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518: Deconstructed iMac

 

00:00:00   I've come to accept that there are certain things in life that I am not very good at,

00:00:06   and washing windows is now being added to that list.

00:00:10   Windows on your car?

00:00:11   No.

00:00:12   Oh, I can't wash any part of a car.

00:00:13   That got added to the list long ago.

00:00:14   Yeah, I can confirm.

00:00:15   Because that is a challenge that I've been tackling for many years and I still have not

00:00:20   mastered.

00:00:21   I can confirm that Marco, for all of his many perks, is completely useless at washing a

00:00:26   car.

00:00:27   I've seen it with my own eyes.

00:00:28   All of his good qualities.

00:00:29   All of the great things about Marco, which there are many, I can tell you that being

00:00:34   able to wash a car is not on that list.

00:00:36   No, not even a little bit.

00:00:39   So what windows are you washing then?

00:00:41   So we have our main sliders to the deck.

00:00:46   Normally in the summertime we can hire a window washer to come out whenever it gets really

00:00:51   terrible and you can barely see through it anymore.

00:00:53   We can hire a window washer and they do a good job.

00:00:55   They don't work in the winter.

00:00:57   So at least here, because normally it's freezing.

00:01:02   So I have a few basic things.

00:01:05   I have one of those big squeegee things with the brush on the other side of it.

00:01:09   Whatever those window washing brushes.

00:01:11   Do you have one of those planks held up by poison ropes and you lower yourself down from

00:01:15   the roof?

00:01:16   No, the good thing is this is all just at floor level so I can just walk up to it and

00:01:21   do it.

00:01:22   And to be clear, what are you washing off the windows?

00:01:25   I've never lived at the beach.

00:01:26   Do you actually get salt on them?

00:01:28   It's rain and dirt and salty, grimy dirt from rain and the ocean.

00:01:34   But is it mostly, I'm wondering, is it a different kind of grime than you get at non-beach houses?

00:01:40   Yeah, it's very like, it's like sticky.

00:01:43   It's not like dry dirt.

00:01:44   It's like constantly damp, slightly sticky, salty, sandy dirt.

00:01:49   Sounds delicious.

00:01:50   And the rest of the house I don't care about, but these windows are, they face south so

00:01:55   they face where the sun comes in all day.

00:01:57   So you really see when they're dirty and like, all right, I can either, you know, have them

00:02:01   be dirty for the next four months until the window washer can be here.

00:02:06   Or you know, do it myself.

00:02:08   And yeah, what is this, your car?

00:02:10   Right.

00:02:11   I cannot find a carwash.

00:02:13   Like I, that's a whole other thing.

00:02:15   You make Casey cry every time you take your car through a carwash.

00:02:18   You have no, well, no, I would be happy if you even took it to a carwash.

00:02:22   Oh my gosh.

00:02:23   I'm that desperate at this point.

00:02:25   I just want, I just want Marco to look at me.

00:02:29   I would get, I would take it to a carwash every time I left the island if there was

00:02:32   one anywhere nearby where I go.

00:02:35   And as far as I can tell, there isn't one.

00:02:37   I'm surprised that, Jon, you don't have some hole in the wall from when you were a kid

00:02:40   that you're suggesting Marco go to.

00:02:42   Well, cause it's just, that's nowhere near where I usually go.

00:02:44   I did not have a favorite carwash.

00:02:46   Sorry.

00:02:47   And I would be fine to just go to one of those, like, you know, just self-serve ones where

00:02:50   it's just like the hose and the thing that takes quarters and you just dial in whatever

00:02:53   like that.

00:02:54   I would, that'd be fine.

00:02:55   I don't need the perfect job.

00:02:56   I just need to like blast all the sand and crap off my car, but nope.

00:03:00   So these are all areas that are not my expertise, but anyway.

00:03:05   Yeah.

00:03:06   So I've, I've, I've watched so many YouTube videos on the technique you're supposed to

00:03:09   use with the squeegee on a window to try to have no lines left after you have squeegeed.

00:03:16   I cannot for the life of me perform this action.

00:03:18   Well, if I can use my knowledge of a car window washing, if you're having trouble with not

00:03:25   all the same thing, well, it is in this sense and that like, you know, obviously I didn't

00:03:30   watch any kind of window streaks or a problem.

00:03:32   I don't think it's your squeegee technique.

00:03:34   I think you haven't gotten all the crap off your window yet.

00:03:37   So there's nothing you can do with the squeegee.

00:03:39   That's not going to leave streaks.

00:03:40   You need to get the crap off your window.

00:03:42   And then the question is, can I get the remaining water off the window in such a way that I

00:03:47   don't get like a little line between, you know, so I think basically you're not removing

00:03:51   the bad stuff from the window sufficiently before you move.

00:03:54   You want to jump right to the step where you're like, Oh, I'm going to use a little squeegee

00:03:57   and it'll be clean.

00:03:58   No, you got to actually get all the crap off first.

00:03:59   Oh, maybe I'll try that.

00:04:01   Like continue to wash, like wash that whatever it is in the salt, dirt, sand, whatever it

00:04:06   is, get it off your window.

00:04:08   And that may take many several passes.

00:04:10   And then finally when you have a clean window with just maybe a little bit of mildly dirty

00:04:13   water on it, then your squeegeeing will work better.

00:04:15   Hmm.

00:04:16   That's my problem.

00:04:17   Yeah.

00:04:18   Cause like, cause like, you know, like when the window washers come, I mean they, they

00:04:20   do it in like three seconds and it's perfect, but they're experts.

00:04:24   Like they, they really know what they're doing.

00:04:25   They're very good at their jobs and they, and you know, they have, they do the whole

00:04:29   house in like two hours.

00:04:30   I don't know how they do it.

00:04:32   It took me like, it took me a good two hours to do three sliders today.

00:04:35   You're calling them sliders like little hamburgers.

00:04:40   That's yeah, they're sliders.

00:04:41   They're sliding door window units.

00:04:43   You're talking about sliding glass doors.

00:04:44   Yes.

00:04:45   Sliding.

00:04:46   Everyone calls them sliding.

00:04:47   This might be an Ohio thing.

00:04:49   I'm going to look this up.

00:04:50   What would you call them?

00:04:51   I would not call them sliders.

00:04:53   What would you call them?

00:04:54   Sliding glass doors.

00:04:55   It's a bit long.

00:04:56   Ow.

00:04:57   I mean, why use three syllables when 17 would do?

00:05:01   I'm just, I'm just telling you what they are.

00:05:03   Sliders are tiny hamburgers.

00:05:04   In the context of talking about windows.

00:05:06   Well, anyway, those are probably easier to clean.

00:05:10   The hamburgers?

00:05:11   Yeah.

00:05:12   Clean them right off your plate.

00:05:13   Plate.

00:05:14   Yum, yum, yum.

00:05:15   You clean your insides, that's for sure.

00:05:17   Well, you clean your own insides out after eating too many of those.

00:05:20   Oh, gosh.

00:05:21   Listen to this guy.

00:05:22   That's just White Castle.

00:05:23   I haven't had White Castle in probably five years.

00:05:25   There's no one, none of them anywhere near me.

00:05:27   Yeah, so I did a Google search for it and I came up with slider services, professional

00:05:31   sliding door maintenance, right?

00:05:33   But this is the Midwest's most experienced specialty contractor.

00:05:35   So I'm wondering if sliders is a Midwestern thing.

00:05:38   I'll have to ask my wife about it when the show's over.

00:05:41   I don't know.

00:05:42   I never had one sliding glass door growing up and I was too young in that house to really

00:05:46   talk about it by that name.

00:05:48   So I don't know what we said there.

00:05:50   Oh my goodness.

00:05:52   So out of curiosity, I thought to myself, you know, I should look and see if there is

00:05:55   a White Castle anywhere near me and there isn't.

00:05:59   But as I'm looking at the White Castle locator, it says, you know, it's no castles found.

00:06:05   And then there's a checkbox that reads, "Only show castles accepting Valentine's Day reservations."

00:06:11   So when I think, even I, I mean, I have the world's worst taste in everything, allegedly,

00:06:18   but maybe, maybe it's somebody's favorite restaurant.

00:06:21   Oh, I'm not judging.

00:06:22   It's just, that's so, wow.

00:06:24   I'm more surprised that they take reservations.

00:06:26   Like even for the people for whom that is their favorite restaurant, like I would never

00:06:31   think to even check to see if they take reservations.

00:06:35   I don't know.

00:06:36   Do you need reservations at White Castle?

00:06:38   You want to get the good seat by the dirty window?

00:06:40   I don't know.

00:06:41   Right.

00:06:42   Well, they probably have professional window washers.

00:06:43   That's right.

00:06:44   Yeah.

00:06:45   They don't have Marco clean in their crap.

00:06:46   John, you want to tell me about what you've put in the show notes as the chicken hat dregs,

00:06:53   please?

00:06:54   Yeah, I think I kept, I should have looked this up.

00:06:56   I kept trying to think of the phrase that they say on the Apple earnings calls when

00:07:00   they're trying to say that there is sufficient supply to meet the demand, like supply and

00:07:05   demand are in balance or something.

00:07:07   There's some, there's some like little phrase that they use all the time that I can't remember.

00:07:11   But anyway, I think that finally the chicken hat supply and demand are in balance.

00:07:16   We got the final, final, final, final shipment of chicken hats like before the last episode,

00:07:23   but I didn't mention it on the show cause I just wanted them to sort of drain out of

00:07:26   the system naturally and they more or less have, we have a handful of them left.

00:07:31   I think everybody who has any interest in a chicken hat now has one.

00:07:35   So congratulations to everybody.

00:07:37   But if you are super duper desperate, we do have a handful of them left.

00:07:41   They're probably just going to honestly sit there for like the next year, kind of like

00:07:44   the ATP pins where everybody who wanted an ATP pin got one.

00:07:47   And then we had like 50 pins in the, in our stock inventory for like a year and a half.

00:07:52   So that may happen with the chicken hats, which if it does fine, but if not just letting

00:07:56   everybody know, if you want a chicken hat, go to ATP.fm/store.

00:08:00   There is a handful left.

00:08:01   And frankly, I don't know how this happened that with all the ordering we were doing that

00:08:05   somehow we weren't left with a thousand chicken hats.

00:08:08   Like like all of a sudden, oh, the demand stops and then we have a thousand left.

00:08:11   So a little bit behind the scenes stuff.

00:08:13   One of the orders that we, one of the many multiple orders that we made, like a box of

00:08:18   hats got lost and it can, I think it was a box of like 150 or 300, no it was 150 hats

00:08:24   or something like, oh, we, we were supposed to have a box of these and it went missing.

00:08:28   And so the manufacturer just, you know, manufactured another box of 150 hats for free and then

00:08:33   sent it.

00:08:34   And then they found the missing box.

00:08:38   And so we had actually an extra 150 hats on top of the amount that we wanted to have.

00:08:44   And that all, all of that sort of fumbling around and multiple shipments put us in a

00:08:48   position where we have, you know, a small number of hats left for anybody who wants

00:08:53   them.

00:08:54   And that's what we're going to have to do.

00:08:58   We'll see if this section even makes it in the release show because the bootleg people

00:09:01   might get to it and decide.

00:09:02   Everyone has the bootleg has already got a hat if they want it.

00:09:05   All right, we'll see.

00:09:07   Speaking of bootlegs and members, now would be a pretty good time if you haven't already

00:09:12   gone to ATP.fm/join to do so.

00:09:16   We are writing a wrong that we as a collective unit made, or at least that's the story I'm

00:09:21   sticking with.

00:09:22   Was it just you?

00:09:23   Yeah.

00:09:24   I really was trying to plan this off on all three of us.

00:09:26   I thought we could take this fall together, but seems not.

00:09:28   I will dive on my sword.

00:09:29   I will commit seppuku.

00:09:31   No, John was particularly embittered at my selection for the trilogy that we had done

00:09:36   of a movie, you know, reviews or whatever you want to call them.

00:09:40   Come on.

00:09:41   Thank you.

00:09:42   ATP movie club is what I meant to say.

00:09:45   John was very upset at me for my selection for ATP movie club, even though the rundown

00:09:49   for multiple reasons, the rundown is an unquestionably good movie.

00:09:52   We all agreed.

00:09:53   Just listen to the episode.

00:09:54   I thought it made for a very good episode of our show.

00:09:57   Thank you.

00:09:58   But anyway.

00:09:59   But none of us were culturally enriched by it.

00:10:02   Oh, gosh.

00:10:03   You know, can you just let me get through this one piece, please?

00:10:05   And thank you.

00:10:06   No.

00:10:07   Apparently not.

00:10:08   I'm new here.

00:10:09   Have you heard the show?

00:10:11   We're going to right my wrongs.

00:10:14   And we're going to, tomorrow night, we're recording this episode obviously right now

00:10:19   tonight, but tomorrow night as I sit here, which is Thursday night in the One Shoe Time

00:10:23   Zone, we are going to record an episode of ATP movie club about the hunt for October,

00:10:29   the hunt for red October, which I will spoil only to say it is one of my favorite films

00:10:34   of all time.

00:10:36   And John, I think, I think we'll have not altogether negative things to say about it.

00:10:42   And Marco, let's verify you have not or had not seen it or have not seen it at the time

00:10:47   we are recording right now.

00:10:48   I'm going to watch it tomorrow.

00:10:49   So it's fresh in my mind when we record.

00:10:51   Excellent.

00:10:52   I actually plan to do the same, even though I think I could probably recite the entire

00:10:55   movie by heart, but nevertheless, we don't know when this episode will be released.

00:11:00   I would say sometime no later than the end of next week.

00:11:03   It's up to whenever Marco has time to edit it, but in the next week or so, we are going

00:11:08   to do ATP movie club, the hunt for October.

00:11:12   And again, if you go to ATP.fm/join, then you can get not only this forthcoming episode,

00:11:19   but also the three episodes prior and also the bootleg and discounts on our limited time

00:11:26   store offerings.

00:11:27   So that's not available right now, but it will be probably shortly before WWDC.

00:11:31   So check it out.

00:11:32   I'm really, really looking forward to recording this.

00:11:34   I am extremely excited to talk to these two fine gentlemen slash my mortal enemies about

00:11:39   one of my favorite movies.

00:11:40   So wish me luck.

00:11:43   And again, that'll be out sometime in the next week, week and a half or thereabouts.

00:11:46   And we do have some other ideas for members special content, but we couldn't nail them

00:11:50   down in time.

00:11:51   And I just wanted to get some member special content out because we felt like it was, it

00:11:55   was due.

00:11:56   So we're doing the easy one, which is fixing Casey's earlier mistake.

00:11:59   Thanks, dad.

00:12:00   Yes.

00:12:01   So, and honestly, you know, this is a little inside baseball, but we, we have many, many,

00:12:06   many ideas.

00:12:07   We don't have any particular timeline about when we're going to execute on any of these

00:12:12   ideas.

00:12:13   We don't know, you know, which one we're going to do next.

00:12:15   It may be several months before we do more member exclusive stuff.

00:12:18   And we're, we're going to continue to try to do things that we don't feel like would

00:12:22   fit in the main show.

00:12:24   You know, we don't want to, we don't want to take away from things that we think we

00:12:30   would feature in the main show.

00:12:31   And we're just trying to like, you know, scroll them off to the side and make you pay to get

00:12:35   them.

00:12:36   You know, where this is stuff that, Hey, if you don't listen, that's fine.

00:12:38   We'd prefer you did, but if you don't, it's not gonna hurt our feelings.

00:12:41   Some day cooking with John.

00:12:44   I don't know how we're going to do it, but someday we're going to figure out a way to

00:12:47   do it.

00:12:48   Cooking works so great in podcast form.

00:12:52   We could, I'm telling you, we can't do any cooking podcasts.

00:12:54   I should look that up.

00:12:55   I'm sure there are just the sound of pots clanging around.

00:12:58   It's just a bunch of Foley artists.

00:12:59   Yep.

00:13:00   Yep.

00:13:01   It would be amazing.

00:13:02   I'm telling you, it would, it would be phenomenal.

00:13:03   What we should do is we should have like John watch as I described to Marco how to cook

00:13:09   or vice versa.

00:13:10   Actually, probably better vice versa.

00:13:11   So John is watching.

00:13:12   Casey, you have to be the one trying to follow John's directions.

00:13:15   That's that's really, that's the formula here.

00:13:18   I don't want the show to end.

00:13:19   John writes down something that is like the perfect, his perfect formula for sauce or

00:13:24   whatever, and then you have to actually do it.

00:13:26   And with him watching, it'd be like that episode where I had to describe a picture to Tiff

00:13:31   and Julian and the whole time you're like waiting to see what they're doing at the end.

00:13:36   It would be like that.

00:13:37   So I'd be describing describing what Casey is supposed to do.

00:13:39   And at the very end, he would like put on his camera and show me what he's done.

00:13:42   It would just be not what I described.

00:13:45   I would like the show to continue.

00:13:47   I don't want the show to end.

00:13:48   And so because of that, I might veto this entire plan, even though it would be a very

00:13:52   funny end to this program.

00:13:53   But I think the chat room points out that Adam Ragusea has a cooking podcast.

00:13:57   I watch his YouTube channel and he puts his podcast up on YouTube.

00:14:01   Those are the videos that I never clicked through because I don't want to watch a YouTube

00:14:03   video of a podcast, but I guess it does exist.

00:14:05   I actually listened to the audio version of that podcast and I can tell you while it is

00:14:09   a podcast by a YouTube cooking person, it's not really a cooking.

00:14:15   If you're thinking about what a cooking podcast would be in the sense of like a cooking show,

00:14:21   it's not that.

00:14:22   It's not.

00:14:23   It's good though.

00:14:24   I do enjoy it actually, but it's not a cooking show.

00:14:26   All right.

00:14:27   So one way or another, we're going to work on member stuff, but again, no promises on

00:14:30   timeline, on content, on what it is, et cetera.

00:14:32   But we are promising that sometime in the next week and a half, you'll hear another

00:14:36   member special if you are a member about the hunt for red October, again, ATP.fm/join.

00:14:42   Let's do some follow up.

00:14:43   Getty Images is suing the creators of AI art tool stable diffusion for scraping its content.

00:14:48   Ruh roh shaggy.

00:14:50   What's going on here, Jon?

00:14:51   That's exactly what you would think from the article.

00:14:53   Getty Images said it believes that stability AI unlawfully copied and processed millions

00:14:57   of images protected by copyright to train its software and the Getty Images has commenced

00:15:00   legal proceedings in the High Court of Justice of London.

00:15:03   So we talked about this when we talk about AI stuff.

00:15:06   There's going to be court cases.

00:15:07   This is going to be lawsuits.

00:15:08   They have begun.

00:15:09   This seems like a pretty big one.

00:15:10   Getty Images is a, you know, we're talking about like these cases, the outcome of these

00:15:13   cases might be determined by how big the people involved are.

00:15:17   Getty Images is pretty big.

00:15:18   They have a lot of images.

00:15:19   They were surely scraped.

00:15:21   That's what this lawsuit alleges.

00:15:23   And there's a second one, which is a little bit different.

00:15:25   This is on behalf of a few artists.

00:15:29   Sarah Anderson, I don't know if you know Sarah Anderson from Sarah Scribbles.

00:15:33   If you click through on the URL that will be in the show notes, the URL is stable diffusion

00:15:39   litigation dot com.

00:15:42   I think you can see some of Sarah Anderson's work.

00:15:44   You've probably seen her comics online.

00:15:46   You're like, oh, yeah, that one.

00:15:47   I've seen those.

00:15:48   Anyway, she's one of three litigants.

00:15:51   Kelly McKiernan and Carla Ortiz have filed a class action lawsuit against stability,

00:15:56   AI, deviant art and mid journey for the use of stable diffusion.

00:15:59   Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:16:01   Same type deals as hey, you're using our stuff without our permission and your things.

00:16:05   And you know, we're suing you over it.

00:16:06   So I don't think this is the best way to come up with a reasonable way to deal with this

00:16:15   technology.

00:16:16   But in practice, you know, it takes a long time for lawmakers to grapple with an issue.

00:16:21   It takes less time for people to decide to sue.

00:16:24   And very often the courts get the first crack at this.

00:16:27   Different jurisdictions, different courts, different cases, different results, which

00:16:32   may be appealed to higher courts and so on and so forth.

00:16:34   But just to let you all know, the ball is rolling.

00:16:38   And I'm sure we were we are in for years and years of these things until and unless, you

00:16:44   know, the various laws of the lands get a grip on this.

00:16:47   Yeah, I think it's going to be a really kind of messy and ever moving thing, you know,

00:16:54   and for probably the next decade, at least, you know, just how the legality around using

00:16:59   copyrighted material for training and AI and you know, whether that counts as as violating

00:17:05   those copyrights without permission or whether it you know, whether it's the same as a human

00:17:08   just viewing things and then being able to create things in that style.

00:17:12   I again, I kind of lean towards the latter.

00:17:15   But we'll see how it all works out both legally and culturally.

00:17:18   Those are those are such unknowns right now.

00:17:21   And I think, you know, whatever we say now, again, I think we're gonna look back in five

00:17:25   or 10 years and like, wow, we were so wrong.

00:17:27   And you know, in one in either direction, and I can't really say which we know where

00:17:30   it's gonna go.

00:17:31   The Getty image of them was fun, because one of the one of the images related to it, I

00:17:35   don't know if it was in this article that we'll link or elsewhere.

00:17:38   But it was like a generated image from stable diffusion or whatever.

00:17:43   And it had the big Getty images.

00:17:45   I had the big images like low like watermark logo over the thing.

00:17:50   Of course, slightly mangled or whatever.

00:17:52   That's amazing.

00:17:53   Yeah, I mean, that's where you get into existing law, like, you know, trade dress and trademark

00:17:58   or it's like, no, you can't sell an image that this has Getty.

00:18:01   Because, you know, we have a trademark and Getty images and blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:18:05   And so like, that's, you know, we'll see how these these court cases end up going.

00:18:09   But you get the right judge and they can say, well, I don't need to make up any kind of

00:18:12   new law or new decisions.

00:18:14   Our existing laws already covered this.

00:18:16   And the fact that this is even possible, even though it's like, we didn't do it on purpose.

00:18:19   We didn't mean for it to show Getty images.

00:18:21   It just did.

00:18:22   We can't control it.

00:18:23   The judge is gonna be like, no, you can't, you can't sell things with the Disney logo

00:18:25   on them.

00:18:26   You can't sell things that say Getty images across them if you're not getting images.

00:18:30   But you know, stranger things happen in court cases.

00:18:33   So we'll see how this goes.

00:18:35   Indeed.

00:18:36   And then you are coming to us again live from the CES show floor with one last tidbit.

00:18:40   This is like the back room type thing.

00:18:42   This is like a YouTube video that I saw of like some something off to the side.

00:18:46   Some I just thought it was fascinating.

00:18:48   And maybe it's like an existing thing that is just, you know, been around for years.

00:18:52   This is the first I had heard of it.

00:18:55   Solid state cooling is relevant to our lives because we're gonna talk about some products

00:18:59   soon that have, you know, microprocessors and stuff in them that produce heat and are

00:19:03   very thin.

00:19:05   Solid state cooling.

00:19:06   You know, so solid state active cooling is exactly what it sounds like.

00:19:09   Active cooling means instead of just having, you know, a piece of metal stuck to something

00:19:15   with fins on it or whatever, and you just like allows the ambient air to cool it.

00:19:19   Active cooling means something is actively cooling it usually by moving that air across

00:19:24   those fins with the use of a fan or if it's active water cooling by pumping water to and

00:19:29   from it.

00:19:30   That's active cooling.

00:19:31   It's a distinct from passive cooling.

00:19:33   Solid state active cooling is active cooling with quote unquote solid state technology

00:19:40   as in like microchips and stuff.

00:19:41   It's like, well, how do you, how do you actively cool something with like silicon microchip

00:19:46   technology?

00:19:47   Well, this company whose name I have difficulty pronouncing it is for or systems F R O R E.

00:19:55   It's a YouTube video where you see somebody also try to pronounce something.

00:19:59   Anyway, this is what it looks like.

00:20:01   It's actually an SSD only it's not an SSD, but it's maybe like 2.8 millimeters thick

00:20:07   and the same dimensions as an SSD and it's hollow inside and inside are a bunch of these

00:20:13   little tiny MEMS, micro electric mechanical systems, M E M S.

00:20:18   I'll put a link to the Wikipedia page and that tiny little silicon based like microscopic

00:20:23   machines that vibrate shoving air downward at up to 120 miles an hour.

00:20:31   And it's like little, little tiny, it's kind of like what we're talking about.

00:20:34   There's 5,000 micro micro lenses on the micro lens of light on each, on each pixel.

00:20:39   These are tiny microscopic little moving things on a piece of silicon that shove air downward

00:20:45   onto the surface of a thing they want to cool.

00:20:48   And so it's basically, it's, you know, it looks like an SSD, but when you plug it in

00:20:52   and apply power to it, air comes rushing out of it.

00:20:54   It moves air without fans.

00:20:57   I mean, is it really solid state if it has moving parts though?

00:21:01   I, you know, it's solid state in the sense that it uses like silicon, you know, tech,

00:21:06   you know, same kind of technology you use to print circuits or whatever, but they're

00:21:09   actual machines, actual physical moving machines.

00:21:11   They're just very, very, very tight.

00:21:13   They're microscopic.

00:21:14   Yeah.

00:21:15   So you can quibble with it, but it's definitely not a fan.

00:21:17   I mean, I feel like the actual, like the real solid state active cooler is a thermoelectric

00:21:21   plate or that, you know, the Peltier, whatever.

00:21:23   Yeah.

00:21:24   Like those, I mean, they're, they're hilariously inefficient, but they do actively cool.

00:21:28   I mean, you can even get like little tiny desk fridges to, to kind of cool a few cans

00:21:33   of soda, like on your desk with the, one of those, you know, they, they do work, but you're

00:21:37   not moving the air then you're just moving the heat.

00:21:39   That's more like a heat pipe kind of, I know it's not the same thing as you're applying

00:21:42   electricity, but no, I think it's, it's, I think there's no question that a thermoelectric

00:21:46   plate is active cooling.

00:21:48   It's just doing it in a really kind of weird and hilariously inefficient way.

00:21:52   Yeah.

00:21:53   So the, the deal with these things and why we might care about them is obviously you

00:21:57   can make these pretty darn thin, right?

00:22:00   Cause I'm like a fan that has to be a certain thickness to, you know, hit the air and move

00:22:03   it.

00:22:04   These little guys work you know, with very little room.

00:22:07   Like I said, it's less than three millimeters high.

00:22:11   Still probably kind of thick to put on top of an SOC, but you, what you can do, what

00:22:15   they recommended in the, in the video, the thing that's the CEO or founder of the company

00:22:18   was saying you'd have a heat pipe going from your hot chip and then you'd put this solid

00:22:24   state cooler on top of the heat pipe.

00:22:27   So this thing would be alongside the thing you're cooling and it would just be a thin

00:22:30   heat pipe connecting to things, you know, vapor chamber, whatever.

00:22:34   The specs in it are interesting.

00:22:36   It produces more, what they call back pressure, more, more of a vacuum than a fan of equivalent

00:22:42   size.

00:22:43   It's not even close.

00:22:44   It's sometimes more pressure than a fan than a fan that is much larger than this noise

00:22:49   wise, which I care about.

00:22:51   They call it completely silent and it's like 21 decibels or something.

00:22:55   It's basically silent, right?

00:22:57   Quiet.

00:22:58   It's quiet.

00:22:59   Well, it does move air.

00:23:00   So if the air hits something and makes noise that could happen, but it's going to be more

00:23:05   quiet than a fan for sure.

00:23:06   Just because of the nature of how it works, all those tiny little things instead of a

00:23:09   thing that's spinning and all that stuff.

00:23:12   They claim that it is able to move air so powerfully that, as one of their big product

00:23:18   claims, that you can dust seal the laptop so you don't have to have completely open areas

00:23:25   for air to get sucked in and air to get pushed out.

00:23:27   You can actually have like, you know, filters there.

00:23:29   Normally you can't do that because the fan isn't powerful enough to shove air through

00:23:33   the filter.

00:23:34   And so you end up with dust getting inside your laptop and gumming up the fan and everything

00:23:37   like that.

00:23:38   Now obviously dust will...

00:23:39   Like, we've tried this before in the PC building worlds and the answer is you can suck air

00:23:46   in through filters, but then the filters just get full of dust.

00:23:51   Dust has to go somewhere.

00:23:52   You may be moving the problem from one place to the other, but it's possible to have...

00:23:57   If it moves air forcefully enough, it's possible to have dust filters that are not self-cleaning,

00:24:02   but that you can...

00:24:04   They're placed in such a way that you can keep them reasonably clear.

00:24:08   It's not going to be like the lint filter on your dryer that you have to scrape a bunch

00:24:11   of stuff off.

00:24:12   I think it'll last a pretty long time.

00:24:13   And I have had computers in the past that have had dust filter things, and they do get

00:24:18   clogged, but I've had dust filters on computers that I haven't cleaned for the life of the

00:24:22   computer, and just, you know, when I was done with it, I put it away into the attic and

00:24:26   it served for five years and never got cleaned.

00:24:28   If you have a cat in your house, maybe that doesn't work, but you know.

00:24:30   After that, you're going to pull a whole cat off of that thing.

00:24:33   Anyway.

00:24:34   By the way, remind me at some point to tell you how I destroyed Tiff's office with a hilarious

00:24:37   Shopvac problem, but yeah.

00:24:39   If they're directional, you got to make sure your switch is in the right direction.

00:24:42   No, that wasn't the problem.

00:24:44   The problem was at some point I emptied her Shopvac and did not put a new bag or filter

00:24:50   in it.

00:24:51   Oh, whoopsies.

00:24:52   And then she used it to suck up really fine glass grinding dust and basically filled her

00:25:01   office very quickly with this cloud of fine white hazardous powder.

00:25:08   It was horrendous.

00:25:09   Anyway, I had to get her a new Shopvac that day.

00:25:13   It was so bad.

00:25:14   You need one of these.

00:25:16   My mistake.

00:25:17   What are they called?

00:25:18   They're called AirJet.

00:25:19   Not a great name.

00:25:20   Anyway, this company has partners that they would, there's partners on the website that

00:25:25   are listed in Intel, Qualcomm, I forget the other company, but they're all mysterious

00:25:28   about who the partners might be.

00:25:30   I look at this and I really hope Apple is one of the partners because this would be

00:25:35   great in a thin laptop.

00:25:36   Now, the only thing I have questions about that wasn't addressed in the video that we're

00:25:39   going to show is obviously this thing like a fan, it takes power to remove power.

00:25:44   And so this thing can, you know, removes 10.5 Watts of heat by taking a maximum of 1.75

00:25:51   Watts of power.

00:25:52   He never said how that compares to how much power a fan takes.

00:25:56   Like what is the ratio of like you give a fan this many Watts and it removes this many

00:25:59   Watts of heat.

00:26:00   I do wonder if this is less efficient than a fan in terms of power consumption.

00:26:05   And I wonder about longevity.

00:26:07   Obviously this is a brand new technology.

00:26:09   Are these things going to get gummed up?

00:26:10   Are they going to break after a while?

00:26:13   You know, it's a, it's an unknown to me at least.

00:26:18   Maybe this is the type of technology that's been around for ages in some other industry

00:26:21   and it just now coming to personal computers, in which case there's some background on it.

00:26:24   And somebody who works in an industry will undoubtedly tell us later, but I was excited

00:26:29   by seeing this, this, you know, sort of off to the side at CES, not a big booth, not a

00:26:35   flashy company, a startup that will probably be bought by somebody if their product is

00:26:39   any good anyway.

00:26:40   But you know, me and the idea of cooling things without noise.

00:26:45   And in this case it's fanless, but it still makes air flow through it.

00:26:50   I think that's cool.

00:26:51   Yeah, it's a really cool concept.

00:26:52   I do have some doubts about it.

00:26:55   It's use in computers in particular because if they're only showing off this 10.5 watt

00:27:00   heat removal capacity on this one, like that's not a lot for a computer chip.

00:27:05   Oh, it's for, it's for laptops.

00:27:06   They were clear about that in the interview.

00:27:07   Like the interviewer was like, what about doing GPU's or whatever?

00:27:11   And the guy was like, no, we can't like, that's too much.

00:27:13   They're very, very thin.

00:27:15   This is the one you see here is the big one.

00:27:17   The smaller one only removes like five watts.

00:27:19   That's the thing.

00:27:20   But even a big one, like even if the big one is 10 watt heat capacity.

00:27:24   Yeah, these are all for like laptops, very thin laptops.

00:27:28   That's not even for most laptops.

00:27:31   It's for like, you know, the old MacBook adorable.

00:27:33   Remember, it's removing that many watts in heat.

00:27:38   It's not saying the SOC has to consume that many.

00:27:40   So basically if you take, for example, if you put the small one of these in a MacBook

00:27:47   Air, it would never throttle, right?

00:27:49   Because right now the MacBook Air is fanless and it throttles.

00:27:52   But the smallest one of these in there, no more throttling there.

00:27:56   You could also probably clock up the MacBook Pro a little bit higher if you put one of

00:28:00   these on in place of the fan, because it would be quiet and you could run it and move more

00:28:05   air across it.

00:28:06   And now you can clock the thing up and make it a little bit hotter.

00:28:08   Like that's, that's the application of these.

00:28:09   They're very, very tiny.

00:28:10   So honestly, I think the, I think even, even the M1 fan based systems or the, you know,

00:28:17   the M2 now, like maybe the base M2 you could, but even the M2 Pro is way above 10 watts.

00:28:23   Like I think you, you cross that threshold pretty soon.

00:28:27   These, the small one of these cool, you know, moves 10 times as much air as the fan that's

00:28:32   in the 16 inch MacBook Pro.

00:28:34   You know what I mean?

00:28:35   Right.

00:28:36   So you could replace both of the fans.

00:28:38   No way.

00:28:40   I guarantee you they're like the, the, the cooling capacity of the MacBook Pro's cooling

00:28:44   system is way more than even two of these, like 10, 20 watts.

00:28:48   You should look it up.

00:28:49   Like I bet the SOC in there is over 50 watts at full load.

00:28:53   Right.

00:28:54   But that's how many watts of power that the SOC takes.

00:28:56   It's not how many watts of power the cooling system removes from it.

00:29:00   That's that's what you're seeing here is a measurement of how many watts of heat are

00:29:03   removed from the thing by the cooling system.

00:29:05   No, I, well, okay.

00:29:07   I think those numbers are close, more closely related than you think, but that's fine.

00:29:10   You could be right.

00:29:11   I, I think at any rate, I think this is, this is going to be for low power devices.

00:29:15   This is not going to be for even mid range laptops.

00:29:18   I think you could definitely help on a mid range laptop, especially if you put more than

00:29:21   one of these things.

00:29:22   Again, the number we need to know is power consumption, right?

00:29:25   They told you how many Pascals of back pressure and you can probably get that number for fans.

00:29:29   Like how much, what is the, what is the back pressure of the fan system?

00:29:33   But what we don't know is how much power do the fans take?

00:29:35   Do the fans take 0.1 watts?

00:29:37   Do they take five watts?

00:29:39   Because that's part of the equation is how much power do I have to put into the cooling

00:29:43   system to take heat out of the rest of the system?

00:29:45   So anyway, they're, you know, they don't look like they're particularly close to coming

00:29:49   to market, but we'll see.

00:29:51   I'm sure there'll be in a PC first and let Apple buys them.

00:29:54   No, it was a fascinating technology.

00:29:56   And you know, the, the PC world discussion was pretty good and they have a couple of

00:30:00   videos on their website that I thought were very interesting.

00:30:02   And yeah, to say that they shoot out air at 120 miles an hour or whatever, it's just bananas.

00:30:07   They don't shoot it out of the side.

00:30:08   They shoot it downward at the thing they're cooling at 120 at which point it smacks into

00:30:13   it, breaks through the boundary layer and then just tumbles out at a leisurely pace.

00:30:17   You know, it's not, it's not, it's not a, you know, a, an air laser that's going to

00:30:20   cut your finger off, but it does shove the air downward and that tiny one millimeter

00:30:24   cavity at the thing they're cooling very quickly.

00:30:26   It's like one of those Dyson hand blade things.

00:30:28   It's like the most awkward to use hand dryer ever in a bathroom.

00:30:32   You ever seen the germ spreaders?

00:30:33   Yeah.

00:30:34   Like really you basically, you almost have to, it's like playing operation.

00:30:36   You almost have to touch everything on the way up and down, but maybe if you get a few

00:30:40   of these together, maybe it could be a really weird hand dryer.

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00:32:29   Twitter decided to kill off all of the good third party, third party Twitter clients.

00:32:38   A few days ago, I don't, uh, I don't remember exactly when it was, but a few days ago, uh,

00:32:42   all of a sudden tweet bot was showing like authentication errors.

00:32:45   Uh, Twitter, if it was showing errors, at least on iOS, if not on the desktop and a

00:32:50   few other clients, I don't remember which one's off hand.

00:32:53   And it seemed pretty clear pretty quickly that this was likely to be a deliberate act,

00:32:59   but nobody really knew.

00:33:01   And then, um, I think it was yesterday, uh, the Twitter developer account tweeted the

00:33:08   following.

00:33:09   Twitter is enforcing its longstanding API rules that may result in some apps not working.

00:33:14   Oh, cool.

00:33:15   Thanks.

00:33:16   Thanks guys.

00:33:17   That's real helpful.

00:33:18   Awesome.

00:33:19   Well done.

00:33:20   I really appreciate your, uh, really appreciate your hard work on that.

00:33:21   Really clearing things up for us.

00:33:23   Uh, but yeah, it seems like, uh, and allegedly SpaceKaren has, has made the call on this.

00:33:29   It seems like Twitter's cut off all the good third party, third party clients and, uh,

00:33:34   pour one out for Twitter because, uh, I'm, I mean, I'm, I don't plan to use the official

00:33:40   client because I know there are fans, fans amongst people I know and respect, but I find

00:33:44   their first party client to be frigging terrible.

00:33:46   So, uh, yeah, uh, this sucks.

00:33:49   This sucks.

00:33:50   Um, there's been a lot of, uh, podcasts that came out earlier in the week that have already

00:33:53   covered this pretty well in certain angles.

00:33:55   And I, and I think I agree with some of the large themes like, you know, Ben Thompson

00:33:58   has been on the record for years basically saying like Twitter probably should have killed

00:34:03   third party clients a long time ago.

00:34:04   And I think, you know, you could make a case for that.

00:34:07   Um, you can make a case for this being, you know, a reasonable decision to have been made

00:34:13   and on the topic before you move on for it.

00:34:16   I don't actually agree with that.

00:34:17   Like the, the, the, the idea that, uh, it's good to cut off third party clients.

00:34:21   It makes sense only at the, like the first level of, of logic and thinking about it.

00:34:26   And the idea there is, um, once, once, once Twitter decided to go to an ad based model,

00:34:32   um, since third party apps didn't show ads and since Twitter never added apps, added

00:34:38   ads to the third party API, which they could have done by the way, um, it's like, well,

00:34:42   we need to control the client because if we're gonna have an ad based business, people can

00:34:45   skip ads if they can do third party clients or whatever.

00:34:47   Right?

00:34:48   So it's like, Oh, well see, once they chose that as their business model, it makes perfect

00:34:51   sense to get rid of third party clients.

00:34:54   Only if you think the only two factors here are third party clients don't show ads.

00:34:59   We want to show ads, therefore bad third party clients, but third party clients as they existed

00:35:03   on Twitter, there's more to them than just their clients that you people use and they

00:35:09   don't see ads.

00:35:10   Right?

00:35:11   So first of all, so few people in terms of like percentage wise of Twitter's customers

00:35:16   use third party clients, right?

00:35:18   And you could say, well, that's because they killed the API or whatever, but either way,

00:35:22   even in their heyday, I feel like the first party client was massively dominant.

00:35:26   So the third party client Twitter users, I mean, just, you know, for the people listening

00:35:30   to this show, I bet like how many people use third party clients?

00:35:32   We have probably one of the nerdier audience and I'm sure most people use the official

00:35:36   client.

00:35:37   There's such a small number that they're not really hurting your ad sales that much.

00:35:42   And the people who are using those third party clients are probably more likely to be the

00:35:47   most engaged Twitter users.

00:35:49   Maybe they produce the most content or whatever.

00:35:51   Now they're saying this for a fact, but it is potentially the case that the people who

00:35:56   are using the third party clients provide more value than they're removing by not seeing

00:36:02   ads, because they're already opting out of it.

00:36:04   They aren't going to click on your ads anyway, and they may be providing value to the platform

00:36:08   by adding content.

00:36:09   And that's why I think that just the blanket idea that they should have killed them because

00:36:13   they're going ad based doesn't take into account that this was a tiny minority that was weird.

00:36:17   It was a weird minority.

00:36:18   And I said, I guess I don't know for a fact that they're a weird minority that is particularly

00:36:23   lucrative or not, but it's possible.

00:36:26   And obviously only Twitter would know or Twitter back when they were competent and actually

00:36:29   understood anything about their business and could look this up.

00:36:31   When was that?

00:36:33   I bet in the past they had people, when they had employees, they had it too.

00:36:37   They had that, but when did they ever understand their business?

00:36:41   That's I think asking a lot of the previous administration.

00:36:44   Because the third party things are just such a sideshow.

00:36:47   It's taken this long for Twitter to even bother doing anything about them.

00:36:49   They're just such a tiny sliver, but that tiny sliver had attributes about it.

00:36:55   It had a history behind it.

00:36:57   They were enthusiastic users.

00:36:58   They were people who were doing complicated things with Twitter.

00:37:02   Maybe they produced more content.

00:37:05   As Ben Thompson has also pointed out in Mr. Gregory, they were also the tiny little sliver

00:37:10   that was probably the easiest to monetize.

00:37:12   Because back in the day, they were the most invested in the platform.

00:37:15   So you could have started charging them money and made the API good and charged for API

00:37:19   usage.

00:37:20   Twitter didn't do any of that.

00:37:21   But setting that aside, I just feel like the accepted wisdom that they should have just

00:37:25   gotten rid of all third party clients when they went to advertising, I don't think is

00:37:28   entirely a slam dunk.

00:37:30   There's more nuance to it than that.

00:37:32   And only the past more competent Twitter knows the answer to that because we don't get to

00:37:37   see the information on the inside.

00:37:40   But I think you could make a case-- I mean, look, I run a web service that has a private

00:37:45   API that my app uses to talk to the web service.

00:37:47   I frequently get requests from people who are like, hey, when are you going to make

00:37:51   an Overcast API?

00:37:52   I want to play with it or make my own alternative stuff or whatever.

00:37:56   And my answer is, sorry, no, I'm not doing that.

00:37:59   I want to control what this does.

00:38:01   And I could see the argument for that.

00:38:02   And you could also say lots of other things like, hey, how about leaving the third party

00:38:08   API where it was but just making it only available to paid subscription members?

00:38:13   So if I wanted to use a Twitter app--

00:38:15   What was I saying?

00:38:16   To monetize the API.

00:38:17   They're the easiest to monetize because they're already invested.

00:38:19   Right.

00:38:20   Yeah.

00:38:21   I would have gladly-- assuming I was still using Twitter for other reasons, I would have

00:38:23   gladly paid the $10 or $20 a month per account to access it via API.

00:38:30   And you have to worry about the development cost to develop the functionality.

00:38:34   But you're never going to make tons of money off them because they're such a small sliver.

00:38:38   But it also means that you can zero them out.

00:38:41   Whatever harm you think they're doing to your ad business, you can cancel that out pretty

00:38:45   easily with lots of different techniques to just say, well, these users were taking 1%

00:38:50   of our ad revenue away.

00:38:51   Can we get that back?

00:38:52   Can we get 1.2% of the ad revenue they would have made back by charging for API?

00:38:56   And now they're just off to the side.

00:38:58   And that sits there.

00:38:59   And even if you just ignore them and neglect them, they're not hurting your balance sheet

00:39:02   anymore and you could allow it to exist.

00:39:05   And it would produce goodwill.

00:39:07   And all the historical baggage of API use with Twitter-- because it's not just arbitrary

00:39:11   like, hey, I want an overcast API.

00:39:13   Twitter grew up with the API.

00:39:15   That API and those apps are an important part of Twitter's history and the development of

00:39:19   the platform.

00:39:20   And the people who are using it are the most enthusiastic and engaged users because of

00:39:24   that history.

00:39:25   So it's not in a vacuum like a business case.

00:39:28   Should we have an API?

00:39:29   Should we charge for it?

00:39:30   In the specific case of Twitter, the API and the apps built around it really helped build

00:39:35   the platform.

00:39:36   I'm not saying they're owed anything.

00:39:37   But I'm saying the historical baggage of that means that those API users are not the same

00:39:44   as the regular Twitter users in terms of influence, engagement, ability to be monetized.

00:39:51   They are kind of a special case.

00:39:52   And it was in some ways right for them to be treated as a special case for a long time.

00:39:57   It's just they were treated as a special case of neglect.

00:39:59   And now they're treated as a special case of getting [BLEEP] over.

00:40:02   Yeah.

00:40:03   And wow, did they.

00:40:04   I mean, talk about mishandling a situation.

00:40:08   I mean, this is, again, classic Elon Musk.

00:40:12   Well, more classic toddler, let's say.

00:40:14   Because I can't think of another-- can you think of-- try to think of it like an indie

00:40:19   business, like a one-person app, like a literal one-person app who has handled something this

00:40:25   badly, who has cut off some service that people were using for a decade with zero notice and

00:40:33   zero communication.

00:40:34   I can't think of one.

00:40:36   Zero notice, I could probably think of like, oh, some person got into a car accident and

00:40:41   they had to stop developing an app and they just cut it off and said, yeah, I'm sorry.

00:40:46   You're not getting your money back.

00:40:47   I can't develop this app anymore.

00:40:49   Sorry, I'm a one-person thing.

00:40:51   Tough luck.

00:40:52   But they would still communicate that.

00:40:54   They would write a post on their blog and say, sorry, I can't work on my cool app anymore.

00:41:00   I also can't give you the money back because I needed to pay my rent later.

00:41:03   Right?

00:41:04   And this is like-- This is worse than that.

00:41:07   This is a multi-billion dollar company where they literally didn't say anything.

00:41:11   They didn't even send a form email that said, yeah, we're cutting off your app.

00:41:15   Just literally nothing until for a week.

00:41:18   At least like when the app store d*cks you over, they tell you.

00:41:20   Yeah, they send you a form email that says section 3.1.2, you're violating blah, blah,

00:41:25   blah.

00:41:26   No, they don't explain, but like you get something.

00:41:28   And even when it's total BS, yeah, you-- Because like, you know, no one knew for those first,

00:41:32   you know, first couple of days, no one really knew whether the API just had like some downtime,

00:41:38   like because that's also plausible with how many, you know, Twitter has been breaking in

00:41:43   weird subtle ways.

00:41:44   So it's like, you know, it could have been just like, oh, something was messed up and

00:41:47   no one knew.

00:41:48   I mean, again, the way they did this, like I like how Jason Snell put it.

00:41:51   Like he said, like it was, you know, not only was it like, you know, badly done, but it

00:41:54   was also just cowardly.

00:41:56   Like dishonorable, cowardly, just terrible.

00:41:59   I mean, look, you know, just from my point of view as a user, Twitter to me has always

00:42:04   been the third party app I'm using.

00:42:07   You know, for a while I used Twitterific for a while, I used Tweety for a while, and for

00:42:11   most of the recent last few years I've been using Tweetbot.

00:42:13   Like to me, Twitter is Tweetbot.

00:42:17   If I would ever have to use the website, it almost felt like I was using a whole different

00:42:21   like foreign thing because it was so different.

00:42:24   And so on some level I can kind of see if Twitter wants to have, you know, ultimate

00:42:28   control over what their product is, I can kind of see, well, if they look at an app,

00:42:33   that's a pretty different experience.

00:42:34   I've never seen a Twitter ad ever.

00:42:37   All the new products they would launch and things they would try, all the trends and

00:42:40   the follow, you know, the hot hashtags or whatever.

00:42:43   I never saw any of that crap.

00:42:45   I had a very different experience of Twitter as a service.

00:42:48   My experience of Twitter was Tweetbot.

00:42:51   And so as a user, to have all of us who were having that experience or all the people who

00:42:57   were using Twitterific or whatever, any other apps that were cut off, to have us all of

00:43:01   a sudden just say, oh, you know what, screw that, now just use the Twitter app.

00:43:04   To me, I mean, I was already gone really, but if I wasn't already gone, that would have

00:43:09   been the last straw.

00:43:10   I'm sorry, like, I'm not going to just jump from this nice experience that I've been having

00:43:15   for like a decade and all of a sudden jump into this total crap show of whatever their

00:43:21   first party stuff is, which is so radically different.

00:43:25   And so again, not only was this poorly done, not only was this like the most cowardly chicken

00:43:31   poop way to do this.

00:43:32   It was like, you know, talk about like the quality of person you're dealing with here.

00:43:36   I mean, this shows the worst character.

00:43:41   It's like a little kid when they do something and don't want to talk about it.

00:43:45   Why would you ever, why would anybody ever build anything against Twitter again?

00:43:49   Why would anybody ever invest in Twitter again?

00:43:52   Hell, why would anybody ever advertise on Twitter again?

00:43:56   Like you're seeing the character of the person who now runs it.

00:44:00   Every week that goes by, he's revealing himself to be a worse and worse person.

00:44:05   It's like when Trump was president and you know, we knew it was going to be bad even

00:44:10   at the beginning, but it just seemed like every single day there was some new scandal

00:44:14   and some new lows that we were reaching every day.

00:44:18   And it was like, I can't even believe how bad it, you know, every day you're like, it

00:44:21   can't possibly get worse than yesterday.

00:44:24   And then something would happen and it would get worse.

00:44:26   That's what he is.

00:44:28   Like that what now that we have an Elon Twitter, he is revealing himself to be that same level

00:44:33   of terrible, incompetent, rash, cowardly chicken person.

00:44:40   He is so he's so bad.

00:44:42   Like some common moves like the one there was a story a couple of weeks ago of like,

00:44:47   just like Trump didn't like to pay his bills.

00:44:48   Elon's way of saving money is we're just not going to pay rent and we're not going to pay

00:44:51   bills anymore.

00:44:52   Like aside from firing everybody and doing all that stuff, it's just like, well, let's

00:44:55   just not pay rent because it's going to take a while for, you know, it's a calculation.

00:44:59   It's going to take a while for this stuff to wind its way through the court and we'll

00:45:02   battle them and blah, blah, blah.

00:45:04   We can save a lot of money right now by just not paying bills, you know, and Trump has

00:45:07   famously would just, you know, not pay vendors for things and say, oh, if you don't like

00:45:10   it, come sue me.

00:45:11   It's just, you know, it's so terrible.

00:45:14   Like it's, that's why I keep trying to compare it to like the smallest possible thing.

00:45:19   Forget about a multi-billion dollar company has any individual human.

00:45:21   Maybe that's not fair because individual humans might have feel like shame or guilt or something,

00:45:25   but like even like a medium business, like just no matter how bad, you know, how bad

00:45:30   somebody handles something, at least they own, like, like at least they communicate

00:45:35   the fact that they're doing something.

00:45:36   This is, this is like, cause we, to this day, we still don't actually have any clear communication

00:45:41   to any of these individual developers that the thing that happened to them was intentional

00:45:45   because that tweet doesn't reference anybody specifically.

00:45:49   And that tweet also mischaracterizes it.

00:45:50   Like they actually like the tweet basically, yeah, it said something on the lines of like,

00:45:54   we're, we're enforcing our rules.

00:45:56   Some, some apps might not work.

00:45:57   So first of all, it doesn't, it doesn't name any apps and it doesn't say what rules and

00:46:00   also they weren't breaking any rules.

00:46:03   Like Twitter was, Twitter has changed the API rules over the years and the, and you

00:46:08   know, these high quality apps that were using them had, first of all, relationships with

00:46:11   people in Twitter and they would go back and forth and they would, but you know, but they

00:46:16   would make sure they were following whatever the rule as the rules would change.

00:46:19   These apps would work with Twitter and follow them.

00:46:22   They were following all the rules.

00:46:24   They were not breaking any rules.

00:46:26   So not only was this like poorly communicated, the thing is the current management, their

00:46:30   current employees at Twitter probably don't know what the rules are.

00:46:33   That is one, that was one of the plausible theories is that like many of these apps had

00:46:36   specific special deals because of the, again, the history that I was talking about before

00:46:41   and the people who knew about those deals or knew where they were written down have

00:46:44   long since been fired.

00:46:46   But but again, so pretend all that's true and it's just a bunch of new employees who

00:46:50   don't know any of this information.

00:46:51   And they're like, oh, this rule says you're only supposed to have 10 of these and you

00:46:53   have 20.

00:46:54   I'm going to cut off your app.

00:46:56   Okay, then do that and be incompetent and then send out a form email that says we cut

00:47:01   off your app because you had 10 of these, 20 of these things and you're supposed to

00:47:03   have 10.

00:47:04   Like communicate, tell people what you're doing.

00:47:07   Don't just like secretly turn off the light switch and run out of the room and then put

00:47:11   your fingers in your ears and go, I can't hear you.

00:47:13   La la la la la.

00:47:14   Like we literally don't know anything about this other than this one tweet that doesn't

00:47:18   address any individual app.

00:47:20   So we just all have to assume you're a bunch of jerks.

00:47:23   You're too scared to say to the people that you did a thing and you're just hoping it

00:47:30   will go away.

00:47:31   It's like ghosting someone on text.

00:47:32   It's the closest thing I can come up with is like, I don't want to deal with you anymore.

00:47:35   I'm just never going to respond to your text.

00:47:37   I'm going to block your number.

00:47:38   Yeah, but it's but with some implied slander as well.

00:47:41   Yeah, but it's and it's your fault because you did something wrong, right?

00:47:44   Right.

00:47:45   Yeah.

00:47:46   Not only am I not going to talk to you, but I'm going to say in public that you broke

00:47:47   the rules like that.

00:47:49   Without naming you.

00:47:50   They could sue.

00:47:51   Like, I mean, they're not going to, of course, but like, they can't the way, I mean, my God,

00:47:56   like just these are like, he's such a terrible person.

00:47:59   Like it just, it just keeps digging and digging.

00:48:02   Like my God, I just, I can't believe how like this is going to go down.

00:48:08   I mean, look, couldn't have happened to a worse person, right?

00:48:10   I mean, maybe, maybe he and Zuckerberg can get coffee sometime, but like, I am so happy

00:48:15   to see how much, not only how much money he's losing, but how much his reputation is just

00:48:21   going down the toilet.

00:48:24   Reputation is going up with sociopaths though.

00:48:27   They love him.

00:48:28   I, and I say this as previously a very big Tesla fan.

00:48:31   I want to see him fail.

00:48:33   And you know, normally I'm not that much of a vindictive person, but he's just such a

00:48:38   shithead and he just keeps showing it more and more and more.

00:48:42   I will enjoy continuing to see him fail.

00:48:46   And I feel bad for the people who are affected along the way, but he deserves this.

00:48:51   Just like Zuck, the amount of value that he has either lost, destroyed or both, depending

00:48:56   on how you characterize it, in such a short time is astounding.

00:49:00   And if he goes down in history as the person who lost the most money the fastest, oh, that

00:49:05   would be such sweet, such sweet revenge.

00:49:08   I think probably he still has too much money to face any consequences for his actions because

00:49:13   that's the kind of place we live.

00:49:15   Well, I mean, I think Tesla's other shareholders might have different opinions on that, but

00:49:18   we'll see.

00:49:19   We'll see.

00:49:20   I'm not a financial person, but, but you know, part of Tesla's fall over the last few months

00:49:23   has been because of other factors, you know, global factors, industry factors and everything.

00:49:28   But there's also no doubt that a large part of it has been him and what he personally

00:49:32   has done and the reputation that he personally is destroying of himself and his brand.

00:49:38   And like, so, you know, there is no, no doubt that a large part of the decline is his fault

00:49:44   and you know, it sucks for the other Tesla investors.

00:49:47   But again, there are very few people in the world who deserve to lose as much as he does

00:49:52   right now.

00:49:53   And so I'm looking forward to his continuing unnecessary proving to the world that he is

00:49:58   a terrible person and also that he is super incompetent.

00:50:03   We'll keep watching, but I'm watching from increasing distance and yeah, I'm totally

00:50:07   gone from Twitter now.

00:50:08   Yeah.

00:50:09   I mean, I don't plan on looking at Twitter unless for some, I have a compelling reason

00:50:14   to do so.

00:50:15   You know, I used to pop open tweet bot from time to time, just make sure nothing was really

00:50:19   going on.

00:50:20   And now, you know, if I open a link on Twitter or to Twitter on my phone and thus the official

00:50:26   app opens and maybe I'll pop into my notifications or something, but I am not going to Twitter

00:50:31   actively at all anymore.

00:50:32   I mean, like I deleted the other day cause I'm like, you know, I'm never going to follow

00:50:35   him.

00:50:36   Who cares?

00:50:37   Like if I open up the webpage, fine, whatever.

00:50:38   Um, but like, bad idea.

00:50:40   Cause like anyway, but what I'm saying, but you know, because of what I was saying earlier

00:50:44   about how, you know, my experience of Twitter, the service has always really been, you know,

00:50:49   tweet bot the app.

00:50:51   When I switched over to ivory, yes, I'm bragging about being in the ivory beta and Oh God,

00:50:54   I'm dying for a Mac version.

00:50:56   But I'll tell you what, I have tried every Mac client that everyone says is like, Oh,

00:51:01   this is a good Mac Mastodon app.

00:51:02   And I, I have yet to find one where that's the case.

00:51:05   Uh, anyway, um, that's, that's a separate day.

00:51:07   If anybody has any recommendations that for some reason I haven't tried yet, please let

00:51:10   me know.

00:51:11   Um, but I want to be able to manage multiple accounts and have a tab that can show mentions

00:51:16   and not all combined mentioned and notifications.

00:51:19   And it seems like none of the apps are really good at that, uh, or offer it at all.

00:51:24   Some, like some of them don't offer it at all.

00:51:26   Anyway, because my experience of Twitter was always tweet bot, really.

00:51:31   Once I got onto ivory, which is just tweet bot for, for Mastodon, basically, it was like

00:51:37   a drop in replacement.

00:51:39   Like because almost everyone who I followed on Twitter was over on Mastodon already.

00:51:44   And like, seriously, for me, it's like a very large percentage of the people I followed

00:51:49   on Twitter, like using a tool like move to Don, a very large percentage of them aren't,

00:51:53   I was able to just find a follow on Mastodon very, very easily.

00:51:55   Um, and so it was just a drop in replacement.

00:51:59   And so it doesn't actually feel any different to me now that I'm using Mastodon instead

00:52:04   of Twitter.

00:52:05   I, it was, I was able to replace it very easily.

00:52:07   And you know, this is part of the reason why companies like Twitter don't like having third

00:52:12   party clients because they don't want someone else to be able to build an alternative network

00:52:16   and have everyone just kind of scoot right over there super easily.

00:52:19   You know, they want to build more of a moat or whatever.

00:52:21   Um, but because I really wasn't using Twitter, the client, I was using Twitter, the backend.

00:52:28   I was able to just move over and it's fine.

00:52:31   And the only hole in my, in my formerly Twitter occupied user life is the Mac app.

00:52:37   It's driving me nuts though.

00:52:38   Oh, it's bad.

00:52:39   Yeah.

00:52:40   Like I'm just not even checking it until like I'm on my phone like at night or whatever.

00:52:43   Which is great.

00:52:44   It's being, honestly, it's being great for my productivity.

00:52:46   Like I, I've been getting so much more done on my computer because I'm not constantly

00:52:49   browsing Twitter on the side.

00:52:52   But yeah, it's, I am, uh, once we have a decent Mac Mastodon app, um, I won't feel like I'm

00:53:00   missing anything.

00:53:01   Like I'm already not missing Twitter itself.

00:53:03   I'm kind of just missing the way things were.

00:53:06   But once you have your app situation settled out, um, you won't miss it at all.

00:53:12   And that's where I am now.

00:53:13   I don't miss Twitter at all.

00:53:16   And you know, we'll see what happens whenever there was like the next big world news event

00:53:19   that's breaking and you know, you want to get up to date now, now, now, you know, that

00:53:22   it might be a little bit different then.

00:53:24   Um, and, and again, and we don't know how Mastodon is going to scale, you know, community

00:53:29   wise and you know, certain things, there are certain challenges and potential pitfalls

00:53:34   there.

00:53:35   But as of now, it's great.

00:53:37   Most of the community I want to follow is already on Mastodon and it's fine.

00:53:43   And so to me, I'm just like, all right, you know, peace out Twitter.

00:53:46   I, you know, I, I don't need Twitter for anything anymore.

00:53:49   So part of this non non action, non announced BS, passive aggressive grade school nonsense

00:53:58   that's going on is the fact that not all third party Twitter clients were killed.

00:54:04   Just some of them.

00:54:05   It seems like it was probably the most popular, but who can say when the company doesn't say

00:54:10   a damn word about it.

00:54:12   But anyway, what this means is that for me, cause I still do use Twitter cause it's not

00:54:16   everyone I follow is over on Mastodon.

00:54:18   I tried using the first party client.

00:54:20   I honestly, I, I can't do it.

00:54:23   It's it's, it's terrible.

00:54:25   It's too bad.

00:54:26   It's I can't do it.

00:54:28   So I just, there's a bunch of other third party clients that are smaller third party

00:54:31   clowns clients that now I'm using them instead.

00:54:34   And then, you know, we mentioned, alluded this earlier.

00:54:37   Twitter's been not down, but differently functional.

00:54:42   Let's say over the past several weeks, uh, Gruber mentioned this.

00:54:46   I thought I was, I thought it was just me until he mentioned it as well.

00:54:49   Like I look at my mentions, right?

00:54:51   I'm a Twitter completionist.

00:54:53   Twitter doesn't seem to be showing me my mentions anymore.

00:54:56   Forget about the official client.

00:54:57   Forget about the website.

00:54:59   Third party clients that, you know, that don't do any algorithmic anything.

00:55:04   It's just, when I look at my mentions, there's like nothing there.

00:55:07   Gruber was getting the situation where he was seeing like five mentions in the official

00:55:13   first party app and 200 in a third party app and 100 in a different third party app.

00:55:19   It's like broken.

00:55:20   Like you can't, there's no place you can go anymore to if you, and obviously it's just

00:55:25   me, who cares?

00:55:26   But my weird Twitter completionist things, if I want to know that I'm seeing all the

00:55:28   tweets in my timeline, it's just literally not possible anymore because of Twitter's

00:55:32   semi-brokenness.

00:55:33   But to the extent that I'm looking at Twitter at all, I'm doing it through different third

00:55:36   party applications.

00:55:38   The final FU thing on this whole Twitter third party app is, aside from destroying the livelihood

00:55:44   of all these developers who have popular third party Twitter applications, there is an aspect

00:55:50   to it that may actually end up costing them money because a lot of these applications

00:55:53   are a subscription type thing and you pay like an annual or monthly subscription.

00:55:57   And if someone paid for a subscription to this app for a year and then two days later

00:56:03   the app was killed by an API change, they're probably going to ask for a refund.

00:56:07   And so now the developers have to give back the money that they thought they had because

00:56:11   their app was killed by Twitter.

00:56:12   And that, you know, again, too, if it's like an individual developer or a small group of

00:56:16   developers that can be a big financial hit.

00:56:18   Hey, I thought I had all this money, but guess what?

00:56:20   You got to give back, you know, this much of the revenue that you already thought you

00:56:23   got because Twitter killed your app and all the users who are using it now can't, who

00:56:27   paid for a year of your service can't get it.

00:56:29   So they want their money back or they want half their money back or something.

00:56:32   It just sucks all around.

00:56:34   So it's not, you know, this is not a victimless crime.

00:56:35   It's like, oh, boo hoo, you can't use a Twitter client you like.

00:56:38   The developers have their business killed and the developers may owe money, have to

00:56:43   return money they thought they had as income.

00:56:45   And it's not like these developers are rolling around with, you know, Bugatti's or whatever.

00:56:51   They're getting by selling a third party Twitter app, which is not, you know, the big bucks.

00:56:55   It's not, you know, Candy Crush or whatever.

00:56:57   So yeah, that's the thing.

00:56:58   It's like, it's like this is one of the reasons why the way they did it was so crappy because

00:57:02   like in a regular operating environment with a business run by adults and decent people,

00:57:08   you would give people warning and, you know, something as major as we're going to kill

00:57:12   the entire basis for which your app is allowed to exist.

00:57:16   You might give them a warning of like a year.

00:57:17   You might say like, all right, on this date next year, the API is turning off for apps

00:57:21   like yours.

00:57:22   Sorry, that's it.

00:57:23   Because what they were doing, despite the horrible passive aggressive message on the

00:57:27   Twitter dev account, what these apps were doing was totally allowed.

00:57:31   It was within the rules.

00:57:32   It was permitted.

00:57:33   It was explicitly permitted by Twitter.

00:57:35   They were totally allowed to do what they were doing and monetize it and everything.

00:57:38   So they were they were doing nothing wrong or unexpected to the Twitter company.

00:57:42   And they had this really complicated system from back from the last time Twitter screwed

00:57:45   with the API where they're only allowed to have a maximum number of X customers after

00:57:49   that they can't have any more.

00:57:50   It was like this very draconian system that they had to work within with where they would

00:57:53   dole out a fixed number of tokens that you could sell.

00:57:56   So it's not even like it was a free for all like it was back in the old days.

00:57:59   That's why app.net launched.

00:58:01   It was in response to that.

00:58:02   Yeah.

00:58:03   Yes.

00:58:04   The last time Twitter tried to screw over third party developers, it did it in a less

00:58:09   crappy way than this.

00:58:10   And yeah, and you remember like the four quadrant thing?

00:58:12   It was a whole thing.

00:58:13   And it was a big scandal back then.

00:58:14   But but they at least even then, even when they were being crappy back then, you know,

00:58:18   they did it in a much more reasonable way.

00:58:21   They gave dates they gave, they communicated their crappiness.

00:58:24   Yeah, exactly.

00:58:25   You didn't have to guess.

00:58:26   They didn't just break one day.

00:58:27   And then they just said, we're not saying anything.

00:58:28   Nope, we don't have a communications department.

00:58:30   Don't bother asking us any questions.

00:58:32   Anyway, I'm glad we have happier news to talk about this week because I have the Twitter

00:58:38   thing.

00:58:39   But you know, again, like, I can't I can't urge this enough.

00:58:42   Switch to Mastodon.

00:58:43   Like if you're on Twitter, get off of it.

00:58:45   You know, if I know there are certain communities and certain people who haven't moved off of

00:58:49   it yet.

00:58:51   You all first of all, I'll ask our audience two things on this topic.

00:58:55   Number one, please move off of Twitter.

00:58:57   Like this is not a company you want to support.

00:59:00   And especially Oh God, this person running it.

00:59:03   Okay.

00:59:04   And number two, I would ask you please, if you have a subscription to tweetbot or Twitterific

00:59:09   or any other any of the other Twitter apps that were just killed, please don't ask Apple

00:59:14   for a refund on it.

00:59:16   You know, look, these are these are small developers like that.

00:59:19   No one could have foreseen this really.

00:59:22   So I mean, yeah, obviously cancel your subscription.

00:59:25   But like, don't ask for a refund for the for the unused portion that now can't work because

00:59:30   you're going to really, you know, that's going to really possibly hurt and, you know, consider

00:59:36   it consider it your risk that was taken also.

00:59:38   And you know, hopefully we'll move on to better pastures.

00:59:41   All right, so we have one more piece of slightly unhappy follow up and then I'll end on a happy

00:59:48   piece of follow up.

00:59:50   The unhappy ish follow up is actually follow out to this week's upgrade actually specifically

00:59:55   upgrade plus episode 442 zombie arms and toaster fridge in the very, very end in the members

01:00:01   only portion.

01:00:02   Jason and Mike went on a tear about filing a feedback and Oh, baby, I was here for it.

01:00:09   Oh, it was good.

01:00:11   It was great.

01:00:12   And so I'm not I'm not gonna get myself riled up about this.

01:00:15   I'm just gonna move right along.

01:00:16   But if you want to hear the two of them just go off on how how awful fire filing feedback

01:00:22   is, how obnoxious it is to to hear that from Apple, and how it's kind of victim blaming.

01:00:28   Oh, it was so good.

01:00:29   It was so good.

01:00:31   So incredibly good.

01:00:32   Upgrade Plus, which is the members only stuff 442 zombie arms and toaster fridge, please.

01:00:37   And thank you.

01:00:38   And thank you, Mike and Jason for your service.

01:00:41   I mean that non sarcastically.

01:00:43   The only thing that bothers me is that Apple is never going to hear this because I don't

01:00:47   know if you know any Apple people are are members of upgrade.

01:00:50   I hope they are.

01:00:51   They should be.

01:00:52   They should be because it's such a great program.

01:00:53   But anyways, check it out.

01:00:55   And then finally, the happy news from the listener cool places file.

01:00:59   We got this which I don't know if it was intended to be anonymous or not, but I will just assume

01:01:03   it was intended to be anonymous.

01:01:04   We got the following letter.

01:01:06   I deployed last year aboard America's fastest deepest diving submarine and before leaving

01:01:10   the pier downloaded some older episodes to listen to offline underwater.

01:01:14   Now that I'm back, I'm happy to say that ATP has now been played some unspecified deep

01:01:18   depth somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.

01:01:21   Most of my listening time was spent as I exercised between the main steam piping just behind

01:01:25   the reactor compartment, which is heavily shielded from radiation, so no health worries there.

01:01:29   When I returned to shore, it was good to catch up on the episodes I missed since there's

01:01:32   zero connectivity with the outside world on a deployment.

01:01:36   I just think this is so freaking cool and very timely since we're talking about hunt

01:01:38   for October.

01:01:39   Again, atp.fm/join.

01:01:41   So if you if you listen to the show in a weird, odd, unusual or cool place, I feel like I'm

01:01:46   channeling a little bit of hello internet here, but I don't care.

01:01:49   Let us know.

01:01:50   I'm going to share it and I appreciate this anonymous listener for writing it.

01:01:53   Yeah, if hello internet wants to stop us, they can come back on the air.

01:01:57   We are sponsored this week by the LunchPaleVC podcast.

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01:03:07   Apple has announced the new M2 Pro and M2 Macs, MacBook Pro, and then even before that

01:03:14   the new M2 Pro and M2 Mac Mini.

01:03:22   So all sorts of new treats for everyone.

01:03:24   We can start with the Mac Mini.

01:03:27   It is a little bit bigger than the old one, and it's silver only, no space gray.

01:03:32   When you say a little bit, you mean a little bit.

01:03:34   I didn't look up these numbers, I'm just trusting Dan Moore and his six colors, but 7.75 inches

01:03:40   instead of 7.7?

01:03:43   So weird.

01:03:44   1.41 inches high instead of 1.4?

01:03:47   I thought these Mac Minis had been the same size for years now.

01:03:50   It's like, "Oh, the Intel one, then they switched to the M1 and it was the same case, and blah,

01:03:54   blah, blah."

01:03:55   And then they make a new case and it's slightly differently sized.

01:03:59   Wow.

01:04:00   I mean, unless you're making some really tightly fitting Mac Mini jeans, I don't think you're

01:04:05   going to notice this difference.

01:04:06   Maybe the rack mount people, but the reason it's weird is because it's not like it was

01:04:11   cramped in there.

01:04:12   Like the M1 Mac Mini was hilariously spacious.

01:04:14   Like you'd open it up and it was just this little tiny motherboard and this giant cooler

01:04:18   and power supply, and the M2 one is a little bit less like that, but it's not like it was

01:04:23   tight in there.

01:04:25   I would love to know what in the world happened to this computer that needed to get 0.01 inches

01:04:31   bigger on its side.

01:04:33   Like what?

01:04:34   I can't wait to see the teardown.

01:04:36   Like did they buy a third party thing that needed that extra 0.01 inch?

01:04:42   So weird.

01:04:43   Anyway, it looks the same on the outside.

01:04:44   I mean, and these products are pretty straightforward, but of all the things, this is the one that

01:04:49   baffles me the most.

01:04:50   The Mac Mini changing size in a tiny, tiny way.

01:04:54   Well, spoiler alert, but the same thing happened to the HomePod for what it's worth.

01:04:58   Yeah, well, the HomePod's a totally new design and the laptops, when they get a little bit

01:05:02   thicker, like, you know, I understand that.

01:05:03   Like things are so tight in a laptop, like every little fraction of a millimeter counts

01:05:07   or whatever, but the Mac Mini, it's like the Mac Pro getting 0.01 inches bigger or something

01:05:12   like in the current case.

01:05:13   Like what did you not have room for in there?

01:05:16   It's just a little, anyway.

01:05:18   All right, regardless.

01:05:20   So silver only, no space gray.

01:05:22   There is an optional 10 gig ethernet for a hundred bucks.

01:05:24   Yeah, that's not new.

01:05:25   I thought it was new, but apparently that was already on.

01:05:26   I was going to say that.

01:05:27   That's not the new, but it is the same.

01:05:29   The M2 starts at 600 bones, 8 gigs RAM, 256 gig SSD.

01:05:33   And that's a hundred dollars less than before, right?

01:05:35   For the old M1 one?

01:05:36   I think that's right.

01:05:37   I actually have an M1 one, but I don't remember what I paid and I think I got it refurbed anyway.

01:05:42   Two Thunderbolt 4 ports, the M2 Pro in the Mac Mini, which is exciting, $1,300.

01:05:47   You get a 10 core CPU, 16 core GPU, 16 gigs RAM, 512 gig SSD.

01:05:53   You can upgrade from 10 to 12 core CPU for 300 bucks.

01:05:57   You get anywhere between six and eight performance cores, four efficiency cores, anywhere between

01:06:01   16, 19 GPU cores, the 16 core neural engine, 200 gigs a second memory bandwidth versus

01:06:08   100 gigs a second in the regular M2.

01:06:10   You get 16 or 32 gigs RAM.

01:06:14   And then the M1 Pro by comparison was same amount of performance cores and efficiency

01:06:20   cores, same cores on the neural engine, but 14 to 16 GPU cores instead of 16 to 19 same

01:06:27   RAM profile.

01:06:28   And again, in this case, you get four Thunderbolt 4 ports, which is exciting and perhaps more

01:06:34   interesting than anything else, no more Intel Mac Mini, which is very, very exciting as

01:06:40   well.

01:06:41   - Yeah, this was great.

01:06:42   This is like the one, when people would look at the Apple Silicon transition, everyone

01:06:48   knows we haven't done the Mac Pro yet, but most people quickly forgot that there was

01:06:52   actually still an Intel Mac Mini also in the lineup because the Mac Mini, it covered, from

01:06:59   the 2018 update, it went from being an only low-end product prior to that to in 2018 becoming

01:07:06   a product that had some low-end options, but also went pretty, pretty solid into the mid-range

01:07:14   performance territory and had some really great higher-end chip options and things like

01:07:19   that.

01:07:20   And that was not replaced when the M1 Mac Mini came out.

01:07:22   They only had the lower-end configuration with the M1.

01:07:27   And it took until now, now that we have in the M2 generation, now that we have the M2

01:07:31   Pro variant, that was the first time they actually really replaced what was still the

01:07:38   only Intel one in the lineup, which was kind of the higher-end CPU options and more ports

01:07:42   and more Thunderbolt bandwidth and stuff like that.

01:07:45   So now we have that role filled, leaving only the Mac Pro unfilled, but this is great.

01:07:53   I mean, when they first made the Mac Mini, that kind of mid-range performance level in

01:07:58   2018, that was a pretty big move.

01:08:01   And that really gave that product a lot of life and really was able to be a lot of people's

01:08:08   desktops and servers and accessory rolls, things like that.

01:08:12   It was a great product.

01:08:13   And so to have that finally be really fulfilled in the Apple Silicon era is really nice.

01:08:20   So I'm really happy to see this.

01:08:21   And in fact, if you look at what would it take, suppose you wanted to have a bunch of

01:08:26   Apple Silicon compute power in a data center or a server situation or whatever.

01:08:32   You look at the Mac Studio, you look at the other Mac Minis, this is actually a pretty

01:08:36   great deal for the amount of processing and GPU power that you're getting per dollar in

01:08:45   that kind of environment.

01:08:46   So it looks great.

01:08:48   The bigger version with the Pro has four USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports instead of two.

01:08:54   So you have more bandwidth, more ports, higher RAM ceiling, obviously more processor power.

01:09:02   Throttles are gonna be a question mark until we actually get these devices.

01:09:07   I do worry maybe it's gonna be loud with the fan or maybe it will throttle.

01:09:11   I don't know.

01:09:12   It probably won't throttle, but it might be loud under heavy load like the Mac Studio.

01:09:17   I don't know, but we'll find out.

01:09:19   I have high hopes and I'm really happy to see the Mac Mini and where it's going and

01:09:27   what they've been able to do with Apple Silicon.

01:09:28   I'm very, very happy with this.

01:09:30   To be clear, the M2 Pro is not on a new process size.

01:09:34   It's the same as the M2 as far as we can tell.

01:09:36   It's 5nm.

01:09:37   I know they have variants of the 5nm processor or whatever, but it's not 3nm is what I'm

01:09:41   getting at.

01:09:42   So the power consumption would be what you would expect from an M2 Pro, which has more

01:09:47   of the M2 stuff in it.

01:09:48   More cores, more GPU cores, so on and so forth.

01:09:51   I don't think the thermal conditions inside a Mac Mini are too rough unless they totally

01:09:55   screwed up the cooler like they did on the Mac Studio.

01:09:58   It should be fine probably.

01:10:00   These are good machines.

01:10:01   They're straightforward.

01:10:02   I like the fact that there's an M2 Pro.

01:10:04   I guess they didn't put an M2 Max in there.

01:10:06   Maybe because of cooling and maybe because you'd start going into the Mac Studio territory

01:10:11   and you just want to separate the lines a little bit, which is fine.

01:10:13   The price drop on the low end M2 one is nice, but the problem with these Mac Minis is, as

01:10:19   always, I feel like this...

01:10:21   I don't know why I feel like this more on the Mac Mini than other things.

01:10:23   Maybe because they don't come with a screen or a keyboard or anything else.

01:10:26   It's just the computer.

01:10:27   But it always highlights to me just how disconnected from cost of materials the upgrades on these

01:10:36   are.

01:10:37   So if you don't want a base config, everything you can add to this costs money.

01:10:42   It's just all pure profit.

01:10:44   If you want to go from 8GB of memory to 24GB, it's an extra $400.

01:10:50   What planet?

01:10:51   Oh, it's special memories on the SoC.

01:10:54   If you want to add 256GB of storage, it comes with 256GB, but if you want to go to 512GB,

01:11:01   the additional 256GB of SSD storage is $200.

01:11:04   No, that's not how these things...

01:11:07   And it's profit.

01:11:08   It's what the market will bear.

01:11:09   I understand that.

01:11:10   But speccing one of these up to the way you actually want it, especially when it comes

01:11:13   to storage, like, "Oh, you want a 2TB drive?"

01:11:16   Add $800 to the price.

01:11:18   A 2TB SSD does not cost $800.

01:11:24   It's actually a 1.75TB SSD because the 256 comes for free.

01:11:28   This is $800 above...

01:11:30   The pricing is brutal.

01:11:31   And we just suck it up because it's like, "Hey, it's a cool computer.

01:11:34   It's a Mac Mini.

01:11:35   That's how much they cost," or whatever.

01:11:36   I do feel like on the Mac Mini, because there is nothing else in the equation and it's just

01:11:41   a box that you're not going to touch or manipulate, it's just like an elemental slab, a container

01:11:46   for Apple's 75% margins on its upgrades.

01:11:49   It's just brutal.

01:11:52   And that's not the fault of this generation or this chip.

01:11:55   It's just the way things are on the Mac, and it kind of burns me up a little bit.

01:11:58   - How do you really feel?

01:11:59   No, I'm excited about this.

01:12:00   I have an M1 Mac Mini that's running Plex and Channels and in some of my Docker containers.

01:12:09   I am excited that this exists.

01:12:11   I have been extremely satisfied with my M1 Mac Mini, which is a 2020 model that I bought

01:12:16   mid to late last year.

01:12:18   I am not presently looking to upgrade.

01:12:20   Jon, do you have any M1 or any Mac Minis of any sort actually in the house?

01:12:25   - I don't have any.

01:12:26   I've never had a reason to use a Mac Mini.

01:12:28   I think they're cool machines, and especially with the ARM ones being so fast and so quiet

01:12:33   and cool.

01:12:34   It's a great machine if I ever had a use of one.

01:12:36   I suppose maybe if I didn't have a Synology, but I had rolled my own Synology type thing,

01:12:41   I would probably have a Mac Mini hooked up to a bunch of different things, but I do have

01:12:43   a Synology, so no Mac Minis in my life.

01:12:46   Or maybe there was no Apple TV.

01:12:48   I'd have one hooked up to my TV at this point, but you know.

01:12:51   - And then Marco, I don't recall.

01:12:52   Do you have one still?

01:12:54   I know you have and then have and then have and then have and different memory serves.

01:12:56   What is your current situation?

01:12:58   - I still technically own the one that was being the iSCSI host to my Synology for many,

01:13:04   many years.

01:13:05   I have since retired that role, but it's still just sitting in my TV cabinet in Westchester.

01:13:11   It's like the old, I think it's like a 2015 or 2016 model.

01:13:16   It's quite old by today's standards and runs a very ancient version of Mac OS.

01:13:23   And then I did briefly use the M1 Mac Mini as my desktop for a while during that transition.

01:13:31   And it was great.

01:13:32   And then it lived in the water closet and then I traded it into Apple.

01:13:36   - Nice, okay.

01:13:37   - Yeah, that's the other role this fulfills.

01:13:38   Now that there is an M2 Pro one of these, but there's still no big, fast iMac, and in

01:13:42   fact the iMac is still on the M1, let alone any variant of the M2, you get an M2 Pro one

01:13:47   of these and you hook it up to an Apple Studio display and you have a, what do you call it?

01:13:52   Deconstructed iMac essentially for probably a little bit more money because like I said,

01:13:57   the Mac Mini is pretty expensive once you spec it up and that monitor is not cheap,

01:14:00   but you get a full, well, not a full Mac system.

01:14:02   You still have to buy a mouse and a keyboard, I suppose.

01:14:04   But anyway, that's a pretty good system because an M2 Pro Mac Mini is gonna be no slouch.

01:14:08   The Apple Studio display is nice if you ignore the camera and it's all Apple stuff and so

01:14:13   I feel like they're filling, this is the hole in the market that we were talking about back

01:14:17   when they didn't have the big iMac.

01:14:19   Now they have something there.

01:14:20   The M2 Pro Mini fills that pretty well until they can get off their butt and deal with

01:14:24   the iMac, which it seems like they're, is the iMac gonna skip a generation and the next

01:14:28   iMac we're gonna see has an M3 in it?

01:14:30   Maybe, but like, and those iMacs are great.

01:14:33   I see them in the Apple Store all the time and the M1 is no slouch, like it's not a bad

01:14:36   computer by any stretch, but as the rest of the line sort of leaves it behind, it'd be

01:14:41   nice if they looked back at that iMac line and came out.

01:14:43   Because when that line came out, it was like, wow, these are great machines.

01:14:46   Like for the price and the features and the size, like it's, you know, no complaints about

01:14:51   them, but as they age and of course stay the same price because that's the Apple way, they're

01:14:56   starting to get left behind now.

01:14:58   - Yeah, well and frankly, I mean, I think the Studio display I think is too expensive

01:15:04   to have Studio display and Mac Mini be an iMac replacement for a lot of people.

01:15:09   It's just, it's not--

01:15:10   - No, it's not gonna replace the 24 inch for sure, but like the 27 inch, like a 5K iMac,

01:15:14   a specked out 5K, let's do the math.

01:15:16   So like if you get a decent M2 Pro Mac Mini with like a one terabyte SSD and like 32 gigs

01:15:22   of RAM, that's $2,200 and $1,600, that's about the territory.

01:15:27   It's a little bit more maybe than like a good 5K iMac with similar specs and plus you have

01:15:32   two separate boxes, right?

01:15:33   So it's not horrendous, but it's, the people who are buying a 24 inch iMac are not in the

01:15:38   market for a $3,700 computer or whatever.

01:15:42   - Yeah.

01:15:43   Anyway, Mac Mini, thumbs up.

01:15:47   - So Marco, also not ordering anything at this time.

01:15:50   Well, I'm sorry, with regard to the Mac Mini, I know you're ordering some stuff, but with

01:15:54   regard to the Mac Mini, no orders at this time.

01:15:56   - I did not order a Mac Mini.

01:15:57   - Okay, all right, now let's talk laptops.

01:16:01   The time has finally come, I had ordered the laptop that I'm using to speak to you fine

01:16:06   gentlemen right now.

01:16:07   I'd order this laptop whenever it was announced in like October, November of 2021, is that

01:16:13   right?

01:16:14   Yes, 2021.

01:16:15   And it has been probably the best Mac I've ever used ever since.

01:16:20   I had been living well over a year in bliss with nothing better on, that had come out

01:16:26   and made this thing look like a piece of garbage.

01:16:29   Until today, it is now a piece of garbage.

01:16:30   No, not really.

01:16:32   But this is the replacement for my M1 Max 14-inch MacBook Pro.

01:16:39   We have the 14-16-inch M1, or excuse me, M2 Pro and M2 Max MacBook Pros.

01:16:46   The 14-inch MacBook Pro is a touch thinner at 0.06 inches instead of 0.061 inches.

01:16:55   And the 14-inch M2 Max adds 0.1 pounds.

01:16:59   Interestingly, and I really want to find an excuse to spend the money on these even though

01:17:04   it's completely wasteful because I don't need it.

01:17:06   But interestingly, they have color matched MagSafe charging cables now, which is really

01:17:11   awesome.

01:17:12   And that is not something that I should be bothered by.

01:17:15   And I wouldn't say I'm bothered by the fact that I don't have a color matched MagSafe

01:17:18   cable, but I would have preferred a color matched one.

01:17:21   Are they metal matched as well?

01:17:23   By color matched, I mean like the braided cable itself is colored to match your thing.

01:17:26   But the other complaint was that the metal part of the MagSafe connector was always silver

01:17:30   even if you got a space-free one.

01:17:32   Ah, that's true.

01:17:33   Yeah, I believe they fixed that after the Airs launched.

01:17:35   Because when the new Airs launched, they finally made color matched MagSafe cables for the

01:17:41   different metal colors.

01:17:42   And then they swapped those for the Pros as well.

01:17:44   I believe, and I don't know if they even did it for the old Pros, but because these

01:17:49   Pros came out after those cables began to exist, that's why the new Pros have it.

01:17:54   Yeah.

01:17:55   Alright.

01:17:56   So in any case, the M2 Max, eight performance cores, four efficiency cores.

01:18:02   So this is the weird thing about this.

01:18:04   The M1 Max had eight performance cores and two efficiency cores.

01:18:09   And the M2 Max has more stuff than the, obviously the cores are different, it's got the M2

01:18:13   cores or whatever, right?

01:18:15   But it has two more efficiency cores.

01:18:19   Instead of adding power cores, like this is the max chip, it's like for performance

01:18:23   or whatever, they had more transistors to spend.

01:18:26   And the way they decided to spend them was keep the number of performance cores the same,

01:18:30   but add two more efficiency cores.

01:18:32   No, honestly, this, again, Jon, you don't know.

01:18:36   I know, I'm sitting right here in the Mac studio right there, I know all about efficiency

01:18:40   cores.

01:18:41   No, no, but you don't know for two reasons.

01:18:43   Number one, you're still using a Mac Pro.

01:18:44   Number two, you don't run iStat menus.

01:18:47   So you don't know that on Apple Silicon Macs, a lot of tasks are delegated to those efficiency

01:18:55   cores.

01:18:56   I understand what the efficiency cores do, but I'm saying it's on the M2 Max when you've

01:19:00   got transistors to spend.

01:19:03   Was it hurting for efficiency cores?

01:19:05   Did it need more of them?

01:19:06   Yes.

01:19:07   I mean, you could say it's a battery saving thing because like, "Oh, I don't want anything

01:19:09   to be running on the power cores unless I'm doing serious work, so I need more efficiency

01:19:13   cores."

01:19:14   Makes some vague sense, but the reason I'm saying this is because that M2 Max, I look

01:19:18   at it and I don't see just the chip that's going to be in this laptop, but I also see

01:19:22   the chip that's going to eventually be shoved head to head with another M2 Max to make the

01:19:27   M2 Ultra in the studio and whatever the hell they're going to do in the Mac Pro.

01:19:31   And there I think you're going to be oversubscribed on efficiency cores as you start tacking these

01:19:35   things together.

01:19:36   So maybe for a laptop makes sense, but it's an interesting choice.

01:19:40   One of the theories I'd heard about this that makes some sense is I think all the M chips

01:19:47   entirely with the exception of the, maybe all the M2 ones, I think they're all going

01:19:51   to have four efficiency cores per unit, right?

01:19:55   And maybe that makes it easier in terms of scheduling to just say, "Oh, we're always

01:19:58   going to have four efficiency cores in the whole M2 things.

01:20:01   For each building block there's four efficiency cores."

01:20:03   Shouldn't make that much difference in the schedule or we'll work it out as it is, but

01:20:08   it's an interesting choice and it really, I feel like, shows how Apple is thinking about

01:20:13   it silicon.

01:20:14   They're not thinking about the Mac Studio.

01:20:15   They're certainly not thinking about the Mac Pro because that's just too many damn efficiency

01:20:19   cores.

01:20:20   If you ever did make that quad thing that we just said in a past show that basically

01:20:23   the rumor was they canceled it, you know how many freaking efficiency cores there would

01:20:27   just be too many?

01:20:28   You'd have to just be running background jobs to occupy them, right?

01:20:30   Because when you do any serious work it's going to wander all of them on the power cores

01:20:34   and there's going to be like 30 of those or whatever, however many there are going to

01:20:38   be, but you'd have all these efficiency cores just milling around, looking at each other,

01:20:41   twiddling their thumbs going, "You got anything to do?"

01:20:43   "No, I'm just doing nothing.

01:20:46   Maybe a cron job will run sometime, I don't know."

01:20:48   Like me and 15 of my friends here.

01:20:50   And it's because, like we talked before, it's a cookie cutter thing.

01:20:54   You get each building block has X performance cores and Y efficiency cores.

01:20:58   It's just a lot of damn efficiency cores.

01:21:00   And to be clear, the efficiency cores are good.

01:21:02   They're not crappy.

01:21:03   They're really amazing.

01:21:04   They're also really very efficient, but at a certain point you just get too many of them.

01:21:08   So anyway, I thought that was an interesting choice with the M.2 Macs.

01:21:12   We'll have to wait until people do the benchmarking and everything because, like they showed in

01:21:16   the little diagram, the M.2 Macs is bigger than the M.1 Macs, but not horrendously bigger.

01:21:22   It's the same process.

01:21:23   It's got a little bit more stuff in it.

01:21:25   The M.2 performance cores are a little bit bigger than the M.1 performance cores.

01:21:29   There's a little bit more stuff.

01:21:31   I think they cut back on the, I didn't write this down in the notes, but I think for the

01:21:35   video processing, it doesn't have, like the M.1 Macs had like double the number of video

01:21:40   encode/decode things, and the M.2 Macs doesn't have double.

01:21:43   It just has one of each, but I think the one of each that it has are better.

01:21:48   I'm sure this will all shake out in the benchmarks.

01:21:49   It's just interesting to see how they shuffle the blocks on the floor plan to make slightly

01:21:55   different choices than the M.1 Macs.

01:21:57   Presumably these choices were made informed by the M.1 Macs and the experience with that,

01:22:03   but it's a really nice apples to apples comparison because it's the same process.

01:22:06   So the only thing that they had in mind is, let's take another bite of that apple.

01:22:11   We have a similar footprint and a similar power envelope to try to make a better chip

01:22:15   than the M.1 Macs.

01:22:17   And what they chose to do was add efficiency cores, make all their cores a little bit better.

01:22:22   I think this does not, remember the rumor, I don't know if we talked about it in the

01:22:25   show of like there was supposed to be a new GPU architecture for the A16 that got canned

01:22:30   and it was like a rare miss for the apple silicon team.

01:22:32   Like it was going to have this all new GPU cores.

01:22:33   They were really amazing and they just couldn't do it because it was taking too much power.

01:22:37   So the A16 just got the regular GPU cores.

01:22:40   As far as I know, these M.2 Macs and pro also don't have any radical new GPU cores.

01:22:46   So it's really straightforward apples to apples.

01:22:49   Let's just massage the very similar guts to the M.1 Macs to try to make a better chip.

01:22:57   Apple's claims were all in the ballpark of like 20% faster at this, you know, 30% faster

01:23:01   is that.

01:23:03   But we'll wait until people start getting these and start doing the hardcore benchmarks

01:23:06   to see like in real world applications, depending on what you're doing, how much better is

01:23:09   the M.2 Macs than the M.1 Macs and how does it do on battery life?

01:23:14   And that's, did we mention that already?

01:23:16   I forget where the apple made the claim, but for one of these machines, apple made the

01:23:18   claim that it was like the longest battery life of any Mac that ever made.

01:23:22   You remember which one it was?

01:23:23   Yeah, for the, that was for the 16 inch.

01:23:25   And it's, it's basically, it went from like 21 hours of whatever test they're basing this

01:23:29   on to 22.

01:23:30   So it's, it's a little bit longer than the one I have that, you know, the M.1 Macs or

01:23:34   pro or whatever.

01:23:35   The M.1 16 inch, it's a little bit longer than that.

01:23:38   And they didn't make that battery bigger cause they can't, it's as big, I believe it is right

01:23:41   up against the a hundred whatever watt hours.

01:23:43   Yeah, it's like 99.5 watt hours I believe.

01:23:46   And the chip is the same process, a five nanometer, again, maybe a tweaked version of it.

01:23:50   So any savings they're getting, any power savings that they're getting with this setup,

01:23:55   it's not by removing stuff cause this, the M.2 Macs has more stuff in it, it has more

01:24:00   transistors, it has more cores, it has mostly more stuff in it than the M.1 Macs.

01:24:04   It's all just about efficiency gains of like, maybe the cores are a little bit more efficient.

01:24:08   Maybe the video encode decode blocks are a little bit more power efficient at doing the

01:24:12   same job as the old ones are.

01:24:14   It's just, you know, so I'd, the claims like, wow, amazing battery life.

01:24:18   It probably is better than the old one, but don't expect it to be radically different.

01:24:21   The other one was already great.

01:24:23   This one is also great.

01:24:24   I feel like they just, you know, added 0.05% to the battery life and it's the new champion,

01:24:30   right?

01:24:31   So it's not anything, it's not like a, you know, a huge leap like the M.1 was over the

01:24:35   Intel things.

01:24:36   So just real quick, the M.2 Macs, like we were starting to say, four efficiency cores

01:24:41   instead of two, 30 to 38 GPU cores instead of the M.1 Macs is 24 to 32.

01:24:48   But I think perhaps most interestingly on these machines, other than, you know, the

01:24:51   standard spec bumps, is that it now has, Jon, help me out.

01:24:55   It's like HDMI 2.1.

01:24:56   Do I have that right?

01:24:57   Oh no, you skipped over one other important thing.

01:24:59   96 gigs of RAM.

01:25:00   Oh, I'm sorry.

01:25:01   You're right.

01:25:02   I totally missed that.

01:25:03   On the 16 inch only, the 16 inch, but I'm sure they could have, you know, whatever they

01:25:06   they're segmenting the line.

01:25:07   The 16 inch, you can get 96 gigs of RAM.

01:25:09   Oh, not on the 14.

01:25:11   Not on the 14 as far as I could tell.

01:25:14   And which is kind of weird, whatever.

01:25:16   And I think this is all just done through increasing the density of the chips.

01:25:19   Like it's not like it has additional RAM chips.

01:25:21   If you look at the SOC with the little RAM chips around the side, like little ears, it's

01:25:24   just higher density RAM chips, right?

01:25:26   So the speeds are the same.

01:25:27   There's just more of it, right?

01:25:28   And again, looking at this and thinking about the 14 offers it by the way, 14 is 96 as well.

01:25:33   You need the M2 max, but that's also true on the 16.

01:25:37   All right, there you go.

01:25:39   Anyway, so 96 is a RAM.

01:25:40   Look at this and you think, well, this is what the M2, you know, what's the max RAM

01:25:44   on the M2 ultra going to be, right?

01:25:46   What is it going to be on the Mac Pro?

01:25:47   The 96 gig sort of telegraphs where things are going in that direction.

01:25:51   I was happy about that.

01:25:52   Like I didn't mention on the Mac mini as well on the M2.

01:25:55   Well, the M2 already had 24 gigs of RAM, so that's not big, but like bumping up the RAM

01:25:59   ceilings, even though these are otherwise quote unquote boring upgrades, oh, you have

01:26:03   slightly better cores and a little bit more of them, whatever.

01:26:07   But bumping up the RAM ceiling I think is important because it shows they're not going

01:26:10   to say, oh, you know, 16 gigs will be enough for anybody forever and the pro machines can

01:26:14   have 64.

01:26:15   No one wants more than that.

01:26:16   It's like, no, please more, give more.

01:26:17   And so the M2 max on their top end laptops, you can get 96 gigs.

01:26:21   I give that a huge thumbs up, despite the fact that I'm now afraid to go to the configurator

01:26:25   and see how much it's going to cost.

01:26:26   It's probably ridiculous.

01:26:27   - I mean, but it's just, again, like this is just one more continuation of, you know,

01:26:32   these the M1 Pro and max versions of these that came out, whatever it was 18 months ago,

01:26:37   whatever that was.

01:26:38   It's amazing that not, you know, not only is this computer amazing, but that the 14

01:26:44   inch and the 16 inch have the same options and the same performance.

01:26:48   Like the 16 inch and the only differences are bigger screen, bigger battery and bigger

01:26:54   cooling capacity of the 16 inch.

01:26:56   And so, but like, you know, but you can get, I mean, you look at the size of a 14 inch

01:27:01   MacBook Pro and that machine is available with the highest CPU, 96 gigs of RAM, eight

01:27:07   terabytes storage.

01:27:09   Like it's, that's incredible.

01:27:12   And you know, and I'll tell you, look, I've had both of these laptops now for whatever

01:27:18   it's been, when did these come out?

01:27:20   18 months ago, whatever it was.

01:27:23   These are incredible machines.

01:27:27   I am so happy with them.

01:27:29   Oh, the 16 inch was slightly better acoustics, you know, larger speakers, but it's, even

01:27:34   the 14 inch speakers are pretty incredible for what size they are.

01:27:38   Like these are incredible machines.

01:27:41   I have been so happy.

01:27:43   I still am incredibly happy with my 16 inch as my desktop laptop.

01:27:48   And then when I, you know, when I travel, I usually do bring it so I can have, you know,

01:27:50   all my work stuff with me.

01:27:52   I love this computer so much.

01:27:55   I've still now, you know, even now almost a year and a half in, I've still never heard

01:27:59   a peep from the fan, except for that one time I was training an ML model.

01:28:02   Other than that, like I've never heard the fan in any other usage.

01:28:07   It is an amazing machine.

01:28:08   It's been rock solid for me living most of its life in clamshell mode.

01:28:13   It has just been an incredible machine.

01:28:16   I am, I don't have any envy of the Mac studio.

01:28:21   I don't have any envy of anything else in the lineup right now.

01:28:25   And so what they have done is taken these two amazing computers and now made them a

01:28:32   little bit better.

01:28:33   And so the result is it's still amazing.

01:28:36   They did a speed bump update.

01:28:37   That's all we've asked them to do for most of the time for most of their products.

01:28:41   They did an amazing, you know, an amazing job with these machines in the first place,

01:28:46   you know, a year and a half ago.

01:28:47   And now they're a little bit better with, with, you know, improvements with time.

01:28:51   That's great.

01:28:52   I am just, I'm so, so happy that they are doing such an amazing job at what I think

01:28:59   is probably their most important Mac.

01:29:00   And because this is their highest end, you know, laptop product, like I said, in the

01:29:06   Mac mini, these, these, uh, you know, the upgrade prices feel more egregious, but you

01:29:11   know, they've got the 96 gig RAM option that is to be clear.

01:29:15   It is adding 64 gigs of RAM.

01:29:16   And if you want an additional 64 gigs of RAM, that's 800 extra dollars.

01:29:20   I know it's special RAM, but I know planet does 64 gigs of RAM cost $800.

01:29:24   Similarly the eight terabyte SSD is please add $2,200 big margins, but like this is a

01:29:31   full complete machine.

01:29:32   That used to be a lot more.

01:29:33   Yeah.

01:29:34   This is the full complete machine.

01:29:35   Uh, despite the fact that Marco uses it in clamshell, these screens are pretty amazing

01:29:39   on these laptops.

01:29:40   Yeah.

01:29:41   To 1600 nits, like just totally thin, tiny, thin little things that have amazing color

01:29:46   and amazing HDR.

01:29:47   Uh, it helps that they're small so you can, you know, they can do the brightness across

01:29:50   the entire screen and blah, blah, blah.

01:29:52   But you know, it's, they're very impressive and like, we'll have to see how the heat goes

01:29:57   on these cause the Mac book areas with the M2 are a little bit sweatier than the M1 ones.

01:30:01   So we'll wait to see people, uh, you know, exercise these.

01:30:03   I think there'll be similar cause again, if you look at the, you know, how big is the

01:30:06   M2 max and the M2 pro compared to the M1 counterparts, they're similar in size.

01:30:10   I don't think it will be radically different.

01:30:13   I do think that if you know, if, if they are a little bit hotter, that kind of adds value

01:30:19   to Marco's computer and Casey's experience.

01:30:22   Cause like the M1s are, you know, that's not going to happen anytime soon.

01:30:26   Again, where that kind of leap from the Intel to the M1 and because the M1 was so amazing

01:30:31   and because they were so low power and because they were put into enclosures that were so

01:30:34   overmatched for the amount of heat they produced, it was just, it was just ridiculous.

01:30:38   Whereas now I think over time, I feel like Apple is going to start creeping back up to

01:30:42   the idea of like, we have so much thermal headroom.

01:30:45   Can we push performance a little bit more, which I think is appropriate on the highest

01:30:48   end laptop.

01:30:49   But I feel like, you know, on the M4 16 inch Mac book pro, you may be able to make the

01:30:54   fans audible more than Marco Canon and his M1, you know, Mac book pro right now.

01:30:59   But I'm telling you though, there, I mean, there's so much headroom in this design that

01:31:03   I already have.

01:31:04   I'd be shocked if, if the new one though, I know, but like I'm saying that there's just,

01:31:09   there's so much headroom.

01:31:10   Cause like, cause like now that I, you know, when I was doing the ML training, like what

01:31:14   now that now I, now that I know what it takes to get the fan to be audible, like it took

01:31:19   me maxing out the CPU and GPU for like four hours before I could hear the fan.

01:31:27   It takes a lot to even make, and it wasn't loud.

01:31:31   It just became audible at that point.

01:31:33   So there's a lot of headroom in this design.

01:31:36   So even if the M2 version runs like 15% hotter, like that's, that's not going to be enough

01:31:42   to make it that different.

01:31:44   I don't think.

01:31:45   Yeah.

01:31:46   So John, tell me about the HDMI differences in these machines.

01:31:49   So confusing.

01:31:50   I was trying to figure out like, do they upgrade HDMI 2.1?

01:31:53   I don't see that term used.

01:31:56   But maybe I'm making that up.

01:31:58   So as we discussed on past shows, HDMI 2.1, the, the, whatever consortium defines that

01:32:03   thing recently changed it so that you can essentially claim HDMI 2.1 compliance.

01:32:08   Even if you only use the HDMI 2.0 subset of the features like HDMI 2.1 is like a cafeteria

01:32:13   thing.

01:32:14   Do you want to support this?

01:32:15   This is, everything is optional.

01:32:16   I support that, that, you know, it's just, so you can't just look at something and say,

01:32:20   HDMI 2.1.

01:32:21   I know what that is.

01:32:22   You have to look at all the fine print and see all the different things.

01:32:24   Apple doesn't even seem to claim HDMI 2.1, but what they do say in extremely confusingly

01:32:29   worded passages on their web pages, which I will now read, that if you get an M2 Pro

01:32:34   in your MacBook Pro, you can power quote, up to two external displays with up to 6K

01:32:39   resolution at 60 Hertz over Thunderbolt, or one external display with up to 6K resolution

01:32:44   at 60 Hertz over Thunderbolt and one external display with up to 4K resolution at 144 Hertz

01:32:48   over HDMI.

01:32:50   So again, the reason they're giving these combinations is like it's just one SOC with

01:32:53   a bunch of video stuff in there.

01:32:55   So you have to basically decide how many things do you plug into your Mac and through what

01:33:00   connectors and then what can their maximum resolutions be.

01:33:03   It can also drive one external display at 8K resolution at 60 Hertz or one external display

01:33:09   at 4K resolution at 240 Hertz over HDMI.

01:33:12   240 Hertz over HDMI is not part of the HDMI 2.0 spec, I believe, but they don't claim

01:33:18   HDMI 2.0.

01:33:19   Anyway, these are the specs, right?

01:33:20   The point is, I don't think you could drive 8K at all before and now you can drive 4K

01:33:24   at really high refresh rates.

01:33:26   Apple doesn't sell a 240 Hertz monitor, but other people do.

01:33:30   So if you want to buy that and run the three games that run well on the Mac, you could

01:33:34   do that.

01:33:36   And then on the M2 Max, you could do up to four external displays, up to three external

01:33:41   displays with 6K resolution at 60 Hertz over Thunderbolt and one external display with

01:33:44   up to 4K resolution at 144 Hertz over HDMI or up to three external displays, up to two

01:33:51   external displays with 6K resolution at 60 Hertz over Thunderbolt and one external display

01:33:55   with up to 8K resolution at 60 Hertz or one external display at 4K resolution at 240 Hertz

01:34:00   over HDMI.

01:34:01   We need parentheses, people.

01:34:02   Clear as day.

01:34:03   We need parentheses to disambiguate because the precedence rules of English are not that

01:34:08   clear and it's not entirely clear.

01:34:10   Anyway, the whole point is all these machines can power monitors at higher resolutions at

01:34:16   higher refresh rates than the past.

01:34:17   So another good thing to see because like I said, the guts of this is not a radically

01:34:21   new GPU or anything like that, but they can do more better than the M1 variants when it

01:34:27   comes to video driving.

01:34:28   So I'm glad to see that the specs are being pushed in all directions because they didn't

01:34:34   have to change how many displays they could drive.

01:34:37   It's not like the past one was like, "Oh, I can't drive enough displays from my 16-inch

01:34:40   MacBook Pro.

01:34:41   It was fine.

01:34:42   It was fine for a laptop.

01:34:43   I'm not expecting 12 displays out of it or whatever."

01:34:44   But they pushed it.

01:34:45   8K, higher refresh rates.

01:34:47   Again, even though Apple does not sell any monitors, they do that yet.

01:34:51   Please Apple.

01:34:53   Pretty impressive update all around.

01:34:55   The only question mark on these entire machines is what are the thermals and noise like compared

01:35:00   to the M1 ones because they have some big shoes to fill.

01:35:03   But the performance looks like it's going to be a nice speed bump and a nice spec bump

01:35:06   all around.

01:35:07   Yeah.

01:35:08   So I have not ordered one.

01:35:10   I'm sitting here now.

01:35:11   I don't plan to.

01:35:12   I know a lot of times I say that, but it's very unusual that I decide to change my mind

01:35:16   on a $5,000 computer.

01:35:19   I plan to sit this one out.

01:35:20   But Marco, what's your intention?

01:35:22   Well, they said in the video.

01:35:25   There it is.

01:35:26   There it is.

01:35:27   They specifically called it Xcode and they said up to 25% faster than the previous ones.

01:35:34   Right now, my productivity is limited by my brain not compiles right now.

01:35:40   There are different times in my developer life where those factors are different.

01:35:46   Right now, 25% is a decent amount, but there's an up to before it and it's for large projects.

01:35:54   My project, I'm not building Photoshop or anything, so I'm going to sit this one out.

01:35:58   But it's only because I am just so damn happy with my M1 Max 16 inch MacBook Pro that the

01:36:06   difference going from the M1 to the M2 is not significant enough for my needs to justify

01:36:11   all that expense and hassle and everything.

01:36:13   But if for some reason I needed a new desktop laptop today, I would 100% jump on this.

01:36:19   But yeah, what I have now is so close and so good.

01:36:22   And like I said, I feel like the M1 line of computers is going to go down in history as

01:36:26   like those are the good ones because I don't think, not only the leap from the previous

01:36:30   generation but just because they're so sort of like overpowered for the electricity they

01:36:37   consume and I do believe that Apple will start pushing the envelope with the M2, M3, M4 and

01:36:43   on upwards that holding on to an M1 may be a good idea if you don't desperately need

01:36:49   the performance bump.

01:36:50   In terms of compiling 25% faster or whatever, if you're not a developer, you might think,

01:36:56   oh, Marco says he has a small program so he doesn't care about that a little extra time.

01:37:00   But you may not really appreciate the scale, like how big do programs get and how long

01:37:05   do they take to compile.

01:37:06   Marco's thing takes a minute or two to compile.

01:37:09   Who cares if I shave 25% off that maybe a big program will take five minutes, right?

01:37:13   No.

01:37:14   Big programs don't take five minutes as opposed to one minute.

01:37:16   Big programs take 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour for a clean build, right?

01:37:22   When you're giving numbers like that and if your build takes a half an hour and we say

01:37:26   we can save you 25%, yeah, you're upgrading from the M1 to the M2 to get that because

01:37:32   25% of a half an hour we're starting to talk about real time, right?

01:37:37   People aren't doing clean builds, obviously doing incremental builds, but the range of

01:37:41   how long it might take to do a task has wide, it's bigger than you think it is, right?

01:37:47   It's orders of magnitude, not just compiling, but whatever your task is, encoding video

01:37:50   or whatever.

01:37:52   Doing small things can be done in a minute or two and those percentages seem meaningless,

01:37:56   but once you get into taking a half an hour, two hours, multiple hours, even a 1% gain

01:38:02   is worth it.

01:38:03   That's what the high end market is like.

01:38:05   People who are willing to replace, not throw out, but trade in a perfectly good computer

01:38:10   for one that is a few percent faster, you will do that if that few percent literally

01:38:15   saves you hours a day.

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01:40:21   I think I know why, Marco, you haven't bought any of these machines and it's because it's

01:40:28   finally happened.

01:40:30   You finally run out of money because how many of the new HomePod have you bought?

01:40:36   50?

01:40:37   100?

01:40:38   1000?

01:40:39   You've got a lot of money left for any of us.

01:40:41   You've got a stockpile in the basement like cheese graters.

01:40:45   I was patting myself on the back for not buying a MacBook Pro.

01:40:49   Yep, yep.

01:40:50   And then you bought, did you buy a baker's dozen?

01:40:54   A half dozen?

01:40:55   How many HomePods have you bought?

01:40:57   Can you, first of all, can we just pause for a minute?

01:41:00   Can you believe this happened?

01:41:01   Can you believe we got a new full-size HomePod?

01:41:04   I can because we talked about the rumor on a past episode.

01:41:06   Yeah, but look, there's rumors about a whole bunch of stuff that doesn't actually come

01:41:09   out.

01:41:10   Once you talk about them in this show, they're going to happen.

01:41:12   Oh, is that how it is?

01:41:13   Once the rumors bubble up to the point where we're willing to talk about it on this show,

01:41:16   it's probably going to happen.

01:41:18   So let's pause.

01:41:19   Dirty secret for everybody.

01:41:21   So there is a new HomePod, a big HomePod.

01:41:24   It's $300, which is $50 cheaper.

01:41:26   It's still a lot of money.

01:41:28   And also, to be clear, the old big HomePod, while it was officially $350, for most of

01:41:34   its life, was kind of backdoor discounted to $300 through Best Buy and other retailers

01:41:41   who work closely with Apple.

01:41:42   So the old one was basically $300 for most of its life.

01:41:46   So this new one, 2mm shorter, 2mm wider, 2/10 of a kilogram lighter.

01:41:52   But more interestingly, it has five tweeters instead of seven.

01:41:57   It has four microphones instead of six.

01:42:00   The I/O, it's 802.11n, I can't even keep up with what's most modern these days.

01:42:06   There's a reason for that.

01:42:08   So everyone's complaining that it doesn't have 802.11ac at least, or whatever, AX or

01:42:12   WiFi 66e, 6x, whatever.

01:42:16   The reason for this is because the old HomePod was based on an A8 processor from, I mean,

01:42:23   what the hell is that, the iPhone 3GS?

01:42:26   It's some ancient, I know it's not that, but it's some ancient phone model and it was very,

01:42:31   very slow.

01:42:32   And for a device that has no screen, really, there is some deal of GPU power that's being

01:42:39   wasted there.

01:42:40   The CPUs are super old and slow.

01:42:43   So when the HomePod Mini came out, the HomePod Mini used an Apple Watch SoC.

01:42:48   It uses, I believe the Mini uses the S5 or S6 SoC.

01:42:52   I think the S5.

01:42:53   - It's the S5.

01:42:56   - Which makes a lot more sense, 'cause you figure, okay, it's a higher spec processor,

01:43:01   smaller, cheaper, and less GPU power than a phone chip would have, because you don't

01:43:06   need those things in a speaker chip, but you do need something a little bit more modern,

01:43:11   a little bit faster cores, a little bit more Siri-compatible processing power.

01:43:16   And so with the HomePod Mini, they moved the HomePod to the Watch's tech stack on the hardware

01:43:25   end basically.

01:43:26   And they're continuing this now with the new big HomePod.

01:43:29   It's very similar in many of those tech spec capabilities to the HomePod Mini.

01:43:35   And that's a very good thing, because the old HomePod had horrendously slow processor

01:43:41   performance.

01:43:42   I know this 'cause I still use them every day.

01:43:45   I've gone through a few since they keep flaking out and dying, but I still use them every

01:43:51   day in my kitchen.

01:43:52   I use a stereo pair.

01:43:53   And the bugginess is just comical.

01:43:56   The performance is just comical.

01:43:59   They're so slow to respond to anything.

01:44:02   They're so buggy.

01:44:03   They're so unreliable.

01:44:06   And a lot of that is just because it's old buggy hardware.

01:44:11   The old HomePods had a few physical design flaws.

01:44:13   There's a bad capacitor, something like, people who know more than I do about electronics

01:44:18   have spotted, there's a few hardware flaws that slowly kill them over time.

01:44:23   But the biggest thing for me as a HomePod user has been they're just ungodly slow.

01:44:27   Also Siri sucks, but that's a separate discussion.

01:44:30   So they're just so slow.

01:44:32   And I also have some HomePod Minis in the smaller rooms of my house.

01:44:36   And the HomePod Minis are way more responsive.

01:44:41   Not even close.

01:44:42   There's a night and day difference.

01:44:44   They sound way worse because they're much smaller.

01:44:46   They only have one speaker in them basically.

01:44:50   It's a much simpler, cheaper device.

01:44:52   But you deal with the HomePod Mini and you deal with the big HomePod and the difference

01:44:56   in responsiveness is night and day.

01:44:59   So no question, the Apple Watch SoCs for this use are way faster than using a really old

01:45:06   phone chip.

01:45:08   And so the new HomePod, the new big HomePod is actually faster.

01:45:12   It uses, so in the Watch SoC land, the S6, 7 and 8 are all basically the same processor.

01:45:19   The HomePod Mini uses the S5, right before those.

01:45:22   And the S6 is faster than the S7.

01:45:25   And this new HomePod uses the S7.

01:45:28   So it's basically one processor step faster than the HomePod Mini.

01:45:32   And the reason it only has 802.11 Wi-Fi is that the Apple Watch only has 802.11 Wi-Fi.

01:45:38   All of them, even the currently, even the nicest Apple Watches today only have 802.11

01:45:43   and Wi-Fi.

01:45:44   Because 802.11 AC I think requires like larger antennas and has higher power and everything.

01:45:49   And everything about the Apple Watch is all about saving power.

01:45:52   And the Apple Watch hardly ever uses its Wi-Fi capability.

01:45:57   Which by the way, it's so funny.

01:45:59   Literally 48 hours ago I was drafting a blog post.

01:46:03   I was going to make my first post on my blog in whatever, it's been a year, I don't know.

01:46:09   And what it was going to be about is like a few small software changes that I wish Apple

01:46:15   would make to some of its product lines to make them dramatically better.

01:46:18   And one of them was about the Apple Watch.

01:46:21   I was about to say I wish they would give them a preference or a setting somewhere on

01:46:27   the Apple Watch where you could say prefer Wi-Fi over Bluetooth to my phone for internet

01:46:35   connectivity.

01:46:37   Because if you've ever used an Apple Watch when it could not reach its phone via Bluetooth

01:46:43   but it was still on Wi-Fi, it's a radically different experience.

01:46:48   It's way faster to do anything over the network.

01:46:51   But Apple Watch is because they're so power constrained, so like radically so.

01:46:56   Everything with the Apple Watch design is all about saving power.

01:46:58   Because of that, the Apple Watch still to this day, it makes a network request.

01:47:04   If your phone is within Bluetooth range, it will communicate the network request through

01:47:09   your phone via Bluetooth and have your phone use its Wi-Fi with its bigger battery to actually

01:47:15   go to the network.

01:47:16   And Bluetooth is way slower than Wi-Fi and in my experience with the Apple Watch, way

01:47:21   less reliable as well.

01:47:23   And so that's why things like syncing music or podcasts directly to your Apple Watch, if

01:47:29   you want to listen to them away from your phone, syncing them over takes forever unless

01:47:33   you turn off Bluetooth on your phone.

01:47:35   And then the transfers go way faster because the watch is then forced to use Wi-Fi instead

01:47:39   of Bluetooth.

01:47:40   Anyway, the other day, I was doing some Siri stuff on my watch.

01:47:44   I sent some timers and my phone was way out of range.

01:47:47   I forget why.

01:47:48   I think it was like rebooting for a software update or something.

01:47:49   My phone was unavailable and Siri on the watch was remarkably fast when it was using Wi-Fi.

01:47:57   So the watch has the processing power to do it when it's using Wi-Fi, but the watch usually

01:48:02   does not use Wi-Fi to conserve battery power.

01:48:06   Anyway, this new HomePod, which is restricted only to 802.11n because it only has the watch

01:48:11   hardware, it will be plugged into the wall.

01:48:15   It will always have power and it, as far as I know, doesn't have Bluetooth or at least

01:48:19   won't be using that part of the chip if for some reason it's built into the SLC or whatever.

01:48:23   It does have Bluetooth.

01:48:24   That's Bluetooth 5.0.

01:48:25   Oh, crap.

01:48:26   Anyway, but it's plugged into the wall, so presumably it will be always connected to

01:48:30   Wi-Fi and will always use that for network requests.

01:48:32   And so if you've ever used an Apple Watch that actually is using the Wi-Fi for the network

01:48:37   request, you can see like, wow, for Siri it actually is extremely responsive.

01:48:43   So that's why this device only has 802.11n, I think, is because it's using the watch hardware.

01:48:48   It's also, look, for this kind of device, the difference in bandwidth and things between

01:48:53   802.11n and 802.11ac or later, I don't think you're really going to notice this difference

01:48:58   in most situations in most people's homes.

01:49:01   So I don't think that's a thing that matters, really.

01:49:04   The only thing that's ever going to have to be due is streaming music, which is never going

01:49:07   to take up, you know, it's a finite amount of bandwidth, even at lossless.

01:49:11   You can do the math and say, maximum, even the silly audio file, highest bit rate, lossless,

01:49:17   you know, blah, blah, blah.

01:49:19   Like, that's the worst case scenario.

01:49:21   And downloading software updates, which is asynchronous and no one is ever waiting for

01:49:26   it, right?

01:49:27   That's it.

01:49:28   It's not like the Apple TV, which, you know, people who don't have ethernet to their TV

01:49:30   are relying on that to stream video, and the quality of video is just going up over time

01:49:35   as services get more and more daring in terms of the highest bit rate they're willing to

01:49:39   vend.

01:49:40   So, you know, it's wanting your HomePod to have the best Wi-Fi, you know, standard doesn't

01:49:47   make any sense unless there's something your HomePod is doing that requires more bandwidth

01:49:52   or lower latency or both than 802.11n, and I can't think of a single thing.

01:49:56   Yeah.

01:49:57   So yeah, so that's, you know, that's the thing people are nitpicking on about the specs,

01:49:59   but that doesn't matter at all in practice for this kind of product.

01:50:02   So it'll be fine.

01:50:03   But anyway, what I am most excited about is that faster chip.

01:50:09   And then for two reasons.

01:50:10   Number one is just because it's way, way faster.

01:50:14   And that's the biggest thing.

01:50:15   And I think that's, that is what we are most likely to notice most often because again,

01:50:21   trying to do anything with the old first gen HomePod is so slow, not even just Siri, but

01:50:27   even, you know, dealing with AirPlay, like when you're trying to send music to it.

01:50:30   Oh my God, it's, it could be 15 seconds before you get anything to play.

01:50:34   And even then it might fail.

01:50:35   Like it just, it's so slow to do anything.

01:50:39   It does hear you remarkably well, and then takes forever to execute the command that

01:50:44   you told it to do and fails a lot.

01:50:46   So that's going to be the number one thing that I'm looking forward to is the speed.

01:50:52   I am slightly concerned about the decontenting of the audio gear inside.

01:50:56   You know, it has fewer tweeters, fewer microphones.

01:51:00   That being said, the old one was, I think, over specced in those areas.

01:51:05   And given what Apple was able to achieve audio quality and microphone quality wise with the

01:51:11   HomePod mini, which has way less hardware inside of it, I'm confident that they're probably,

01:51:18   they probably did a pretty good job with this.

01:51:21   The woofer looks like it's probably the same.

01:51:24   Like they don't, they don't come out and say that it's the same, but it looks like it's

01:51:26   like the same size.

01:51:28   It's the same placement inside.

01:51:29   If you look at like the PR photo of like the x-ray view of the guts inside of it, how things

01:51:33   are laid out, you can look at old, at that same view from the previous HomePod, from

01:51:37   like old blog posts and everything.

01:51:39   And it's a very, very similar internal structure, very similar layout, just a few fewer parts

01:51:44   inside, like a couple fewer tweeters and things like that.

01:51:47   So it's probably going to sound really good.

01:51:49   It's probably going to be way more responsive.

01:51:52   And the second reason I'm excited about it basically being like a juiced up HomePod mini

01:51:57   is that the HomePod mini kind of runs a different software stack too.

01:52:02   Like when the first HomePod came out, I believe internally it was running something called

01:52:06   Audio OS or Audio OS or something like that.

01:52:09   And I think when the HomePod mini came out, it was actually running different software.

01:52:15   And then I think over time they've slightly merged a little bit, but the HomePod mini

01:52:19   always had better and more reliable features and implementations than the big HomePod did.

01:52:24   Now this will unify them.

01:52:27   Now they're going to be running basically the same guts and have basically the same

01:52:31   hardware capabilities and especially other things like the thread rate, or excuse me,

01:52:35   matter radio, the temperature sensor.

01:52:39   It's going to be running all the same stuff.

01:52:41   And so that's more likely also to make the software more reliable over time.

01:52:46   Apple is only going to have one hardware platform to target here, running similar processor,

01:52:51   otherwise same hardware.

01:52:53   So it's more likely to be more reliable over time.

01:52:56   Because the other problem with the HomePod is that it's not an area of significant focus

01:53:02   for Apple.

01:53:04   They're going to neglect it.

01:53:05   They're going to put the B team on parts of it.

01:53:07   It's going to be a low priority.

01:53:09   It's going to have a lot of bugs that don't get fixed for a long time.

01:53:12   And so the less work you give them, the better.

01:53:15   So to have a unified hardware ecosystem and software ecosystem around this product, like

01:53:20   they did a pretty bad job managing the first HomePod's software ecosystem.

01:53:26   The HomePod mini, they've been doing a better job.

01:53:28   So this will be lumped in with the HomePod mini in terms of what it will take Apple to

01:53:31   maintain it and keep it updated over time.

01:53:34   And so that is more likely to result in good outcomes for owners.

01:53:39   And look, I wish their hardware lasted longer.

01:53:43   I wish the first generation one didn't have as many problems as it did.

01:53:45   I wish they didn't have this premium price product that they put a slow processor in,

01:53:49   even at the time it was slow.

01:53:51   But hey, the first gen HomePod is in many ways like the first gen Apple watch, where

01:53:58   it proved to have some good ideas, but you saw significant benefits from the first couple

01:54:04   of hardware revisions after it.

01:54:06   So hopefully this is going to be really good.

01:54:09   It remains to be seen, whether it still sounds as good with the fewer speakers or whatever,

01:54:14   I think it's going to be pretty good.

01:54:16   So I ordered a pair of them.

01:54:18   White, of course, white is clearly the better color.

01:54:20   I will take, I will hear no alternatives, no dissenting opinions on that, because if

01:54:28   you think black HomePods are better, you're just wrong.

01:54:30   The white ones are so much better.

01:54:33   But anyway, so I got a pair of white ones.

01:54:36   And if they're good, you know, maybe I'll replace one more pair that I have still in

01:54:41   operation that's barely working.

01:54:44   But I started with one pair.

01:54:46   We'll see how it goes.

01:54:47   And I'm so excited that this product is being updated.

01:54:51   When the first HomePod launched at $350, we all made fun of a few pretty big flaws about

01:54:57   it.

01:54:58   Number one, it was too expensive for the market.

01:55:00   And number two, it didn't have a line in, and it lacked a lot of kind of enthusiast

01:55:06   features.

01:55:07   Siri was super slow and unreliable and stupid compared to Alexa or Google Assistant.

01:55:13   And you look at the competitive market today, you know, they brought the price down a little.

01:55:18   But what makes the price easier to take is that there's the HomePod mini, and it's

01:55:22   doing fine.

01:55:23   It's 100 bucks.

01:55:24   It's, I think, one of the best values in Apple's lineup.

01:55:27   It's a pretty good small speaker.

01:55:29   It sounds way better than any other small speakers from all the other companies.

01:55:33   Like, you know, the other companies have better sounding bigger speakers, but they're small

01:55:36   ones that didn't even come close.

01:55:39   And I think the HomePod mini, I think, is a success.

01:55:41   You know, it's not taking over the world, but I think it's an overall successful product

01:55:46   that they're doing a pretty good job with.

01:55:48   It comes in a bunch of fun colors.

01:55:49   It's good for them, you know.

01:55:50   Now that the HomePod mini exists and is doing fine, I think the pricing pressure for the

01:55:55   bigger one is greatly relieved because it is not the only option.

01:56:00   So they can actually make it a premium one.

01:56:02   And in that premium market, not only is there very little competition, but the competition

01:56:09   that's there is more expensive by a good amount.

01:56:14   You know, like if you actually want something that is like smallish, tastefully designed,

01:56:19   but has the audio performance of this big HomePod, you're not going to find much.

01:56:24   And the little that you will find is going to be, you know, from like the boutique brands

01:56:28   like B&O or is it name, naim, I don't know how it's pronounced.

01:56:33   And they're all way more expensive.

01:56:34   So what they're, what they deliver here, assuming that it's as good as the first one in terms

01:56:39   of audio quality and assuming that it has the performance of the HomePod mini at least

01:56:43   in its responsiveness, should be a pretty great product.

01:56:48   It's not going to be for everyone because not everybody wants a $300 smart speaker,

01:56:52   let alone a stereo pair of them, which I think is still going to prove to be awesome.

01:56:55   But I would, again, I would challenge you to spend $600 for the stereo pair of, try

01:57:02   to spend anywhere near that money on anything that sounds better at this size.

01:57:07   You won't find it.

01:57:09   Even possibly at any size.

01:57:10   Like it's, it's that they're, they're that good.

01:57:14   If you're in that market.

01:57:15   They still retain the capabilities of being used as speakers for Apple TVs.

01:57:20   I've never tried that, but I know people have, and it seems to work well for people from

01:57:24   what I've heard.

01:57:25   Can we, can we talk a little bit more about that?

01:57:26   I did not realize, apparently I was supposed to know, maybe we talked about it on this

01:57:30   very program and I forgot, but apparently even the HomePod mini, and I think the original

01:57:35   HomePods could work in concert with an Apple TV to be an, to receive eARC from the TV and

01:57:45   then broadcast that to the HomePods.

01:57:47   Let me translate that into English.

01:57:49   You could be watching or playing a video game, like playing your PlayStation on your TV or

01:57:54   watching your cable box on your TV.

01:57:56   And if your TV supports eARC, it would send the audio to the Apple TV.

01:58:02   Even if you're not doing anything else, the Apple TV, the Apple TV is otherwise idle.

01:58:05   It will send the audio to the Apple TV, and the Apple TV will rebroadcast to your HomePods,

01:58:09   such that your HomePods can be your TV speakers.

01:58:12   I knew that you could have the Apple TV for Apple TV stuff broadcast everything to the

01:58:18   HomePods.

01:58:19   I had no idea that you could do this in the same style that my Sonos setup does, where

01:58:24   whatever it is you're watching on the TV will be broadcast to the HomePods.

01:58:30   And I was talking about this on Mastodon today, and as with all things, about half the feedback

01:58:34   I got was, "Yes, it works pretty consistently, but not perfectly."

01:58:38   And the latency is great, and half the feedback I got was, "Yes, this is something you can

01:58:42   do, but the latency is awful."

01:58:43   So...

01:58:44   Well, in this scenario, your Apple TV is acting as a little software-powered receiver, essentially.

01:58:50   Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:58:51   That's all you receive, right?

01:58:52   But unlike an actual receiver, Apple does not have all the weird controls for messing

01:58:58   with the delay and everything.

01:59:00   And yes, as we talked about in the past, the thing we were talking about syncing stuff up,

01:59:04   the HDMI spec itself has some synchronization stuff in it, but setups can be wonky, and

01:59:08   so I feel like the reason you get that disparity is sometimes the automatic synchronization,

01:59:14   latency, blah, blah, blah, HDMI stuff works fine with people's setups, and other times

01:59:17   it doesn't, and when it doesn't, Apple has not yet added all the little picky features

01:59:22   to fix it and go through that whole thing that I described on a past episode.

01:59:26   So I kind of understand that.

01:59:28   And I think the reason you don't remember it is because we just talked about it in the

01:59:31   context of, "I'm just going to use my," like when the HomePod first came out, "I'm just

01:59:36   going to use my HomePods as my TV speakers."

01:59:39   And you didn't think about what that meant, but what that meant was like, "No, whatever

01:59:42   I watch on my TV, the sound comes out of the HomePods," and the only way that worked is

01:59:46   with that feature that introduced like a year or so ago that basically uses your Apple TV

01:59:50   as a little miniature software-powered receiver to do eARC, blah, blah, blah.

01:59:54   Yeah, yeah.

01:59:55   That's why, Casey, this is why you didn't know about this feature, because it wasn't

01:59:58   there at launch with the previous ones.

02:00:00   It was added later in software.

02:00:02   Gotcha.

02:00:03   We should also mention very quickly that these things support spatial audio.

02:00:07   They also added sound recognition for smoke alarms or carbon monoxide alarms, and it can

02:00:13   send a notification to your devices, which is pretty cool, although that's coming apparently

02:00:16   in the spring.

02:00:17   Yeah, that's a great feature if it works well, but again, it isn't out yet, so we won't know

02:00:22   yet.

02:00:23   Yeah, that's coming out in the spring.

02:00:25   Stereo pairs require the same generation of HomePod.

02:00:27   You can't take an old one and a new one and pair them, which I mean, that's not surprising.

02:00:31   Because I've just got the old one, and I might even consider a new one if I could pair them,

02:00:35   but I can't, and now it's like, ugh.

02:00:37   And I understand why.

02:00:39   I mean, there's software reasons why.

02:00:41   There's also hardware reasons if you're going to have a pair of speakers of one of them

02:00:44   that has a different number of drivers than the other.

02:00:45   It's a little bit weird.

02:00:46   Like, I get it, but it's kind of a shame.

02:00:49   Looking at this product, the thing that strikes me about it is how Apple has not really rethought

02:00:57   the HomePod.

02:00:58   Not at all.

02:00:59   Like, it's kind of like you mentioned the Series 0 watch.

02:01:01   Imagine if the follow-up to the Series 0 watch came like years later.

02:01:05   Like, they just didn't do anything.

02:01:07   People wondered if they were ever going to make another watch again, and they came out

02:01:10   with a new one, and it looked like the Series 1.

02:01:12   What was the one after the Series 0?

02:01:13   It was just called Series 1, or was it called Series 2?

02:01:16   No, this confused everybody.

02:01:18   There was the Apple Watch with no number, which we called the Series 0.

02:01:22   Then the next year, they released two models called Series 1 and Series 2, which had the

02:01:27   same processor as each other.

02:01:30   So there's one called the Series 1, but it was really part of the second-generation family

02:01:35   of Apple Watch.

02:01:36   It's like Xbox naming, you know?

02:01:40   But similarly, when those watches came out, they didn't rethink the Apple Watch.

02:01:43   They were very much like the Series 0, and this is the same way.

02:01:47   This product is not like the current generation of MacBook Pros.

02:01:51   People were like, "Oh, we screwed up. We're going to put a good keyboard and an SD card

02:01:54   slot in HDMI port."

02:01:55   No, this thing does not have audio input.

02:01:57   You cannot use these as speakers.

02:01:59   The power cord is not removable.

02:02:00   Like, none of that stuff.

02:02:01   They didn't do any of that.

02:02:02   I don't know, the power cord is removable.

02:02:05   We don't know yet, I don't think.

02:02:07   It's removable.

02:02:08   Alright, so on the original generation HomePod, the power cord is also removable.

02:02:12   It's just hard to remove.

02:02:14   It's like you're not really supposed to remove it.

02:02:16   You can.

02:02:17   If you had used a standard plug, you would have to pass the UL labs, whatever, in the

02:02:21   United States to like it.

02:02:22   And so they didn't do that, so it's not user-removable.

02:02:24   And that allows them to sidestep having to put an ugly standards-compliant, safety-compliant

02:02:30   plug.

02:02:31   So that's why it's technically not removable.

02:02:32   But anyway, the point is, this product does not have a bunch of ports on the back.

02:02:36   People aren't going to buy this to just use it, to Marco's point, like, "What if I just

02:02:39   want a really good-sounding spear?

02:02:41   Can I use these as just good-sounding speakers?"

02:02:43   No.

02:02:44   There's a software component that needs to be AirPlay, needs to go through your Apple

02:02:47   TV, blah, blah, blah.

02:02:48   They're not just stereo components.

02:02:50   They're not.

02:02:51   So they didn't rethink that.

02:02:52   The other way they didn't rethink it, although they're kind of leaning in that direction,

02:02:56   is they didn't do the thing that we've always wanted them to do for ages, is like, "Hey,

02:02:59   can you make something that's like my whole home hub?

02:03:01   Make it my Wi-Fi hub.

02:03:03   Make it my HomeKit thing.

02:03:05   Make it my Siri thing.

02:03:06   Make it play music, blah, blah, blah."

02:03:08   They didn't do that, but they kind of like, "Okay, well, what if we put temperature and

02:03:12   humidity sensors on there?"

02:03:13   No, it's not a home device.

02:03:15   It's still just a speaker, but they're small.

02:03:17   We can put them in there.

02:03:18   And then, oh, if it hears your smoke detector go off, it'll do something.

02:03:21   And it is plugged in all the time, so it probably will be your HomeKit hub, unless the Apple

02:03:25   TV steals it from it.

02:03:27   They're not ready to say, "This is the new hub for your house."

02:03:31   Because first of all, as we all know, if it was going to be the hub for your house, it

02:03:33   would have to be a Wi-Fi mesh network thing.

02:03:35   Apple left that space a long time ago and seems not interested in going back into it.

02:03:39   But they do still do a HomeKit thing.

02:03:42   And this is looking slightly more HomeKitty, thread radio, temperature sensor.

02:03:48   You can talk to it to control stuff in your home.

02:03:51   But predominantly, it is still the product it was, which is basically a wireless speaker

02:03:56   that integrates with Apple stuff.

02:03:58   That sounds really good, but I feel like they're leaving money on the table by not doing a

02:04:03   little bit to make this a potential purchase of people who aren't super-duper bought into

02:04:08   the Apple ecosystem, but just want a good speaker, and also to give it longevity, assuming

02:04:12   this thing doesn't burn out like the other one does with a bad diode, a bad amplifier.

02:04:20   There's some fatal flaw, some weird uncharacteristic from Apple fatal flaw in the HomePods that

02:04:26   makes them the original generation of HomePods.

02:04:28   Hopefully this one is better there.

02:04:31   If this is the rate of development of the HomePod, it's going to be a long time before

02:04:34   this thing goes in any direction.

02:04:36   But if it's leaning in one direction or the other, it is not leaning in the direction

02:04:39   of this is a good speaker for people to buy who are into audio, like in terms of outside

02:04:43   the Apple ecosystem, but it is leaning a little bit into this is your home hub, which I think

02:04:48   is fine.

02:04:49   I don't expect this thing to sprout a screen anytime soon or anything, but it is plugged

02:04:52   in all the time and it's probably in a nice location in your home, and it's just sitting

02:04:56   there, so why not have it keep track of temperature and humidity?

02:05:00   Why not have it speak to it to turn the lights on and off or whatever?

02:05:05   I know, Marco, you're excited that the S7 is way faster than the old chip, but I look

02:05:10   at this and I say it's $300 and the best we could get was a watch chip.

02:05:14   I'm sure it'll be great.

02:05:15   I'm sure it'll be fine, but if this thing is going to sort of grow into being an actual

02:05:19   home hub, when the Apple TV, what does the Apple TV have now, A15 or something in it?

02:05:23   The Apple TV is so massively overpowered compared to this thing, and it's so tiny.

02:05:29   I think if you had to elect something in your house to be your home hub, which I don't actually

02:05:33   know if you can do that, I think it just picks on its own or there's some way that...

02:05:36   Yeah, as far as I can tell, you have no control over that.

02:05:38   It'll tell you which device is the current home hub, but you can't pick it as far as

02:05:43   I can tell.

02:05:44   But if I had to elect one, I'd elect the thing with an A15 in it, but it would be kind of

02:05:48   cool if Apple eventually figured out what the home pod's going to be when it grows up.

02:05:54   Right now, what it is is the second generation of the exact product that they made before.

02:05:59   It's just they took a long vacation in between to, I don't know, think about stuff for a

02:06:03   while.

02:06:04   Because if this had come out a year after the home pod, we'd be like, "Oh, the next

02:06:08   home pod out, and it's better than the first one."

02:06:09   Marco probably wouldn't even have had time to have all of his fail, because he just would

02:06:12   have replaced him with the new one anyway.

02:06:14   And then we would have moved on.

02:06:16   There was this weird time in the wilderness where they didn't know what they were going

02:06:18   to do, and they came out of the wilderness and they said, "Let's just do what we did

02:06:21   before."

02:06:22   And so there they go.

02:06:23   They did what they did before, presumably slightly better.

02:06:28   I'm kind of disappointed in the fact that they didn't take the lessons other than the

02:06:35   reliability ones, we hope.

02:06:36   In the same way that the laptop says the lessons of the previous line of laptops that people

02:06:39   had complaints about.

02:06:40   I mean, one of the lessons, as you said, Marco, was like, "Maybe the lesson was we should

02:06:43   have a cheap one."

02:06:44   And they do now, so great.

02:06:46   And then we don't have to worry so much about the price.

02:06:47   But then they de-contented this one.

02:06:49   To save 50 bucks?

02:06:50   If it sounds just as good, then good.

02:06:53   You made it cheaper and it sounds just as good, so that's fine.

02:06:56   But we'll see.

02:06:57   I don't feel like they took...

02:07:00   There are lots of lessons they could have taken from the original HomePod in terms of,

02:07:04   again, picking two directions.

02:07:06   To go more into the generic audio device direction or to go more in the HomeHub direction.

02:07:11   And it seems like they leaned a tiny little bit in the HomeHub direction, but then just

02:07:16   stopped and said, "It's just another HomePod.

02:07:18   It's a big one and it replaces the previous big one."

02:07:21   And presumably because of the synergies of the platform with the Mini, they're more committed

02:07:26   to this big one than they were to the other one.

02:07:28   But this may be the new Mac Mini in terms of the product that never gets updated, something

02:07:32   aside of the Mac Pro.

02:07:33   The Mac Mini used to be the product that was like, "Oh, we got a new Mac Mini.

02:07:37   It probably won't be another one in three years."

02:07:38   Maybe that's the HomePod now.

02:07:39   We'll see.

02:07:40   Yeah, I mean, at this point, I'm just happy that they are still continuing this product

02:07:45   line at all.

02:07:46   Yes, my wish list...

02:07:47   Resumed.

02:07:48   I wouldn't say they're continuing it.

02:07:50   They resumed it.

02:07:51   They stopped.

02:07:52   I feel like they stopped and then they resumed.

02:07:56   There's definitely a gap there.

02:07:57   There's a gap there.

02:07:58   Well, yes.

02:07:59   And we don't necessarily know the reasons why they stopped it.

02:08:02   They're all breaking.

02:08:03   That might have had something to do with it.

02:08:04   Yeah.

02:08:05   And they also stopped it in kind of early COVID days.

02:08:08   And so it could have had to do with supply chain, because maybe the A8 they were manufacturing,

02:08:14   maybe they couldn't get any more of those made.

02:08:17   If you look at what chips Apple ships in their current product line, over the last 18 months

02:08:23   or so, they have dramatically eliminated products that were using older chips.

02:08:30   Most of their product line now is using the same very small set of very modern chips.

02:08:37   Different levels of them, for sure.

02:08:39   But if you look around, all the old stuff that was using old A12s or whatever, those

02:08:43   are all gone from the lineup.

02:08:45   They have systematically replaced all of that old stuff over the last 18 months or so.

02:08:50   And so it could have had to do with chip supply issues.

02:08:53   It could have had to do with the hardware failures, whatever it was.

02:08:56   I don't necessarily, we can't really necessarily know that when they killed the old HomePod

02:09:02   that they were saying, "Well, that didn't work.

02:09:06   Maybe it was really just like, we can't replace this yet, but we can't keep selling this one

02:09:10   because of Reason XYZ.

02:09:11   So we'll just go without it for a little while."

02:09:14   But even before they killed it, they weren't updating it.

02:09:16   You just kind of sat there.

02:09:18   It sat there long enough for the ones in the field to start to fail due to heat issues

02:09:23   or components burning out.

02:09:25   And then they stopped selling it.

02:09:28   It definitely doesn't seem like, even when they came out with the Mini, they didn't have

02:09:33   a new version of it ready then.

02:09:36   It obviously wasn't part of their grand plan for this product line until, I feel like the

02:09:42   Mini was like, "Look, if the Mini doesn't go anywhere, then we're just bailing on this

02:09:45   whole thing."

02:09:46   But I guess the Mini was successful enough.

02:09:47   They said, "We should probably do the big one."

02:09:49   It's so hard to tell from the outside with the timelines and these things, but it definitely

02:09:52   doesn't look like a coordinated effort to say, "We did the big one.

02:09:54   We learned some lessons.

02:09:56   Now we're going to try again."

02:09:57   And what they tried again was with the Mini.

02:09:59   And then it seems like that was enough for them to go for the big one again.

02:10:04   But there was definitely a period of time where they were not committed to the idea

02:10:07   that the big HomePod would remain a product that they'll line up and get updates on some

02:10:14   regular intervals.

02:10:15   So I'm glad they have come back to it, but like I said, I'm a little bit disappointed

02:10:18   that they've come back to it with basically the same thinking as before.

02:10:21   Yeah, but again, I think, again, this is not a high priority product line for Apple.

02:10:28   So we don't want them to be too ambitious if they can't keep up.

02:10:33   And again, this is setting the bar pretty low.

02:10:36   This is going in with pretty low expectations, but it's also realistic.

02:10:38   Apple is not very good at multitasking.

02:10:40   Even as the company has gotten so much bigger over the last decade, they're still not good

02:10:44   at multitasking and managing many different product lines sufficiently.

02:10:49   So if this is what they can give us, I'll take this over abandonment.

02:10:55   This is much better.

02:10:56   And yeah, down the road, there are still some pretty significant holes in the HomePod lineup.

02:11:02   What I would most like to see, some kind of HomePod port or HomePod amp kind of thing

02:11:08   where you could have the HomePod functionality with maybe like a microphone unit and then

02:11:13   some kind of line output to be able to drive any speakers you want with a HomePod-like

02:11:20   functionality leading the way.

02:11:22   That would be great.

02:11:23   And then secondly, I would love some kind of portable battery-powered HomePods.

02:11:27   You could bring it out onto your deck or something.

02:11:29   That would be great too.

02:11:31   And I understand those are relatively specialized use cases, but already products exist to kind

02:11:37   of hack that on now.

02:11:38   That's why you need to get a Rivian.

02:11:41   It comes with one of those.

02:11:43   Like I currently have.

02:11:44   There's some $30 Amazon battery-based thing from some no-name company.

02:11:50   Those party speakers.

02:11:51   Someone on Twitter was talking about party speakers.

02:11:53   That's a whole thing now.

02:11:56   They're not like the RGB festooned gaming PCs, but it's a similar vibe where they just

02:12:01   take basically a big battery-powered speaker, but they make it look ridiculous with like

02:12:06   chrome and shiny things and colors and vents and wings.

02:12:10   It's just a party speaker.

02:12:13   That is actually a surprisingly big market.

02:12:15   And I think Sony's doing really well there.

02:12:16   Anyway, but if you look at the Amazon Echo series of products, they learned pretty early

02:12:23   on that this was a thing people do.

02:12:25   And so the Echo that I bought two years ago, the little ball one, which otherwise has been

02:12:29   total garbage and they kept failing and it's a totally garbage product, but that product

02:12:37   comes with on the bottom of it a little tripod screw mount hole and little pogo pins.

02:12:43   And other companies can make battery and they have made battery bases for it.

02:12:47   The product directly supports it with no hacks.

02:12:50   It literally screws into the tripod mount so it mounts itself to the bottom.

02:12:53   It powers it through those pogo pins.

02:12:55   Like Amazon designed the Echo with this use case in mind for people to make these accessories.

02:13:00   I have a similar thing for the HomePod mini.

02:13:03   The HomePod mini makes no effort to enable this.

02:13:05   And so you have to like run the cable of the HomePod out the back into this thing and then

02:13:10   loop it around to bunch it all up because it's like this fixed length cable.

02:13:13   And then you have and then like it has to like wrap around the HomePod mini with these

02:13:17   big plastic like clamp things.

02:13:20   And it dramatically reduces the sound quality because some part of how it's designed to

02:13:25   resonate doesn't work well with this.

02:13:26   And so it makes it sound like garbage, but it does work.

02:13:30   And actually the HomePod mini is way better at this than the Amazon Alexa thing because

02:13:36   the Alexa thing when you pick it up and move it, it does not do well with like transitioning

02:13:40   to a different Wi-Fi node.

02:13:41   If you have like a multipoint Wi-Fi setup, the Echo just drops it and fails.

02:13:46   And so you bring it like as soon as you bring it outside, if it switched to a new AP, you

02:13:49   got to like reboot the Echo for it to work.

02:13:51   Whereas the HomePod works perfectly.

02:13:53   It like transition between the Wi-Fi access points perfectly.

02:13:56   It's fast, it's responsive.

02:13:58   Like the HomePod mini I'm saying.

02:13:59   Like so the HomePod mini is a great product for this and Apple just makes no effort to

02:14:03   enable it whatsoever.

02:14:04   So like this is the kind of thing like if Apple wants to keep making the HomePod product

02:14:10   line, keep developing it further, I would, again, I would love to have those two products.

02:14:14   A battery powered portable option that you could bring out onto your deck or whatever,

02:14:17   your front yard, whatever it is.

02:14:19   And also some kind of like HomePod with a line out that you can connect your own speakers

02:14:25   to.

02:14:26   And that way, you know, if you already have speakers that are good, use them.

02:14:30   Or if Apple's, you know, if Apple starts to make speakers that suck or, you know, if they

02:14:35   have some part of their product line that they're not filling very well, that product

02:14:39   helps fill those gaps.

02:14:40   Kind of like the Mac mini.

02:14:41   It's like you can fill in the gaps that you're not thinking of because they're not, you know,

02:14:45   mass market enough, but everyone has something like that, you know.

02:14:48   So I would love to see those down the road.

02:14:49   But for now, I am very, very happy that we have a new HomePod big.

02:14:54   And I can't wait to get it.

02:14:56   You know, I'm not getting it until the first deliveries are February 3rd.

02:15:01   So you know, I'm not getting it for a few weeks.

02:15:03   But oh, man, I'm looking forward to it.

02:15:05   I know this doesn't matter to you.

02:15:07   But does the is the Echo actually waterproof?

02:15:09   Doesn't matter to you?

02:15:10   I don't use it in the rain.

02:15:11   Know what I'm saying?

02:15:12   Like for like outdoor, those party speakers, not that all the party speakers are waterproof,

02:15:16   but I feel like a battery powered portable thing would have would probably have to be

02:15:20   significantly more water resistant, let's say, than any of the HomePods.

02:15:24   Frankly, I'll tell you, I've been using the HomePod mini that way for, you know, maybe

02:15:28   half a year.

02:15:29   See, I told you it didn't matter.

02:15:31   It's been so right.

02:15:32   But I don't leave it out all the time.

02:15:34   Like it's different from, you know, a camera's out there all the time, a HomePod mini, I

02:15:37   bring it out if we're like going to be hanging out there, and then I bring it inside afterwards.

02:15:42   But but yeah, it's the home.

02:15:44   And I'm telling the HomePod mini in its stupid little battery thing.

02:15:48   It's so even even in this terrible contraption from this cheapo Amazon brand that actually

02:15:52   makes it sound worse than when it's not an it still sounds better than every portable

02:15:56   Sonos thing.

02:15:57   I've trust trust me, I tried them all sounds better than all of those.

02:15:59   It sounds better than every JBL thing I've seen sounds better than that little B&O thing.

02:16:03   It's like, like, has like little leather handle on top.

02:16:05   Like I've heard all these things.

02:16:07   The HomePod mini can beat them all if Apple chooses to address this market.

02:16:11   They can literally just make a HomePod mini with a battery base, and they would destroy

02:16:16   this market.

02:16:17   But they and they I don't think they're gonna do it like that.

02:16:20   That's not really their style of thing to do, but I wish they would.

02:16:23   But anyway, I'm happy with what I have so far.

02:16:26   I hope they continue to expand this line.

02:16:28   And I and ultimately, I really, really hope that this new HomePod is as much more responsive

02:16:34   with Siri as I think it will be with this new chip.

02:16:37   And it look and we can get into Siri another day.

02:16:40   Siri is still comically bad compared to its competitors.

02:16:45   And that's a whole different thing.

02:16:47   But you know, that's probably that's probably a whole different part of the company as well.

02:16:50   So I'll pick on them some other day.

02:16:51   But for now, super happy with the HomePod update.

02:16:55   I don't have it yet.

02:16:56   So you know, but I don't think it's gonna be bad in person.

02:16:59   I think I think I'm gonna be really happy with it when I get it.

02:17:03   Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Sofa, and the LunchPaleVC podcast.

02:17:09   And thanks to our members who support us directly.

02:17:11   You can join at atp.fm/join.

02:17:14   And we will talk to you next week.

02:17:17   Bye.

02:17:24   [music]

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02:18:07   [music]

02:18:14   [music]

02:18:19   So just very quickly, I wanted to give an update for something that I don't think anyone even realized.

02:18:24   Because I don't think I talked about it.

02:18:26   But I ordered one of those Belkin... I don't even know the name of this thing.

02:18:29   And I'm gonna have to dig up the name and the link for the show notes.

02:18:32   But suffice to say, the Belkin DooDad that you put on top of your studio display

02:18:36   so the camera isn't garbage.

02:18:38   Oh cool. Your phone sticks to it and you can use your phone?

02:18:41   Right. Yep, that's exactly right.

02:18:43   And I would do a demo. I have all the lights off because it's been forbidden for me to have the ceiling fan on while we record.

02:18:50   And I'm too lazy to do the little yanking on the chain thing to turn the fan off and the light on.

02:18:55   So the lights are off.

02:18:57   So otherwise I would give you two a demo of what I look like with the fancy new continuity camera setup.

02:19:04   But this Belkin thing was like 30 or 40 bucks from Apple. Something like that.

02:19:09   There is a version for notebooks that's not the one I'm talking about.

02:19:12   The one I'm talking about is the version that goes on displays.

02:19:16   The version for notebooks is $30. I don't have the link in front of me for the full version.

02:19:21   But I think it was 40 bucks, which is kind of ridiculous.

02:19:24   Yeah, it's at the bottom in the "you might also like" thing on that page.

02:19:27   Oh, thank you. There you go.

02:19:29   So yeah, it's okay. The instructions it came with were kind of useless.

02:19:36   And when I plopped it on top of my display, it just wanted to fall over as soon as I put any weight on it, like have the phone on it.

02:19:43   Eventually I was able to deduce what they wanted me to do.

02:19:47   But it's not one of those things where it like clamps to the top of the display, which kind of makes sense, right?

02:19:51   Because you don't want a lot of pressure up there.

02:19:54   But it wasn't immediately obvious to me what it is I was supposed to do to get this thing to not flop around.

02:20:01   But I was able to figure it out.

02:20:03   And I now am using my studio display as a hub insofar as I have my last year's iPhone 13 Pro up there.

02:20:12   And then it's connected via lightning to USB-C to the back of the studio display.

02:20:17   Really just for the purpose of power, because I think the video is transmitted over Wi-Fi or whatever anyway.

02:20:22   But, coincidentally over the last 48 hours I had a FaceTime call this morning with a friend of the show, James Thompson, and yesterday with Underscore.

02:20:31   And I used the continuity camera and this Belkin Doo-Dad both times.

02:20:35   And when you put it in normal mode, it works really, really well.

02:20:40   So like, not center stage, not any of the portrait background blurring, studio light or whatever they call it, that actually works pretty well.

02:20:49   But I will say, as soon as you put on center stage, which I am a center stage apologist, I really like the feature in general.

02:20:55   But the second you put on center stage, even with a one year old top of the line iPhone, the image quality goes to garbage.

02:21:02   It's just awful.

02:21:03   And so, but if you leave it on the standard version, then it really does look quite good.

02:21:11   And way better than the studio display camera. Way, way, way better.

02:21:15   Which I know surprises nobody, but this is your apology camera, just like there was an apology mouse way back when.

02:21:20   And I do like it. It kind of sucks that I have this one year old probably worth $800 or whatever iPhone up there.

02:21:29   That's now just going to live up there.

02:21:31   And I had to buy this $40 Doo-Dad to do it.

02:21:34   But it does work out really well.

02:21:35   The only problem I do have, and maybe this is user error, but I very briefly tried to turn on desk view.

02:21:42   And it was easily like 8 inches above the surface of my desk.

02:21:48   Now, as you recall, I do have a glass topped desk, which I know everyone thinks is very weird.

02:21:54   And honestly, I'd like to get a new desk at some point.

02:21:56   But for whatever it is, whatever the difference that may or may not make, maybe it wasn't detecting the desk surface because it's glass.

02:22:04   I have no idea. I didn't think it was that smart.

02:22:07   But one way or another, I tried to use desk mode, and it was basically the area in front of my chest mode instead rather than the desktop.

02:22:17   But in general, I do like it.

02:22:20   I would say if you have a need for this sort of thing, which if you're a studio display owner, you probably do, I give it one thumb up.

02:22:28   It's not great. It's a little too expensive. But it's better than nothing, and it works.

02:22:32   So there you go.

02:22:33   A glowing review.

02:22:35   Blowing, glowing review.

02:22:37   [BEEPING]