00:00:00 ◼ ► I have to tell the listeners how John Siracusa makes enhancement requests for the ATP CMS.
00:00:14 ◼ ► The ATP CMS is a custom CMS that I wrote in PHP against my custom PHP framework that I've been using for years.
00:00:25 ◼ ► Basically nobody can really use it that well. It's not a common framework. It's not documented at all.
00:00:33 ◼ ► I basically just do it. The problem is that John has wish list items and I do too. We have wish list items.
00:00:42 ◼ ► The reality is this is kind of a busy time for both me and any iOS developer. This is a busy time.
00:00:50 ◼ ► Enhancement requests to the podcast CMS are not super urgent usually and so therefore are not very high on the priority list.
00:00:58 ◼ ► So what John does to encourage me to do the request that he has, which is surprisingly effective, by far the most effective method yet.
00:01:09 ◼ ► I'm not doing it to encourage you to do them. I'm doing it to almost do all the work for you.
00:01:21 ◼ ► I've given Casey and John access to my GitHub repo. It's a private repo otherwise but they have access to it for the CMS in case they ever wanted to look at it or take some part in coding it.
00:01:33 ◼ ► And John has taken me up on that offer. John has started submitting pull requests for his feature wish list items to me for the ATP CMS.
00:01:44 ◼ ► The problem is the CMS has written in PHP as mentioned. Not only does John not know PHP, John doesn't have an installation of PHP.
00:02:01 ◼ ► I thought it would be good to have a web page that lists all the member specials. They won't be accessible to non-members but at least let them see what all the specials are since they don't have access to the special stuff.
00:02:15 ◼ ► Yeah so he submits a pull request in a language that he doesn't know for an undocumented framework.
00:02:34 ◼ ► Yeah because there's a lot of syntax errors. There's a lot of missing parentheses, missing semicolons, broken things, things that will never work, function calls that don't work.
00:03:00 ◼ ► I think most of the things I submit are really close to running. It's like what you would type yourself and then you would run it and then you'd say, "Oh I forgot a semicolon, oh I missed a curly brace."
00:03:10 ◼ ► I mean I was pretty close with this most recent one, wasn't I? They're small, they're just small pull requests. They're tiny.
00:03:23 ◼ ► John submitted this. I skimmed over the code. I saw that it was basically what I would need to do.
00:03:30 ◼ ► But it was easier for me to just write it myself than to try to figure out, like, is this exactly correct or not?
00:03:39 ◼ ► You know, PHP, obviously as everyone knows I'm not a huge unit test writer, I don't have a unit test for this.
00:03:46 ◼ ► It isn't especially strictly typed either. There's some options for that in modern PHP but this is all older code that doesn't really use any of those things.
00:03:55 ◼ ► So it would be hard to catch a subtle error. It is hard, I know, from writing this language for so long.
00:04:01 ◼ ► So I just write my own and delete his pull requests because it's easier. It's way easier.
00:04:07 ◼ ► But I looked at a diff in the last one and some of the things were pretty much the same.
00:04:10 ◼ ► I mean, there's sort of one obvious place and way to do it in your code base and we both basically did it the same way.
00:04:19 ◼ ► Well, yeah. That is kind of a big difference though. And that is kind of a big difference.
00:04:28 ◼ ► If Marco said here's a list of instructions for you to bring up the environment to run this server on your local machine, I would follow them and do it.
00:04:34 ◼ ► Or if you had a Docker container. In fact, I started trying to make a Docker container with what I thought were all the dependencies.
00:04:44 ◼ ► Whichever one you're using, I thought you were using the opposite one. So I was trying to build a Docker container with that.
00:04:48 ◼ ► And I eventually gave up because it was taking me longer to try to build a Docker container to run the stuff than it would for me to just speculatively write it.
00:05:07 ◼ ► I think that one more or less worked, didn't it? It was like one or two syntax errors and then that's running on the site, right?
00:05:12 ◼ ► See, and that -- I actually -- the first one, the JavaScript one, I just approved that one because I didn't touch it.
00:05:39 ◼ ► People send me patches to my open source stuff. I always just accept their pull request and then I fix it.
00:05:44 ◼ ► Or then what I do is I add tests because no one ever submits their pull request with tests.
00:05:58 ◼ ► Does everyone -- Marco -- everyone agrees that Marco should provide us with a Docker container where we can just bring up this environment.
00:06:05 ◼ ► It's a shame that there's no documentation anywhere on the Internet on how to install PHP.
00:06:18 ◼ ► You really shouldn't spend your time making your Docker container because these are tiny changes.
00:06:28 ◼ ► It's not like I'm sending these giant pull requests that are like, "You can't make sense of this," and it broke the whole site.
00:06:33 ◼ ► All right, it is still September, and that means it is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.
00:06:39 ◼ ► And that means we are trying our darndest to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
00:07:19 ◼ ► then they probably have received some sort of indirect, if not direct, treatment from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
00:07:35 ◼ ► In some cases, they will fly families from other places, including other countries, into Memphis where they will treat them.
00:08:06 ◼ ► I know this is not a lot of warning, but tomorrow, which if you're listening to this right when the episode airs,
00:08:24 ◼ ► are going to be doing a 12-hour podcast-a-thon where they're doing their darndest to raise money
00:12:10 ◼ ► And I issued an apology to one of my co-hosts because I felt like I got a little over the top.
00:12:25 ◼ ► But all in all, we are just as good friends, if not better friends, on the other side than we were before.
00:12:30 ◼ ► So if you would like to, you can go to atp.fm and you can find a link to the member special.
00:12:42 ◼ ► You should go to atp.fm/join where you can become a member and you listen to the member specials.
00:13:02 ◼ ► Or if you listen to the bootleg, the specials are mixed in there chronologically with all the bootlegs.
00:13:06 ◼ ► But you might not want to have to scroll through all those trying to find out which ones are the member specials.
00:13:10 ◼ ► So we have created, through a wonderful pull request that I recently submitted and Marco ignored, a new feed for members.
00:13:23 ◼ ► Remember the two you had before was the regular member feed, which is the edited version of the show but with no ads in it.
00:13:29 ◼ ► Then there's the bootleg feed, which is the unedited livestream that you're listening to.
00:13:38 ◼ ► Specials are still in the other two feeds, but if you just want to become a member to check it out and you want to see what the specials are like,
00:13:44 ◼ ► you can subscribe to the specials feed that only has our member specials in chronological order.
00:13:49 ◼ ► And that is, I believe, live right now. So that's how you can catch up on the specials.
00:14:01 ◼ ► When you listen to it, you'll kind of see why. We tend to go on when we talk about Apple stuff.
00:14:18 ◼ ► And remember, we don't necessarily encourage this, but if you wanted to, you could join for just one month, grab all the specials,
00:14:26 ◼ ► and then easily cancel your membership because we respect you as a user and as a listener.
00:14:34 ◼ ► You can take that approach, but I think what will happen is once you join and see how amazing these specials are
00:14:43 ◼ ► Also, I think we have enough member specials now that it might be a challenge to get through all of them in a month.
00:15:02 ◼ ► but I'll say optimistic that we have things that we would like to talk about other than just follow-ups.
00:15:07 ◼ ► So we've got to move forward. So let's talk about the Apple event, and let's start with the Apple stuff saves your life video.
00:15:15 ◼ ► We apparently mentioned something that did not make it through the edit. So John, can you tell us about this?
00:15:20 ◼ ► Yeah, we were talking about this video. I was like, it's so weird that they're emphasizing the Apple watch
00:15:23 ◼ ► on their intro video to what is the phone event. But then eventually, when we were discussing it on the show,
00:15:28 ◼ ► we said, but they did have the phone in there, like, you know, call SOS with the satellite feature on the phone
00:15:33 ◼ ► to save you, so on and so forth. Unfortunately, that got edited out, so we had a week of people telling us,
00:15:37 ◼ ► hey, you said they only mentioned the watch, but they mentioned the phone in that video too.
00:15:40 ◼ ► We know. We got there eventually. I got it. I understand. Did I edit that out? Yeah, I understand why it got edited out.
00:15:45 ◼ ► We were kind of going in circles, and so it makes sense that that was trimmed because we were just repeating ourselves.
00:15:50 ◼ ► But we did eventually figure out at the end of that segment that they did talk about the phone. I just got it.
00:15:55 ◼ ► I double checked that you did edit out, but it's fine. Marco, I just wanted people to know if they just heard the edited version of the show
00:16:00 ◼ ► and didn't hear the bootleg that that intro video did include the iPhone in it, not just the watch.
00:16:10 ◼ ► It is, but this was a question. I think Marco had this question when we were doing like the show before the event.
00:16:15 ◼ ► Like, what are they going to call it? Are they just going to call it Apple watch ultra? Are they going to call it Apple watch ultra series 2?
00:16:19 ◼ ► Or something like that. And we didn't really emphasize that the answer was that they're going to call it Apple watch ultra numeral two.
00:16:27 ◼ ► Space numeral two. But apparently if you get one of these and look on the back of the watch, it just says ultra.
00:16:33 ◼ ► It doesn't. Like if you look at the back of a series nine, it says series nine on it somewhere, I think.
00:16:37 ◼ ► But the ultra just says ultra with no two. So that is interesting. But anyway, that's what they call it on their web page and everything.
00:16:46 ◼ ► Well, there is some precedent for this in the sense that like Apple Apple's products have names that aren't always emblazoned on them.
00:16:53 ◼ ► So, for instance, when the iPad three came out, it was, I believe it was called officially the iPad three and the iPad two.
00:17:00 ◼ ► Also, the iPad two was officially called the iPad two. But if you flip it over the back, it just said iPad.
00:17:05 ◼ ► It didn't say iPad two, you know, engraved in the metal on the back. So there is some precedent for this.
00:17:15 ◼ ► The watch is the exception because the watches since that after the series zero essentially have always had their series name on the back of them, which seemed like a watchy kind of thing to do, but not on the ultra.
00:17:25 ◼ ► Yeah. And, you know, iPhones also, you know, back when they did say iPhone on the back, they don't anymore.
00:17:29 ◼ ► But back when they did, it would just say iPhone. It also it wouldn't say like iPhone seven, you know.
00:17:34 ◼ ► So there is some precedent for this, but it's a little bit different with the Apple watch ultra because it looks exactly the same from from the exterior.
00:17:41 ◼ ► Like, I don't I don't I don't know if you can tell the difference from the outside at all unless you power it on and go to the about screen or something.
00:17:52 ◼ ► We were casting about with regard to the titanium watches of years past, trying to figure out how much they cost, what was the delta, so on and so forth.
00:18:00 ◼ ► A friend of the show, Dan Provost of Studio Neat, wrote to say the titanium Apple watch was only one hundred dollars more than the steel.
00:18:06 ◼ ► That's important. Not the sport, but the steel watch. And it came with an extra sport band.
00:18:10 ◼ ► So if you accounted for that, it was fifty dollars more. You might have been thinking of ceramic, which I think did start at around twelve hundred dollars or so.
00:18:20 ◼ ► Then Doug Miller also wrote the titanium edition watches also came with an extra year of warranty.
00:18:24 ◼ ► So two years rather than one. And AppleCare+ had three years of coverage rather than two years.
00:18:28 ◼ ► So one hundred dollars more got you the extra year warranty to Hermes, Hermes. I can never get it right.
00:18:33 ◼ ► I'm sorry. Also get Hermes extra years. Hermes. The Hermes also get an extra the extra year stainless steel.
00:18:39 ◼ ► Otherwise does not. And speaking of the company whose name I cannot pronounce, the Ernie's. Hermes.
00:18:51 ◼ ► I already killed all them when I talked about Velveeta. So I mean, I think that I'm just shooting a dead horse.
00:18:55 ◼ ► That's true. Anyways, that company still sells Apple watches with leather straps and the special watch face, but only through their own store.
00:19:04 ◼ ► And so we'll put a link to this. Yeah. At first I thought the story was, oh, they still sell leather watch.
00:19:08 ◼ ► Well, of course anyone can sell leather. You know, you can sell a watch strap that works with the Apple watch.
00:19:12 ◼ ► Only Apple's not making leather ones, but other people will continue to make leather ones, including Hermes.
00:19:18 ◼ ► That's the terrible Spanish accent for a French word. But they're not just selling leather watch straps.
00:19:25 ◼ ► They're selling the Apple watch Hermes with leather straps on it. Like it's if they sell watches on this website, Apple watches.
00:19:33 ◼ ► And I guess, you know, Apple must bless this in some way because I don't, can you buy like a bare watch body?
00:19:39 ◼ ► I guess they could be buying them recently. But anyway. No, Apple's obviously cooperating with this and supplying them, you know?
00:19:44 ◼ ► Yeah. So it's like Apple doesn't sell leather watch straps, but they kind of do. Anyway, whatever. It's fine.
00:20:10 ◼ ► And I'm too, I don't know, stubborn, ignorant. Choose your, choose your adjective here too.
00:20:14 ◼ ► Just ask John what he got. And so I thought, ah, screw it. I'll get the fine woven case.
00:20:20 ◼ ► And I got one. And since purchasing it and then picking it up at the store on Wednesday, I have read nothing but complaints about the fine woven case.
00:20:30 ◼ ► So what I thought I would do is I have here, I have a fine woven case that I have not yet opened.
00:20:41 ◼ ► So I did prime the box because there was no, you know how they have a little tear sticker thing on the iPhone boxes?
00:20:48 ◼ ► There's nothing like that here. And so apparently brute force was the answer in order to get the damn thing open.
00:21:10 ◼ ► My wife's got like the Mulberry colored one. I wish I knew what, is it actually Mulberry?
00:21:42 ◼ ► I mean, the name is accurate because if you look real close, it looks like it's made of a woven material, but the threads are very fine.
00:21:49 ◼ ► Do you see that when you look at it? Like it's a bunch of sort of cross-hatched threads that are very, very fine.
00:21:54 ◼ ► And when I, this is my wife's case, it's not mine, but when it's, so I wasn't gonna like mess with it or whatever.
00:21:57 ◼ ► But anyway, when I took it out of the package and felt it, I was like, this feels nice or whatever, but it does not feel or look durable.
00:22:06 ◼ ► Because it's a bunch of tiny, tiny fibers that form a pattern and that pattern is very, very tiny.
00:22:19 ◼ ► And I was like, well, okay, so if that regularity is disturbed in any way, it's not going to look uniform anymore.
00:22:26 ◼ ► And that's why there's a million YouTube videos of people taking their fingernail and going...
00:22:33 ◼ ► On that point, though, like, you know, I know the Verge had a problem with that as well.
00:22:36 ◼ ► But like, if you take your fingernail and you scratch leather, it also marrs it. I guess I think the difference is...
00:22:42 ◼ ► I've got a leather case right here and I'm taking my fingernail to it right now and I'm going down it and it doesn't really mar it.
00:22:51 ◼ ► No, I mean, leather is easily scratched. The difference is that if it's not like a super deep scratch, over time, like the oils and stuff will kind of hide the look of it mostly.
00:23:00 ◼ ► So it will kind of like blend it back in to a degree. Whereas the people are saying that the fine woven doesn't really do that because it doesn't have that kind of...
00:23:08 ◼ ► Leather is a, you know, kind of a random... There's a pattern on leather and it's usually random-ish, but it's not made of a bunch of structures that crisscross each other that you can see.
00:23:19 ◼ ► Like, it's not made of individual threads of leather. It's not fine woven leather, right?
00:23:23 ◼ ► So if you mar the surface, it's just a flat surface that you're marring. You have to actually dig into leather to do it.
00:23:29 ◼ ► Whereas the fine woven thing, you just need to pull on one or two of those little threads and yank them out of position or break them.
00:23:36 ◼ ► And that's never going to self-heal or fill with oil or anything if you've broken some of the threads or moved them out of alignment.
00:23:43 ◼ ► But, I mean, the question is, do you care? Like, do you care if the back of the fine woven case eventually looks like your well-worn pair of jeans?
00:23:54 ◼ ► I was going to say this about the original iPhone. I think I said it about the iPhone 5 case, which got nicked up a lot.
00:23:59 ◼ ► And I said, best case scenario, it looks like the Millennium Falcon when you're done with it.
00:24:02 ◼ ► Worst case scenario, it looks like, I don't know, like an iPhone 5 was scratched all over it.
00:24:10 ◼ ► My wife treats her phones fairly cavalierly, chucking them into a bag, usually with other iPhones.
00:24:33 ◼ ► Right now it's perfect because she hasn't gotten her phone yet, so it's just sitting in the case waiting.
00:24:36 ◼ ► Yeah, so another thing which I need to talk about in a second is that this is the first time I've felt the Pro Max, if you will.
00:24:48 ◼ ► So the back, I actually, to be honest with you, I was coming into this having been incepted, if you will, by all the bad press coverage.
00:25:11 ◼ ► Yeah, actually, so for reference, I ordered a Peak Design case and this, and I'm going to kind of spend some time with both and kind of decide.
00:25:39 ◼ ► So, the thing that deeply bothers me about this case, and I don't know if I'm just being a turd or what,
00:25:58 ◼ ► I don't think I dig this at all. Because there's a very, very sharp contrast, both in color and especially material, between the sides and the back.
00:26:07 ◼ ► And it's like, you know how, I don't know, it was probably like 5, 10, maybe even 20 years ago now,
00:26:11 ◼ ► like two-tone houses were super popular, where you'd have a portion of the front of the house that was one color,
00:26:23 ◼ ► The back being a different color and texture than the sides, I really, really don't care for that at all.
00:26:33 ◼ ► And then, I think, I don't know, at first I wasn't that turned off by it, but now the more I'm messing with it, the more I think maybe it's going back.
00:26:41 ◼ ► I think I like the two-tone look. To be clear, they're not trying to make them the same.
00:26:44 ◼ ► They're intentionally different looking, kind of like the sides and back of the M1 iMac are different than the front.
00:26:52 ◼ ► But the sides, I felt like at least felt a little more durable than the back, because it didn't have as many loose threads to snag things on, you know what I mean?
00:27:00 ◼ ► And the buttons, I think the buttons are metal, why don't you check it with your teeth?
00:27:16 ◼ ► No, my incisors, I think they, maybe they are metal. Maybe you're right, actually. I think they might be right.
00:27:21 ◼ ► But nevertheless, big phone. It's big. Not as dramatic as I expected, like I'm not immediately turned off by it, which is probably me just trying to be positive.
00:27:32 ◼ ► But it's not altogether awful. When I hold it in what I assume would be my comfort position with the load-bearing pinky...
00:27:42 ◼ ► Anyway, I can get up to, which this isn't perhaps the best metric, but I can get my thumb up to the bottom of the camera mesa plateau, whatever we're calling it these days.
00:27:52 ◼ ► Which is, you know, what, three quarters of the way up the screen? That's not altogether terrible, but I'm going to have to really embrace the use of reachability or whatever it's called, where you slide down the home indicator and everything drops down.
00:28:03 ◼ ► Oh, is that still a thing? Yeah, it's still a thing. Oh, I forgot about that. It's got a lot of dashimy.
00:28:08 ◼ ► Yeah, well, yeah, that's exactly it. Or just be too handed. But no, this is not as egregious as I expected. I'm sorry, the size is not as egregious as I expected.
00:28:19 ◼ ► And actually, truth be told, the material on the back, I think I actually kind of like it where, you know, questions aside, I am really not digging this two-tone. I'm really, really not.
00:28:29 ◼ ► So I'm going to try it for a couple days and maybe it'll go back, you know, well within the two-week window.
00:28:33 ◼ ► But I just don't know what else to get if I don't stick with this. And I know honestly, so for whatever it's worth, I just pulled out my Peak Design case and I'm comparing it.
00:28:42 ◼ ► Like the Peak Design case from the 14s, I don't have the 15 one yet, but I think I'll have it in a couple days.
00:28:48 ◼ ► The 14 Pro Peak Design case, it actually compares, I think, very favorably to the fine woven in the sense that it, again, it has a plastic back or I mean, sorry, it has a fabricy kind of back with plastic sides.
00:29:02 ◼ ► And it also, I would say they feel of similar quality. The Peak Design one, though, the fabric aged pretty well.
00:29:11 ◼ ► Like I had this on my phone for most of the year and there's a couple of little scuffs and stuff on the fabric, but not many.
00:29:17 ◼ ► And it had, you know, I think it's, I suspect the Peak Design ones are going to be significantly more durable than fine woven.
00:29:31 ◼ ► Well, I'm not clear. I'm not as familiar with Peak Design's lineup, but there seems to be a Nomad Times by Peak Design rugged case.
00:29:39 ◼ ► But is the everyday case, it seems to have some sort of mounting apparatus on the back of it. Does that interfere with MagSafe then?
00:29:49 ◼ ► Yeah, it is fully MagSafe compatible. It actually, I think anecdotally, I think it might be a little bit stronger than MagSafe.
00:29:58 ◼ ► Yeah, that could just be, you know, maybe like the texture of the case being a little bit more grippy or something. Who knows?
00:30:06 ◼ ► I think so, yeah. I mean, that's, in fact, I think it actually might even be MagSafe compatible. Let me see.
00:30:12 ◼ ► It says a MagSafe compatible phone case with the perfect balance of sliminess, smart aesthetics, and protection.
00:30:20 ◼ ► Yeah, like I have, they sell like a bike handlebar mount and stuff that I've used with it and they have, you know, some car mounts and stuff.
00:30:26 ◼ ► So, yeah, their mounting system is fantastic. But even like most of the year, I was just using it just as a regular case because it happens to be a very nice case.
00:30:34 ◼ ► Like I had ignored it for years because I didn't think I had a need for the mounting system.
00:30:40 ◼ ► And then actually some ATP listeners wrote in to say, "Hey, this is actually a good quality regular case even if you aren't using the mount."
00:30:47 ◼ ► So I decided to try it and I found that I agreed that it actually, it's a very nice feeling non-leather case.
00:30:53 ◼ ► And it's, in my opinion, it might have been the best feeling non-leather case that I had used.
00:30:58 ◼ ► And it's certainly the nicest feeling, like in the sense of how it kind of feels like it's made of premium materials as opposed to feeling like a piece of plastic.
00:31:06 ◼ ► Oh, interesting. We need to move on. But as a final note, it looks like the everyday case for the iPhone 15 Pro Max at least, you have the option of one with a loop.
00:31:15 ◼ ► And what I think I might have shared on the program is I actually purchased my first PopSocket because I'm very scared about the size of this phone.
00:31:24 ◼ ► And so perhaps I'll often noodle on this. Maybe I'll get the one with the loop and maybe that would eliminate the need for like a PopSocket or anything like that.
00:31:34 ◼ ► Oh, well, thank you for going on this journey with me. And let's get back to our regularly scheduled follow-up.
00:31:38 ◼ ► Apple Watch has had assistive touch since 2021. I almost said 2011. Since 2021, it's been a thing in the accessibility options to do what they're, what are they calling it now? The double tap or something like that?
00:31:50 ◼ ► Yeah, we mentioned this on the last show that the feature has existed for a while, but I pulled this out specifically because I thought, OK, so the feature has been around for a while, but surely this is an improved version.
00:31:58 ◼ ► And they mentioned in the press release for, you know, for this feature that it uses the heart rate sensor and everything in addition to the accelerometer and gyroscope.
00:32:13 ◼ ► I don't know if this is an official Apple statement, but apparently the difference is that like whatever algorithm they use now is presumably better about detecting when you do the little finger thingy without you having to be so deliberate and without getting false positives.
00:32:25 ◼ ► And that it quote unquote needs the S9's double-sized neural engine to run the smarter detection algorithm.
00:32:33 ◼ ► So I don't know if that's actually true. Would it be too slow on the old one? Would it take too much power? Can they really only run it on the S9 or is this just feature differentiation?
00:32:42 ◼ ► Will it actually run on the older watches? I don't even know if they because it's not out yet. Right. Like the reviewers, the reviewers have reviewed it, but Apple has had to send them a special watch with like beta software so they could try the double tap.
00:32:54 ◼ ► Because if you get a series nine or an ultra two right now, it won't have double tap. It's one of those coming later this year features.
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00:35:00 ◼ ► Somebody who's at Holger Eilhard put together, this is so brilliant and I'm so mad I didn't think of this.
00:35:10 ◼ ► I don't know if this is the person who put it together but I tried to source it back to the beginning but you know how these images go on the internet. So if someone else made this, write in and tell us and we'll give you credit but this is as far back as I could trace it.
00:35:20 ◼ ► So there's a mechanism on Apple's website where you can compare different versions of the iPhone and Holger or whomever put together a screenshot of the iPhone 12, 13, 14 and 15.
00:35:32 ◼ ► These are non-pros mind you and Holger selected blue, whatever the closest thing to blue was.
00:35:41 ◼ ► On Apple's website you pick which color you want them to be and they all just say blue.
00:35:45 ◼ ► And if you look at the 12 it's a pretty deep blue. The 13 is I don't know an averageish blue. Then the 14 is a sky blue and the 15 is freaking white.
00:35:55 ◼ ► So as somebody else quipped, you know, Apple needs to replace the toner in their ink cartridge in their printer because my word this is one heck of a transition.
00:36:06 ◼ ► Yeah and Apple's press videos like the event video that we all watched and their website and the press photos and everything don't really show just how not colored these phones are.
00:36:18 ◼ ► Because you'd be like oh the blue one looks blue, the pink one looks pink, the yellow one looks yellow like in all Apple's things.
00:36:22 ◼ ► But then I started watching like YouTube reviewers and stuff showing the phones in their videos and I'm like wow did they send this person five white phones?
00:36:30 ◼ ► They all look white. It is an incredible challenge of like color balance. I was watching the MKBHD thing. He's got a bazillion dollars worth of camera equipment.
00:36:38 ◼ ► I'm like you could not find a camera that can show this phone as yellow. If he held up the blue one and the yellow one and said which one is blue and which one is yellow. Like those are two white phones.
00:36:46 ◼ ► Obviously the sides, it's easier to tell from the sides, but his fancy 8K red camera stuff and studio lighting was not able to discern anything but white on the back of these phones.
00:37:02 ◼ ► Definitely not. With regard to repairability, the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max are reaping the dividends of the 14 non-Pro of last year in embracing that design.
00:37:14 ◼ ► This is an article in Ars Technica which says fixing damaged rear glass on an iPhone 14 Pro or an iPhone 14 Pro Max cost you $500 or $550 respectively if you didn't buy AppleCare Plus.
00:37:26 ◼ ► That's half of what those models cost to buy brand new. For an iPhone 15 Pro or 15 Pro Max, that charge falls dramatically down to $169 or $170 or $200 depending on if you're Pro or Pro Max.
00:37:42 ◼ ► That is way better. And as someone who has broken the back glass on I think it was a 12 Pro, thank goodness I had AppleCare because otherwise that would have been ugly. So this is great news.
00:37:52 ◼ ► The iPhone 15 and 15 Pro cameras, there was some confusion amongst everyone about this.
00:38:00 ◼ ► Our friend Andreas Netzmann writes, "The iPhone 14 Pro and 15 Pro have identical main and ultrawide cameras. Same focal length, pixel or sensor size, and aperture.
00:38:09 ◼ ► If you listen closely in the event video, when Apple compares the 15 Pro main camera to the iPhone 15, they're doing that comparison to the iPhone 15, not the 14 Pro because the 14 Pro and the 15 Pro main cameras appear to be identical."
00:38:25 ◼ ► Yeah, this was kind of a bummer. I got it wrong, I think a lot of people got it wrong because Apple said, they talked about how it has a bigger sensor and yeah, it turns out it has a bigger sensor than the non-Pro 15.
00:38:39 ◼ ► We should have caught that, that's on us. But still, it's on the screen if you see it, they're not lying. It's kind of like when they do the comparisons, "Look how much faster our computer is than the last Intel one we shipped three years ago."
00:38:59 ◼ ► We see that and we go, "That's a dumb comparison so they can show a chart that shows something dramatic." But we're not fooled by it. We see the chart and it's like, "Intel and M2, I hope you're better."
00:39:09 ◼ ► But here, it got past a lot of people. We have it in the show notes here. Also, Petapixel is where a lot of the people, the two big YouTubers that I used to watch from DPReview went.
00:39:20 ◼ ► So their no joke website and they just do camera stuff, they also got confused and had to put an update on their article that said, "Update, the original story said the main camera sensor was the same, but it was bigger, but actually it's not. It's just bigger than the 15."
00:39:32 ◼ ► So Apple polled one past a lot of people, including us, but just to clarify, it's the same main camera as the 14 Pro.
00:39:39 ◼ ► Yeah, which is kind of a bummer to be honest. The big camera upgrade this year for the main camera, I was hoping it was both hardware and software, and it seems like it's really software.
00:39:52 ◼ ► And the software upgrade from the earlier reviews where it's using the 24 megapixel combo images, which is kind of these more advanced processing modes that kind of use interpolation and multiple exposures as the resolution step as well, not just the exposure step it seems.
00:40:08 ◼ ► And that seems like, I don't have the app, that seems like it's going to be a substantial improvement, but it is kind of disappointing that they kind of made it sound like they had improved the sensor from last year and really no, the sensor's the same.
00:40:21 ◼ ► Yeah, so here's the thing. We continue with this, but Andreas continues to say that one thing they did change is they changed the arrangement of the cameras because they wanted to put the two ones for spatial video next to each other, right?
00:40:31 ◼ ► So the arrangement of like where the little circles is usually people don't even know which circle is which on like which is your one X two X, but they anyway, they changed the arrangement around a little bit, right?
00:40:40 ◼ ► But what this means I think is that the camera, like the actual camera hardware in the 14 Pro and 15 Pro, not the max with the five X, but plain old 14 Pro versus plain old 15 Pro.
00:40:53 ◼ ► The camera hardware is in the little lenses and the sensors that are behind them seem to be essentially identical. Am I missing anything?
00:41:05 ◼ ► Yeah. And so here, so here it is. And by the way, the three X camera sensor has not changed in three years.
00:41:11 ◼ ► You know, the ones on the road that's been the same thing for the past three iPhone. So here we have a new iPhone with essentially the same cameras as last year's iPhone and you was like, oh, I'm going to buy the new iPhone because I'll have better cameras.
00:41:23 ◼ ► This as Margaret said, this year it does have better cameras because the camera is more than just the piece of hardware that's in the little circular thing. There's more to it than that. There's the image processor.
00:41:31 ◼ ► There's the fact that it combines the 48 and 12. Like it is a better camera. So it's not like, oh, Apple made an iPhone and the camera's not even better. No, it is. It's just not better in the way we're used to it being better, which is they actually put a different camera module, different lenses, different sensors, both right.
00:41:46 ◼ ► And on the 15 Pro, that's not the case. Obviously the 15 Pro Max has the five X camera, which is totally new, has not appeared in any previous iPhone, it's the longest zoom, you know, so on and so forth.
00:41:56 ◼ ► So that's a clear bump, but I think this is the first year I can remember where every single camera on the back of the thing did not change from the X Pro to the X plus one pro.
00:42:07 ◼ ► Just to get ahead of the well actuallys, I thought they said that they put a different coding on it or something like that.
00:42:13 ◼ ► Yeah, that's true. Yeah, you're right. They did have the glare, although the people who have tested it said, if you're wondering if you're still going to get ghosts and stuff, you still will.
00:42:20 ◼ ► Yeah, the Petapixel video review actually did a good job with that. No, I think the spirit of what you said there was completely accurate. I'm just trying to get ahead of the well actually crowd.
00:42:28 ◼ ► Yeah, and to be clear, there may be other subtle changes because it's not like they give us every technical detail. The only thing we have to do is what Andreas did, which is like, okay, it's got the same aperture, the same sensor size, like the same zoom range, the same, like every spec that they give us about it.
00:42:41 ◼ ► That's all we can compare with. For all we know, they did make improvements. Maybe the sensor reads out faster, right? Maybe it's actually the same size sensor, but it's better in some other way.
00:42:48 ◼ ► We don't know those details, but usually when there's a camera update, there's something that Apple talks about when they introduce the product to say, this is better for these reasons. Like say it has a bigger sensor, better light gathering ability.
00:43:00 ◼ ► And just like, you know, they did actually brag about the coding saying we have a better coding that helps with flaring and stuff like that. And I think it is an improvement, but it doesn't entirely get rid of it.
00:43:09 ◼ ► Yeah, and then it's worth noting as well while we're in this kind of section of the follow-up, the 5x camera in the Pro Max, the sensor is larger than the 3x camera sensor by about 25%.
00:43:20 ◼ ► Yeah, which is not a small difference. It is kind of unfortunate that the 3x camera, you know, it's always been fairly mediocre and after three years, it's still the same. Not loving that.
00:43:34 ◼ ► And the 5x, I think like, you know, again, it's probably choking out more light because of the longer zoom range and everything, but it has a bigger sensor to compensate for that.
00:43:42 ◼ ► So I imagine the 5x is going to be at least as good as the 3x and from the preliminary photos I've seen of people taking the 5x pictures on their Pro Maxes in their reviews, it looks pretty much as good or better than the 3x.
00:43:54 ◼ ► With iOS 17, the iPhone 14 Pro can also take the 48 megapixel Heath images, which are approximately 5 megabytes versus 75 megabytes per image for the 48 megapixel RAW files.
00:44:08 ◼ ► Yeah, I tried to figure out if, because I have a 14 Pro, I tried to figure out, can I take 24 megapixel pictures with the 14 Pro? It's got all the same camera hardware.
00:44:17 ◼ ► It doesn't seem like there's, I haven't figured out how to do that yet. So yeah, you can take, once you up there to iOS 17, you can take 48 megapixel Heath images, which is nice.
00:44:26 ◼ ► And like now in the little control in the camera lets you say, do you want to take a 48 megapixel RAW, tap it again, 48 megapixel Heath.
00:44:33 ◼ ► I just wish there was a 24 megapixel option. Like obviously this, not obviously, I feel like the hardware in this phone could do it.
00:44:41 ◼ ► It would probably be slower because it's doing more processing and it doesn't have the, you know, the A17 Pro in there, which presumably has extra stuff to do this.
00:44:50 ◼ ► So this could be market segmentation or they could just decide that the performance wasn't adequate to do 24 megapixel on the 14 Pro.
00:44:57 ◼ ► But when you say like, oh, the 15 Pro, the camera is better, the camera system, the overall thing is better.
00:45:03 ◼ ► A big part of that is the 24 megapixel thing. And if they backported that to the 14 Pro, now it's going to be like, well, what is better about the 15 Pro camera versus the 14 Pro?
00:45:17 ◼ ► So I feel like this differentiation of keeping the 24 megapixel on the 15 Pro, whether legitimate or not, does really put, is the biggest separation between the two really.
00:45:31 ◼ ► And, but it doesn't have the same camera. Like that's the whole thing. When they were comparing it, they were comparing it to the 15.
00:45:40 ◼ ► What the 15 has is, in some ways, the sensor is better than the 14 Pro from the reviews I've seen, but it's also smaller.
00:45:50 ◼ ► Yeah. But I think ultimately what we're seeing here is that most of the camera advancement here is software that is being fairly artificially locked to the new phones, which is, I mean, look, the Apple has done this before.
00:46:03 ◼ ► Like this, this is total and it's look at their prerogative to do it if they want to. I don't, I don't love it, but they've done it before. And you know, oh, well.
00:46:11 ◼ ► Yeah. So I'll put some links in the show notes to some more reviews of the cameras. We'll put the PetaPixel review from the two guys from the DP review due to the DP review YouTube videos, sorry, I like, and the DP review itself still alive. They have a written review about the cameras.
00:46:34 ◼ ► Apparently Apple has put together a whole list of things you can do, but one of them is use a display, which is super cool.
00:46:43 ◼ ► Yeah. Like who, like, this is one of the reasons why I'm, I was, I've been so excited with the rumors of moving to USB-C and why I'm so happy that we are finally now having moved to USB-C, uh, is that there are so many, you know, seemingly edge case use cases that you, that you'll now be able to do.
00:47:03 ◼ ► Either that you couldn't do it all before, or that would require some really ridiculous hardware adapters and stuff to do before. And this is one of those things. Yeah. Your iPhone can now just dump out video over USB-C. I thought the lightning port couldn't do that. That's awesome.
00:47:20 ◼ ► Yeah. The lightning port didn't have some kind of weird video out capabilities. I forget back in the day.
00:47:24 ◼ ► Remember, wasn't that the one that panic had taken apart where it was doing like an AirPlay thing. I don't think I'll be able to find a link for the show notes, but it was like AirPlaying or something like that. I think maybe even before there was such a thing as AirPlay into like some sort of server within the cable, the dongle itself, it was bananas.
00:47:42 ◼ ► Uh, but anyway, yeah, so there's a support document, which will link in the show notes, charge and connect with the USB-C connector and your iPhone 15, you can charge your phone. You can connect your iPhone to iPad, Mac, and other computers. You can charge other devices with your iPhone 15, play audio, connect to displays, monitors, USB-C displays, HDMI displays, connect to other devices, including CarPlay compatible cars, external storage, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:48:02 ◼ ► So I've seen a lot of people connecting their phones to the iPhone 15 or 15 pro or pro max to things to see which thing will charge which thing. Uh, and you know, some of the reviews are saying if you connect to USB-C iPhones, the one with more charge will charge the lesser one.
00:48:18 ◼ ► Cause I somehow negotiate this. Other people were confused because they said when I tried this, the phone charged it. But when I tried that, the thing charged the phone and I couldn't figure it out. I recall, and we talked about this ages ago, that the order that you plug them in is potentially a factor. And so far I haven't seen any reviewer even mention that as a factor.
00:48:35 ◼ ► So if you are testing it yourself, uh, consider testing whether the order that you plug the items in makes a difference. I don't remember if it does or not, but it's one more thing to try.
00:48:44 ◼ ► Yeah, if I recall correctly, I, you know, keep in mind that the iPhone 15 and 15 pro being USB-C, they seem to be fairly standard USB-C PD compatible devices. And so I believe there is a protocol in USB-C power delivery that allows the devices to negotiate like who has more power here and who needs power here.
00:49:07 ◼ ► And forgive me for those of you who know more about this than I do if I'm butchering it, but I believe there is some kind of protocol for that. So it would not surprise me if Apple implemented that protocol. And certainly yes, the order of the order that you plug things in from what we heard in the past is one of those things where like, you know, if you have like two USB-C batteries and you want one to charge the other, typically I believe the protocol is you connect the source battery first and then next you connect the destination.
00:49:34 ◼ ► Yeah. And by the way, all these features that we're talking about, this is part of the benefit of going to USB-C. It's not like something magical Apple did. This is part of the spec for USB-C. All the USB-C devices we have and how they do charging and how they, how USB-C supports video out and how you connect monitors to Macs with USB-C. This is not, you know, this is part of the spec.
00:49:51 ◼ ► So they're reaping the benefit of moving to a standard that already has these capabilities and people are worried, oh, Apple's going to implement it. They're just going to have a USB-C shaped hole, but all you can be able to do is charge. No, they implemented full USB-C compliant with the standard as you would expect they would because they're one of the early adopters of USB-C. They've been selling USB-C devices for ages now. And when they brought it to the phone, they brought all the features with it.
00:50:14 ◼ ► Yeah. And this, and this is why I don't care that the cameras are the same for the pro. I just, I want USB-C and titanium so much.
00:50:21 ◼ ► I hear that. Something I would like to talk to you folks about perhaps next year, I don't think we have time for it today, but especially next year when, when for those of us who are idiots like us, they upgrade every year. What is the best way to do a phone to phone transfer? Is it a Thunderbolt cable between them? Is it a couple of USB-C ethernet adapters?
00:50:39 ◼ ► I think for this year, the best thing is probably just to do the wireless stance that most of us have done in prior years because of the 14 Pro. But next year, I think all bets are off. Like there, there may be all sorts of different approaches that might make this quite a bit faster. And I am not looking forward to my multi hour transfer from one phone to the other tomorrow. So we'll have to revisit this next September.
00:51:02 ◼ ► Yeah. I think some people did wire transfers this year, but obviously the source phone is going to be USB-C USB two speeds no matter what, because you know what I mean? So it's going to be slow, but I think it already does work over a wire. So I imagine it would continue to work over the wire and only it would go 10 gigabits instead of 480 megabits. But yeah, we'll find out next year.
00:51:20 ◼ ► Yeah. It occurred to me just a little while ago that I should prepare myself for this. So I am currently attempting to back up my phone to my computer because wait a second, I could put one of those high speed Thunderbolt cables between my computer and the new iPhone. And maybe I can do a restore from finder in order to, in order to get the new phone set up in less than two hours.
00:51:40 ◼ ► I don't know if I do either, but you know, can't hurt to have a backup just in case. Alrighty. Moving right along. Praveen Kankatnila would like to know if you could follow up John and elucidate why the USB A to C adapters are fire hazards, which is what you said last episode. Praveen says, I tried looking this up, but couldn't find a satisfying answer. I've used a ton of these over the past few years. Now I'm a bit worried. What's going on here, man?
00:52:05 ◼ ► Lots of people wrote in saying, I use these connectors. Should I be worried? And they would send me links to their connectors often. And they're not the connectors I was talking about. And it's confusing to talk about, but we will link in the show notes. One of these types of adapters is basically a USB A plug, like the rectangular metal thing that can only go in one way, but is externally symmetrical. And then a USB C shaped hole in the back of it.
00:52:29 ◼ ► And most people were saying the reverse. It was like a USB C plug with a USB A shaped hole on it, which are much more common. The reason I was saying they're fire hazards, I'm going on Amazon and reading the reviews, trying to find a reputable one. And every single one I went to had some fairly, I mean, significant amount of one star reviews that said melted, caught fire, never worked, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff.
00:52:51 ◼ ► And I was like, surely there's going to be one of these that doesn't have melted or caught fire in multiple melted or caught fire. But no, they all did. And that's what I was saying is I couldn't find one from like a reputable brand where I could, if there was even a melted or caught fire and say, well, they maybe just got unlucky or whatever. Right.
00:53:07 ◼ ► Also, when I was searching for this and trying to find ones to link to, we have some of these in the house already and our house hasn't burned down. My wife bought them. I don't remember. Maybe when she got her USB C iPad originally, she's got one that looks similar to the one that we're going to link in the show notes and she's used them and nothing terrible has happened.
00:53:24 ◼ ► I was disappointed by the idea that seemingly no well-known reputable brand makes an adapter like this, which is why I was suggesting that people just buy a cable because you can buy a cable from a well-known brand that has the two ends that you want it to have.
00:53:39 ◼ ► And that will solve your problem. These tiny little adapters that just turn a USB A shaped hole into a USB C shaped hole for you. That's what they're doing for you. Essentially, they're conveniently sized and they just do the minimal job.
00:53:50 ◼ ► But there's something about, I don't know, maybe they're doing it in too small space. Maybe they get hot. Maybe they're just made very cheaply. And they're like, they're like $8. I was like sorting by price, highest to lowest, which I often do on Amazon to say, show me the one that's not garbage.
00:54:02 ◼ ► And then, you know, you find that $10,000 item at the top, like no squirrel, squirrel, squirrels, somewhere between $8 and $10,000 is the one I'm looking for. And I just couldn't find it. So I ordered cables. So anyway, I don't need any of these. You don't have to send me suggestions, but that's why I was scared off of these tiny little connectors.
00:54:17 ◼ ► They're small, cheap and plentiful, but they all have scary reviews. And I already own some.
00:54:22 ◼ ► You can kind of figure out like, you know, maybe one of the issues, because, you know, first of all, the reason why reputable brands don't sell those is probably because they're out of the USB specs.
00:54:31 ◼ ► Yeah, it's probably, you're not allowed to make something that's according to the spec.
00:54:35 ◼ ► Maybe like, you know, if you're a USB IF member or certified or something, maybe you actually aren't allowed to make these, but at least you probably wouldn't want to at least. But think about some of the conditions you could create with that kind of thing. So for instance, you could plug your Apple, you know, 100 watt USB-C power adapter into the wall, then use one of those adapters to feed that 100 watts of power into a USB-A port on something. That's weird.
00:54:58 ◼ ► And, you know, that could be a problem. And you could figure like, it may be possible to create some weird scenario like that, that could put a lot of voltage where it shouldn't be or something like that. And I know there's different safety checks in place.
00:55:11 ◼ ► I mean, you can do that with a USB-C to A cable as well. But yeah, but anyway, so I'm sure it's reasons like that, that probably prohibit a lot of these things from being made by any reputable company.
00:55:23 ◼ ► Let's talk about material science, the iPhone 15 Pro and diffusion bonding. Robert Newman writes in, "During this week's Apple event, it was explained that the titanium bands of the iPhone 15 Pro are diffusion bonded to an aluminum substructure. As someone that has some professional hands-on experience with diffusion bonding, quick aside, loving our coverage."
00:55:41 ◼ ► The amount of different professions that our listeners are in is astounding. It makes me so happy. It really does. Robert continues, "I was astounded to hear this. I didn't know there was a practical process for diffusion bonding.
00:55:52 ◼ ► Titanium to aluminum. Diffusion bonding involves three variables, pressure of the bond line, temperature and time. The term welding is usually used for processes where metal is melted, but diffusion bonding is different because there's no melting.
00:56:05 ◼ ► When two materials are pressed tightly together, some atoms migrate out of one material into the other. This can even happen at room temperature, albeit very, very slowly. Raising the temperature greatly speeds up the diffusion process so that a strong bond can be formed relatively quickly.
00:56:17 ◼ ► The diffusion bonding temperature is always below the melting points of the materials." That was all news to me and very interesting.
00:56:23 ◼ ► And Robert had some other part that I cut out talking about ways that he thought diffusion bonding might be able to be done. Like part of the way they squish the materials together is using metals that expand and contract at different temperatures to sort of make like a vice where when you heat it up, one of the things expands or contracts faster or slower than the other, causing pressure.
00:56:40 ◼ ► And so you could use the materials themselves to push themselves together while you're heating it up to get the heat for the diffusion bonding, but the heat also expands and contracts things at different rates, causing them to squish together.
00:56:52 ◼ ► It was interesting speculation about how they might do it. But yeah, diffusion bonding, of course, we have an expert in the audience on it. And I do wonder, is it just, you know, does Robert, had Robert just not heard of diffusion bonding titanium to aluminum or has Apple actually innovated in this area?
00:57:06 ◼ ► Could be either way. All right, let's talk about battery life and three nanometers. And a couple of people have asked about this. And I think presumably John was, you know, having some thoughts about this.
00:57:18 ◼ ► It seems like we're getting the same battery life claims as the predecessors, as the 14 Pro and Pro Max. What's up with that? And only a 10% CPU performance increase. So what's up with that? John, tell us about three nanometers. Is it already a disappointment? What's going on here?
00:57:33 ◼ ► Yeah, so we're talking about three nanometers, like, oh, we're talking about the phones or any of this stuff is coming. It's like, well, when three nanometers comes, we will reap the benefits of a silicon shrink. The features on the chip will be smaller. The chips themselves will take less power for the same number of transistors. And obviously, Apple will use that to put more transistors on, which they can use those new transistors to add more powerful features.
00:57:53 ◼ ► The same stuff we normally get from a silicon shrink. But when these new iPhones came out, Apple did not really spend any time saying, they said, oh, look at our new three nanometer process. But they didn't say, all right, well, what do we get from that?
00:58:07 ◼ ► Do these phones use dramatically less power and therefore get longer battery life? No, their battery life claims were the same as everything else. Are they dramatically faster? These are their Apple's claims in the event.
00:58:16 ◼ ► They said 10 percent CPU performance increase and they put on the slide improved branch prediction and wider decode and execution engines. Those two things could account for a 10 percent CPU increase.
00:58:29 ◼ ► Right. And they said 20 percent GPU performance increase. But of course, they added 20 percent more GPU cores. Yes.
00:58:35 ◼ ► Yeah. OK. That makes sense. And they added ray tracing features, which is more things. And there are improvements to the A17 Pro that I think the neural engine is once again faster and bigger and better or whatever.
00:58:47 ◼ ► But the sort of what we would expect from a shrink is like, OK, we did all that. But also, like it either uses less power or you've clocked it higher with the power over your head and that we'd get a bigger performance increase.
00:58:58 ◼ ► There's been some investigation of like, what is the A17 Pro? Revenge in this on Twitter said, matching the code names with the comments.
00:59:07 ◼ ► He's looking at source code. It appears that H14, that's the code name, corresponds to the A15 chip and H15 corresponds to the A16 chip.
00:59:14 ◼ ► That's not confusing at all. However, instead of instead of H16, there is a comment called H16 call.
00:59:21 ◼ ► Considering that call is the code name for A17, it is suggested that it is suggested great passive voice that the A17 Pro might be essentially based on the A16 architecture with cache optimization, clock upgrades and additional GPU cords.
00:59:35 ◼ ► So what they're trying to say is this is kind of a, you know, S6, S7, S8 watch chip situation.
00:59:43 ◼ ► Obviously, every A whatever chip is based on the previous one, but there's some minimum amount of architectural change that we expect when they're incrementing that number going from the A14 to the A15 to the A16.
00:59:55 ◼ ► We expect these cores are a little bit better. They're not exactly the same as the cores were on the other thing. The GPU cores are better than exactly the same.
01:00:02 ◼ ► Now, the A17 does that. The GPU cores are supposedly all new, right? They have ray tracing features. This is the fancy new GPU cores.
01:00:09 ◼ ► So it definitely qualifies. But the CPU, the power cores and efficiency cores, those cores seem to be pretty much identical with the only things that Apple mentioned being improved branch prediction, which is the thing, you know, so they're not exactly identical.
01:00:21 ◼ ► The branch predictor is a part of the CPU and wider decode and execution engines also important parts of the CPU.
01:00:28 ◼ ► But that the Apple itself is only saying 10% performance increase. Now people are benchmarking these and sometimes getting another getting preliminary benchmark, sometimes getting better numbers than Apple promise.
01:00:38 ◼ ► So maybe Apple is under promising on these, but it doesn't seem like a huge advantage. And we don't know because Apple didn't mention whether the rumors about the support chips in the new iPhones using less power because they're on shrinks.
01:00:50 ◼ ► We don't know if that's true. Apple didn't say it. I haven't seen a teardown. No one has confirmed or denied that. All we know is what Apple claimed and they claimed pretty much the same battery life as you got before.
01:00:59 ◼ ► 10% better CPU, 20% better GPU, which is nothing to sneeze at, but this is supposed to be a year with a shrink. So here's what I want to throw out there for us to think about as the year winds on and as we go into next year.
01:01:10 ◼ ► TSMC's three nanometer process. Does it provide power savings? I know it's a dumb thing to say. I was like, of course we need to do a shrink of power savings.
01:01:21 ◼ ► You have to be more precise. Basically, does it take fewer watts per instruction than five nanometer did? Because obviously, you use this benefit to your advantage.
01:01:34 ◼ ► You say, okay, well, five nanometer, we can do more instruction for the same number of watts of power and we're going to use that to clock the chip higher because the power usage increases there.
01:01:44 ◼ ► We're going to add more cores. We're going to make the chip bigger. We're going to use more transistors. I'm not saying they should just get lower and lower power over time, but you should get a dividend from it.
01:01:54 ◼ ► So they added 20% more GPU cores. So that's a dividend. Those GPU cores weren't in the A16 and now there's one more in the A17 and we get the same battery life.
01:02:05 ◼ ► So that could be them reaping this advantage. But they spent very little time making any kind of claims about the power saving advantage of three nanometer.
01:02:14 ◼ ► And we read off of TSMC's own marketing slides where they say, whatever it was, 15% power reduction and 30% more speed or whatever.
01:02:22 ◼ ► So this is a thing for us to watch as Apple ships new three nanometer products to see if we can discern is three nanometer better than five nanometer in terms of power usage per instruction executed.
01:02:36 ◼ ► And I'm not sure how we can determine that, but I figured as more and more three nanometer things come out, we'll have more and more evidence either for or against the idea that three nanometer may not be as big leap over five nanometers as we thought.
01:02:48 ◼ ► Continuing along, our friend Eric Wielander has a pretty good and pretty brief video with regard to the Thread Radio that is in the 15 Pro.
01:03:04 ◼ ► And the thing that struck me the most was that apparently the way Thread works is some device needs to act as what's called a border router to bridge basically between the IP network and the Thread network.
01:03:17 ◼ ► And the iPhone 15 Pro could go around that because it can act as its own border router.
01:03:26 ◼ ► I'm probably getting the details wrong on this, but the spirit of what I'm saying should be accurate.
01:03:30 ◼ ► And so you can check out Eric's video, which I'll link in the show notes, if you're more interested in that.
01:03:37 ◼ ► Apple 2030. Apparently it has always been a thing. Well, maybe not always, but you know what I mean.
01:03:44 ◼ ► It is not a new logo. It's not a new brand. And Josh Anglesburg writes, "I found this Apple press release from the recent event that clarifies their carbon neutral goal, which reads, 'By 2030, Apple has plans to be 100% carbon neutral across its entire manufacturing supply chain in all product life cycles.'
01:04:02 ◼ ► That means that every Apple device sold from component manufacturing, assembly, transport, customer use, and charging all the way through recycling and material recovery will have a net zero climate impact."
01:04:14 ◼ ► And you can see more detail about this in question three of their environment FAQ. We will link both of those things in the show notes.
01:04:20 ◼ ► Yeah, this was dug out of, what is it, the AirPods 2 second generation press release, right?
01:04:25 ◼ ► You would think it would be so easy to find and I was searching for it. I was searching on the show last night. I was searching for it.
01:04:33 ◼ ► But I would be shouting this from the rooftops because it is not what I expected last show.
01:04:42 ◼ ► But for all their products, that's what they mean by carbon neutral? Yes, that's what they mean.
01:04:46 ◼ ► They basically mean from cradle to grave, everything needed to build it, to ship it to you, everything you do with it the whole time you own it, and then reclaiming it and recycling it.
01:05:01 ◼ ► Obviously they haven't achieved their goal yet. They're just barely getting some watches and some configurations as their first sort of products.
01:05:10 ◼ ► So I would suggest to them that they bold those things in their claims and make it easier to find in their FAQ.
01:05:17 ◼ ► Because yeah, it's not just about building them. It's not just about having factories that run on solar panels.
01:05:21 ◼ ► That's not what it's about. It's about the entire impact of this product they're trying to offset.
01:05:26 ◼ ► Which is incredible. And I definitely admire that. It's a heck of a goal. And I hope they can reach it.
01:05:32 ◼ ► All right. Carlos writes, "Continuing the trend of having listeners with every single career" -- again, makes me so happy --
01:05:39 ◼ ► "and work at a large environmental NGO" -- what is that? Non-Government Organization --
01:05:43 ◼ ► "which implements some of those Apple-funded projects mentioned in the video that protect the world's soil, plant, and trees.
01:05:52 ◼ ► Some examples, US government's 30x30 initiative to conserve 30% of the US's land, oceans, and freshwater by 2030.
01:05:59 ◼ ► The US Inflation Reduction Act has been designed to meet 2030 emissions reductions targets.
01:06:13 ◼ ► 2030 is going to be a hell of a year filled with disappointments about the Paris Agreement.
01:06:29 ◼ ► "Are you going to be at Apple 10 more years?" And Tim Cook said, "10 more years? I... probably not."
01:06:42 ◼ ► Yeah, this is the last show when I made a joke about the 2030 thing of executives being long gone.
01:06:50 ◼ ► But I didn't do the math in my head. I didn't remember when this interview was, so I looked it up.
01:06:57 ◼ ► In fact, it would be a great career topper for him to go out and say, "Hey, we've achieved our 2030 goal, and I'm also retiring."
01:07:15 ◼ ► No, let me do this one. All right, so this is something that's not really related to the Apple event.
01:07:26 ◼ ► I was reading Gruber's post on Daring Fireball about the Apple event, and I came across this passage,
01:07:34 ◼ ► He's talking about the new GPUs and the Apple things and how Apple is emphasizing the GPUs
01:07:38 ◼ ► and how they had a whole section with gaming or whatever. So here's quoting from Gruber.
01:07:51 ◼ ► And then he says, "I firmly believe Apple wants to do to NVIDIA with GPUs what they did to Intel with CPUs.
01:07:58 ◼ ► Match or surpass them in pure performance and utterly blow them away in performance per watt."
01:08:20 ◼ ► and what he says is, "Match or surpass them in pure performance and utterly blow them away in performance per watt."
01:08:34 ◼ ► where we're constantly going on and on about how amazing Apple Silicon is, and it is amazing,
01:08:43 ◼ ► And the two ways that, you know, the one way we always talk about is, oh, performance per watt,
01:09:03 ◼ ► If you look at Apple's best single-core score, which is apparently the M2 Max on Geekbench,
01:09:36 ◼ ► We all start to think that that's true, that Apple Silicon is better than Intel in every front,
01:09:50 ◼ ► Well, I'm saying it because Gruber specifically pointed out, in contrast to performance per watt,
01:10:26 ◼ ► I'm going to burn through my battery in five seconds," and it throttles way, way down, right?
01:10:33 ◼ ► and you'd have to say, "Match or surpass Intel in "per performance" and laptops when they're not plugged in."
01:10:49 ◼ ► But they don't make the pure fastest, and by the way, Intel has been behind in many reasons.
01:10:59 ◼ ► They're doing a little bit better on that. We'll link in the show on Sunar's technical article about Intel's upcoming laptop chips,
01:11:06 ◼ ► They're not getting in through the animator, because Apple bought all that up, so poor Intel.
01:11:17 ◼ ► If it's important to you to have a mobile 3D rig where you take your laptop somewhere onsite and you plug it in,
01:11:25 ◼ ► you put it in your luggage, you go, you land there, you open up your thing and you plug it in and you want the fastest possible laptop,
01:11:30 ◼ ► Intel has that. Intel has the fastest possible laptop, because they have the fastest possible chip.
01:11:35 ◼ ► Yes, you have to keep it plugged in, but if you care about the high end, Apple is just not competing there anymore.
01:11:56 ◼ ► I'm not saying that Apple is doing anything wrong, especially when it comes to laptops,
01:12:01 ◼ ► Like, Apple's making the right trade-offs. Again, I think they have the best laptop things.
01:12:05 ◼ ► But don't be fooled into thinking that because Apple Silicon is amazing and especially amazing for laptops,
01:12:24 ◼ ► "All the pictures of Marco's car as rapidly changing chapter art made me wonder how those work.
01:12:33 ◼ ► I believe MP3 chapters don't have much space allocated to them, so I can't imagine that you can put the whole image in.
01:12:43 ◼ ► if someone wanted to generate an individual image URL for each person and/or point in the episode."
01:12:51 ◼ ► Great question, and exactly right on that concern about dynamically loaded images being potential tracking pixels and privacy innovators.
01:13:06 ◼ ► Chapter images are part of the ID3 tag, and so they're size limited only by the size of how big an ID3 tag can be.
01:13:14 ◼ ► And if you really stretch it, ID3 tags can be very large. Many, many megabytes at least.
01:13:25 ◼ ► It's simply that you are therefore forcing everyone to download all of those images as part of the MP3,
01:13:31 ◼ ► so you don't want to spend a huge amount of the file size as images when that's really not what most people are there for.
01:13:44 ◼ ► There was one episode where I put something like 70 images as chapter art to form an animation every couple of seconds during our theme song.
01:13:51 ◼ ► So that was when we embedded Jonathan Mann's butterfly keyboard song. We'll link to that somehow.
01:13:58 ◼ ► So anyway, it is possible to do that. They all fit, and it's fine. They're all part of the file.
01:14:03 ◼ ► And in fact, the way I do it is I just shrink them down to be maybe a few hundred kilobytes each.
01:14:10 ◼ ► Because the thing is, artwork that you're embedding in an MP3 for chapter artwork or whatever is usually viewed at pretty small sizes.
01:14:18 ◼ ► So if you just use JPEG with pretty low quality settings, like 40% quality on JPEG, you can usually get pretty much anything down to a few hundred kilobytes.
01:14:27 ◼ ► And in the sizes at which they're being viewed, it's totally fine. No one really notices the problem.
01:14:32 ◼ ► So anyway, and interestingly, what I like about this question is that Joel correctly identifies, like, if you have a spec that you're trying to get past to have podcast players load images dynamically during playback, that is absolutely a potential privacy hole.
01:14:55 ◼ ► So that's why there are a few, like, proposed specs and alleged standards out there, standards nobody supports, for things like loading images via URL upon playback or during playback.
01:15:11 ◼ ► Because right now, the way podcast ad privacy works is, yeah, they'll get your IP when you download the file, because they have to, but after that, they'll get nothing from you.
01:15:20 ◼ ► They don't know, did you play the episode? Where did you play the episode? How long after downloading did you play the episode? How far into the episode did you get?
01:15:30 ◼ ► They would love to have that information, and in an ideal world, that sounds reasonable, however, we all know it would be abused like crazy, because that's what ad tech people do, and so I don't want to do that.
01:15:41 ◼ ► So anyway, Overcast will not support any standard that loads stuff dynamically like that, unless I can do it in some kind of privacy protecting way, and frankly, I don't see that really happening, so here we are.
01:15:51 ◼ ► All right, M.R. writes, "Can you explain how binning works with silicon chips? Do manufacturers count on X number of chips being defective? How do they count on the defect being the same?"
01:16:05 ◼ ► They see the results of how good is our fabbing. If they could get 100% of them not to be defective, they would, but they can't.
01:16:12 ◼ ► So there's always some percentage of defects, and they want to drive that down to be lowest.
01:16:20 ◼ ► What they do is they partition off pieces of the chips that they can essentially say, "Hey, if anything is wrong in this whole GPU core, basically cut its bridges to the mainland."
01:16:28 ◼ ► I think they have, like, you know, I don't know if they have, like, tiny little fuses that they blow in the thing, but I don't know what the technology is, but essentially they separate it, they electrically separate it from the whole rest of the chip, and they just disable it entirely.
01:16:39 ◼ ► But you don't know where the error was in that GPU core. It could have been anywhere. They could have messed up all sorts of places.
01:16:47 ◼ ► But there could be problem defects with the chip that span regions or that go in areas that they can't remove.
01:16:53 ◼ ► Like, there's essential parts of the chip that kind of have to be there and have to work, and if those are busted, the whole thing's gone.
01:16:58 ◼ ► So, yeah, that's how it works. Every chip that comes off, they will test to see which parts of it work and which part of it don't.
01:17:05 ◼ ► And sometimes, if you're lucky, one of the parts that doesn't work is a part that you can separate off because you decided ahead of time when you design the chip, "We're able to disable the GPU cores," or this or that, the other thing.
01:17:16 ◼ ► And if everything else works, that's still a good chip, and so you bin that one and say, not bin as in the UK thing of throwing it in the garbage can, but you say, if you separate them into different bins, "Here are the ones where everything works.
01:17:28 ◼ ► Here's the one where everything works except for one of the GPU cores. Here's the one where everything works except for one of the CPU cores," or whatever part of the chip you have decided ahead of time that if we have a defect only in here, we can isolate that and still have a good chip.
01:17:41 ◼ ► Yeah, there's also different types of binning, so that's like if you can disable a whole core and separate out the defect and the rest of it still works.
01:17:49 ◼ ► There's also, Apple doesn't really do this as far as I can tell anymore, but frequency binning, where this is still a thing I think in most other places, especially in the Intel world, certainly in the GPU world, I assume, where you have the idea of, like, you run this chip,
01:18:05 ◼ ► and it turns out this chip at the highest power level and spec that you are selling this product line at, maybe it doesn't pass the tests, but maybe if you lower the clock speed down to 4.0 GHz instead of 4.2 GHz or whatever, if you lower the peak speed down, maybe it works at that speed.
01:18:24 ◼ ► So that's how they can sell slower speed chips if they sell multiple speeds. Again, Apple doesn't really do this with their chips, but Intel sure does, so this is one of the reasons why PC CPUs are sold at different clock speeds.
01:18:38 ◼ ► That way they can manufacture them, and as far as I know, I don't know if this is still the case today, this might be an overly simplistic view from the past, but they would try to make all of them meet all the highest specs, and then they would realize,
01:18:50 ◼ ► "Okay, well, only 10% of them actually can perform at 4.2 GHz, so we're going to have that be the high speed that we sell, we'll sell that one for more money, and all the ones that don't pass that but pass at 4.0, we'll sell that as the next speed down, and then maybe we'll sell 3.6 as the next speed down for those that didn't even pass that," etc.
01:19:07 ◼ ► Yeah, that's part of the—when we think about silicon chips and the whole world of computers as being like, you know, digital logic, right? But in the end, these are analog devices. That's why things like how good your cooling system is, and how well manufactured the tiny little features on the chip are, like how carefully arranged all the atoms are with all the pieces and traces on there, it's an analog device in the end.
01:19:30 ◼ ► They're little analog transistors in there, and they're manufactured in essentially an analog process, and each one is its own special little snowflake in many ways, and that's why you have to kind of test them and say, "Well, this one runs okay at this speed at this temperature, but if it gets a little bit too hot, it crashes, so if we bring the speed down," like it's very sort of—that's what the overclocking world is, very much like doing hot-rodding cars, right?
01:19:55 ◼ ► Where you have an engine, an internal combustion engine, it's clearly an analog device, how fast can I make it go? Do we need to put new lighter pistons in, stronger connecting rods, right? You know, bigger intake, like you're trying to see how fast will it go before it blows up, and just like hot-rodding, these overclockers, they run it until it doesn't work anymore, like, "Okay, let's dial it back a little bit," and they just get just at the ragged edge of how fast can I make this go, and if I put liquid nitrogen on it, and then, you know, super cool, it didn't crank up the clock speed, how long does it work before the game crashes?
01:20:24 ◼ ► Obviously, that's not the way most of us want to live, and I imagine that's part of the appeal to Apple, of just saying, "Look, we don't do clock speed binning," like, what that means is when we get these Apple Silicon chips, some of them could go much higher clock than others, because that variation still exists in the chips.
01:20:39 ◼ ► They're just not testing for it and selling based on it, but there is the same variety in clock speed variability. You know, obviously, different chips have different ranges of where they'll work, but if there was -- I don't think it's a big Apple Silicon overclocking community, but hey, you could get one, and you can get a lucky one.
01:20:55 ◼ ► If you could crank that clock speed up and say, "You know what? My Mac laptop or Mac Studio or whatever is actually stable at stock speed plus whatever gigahertz," right, or you put a bigger cooler on it or whatever, so it is interesting that Apple has chosen not to do that, because back in the Intel days, they absolutely would, and in the PowerPC days as well, because they were buying their chips from somebody else, and Intel bins like that, and Intel charges more for the ones that go higher speeds, so Apple will hopefully pass that on to us with their own little markup added.
01:21:24 ◼ ► All right, Jason Filero writes with regard to our salute to lightning from a couple of weeks back, "Does the industry have something on the horizon that would eventually supersede USB-C's form factor? It seems like a reliable and, dare I say, timeless design. If there would be a revision, what might that look like? I'm personally curious from a water-resistant standpoint and connector design to make things difficult to snap off.
01:21:45 ◼ ► Or do you guys think that the slim oval form is here to stay and that pin designs and faster chipsets will allow for faster data or charging in the future?" I don't know. It's a great question. I get the vibe that we're going to have this physical connector for easily five, probably ten or fifteen years. I mean, look at USB-A. It's been around freaking forever.
01:22:06 ◼ ► Yeah, that's the thing. USB-A, I think, is the biggest argument for why I think USB-C has a pretty long life ahead of it, because USB-A came out 25 years ago, approximately, and it's only in the last few years being really replaced in a widespread way.
01:22:25 ◼ ► And it's still taking forever. Before it came on, I was watching another review of a 2024 model of car that has in it USB-C and USB-A ports, because they know some people still have the A. It's taken so long to get it. Even though the successor has been here for years and years, the transition has taken a really long time.
01:22:42 ◼ ► People are still selling brand new cars with both A and C ports, because some people still have A stuff. Is it going to be 30 years before the A ports are finally gone? I can tell you, it didn't take that long for the 30-pin connectors to disappear, although I know you still go to the hotels and see the 30-pin connector next to the thing in the nightstand.
01:22:59 ◼ ► But anyway, we'll really know the transition is done when no cars sold come with A ports anymore, but today is not this day.
01:23:06 ◼ ► Of course, this is the tech business. I think it is very, very likely that USB-C will be replaced down the road, but I really don't think that's any time that we need to worry about now.
01:23:23 ◼ ► It would not surprise me if we are happy with USB-C, generally speaking, for at least 15 years. When you look at how USB-A advanced over time, and you can see some of this has already happened with USB-C, what do you do?
01:23:39 ◼ ► You take the existing pin out and you make it run faster. You adjust some fine electrical properties of how we use the X number of pins that are used for data. Or you introduce different protocols where you use the pins in entirely different ways.
01:23:55 ◼ ► You kind of reconfigure them in logic to say, "Now we're going to use these three wires this way and these three wires this way. Using this protocol, we'll speak at this bit rate over these wires, and using this error correction protocol, we can squeeze a bit more out of it."
01:24:10 ◼ ► You've already seen that with USB-C so far. USB-C, to its detriment, has a billion different protocols and cable types and everything else, as we talk about, but the connector is largely the same.
01:24:25 ◼ ► You can add more pins if you're really clever about it, but that gets a little bit tricky and that's not commonly done. USB-A did last a long time because we were able to play those tricks.
01:24:40 ◼ ► Ethernet is also a very, very old wiring standard and we've been able to play different tricks with it over the years to occasionally raise its data rate and make it last a long time. There's really nothing on the horizon to replace it at the moment either, because we still have decent headroom there.
01:24:58 ◼ ► Similar to that, I think USB-C, we've already had multiple data rate standards for it, we've already had multiple protocol and mode standards for how the different wires could be used and at what speeds and everything.
01:25:13 ◼ ► So I think we're going to just see that progression over time. And down the road, yes, of course it will be replaced by something else. The tech industry doesn't stand around still forever, but there's a lot of headroom built into the USB-C spec, there's a lot of power delivery possible, there's a lot of data delivery possible, there's a lot of different modes those pins can be in, there's a lot of pins to work with.
01:25:35 ◼ ► So we can have a wish list of things we might like to improve about it. Yeah, it would be nice to have great water resistance, yeah it would be nice to have a connector that would be more difficult to snap off or whatever.
01:25:48 ◼ ► That would be nice. It would be nice to have something that was maybe more contact based and less plug and hold based like MagSafe.
01:25:55 ◼ ► But who knows, I think we're going to have USB-C for most likely a pretty long time, simply because again, look at USB-A and look at how long we've had that.
01:26:05 ◼ ► Yeah, one of the answers to the connector question is always like, "Oh, this will be the last plug connector and everything will be wireless afterwards."
01:26:12 ◼ ► Wireless standards also continue to evolve and MagSafe is a big part of that and that will continue to get better and be supplanted by even better wireless ones.
01:26:20 ◼ ► Apple could accelerate this feature by saying, "Well, we're not going to have USB-C ports anymore, somehow we'll deal with the EU situation."
01:26:27 ◼ ► And then just go all wireless, but I think there will be a successor plug design type thing and you can just look at the USB-C connectors and see how it could be improved.
01:26:40 ◼ ► USB-C will eventually, probably sometime in our lifetime I would hope, become the limiting factor in the thickness of iPhones.
01:26:47 ◼ ► And when that happens, Apple will be looking around for something to do different, either by getting rid of the port entirely or coming up with a new proprietary port because no one in the industry has made something that is smaller than USB-C.
01:27:01 ◼ ► And there are actually rumors of, I think Apple has some patents on this, but Apple patents everything they ever think of, like every company, like magnetic connectors.
01:27:09 ◼ ► That's what Marco was kind of alluding to, it's not like MagSafe but for data, right? So you wouldn't actually have to have a hole in the device to stick a plug into, just a magnetic connector.
01:27:17 ◼ ► And there's all sorts of problems with that or whatever. Anyway, I think there will be a successor design, but this USB-C design I think has just as much legs as USB-A.
01:27:24 ◼ ► USB-A is like one of the worst connectors of our entire lives because of the external symmetry and internal asymmetry just frustrating millions of person hours wasted putting the plug in twice or whatever.
01:27:35 ◼ ► But it was still better than what came before it. And one of the things that unifies all these things, if we're as old as the people doing this podcast at least, we live through the essentially the parallel to serial transition.
01:27:46 ◼ ► Used to be the computer connector is very heavily leaned on parallelism, which means having lots of wires going to lots of pins.
01:27:53 ◼ ► And the more wires you had, the more data you could send because you'd send information along all those wires at the same time.
01:27:59 ◼ ► And eventually the computing part at the either end of the devices got fast enough and good enough and cheap enough that you could do serial interfaces where pretty much every bus since then has been like, we just need ground and power and data transfer lines.
01:28:13 ◼ ► And we'll go faster by just shoving things through one at a time single file, not really, but you know, single file sends single file received with various signaling mechanisms to get more out of that.
01:28:23 ◼ ► We'll just go faster and faster serially. And we all like that because if you've ever dealt with a SCSI cable, they were huge and they did not bend easily and they were temperamental.
01:28:31 ◼ ► And so yes, serial is better than parallel. But since then, USB was a big part of that universal serial bus. That's what the S is there for.
01:28:38 ◼ ► We've had skinnier wires that are easier to deal with. And all they've been doing is saying, you know, now that the wires are scanning, maybe the connector shouldn't be gigantic either.
01:28:47 ◼ ► So I think serial connection protocols and methods are here to stay because it has proven that we can really scale that up real fast.
01:28:54 ◼ ► And the convenience aspect of it is important. So I think, you know, look for USB-C to be here until either we get rid of connectors or until devices require something smaller.
01:29:05 ◼ ► I think that is going to be the forcing factor because if you don't require something smaller and there's not some kind of fatal flaw that we haven't discovered yet in the USB-C connector,
01:29:17 ◼ ► The wire, the stuff we send over the wire will keep getting faster. You know, we have a thing on the notes about Thunderbolt 5, which we'll talk about in a future show.
01:29:24 ◼ ► You know, Thunderbolt uses the same, you know, connector stand or whatever. It's going to keep getting faster.
01:29:28 ◼ ► But I think that connector is going to be with us until either wireless takes over entirely or essentially the iPhone can't get any thinner because like kind of like the RJ45 port on the side of a laptop.
01:29:40 ◼ ► Like the, you know, the USB-C port is the limiting factor in the thickness of the iPhone. And that's not happening anytime soon because we need that big battery.
01:29:46 ◼ ► But who knows? In the future with solid state batteries and wafer thin iPhones, we might need a new connector.
01:30:02 ◼ ► That makes me depressed to think about that. I think micro. I think micro because I think every device that I know of that I hate that has micro, I look at the modern version of that and they have USB-C.
01:30:16 ◼ ► And honestly, I was going to ask John earlier, do you think which will happen first? The last three pedal car is shipped or the last USB-A equipped car is shipped?
01:30:30 ◼ ► No, the three pedal parts aren't going away. They'll just end up being like horses. You know, horses didn't go away. It's just that if you have one now, you're probably rich and weird.
01:30:39 ◼ ► I mean, Porsche, the latest 911 they came out with is like the super duper, the S/T or whatever. Really expensive, fancy, whatever.
01:30:47 ◼ ► It's basically, I think it's like a GT3 RS without the big wing on it, without the boy racer looks.
01:30:52 ◼ ► Stick shift only. Because they know, they know there's an audience for this. And granted, that audience is going to get old and die.
01:30:57 ◼ ► But I think it'll just be like the weird watch thing where they fetishize having a bunch of little gears that aren't as accurate as a $10 quartz crystal, right?
01:31:04 ◼ ► Three pedals are going to be with us forever. Just in increasingly small, narrow areas.
01:31:11 ◼ ► Thanks to our sponsor this week, Squarespace. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at ATV.FM/JOIN.
01:31:21 ◼ ► Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
01:31:33 ◼ ► John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
01:31:44 ◼ ► And you can find the show notes at ATV.FM. And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
01:32:23 ◼ ► Marco, you have spent a little bit of time in your banana, in your Rivian. What's going on?
01:32:31 ◼ ► Yeah, so now that I've, I just took the Rivian on a long trip, so I have some follow up and I have a few little exciting things I've tried as well.
01:32:48 ◼ ► I have found the perfect color reference. My car is exactly the color of Jake the dog from Adventure Time.
01:32:58 ◼ ► It's the color of that Jake the dog figurine. Because on the show, he is not that color.
01:33:06 ◼ ► Anyway, no, my car is Jake the dog color. It's exactly. And my family, we've all watched Adventure Time, we love it.
01:33:14 ◼ ► And they all, as soon as we came upon this realization, we were all like, "Oh my god, that's exactly it. It's perfect."
01:33:20 ◼ ► And now my family calls my car Jake, and so, and Tiff wants to somehow style the headlights so it looks more like his eyes.
01:33:27 ◼ ► I don't know how, I'm a little scared to think about it. But anyway, so yeah. Rivian yellow is basically Jake color. It's very, very close.
01:33:35 ◼ ► In some lighting anyway, because I think Jake does not change color as much as your car does.
01:33:55 ◼ ► Last time I talked about it, I was complaining that there was no button that you could hold down or something to trigger Siri.
01:34:03 ◼ ► Because most cars, if they have like a steering wheel button for voice control, usually if you have a Bluetooth phone connected, usually like holding that down might trigger Siri over the Bluetooth connection or something.
01:34:14 ◼ ► A few people wrote in to say, "Hey, why don't you just say, 'Hey, you know, assistant,' instead of trying to push the button?"
01:34:21 ◼ ► And so I started trying saying, "Hey, assistant." And yeah, actually it works really well. It works fantastically.
01:34:29 ◼ ► When my phone is on a mount in front of me, like next to the vents or whatever, like that's where I prefer to have it in non-car play, equipped cars.
01:34:45 ◼ ► It woke the phone up, it got the phone's attention, but then it used the car's microphone and speaker for the Siri session.
01:34:54 ◼ ► So I don't know, I think the phone's microphone is the one that's listening for the command, like for the wake-up word, but then once it is woken up, it uses the audio devices in the car.
01:35:06 ◼ ► So it actually is pretty reliable. The only little weird thing is that it's a little impatient. Like if I talk too slowly, it'll stop listening.
01:35:15 ◼ ► And then I'm back to playing fish. I'm like, "Okay, wait, hold on. I wasn't done yet." And then I go back and correct it.
01:35:20 ◼ ► For the most part, that actually works pretty well. So thank you listeners who pointed out that I can just say "Hey, thing."
01:35:35 ◼ ► They had this weird little like flip-down compartment between your legs on the front ridge of the driver's seat.
01:35:43 ◼ ► So like, you know, the seat curves down between your knees and down there, like between that lip of the seat and the floor on the front wall of the seat is a little flip-down sunglasses compartment.
01:35:56 ◼ ► Now, they tell you, "Oh, you can put..." because weirdly there's no glove box in the Rivian. I don't know why. There's no good reason.
01:36:02 ◼ ► So they're like, "Oh, you can put like your car insurance and registration paperwork for cops and stuff. Put it in there."
01:36:07 ◼ ► And as soon as I tried to reach that when sitting in the seat, I realized that would look to a cop exactly like I was pulling a gun from under the seat.
01:36:19 ◼ ► So I'm not going to do that. That's terrible. And so somebody suggested, "Oh, you can put sunglasses there."
01:36:25 ◼ ► The problem is putting sunglasses between your legs down by the floor, there is no good way to reach that while you are driving.
01:36:33 ◼ ► Like it is just, it is incredibly cumbersome. So that's a no-go. I still have not found a place to put sunglasses in this car.
01:36:56 ◼ ► I do. And I had forgotten when I bought the car. So here's how the Rivian windshield wiper controls work.
01:37:04 ◼ ► Fortunately, you can just tap but not hold the washer fluid firing button and it will do a single wipe. It took me a long time to figure that out.
01:37:14 ◼ ► So there is a way to do a single wipe on press. But if you want to change the mode the wipers are in, either turn them on or speed them up or slow them down or whatever,
01:37:21 ◼ ► there is a little up down rocker on the stalk and you twist it up to move it up, twist it down to move down.
01:37:29 ◼ ► But the first input is ignored because the first input when you twist it up once, it doesn't increase the speed.
01:37:38 ◼ ► It starts showing the menu on the screen. In the main cluster area, you don't have to look on the main screen in the middle, it shows it on the driver's cluster.
01:37:48 ◼ ► But it still hits that up and it then starts showing on the driver's cluster the levels of the windshield wiper.
01:37:55 ◼ ► Then you have to hit it up again to actually change the setting. This is really stupid. I am loving this car so far.
01:38:04 ◼ ► I think the windshield wiper controls might be the single worst thing about it. I am shocked that they haven't changed this behavior in a software update yet.
01:38:14 ◼ ► It's already not a great control the way they've done it, but it would be a substantially better control if the first input actually changed the position of the setting.
01:38:25 ◼ ► So make the first push up or push down, actually move the setting up and down rather than just wake up the menu because that is ridiculous.
01:38:34 ◼ ► It would be substantially better if the reason we talk about this is because when you press the thing up, it returns to its center position like a joystick that you shove in one direction and it springs back to the middle.
01:38:44 ◼ ► It would be better control if it worked like every other car's wipers where you actually turn something or move something into a position where it stays.
01:38:52 ◼ ► You know what I mean? Because then you could look at it and see where it is and you'd know you go down a little bit more for faster wipers, up one more, push up once for a swipe and then it will spring back to position.
01:39:00 ◼ ► But no, because it's software integrated, they can't do that because then there would be a conflict.
01:39:12 ◼ ► But also they've decided that this is just now an affordance for you to get to the touch screen controls or something.
01:39:21 ◼ ► Does it just show the current level, but does it bring up the controls where you could use the touch screen to change it?
01:39:26 ◼ ► I don't think it's accessible on the touch screen. It's only displayed in the driver cluster.
01:39:32 ◼ ► If it's not accessible on the touch screen, they should just use a normal wipe out control.
01:39:36 ◼ ► Because the whole point of having a little toggle that springs back to the middle is because it's never in a position that could be in conflict with the touch screen because it never changed its position.
01:39:45 ◼ ► I don't know. The rest of the car is so well designed in so many ways, it's baffling how badly designed the wiper controls are.
01:39:56 ◼ ► And the lack of glove box and the lack of glasses holder in a gigantic car with a huge amount of space inside it, but there was just no room for a sunglasses holder in the headliner. Sorry.
01:40:06 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. So yeah, please fix the wipers. Also, the automatic wipers are continuing in the series of cars that I have had.
01:40:25 ◼ ► At least you can do it yourself. At least you actually have stocks. Count your blessings. You can have a Tesla with no stocks.
01:40:31 ◼ ► Otherwise, I'm very happy with most of the setup of the stocks and the controls and everything. That's why this is so weird. They just totally blew windshield wipers and sunglasses. That's really weird.
01:40:41 ◼ ► Anyway, alright. Now that I've had the car for a few weeks, I can tell you with certainty this is the most attention and questions I've gotten from strangers with any car I've ever had.
01:40:59 ◼ ► I mean, let's be honest. You're the only human I know that bought an electric car that is louder than a BMW M5 because that car is so loud, visually loud. It's bananas. It is. It's literally a banana.
01:41:13 ◼ ► It's literally Jake, first of all. So anyway, bananas are different. Plus, bananas are... talk about color. I considered using a banana as a color reference object, but there are just so many different colors of bananas.
01:41:23 ◼ ► That was a harder reference object to use. Anyway, when I first got the first Tesla, probably what was that, seven years ago or something like that, I did get a decent number of strangers saying, "Hey, how is that?" or "How is it on long trips?"
01:41:39 ◼ ► I got a few of those. The Rivian gets so many more now and it is staggering how many questions I get from strangers or people saying, "Hey, nice. I'm waiting for one myself." But so many questions. And I don't answer them because people tend to ask relatively the same handful of questions over and over again.
01:41:59 ◼ ► And I consider it an opportunity to maybe in the future cause this person to buy an electric car if they were a little bit hesitant before. They always ask two things. They ask about the range and they ask if the battery can get wet. Which is funny.
01:42:20 ◼ ► Well, you gotta figure out how to use the wipers. That's pretty challenging. But it's funny when you think about it from a nerd perspective because we're like, "Of course it can get wet." But it actually... it's a huge battery and it's electric and people are trained to think you can't get electric things wet. So I understand why they're asking that question. It's kind of adorable.
01:42:46 ◼ ► But that is the question. Those two... you know, people ask you how far can you go on a charge. And the number two question I get is, "Can you get it wet?"
01:42:56 ◼ ► I would love for you... I swear, if I had an electric car and someone asked me that, eventually I would have curiosity would get the better of me and I'd be like, "Why do you ask that?" Just to make them do a little bit of introspection. Like, think about it for two seconds. Because even a few seconds of examination makes no sense. But it's because electric vehicles are weird. All their preconceived assumptions about everything goes out the window because this is an exotic strange beast to them.
01:43:22 ◼ ► So they have questions that if they thought about it, I'm like, "Hm... but anyway, yes, please tell them this."
01:43:31 ◼ ► I'm getting like rain. Especially because I'm driving at the beach, which the last part of the trip at the beach is down these little tiny local roads that are just these little wide sidewalks, basically.
01:43:40 ◼ ► So if I have to pass a person, you know, we had to kind of like squeeze... one of us kind of like scoot over. I kind of scoot onto the little tiny berm and they kind of scoot over.
01:43:48 ◼ ► I'm basically driving like right past them and so they're at my window level. So I just leave the windows open at this point because people keep like, you know, waving at me to ask questions.
01:43:55 ◼ ► And like I'm getting stopped by everybody. Like the cops, like random strangers. Like everyone's like, "Hey, what's... hey, how do you like it? How does it work on the beach?"
01:44:05 ◼ ► I had pulled over next to the federal gate to get into the island. I had pulled over. They have like a little parking lot to air down my tires.
01:44:13 ◼ ► Somebody who was driving by saw my car after he had passed the lot, stopped, backed all the way up back to the driveway and turned in just to ask me questions.
01:44:24 ◼ ► People love the idea of Rivians. They're really... young people are like, "It's a Rivian!"
01:44:32 ◼ ► And now that the car, the car is now, you know, when I'm at the beach, the car is parked next to my house. But it's still early enough in the season that like drunk people still walk by at night on the weekend sometimes.
01:44:43 ◼ ► And like Tiff and I will be lying in bed and we'll hear, we heard this, this like group of teenagers the other night, "Dude, let's meet by the Rivian!"
01:44:55 ◼ ► The chat room points out that maybe people are asking about the battery as in like taking like an off-roader, like through, fording a river in your car, that type of thing.
01:45:03 ◼ ► Maybe that's what they mean, not going in the rain, but like actually taking your truck into deep water.
01:45:12 ◼ ► I know they have the Land Rovers with the snorkel on top so the, you know, intake doesn't get filled with water, but like honestly, if you own a car, don't put it in water. Ever.
01:45:21 ◼ ► Yeah, and some of them have explicitly asked about that, but that is not the common case.
01:45:25 ◼ ► And yeah, the Rivian, it seems like it does no worse than most cars at being submerged, but yeah, it's generally a bad idea.
01:45:33 ◼ ► And in general, yeah, salt water, just as bad as it is on an internal contribution. Do not put your car into salt water under any circumstances. I'll end up seeing it on a YouTube rebuild channel.
01:46:03 ◼ ► Tesla has started modifying some of its superchargers to have what they call the Magic Dock, which is basically an adapter that dynamically attaches by the supercharger.
01:46:14 ◼ ► It's kept internal to the supercharger, and if you pull up to it with a CCS-equipped car, you know, the other connector in North America,
01:46:23 ◼ ► if you come up with a CCS-equipped car and you open the Tesla app and you unlock the port in the Tesla app by saying, "Hey, I met this supercharger.
01:46:37 ◼ ► It'll unlock it and kind of pre-install onto the supercharger plug this fixed blocky adapter that converts the supercharger into a CCS plug.
01:46:47 ◼ ► So it's a way that CCS cars can use Tesla superchargers without having any other kind of adapters that you brought with you that technically don't really exist yet,
01:46:59 ◼ ► So I got to actually use a Tesla charger on this trip, and it was really weird and the app was pretty buggy, but it worked.
01:47:07 ◼ ► It worked. It charged my car. It wasn't super fast. I think I got about 75 kilowatts out of it, so not as fast.
01:47:15 ◼ ► Like, on the same trip, the Electrify America chargers that I was usually stopping at were going like 155, 160 kilowatts, so that, you know, it was not as fast as them,
01:47:24 ◼ ► but that will vary per supercharger. I'm sure it is able to be faster, you know, with different equipment maybe or different conditions.
01:47:31 ◼ ► But anyway, it worked. It cost about the same as Electrify America's, like, non-member pricing, and Tesla will also sell you.
01:47:40 ◼ ► So for those of you who don't know, Electrify America and Tesla both, for this kind of arrangement, you pay a certain number, a certain price per kilowatt hour.
01:47:50 ◼ ► Around here, it's about 42 cents per kilowatt hour, or if you pay like 12 or 8 bucks a month, you can get a lower rate for like, you know, 32 or 36 cents per kilowatt hour.
01:48:02 ◼ ► And so, you know, this is obviously like a customer loyalty kind of program for both brands, and it seems like pricing-wise, I checked in with a couple of friends,
01:48:12 ◼ ► and it seems like the member price of Tesla superchargers seems to be in line with whatever Tesla owners pay just regularly.
01:48:20 ◼ ► So if you're a non-Tesla owner, you can pay a little bit of a premium or pay Tesla 12 bucks a month or whatever to have the owner pricing.
01:48:28 ◼ ► Either way, they're about the same as Electrify America in most places, but it varies. It varies by location and time.
01:48:33 ◼ ► But anyway, yeah, it worked. Very few of the Tesla superchargers have the magic dock around here, but I'm looking forward to more of them adding it.
01:48:42 ◼ ► Now, with regard to the Electrify America ones, the going wisdom, if you listen to the media, is that it is impossible to get an Electrify America charger that works without trying four times.
01:48:56 ◼ ► I went to two different EA chargers on this trip, and there's one nearby on Long Island that I've used a couple of times.
01:49:03 ◼ ► The one on Long Island, there's I think six chargers there, and usually two of them are down.
01:49:09 ◼ ► You can tell as soon as you pull in because the screen is off. So it's very obvious, and you can just quickly change parking spots.
01:49:15 ◼ ► And that sucks, but it hasn't been a problem necessarily yet. It just makes them less nice.
01:49:21 ◼ ► The ones that I went to on this trip, the two different ones in various parts of upstate New York, they were both totally fine.
01:49:28 ◼ ► And in fact, this one that was at a random Walmart in the Albany region was the fastest charger I've ever gotten.
01:49:34 ◼ ► Having it sustain at 155 kilowatts, I've never gotten a charge that fast, including my Tesla previous lives.
01:49:58 ◼ ► But again, this varies by region so much. That's why it's a little hard to really compare.
01:50:03 ◼ ► Anyway, so that's the magic doc. And then finally, I have a bit of a surprise. I took this trip with CarPlay.
01:50:27 ◼ ► So there have been, over the last few years, because I've developed a CarPlay compatible app, but did not own a CarPlay car, and of course my office is not a CarPlay car, I had a need for a CarPlay test device.
01:50:40 ◼ ► In the past, what I've done here is I've bought a CarPlay aftermarket head unit that's made to go into cars that don't have CarPlay but that have the double-din stereo holes.
01:50:51 ◼ ► I bought one of those and just put it in a plastic case with a 12-volt power supply and have all this wiring and everything. It's been a huge pain in the butt.
01:50:59 ◼ ► It ended up making this huge project box-sized thing, like the size of a lunch box, just to have a CarPlay testing head unit in my office for development.
01:51:07 ◼ ► And then what happened a few years ago, random manufacturers started selling what are effectively Android tablets that are made for cars that can somehow, I don't know how this works with Apple certification or whatever,
01:51:20 ◼ ► somehow they can run CarPlay and Android Auto on effectively a 7-inch Android tablet or a 9-inch or whatever, in that size range.
01:51:33 ◼ ► So I switched my testing rigs to use those, and they also support wireless CarPlay, which is fantastic.
01:51:43 ◼ ► They're really inexpensive. So if you want to add CarPlay to a car, the least invasive and least expensive way to do it seems to be these $100-ish 7-inch Android tablets that are made for this purpose in cars.
01:52:03 ◼ ► And this one, the one that I got was actually powered by USB-C instead of having some kind of weird custom 12-volt thing that has to plug into the cigarette lighter.
01:52:10 ◼ ► And with the Rivian, USB-C is much easier to get power to the front because new Rivians no longer have a 12-volt socket anywhere in the front of the car.
01:52:21 ◼ ► The other way to get 12 volts in the front, there's these adapters that tap the OBD port, the diagnostic port in the driver's footwell.
01:52:33 ◼ ► So there are adapters that will convert OBD2 ports to USB or 12-volt sockets, which is interesting and useful here.
01:52:41 ◼ ► So that's how I did this trip. I got one of those adapters, and I got this $100 Android tablet thing, 7-inch Android tablet, and actually had CarPlay here.
01:53:23 ◼ ► So, the most recent of these weird Android tablet CarPlay things have a capability, and including this one, where the phone and the CarPlay tablet negotiate to start...
01:53:43 ◼ ► So they use Bluetooth to negotiate the Wi-Fi connection, and then the phone is able to remain connected to Bluetooth with the car.
01:53:57 ◼ ► They have built-in FM transmitters, they have line-out jacks, so if your car has a line-in somehow, or if you want to use the FM transmitter, you can get the audio out that way.
01:54:05 ◼ ► Or, you can use the feature of these where it basically tells the phone somehow, over some part of the CarPlay protocol,
01:54:12 ◼ ► it tells the phone, "Hey, you keep playing audio through your other connection. Don't play audio through me."
01:54:18 ◼ ► So in this case, it was extremely responsive. The phone was playing audio directly to the car via Bluetooth,
01:54:26 ◼ ► and was not involved with the Bluetooth audio stack of this weird Android tablet thing.
01:54:30 ◼ ► So the latency was the same as if I was playing just Bluetooth audio, which is not great latency, but way better than most wireless CarPlay.
01:54:47 ◼ ► It is the best audio setup that I've found for these things, and only the newest ones seem to do it.
01:54:55 ◼ ► Wait, wait, wait. So I understand that your car is playing audio to the Bluetooth thing,
01:54:59 ◼ ► but all the controls are still appearing in the CarPlay interface, and those controls are controlling the audio,
01:55:04 ◼ ► and so it's like, the controller is wireless CarPlay, but the transmission of audio is to the car itself?
01:55:10 ◼ ► Yes. So, you know, CarPlay is merely a video signal that's sent to the car, and then some kind of like touch input protocol
01:55:20 ◼ ► This unit is showing the video stream, which is basically an AirPlay video stream as far as I know,
01:55:25 ◼ ► showing the video stream from CarPlay, and then sending input back and letting the phone deal with it.
01:55:36 ◼ ► So, phone is playing audio directly to the car, and the car's audio, you know, remote control buttons all work normally,
01:55:46 ◼ ► And so if you hit next track on your steering wheel, that goes to your phone through Bluetooth,
01:55:52 ◼ ► and goes to next track, and then the CarPlay display reflects that fact, because it's just displaying what's going on?
01:56:01 ◼ ► So, there are some downsides, and ultimately I will say I drove there with this CarPlay unit,
01:56:36 ◼ ► and occasionally if I got too close to the car, having my phone connect to it, even when I was not in the car.
01:56:41 ◼ ► Like if I was just walking around where the car was parked, if I walked near the car, my phone would connect to this thing.
01:56:47 ◼ ► And so to actually use this well in a lot of situations, you would want to have some kind of physical power switch,
01:57:03 ◼ ► If it is powered off, you get into the car, and then maybe, you know, 15, 20 seconds later,
01:57:16 ◼ ► You can see in this picture, below my phone icon, it has this assistive touch-like overlay,
01:57:25 ◼ ► that is like the home button of the unit that you can drag around anywhere on the screen, but you can't turn it off.
01:57:36 ◼ ► Now, this is actually not necessary. CarPlay has a feature where the car can provide like an icon to CarPlay
01:57:48 ◼ ► Like on your CarPlay home screen, one of the quote apps there might be the car, and you tap that and it kicks you out of CarPlay.
01:57:54 ◼ ► So this button is not necessary in CarPlay mode, but they have it here anyway, and you cannot turn it off.
01:58:01 ◼ ► And again, I've had now three of these like Android tablet CarPlay style units, and this is the only one that has this.
01:58:13 ◼ ► You know, I've heard, even just on this week's upgrade, they talked about this, and I've even said this before,
01:58:18 ◼ ► wouldn't it be nice if Apple added a mode for iPhones that maybe you just mount your iPhone in landscape mode in a car,
01:58:45 ◼ ► It is tricky to hit them, and as a result, first of all, I think you're losing some of the safety benefits of CarPlay
01:58:51 ◼ ► when it's a little bit tricky to hit things, but it also is kind of annoying and error-prone.
01:58:58 ◼ ► I think if you're going to get one of these style units for your car, I would suggest going for one of the 9-inch class devices instead.
01:59:04 ◼ ► There are a bunch out there. Most of them are 7. Some of them are 9. Go for 9, if you can fit it.
01:59:22 ◼ ► But 7 inches is too small for CarPlay. That's why the iPhones don't have this mode, as far as I know.
01:59:35 ◼ ► Like, the screen quality, you don't realize how nice iPhone screens are and how nice built-in car display screens have to be until you put a cheap screen next to them and try to use them in the same conditions.
01:59:50 ◼ ► It is not that bright. The alignment of the polarizer is slightly wrong for sunglasses, so it's a little bit dimmer even still than it needs to be because it doesn't quite align right with sunglasses.
02:00:09 ◼ ► So it almost felt like you had to apply pressure, like an old resistive screen. It's not.
02:00:13 ◼ ► But it's just that crappy of a touch screen that you have to kind of give it a lot of input for it to actually register.
02:00:20 ◼ ► So it's not great as an input device, and I found it kind of frustrating to use from that point of view.
02:00:26 ◼ ► And then finally, the reason why I took it off before driving home today is after a few days, I couldn't get it to reliably connect to my phone anymore.
02:00:34 ◼ ► Like, it just stopped. I couldn't get it into carplay mode no matter what. I rebooted everything, couldn't get it into carplay mode.
02:00:41 ◼ ► But it was somehow partially connected because then I couldn't get my phone to play audio through the car anymore for a little while.
02:00:46 ◼ ► I had to reboot things again. It was a whole thing. It was super unreliable after only a few days.
02:00:51 ◼ ► So I took it off and I put my MagSafe mount back up there and I just drove with my phone in the MagSafe mount using Waze on the phone screen as I did in the Tesla for its entire lifetime.
02:01:11 ◼ ► But the experience, you get what you pay for and Rivian should just frickin' add carplay like everybody else already.
02:01:18 ◼ ► Like, it's, 'cause it is, and it turns out it is way nicer for all these reasons to have it just built into the car.
02:01:29 ◼ ► But if you have either a Tesla or a Rivian or an older car before carplay was around, this is an option you might want to consider that you might not have known about.
02:01:53 ◼ ► Look, Rivian, if anybody from Rivian is listening, let me just say, the Rivian philosophy of like, we don't need to do this, whatever.
02:02:12 ◼ ► The best three navigation systems in the universe right now are Waze, Apple Maps and Google Maps.
02:02:29 ◼ ► I don't know. I haven't driven out of the state of New York. I don't know if it's this bad everywhere else.
02:02:33 ◼ ► In New York, typically you have in most places that have people in them, you have like, if you have a village, then outside of that you have a town.
02:02:53 ◼ ► It won't say Bayshore. Bayshore is the village. It will say Islip, which is the surrounding town.
02:03:03 ◼ ► That's not what anything else calls this. And so you have to keep double checking. Is that the right one?
02:03:09 ◼ ► I was just looking at, there was someone put, did you see, Jack could put a link to historical maps.
02:03:14 ◼ ► So, of course, I looked up historical maps of Long Island, and they had one that was showing things divided up.
02:03:25 ◼ ► They would show just the, because there was nobody on the island. It was like from the, you know, 1700s or whatever.
02:03:35 ◼ ► It's like you have to, a lot of the map work was the thing that bothers me. How far do I have to zoom in before you show me the words Bayshore?
02:03:41 ◼ ► Because, like, as far as I'm concerned, it's a pretty important thing, because you think you're in Bayshore.
02:03:45 ◼ ► No one says they're in Islip, right? Because Islip is a different place. Are you in CI? Are you in Bayshore? Like, anyway, yeah.
02:03:51 ◼ ► Right. And even, like, you know, if you type in the address, like, the way you would send mail to these places would have the local village name instead of, like, the surrounding town or county name.
02:04:01 ◼ ► But they, so the Rivian maps don't even list things the way anyone, including the post office, would list them.
02:04:07 ◼ ► So it makes it hard to know even if you're looking at the right thing. So, yeah, there's little things like that.
02:04:12 ◼ ► Look, and of course the Rivian music player is very, very limited because it's only going over Bluetooth and it has this built-in app for other things, but it's terrible.
02:04:18 ◼ ► Look, Rivian is fantastic at the UI design of things like the instrument panels, like, besides the windshield wiper thing, which I already, you know, ranted about, which is terrible.
02:04:28 ◼ ► But, like, the temperature controls, the various, you know, car controls of different features or modes or settings for the car, those are all great.
02:04:38 ◼ ► The typography is great. The graphic design is great. Things are easy to see, easy to read, easy to find.
02:04:43 ◼ ► You still need CarPlay. You still do because you're never going to match navigation and audio apps in phones. You can't.
02:04:52 ◼ ► That's not what anybody even wants you to do. Don't even try. You won't succeed and no one wants it.
02:04:58 ◼ ► Just use CarPlay. You're never going to be better than Apple Maps, Google Maps, and Waze. You're just not.
02:05:03 ◼ ► Don't bet against the smartphone. Work with it. That's how everyone else is gone. There's a reason for that.
02:05:14 ◼ ► No, you know what? I, you know, I can work around that. You know, I can put a bag on the floor.
02:05:19 ◼ ► Just that dashboard is so huge. It's like an aircraft carrier and there's no Glovebox. It's insulting.
02:05:28 ◼ ► It would be such a differentiator because if you think about the cool kid, like Silicon Valley, new fancy electric car, you got Rivian and you got Tesla.
02:05:38 ◼ ► This could be a differentiator. Like, put CarPlay in there. And then suddenly, if you're an Apple person that wants a car that's actually put together properly,
02:05:46 ◼ ► that's not, you know, that the company isn't run by a lunatic, then all good reasons to buy Rivian.
02:05:52 ◼ ► Yeah. And look, Rivian, it's so good in every other way I've found so far. I freaking love this car. It's really, really good.
02:06:01 ◼ ► For God's sakes, give me CarPlay. Like, I still, it's so frustrating it doesn't have it. And look, you don't need to overthink it. Make it a window.
02:06:08 ◼ ► Make it one of, like, one of the main apps. There's like, you know, the five or six main apps you have. Just make it one of those.
02:06:13 ◼ ► And you have it in a window. And your other controls, you know, the climate bar, the top bar, those are just around it. It's fine. That's totally fine.