don't know, like, I don't know if the answer is a gimbal or it's like, you know, you always need more, you know, B-roll footage or whatever. I know what you look like standing in front of things.
01:36:57 ◼ ► And I know a little bit of what you look like driving. I wanted to see more of the car. Even when you were talking about the wing and how the wing is like, like not as ridiculous as those ugly wings. The whole time you were talking about that, I wanted to see, like, close-ups of this wing that you're talking about.
01:37:13 ◼ ► You know what I mean? And you did. You did have a cutaway shot of the wing and you showed it, but it was so brief. And then the rest of the time it was you talking about the wing. You're like, show me. Show me all these things. Like, the things that you have shots of, but you don't realize, like, they go by fast when watching them.
01:37:25 ◼ ► Like, I wanted to see that weird flip-up thing where, like, that you used to open the trunk and you showed it. You had a shot of it, but it felt like it went by too fast as I wanted to see more of that because it was weird.
01:37:35 ◼ ► So you have to assume that when people are seeing the things you want to show us, we're seeing them for the first time. So we're like, slow it down and or like linger on it longer than you think.
01:37:44 ◼ ► Because that's the only time we're going to see that latch and that thing. My question is like, the camera is in there, but it's also the latch. So do your fingers hit the lens of the camera? And I couldn't tell because it all went kind of went by too fast.
01:37:54 ◼ ► Well, that's an interesting point. The answer is no, but I totally get what you're driving at, though.
01:37:58 ◼ ► And so, I don't know, how does that work, though? If it flips up, is the camera, like, does the camera not there when you use the latch?
01:38:03 ◼ ► Well, no, it's that the camera is still within the body of the car and you're putting leverage on the VW logo itself. Does that make sense?
01:38:13 ◼ ► So your hands or your fingers are kind of tucked up directly against the VW logo while the camera is still within the rear body panel. That was a really poor description, but does that make sense?
01:38:25 ◼ ► Yeah. I like that bit about the sensor thing and behind the logo because I never would have guessed that. That's a detail like I haven't seen anyplace else. And that's a great that that type of thing is a great detail show.
01:38:35 ◼ ► In fact, I saw a Golf when I was walking the dog after watching this video and I saw that it did have the sensor thing because it wasn't an R and it was probably like previous year.
01:38:43 ◼ ► So this must be actually a new development. So that was all great. Those wheels are hideous. You're so right.
01:38:54 ◼ ► I think the style of wheels that Casey wanted on it that he showed in the little caption, which is nice, although they should have been bigger, was I think a little bit dated looking.
01:39:04 ◼ ► And the new ones, I think, are I wouldn't say that they're the coolest wheels I've ever seen, but they look fresh. They look a little bit new and modern.
01:39:11 ◼ ► They do look more modern, but I just don't like the style. I'm not. This just doesn't appeal to me. And I also think they're a little oversized.
01:39:19 ◼ ► So, yeah, I couldn't get a good look on like, you know, how thick is the tire versus the rim?
01:39:30 ◼ ► I was about to say exactly that. On the brand new wheels, it's rubber bands around the wheel. On the prior generation Golf R, it's golf? I have to like, God, I don't know why it's so hard for me.
01:39:44 ◼ ► Anyway, on the prior generation Golf R, there was another inch of sidewall, if I'm not mistaken.
01:39:49 ◼ ► Yeah, because I'm looking at like a press picture of it now, which is a little bit like, you know, it's perfectly lit, so you can see and it's turned slightly.
01:39:56 ◼ ► And those, boy, you could not have those in the Northeast. Like you hit one pothole with that. Those rims are bent. It's done.
01:40:05 ◼ ► Yeah, I think we're going to see a swing back in a different direction because a lot of modern cars across all price ranges come with these very low sidewalls.
01:40:13 ◼ ► And then people are damaging tires and, you know, damaging wheels and popping tires and just you can't like, so I think it's going to be a swing back and car advice to people.
01:40:21 ◼ ► If you have the option of like the ridiculously huge wheels and you live like in New England or someplace with weather or potholes, maybe get the one size down.
01:40:28 ◼ ► You'll know I'm still living in fear of the fact that I might have to bent rims and I'll have to, you know, when I get four new tires for my car to deal with the slow leak that I have in two of my tires, I don't want to find out it's actually the rims because they're expensive.
01:40:44 ◼ ► Oh, geez. They're expensive and I don't want to find that out, but it may be true. Anyway, back to the video. Yeah, more pictures of the car, more inserts, even things out, consistencies.
01:40:55 ◼ ► But I think I feel like consistency is more important than overall quality because when you have the really, really good segments, it just contrasts with the bad audio and the really bad segments, whereas it was just in the middle the whole way.
01:41:06 ◼ ► And I didn't think it was too long at all. I thought it was fine. Like I said, I could have dealt with seeing more of the car. Yeah, no, I think everything's progressing here. You just need to do more of these videos.
01:41:20 ◼ ► And my general advice, and this is kind of style advice, is I prefer video. It feels like you're kind of treating these videos a little bit like a blog post that you read out loud while driving. And I think you should lean more heavily on what you can only do in a video because you're going to have the blog post anyway, right? You'll have the opportunity to do the blog post.
01:41:39 ◼ ► This is not like an opportunity to read an essay into YouTube while driving a car. And obviously you're not doing that the whole time, right? You're doing lots of stuff and shots of the car. But I would lean more heavily in that direction because when I'm watching a video about the car, you can be telling that same story that you told.
01:41:54 ◼ ► But while it's going on, I want to see the car and I'm interested in your experience of the car and how you feel about it and seeing you use it and that type of thing. And I'm less interested in you giving me your comments when the only thing on the screen is you and a car that I'm not seeing different parts of.
01:42:27 ◼ ► I feel like your presence is not as needed as you think it is in these videos. Your voice is needed, but your presence should be felt behind the camera by directing it.
01:42:52 ◼ ► Yeah, and that's actually what you just said a moment ago about a cutaway being relevant. That's actually something I struggled with on this video. Earlier today when I was doing kind of my final couple of passes was I can't remember which exact shot it was, but there were a couple places.
01:43:08 ◼ ► I think it was when I was showing the drive by, you know, when the car was actually in motion and you're outside the car looking at it. I was showing that before I had done any of the ride along footage and previously when I was planning this all out and working in Final Cut, my intention was to never show the car in motion prior to me getting in the car and starting to take it from a drive.
01:43:31 ◼ ► There's no reason that we're not going to be confused by the content. How is that car driving? Who's driving it? There's nobody in it because he didn't get in yet.
01:43:40 ◼ ► Oh my God! I mean, I joke, but I was trying to, and I don't remember if it was you John or Marco, that said there's an arc to this. In my head the arc was I am not driving now, I will be driving later, you shouldn't see the car moving yet. And I agree with you that I think I need to do a better job of letting go of that.
01:44:01 ◼ ► Both of you, I think, said if I'm talking about something I need to focus on and focus on it for longer, I agree with that. But additionally, if I'm not necessarily talking about a specific piece of the car and I just want to cut away to something else, that's okay.
01:44:13 ◼ ► And I think what I need to work on for next time is, I do have a fair bit of B-roll, but I don't think I'm good at figuring out what B-roll can I show that's not just swooping over part of the car over and over and over again.
01:44:32 ◼ ► You don't need any swoops. It doesn't even need to be relevant. The trick is it just needs to be like visual wallpaper. One of the best examples, surprisingly, because I watch a ton of these videos, is Destiny videos.
01:44:43 ◼ ► Lots of Destiny videos have, like they're talking about something like, "Oh, here's an upcoming change in the game and here's what I think about it," right? What the hell do you show when someone is saying, "Let me tell you what I think about an upcoming change to the game?"
01:44:58 ◼ ► The worst thing you could do is show a slow scrolling web page showing the announcement of the change to the game.
01:45:03 ◼ ► So what people do is they just show footage that they have. I used to see in the videos, "Oh, I don't have any footage, so I'm just going to show you some footage of this last whatever match that I played or the last raid with friends or whatever."
01:45:16 ◼ ► People don't even say that anymore. They just say, "I'm going to talk about this thing," and they just run footage of Destiny playing, hopefully interesting footage that keeps your attention but has nothing to do with what they're saying, like absolutely nothing to do with what they're saying.
01:45:28 ◼ ► And that's the extreme, and it works. It works fine. You have relevance. You're talking about the car. You're going to be showing the car.
01:45:35 ◼ ► I don't care that he's not talking about the car turning and the car is turning. I just want to see the car.
01:45:41 ◼ ► And it's tough with the outside ones because you don't have a drone that's following the car and it's hard to get external footage or whatever.
01:45:50 ◼ ► I know, I know. I understand it's hard to get that kind of footage, but you did it in its use. You were talking about driving in the car and you were showing different angles from driving.
01:45:59 ◼ ► It was clear that you were showing footage that was not you talking, like you were talking over footage that you had, and that was great. I'm like, "Yes, exactly that."
01:46:07 ◼ ► It all came together, I felt like, where I was watching more like a TV show put together professionally by a giant crew because it's like, "I'm hearing your voice. I'm hearing the story. I'm seeing exciting footage that isn't directly related to what you're saying."
01:46:23 ◼ ► It was like it all gelled. I think that was a great section. And then earlier when you were trying to do the same thing before you got in the car, that felt a little bit clunkier.
01:46:30 ◼ ► I saw you going for it. So you're getting there. You're doing it. Just keep going in that direction and just keep trying to do it. Don't back away from it even if it feels awkward a few times.
01:46:41 ◼ ► I appreciate it. That makes sense. Everything both of you guys have said makes sense. And I'm pleased that you're not deeply bothered by the length or the audio or anything.
01:46:50 ◼ ► I think you could have gone longer. I'm willing to hear and see more about this car. Especially at the end with the whole upshot, this is what we need to talk about now. You're like, "Oh, I've decided what my next car is going to be." So what's the deal here?
01:47:02 ◼ ► So about that. At the same time that I was deciding, "What is the conclusion here?" Because I filmed most of the introduction and most of the footage fairly early.
01:47:16 ◼ ► Yeah. As it turns out, the conclusion I showed you guys is not my real conclusion. My real conclusion is I hate this car.
01:47:26 ◼ ► No, I filmed the conclusion, I think, Thursday and the car went back on a Friday morning.
01:47:32 ◼ ► And when I reached the conclusion that I think this will be my next car, because you really should watch the video if you haven't yet, listeners.
01:47:42 ◼ ► But the summary is that there are things that are missing on this car. It does not have a sunroof, it does not automatically park itself, it doesn't have true self-driving on the highway or anything like that, like even Aaron's Volvo does.
01:47:58 ◼ ► But it has basically all the bare minimum things that I really want, with the exception of the sunroof. And it has an overabundance of power.
01:48:07 ◼ ► And perhaps more interestingly than the overabundance of power, it has a really great four-wheel-drive system that seems to laugh in the face of physics.
01:48:16 ◼ ► And that ability to just plant your foot and twist the wheel and just not give a crap and know that the car will figure out how to get you through that turn is just intoxicating.
01:48:28 ◼ ► And kind of the real, I don't know, party piece or the real interesting part of the conclusion that I came to, which I said on the video, was that, "Hey, you know, I love a sunroof."
01:48:41 ◼ ► And the GTI, which is a less powerful version of the same car, has a sunroof. And it has self-parking and it has some of the other things that I wish this car had.
01:48:48 ◼ ► But the thing of it is that I'll miss the sunroof maybe six months a year, maybe eight or ten, or according to John, you know, fifty-one weeks of the year because there's no winter here.
01:48:58 ◼ ► But I will miss that power. If I had a GTI, conversely, I would miss the power of the Golf R every time I got in the car. Golf R.
01:49:06 ◼ ► Every time I got in the car. And so I think if I were to buy a car tomorrow, I think I would be buying a Golf R.
01:49:13 ◼ ► That being said, as I said last episode, which may or may not have made the published version, I have been having many conversations with Aaron about what we should do about cars.
01:49:24 ◼ ► And the current working conclusion is, "Maybe we could be a one-car family. Maybe that'll work."
01:49:36 ◼ ► And so I think what we're probably going to do is CarMax the BMW, because it's just sitting there rotting in the driveway right now, CarMax the BMW and then just see how it goes.
01:49:48 ◼ ► Yeah, sorry, I'm assuming everyone's an American who's done this before. CarMax is a place that they'll buy a car from you even if you don't buy a car from them.
01:49:57 ◼ ► And it's very easy. It's no hassle. I understand that I could get a better price for that if I sold it myself or perhaps sold it through different means, but the advantage of CarMax is it's like one of those trade-in places online, some of whom have sponsored the show in the past.
01:50:13 ◼ ► You just send them a device and they give you a check. And maybe that check isn't as much as you'd like, but it's super easy. Well, CarMax is that same thing.
01:50:19 ◼ ► You bring in your car, they look at it, they hand you a check right then if you decide to sell it to them.
01:50:24 ◼ ► So anyway, so we're probably going to sell the car to CarMax, the BMW to CarMax, try being a one-car family for a while and see how it goes.
01:50:30 ◼ ► And if it goes well, maybe we'll stick with that. If it doesn't, then we have to have a tough conversation about, you know, should I really be buying a $40,000 car or should I just be getting like a beater that I can use in a pinch if need be?
01:50:50 ◼ ► But I'm surprised you didn't yell at me for my Accord dig, speaking of. That was just for you, Jon. Did you not even notice it?
01:51:03 ◼ ► Yeah, that's exactly right. Or not old enough for an Accord, actually, is I believe what I said.
01:51:07 ◼ ► No, you said too young for an Accord. You're not too young for an Accord. That's the problem.
01:51:14 ◼ ► It's funny you say that. There were two places in the video where I made a joke about how old I was.
01:51:21 ◼ ► And I said in one of them, well, I did the same hand motion in both, but in one of them I think I said that much is obvious.
01:51:28 ◼ ► And what I cut away from, because you couldn't really tell on the video, is I was like pawing at the corner of my beard and my sideburns, which have gone very gray.
01:51:39 ◼ ► But you couldn't really tell on the video. And so because of that, I actually put in other B-roll filler shots so it didn't look really stupid.
01:51:58 ◼ ► Oh, one more thing. I, again, this is personal preference, but I would like it if you retired the top of the parking garage.
01:52:09 ◼ ► Yeah, I thought about that. And actually the place where we did the drive-by, that's a park somewhat nearest to us, don't be creepy.
01:52:20 ◼ ► Yeah, when you were driving, I was like, "Look at all these beautiful locations. Everything's green, it's sunny, you can go anywhere." And I'm looking at concrete.
01:52:27 ◼ ► Yeah, that's fair. The idea at the time, which I think I'm wrong, but the idea was I want the background to be as nondescript and maybe even boring as possible so that you're not attracted to the background, you're attracted to me and the car.
01:52:40 ◼ ► But I think you're right. I certainly need to change it up, even if I don't retire the parking garage.
01:52:54 ◼ ► I was stunned by how easy it was to drive, which seems silly, but as I said in the video, anytime you drive a clutched car, a three-pedal car, the place that the clutch catches is different.
01:53:08 ◼ ► The way the gearshift works, it just feels a little bit different. And for me, it usually takes me at least a few hours, if not a few days, to really, really get used to how a car feels and be able to drive it with real, real, real confidence.
01:53:29 ◼ ► I felt within like 10 minutes that I was as good in it as I was in my BMW that I've had for six years, which was super cool.
01:53:37 ◼ ► And in general, it's a really well-built, really well-made car. I got it with 700 miles on it. The car was almost literally brand new.
01:53:47 ◼ ► I returned it with something like 1,000 or 1,100 miles on it. And I loved it. I really did.
01:54:07 ◼ ► And granted, I haven't driven my BMW in like a month, but I'm pretty darn sure it doesn't have a kick-down switch.
01:54:12 ◼ ► Aaron Swalwell absolutely does, but it's not automatic. Why does this thing have a kick-down switch? It makes no sense.
01:54:18 ◼ ► It seems like a thing they could leave all the stuff in there, but make it so you don't feel it.
01:54:33 ◼ ► But basically, the way it works is in an automatic car that's geared—so you wouldn't see this in your Tesla, but I bet you Tif's car has it.
01:54:41 ◼ ► If you push the pedal all the way to the floor, you feel a stop. And you feel like that's it. That's the floorboard.
01:54:48 ◼ ► But if you push a little bit further—and it shouldn't require an overabundance of effort, but you have to push—
01:54:55 ◼ ► then there's a little click, and it goes just a hair further into the floor—well, not literally into the floorboard, but you know what I mean?
01:55:17 ◼ ► And what that does is, in an automatic, what it'll do is it will force the car to downshift as low as it can possibly go, given the car's speed and whatnot.
01:55:31 ◼ ► So you're saying to the car, "I want as much as you can give me. Give her all she's got, Scotty."
01:55:36 ◼ ► And that is a really convenient thing in an automatic, say if you're going to pass or something like that, or for whatever reason you really need all the power the car has now.
01:55:45 ◼ ► But that makes no sense in a manual transmission car, because you're the one controlling the gears. It's not going to shift for you.
01:55:59 ◼ ► I glanced at it and I did not notice anything. I should have looked one more time, but I didn't notice anything.
01:56:06 ◼ ► And I think it's just a part-spin thing, is my understanding. But I have not verified that.
01:56:15 ◼ ► I have driven a GTI in the past, which I made brief mention of in the video, and I might be getting one as a press car, maybe.
01:56:23 ◼ ► The problem that I have with the Golf R, which I didn't want to belabor too much in the video, but I did mention, is that it feels every bit of its $40,000.
01:56:33 ◼ ► Which is good, and also a little bit bad. Like, it feels like a $40,000 car. In some ways it feels better. In some ways it feels maybe not like a $40,000 car.
01:56:43 ◼ ► But anyway, the GTI that I drove, it was a $30,000, $32,000 car, something like that, and it definitely felt like it was way nicer than a $30,000 or $32,000 car should be.
01:56:56 ◼ ► Because it had basically everything the Golf R has, except less power and two fewer driven wheels.
01:57:08 ◼ ► In so many ways it felt really good. Actually, the one thing the GTI doesn't have that's a big deal is it does not have the digital dash.
01:57:14 ◼ ► Which I actually like the digital dash, but I could make an argument that the digital dash is terrible.
01:57:20 ◼ ► But I actually like it. And so the GTI doesn't have that. But otherwise, I left driving that GTI, which I drove for literally 15, 20 minutes,
01:57:43 ◼ ► And if it isn't, or if you live in a place that has a lot of snow, then look at the Golf R, because that's just the GTI but more.
01:57:52 ◼ ► I think you should give the GTI serious consideration, because the way you talked about both cars, first of all, you can say GTI.
01:58:05 ◼ ► And you also, you seem to, like, it almost seemed like you were trying to rationalize the Golf R because it's like faster and the better performance version.
01:58:22 ◼ ► You know, you are not the first person who said that, and there is a lot of truth to what you're saying.
01:58:29 ◼ ► I mean, you justified in the video, you know, you brought up a good point, which is, you know, you kind of did that with your BMW, like you didn't save it for the M3, you got like 335 instead.
01:58:39 ◼ ► But first of all, what you got was a car that in many cases is faster than the M3 of the time.
01:58:45 ◼ ► I have a feeling despite all the problems you've had with it, you would have had more with an M3.
01:58:50 ◼ ► And, you know, it was still a pretty amazing car, and it was more practical in a few ways.
01:58:56 ◼ ► So if you wanted to go either way, I could encourage you, I could justify it, I could give you reasons for either direction that you might want to take here.
01:59:03 ◼ ► Based on what you said in the video, I think you probably would be happier with the GTI.
01:59:22 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean it is a trim level of the Golf. So Jon is technically right, but if you say a GTI to anyone...
01:59:41 ◼ ► And I still stand by what I was saying, that I would miss that power in the Golf R, but I wouldn't always miss the sunroof.
01:59:53 ◼ ► if we decide that we want to go a slightly, ever so slightly more frugal approach, and assuming we get a second car at all,
02:00:00 ◼ ► you can get a lightly used GTI with CarPlay for not a tremendous amount of money. For like $25,000, $30,000.
02:00:20 ◼ ► I haven't looked into how much a used GTI is, but my point is just that, you know, when you go used,
02:00:26 ◼ ► it could maybe be literally half the cost of a new R. And then that changes the calculus a little bit, you know what I mean?
02:00:37 ◼ ► But, I don't know. Like I said in the end of the video, it's a great problem to have, right?
02:00:51 ◼ ► So, one way or another. Or I just don't get anything. And I'm very sad, but I'm also less broke.
02:01:01 ◼ ► But, all in all, I had a lot of fun with the car. I really enjoyed the car. I really enjoyed making the video.
02:01:07 ◼ ► It was stressful. It was hard because I wanted to have it done by the time we record this on Friday evening.
02:01:15 ◼ ► And I'm glad I had the deadline for the record because that forced me to really get it done and not just dilly-dally for a week.
02:01:21 ◼ ► But, you know, since we got back from London, we had a few days where I mostly relaxed.
02:01:32 ◼ ► Then I spent all of the following week basically being a ghost and just filming non-stop.
02:01:49 ◼ ► Next week I am very excited to maybe crack open my iOS app that I haven't looked at in like six months.
02:02:00 ◼ ► Because I tell you what, this whole fun employment thing, it's been a lot busier than I expected.