PodSearch

ATP

517: A Tesla Full of Kindles

 

00:00:00   - Marco, you still have a Tesla?

00:00:01   - I do still have a Tesla.

00:00:02   I was gonna actually sell it over Christmas break,

00:00:06   but because my son got the flu and that kind of delayed,

00:00:10   like we had to move all of our timing of all of our travel

00:00:13   and it made it so that there was no extra time

00:00:15   that I was gonna be spending around the Tesla

00:00:17   to get it sold, so it didn't happen yet,

00:00:19   but there are two more breaks coming later this winter.

00:00:23   So we'll see.

00:00:25   I gotta sell it while it's still worth anything

00:00:27   'cause it's certainly worth a lot less now

00:00:30   than it was last summer.

00:00:31   (laughing)

00:00:33   It's Elon's final middle finger to me.

00:00:35   It's like, fine, you leave Twitter,

00:00:36   I'm gonna devalue your car.

00:00:38   (laughing)

00:00:39   - That's not true.

00:00:40   If you're willing to discuss,

00:00:41   what is your sales strategy for this?

00:00:43   Are you Carvanha-ing?

00:00:44   Are you gonna sell it privately?

00:00:45   'Cause you're not looking to buy something,

00:00:47   so a trade-in doesn't seem possible.

00:00:48   Are you gonna go to CarMax?

00:00:49   Like, what's the plan?

00:00:50   - So, none of these things will give me a real quote.

00:00:53   So, here's, when I was last home for, like,

00:00:57   I'm like, "Oh, let me try to sell the Tesla while I'm here."

00:01:00   So I tried Carvana and everything and they were all like,

00:01:03   "Well, because of this not being a common car,

00:01:06   "you need to schedule an appointment

00:01:07   "and bring it in to us, la la la."

00:01:09   And I'm like, "Well, that's not gonna happen

00:01:11   "on Christmas Eve or whatever."

00:01:12   So I'm like, "All right, well, I guess I'll do that

00:01:14   "some other time."

00:01:15   And then I stupid, oh, I made a mistake.

00:01:18   So I went to Kelly Blue Book to see what's my current,

00:01:23   I figure, you're right, I'm not buying anything new

00:01:26   so that weakens my position for sure.

00:01:28   But I'm like, when you go to Kelly Blue Book,

00:01:30   you get the three values.

00:01:31   You get the dealer trade-in at the lowest,

00:01:33   then you get the private sale, which is the highest,

00:01:36   and I forget what the middle one is.

00:01:38   I'll take whatever, like the lowest value,

00:01:40   the dealer trade-in, I would take that.

00:01:42   That's fine, like at least it would be out of my hands.

00:01:44   I don't wanna deal with the private sale,

00:01:45   it's a pain in the butt.

00:01:46   And it takes more time than frankly I ever have around,

00:01:49   like I'm never there for long enough to do a private sale.

00:01:52   'Cause I've done that in the past,

00:01:54   and you list it somewhere,

00:01:55   and you gotta wait maybe a week or two,

00:01:57   and show different people the car,

00:01:59   have them come around and kick the tires

00:02:01   and go on a little test drive,

00:02:02   and then decide not to buy it.

00:02:03   It's a huge time suck, that's why I don't do that anymore.

00:02:07   It's terrible.

00:02:09   And I'd never had a good experience with a private sale,

00:02:11   and so I'm like, all right, as a seller at least.

00:02:13   As a buyer, I've had great experiences,

00:02:15   but as a seller, I never had one.

00:02:18   So I thought, okay, well fine,

00:02:19   whatever the dealer trade in price is,

00:02:21   I'd be happy to take that.

00:02:23   So I go on Kelly Blue Book,

00:02:24   and I get the dealer trade in price,

00:02:27   and then they offer at the bottom of the screen,

00:02:30   hey, get our instant cash offer price now,

00:02:33   and we'll buy the car from you without you buying a vehicle.

00:02:37   So I thought, okay, let me see what they'll offer for that.

00:02:41   And it's one of those stupid scams

00:02:42   where they're not really gonna buy your car from you.

00:02:46   They give your information to 14 dealers in the region.

00:02:50   - Oh, gross.

00:02:51   and then you get spammed like crazy

00:02:53   from these desperate vultures,

00:02:56   and they're all offering like $15,000

00:02:59   below the dealer trade-in value.

00:03:00   - Boo.

00:03:01   - So I'm like, okay, well, first of all,

00:03:04   this is literally the site that just told me

00:03:07   what my goals were. (laughs)

00:03:10   And this is way below that.

00:03:12   And second of all, now I'm gonna get spammed forever

00:03:15   from these rando, desperate, used car dealers.

00:03:17   Thanks a lot.

00:03:18   So I can't recommend Kelly Blue Book for anything

00:03:22   at this moment, for either the valuation,

00:03:24   which seems to be wrong,

00:03:25   or for their stupid cash offer thing.

00:03:28   So I'm probably gonna go to Carvana or CarMax

00:03:31   or whatever those things are and take whatever they give me,

00:03:34   which is probably gonna be very, very low.

00:03:36   And I'm gonna really be grumbly about it for a while,

00:03:39   but at least I won't have to deal with it anymore.

00:03:42   - Well, through the magic of YouTube advertising,

00:03:45   I'm going to recommend something to you

00:03:46   that maybe Casey will be familiar with.

00:03:49   - Cars and bids?

00:03:50   - Exactly.

00:03:51   - No, 'cause here's the thing.

00:03:53   Cars and, I like browsing cars and bids

00:03:55   to see what are the Rivian's costing these days.

00:03:57   But the reason I would not wanna sell on a site like that,

00:04:00   that's a site that is browsed by car nerds.

00:04:05   I don't wanna sell my car to a car nerd.

00:04:08   - But it's like eBay though,

00:04:09   like you just put pictures and then a bunch of people bid

00:04:11   and they're probably gonna pay a lot

00:04:13   because car nerds know what they're getting,

00:04:14   Like they understand the nuances of why this is good,

00:04:16   low mileage, good condition, one owner, blah, blah, blah.

00:04:19   And they'd understand this is the one

00:04:20   before they ruin the steering wheel, so on and so forth.

00:04:22   So you'll get a lot of money for it,

00:04:24   and you don't have to deal with showing people the car

00:04:26   and kicking the tires and they have to like it.

00:04:27   Someone's gonna win the thing

00:04:29   and then they're gonna buy the car.

00:04:30   And they're a car person,

00:04:31   so they'll probably understand what they're buying

00:04:34   and know how to go and get it from you.

00:04:36   - No, Cars and Biz is the kind of place

00:04:39   where Casey should sell a car.

00:04:40   Because Casey's cars have been detailed and washed

00:04:44   and kept in great condition.

00:04:46   - No, Cars and Biz doesn't care

00:04:47   that yours is a little scratched up, it'll be fine.

00:04:50   - It's not gonna be, no, car nerds,

00:04:52   they're gonna see things I've never seen.

00:04:54   They're gonna be the panel gap people.

00:04:56   - Like I said, they also appreciate

00:04:58   why your car is desirable above and beyond the fact that,

00:05:02   because all the Carvana or whatever,

00:05:03   all they care is make, model, year, mileage,

00:05:06   condition as a one to five scale.

00:05:09   They don't understand the nuances

00:05:10   of why this car is worth more than an uglier color

00:05:14   or a model year that was worse, you know what I mean?

00:05:16   I feel like you'd get way more money for there.

00:05:18   And it should be just as little hassle

00:05:20   because you don't have to deal with showing people the car

00:05:23   and all that stuff, it's just you put up the pictures,

00:05:25   people bid, you get a decent price, you sell.

00:05:27   - Yeah, maybe.

00:05:28   I mean, the other thing too is like,

00:05:29   I also have and would want to sell with the car

00:05:33   a second set of rims that had snow tires on them.

00:05:37   Now the tires aren't usable anymore,

00:05:38   so I'll probably have to dispose of those myself.

00:05:40   But there's a second set of Tesla rims

00:05:42   that's probably worth a thousand bucks or whatever.

00:05:44   - The Cars and Bids people will also understand

00:05:46   that those are valuable.

00:05:47   - That is true, actually.

00:05:48   - And be willing to buy them from you

00:05:49   because they'll just resell them for more.

00:05:51   - Right, so, maybe.

00:05:53   But then I gotta, first of all,

00:05:54   I'll have to do this not in the winter,

00:05:56   'cause it'll have to look nice.

00:05:58   - No, totally do it in the winter.

00:05:59   I'm looking at a Ford Bronco right now,

00:06:01   pictures of it in the snow.

00:06:02   - No, but then I have to go get it detailed.

00:06:04   It's a much greater hassle.

00:06:07   - You just gotta slum it on Cars and Bids.

00:06:08   You're like, "Look, I've got a car.

00:06:10   "I know you want this car.

00:06:11   Here's a bunch of pictures.

00:06:12   I've got a car.

00:06:13   You've got bids.

00:06:14   Let's make it happen.

00:06:16   You have a desirable car in good condition with low mileage.

00:06:19   It's a slam dunk.

00:06:20   Do not let Carvana buy this car for you for like $10,000

00:06:24   less than it's worth.

00:06:25   I also think--

00:06:27   I don't know, I've really soured on Demiro over the years.

00:06:30   I would also consider Bring a Trailer as a--

00:06:33   It's not that different.

00:06:35   It's a very similar thing.

00:06:36   eBay for cars is what we're saying.

00:06:38   So you don't have to deal with lots of people looking at it.

00:06:40   Let's see.

00:06:40   here's pretty much exactly my car with three times the mileage that sold for $10,000 more

00:06:48   than what they offered me.

00:06:49   That's what I'm saying.

00:06:50   I'm coming around to John's point on this one.

00:06:52   I hate to bring it to you.

00:06:53   That's a substantial price difference.

00:06:57   The things that your car has are intangibles, and those intangibles are only going to be

00:07:00   appreciated by car people who know what they're getting.

00:07:04   What intangibles are you thinking of?

00:07:05   Previously owned by Marco Arment?

00:07:07   single owner, good condition, low mileage, and it's the Model S before they screwed

00:07:11   it up.

00:07:12   It's the last one with a goddamn sunroof.

00:07:14   And a round steering wheel.

00:07:16   And a complete steering wheel.

00:07:17   You get the entire steering wheel with this price.

00:07:19   And it's just driven by a little old man in Westchester to church every Sunday.

00:07:25   It was not flogged, it was not abused, he was not drag racing on the weekend.

00:07:30   Only hit by one plow.

00:07:32   - No teenager ever drove it, it's only accidents

00:07:35   where like when it was parked unattended,

00:07:37   like it's just, it's a good car.

00:07:39   The battery's probably got tons of life left in it.

00:07:41   Check the battery health thing.

00:07:42   - The stock tires are not that well worn

00:07:44   because I kept snow tires on it

00:07:46   for like a year and a half straight.

00:07:48   - And at this point you can be pretty sure

00:07:50   it isn't one of those ones that's assembled

00:07:52   with roofing screws, right,

00:07:53   'cause it would've fallen apart by now.

00:07:55   - Yeah, right.

00:07:56   - So whoever built this one was not like,

00:07:57   you know, just slapping it together in a tent.

00:08:00   - Oh, I guess I should probably do this,

00:08:02   but how that, I mean, this, oh, this sold in Texas.

00:08:04   I don't, fuck.

00:08:05   - It's not a thing you don't have to deal with that.

00:08:06   They'll come and get it just there.

00:08:08   The people who want this car are gonna want it.

00:08:10   - How does, so wait, how does it work?

00:08:11   They literally just like send a trailer to come get it,

00:08:13   or what?

00:08:14   - Yeah, usually.

00:08:15   - I mean, whoever buys it is gonna do that

00:08:16   if they don't, like, it's the buyer's problem.

00:08:18   You say where you are, and it's the buyer's problem

00:08:20   and how they're gonna get it, but it's not your problem.

00:08:22   You don't have to ship it to them or something.

00:08:23   - Oh, this one has a bunch of paint chips.

00:08:25   Mine's in less crappy condition than this one.

00:08:27   - See?

00:08:28   What if I just page on like $5,000

00:08:31   to just come do this entire thing for me?

00:08:33   'Cause I'll make way more than that.

00:08:35   - Just use it as packing material

00:08:36   for some other thing you're gonna send me.

00:08:38   I'll take the Tesla off your hands.

00:08:40   - I'll fill the Tesla with Kindles and send it to you.

00:08:42   - As you know, I enjoy stick shift cars,

00:08:46   but if I'm gonna have one without a stick shift,

00:08:48   it'll be electric.

00:08:49   - Amen to that, brother, amen to that.

00:08:51   - Yeah, you know what's better than manual transmission?

00:08:52   No transmission.

00:08:53   - There's still a transmission.

00:08:55   - Not really.

00:08:56   I mean, Tesla's a single speed.

00:08:57   - I know, but it's still, anyway, whatever.

00:09:00   - Is it a transmission if it can't change gears?

00:09:03   - Yeah, yeah, 'cause it changes the gear ratio.

00:09:05   It's not just like one to one.

00:09:07   - No, I think it's, I don't think it does.

00:09:10   - It does.

00:09:11   - How?

00:09:12   - Marco, because it transmits its power.

00:09:14   - It is a fixed ratio, but it is a gear ratio.

00:09:16   There are different numbers of teeth on the gears.

00:09:18   - That's just called gears.

00:09:19   They're just a set of gears.

00:09:21   - Right, but they don't all have the same number of teeth.

00:09:22   The gear ratio is not one to one.

00:09:24   - No, but I don't--

00:09:25   - Otherwise your back wheels would be turning

00:09:26   at 20,000 RPM.

00:09:27   - No, but I don't think, like, do Teslas have

00:09:31   more than one gear besides forward and reverse?

00:09:34   - No, I mean like actual gears, as in circular things

00:09:36   with teeth that mesh with each other.

00:09:38   Go look at exploded diagram of the thing

00:09:41   that powers your car, you will see several gears

00:09:43   that mesh with each other with different numbers

00:09:45   of teeth on them. - But doesn't a transmission

00:09:46   require the two like change between ratios at some point?

00:09:50   - No, it just requires the power to be transmitted

00:09:53   through a series of gears with different numbers

00:09:55   of teeth on them unless it's just one gear ratio.

00:09:57   - Okay, so then a watch is a transmission then.

00:09:59   'Cause there's gears-- - Well, it's not a car, so.

00:10:02   (laughing)

00:10:03   Lots of things have gears that aren't cars.

00:10:05   This is like robot or not.

00:10:05   - Like is my hand mixer, is my electric hand mixer upstairs?

00:10:08   Is that a transmission?

00:10:09   - Exactly, like what about my kitchen haters?

00:10:10   Does that have a transmission?

00:10:11   Well, kind of.

00:10:12   - Yeah. - Oh gosh.

00:10:14   What have we done?

00:10:15   I have regrets.

00:10:17   (electronic beeping)

00:10:18   All right, let's bring us back around

00:10:19   and let's do some follow-up.

00:10:21   Jonas writes, "I was a bit worried

00:10:22   "about the time machine iCloud backup,

00:10:24   iCloud photo library thing, but it seems that it's included in time machine backups

00:10:28   And so I guess Jonas or maybe John found a knowledge base or whatever article about this

00:10:34   So tell me about this at Apple comm so we can be pretty sure they know what they're talking about

00:10:38   It says Apple says even if you use iCloud photos, it's important

00:10:42   You always back up your library locally using one of the followed methods and the two methods

00:10:46   They list our use time machine and it claims that will back everything up or manually copy your library to your external storage device

00:10:52   I think what I was misremembering last episode was and I again

00:10:56   I don't know if this is true because all we have is this vague advice from Apple

00:10:59   This is hey back it up use time machine. So thumbs up on that

00:11:01   Maybe I was misremembering a thing where when you use time machine, you will not back up the SQLite metadata databases

00:11:09   But will only back up the photo files and the rest of the structure

00:11:12   If you use iCloud photo library because it assumes it can always regenerate the SQLite databases from the iCloud photo stuff

00:11:18   That's the thing now

00:11:20   I don't know if it's true, but apparently you're safe using time machine if you just want to back at the actual photos

00:11:24   I think and it will back up the whole thing the whole photo library

00:11:27   There was just some big blow up a couple years ago people being mad that a time machine wouldn't back up some

00:11:33   What they considered to be an important part of the photo library

00:11:37   And the reason they don't back it up is because if you use iCloud photos

00:11:40   That the that source of truth is in the cloud anyway

00:11:44   So your local backup of it is just gonna get overridden with what's in the cloud

00:11:47   And that's why I think they didn't pack it up

00:11:48   So maybe more follow-up on this in the future, but for the main question of will it back up my photos the answer is yes

00:11:53   Cool. All right, there are

00:11:55   Some new monitors that we need to talk about we talked about the Samsung 5k

00:12:00   Last week and actually we have some updates on that and then there's a Dell we need to talk about but tell me we have a

00:12:06   Little more information about the Samsung I guess. Yeah, we talked about the camera last time. I'm like, oh, it's a 4k camera

00:12:10   It's a good camera not like that crappy one on the Apple Studio display

00:12:13   Well, 4K camera is about 8.3 megapixel and the studio display has a 12 megapixel camera.

00:12:19   I still think the one on the Samsung is probably better because we don't know what the crop

00:12:26   factor is on that 4K camera.

00:12:28   Apple's super ultra wide camera that it uses on the studio display tracks you through a

00:12:33   wide range of, you know, you can move all over the place, right?

00:12:37   I would imagine Samsung is going to take a less extreme approach with its 4K camera and

00:12:42   And when it says that it tracks you,

00:12:43   I bet it crops out a portion of the 4K frame,

00:12:47   but not as tiny a portion as a studio display does.

00:12:49   We'll see when the thing ships,

00:12:50   but that's a software question more than a hardware one.

00:12:53   But just wanted to clarify,

00:12:54   4K is about eight megapixels

00:12:56   and a studio display is 12 megapixel camera.

00:12:59   - And then Dell has a new 6K monitor

00:13:02   that makes your XDR look like a pile of garbage.

00:13:04   - It does not, but it exists as a 6K monitor.

00:13:08   So here's what's important about it.

00:13:09   It is a 32 inch 6K monitor,

00:13:11   which is the same as the XDR.

00:13:13   It has more pixels than the XDR.

00:13:15   The XDR is also 32 inches,

00:13:17   but the Dell 6K monitor is 6144 by 3456,

00:13:21   and the XDR is 6016 by 3384.

00:13:26   Sorry for reading those numbers that way,

00:13:28   but that's the way my brain works sometimes.

00:13:30   So the Dell monitor has 875,520 more pixels than the XDR.

00:13:35   The PPI is very similar.

00:13:40   On the Dell it's 223 and on the XDR it's 215.

00:13:43   So this is a Mac appropriate monitor

00:13:46   with more pixels than the XDR.

00:13:49   So this is looking pretty good here.

00:13:51   Same size, more pixels.

00:13:53   - It looks pretty good until you see it.

00:13:55   - No, we'll get there, we'll get there.

00:13:58   It is not a fancy display like the XDR though.

00:14:02   It is an LG IPS monitor.

00:14:06   It covers P3 but that's about it.

00:14:09   It does 600 nits max, which is not anything close

00:14:12   to the XDR 1600 nits max.

00:14:14   It has the good old familiar from last episode,

00:14:18   display HDR 600 certification,

00:14:21   but according to Arstactica, it does have local dimming.

00:14:24   It has 12 zones.

00:14:26   That's not good.

00:14:27   - I think I would just turn it off at that point, right?

00:14:30   - Yeah, the peak brightness is less than half of the XDR

00:14:35   and the XDR has 576 dimming zones.

00:14:37   And even that is paltry compared to modern mini LED monitors

00:14:41   that have way more dimming zones.

00:14:42   12 dimming zones is not good.

00:14:45   But it does claim that it has a good IPS display

00:14:48   or whatever, anyway.

00:14:49   Hide adjustable stand included of course with rotation

00:14:52   'cause why wouldn't you have that on such an expensive model

00:14:54   and that would be crazy.

00:14:55   - Wait, it's not $1,000?

00:14:57   - No, yeah.

00:14:58   Here's the thing, I mean this is CS, this is coming from CS

00:15:00   so we don't know the pricing of this.

00:15:01   So we can't make fun of how badly priced Apple's things are

00:15:04   'cause we don't technically know about the price

00:15:06   So I'm going to say it's going to undercut Apple.

00:15:09   It has a 4K dual gain HDR webcam that uses quote unquote AI to keep you in the frame.

00:15:15   You know, sounds familiar, huh?

00:15:17   This is apparently a dual gain HDR CMOS sensor with multi-element lens.

00:15:21   The webcam has independent hardware tilt.

00:15:24   So even though the camera is built into the monitor, you can apparently tilt it with your

00:15:28   hand.

00:15:29   It uses Dell Express sign-in technology to detect your presence when you're nearby and

00:15:32   logs you in automatically, locking your PC when you walk away.

00:15:35   You know I want face ID on the Mac and I would love it if it locked the screen when I walked

00:15:38   away because it knew I did that because of the camera but I'm sure this is all like a

00:15:41   Windows feature and not a monitor thing.

00:15:44   If it works as well as the Windows face recognition thing to log in you're not missing much.

00:15:50   I mean that's better than nothing I feel like but we'll see.

00:15:52   It's not.

00:15:54   It's worse than nothing.

00:15:55   Oh well.

00:15:56   If it worked as well as face ID on my iPad and my iPhone I would be happy.

00:16:00   So and I feel like Apple could make that happen someday maybe.

00:16:03   It has a mute and camera disabled touch sensors accessible on the front of the monitor, because

00:16:07   it's nice to be able to do those things quickly.

00:16:09   14 watt stereo speakers.

00:16:11   Auto KVM built in.

00:16:12   Let's you control two PC sources with a single mouse and keyboard.

00:16:16   Viewing content from two computers with picture in picture and picture by picture modes.

00:16:20   I think you can put the two monitors side by side.

00:16:23   Like two images on the screen.

00:16:25   Connectivity.

00:16:26   Of course it has tons of ports, why wouldn't it?

00:16:28   Such an expensive large monitor.

00:16:30   HDMI, DisplayPort 2.1, Thunderbolt 4,

00:16:33   RS calls this Thunderbolt 4 downstream.

00:16:35   I'm assuming that means that's how you connect

00:16:37   your computer to it, I'm not sure.

00:16:40   USB-C upstream, four USB-A ports,

00:16:43   2.5 gigabit ethernet port,

00:16:46   and a front panel with two USB-C ports

00:16:48   at 10 gigabits with 15 watt power delivery

00:16:50   and one USB-A port with 10 gigabits,

00:16:52   and BC 1.2 power charging,

00:16:55   which is apparently an abbreviation

00:16:56   for USB battery charging revision 1.2.

00:16:59   up to 140 watts of power delivery.

00:17:02   So it's not the same specs as the XDR.

00:17:05   It's kind of an XDR for people who don't need 1600 nits,

00:17:09   great color fidelity, so on and so forth,

00:17:11   but just want a big single monitor with tons of ports

00:17:15   and lots of features and all that good stuff.

00:17:17   Unfortunately, as Marco alluded to before,

00:17:20   it's ugly as sin.

00:17:21   (laughing)

00:17:22   - It's so ugly.

00:17:23   - Let me paint you a word picture.

00:17:26   So imagine like a standard computer monitor

00:17:28   with a ugly plastic base or stand on it.

00:17:32   But as you look up, you notice that there's a forehead

00:17:37   that must be a couple of inches tall.

00:17:40   And that is way out of line with the bezel

00:17:42   on the rest of the sides of the display.

00:17:44   - And as big as the forehead is,

00:17:46   is it so big because it contains the camera?

00:17:48   No, it does not contain the camera.

00:17:50   - No, Jon, I'm glad you asked.

00:17:52   Only half of the circular camera is within the forehead.

00:17:55   - Half of the huge camera.

00:17:57   Like huge, just like the size of a golf ball.

00:18:01   - Right, and then the other half of this golf ball

00:18:03   sized camera is above the top bezel.

00:18:06   It's the top of the monitor.

00:18:08   It looks preposterous.

00:18:10   - It looks like an enemy from Half Life.

00:18:13   - It's like so ungainly looking.

00:18:15   Like anything where the bezel is bigger on the top

00:18:17   and the bottom always kind of looks like the monitor

00:18:18   is upside down and then it's got the big thing.

00:18:21   But if you look at the videos of this thing,

00:18:23   the stand is tilt adjustable, height adjustable, rotates.

00:18:27   So many ports on this thing, so many features.

00:18:30   It's got all the stuff that you can want.

00:18:31   And I bet the price is gonna be pretty good.

00:18:33   And I don't think there's really any other game in town

00:18:36   for, hey, I want an XDR, but I don't need,

00:18:38   you know, 1,600 nits.

00:18:39   Now, as I said, when we talked about this

00:18:41   and kind of, you know, a few months after I got it,

00:18:44   whatever, I really do, I didn't think I would care

00:18:46   about the HDR, but I really do appreciate it

00:18:48   because my phone, my family's phones take HDR video

00:18:52   and photos, and when I view them on the big screen

00:18:56   where I do my photo editing, they look HDR.

00:18:59   I actually use those 1600 nits

00:19:01   and so do Apple's Pro laptops now.

00:19:04   So I'm kind of at the point where,

00:19:05   if you had asked me before about the XDR,

00:19:08   I'd be like, oh, I would just love something like the XDR

00:19:10   that just doesn't have that HDR stuff

00:19:11   that I don't care about.

00:19:12   But now I'm kind of over the line where I think

00:19:14   I don't ever wanna buy a monitor that doesn't do HDR

00:19:17   for my quote unquote good monitor.

00:19:18   So in that respect, this one is not to my liking,

00:19:23   but I think having a 6K monitor

00:19:25   for people who don't care about HDR

00:19:27   that has all the features and connects to all the things

00:19:30   and has a good camera built in and everything.

00:19:33   If this thing is priced reasonably,

00:19:35   I'm just super glad this exists

00:19:37   because now we have another alternative to the Apple 5K

00:19:41   and now finally we have something I never thought

00:19:42   we'd have, an alternative to the XDR

00:19:44   that again, assuming it's not more expensive,

00:19:47   is great to just have in the market

00:19:49   for people who want a big monitor

00:19:51   but don't wanna pay six grand once you have the stand.

00:19:54   - Yeah, and I'm guessing this is,

00:19:56   I mean, not knowing anything about

00:19:58   what these components cost these days.

00:20:00   Apple's at six grand from a monitor

00:20:01   that's now a few years old

00:20:03   that has higher specs in certain areas

00:20:04   and of course higher design and everything else.

00:20:06   I'm gonna say this is probably gonna be

00:20:08   under four grand for the Dell one

00:20:10   and if I'm right about that,

00:20:12   even if it's four grand,

00:20:13   it's probably even gonna be less than that,

00:20:15   that's gonna be a great deal.

00:20:16   Like for what you're getting

00:20:17   compared to what else is in the market,

00:20:19   I think this is gonna be well under the XDR's price.

00:20:23   maybe even half, it could be 3,000, I don't know,

00:20:26   but whatever it is, it's probably gonna be

00:20:29   a really compelling price, and the money you're saving,

00:20:32   you can buy anything that will make you not see

00:20:35   how this looks, maybe like one of those,

00:20:38   if you look through one of those cartoon ninja masks,

00:20:40   so you're looking through a slit,

00:20:42   if you can just cut off the top and bottom

00:20:43   and not see anything beyond that, I don't know.

00:20:46   - You know what I do think is kind of cool?

00:20:48   It's really ugly, but I like the principle of it.

00:20:51   So they have some, I guess, capacitive buttons

00:20:54   on the bottom left-hand side of the screen.

00:20:55   Not in love with that, but at least they have a button.

00:20:58   Imagine how cool it would be if your studio display

00:21:00   had a power button.

00:21:01   That would be amazing!

00:21:03   But anyway.

00:21:03   - No, you know what?

00:21:04   I love hearing about everyone's studio display bugs.

00:21:08   Because you know how many times I've had to unplug my XDR?

00:21:11   - I'm gonna guess none.

00:21:12   - Yep, correct, none.

00:21:13   Oh wait, once I rewired my desk.

00:21:15   - But both of these monitors should have power buttons.

00:21:19   Like even the XTR, which I've also had no problems with,

00:21:21   it should still have a power button too.

00:21:23   - No, it's an Apple device, it's not gonna have

00:21:24   a power button, their headphones don't even have

00:21:25   a power button, not a chance the monitor will.

00:21:27   - But they should, that's a, like, we got them to add back

00:21:30   the good keyboards, SD card slot, HDMI to the laptops,

00:21:33   I think we can convince them that power buttons

00:21:35   are a thing that electronic devices should have.

00:21:37   - I know, I tell you, I actually, for interesting reasons,

00:21:40   I used someone else's 12-inch MacBook today,

00:21:43   and it's the first time I've seen one of those

00:21:45   in a long time, and of course, the space bar is broken.

00:21:49   but it did feel really small.

00:21:51   I was like, damn, I wish this size still existed,

00:21:54   but wow, I'm glad this keyboard doesn't still exist.

00:21:57   - Yep.

00:21:58   Anyway, next to these capacitive buttons,

00:22:00   there's a little like MacBook Air,

00:22:02   original MacBook Air style door that drops,

00:22:04   or not door, but like, I don't know,

00:22:06   like column that drops down.

00:22:08   - It's a USB-C hub is what it is, basically.

00:22:11   - Yeah, so it has two USB-C ports on it

00:22:13   and a USB-A port on it.

00:22:14   And then you can shimmy it back up

00:22:16   within the contents of the inside of the monitor

00:22:19   and confines of the monitor, that's what I was looking for.

00:22:21   You can slide it back up inside the monitor

00:22:23   and it disappears.

00:22:24   And I think I'm supposed to hate this,

00:22:26   but I think I kinda like it.

00:22:28   - No, front-facing parts, useful thing to have,

00:22:30   so you don't have to constantly reach around

00:22:31   behind the monitor.

00:22:32   This is exactly what PC makers will do,

00:22:34   is like, oh, let's just add all the features

00:22:35   that we think will be useful.

00:22:36   Sometimes inelegantly and sometimes they go overboard,

00:22:39   but it's such a nice, that's why you need,

00:22:41   Apple needs competition and you need contrast.

00:22:43   The Apple's overly simplified thing is contrasted

00:22:46   with this thing that has every feature

00:22:47   anyone could ever think of.

00:22:49   Somewhere in the middle is probably where we wanna be,

00:22:50   but it's good to have the two things balancing each other.

00:22:53   So if you don't like what Apple has done,

00:22:55   you have an alternative.

00:22:56   - Yep.

00:22:57   - Do you think as you type on your desk

00:22:59   that this stand will wiggle the whole monitor?

00:23:01   - I think Dell usually has pretty good stands,

00:23:03   and this one looks pretty sturdy.

00:23:05   It's LG that can't make a stand.

00:23:06   - I know, well, but I haven't,

00:23:08   I used to love Dell monitors.

00:23:10   Back in the pre-written days,

00:23:12   I had two Dell 24 inches and they were fantastic.

00:23:15   And I mean, you know, at the time when those came out

00:23:18   in, you know, 2006 or whatever, those were really great,

00:23:22   very competitively priced, very well performing monitors

00:23:25   and they were great, but that was a long time ago

00:23:29   and I, you know, I wouldn't make any assumptions

00:23:32   unless I've heard otherwise that they would still be

00:23:35   even, you know, the same company,

00:23:36   little one making the same quality stuff.

00:23:38   We are brought to you this week by Sanity,

00:23:41   the composable content cloud that powers awesome digital experiences for companies like Puma,

00:23:47   Sonos, Skims, Figma, and more.

00:23:50   With the new year comes new beginnings, and you're probably taking a good look at how

00:23:54   you manage content across your apps.

00:23:56   Maybe you're tired of wrangling APIs that are poorly documented, working in a CMS that's

00:24:00   bloated and unintuitive, or dealing with data stores that sneak in surprises like weird

00:24:04   caching or worse, data loss.

00:24:07   But believe me, I can relate.

00:24:09   Sanity is a complete solution for authoring, managing,

00:24:13   and distributing your app's content

00:24:15   to any device, channel, or service.

00:24:17   Teams can deploy an entire production-ready backend

00:24:20   in seconds that handles all the hard stuff

00:24:22   like content caching and global distribution.

00:24:25   Your content editing tool, the Sanity Studio,

00:24:28   is completely customizable and can be deployed

00:24:31   as a React dependency available on slash studio

00:24:34   or even slash WP admin if you're feeling nostalgic

00:24:37   or wherever you want it to be.

00:24:38   Sanity treats content as data,

00:24:40   making your content readily programmable,

00:24:43   queryable, and reusable for any use case,

00:24:46   such as building an e-commerce store,

00:24:47   personal blog, media site, or digital enterprise.

00:24:51   And some features Sanity customers love

00:24:53   include real-time content previews,

00:24:55   a highly customizable block content editor,

00:24:57   TypeScript support, and just so much more.

00:25:00   You can see for yourself at Sanity.io/ATP.

00:25:05   Sanity is offering our listeners a free boosted plan

00:25:08   with increased API and bandwidth limits

00:25:10   so you can try it out yourself.

00:25:12   Visit sanity.io/atp to get started.

00:25:16   Once again, sanity.io/atp.

00:25:19   Thank you so much to Sanity for sponsoring our show.

00:25:22   - John, do you need Marco and me

00:25:27   for the next like 20, 30 minutes

00:25:29   or can we just take a little nap?

00:25:30   - Yeah, you'll have to be my camera crew

00:25:32   as I report from the CES show floor.

00:25:34   (laughing)

00:25:35   - My annual trip to CES that I don't actually take,

00:25:38   this is it.

00:25:39   So CES is going on.

00:25:41   I've never actually been to CES,

00:25:43   but I will be virtually reporting from there

00:25:45   on the tiny amount of things

00:25:47   that I actually care about at CES,

00:25:48   and those are having to do with televisions.

00:25:50   What's going on on the world TV

00:25:51   is just a quick overview here.

00:25:53   - Well, hold on, I'm curious before we begin.

00:25:56   I know from being on the more computer side of things

00:26:00   that CES does not have a strong correlation

00:26:04   into what actually comes out on the market.

00:26:06   Is that better for TVs?

00:26:07   Like do TVs have a better track record

00:26:09   of what's shown at CES actually then gets delivered

00:26:12   to the market?

00:26:13   - Yeah, yeah, so for televisions it has simply become

00:26:16   the thing where like everybody,

00:26:18   there's like an annual crop of televisions

00:26:20   and everybody just shows, with an asterisk

00:26:22   that I'll get to in a second,

00:26:23   shows their TVs at CES.

00:26:25   They also show stuff that isn't a TV.

00:26:28   Here's something we're thinking of,

00:26:29   here's something stupid, like the concept car equivalent.

00:26:31   That crap is, you know, whatever, right?

00:26:33   But the TVs they show, they ship them later that year.

00:26:36   Unless something catastrophic happens,

00:26:38   they ship them pretty reliably.

00:26:40   So it's annoying that CES comes

00:26:42   and you don't get prices and availability,

00:26:44   but you basically know, look, this happens every single year.

00:26:46   They show them in January, they're not yet ready to ship.

00:26:49   Sometime during the year, probably around the middle,

00:26:51   they're gonna ship them,

00:26:52   we're gonna find out the pricing and availability,

00:26:54   and we do it all over the next year.

00:26:55   So that is very reliable.

00:26:56   So it's not like, you know, they give you the names,

00:26:58   the model numbers and everything, right?

00:27:00   So these are real products, not, you know,

00:27:02   Ignore the concept car stuffs, although I'll talk a little bit about the concept car stuff

00:27:06   here too.

00:27:07   So this year, the starting news is you can finally get Quantum Dot QD OLED screens in

00:27:14   larger than 65 inch sizes.

00:27:16   All the fancy TV people who have bigger houses than me wanted to buy my recommended TV last

00:27:21   year, the Sony A95K, but like, oh, it only goes in 65 inch.

00:27:24   That's the biggest size you can get, which is fine for me.

00:27:27   My last TV was 55 inches and I upgraded to 65 and that's about as big as I can fit, but

00:27:32   There was nothing bigger.

00:27:33   So this year finally you can get a 77 inch size.

00:27:35   Samsung display makes QD OLED screens.

00:27:37   They are the only manufacturer that does.

00:27:40   Every television that has a QD OLED screen comes from Samsung.

00:27:43   Samsung announced a 77 inch television.

00:27:46   Their naming scheme is not as good as LG's.

00:27:48   Last year was the S95B that came in 55 and 65.

00:27:52   Now you can get the S95C.

00:27:55   I get it.

00:27:56   You're incrementing the number.

00:27:57   What is the S?

00:27:58   What is the 95?

00:27:59   I don't get it.

00:28:00   series, which is sort of their lower end model.

00:28:03   So they bifurcated their entire line.

00:28:05   The S95C comes with what Samsung calls a one connect box

00:28:09   that they've had on their TVs for many years.

00:28:11   Do you have that on your frame as well, Marco?

00:28:13   - Is that, so the frame has, you run one skinny cable

00:28:18   to the TV and it goes down into this giant box

00:28:20   that has all the other ports on it that you hide

00:28:22   like in your entertainment center.

00:28:23   - That is the one connect box and that is exactly the idea.

00:28:27   It makes it easier to mount the TV

00:28:29   and you don't have to, I think it's actually a fiber optic

00:28:32   on the modern ones.

00:28:33   One little skinny cable goes to the TV

00:28:35   and there's a breakout box with everything else in it.

00:28:37   The power plug, the HDMI port, it's a good idea.

00:28:40   But Samsung puts it on another fancy TV.

00:28:42   So the S95C has the one connect box.

00:28:44   - I mean, I don't know how good, mine's buggy as hell.

00:28:46   We have two frame TVs, they're both buggy as hell.

00:28:49   I would never in a million years buy another one.

00:28:51   And I don't know if it's because of the electronics

00:28:53   being separated, probably not.

00:28:55   It's probably just 'cause Samsung sucks,

00:28:56   but man is it buggy as hell.

00:28:58   I would never do this again.

00:28:59   Yeah, I can't speak to the reliability of the One Connect box because obviously that's

00:29:02   some proprietary thing that they're doing with the fiber optic cable, right?

00:29:05   But in theory, the electronics that are in that box are the same as they would stick

00:29:08   on the back of the TV, so if they suck, they would probably also suck on the back of the

00:29:11   TV.

00:29:12   But anyway, their fancy line, S95C, has the One Connect box, and it also has bigger and

00:29:17   better speakers in the TV because now there's room for them.

00:29:19   They basically have speakers taking up the whole back of the TV with openings on the

00:29:23   back and everything for better bass.

00:29:25   So that's the S95C.

00:29:27   And the S90C doesn't have the One Connect box and it's more of the lower end model.

00:29:33   So they've split up their QD OLED line into the good ones that have features you might

00:29:37   not want like the One Connect.

00:29:39   That's a good one.

00:29:40   All right.

00:29:41   Speaking of One Connect box, LG has a product they call the Signature Series OLED TVs.

00:29:47   It's just a WRGB OLED, not a QD OLED.

00:29:50   And theirs are wireless.

00:29:52   There's a power plug that goes to the back of the television and there's a breakout box.

00:29:56   the breakout box communicates wirelessly.

00:29:59   They call theirs a zero connect box.

00:30:01   Isn't that clever?

00:30:02   - But it still has power, I mean, so what's the point?

00:30:05   - Well, the point is, it's a lot easier

00:30:07   to sort of mount the TV, like if you have to be like KC

00:30:09   and mount it way too high over your fireplace or whatever,

00:30:12   you just have to have power, you don't have to fish

00:30:14   HDMI cables through, or like, tellers have lots of ports

00:30:17   in the back of them that you might not want to connect.

00:30:18   - But I'm saying, like, when you have the one cable

00:30:20   that goes to the breakout box,

00:30:22   the way my stupid buggy Samsung ones do,

00:30:24   What's the difference if you have to run a power cable

00:30:27   to the TV or this cable to the TV?

00:30:30   - Right, well, lots of people have a power plug

00:30:32   near their television or behind

00:30:33   where they're gonna wall mount it,

00:30:35   but not a lot of people have the special

00:30:37   one connect fiber optic cables fished through their wall

00:30:40   to the box that they're gonna buy with the TV.

00:30:41   Not a lot of people have HDMI, or if they do have HDMI,

00:30:44   it's not the right standard for HDMI 2.1, whatever.

00:30:47   This is a silly rich person TV, right?

00:30:50   It's not a serious TV, but it is a real product.

00:30:52   It's 97 inches, it's probably horrendously expensive.

00:30:55   I just think it's interesting because they're sending

00:30:58   real full fledged, not compressed,

00:31:01   like full fidelity 4K 120 hertz video signal

00:31:06   to the television wirelessly up to 30 feet away.

00:31:09   I don't recommend this television,

00:31:11   I just think it's interesting that we've gotten

00:31:12   to the point where they can do that

00:31:13   on a silly rich person TV for people who, you know.

00:31:17   If you look at the pictures,

00:31:19   see how it's like the television itself

00:31:20   is on one of those awkward stands

00:31:21   that no normal person would have in their house, right?

00:31:24   It's just kind of like freestanding and alone.

00:31:26   That was to make fun of the fact

00:31:27   that they never show any power cables or anything else.

00:31:29   Well, you can see the cable in this picture.

00:31:31   It's just the power cable.

00:31:32   It goes down one of the legs

00:31:33   and that's the only cable you need to attach.

00:31:35   So finally, it's a realistic picture

00:31:37   and you just gotta find someplace to hide this box.

00:31:40   So there's that.

00:31:40   I just thought it was silly.

00:31:41   It's like the TVs, they have like a TV that rolls up

00:31:44   and all the silly rich people TVs are just fun to look at,

00:31:46   but they are real products they do sell

00:31:48   to real silly rich people.

00:31:51   More seriously from LG, their competition for QD OLED,

00:31:55   'cause they kinda got trounced last year

00:31:57   by having, they didn't have a QD OLED TV,

00:31:59   they still don't have a QD OLED TV.

00:32:01   Well, what they have now is the Micro Lens Array.

00:32:05   They took their WRGB OLEDs, which are OLED TVs

00:32:08   that have a red, a green, and a blue sub-pixel,

00:32:11   and then also a big hunk and a white sub-pixel next to it.

00:32:14   They took that TV, and on top of each pixel,

00:32:18   they put tiny little microscopic lenses.

00:32:20   So on a 77 inch TV, every pixel has 5,117 lenses

00:32:24   on top of it.

00:32:26   - Every single pixel?

00:32:27   - Every single pixel.

00:32:28   There's a lot of pixels on a 4K TV.

00:32:30   - What?

00:32:31   - Yep.

00:32:32   They're micro lenses.

00:32:33   It's a junior mint.

00:32:34   It's refreshing.

00:32:37   All right.

00:32:38   You can look at some of the pictures.

00:32:39   So what's the point of these little lenses?

00:32:41   The point of the lenses is to take light

00:32:43   that would otherwise be lost to internal reflection

00:32:45   as light passes through the various glass layers

00:32:47   'cause when you send light through, you know,

00:32:49   Anything there, you lose some of it due to internal

00:32:52   reflections of light that doesn't make it out

00:32:54   to people's eyeballs.

00:32:55   The micro lens array makes more of the light make it through

00:32:59   without losing less of it to internal reflection.

00:33:01   So you don't need to run your backlight,

00:33:03   or not backlight, you don't need to run your pixels brighter

00:33:05   you just get more of the light that you're producing

00:33:08   out to people's eyeballs.

00:33:10   And that is their competition for QD OLED.

00:33:12   You also get better viewing angles,

00:33:13   'cause again more light is leaving the display

00:33:16   going to eyeballs and less of it is getting stuck

00:33:18   inside the display, less off-axis color tinting,

00:33:21   all of the things that were problems with WRGB OLEDs

00:33:24   that weren't problems with QD OLEDs,

00:33:26   they're combating that with the microlens array.

00:33:29   So it is brighter, the estimates are it'll be

00:33:31   about 1500 nits, 1500 calibrated nits on a 10% window.

00:33:35   When we say that we mean make a 16 by nine box

00:33:38   that is 10% the size of the TV,

00:33:40   that can be probably around 1500 nits.

00:33:43   Full screen, 200 nits.

00:33:44   This is what TVs have been like for years by the way,

00:33:46   if you don't know.

00:33:47   make the entire screen white you get 200 nits right if you make a 10% window white 1500 nits

00:33:54   this is relying on the fact that most real television content is not like 100% white but

00:33:58   that scene in the matrix is pretty close so just keep that in mind this is an increase from last

00:34:03   year's model last year's best lg model was 933 nits on a 10 window and 172 full field so this

00:34:10   is a big jump in brightness thanks to all those little tiny lenses um obviously you'll have to

00:34:16   have to wait for reviewers to get these TVs to compare them.

00:34:20   Samsung's QD OLEDs are also brighter this year,

00:34:23   so it'll be quite a competition.

00:34:26   Obviously, the things QD OLEDs still have going for them

00:34:28   is they don't need a bunch of little microlenses

00:34:30   because they're just naturally better at putting out light

00:34:33   because they have fewer layers to go through.

00:34:35   And the part that produces the light

00:34:36   is literally physically closer to the surface.

00:34:39   They have naturally good viewing angles.

00:34:41   And their brightness doesn't rely on the white subpixels.

00:34:44   So while you can get some, you know,

00:34:46   a 10% window at 1500 nits that's pure white,

00:34:49   you cannot get a 10% window at 1500 nits that's pure red,

00:34:52   because that white sub pixel

00:34:53   is doing a huge amount of the work.

00:34:54   If you add up the brightness of the R, G, and B sub pixels

00:34:58   in a QD OLED, you get the white, you know,

00:35:00   the full brightness.

00:35:01   If you add up the R, the G, and the B sub pixels

00:35:04   on a WRGB OLED, you get like 10% of the brightness.

00:35:06   Most of it is that white sub pixel,

00:35:08   which tends to wash out colors.

00:35:09   So I still feel like QD OLED is the future

00:35:12   and is the better technology,

00:35:13   but kudos to LG for finding a way to get way more brightness

00:35:18   out of their TVs and come up with a technology

00:35:22   that should make, I feel like, their top end TVs competitive

00:35:25   with QD OLEDs this year, we'll see.

00:35:26   Second to last, Samsung's, I'm not gonna say

00:35:31   like silly concept car thing 'cause these are real products,

00:35:34   but they're real products for fabulously rich people.

00:35:37   Micro LED, every year you see micro LED at CES

00:35:40   because it is the best technology.

00:35:42   This is non-organic LEDs,

00:35:45   where every single pixel has a little red LED,

00:35:47   a little white LED, and a little green, not red,

00:35:51   red, green, and blue, right, RGB.

00:35:53   Which is unlike the current ones,

00:35:56   which just use a single LED that they pass

00:35:58   through their color filters or quantum dots or whatever.

00:36:01   No burn-in problems, instant response,

00:36:04   and no white sub-pixel, amazing viewing angles.

00:36:07   This is the promised land of television technology.

00:36:11   it also costs like 30 grand, right?

00:36:14   And the big problem with micro LED TVs has been,

00:36:17   we can't make the little LEDs micro enough.

00:36:20   So you see them in stadiums all the time,

00:36:21   like those big screens that like a basketball game,

00:36:24   those are not really particularly micro,

00:36:26   but those are LED screens.

00:36:27   They have red, green and blue LEDs for each pixel.

00:36:30   Making them small is really, really hard

00:36:32   because we can't make,

00:36:34   we can't economically make a bunch of tiny little LEDs.

00:36:37   So the way manufacturers have been making these

00:36:39   for years and years is they make

00:36:41   sort of like a sub board,

00:36:43   is a micro LED thing with a certain number of pixels,

00:36:46   and then they checkerboard those things together

00:36:48   to make a complete TV, right?

00:36:49   Because they can't make one board the size of a TV.

00:36:53   They can just make a bunch of sub boards

00:36:55   and put them together so you can't see the seams, right?

00:36:58   And the problem has been the smallest one you get

00:37:00   is 300 inches, and then the next year

00:37:02   the smallest one you get was 200 inches,

00:37:04   and the next year the smallest one you get was 100 inches.

00:37:06   By the way, they always cost like 10 grand,

00:37:07   30 grand or whatever, right?

00:37:08   but you just couldn't make them small enough.

00:37:11   Well, this year, Samsung was showing micro LED TVs

00:37:15   in sizes from 50 inches up to 140 inches.

00:37:18   Those are real TV sizes.

00:37:19   So from a tech perspective,

00:37:22   we can now make micro LED TVs

00:37:25   in the sizes humans can fit in their homes.

00:37:28   Just not at the prices humans can afford to buy them.

00:37:31   I don't even think there were prices attached to these.

00:37:33   You know, it's one of those kind of,

00:37:34   if you have to ask, you can't afford it.

00:37:35   But anyway, the sizes that come in are weird.

00:37:37   It's 50, 63, 76, 89, 101, 114, and 140 inches.

00:37:42   And those sizes are a result of basically the size

00:37:45   of the little unit, the little checkerboard thing.

00:37:49   When you stick a bunch of those together

00:37:51   to make 16 by nine display,

00:37:52   these are the inch sizes you end up with.

00:37:54   But they're 240 hertz, they're low power,

00:37:56   they have amazing color, phenomenal brightness,

00:37:59   no image retention ever.

00:38:01   I can't wait for this technology to arrive.

00:38:03   Hopefully we will have affordable micro LED TVs

00:38:06   before my eyes get so bad that I can't appreciate them.

00:38:09   - Hey, wasn't there a rumor just a few days ago

00:38:11   that the next, or that an upcoming Apple Watch

00:38:14   will probably use micro LED?

00:38:16   - Yeah, there's been micro LED Apple Watch rumors

00:38:18   for about five years.

00:38:19   Micro LED, I mean, it's not like all the technology

00:38:21   is never gonna come, 'cause every year at CES

00:38:23   the micro LED TVs get better and better.

00:38:25   But yeah, the rumor that Apple's gonna use them

00:38:27   in some device someday, they will eventually,

00:38:29   but they don't even have OLEDs on their laptops yet.

00:38:31   So let's, you know.

00:38:32   - Wait, wasn't the factory that they did the,

00:38:35   like they bought a factory in Arizona,

00:38:38   and then the whole deal fell apart,

00:38:39   and so wasn't that for micro LED?

00:38:41   - I think one of those was for quartz for something,

00:38:43   like the display quartz or whatever,

00:38:45   but they did make a big investment in micro,

00:38:47   everyone's investing in micro LED,

00:38:49   everyone knows this is the next step,

00:38:51   and it like, all the different things that I talk about,

00:38:53   of these TVs doing stuff so they don't suck as much,

00:38:56   QD OLED was the most recent big step,

00:38:59   look at all the crap we don't have to do,

00:39:00   no white subpixel, we don't lose light

00:39:02   by cutting through color filters,

00:39:03   amazing viewing angle, low power, thin,

00:39:06   but you still have image retention

00:39:08   and you can't get as bright as an LED backlight, right?

00:39:10   So there's always caveats.

00:39:12   Micro LED, the only caveats were,

00:39:15   we have to make a bunch of small ones

00:39:16   and stick them together so you might see the seams

00:39:18   and we can't make them that small.

00:39:19   And they're working on those.

00:39:20   So the size, we've got it.

00:39:22   50 inch micro LED 4K televisions at 240 Hertz.

00:39:26   It's gonna happen, maybe in the next five years.

00:39:29   Stay tuned.

00:39:31   And the final item that I thought was interesting,

00:39:33   second to last actually. Roku is making TVs. Roku makes those little set-top boxes and if you have

00:39:38   a TCL TV it probably has Roku built in, you got a little Roku remote. Roku is making TVs but the

00:39:43   TVs will be manufactured by TCL but currently a lot of the TVs that TCL makes that have Roku built

00:39:51   into them are designed by Roku and Roku just basically hands TCL a design for a TV and then

00:39:56   TCL makes it. So now Roku is making its own TVs which have Roku built in but they're being

00:40:01   being manufactured by TCL, it's confusing.

00:40:03   But it's kind of like if Netflix started making TVs,

00:40:07   no, maybe not Netflix, it's our streaming service.

00:40:09   But Roku is one of the few sort of competitors

00:40:11   remaining standing in the software that runs your TV.

00:40:15   You've got WebOS, Google TV, Apple TV, Roku.

00:40:18   What am I missing?

00:40:20   - Amazon.

00:40:20   - Fire TV, yeah.

00:40:22   Amazon is kind of losing steam.

00:40:25   And then I think, didn't Amazon also make a TV,

00:40:27   like an Alexa TV type thing?

00:40:28   - I believe that's right.

00:40:29   - I recently bought a new tailgate TV.

00:40:31   So this is a TV that basically has to be not impressive.

00:40:36   It just needs to be relatively light and cheap.

00:40:38   - This might be, by the way,

00:40:40   the most Southern thing you've ever said.

00:40:42   I just bought a tailgate TV.

00:40:45   - I'm flummoxed because I don't have a good retort for this

00:40:47   'cause you're probably right.

00:40:49   Anyway, the one we bought, I think it was like $110.

00:40:54   It's like a 32 inch.

00:40:55   I don't remember if it's 720 or 1080,

00:40:58   'cause again, it doesn't matter.

00:40:59   We're gonna be looking at it outdoors.

00:41:01   But anyways, it's a Amazon Fire TV.

00:41:04   I think it was, it's whatever the insignia maybe,

00:41:07   which is I think the Best Buy store brand,

00:41:09   and the only reason I went to Best Buy

00:41:10   was 'cause it was dirt cheap.

00:41:12   But yeah, so that one is an Amazon Fire TV,

00:41:15   and it is not great.

00:41:17   - Yeah, I feel like Amazon is kind of losing,

00:41:19   losing the interest in that market,

00:41:22   and Amazon's kind of consolidating a lot of stuff,

00:41:24   so I'm not sure how long they're gonna be there,

00:41:26   but yeah, they do have a TV OS.

00:41:28   So and the final thing is Sony.

00:41:30   Sony is at CES, but they're mostly

00:41:31   showing PlayStation stuff and their stupid car

00:41:34   that we'll talk about someday and are on the show

00:41:35   because it's been in the show notes forever.

00:41:38   They weren't showing TVs.

00:41:40   I will put a link in the show notes to a YouTube video

00:41:42   from someone who tries to explain why this is.

00:41:44   They have new TVs that are coming.

00:41:46   The theory of this person is,

00:41:49   and probably an informed theory is,

00:41:51   they just didn't feel like talking about them at CES

00:41:53   because they fancy themselves being in the Apple position.

00:41:57   Apple famously does not go to CES, hasn't for decades at this point, because Apple doesn't

00:42:03   have to.

00:42:04   Apple doesn't need to be at a place where media attention is focused, they just make

00:42:08   their own events and tell people to show up and that's all.

00:42:11   Sony apparently doesn't feel like they have to show their televisions here because they'll

00:42:15   just show them in a couple weeks and then when that happens they'll be the only story.

00:42:20   Instead of just being slotted in with 50 other stories about what's going on at CES it'll

00:42:23   be "Oh, the new Sony TVs are out now."

00:42:25   I think this is the first year Sony has tried that move so we'll see how it works out.

00:42:29   The bad news is that I don't get to know what new TVs Sony has but the good news is that

00:42:34   they don't make their own panels.

00:42:36   They sell QD OLED TVs.

00:42:38   They're going to have one of the new QD OLED panels.

00:42:41   Panasonic already has TVs announced with the new QD OLED panels and people are testing

00:42:44   those and Sony's going to get the same exact panels.

00:42:47   It's such a shame that Panasonic doesn't sell TVs in the US anymore because they make such

00:42:51   good TVs.

00:42:52   I might have bought a Panasonic if they still sold here because their tastes tend to align

00:42:55   with mine. But yeah, Sony is just trying to, you know, be its own story at some point in

00:43:05   a few weeks rather than announcing at the show, which is kind of weird. And it's also

00:43:09   weird that they showed a car, but again, we'll talk about that in a future program.

00:43:12   So does this make you regret your semi-recent TV purchase? Is there something that you see

00:43:16   here that you think you could feasibly, that you would feasibly purchase if it was available

00:43:21   today?

00:43:22   It actually makes me glad because in particular Samsung splitting its line

00:43:26   Into like the the best stuff is only on the thing with the one connect box with the weird

00:43:31   You know

00:43:31   Like I don't I don't like that they split the line like that because last year the TV is the best TVs

00:43:37   We're just like normal person TVs. No weird breakout box. No weird super thin design, you know

00:43:42   Not the one that's sold without a stand, right?

00:43:44   They were just regular TVs with regular TV features and this year

00:43:48   Samsung splitting the line it would make it hard for me to choose among them and maybe Sony will do the same thing

00:43:53   Whereas last year it was easy Sony a95k if you have my set of values of what you want out of TV

00:43:59   That was the one to get I'm sure when Sony comes out with new TVs

00:44:03   They'll have one that is better than my TV, but not enough for me to want to upgrade like I'll you know

00:44:08   Considering how long I get my plasma

00:44:10   I'm gonna be riding this a95k probably until something goes terribly wrong with it

00:44:14   And then maybe I'll replace it with a micro LED

00:44:17   But no I'm interested in the market because display technology is super important and it will affect all of our devices eventually

00:44:23   I just feel like Apple is

00:44:25   Not that they're lagging behind because the displays on the laptops in particular are phenomenal like those mini LED screens have amazing specs and look

00:44:32   Great, and I think are the right choice

00:44:34   Especially for a computer screen where I just think OLED

00:44:37   You know OLED is not great because you got image retention and in particular QD OLED with its

00:44:42   The sub pixels are arranged in a triangle it screws with like text display

00:44:47   Even if you don't do some pixel ID aliasing which Apple doesn't it just doesn't quite look right on a computer display

00:44:52   It looks a little bit weird. So I

00:44:54   Don't know what the answer is. But all this all this television technology will eventually affect all of our devices

00:45:00   Already we've got OLED screens on our phones and that's been pretty great. I think I want an OLED screen on my iPad someday

00:45:07   will have micro LED screens on all our Apple devices.

00:45:10   The TV world is kind of a preview of that

00:45:12   in terms of manufacturability pricing and what they can do.

00:45:15   So even though I'm not in the market for a TV

00:45:18   and none of these TVs particularly tempt me,

00:45:20   I do like keeping up on it.

00:45:21   - We are brought to you this week by Memberful,

00:45:26   the easiest way to sell memberships to your audience.

00:45:29   Memberful is used by some of the biggest creators

00:45:31   on the web and there's so many reasons

00:45:34   you might choose to use them.

00:45:35   So maybe you already have membership set up

00:45:37   but it's getting too complicated to manage

00:45:39   and you wanna simplify it, believe me I can relate.

00:45:41   So you can get back to focusing on what you're best at

00:45:44   by using Memberful.

00:45:45   Memberful handles all the hard stuff

00:45:48   so you can focus on what you do best

00:45:49   and what you enjoy most

00:45:51   while earning revenue quickly through membership.

00:45:53   They offer everything you need to run a membership program

00:45:56   including optimized checkout, Apple Pay support,

00:45:59   free trial support, gift subscriptions,

00:46:01   easy member management, dashboard analytics,

00:46:04   and so much more.

00:46:05   And what's great about Memberful, among many other things,

00:46:08   is that you don't have to rewrite

00:46:09   your whole stack from scratch.

00:46:10   Memberful seamlessly integrates

00:46:13   with the tools you already use,

00:46:15   with tons of fully managed integrations

00:46:17   with the most popular tools and services out there.

00:46:20   And if you wanna simplify your memberships

00:46:22   and grow your revenue,

00:46:23   Memberful has a world-class support team ready to help you,

00:46:26   because they ultimately are passionate about your success,

00:46:29   so they always give you access to a real human.

00:46:31   And they care so much about your success

00:46:33   that they do what I think is kind of like

00:46:35   the pro-confident move, which is they don't

00:46:38   stick their branding all over everything.

00:46:39   With Memberful, you always have full control

00:46:42   and ownership of your audience, your branding,

00:46:45   and your membership.

00:46:46   Payments even go directly to your own Stripe account,

00:46:48   and that to me is huge.

00:46:51   You can see for yourself by getting started for free

00:46:53   with no credit card required at memberful.com/atp.

00:46:58   Once again, that's memberful.com/atp

00:47:02   to start your free trial with no credit card required.

00:47:05   Thank you so much to Memberful for sponsoring our show.

00:47:08   - All right, there's been some new news

00:47:14   over the last few days that apparently,

00:47:17   Qi 2 is being worked on, and I guess it's just MagSafe?

00:47:22   That's what everyone seems to be saying

00:47:24   from an article from The Verge.

00:47:26   With the blessing of competitors,

00:47:28   Apple is about to change the Qi wireless standard itself.

00:47:32   It's contributing a new version of Qi that works much like MagSafe, magnets, authentication,

00:47:37   and all.

00:47:38   It's called Qi 2, and yes, it effectively means that MagSafe is coming to Android for

00:47:41   better or for worse.

00:47:42   Samsung and Apple are both expected to put Qi 2 certified products on the market, wireless

00:47:45   power consortium spokesperson Paul Golden tells The Verge, and he says there's no reason

00:47:50   to think future Qi 2 certified chargers wouldn't work with both.

00:47:53   There's also no reason to think a future Qi 2 charger wouldn't work seamlessly and identically

00:47:57   with both Android and iPhones, he says when I ask.

00:48:01   That's because Apple, a WPC "steering member" and a chair of the board of directors, is

00:48:06   contributing essentially the same magnetic power profile as MagSafe to the new Qi 2 standard.

00:48:10   I also read somewhere in here though that the magnets, apparently the arrangement is

00:48:14   ever so slightly different.

00:48:15   I don't have a pull quote for you right off the top of my head, but I guess the magnet

00:48:18   array is, or arrangement is slightly different on Qi 2, which makes me and The Verge wonder,

00:48:24   does that mean it won't be compatible with the iPhone that we have today?

00:48:27   Like how is that going to work? Nobody knows, but I think it just might be an

00:48:30   improvement, like a 2.0. Like if you look at one of the points that is made in

00:48:34   this article is that a kind of unlike, well, maybe it's not unlike, you know,

00:48:37   they, they made for iPhone thing where you'd have a lighting connectors and

00:48:40   stuff where you had to like do it the right way.

00:48:42   You had to sort of get the lighting connectors through Apple or certified

00:48:46   battle or whatever, but you could also say, ah, we don't care about that.

00:48:49   We can figure it out. Let's just make something that works in the lightning

00:48:51   Right, but here we're making a charger. We don't want to pay whatever Apple is charging to use the the official lightning thing

00:48:57   With mag safe that has happened even more. It's a ring of magnets cheap case manufacturer

00:49:04   Like look, I don't whatever you have to do to like certify that your mag safe compatible and use the like

00:49:09   Let's not do any of those just put a ring of magnets and it you can find it. Does it work?

00:49:13   It more or less works like the car mount that I have. I don't think that's mag safe certified

00:49:18   it was like a $20 car amount.

00:49:20   It's a circle with magnets in it

00:49:21   that's roughly the size that it has to be.

00:49:24   I think if they make changes to the magnet arrangement,

00:49:26   it's gonna be like that where,

00:49:28   yeah, it is different, but it's close enough

00:49:31   and it'll work and your thing will stick to it.

00:49:34   And we know from the battery packs

00:49:36   and stuff that you buy for phones,

00:49:37   some of them attach more strongly than others

00:49:39   'cause they use maybe bigger magnets,

00:49:40   thicker magnets, stronger magnets.

00:49:43   Additional magnets, layers of magnets,

00:49:45   it's not the type of thing where

00:49:48   like a wire protocol where either it works or it doesn't,

00:49:51   you just kinda have to have the magnets

00:49:52   in the neighborhood.

00:49:54   So I think whatever Qi2 ends up being,

00:49:57   I would expect it to work well enough

00:50:00   with all of our existing MagSafe stuff.

00:50:02   - I mean, it can't be that much worse than Qi1, right?

00:50:04   I mean, I think this is good news in the sense

00:50:09   that MagSafe really was and is an improvement over Qi.

00:50:15   Now, Qi charging has a lot of upsides,

00:50:18   but it has a couple of really big annoyances.

00:50:20   Number one is that it's super slow,

00:50:22   and I guess number one be that it's also super inefficient,

00:50:25   which maybe should be a number two.

00:50:27   This is why we run a show called Top Four

00:50:29   that never has four entries.

00:50:30   (both laughing)

00:50:32   So anyway, yeah, so it's super slow,

00:50:34   it's super inefficient, and we've all had that experience

00:50:38   of having a Qi charging mat next to our bed or something

00:50:41   and thinking our phone is charging on it overnight,

00:50:44   and you wake up and you realize,

00:50:46   oh, it wasn't quite aligned right

00:50:48   and my phone didn't charge overnight.

00:50:50   And MagSafe improves that.

00:50:54   It improves it by a decent amount.

00:50:57   All of those problems are still there though.

00:51:00   It is still slow, MagSafe just makes it less slow.

00:51:04   Part of the reason it makes it less slow

00:51:06   is that the magnets align it correctly

00:51:08   much more of the time and it has that kind

00:51:10   of communication mechanism where it can verify.

00:51:12   Like I know we've also maybe had,

00:51:15   I don't know if you've ever had the experience

00:51:16   of placing a metal object on a Chi-Mat accidentally,

00:51:20   coming back a little while later

00:51:22   and it's maybe a little warmer

00:51:24   than you would like for comfort.

00:51:25   I have, that's not fun.

00:51:27   And MagSafe, I think part of the reason

00:51:30   why it doesn't deliver its 15 watts of max power

00:51:34   to everything is that there is some kind of

00:51:36   like authentication mechanism where it communicates

00:51:38   and makes sure that what's on the other end of that thing

00:51:41   as a device and not like a Yeti cup.

00:51:43   So, I speak from experience. (laughs)

00:51:47   - Cheat chargers are not coasters.

00:51:49   - No, although they are cup warmers

00:51:51   if your cup is a Yeti cup.

00:51:53   Not recommended.

00:51:54   - Don't put your Yeti cup on your induction stove either.

00:51:56   This is all the same thing.

00:51:57   - Yes.

00:51:57   - Like electricity and magnetism.

00:51:59   - Right.

00:52:00   Yeah, anyway.

00:52:01   So, you know, having MagSafe be incorporated

00:52:05   into the Cheat, you know, we already know what this does.

00:52:07   The automatic alignment of the magnets

00:52:10   does enable more efficient charging,

00:52:13   'cause you don't have to worry like,

00:52:14   well, we can still send power to this

00:52:16   even though it's only 70% in the target zone,

00:52:19   we'll just kinda fudge it with induction

00:52:21   and we'll lose more to heat

00:52:22   and it'll charge more slowly, but oh well.

00:52:24   MagSafe takes care of that to a degree.

00:52:26   It also, by having the alignment,

00:52:30   reduces the error rate of,

00:52:32   I think my phone charged overnight,

00:52:34   and then it actually didn't.

00:52:35   Now, it doesn't actually eliminate that error rate.

00:52:38   I know this from using a MagSafe glued to my end table,

00:52:42   or double-sided taped to my end table,

00:52:45   every night for the last three years.

00:52:48   I know that I still occasionally have times

00:52:50   where I think I feel it clip on,

00:52:53   but then I wake up the next morning and oh,

00:52:54   it was actually not all the way on and it didn't charge.

00:52:57   But it happens way less often with MagSafe

00:53:00   than it did with the flat Qi thing I had before.

00:53:03   So MagSafe is better than Qi,

00:53:06   and so it does make sense

00:53:08   to modify Qi to incorporate magnets

00:53:11   in basically the same way.

00:53:13   And this is not the only time this has ever happened.

00:53:16   USB-C itself was heavily contributed to by Apple

00:53:21   because the PC world, we see what they do

00:53:24   when they make a port without Apple's input.

00:53:27   That's how you get the USB-3 Micro B plug.

00:53:32   - Or USB-A, the connector everyone loves to hate.

00:53:36   - Externally symmetrical, internally asymmetrical.

00:53:39   It's like a cruel joke.

00:53:40   - Right. (laughing)

00:53:41   So anyway, so this is a good thing.

00:53:44   And you're right that it does effectively

00:53:47   kind of formalize what the industry

00:53:50   was already unofficially doing.

00:53:52   There's so many third party things that are like,

00:53:55   it's magnetic charging.

00:53:57   And you know, they don't say MagSafe.

00:53:59   It's magnetic charging compatible with your iPhone,

00:54:01   but it'll only be 7.5 watts, whatever, you know.

00:54:04   those are all just imitation MagSafe things.

00:54:06   So it makes sense to have this be part of the ecosystem.

00:54:09   The only thing that I would pour a little bit of water on is

00:54:13   this is not, this is still not gonna be better

00:54:17   than wired charging in certain ways.

00:54:20   We know, first of all, wired charging

00:54:22   can still be higher power, it's still more efficient,

00:54:25   and it's still, in some ways, safer.

00:54:28   It still allows data transfer, which this doesn't really.

00:54:31   So wired charging is still gonna exist

00:54:34   and still be popular, it's also cheaper.

00:54:36   So you know, it's still gonna exist for a while.

00:54:38   But this is a good thing to formalize and unify

00:54:43   what is a fairly obvious improvement to the Qi standard.

00:54:49   And hopefully unify iOS and Android devices

00:54:52   into using the same thing and all the benefits that brings.

00:54:56   - And look, it happened without government intervention.

00:54:59   And I say that both to blame the government

00:55:01   and to blame Apple.

00:55:02   'Cause see, Apple, if you just get off your butt

00:55:04   and do what's good for the industry,

00:55:05   you avoid government regulation, I would say,

00:55:07   and see government eventually,

00:55:09   even pigheaded companies like Apple will see the light

00:55:12   and unify it on a standard.

00:55:14   And on the USB-C front, like as you said,

00:55:16   this doesn't, you know, is this how Apple's gonna comply

00:55:19   with the USB-C, they're just gonna do MagSafe ever?

00:55:21   They could, but they would have to add substantial

00:55:24   data transfer to MagSafe probably,

00:55:27   or have some other way to do data transfer wirelessly.

00:55:29   It would be a big complication

00:55:31   if they went totally portless.

00:55:32   I mean, there's been rumors of that for ages.

00:55:34   I don't think Chichu factors into it any more so

00:55:38   than just to say that Apple is clearly very dedicated

00:55:40   to the MagSafe connector and it will continue to exist

00:55:42   on phones and maybe even other devices in the future

00:55:45   because it's not going anywhere.

00:55:47   But yeah, standardizing on it for everybody.

00:55:49   It already was standardized.

00:55:52   Like USB-C was everywhere except Apple.

00:55:55   It's kind of like electric car connectors.

00:55:57   It's standardized everywhere except Tesla

00:56:00   and kind of Nissan still.

00:56:02   But, you know, it's like, so we're so close.

00:56:05   And so that's why all these laws

00:56:06   are essentially Apple laws,

00:56:07   or if there's ever a law about it for chargers in the US,

00:56:09   it'll be the Tesla law, right?

00:56:11   Because we don't need any law to force standardization.

00:56:13   It happened on its own,

00:56:15   except for one pretty darn important player,

00:56:17   whether that be Apple or Tesla.

00:56:19   So at least on the wireless charging front,

00:56:24   we didn't have to wait for that.

00:56:25   Apparently everyone got their acts together.

00:56:27   And it's kind of a shame, like I said,

00:56:29   Apple was heavily involved in USB-C.

00:56:31   is just they did Lightning first.

00:56:33   And I think they should have done Lightning first.

00:56:35   We enjoyed the benefits of Lightning for years

00:56:37   before the rest of the industry won USBC,

00:56:39   but now it's time.

00:56:41   - The other thing about Qi2 too is,

00:56:43   Qi2 also, is that it presents the possibility,

00:56:48   although they're vague on the details,

00:56:51   and of course Apple's not saying anything,

00:56:53   that maybe in the future, the Apple Watch

00:56:57   and other smart watches that have non-flat

00:57:00   or smaller contact areas than what we currently use for Qi

00:57:04   could possibly be charged by some kind of part

00:57:06   of the Qi 2 standard.

00:57:07   I really hope that plays out because right now,

00:57:11   the ideal case would be if you're traveling or something,

00:57:14   you could have basically one type of charger with you.

00:57:18   Again, you see the USB-C versus lighting debate

00:57:20   for years, right?

00:57:21   Ideally, you have one type of charger

00:57:23   and you can use as many devices with it as possible.

00:57:25   Smart watches throw a whole wrench in that

00:57:28   because they don't have any ports

00:57:29   and they're so small, whether it's an Apple Watch

00:57:33   or the other ones, they all have these,

00:57:35   usually they have custom induction-based charger techniques

00:57:38   or something or maybe little pins on the side

00:57:40   that you have like little flat custom plug

00:57:43   that mag saves onto them or whatever.

00:57:45   So there's all these different charging techniques

00:57:47   for these super small devices that are too small

00:57:49   to have Qi or even oftentimes USB.

00:57:53   So if Qi 2 has good provisions in it

00:57:56   to allow smaller devices to maybe unify in something,

00:58:01   whether it's an Apple Watch or a Fitbit

00:58:04   or Garmin things or whatever else,

00:58:06   that would be fantastic.

00:58:08   I really, really hope that's part of it

00:58:11   and I really hope Apple's on board with that

00:58:13   and moves in that direction,

00:58:15   but I know better than to get my hopes up too far on that.

00:58:20   We are brought to you this week by Collide.

00:58:25   You know the old saying, "when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like

00:58:29   a nail"?

00:58:30   Well the traditional approach to device security is that hammer, a blunt instrument that can't

00:58:35   solve nuanced problems.

00:58:37   Even after installing clunky agents that users hate, IT teams still have to deal with mountains

00:58:42   of support tickets over the same old issues, and they have no way to address things like

00:58:47   unencrypted SSH keys, OS updates, or pretty much anything going on with a Linux device.

00:58:52   Collide is an endpoint security solution that's more like a Swiss Army knife.

00:58:56   It gives IT teams a single dashboard for all devices, Mac, Windows, and yes, even Linux.

00:59:03   You can query your entire fleet to check for common compliance issues or write your own

00:59:07   custom checks.

00:59:09   Plus, instead of installing intrusive software that creates more work for IT, Collide's

00:59:14   lightweight agent shows end users how to fix issues themselves.

00:59:18   You can achieve endpoint compliance

00:59:21   by adding a new tool to your toolbox.

00:59:23   Visit collide.com/ATP to find out how.

00:59:27   That's collide spelled K-O-L-I-D-E.

00:59:31   Collide with a K, collide.com/ATP.

00:59:34   Thank you so much to Collide for sponsoring our show.

00:59:37   - All right, we got email a few days back,

00:59:43   maybe a week or two back, I forget exactly when this was,

00:59:46   Kevin Chen, who has spent some time looking at how rewind.ai works. To remind you, rewind.ai

00:59:54   is John's favorite thing. LIFESTREAM! And it's the thing that will record everything that happens on

01:00:01   your Mac, and it will let you search for it, and so on and so forth. So Kevin spent some time

01:00:05   going through and figuring out how it works. Now, I can't confirm or deny anything that Kevin said,

01:00:10   but it rings true to me based on what I know about these sorts of things. It sounds like this is

01:00:15   is accurate. So we're not going to read Kevin's post. It is worth reading for the record,

01:00:20   but I'm just going to kind of quickly hit the highlights. What ends up happening is

01:00:25   Rewind uses accessibility APIs to identify the front-most window, and it stores the timestamps

01:00:31   of I guess when the window changes in a SQLite database in the user's library folder. I wonder

01:00:36   if they're using Blackbird. You never know. It takes a screenshot of the screen that contains

01:00:41   the front-most window, and if there are multiple screens, only the currently focused screen

01:00:45   will be captured.

01:00:46   A new screenshot is created every two seconds.

01:00:50   And then it uses Screen Capture Kit, which we'll put a link in

01:00:53   the show notes, to hide disallowed windows, including

01:00:57   private browser windows and a user-defined exclusion list.

01:01:00   Then it will OCR the screenshot on device using

01:01:04   Apple's Vision Framework, the same pipeline that powers live

01:01:07   text, and masquerade as well.

01:01:09   And then it'll store the inference results to a SQLite

01:01:12   database.

01:01:13   it then periodically compresses the screenshot sequence into an h.264 video with what, gentlemen?

01:01:19   They have incredibly, well, I'm not gonna say incredibly inefficient, yeah, FFmpeg,

01:01:23   and I was surprised to see that because Apple has tons of libraries to compress video. Maybe they

01:01:30   don't have ones that take images as input, but there was a question I think in the blog post

01:01:34   from some people, "Does FFmpeg use the h.264 hardware in all of Apple's computers?"

01:01:41   - I just thought it did.

01:01:42   I'm not certain about that, but I thought it did.

01:01:44   - I think it probably does too,

01:01:46   or at the very least it has an option

01:01:47   that you don't remember to do that.

01:01:49   - There are various modules and options,

01:01:51   I mean, 'cause FFmpeg is not just one set of things,

01:01:54   it's like there's a whole bunch of different optional things

01:01:55   that can be bundled into it or whatever else,

01:01:57   and some of those things do use the hardware acceleration.

01:02:00   - Yeah, the more, I mean, this is, you know,

01:02:03   it's not an MVP, but this is the first version of a product,

01:02:06   and using, I mean, I don't know how else you would do it,

01:02:10   It just seems like they're using screen capture kit

01:02:12   and Apple's vision framework.

01:02:13   I would have expected to see them using

01:02:15   whatever the appropriate, was it AV foundation,

01:02:17   whatever the appropriate Apple library is

01:02:19   to do this work rather than FFmpeg.

01:02:21   But either way, it's probably pretty efficient.

01:02:25   - And then additionally, if the user joins a Zoom call

01:02:28   and enables transcription through rewind,

01:02:30   it will transcribe the audio on device

01:02:32   using the OpenAI Whisper model.

01:02:35   Then it stores the transcripts and speaker information

01:02:37   into a SQLite database.

01:02:38   And so then Kevin did some benchmarks and whatnot.

01:02:41   So CPU usage when recording on his 14-inch MacBook Pro

01:02:45   with an M1 Pro processor,

01:02:47   Rewind uses about 20% of the CPU continuously.

01:02:52   - Not good. - And then Rewind Helper,

01:02:55   which is I think the thing that does the transcoding,

01:02:58   or manages the transcoding and whatnot,

01:02:59   spikes over 200% CPU every time the temporary PNG images

01:03:03   are compressed into an H.264 video.

01:03:06   That's really not good.

01:03:07   - Now wait, hold on, do we know whether

01:03:09   that's efficiency cores or the high power cores?

01:03:12   - Oh, that's an interesting question

01:03:13   and I don't think we know.

01:03:15   - That's the problem with CPU percentages

01:03:16   'cause remember 100% CPU is not all of your CPU,

01:03:20   it's all of one core according to the way

01:03:22   that Apple's activity monitor does stuff.

01:03:23   So 20% sounds like a lot, but on a laptop,

01:03:27   like you don't, you really, when it's idle,

01:03:29   you want it to be idle.

01:03:30   And if it's using 20% of even just one core continuously,

01:03:33   that's not great for battery life.

01:03:35   But again, you know, what are you getting for it?

01:03:37   you're getting live streams, right?

01:03:38   So I think it is being as efficient as it can be,

01:03:41   modulo a few things, like later in the article,

01:03:45   Kevin goes into some suggestions

01:03:47   for how this could be improved,

01:03:48   like not writing out pings,

01:03:50   but instead of going straight to the H.264,

01:03:52   or I would say like if they're shelling out the FFmpeg

01:03:55   versus statically linking with the library,

01:03:57   that would be something to look into,

01:03:58   but again, it's version one.

01:04:00   - I would say too, though, I mean, just for CPU load-wise,

01:04:02   like when you're running an M1 or M2-based Mac,

01:04:07   If you run something like iStat Menus,

01:04:09   like Casey and I and definitely not John do,

01:04:12   you will see your efficiency cores are running

01:04:16   at what on Intel machines would be

01:04:19   kind of an alarmingly high percentage.

01:04:22   Mine right now, the efficiency cores are hovering around,

01:04:25   looks like about 75% use, and that's kind of constant.

01:04:28   And one of those things is Zoom, but oh well.

01:04:30   The other thing is just Windows Server though,

01:04:32   which again, Zoom.

01:04:34   But it's fairly common for me in fairly idle use

01:04:38   to look up at my menu and see my two efficiency cores

01:04:42   being used very heavily by kind of just regular

01:04:45   system activity or background things like photo indexing

01:04:48   and everything.

01:04:48   And from what I understand, and I think this matches

01:04:50   my anecdotal experience so far, from what I understand,

01:04:53   the kind of real noticeable battery life cost

01:04:58   to one of the efficiency cores being maxed out

01:05:01   is basically nothing.

01:05:03   It's very different from the high power cores.

01:05:05   If you're maxing out your high power cores,

01:05:06   that's a different scenario.

01:05:07   But the efficiency cores with a battery

01:05:11   the size of a modern laptop battery,

01:05:12   I get the impression that you're basically

01:05:15   using those for free.

01:05:16   - Interesting.

01:05:17   Continuing on with the rewind stuff from Kevin Chen,

01:05:20   the storage usage.

01:05:22   So the screen recordings are chunks

01:05:25   of about 180 megs an hour.

01:05:27   The metadata OCR results in call transcripts,

01:05:29   which are, again, the SQLite database

01:05:31   are about 26 megs an hour, console logs about 4 megs an hour. With regard to security, Rewind

01:05:37   currently doesn't encrypt data at rest. Any app with full disk access and any attacker

01:05:42   who encounters an unlocked computer has the ability to read recordings from all time,

01:05:46   including soft deleted clips. That's also not stupendous. And then other notable things,

01:05:51   resources/pavacons. There's a directory of 912 pavacons for popular websites stored as

01:05:59   There's PNG images, examples include Amazon,

01:06:01   Dropbox, YouTube, et cetera.

01:06:03   These are used in the timeline view

01:06:04   when the front most app is a web browser

01:06:06   instead of showing the browser's app icon,

01:06:08   which is kind of cool, though I don't know--

01:06:10   - That's such a 1.0 thing, it's like,

01:06:12   we just need to ship this, don't worry about it.

01:06:14   What do we do about the icons for the things?

01:06:16   - Just, we'll just ship a thousand of them.

01:06:18   Like, I mean, obviously you would think,

01:06:20   why don't you just go to the web and get them?

01:06:21   Oh, then you gotta make a network request

01:06:23   and it's all complicated.

01:06:24   They love that they just, just ship them all.

01:06:26   Like, just, our app bundle will be bigger,

01:06:28   Marker would never do this.

01:06:29   We're just going to ship 912 of what we think are the most popular websites, PNG images

01:06:35   of all their, I would say, favicons.

01:06:38   I just thought that was funny.

01:06:40   So it's implemented in a pretty straightforward way, in an explicable way, with a lot of 1.0

01:06:46   stuff.

01:06:47   The data not being encrypted at rest is not great, because it's bad enough when someone

01:06:50   gets access to your computer, but that is a treasure trove.

01:06:53   It's already OCR text, and you've got all the screen images.

01:06:58   This is the problem of like, well, if it never leaves my device and it's not using cloud

01:07:01   transcription and so on and so forth, everything's done locally, it's nice and secure.

01:07:04   It's like, yeah, but now you've just made, I don't know, like the equivalent of like

01:07:08   collecting evidence against yourself and putting it in a little box and wrapping it up with

01:07:11   a bow.

01:07:12   Not that you're doing any bad things, but in terms of privacy, you probably don't want

01:07:15   anyone getting at that because they could just sort of go through that and see what

01:07:18   you've done for the past day, two days, week, month, year.

01:07:23   It's up to you to kind of be studious about like, well, I want to exclude private windows,

01:07:27   show it when I go to my bank website,

01:07:28   like whatever you want to do,

01:07:29   but with great power comes great responsibility.

01:07:32   But anyway, it's implemented in what I think

01:07:34   is a fairly straightforward way,

01:07:35   and I thought this was a really interesting examination

01:07:38   of how it works and what it takes.

01:07:40   And your point, Marco, about the efficiency course

01:07:42   is important because that's kind of what they're there for.

01:07:44   It's not like when you write a program,

01:07:45   you can, well, you can specifically target things,

01:07:47   but there's, scheduling on macOS is really weird,

01:07:50   but there are, suffice to say,

01:07:51   there are APIs when you run code in a Mac application

01:07:55   that you can tell the OS and the threading job service

01:08:00   that you're using through whatever API you're using,

01:08:02   what priority you want.

01:08:03   And if you say something like low background,

01:08:06   like all different words for the priorities,

01:08:07   you'll end up running on the efficiency cores

01:08:09   pretty much exclusively.

01:08:11   There's also some other details about core affinity

01:08:13   of whether your job stays in the same core,

01:08:15   bounces around and how that infects cache or whatever.

01:08:18   But I think everything this is doing

01:08:19   is sort of below the level of notice

01:08:22   of a modern M class processor, because it's not,

01:08:26   you know, the stuff that it's doing that's complicated,

01:08:28   like the text kit thing, the vision framework

01:08:31   of parsing text, that's gotta be optimized to hell and back.

01:08:34   Like the Apple did that work for you already.

01:08:36   That's already efficient, it's already gonna be fast.

01:08:38   You don't need the results in real time, right?

01:08:40   So it can be, it's asynchronous in the background

01:08:43   and you're not in a big hurry.

01:08:44   So I bet that does pretty well.

01:08:46   Screen capture kit, again, Apple optimized that

01:08:48   to be able to capture your screen without destroying

01:08:50   your Mac and making it slow and unresponsive.

01:08:52   So that's great.

01:08:53   F of MPEG, I feel like is a weak point here

01:08:55   because as optimized as it may be,

01:08:57   I have to think that any Apple framework

01:08:58   would be even more optimized.

01:09:00   Even if the F of MPEG thing is just calling

01:09:02   into the Apple framework, it still seems like.

01:09:03   - I believe that is exactly what it's doing.

01:09:06   If you configure it properly, like Marco was saying,

01:09:08   and it's video toolbox is the,

01:09:10   I don't know why it's called video toolbox.

01:09:11   Maybe that's an Apple thing.

01:09:12   Maybe it's an F of MPEG thing, but that's what they're,

01:09:15   that's what F of MPEG calls the like front end Apple APIs.

01:09:18   And I actually did, just for grins and giggles,

01:09:20   look through the video toolbox code a year or two back,

01:09:24   and it looks like, if memory serves,

01:09:26   and again, this is a year or two ago,

01:09:27   I'm pretty sure it's just calling into AV Foundation.

01:09:29   I don't think it's doing anything you wouldn't expect.

01:09:31   - Yeah, I understand the marshaling of the jobs,

01:09:36   however it's dealing with threading

01:09:39   or background tasks or whatever,

01:09:41   in an Apple framework, you could give it a batch of work

01:09:44   and let it do that in a way that is most efficient

01:09:46   on your M whatever processor,

01:09:47   whereas at FFmpeg you're kind of doing that manually,

01:09:49   deciding how many jobs you want to run,

01:09:52   how many cores you want them to use,

01:09:53   even if each individual one is just using

01:09:55   AV Foundation behind the scenes.

01:09:57   Same thing with like, for the OpenAI thing,

01:09:59   I don't know if Apple has a solution to that,

01:10:01   of the transcribing speech into text.

01:10:05   I think there's an Apple solution,

01:10:06   but OpenAI is a popular open source one.

01:10:10   I think when someone was digging into this,

01:10:11   they found the OpenAI, maybe it was Kevin,

01:10:13   found the OpenAI model file in the executable one,

01:10:16   like the speech model file there.

01:10:18   I'm not sure if they're using the OpenAI library, which

01:10:22   I think is written in C++ to do it.

01:10:24   But as the advertising material said,

01:10:27   this is actually a good demonstration

01:10:28   of leveraging Apple's platform APIs to build an application

01:10:32   that you otherwise would not be able to build without Apple's

01:10:35   help.

01:10:36   These libraries they're using make the application.

01:10:39   If you had to write all these libraries yourself from scratch,

01:10:42   it would take you many more years and many more millions

01:10:45   of dollars.

01:10:45   But because Apple offers these frameworks,

01:10:48   a company can make this product in way less time

01:10:52   with far fewer people, and I think that's pretty cool.

01:10:54   - Video toolbox is apparently an Apple thing,

01:10:56   real-time follow-up, and we'll put a link to it

01:10:58   in the show.

01:10:59   - People will be familiar with it because you see it

01:11:00   in the menu in Handbrake, and you know it as the thing

01:11:02   that makes my encode go faster.

01:11:04   (laughing)

01:11:05   - Gosh, I haven't used Handbrake in forever,

01:11:07   but you are not wrong.

01:11:08   All right, let's do some Ask ATP.

01:11:09   We got a really fascinating one from Stefan Jacobs

01:11:13   about a month ago, I'd say. It's been a while. But we were trying to find some room to fit

01:11:17   it in because this might be the only ask ATP we do for the day. So Stefan writes, "During

01:11:22   the recent discussion about Twitter, you briefly discussed the analogy of leaving Apple platforms

01:11:26   if someone at Apple made decisions of a similar nature to those being made at Twitter. The

01:11:32   options are obviously not great. Neither Windows nor any of the various Linux distros offer

01:11:36   anywhere near the attention to detail and polish that Apple has put into its platforms

01:11:39   over the years. So here's my question. If someone were to build a third alternative

01:11:44   mainstream OS that could host a hypothetical wave of Apple refugees, what are the key things

01:11:49   they would need to get right? PS, optional clarifying parameters if needed. And since

01:11:54   I'm talking to John Syracuse, I'm sure they are. Let's assume that Apple has a less stark

01:11:58   advantage in processor hardware by the time this happens. And to begin with, the OS would

01:12:02   probably need to be able to run on third-party hardware, although tight integration, a la

01:12:07   would presumably be possible over time.

01:12:10   John, tell me about System 76, what's the context here?

01:12:14   - I don't even know what that is,

01:12:14   it's the click on the link.

01:12:16   - Oh, right, good. - I've seen it before.

01:12:18   - Oh, it's a Linux laptop vendor, I see, okay.

01:12:21   So it's Linux laptops that are supposed to be like MacBooks.

01:12:24   Got it.

01:12:25   - Just like every other laptop.

01:12:26   - Yeah, sure.

01:12:27   All right, so here's my question, I'm repeating.

01:12:30   Stefan writes, so here's my question.

01:12:31   If someone were to build a third alternative mainstream OS

01:12:34   that could host a hypothetical wave of Apple refugees,

01:12:37   What are the key things they would need to get right?

01:12:39   Does anyone, would anyone like to start?

01:12:42   - One thing I want to say right off the bat about this

01:12:43   is because Twitter is the context of the thing.

01:12:47   A key factor in this hypothetical is that

01:12:50   if Apple ever went the way of Twitter,

01:12:52   and there are many things preventing that,

01:12:53   not the least of which is that it is not a private company

01:12:56   owned or controlled by a single person,

01:12:57   if Apple did go in that direction,

01:13:01   the self-destruction, the implosion of Apple

01:13:05   makes it possible for there to be an alternative.

01:13:09   Like, I think Mastodon, for example,

01:13:12   getting so much more activity and becoming more popular

01:13:16   happens because Twitter is self-destructing, right?

01:13:18   And so if you look at this question,

01:13:20   every time we talk about it, it's like, yeah,

01:13:21   but it's basically impossible to make a competing

01:13:26   phone platform, desktop operating system,

01:13:28   tablet, whatever you want to say.

01:13:29   It's basically impossible, right?

01:13:31   But if Apple self-destructed, that's a power vacuum.

01:13:34   something would fill that vacuum.

01:13:36   So I don't think it's entirely ridiculous to think

01:13:39   if Apple did implode and just sort of, you know,

01:13:42   if Apple pulled Twitter, let's say,

01:13:44   it would make an opportunity for someone to fill that void.

01:13:48   And I think that someone,

01:13:51   if someone did succeed to fill that void,

01:13:53   they would probably be vaguely Apple-ish,

01:13:55   kind of like Mastodon is vaguely Twitter-ish,

01:13:58   but also learning from the mistakes of Twitter.

01:14:00   But, you know, kind of trying to appeal in the same way

01:14:04   to sort of a small group of early adopters

01:14:06   like Mastodon did or like Apple did, right?

01:14:08   So, usually I complain that people's hypothetical

01:14:11   is not realistic, I have to say that the implosion

01:14:14   of Apple itself makes this somewhat more realistic.

01:14:18   - All right, so what's important?

01:14:20   - I mean, I think number one would be,

01:14:22   we know there are some similar challenges

01:14:26   as with social networks of chicken and egg problems

01:14:29   or getting network effects going.

01:14:31   And in an operating system, one of the biggest challenges

01:14:33   is software compatibility, like what's gonna run on this?

01:14:36   And so I think the best way to bootstrap this

01:14:40   would either be to base a new operating system

01:14:43   on Linux or on Android.

01:14:46   And I don't love either of those options

01:14:48   for lots of reasons, but what we see

01:14:51   with the Mastodon explosion, as John was saying

01:14:55   just in the wake of the Twitter implosion,

01:14:58   part of the reason why Mastodon is so much more appealing

01:15:01   to many of us nerds who care about these kind

01:15:04   of distinctions, compared to something like Hive

01:15:08   or Post or whatever, is, as I was saying a few episodes ago,

01:15:11   like, now that we've been burned by the big closed

01:15:15   ecosystem of Twitter, the idea of something being open

01:15:20   and protocol based and not being in the hands

01:15:23   of just one big company, it's like, okay, well,

01:15:26   now we learn that lesson that one centralized big company

01:15:29   is bad, so we're gonna now apply that lesson

01:15:31   and not let that same mistake happen again.

01:15:34   Well, we have that same problem with Apple,

01:15:37   they've just been a good enough steward

01:15:39   most of the time that we haven't jumped ship.

01:15:42   But if Apple did go bad and cause us all

01:15:45   to jump ship in some way, I would want to then

01:15:49   make sure that same mistake of that big centralization

01:15:52   couldn't happen again, and I would rather

01:15:55   set up shop on Linux than on Windows.

01:15:57   Also, I mean, it helps also,

01:15:59   I might have said Windows a couple years ago,

01:16:02   but in that intervening time,

01:16:04   I've had more experience with Windows.

01:16:06   - You've used Windows?

01:16:07   - Well, you should have had as more experience with Linux

01:16:09   and that might change your mind.

01:16:10   - Fair enough, but Linux is, as I said many years ago,

01:16:15   it's almost like going to live in the woods,

01:16:17   but I think I'd rather go start my own civilization

01:16:19   in the woods based on the foundation of Linux

01:16:21   than to live in the hellhole that is Windows

01:16:24   any more than I have to.

01:16:25   And over the years, whenever we'd insult Windows

01:16:28   on this show, we'd hear from people who are like,

01:16:30   you know it's better now, you should try it.

01:16:31   They've really made it a lot better now.

01:16:33   And I was starting to believe these people.

01:16:36   But now I've actually used it firsthand,

01:16:38   modern versions on modern hardware.

01:16:39   And I can say without a doubt, it's not that much better.

01:16:42   It is a little bit better, it's not that much better.

01:16:44   And it is not something I want to use still.

01:16:48   So whatever the new OS would be

01:16:53   that I would want to invest my time and resources in

01:16:56   would hopefully be a Linux based thing.

01:17:00   Android would be a little bit better

01:17:03   in the sense that Android would provide

01:17:05   that app compatibility, but it's not,

01:17:09   Android would provide crappy app compatibility.

01:17:11   And not to say that Android apps are crappy, they are,

01:17:13   but for this point, it's more about,

01:17:16   it's like the cross platform nature of Android apps,

01:17:20   like running on a general PC operating system,

01:17:23   it makes it a pretty crappy experience.

01:17:25   Like if anyone's ever used,

01:17:27   there are already ways to run Android apps

01:17:29   on PC operating systems, and they're terrible.

01:17:32   They're very clunky.

01:17:34   I mean, heck, look at Catalyst on Mac OS.

01:17:35   It isn't that much better.

01:17:37   It's not a great experience.

01:17:38   So Linux, I think, would be the best

01:17:43   long-term place to invest.

01:17:45   And so I think what a third-party alternative OS

01:17:50   would have to be, I think, would just be a really good

01:17:54   Linux distribution that invests heavily in the desktop

01:17:58   and laptop user experience, which we've seen smaller

01:18:01   efforts of this over time with Linux.

01:18:04   None of them have ever really gone anywhere,

01:18:06   but I think that's what it would have to be.

01:18:08   And if there really was a big Apple implosion

01:18:11   and there were all these talented, opinionated people

01:18:14   who wanted somewhere to go, that I think would be

01:18:16   way more likely to succeed than either Windows

01:18:20   appealing to this crowd, which it never will,

01:18:23   because, I mean, God, just try it, trust me.

01:18:26   So either that, that's not gonna happen,

01:18:28   or a whole new OS starting from scratch

01:18:31   that wouldn't be able to run any of the software

01:18:34   from any of the other OSes we have now,

01:18:36   I think that's a no-go, because software compatibility

01:18:39   is just too important.

01:18:40   And the fact is, Linux actually has pretty decent

01:18:44   software compatibility with a lot of stuff

01:18:46   that a lot of people wanna use these days.

01:18:48   It's not amazing, it's not as much as Windows

01:18:51   or Mac or Android, but it's not as bad as you would think

01:18:55   if you haven't tried it recently.

01:18:56   So that's where I would go with it,

01:18:59   is like start with Linux and just make

01:19:01   a really good distribution that has a really

01:19:04   significantly improved experience around key areas

01:19:07   for desktop and laptop use.

01:19:08   - See, but I think you're majoring

01:19:10   on the implementation details,

01:19:11   and I don't think that's the spirit

01:19:12   of what Stefan was asking.

01:19:13   I think what Stefan was asking is,

01:19:15   what would you look for in an operating system that would make it feel like home or like somewhere

01:19:22   you could, you know, pitch your tent, so to speak. And so when I read this question, what I was

01:19:27   thinking of is like, what would appeal to me? What are some of the core things about macOS that I

01:19:33   wouldn't want to give up? So some of that is, you know, kind of hand-wavy things like, well,

01:19:38   attention to detail, which it's hard to get specific about that unless you're talking about

01:19:42   like something you know at a micro level but in general like a good attention to detail a good

01:19:47   visual design but then i started thinking okay well what about one of the things that i love

01:19:52   about mac os that i never really experienced on windows and maybe maybe that's because i never

01:19:58   took the time to learn but mac os has incredibly robust like keyboard shortcuts and keyboard

01:20:03   support throughout the entire operating system and every app within it and you can do so much

01:20:08   with the keyboard particularly when you're using the keyboard in combination with a mouse and so

01:20:12   I think robust keyboard shortcuts and keyboard support is also important to me.

01:20:15   I wonder if now I'm starting to get into the implementation details, kind of like you were,

01:20:20   Marco, but I think a good developer story is powerful. I would argue that part of the reason

01:20:25   that Macs got so darn popular in the early to mid-aughts was because the developer story

01:20:31   was so good. It was a Linux computer, not too dissimilar than a lot of the web servers that

01:20:38   that we were all writing code for,

01:20:39   but it was a Linux computer right there on your desk,

01:20:42   and you didn't have to do a VM or anything,

01:20:43   it was right there.

01:20:44   - What are you talking about, it was a Linux computer?

01:20:46   - Well, okay, Unix, sorry, sorry, excuse me.

01:20:49   - That just gave you a lot of feedback.

01:20:50   You said it twice, and it wasn't just a SPECO,

01:20:53   it was not a Linux computer.

01:20:54   - You're right, you're right.

01:20:56   I'm already getting blown up in the chat room, too.

01:20:58   But anyways, so, no, you're right,

01:21:00   it was a Unix computer, it's a Unix system, I know this.

01:21:02   It's a Unix computer right there on your desk.

01:21:03   - Wait, is BSD, like, there's gonna be somebody

01:21:06   who writes in and is like, actually--

01:21:08   - No, don't you remember, this was before your time.

01:21:10   Apple got real, official, all-caps Unix certification

01:21:15   for Mac OS X.

01:21:16   - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:21:17   - There's a great story you mentioned, Ed,

01:21:19   about the person who led that effort.

01:21:21   I'll see if I can find it for now.

01:21:22   - Oh, I remember that.

01:21:23   That was a good story.

01:21:24   I don't know if I'll be able to find it,

01:21:25   but that was a very good story.

01:21:27   But anyway, but to finish kind of the thoughts I had,

01:21:30   you know, having a good developer story,

01:21:32   I think, is important, although maybe I'm into,

01:21:36   I'm too much indexing on what's important to me and not what's generically important.

01:21:41   But speaking of generically important, I think what's pretty great about Mac OS in a way

01:21:46   that, say, Swift wants to be but kind of isn't, is that Mac OS does do a pretty good job with

01:21:54   progressive disclosure.

01:21:55   So to do basic stuff is fairly straightforward.

01:21:59   To do intermediate level stuff is kind of hard, but not terribly hard.

01:22:05   to do hard stuff is hard, but it's possible.

01:22:08   And that's, I think, a really important thing

01:22:11   that I would want to see in whatever this new operating

01:22:13   system I would potentially be using.

01:22:16   So I don't know if you guys have anything along those lines,

01:22:18   or if you'd rather go back into the nerdy stuff.

01:22:20   That's fine, too.

01:22:21   But that was the sort of thing that I

01:22:23   was thinking about when I was reading Stefan's question.

01:22:25   I think they're kind of connected.

01:22:27   When Margaret was talking about bootstrapping

01:22:29   and how you've got the problem of, well, for a platform,

01:22:32   you need people to make apps and everything,

01:22:33   thought where you were going in case you kind of glanced off this as well is the

01:22:39   developer story not in terms of what does the platform offer for developers

01:22:43   but in terms of what developers are drawn to this platform like the only

01:22:47   reason the Mac even still exists is because Apple bought next and part of

01:22:53   that was the developers who had been developing for next an obscure platform

01:22:57   that nobody cared about that sold computers to colleges right for ten

01:23:01   $10,000 each, was because those developers,

01:23:05   they came with the platform, because like,

01:23:07   where the hell else are they gonna go?

01:23:08   You gonna write objectoracies for somebody else, right?

01:23:10   They came with the platform, and those are the ones

01:23:12   that made the great Mac apps that defined the Mac

01:23:16   for the new generation.

01:23:18   There was also the classic Mac OS apps that were great.

01:23:21   I mean, some of them are still around,

01:23:22   and then we bring like Microsoft Office

01:23:24   and Photoshop for sure, but sort of the renaissance

01:23:27   of the Mac in the early days of Mac OS X

01:23:29   was because Apple had essentially purchased a developer community filled with really good,

01:23:36   interesting developers that share values that we have.

01:23:39   So for a platform that's going to appeal to us, I think it would have to come with or

01:23:45   be attractive to the kinds of developers who make the apps that appeal to us.

01:23:51   So we got the Next and the AppKit Objective-C developers before.

01:23:56   If it was some other platform, it would have to be like, well, what is the platform that

01:24:00   those type of developers, either literally those people, because some of those people

01:24:04   have been moved from platform to platform again because they're not writing next apps

01:24:06   anymore, right?

01:24:08   Or people like that, whatever the current equivalent of that is.

01:24:10   If they're attracted to the platform and they want to make apps for it, we would be attracted

01:24:15   there as users and in some respects as developers because those are the type of people...

01:24:20   And the apps don't come from nowhere.

01:24:21   It's not like, oh, you just have a platform and it should have good apps.

01:24:24   Where do they come from?

01:24:25   make them. The kind of people who made classic Mac apps when no one had heard of the Mac

01:24:31   and they were really expensive. The kind of people who were making NeXT apps when nobody

01:24:34   heard about NeXT. The things that appealed about NeXT and the Mac, and it's not just

01:24:38   that Steve Jobs involved making both of them, those qualities, even though they were so

01:24:43   very different, NeXT, BSD Unix-based system for schools, no color, grayscale screens initially,

01:24:50   Objective-C, weird programming language, the user interface didn't really look anything

01:24:55   like the Mac, but the sort of the things that appealed to AppKit developers are the same

01:25:00   type of things that appealed to Mac developers and it was kind of a natural marriage of those

01:25:05   things for the current Mac platform.

01:25:07   So I think any platform that I would go to after the Mac, I would basically be following

01:25:13   that muse.

01:25:15   Where are those people going?

01:25:16   Where are people like that?

01:25:17   Where do they want to be developing stuff?

01:25:20   Because that's where I'm going to live is they're going to make that a nice place for

01:25:22   me to live.

01:25:23   In terms of the Twitter Mastodon, like, "Don't go to a place owned and controlled by one

01:25:27   company blah blah blah," don't think we have a viable model for that for computing platforms

01:25:34   that involve hardware.

01:25:35   Obviously there's the web, the platform no one owns, and I think the web is awesome.

01:25:39   I spent my entire career programming for the web.

01:25:41   I think it's great.

01:25:42   But the web relies on the existence of devices that you use to view the web, whether that's

01:25:48   your phone, your laptop, whatever, your television.

01:25:53   Those hardware devices are made by companies

01:25:56   that probably also have some kind of platform thing

01:25:58   going on there.

01:26:00   The web does not provide a solution to that.

01:26:02   And talking about the qualities of the platform I would like,

01:26:05   one of the things that is always attracting me to Apple

01:26:06   is the marriage of hardware and software.

01:26:09   The same company controls both of those things enough

01:26:13   to make them marry together to make a single device

01:26:15   that is pleasing.

01:26:16   So even if we're just talking about like,

01:26:18   oh, let's just say it's the web, the platform no one owns.

01:26:21   Even, you're just gonna have

01:26:23   a Chromebook equivalent type of thing.

01:26:24   All it does is browse the web.

01:26:25   That solves the platform problem.

01:26:26   You don't need to have an API.

01:26:27   It's all web apps, whatever.

01:26:29   Someone still needs to make that hardware.

01:26:31   Someone still needs to deal with power management

01:26:33   and little, the neural engine and live text on the web.

01:26:36   Like everything that Apple does now,

01:26:38   you need some company to do that.

01:26:40   And that company is going to be one single private company.

01:26:43   I don't think there is a model for

01:26:46   a federation of small, equally competitive companies

01:26:50   working on an open platform.

01:26:51   Someone's gotta own and control it enough

01:26:53   to be able to make hardware that appeals to me.

01:26:56   So it would have to be a single company, right?

01:27:00   And they could build on an open source.

01:27:02   You know, Mac OS X is built on BSD, you know,

01:27:05   which, and Darwin open source,

01:27:06   like this open source stuff underneath all this, right?

01:27:09   We're all standing on the shoulders

01:27:10   of all the giants that came before.

01:27:12   But in the end, the Mac operating system,

01:27:14   iOS, iPadOS, those are proprietary operating systems made and controlled by a single company

01:27:19   that marries them directly to hardware that it also controls and with chips that it designs

01:27:24   and all the way up the stack.

01:27:25   So that is a quality of the thing that I would go to that I think it has to exist.

01:27:30   Microsoft is out, not because I dislike Microsoft or think everything is bad, but they just

01:27:34   have so much legacy burden, they will never get out from under that unless they literally

01:27:38   burn to the ground, right?

01:27:39   So they are held back by their legacy, which is also something that makes them billions

01:27:42   of dollars, right?

01:27:44   In some respects, that's true of Apple as well, right?

01:27:46   - I don't think Microsoft would ever make something great.

01:27:49   They don't have it in them.

01:27:50   They don't have the right priorities.

01:27:52   - Xbox is close.

01:27:53   - No, I mean operating system-wise.

01:27:55   - Yeah, well, Xbox has an operating system.

01:27:57   (laughing)

01:27:59   It does, but it's, it's debatable, right?

01:28:03   There's been some great things out,

01:28:04   but everything in Microsoft is held back.

01:28:07   The strategy tax at Microsoft is off the charts,

01:28:09   even under new leadership.

01:28:10   And nowadays, Microsoft is like,

01:28:12   "Oh, it's just the best place to run Linux."

01:28:14   Because the Windows operating system has a Linux subsystem.

01:28:17   I don't count Microsoft out and they're doing much better,

01:28:20   but the legacy, the thing that makes them money,

01:28:22   the thing that runs that company,

01:28:24   will always necessarily make that operating system

01:28:27   not appeal to me because they can't just say,

01:28:29   "We don't care about our existing customers, new thing."

01:28:32   Even Apple couldn't do it.

01:28:33   Even Apple had to do Carbon.

01:28:35   It's just that Apple was starting from a place

01:28:36   I like better, so that's why I'm counting on Microsoft.

01:28:38   Google is good at the web, Google is not particularly great.

01:28:44   They make good phones, like the Pixel phones, they do a pretty good job there.

01:28:49   Chromebooks is not a great laptop as far as I'm concerned.

01:28:53   I like the idea, the implementation is not great.

01:28:56   So I don't think this is an existing company.

01:28:58   I think it would have to be a new company filling that power vacuum, attracting whatever

01:29:04   the modern equivalent of the Mac or Next developer community, or maybe like the BOS development

01:29:10   community is kind of similar, although in hindsight the Next developer community had

01:29:15   more forward thinking technical ideas, right?

01:29:18   Doing everything in C++ was cool and fast in the 90s, whatever the hell B was, but boy

01:29:24   am I glad they were not all living on a platform that was built on a foundation of C++ at this

01:29:28   point.

01:29:29   Objective C was in hindsight a way better choice.

01:29:33   And then Swift hopefully even better going forward, right?

01:29:35   So I think the pieces are there for someone to pick up those pieces and build an operating

01:29:39   system that I would like and I think that's how it would have to be.

01:29:42   It would have to be marriage hardware and software, the kinds of developers that made

01:29:46   the Mac what it is and all the errors of the Mac being attracted to that platform, only

01:29:51   controlled by a single company with leadership that has taste.

01:29:54   That's the final thing I would throw in there.

01:29:55   Like when we say has taste, we mean has the same taste as us.

01:29:59   That's why we like Apple things.

01:30:00   It's like we like all the things we like.

01:30:02   There is a particular, that's why the developers

01:30:04   are drawn to there.

01:30:05   Like why were developers interested in writing

01:30:07   Mac software?

01:30:08   A lot of them wanted to write it because the screen

01:30:10   looked really nice and you had proportional fonts

01:30:12   and a bitmap display with tiny little pixels.

01:30:14   Who cares how big the pixels are?

01:30:16   I cared.

01:30:16   I cared how big the pixels were.

01:30:17   I didn't even know how to program.

01:30:20   But even other Apple platforms, like look,

01:30:22   the Apple 2GS has a mouse and like,

01:30:23   the pixels are the size of boulders.

01:30:25   Oh, but it's got color.

01:30:27   Have you seen the size of the pixels?

01:30:29   I, I've cared so much about that

01:30:32   and I couldn't understand why everybody else

01:30:34   would look at like a CGA screen and they'd be so excited

01:30:36   'cause theirs had color and mine didn't.

01:30:38   I was like, I'll look at Dark Castle all day long

01:30:41   before I look at your CGI game,

01:30:43   even though your game is quote unquote in color.

01:30:45   Are you kidding?

01:30:46   That's the type of values and quote unquote taste

01:30:50   that I'm bringing with me and I'm going to go

01:30:53   where those developers with that same taste go.

01:30:56   - That's a pretty good answer.

01:30:58   Marco, any final thoughts?

01:30:59   No, he's frustratingly correct as usual.

01:31:02   Oh, a story the last 10 years, am I right?

01:31:06   All right, let's see how many more we can squeeze in real quick.

01:31:09   Andy Clark writes, "There seems to have been a lot more talk about RSS recently,

01:31:13   probably given Twitter's troubles.

01:31:14   Do you use RSS, and which reader apps do you use for iOS and/or MacOS?"

01:31:21   For me, I stopped using RSS a few years ago, which has kind of faded out of my life.

01:31:27   And I was using Twitter both in terms of what are people talking about and a list I specifically

01:31:31   had for news.

01:31:32   And I was using Twitter for that.

01:31:34   Now I am feeling a little bit of a void in that department.

01:31:37   So on my to-do list of something I want to explore is rebuilding an RSS list and start

01:31:43   using RSS apps, reader apps again.

01:31:46   I really enjoyed the app Reader, R-E-E-D-E-R.

01:31:51   Last I was an RSS person, which was again a long time ago.

01:31:54   But I think I would probably start with NetNewswire,

01:31:58   to be honest with you, which is written

01:31:59   by a few friends of ours.

01:32:01   And I haven't used it in years and years and years and years

01:32:05   but I see some chatter about what they're working on

01:32:08   in a Slack that the three of us are in

01:32:09   and it sounds like it's pretty slick these days.

01:32:12   So I'd probably take a look at either of those.

01:32:14   Marco, are you using RSS?

01:32:16   - I never stopped using RSS.

01:32:18   - Fair enough.

01:32:19   - And I'm not just in the technical sense of like,

01:32:22   "Well, you know, podcasts are based on RSS."

01:32:23   I was like, no, that's not, I mean, you're right,

01:32:25   that's correct, but that's not what anybody means

01:32:27   when they say this.

01:32:28   But yeah, no, I've always,

01:32:29   I've never stopped using an RSS reader.

01:32:32   You know, for the sync backend, I like using,

01:32:35   what's the hamburger one, is it Feedbin?

01:32:37   Yeah, hamburger icon, yeah.

01:32:39   So Feedbin is my sync backend,

01:32:40   and you can use any of a whole huge list of clients

01:32:43   with some of these sync backends.

01:32:45   And on the iPhone, I use an app called Unread,

01:32:50   which it's one of those--

01:32:52   - Oh, I used that years ago too.

01:32:53   It's kind of like if you ever use the clear app

01:32:55   for your to-dos or shopping lists,

01:32:57   where it's very opinionated, very limited,

01:33:00   and very gesture-based, it's kind of like that

01:33:03   for RSS readers. (laughs)

01:33:04   And I like that a lot on the phone.

01:33:06   I have a lot of muscle memory there,

01:33:09   and I enjoy the design of it quite a bit.

01:33:12   On the Mac side of things, I've bounced around a lot.

01:33:17   Net News Wire is what I should be using.

01:33:19   I'm currently still, so for a while before

01:33:22   when NetNewsWire was back, I used an app called ReadKit,

01:33:25   which is very much in the spirit of old NetNewsWire.

01:33:30   And ReadKit, they had a new version come out

01:33:35   that I think is now based on Catalyst or something,

01:33:37   and it doesn't fit me as well,

01:33:39   like the new version doesn't.

01:33:40   So I'm still on the old version, on my Macs for now,

01:33:45   and then at some point I have a to-do list item

01:33:49   to move to NetNewsWire, because NetNewsWire

01:33:52   is the one that is I think by far under the most

01:33:56   active development on the Mac.

01:33:58   They also, I'm pretty sure they have also

01:34:00   an iOS version now.

01:34:01   I haven't looked at it yet,

01:34:02   I'm so happy on iOS with Unread.

01:34:04   But certainly I would, if you're starting fresh,

01:34:07   I would start on a newswire and only branch out

01:34:10   if you really have to from there.

01:34:11   'Cause that's the one getting the most active development.

01:34:13   As for RSS content itself,

01:34:15   I continue to give the same advice I've given for,

01:34:20   geez, 15 years, whatever it's been that I've been using,

01:34:23   longer than that, that I've been using RSS readers.

01:34:25   Don't just go and subscribe to the giant high-volume feeds

01:34:30   from whatever the big blogs are that,

01:34:33   I used to say Engadget and stuff,

01:34:35   but most of those don't even exist anymore.

01:34:37   But don't go at just the New York Times front page,

01:34:40   the Verge front, don't just add a whole bunch

01:34:42   of high-volume stuff.

01:34:43   RSS is ideal in the standard RSS reader paradigm,

01:34:49   and there are lots of ways to consume it,

01:34:50   you don't have to do it this way,

01:34:52   but the way most of them work as kind of like

01:34:53   this big kind of inbox style thing,

01:34:56   it is ideal for subscribing to any number you want

01:35:01   of infrequently updated things,

01:35:03   like John's blog, or my blog, or Casey's blog,

01:35:06   all of us, I mean Casey updates more than John and I

01:35:09   combined by a good margin, but it's really good at that,

01:35:13   'cause there's no cost to following an infrequently

01:35:16   posted blog.

01:35:19   So all the blogs people have that have been kind of

01:35:22   mostly abandoned or become low volume in the last decade,

01:35:26   go subscribe to all of those from anybody that you know.

01:35:29   And then when it comes to the high volume stuff,

01:35:34   subscribe to a very small number of those

01:35:37   because what you don't want to happen is the RSS reader

01:35:40   to all of a sudden be this thing where there's

01:35:43   thousands of items piling up unread

01:35:45   and you're just not seeing them.

01:35:47   And you could, if you wanted to,

01:35:48   you could switch to like the river approach

01:35:50   where you don't even try to like quote keep up

01:35:53   and you just dip in whenever you want

01:35:55   and just browse what's on top

01:35:56   and then come back some other,

01:35:57   come back later to see more.

01:35:59   That method doesn't really work for me.

01:36:02   For me, I do like the inbox slash keeping up model,

01:36:05   but I shrink everything down.

01:36:06   So for instance, I don't subscribe in my RSS reader

01:36:09   to 9to5Mac and Bloomberg and all this stuff.

01:36:14   Instead, I subscribe to MacRumors.

01:36:16   And MacRumors will link out to anything

01:36:19   in that broader ecosystem that I really need to see.

01:36:22   And then otherwise, it's smaller volume sites.

01:36:26   Like, of course, Daring Fireball, Michael Tsai's blog,

01:36:29   which is awesome, Pixel Envy, Six Colors, 512 Pixels.

01:36:33   That's the stuff I read in the Mac world, in my RSS reader.

01:36:37   And that's all fantastic stuff.

01:36:39   And then a whole bunch of small blogs and stuff.

01:36:42   But it's great for that.

01:36:43   And if you need any help finding feeds,

01:36:47   I know NetNewswire actually comes with

01:36:49   a stock default set that you can adopt if you want to.

01:36:52   So that's a good place to start.

01:36:55   - John.

01:36:56   - I'm not in the default set though,

01:36:58   I'm a little sore about that.

01:36:59   (laughing)

01:37:00   I need to leverage my personal connections

01:37:02   to get that in there.

01:37:04   So I'm a NetNewswire user from way back.

01:37:06   The first time I saw NetNewswire,

01:37:09   I took to it like a duck to water

01:37:11   because it used the same key bindings as Tin, T-I-N,

01:37:15   which was my preferred Usenet reader when I was in college.

01:37:19   - Wow. - Wow.

01:37:21   - And it looked kind of like Tin in terms of the arrangement

01:37:24   'cause Tin was a character-based application

01:37:27   that you used in a terminal window, it used curses, right?

01:37:29   So it wasn't a GUI app, right?

01:37:31   - Oh my God. - But it had

01:37:32   the same type of thing where you'd go through the groups

01:37:33   and then you'd see the message list

01:37:34   and then you'd see a detail pane

01:37:36   with the message you're looking at

01:37:37   and NetNewsWire used the same key bindings.

01:37:40   and they're like VI key bindings,

01:37:41   where you just literally hit a key,

01:37:42   NT spacebar, like no command strokes,

01:37:45   'cause it was like VI, right?

01:37:47   So I was like, wow, here's this shiny Aqua,

01:37:51   Mac OS X application for reading RSS feeds,

01:37:54   which are becoming really popular,

01:37:56   and all the key bindings are like tin, and it's awesome.

01:37:58   And I used that for so long until it kinda got bought out

01:38:01   and found new ownership or whatever,

01:38:02   and now this new thing is kind of like

01:38:04   when Twitter for the Mac went away

01:38:06   and then had a resurgence as the Phoenix project,

01:38:08   NetNewswire, the original author of NetNewswire,

01:38:11   our friend Brett Simmons, eventually got back the rights

01:38:13   to NetNewswire and rewrote NetNewswire.

01:38:17   Like it rose again from the ashes.

01:38:19   Here is NetNewswire written again in a modern language

01:38:21   with modern APIs by the original author

01:38:23   after many years in the wilderness.

01:38:26   And it is a phenomenal news reader for the Mac.

01:38:28   It is a phenomenal Mac applications.

01:38:30   If you use Mac applications and,

01:38:32   oh, I'm gonna say if you use Mac applications,

01:38:34   they feel sluggish.

01:38:35   They don't feel sluggish 'cause you don't know any better.

01:38:36   Until you launch and use NetNewswire

01:38:38   and you realize, oh, so this is how fast

01:38:39   a Mac application could be if it wasn't written

01:38:41   using WebKit or whatever, you know, Electron.

01:38:44   Everything is so fast and responsive.

01:38:46   It is simple, straightforward, it is very understandable

01:38:48   to me at least because I've been using NetNoiseWire forever.

01:38:51   It still kinda has 10 key bindings,

01:38:53   but they've changed the UI to be less 10-like or whatever.

01:38:55   But anyway, I use that on the desktop.

01:38:58   I used to use Feedbin for years and years

01:38:59   when I was using various different readers

01:39:02   and syncing services, so I'd be all in sync.

01:39:04   But since NetNoiseWire has iCloud support,

01:39:06   I finally stopped paying for Feedbin.

01:39:08   I think I still paid for this year.

01:39:09   Maybe it actually just expired, I don't know.

01:39:11   But NetNewsWire will use your iCloud account,

01:39:14   use CloudKit I'm assuming,

01:39:16   and I don't have iCloud Drive disabled,

01:39:18   so it works for me.

01:39:19   So I don't pay for Feedbin anymore.

01:39:21   Back when I paid for Feedbin,

01:39:22   I also used Reader, R-E-D-R,

01:39:24   like you mentioned before, on the phone,

01:39:26   but there's also NetNewsWire for the phone.

01:39:27   In general, on the phone, I don't use RSS.

01:39:29   It's more of a desktop experience for me.

01:39:32   I used to use Reader on my iPad a lot,

01:39:34   but I don't know.

01:39:35   I feel like Twitter has, again, Twitter has not replaced RSS for me.

01:39:40   Twitter supplanted as the majority stream that I use to consume stuff.

01:39:47   And now I'm not all on Mastodon, I'm like half on Twitter.

01:39:51   I'm both on Twitter and Mastodon.

01:39:52   So the combination at this point of Twitter and Mastodon is still ahead of RSS in terms

01:39:56   of prioritization of where I find things, but then Newswire is my preferred RSS reader

01:40:01   on the Mac.

01:40:02   And I'm kind of a completionist, but not really.

01:40:06   Like I subscribed, you know, Marko wouldn't like it.

01:40:08   I subscribe to tons of things that I know have too much volume, and sometimes I just

01:40:12   mark, I'm not a completionist, I just mark them all as red.

01:40:14   I say, "Well, I'm too behind on that, I don't care."

01:40:17   The way I would organize my feeds, and I have tons of feeds, I used to have folders for

01:40:21   things like, I had a folder called "Infrequent," which was things like, this is a folder full

01:40:25   of things that I do actually want to keep up with because it's blogs that post twice

01:40:29   a year, right?

01:40:30   I'm never gonna just mark all them as red,

01:40:32   whereas these other sites that post 50 things a day,

01:40:34   ah, just mark them all as red.

01:40:35   And they're in subfolders,

01:40:36   and you can mark an entire folder as red

01:40:38   with a single keystroke, and it happens instantly.

01:40:41   So I kind of, you know, I use RSS like that,

01:40:44   where I don't go through the river of stuff.

01:40:47   I just look at things that might be interesting,

01:40:48   and then there are certain feeds

01:40:50   that I read literally every single thing

01:40:52   that comes out on them, because they're so infrequent

01:40:54   or because I care about them so much.

01:40:56   - Thanks to our sponsors this week,

01:40:57   Memberful, Collide, and Sanity.

01:41:01   And thanks to our members who support us directly,

01:41:03   you can join at ATP.fm/join.

01:41:06   And we will talk to you next week.

01:41:08   (upbeat music)

01:41:11   ♪ Now the show is over ♪

01:41:13   ♪ They didn't even mean to begin ♪

01:41:16   ♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪

01:41:18   ♪ Oh it was accidental ♪

01:41:21   ♪ John didn't do any research ♪

01:41:23   ♪ Marco and Casey wouldn't let him ♪

01:41:26   'Cause it was accidental, it was accidental

01:41:31   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:41:36   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them

01:41:41   @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:41:45   So that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:41:50   ♪ Anti-Marco, Armin, S-I-R-A-C ♪

01:41:55   ♪ U-S-A-C, R-A-Q-S-A ♪

01:41:58   ♪ It's accidental ♪

01:42:00   ♪ Accidental ♪

01:42:01   ♪ They didn't mean to ♪

01:42:04   ♪ Accidental ♪

01:42:05   ♪ Accidental ♪

01:42:06   ♪ Tech podcast ♪

01:42:08   ♪ So long ♪

01:42:10   - So John, you've been wanting to talk about

01:42:14   Mercedes brake pedals for a while, specifically the EQS,

01:42:17   which apparently can be either the sedan or the SUV.

01:42:21   But let me tell you, the Mercedes electric sedans,

01:42:24   the EQE sedan, EQS sedan, not good looking cars.

01:42:28   - Why are there so few good looking electric cars?

01:42:31   Like, they should be easier, shouldn't it?

01:42:34   - Everybody wants to look futuristic

01:42:37   and that leads them in interesting directions.

01:42:38   And of course, the BMWs don't look weird,

01:42:40   they look like normal BMWs,

01:42:41   but the normal BMWs now look ugly, so.

01:42:44   - Yeah. (laughs)

01:42:44   - I was gonna say, if you want an electric car

01:42:46   It doesn't look odd.

01:42:47   BMW just takes their regular cars and makes them electric because they built a platform

01:42:50   that they can do that with, but they look like BMWs.

01:42:53   Oh, wait, time out.

01:42:54   Breaking news, breaking news from all in the chat room.

01:42:58   Model S/X steering wheel retrofit, $700 available March 2023.

01:43:04   Travel in luxury, enjoy the warmth of a heated wheel and the touch of a premium vegan leather

01:43:09   in a traditional form factor.

01:43:10   No stalks or shifters.

01:43:12   Oh my God.

01:43:13   - The future fit is only compatible with Model S

01:43:15   and Model X vehicles configured with a yoke steering wheel.

01:43:17   Purchase price includes installation through Tesla service.

01:43:19   - Imagine if they just put those on the car

01:43:21   when they sold them.

01:43:21   - Imagine that.

01:43:23   Wouldn't that be novel?

01:43:24   - Flat bottom.

01:43:25   - Oh, it is a very, very slightly flat bottom, you're right.

01:43:27   - You cannot have a round steering wheel anymore,

01:43:29   and I hate it so much.

01:43:30   - Oh, quit your whining.

01:43:32   - I hate it.

01:43:32   - Flat bottom's not that big a deal.

01:43:34   - That's huge.

01:43:35   So you'll be able to order the full steering wheel again.

01:43:38   - Well, it says March 2023, so probably in 2025

01:43:41   you'll be able to get it.

01:43:42   (laughing)

01:43:43   - Yeah, never trust a date from Tesla.

01:43:46   - That's incredible.

01:43:48   - You can give them your money now probably though.

01:43:50   - Yeah, I bet you can.

01:43:51   Well no, it says email me when the item's available to order.

01:43:54   - What's comforting about this is that

01:43:56   the fact that they have to offer this option

01:43:59   shows that just no one liked it.

01:44:01   And enough people didn't like it

01:44:04   that they actually were forced to offer it.

01:44:07   - Tesla's having demand problems as they say.

01:44:09   They're not selling as many cars as they wanted

01:44:11   And I'm sure in the discussion of how can we sell more cars,

01:44:14   one of the items that had to come up

01:44:15   is I do hear a lot of people saying they don't

01:44:17   like the yoke steering wheel.

01:44:18   Imagine that.

01:44:20   And we already did design a steering wheel for this

01:44:22   because I remember the pictures of it before the yoke came out.

01:44:26   There were official images from Tesla

01:44:27   that showed a round steering wheel.

01:44:28   That's why everyone thought it would be an option.

01:44:31   But then Elon decided no, it's the yoke for everybody.

01:44:35   Weren't there some regions where the yoke was totally illegal

01:44:37   and so they had to sell it like this?

01:44:39   Maybe.

01:44:40   I mean, just because it's illegal doesn't mean that we're--

01:44:42   - I guess that's true, yeah.

01:44:44   - What do laws matter?

01:44:45   - No, honestly, I'm actually not tempted at all

01:44:48   by the new Teslas, in part because of Elon Musk being a jerk,

01:44:53   but also in part because now that I've had a car

01:44:57   for the last few months that is designed to be used

01:45:02   instead of a car that's designed to look good,

01:45:05   I'm actually kind of spoiled by a lot of the utility of it.

01:45:08   - You're spoiled by buttons.

01:45:10   - And like, there's buttons, there's handles,

01:45:12   there's compartments everywhere,

01:45:15   the cup holders have little rubber inserts

01:45:17   so stuff doesn't slide around, like there's just,

01:45:19   oh my God, it's just so designed to be used by humans

01:45:24   and I mean, of course as an off-roader,

01:45:26   the Defender's also very, very well designed for that,

01:45:29   but just like, there's just stuff everywhere

01:45:32   that helps me use it as a vehicle

01:45:35   And this is why I'm actually not super tempted

01:45:38   by the Rivians right now,

01:45:39   because Rivians are also designed

01:45:41   kind of with the Tesla mindset of like,

01:45:43   let's make the most minimal interior possible.

01:45:45   - I don't know about that.

01:45:45   - I don't think they're in the same mindset.

01:45:48   They're more electronic than you might think,

01:45:51   but I think they do have a different vibe

01:45:54   than Tesla. - Yep, agreed.

01:45:55   - You should go sit in one.

01:45:56   - I think the overall features of the car do,

01:45:59   but the actual dashboard and controls

01:46:02   are very, very Tesla-like.

01:46:04   - No, they've got stocks and stuff.

01:46:05   - Not many.

01:46:07   - Just try it out.

01:46:07   Go into dealership and look at one in Citadel

01:46:09   and you'll see it's not as far from a--

01:46:11   - There are no dealerships.

01:46:12   - There's a dealership in Richmond for God's sakes.

01:46:14   If Richmond has one, then almost every other city should.

01:46:18   Anyway, all right, let's go back to this Mercedes stuff.

01:46:20   Sorry for interrupting, but I think this is hilarious.

01:46:22   And yeah, imagine people want an actual

01:46:26   frigging steering wheel, but no, Elon's a genius.

01:46:28   Elon knows best.

01:46:29   Anyway, Mercedes EQS SUV brake pedals.

01:46:32   Tell me about this, John.

01:46:34   - Yeah, so this is related to when we were talking about

01:46:36   how any control in a car or any other thing

01:46:41   that is manipulated through a touch screen

01:46:43   or other electronic means,

01:46:45   it's difficult to also have a physical control for it

01:46:48   because then the physical control can get out of sync

01:46:50   with the electronic control

01:46:51   and you have to figure out how to deal with that.

01:46:53   And we started talking about how, you know,

01:46:55   like the faders on a audio board,

01:46:56   sometimes the faders are hardware things

01:46:58   that slide up and down, but they will move on their own.

01:47:00   So if you change a level through a software interface

01:47:04   to make sure that the hardware always matches the software,

01:47:06   the hardware will literally move.

01:47:07   And there was also some car that did that

01:47:09   where if you turn the volume up on the steering wheel control

01:47:12   that the volume dial would turn or whatever.

01:47:14   And we talked about dials that have lights around them,

01:47:17   dials just spin forever,

01:47:18   but they also have lights around them

01:47:19   to indicate the position and all sorts of this.

01:47:22   How do you have physical controls,

01:47:24   but also software controls?

01:47:25   Or even just how do you have a control

01:47:27   that you can control in more than one place

01:47:29   with physical controls

01:47:30   while trying to keep them in sync.

01:47:31   How do you deal with that, right?

01:47:33   So Mercedes had an interesting solution here

01:47:35   on their EQS SUV where they've got, like many cars,

01:47:40   they have a regenerative braking function,

01:47:41   which basically means when you,

01:47:45   to slow the car down rather than squeezing discs

01:47:47   inside the wheel wells to make heat and friction

01:47:51   and slow the car down,

01:47:51   instead they use electricity and magnetism

01:47:54   to essentially charge the battery.

01:47:55   You use the momentum of the car to charge the battery

01:47:58   by regenerating energy, and as you charge the battery,

01:48:02   that will slow the car down,

01:48:03   because the energy to charge the battery

01:48:04   has to come from somewhere,

01:48:05   it's coming from your kinetic energy of the car moving.

01:48:07   That's called regenerative braking.

01:48:09   Cars have ways to adjust that.

01:48:12   How much regenerative braking do you want?

01:48:15   And you would think, well,

01:48:16   we don't want all the regenerative braking,

01:48:17   but what they mean is, how much regenerative braking

01:48:19   do you want when you lift up on the gas pedal?

01:48:23   So in a regular car, I don't know, regular car,

01:48:25   or an internal combustion car,

01:48:26   If you lift up on the gas pedal,

01:48:28   the only thing slowing you down is wind resistance,

01:48:31   rolling resistance, friction, right?

01:48:33   The car doesn't start, it doesn't, you know,

01:48:36   slow down due to the brakes, right?

01:48:38   With regenerative braking on its maximum setting

01:48:40   on Teslas and other cars,

01:48:42   as you lift up on the brake pedal,

01:48:44   it starts regenerative braking.

01:48:46   So it doesn't just like give less power to the wheels,

01:48:49   it actually starts robbing the kinetic energy of the car

01:48:52   and using it to charge the battery, so your car slows down.

01:48:54   I think maybe the thing people might be familiar with,

01:48:56   like this is maybe the golf carts work this way, I think.

01:48:59   I don't golf, so I don't know, but I think like,

01:49:01   there are some other electric vehicles

01:49:03   you might be familiar with, maybe like, maybe bumper cars,

01:49:05   where they work the same way,

01:49:06   that as you lift up on the go pedal,

01:49:09   it becomes the slow pedal, right?

01:49:11   Regenerative braking off means,

01:49:13   oh, it works like an internal combustion car.

01:49:15   You lifting up on the gas pedal does not slow the car

01:49:18   in any way, the only thing slowing the car,

01:49:20   friction and wind, right?

01:49:21   And so if you're used to an internal combustion engine,

01:49:23   you might want regenerative braking totally off.

01:49:26   but if you're used to what they call one pedal driving,

01:49:28   you can just drive mostly with entirely with the gas pedal

01:49:31   because as you lift up on the gas pedal,

01:49:33   it essentially applies the brakes,

01:49:35   the regenerator brakes in proportion

01:49:37   to how much you're lifting up the gas pedal.

01:49:39   Now, Mercedes has the same settings.

01:49:41   Do you want super duper regenerator braking

01:49:43   for one pedal driving where you basically never need

01:49:46   to touch the brake pedal

01:49:48   unless you're doing emergency braking or something?

01:49:50   Or do you want it to behave like internal combustion engine?

01:49:53   But what Mercedes has decided to do

01:49:55   is reflect the braking state in the brake pedal.

01:49:59   So in normal regenerative braking,

01:50:02   as you lift up on the gas pedal

01:50:03   and it applies the regenerative brakes,

01:50:06   the brake pedal doesn't do anything.

01:50:08   Now your car is braking,

01:50:09   but the brake pedal is in its fully up position.

01:50:12   So Mercedes says, well, if we're applying the brakes at all,

01:50:15   we should move the brake pedal down

01:50:17   to reflect the amount of braking that we're applying

01:50:20   so that if you were to take your foot off of the gas pedal

01:50:23   and put it onto the brake,

01:50:24   it would reflect the fact that, hey, you know what?

01:50:26   The brakes are actually applied like 50% already

01:50:28   because of how you let up on the gas pedal.

01:50:31   So the brake pedal will be 50% depressed

01:50:33   when you put your foot over there.

01:50:35   Now I've never driven one of these cars, so I can't say,

01:50:38   but this MKBHD did a review of it

01:50:40   and he found it extremely disconcerting

01:50:42   to take his foot off of the gas, the accelerator,

01:50:45   and reach for the brake pedal with that same foot

01:50:48   and not quite know where that brake pedal might be

01:50:51   because how low will it be?

01:50:53   Like there's even like this intelligent braking thing

01:50:56   where it will apply regenerative brakes

01:50:57   based on like how far the car is in front of you

01:51:00   or how fast you're going and what the conditions are

01:51:02   and in turn reflect that in the brake pedal,

01:51:04   which may be in any position between completely up

01:51:07   and maybe not completely down, but halfway down.

01:51:11   And I think this attempt to make the physical control

01:51:14   reflect what the car is doing,

01:51:15   I understand the motivation,

01:51:18   but I think braking in the muscle memory

01:51:20   of always being able to find the brake pedal,

01:51:22   especially in an emergency situation

01:51:24   where you take your foot off the gas accelerator real quick

01:51:28   and go for the brake pedal,

01:51:29   I want that brake pedal to be in the same expected spot

01:51:32   every single time.

01:51:33   And I don't mind that the first two inches of travel

01:51:35   doesn't do anything because that much braking

01:51:36   was already being applied, because in that situation,

01:51:39   you're probably slamming on the brakes anyway.

01:51:41   So I think this is a pretty bad idea.

01:51:44   I give them points for trying to do it

01:51:46   and it's relevant to our past discussion,

01:51:48   but I think the muscle memory of being able

01:51:49   to always find the brake pedal is so much more important

01:51:52   than correctly reflecting what the car is doing.

01:51:56   - Yeah, before I address that real-time follow-up,

01:51:58   new Model Ss and Xs give you the option

01:52:02   to order the steering wheel or the yoke, no cost difference.

01:52:06   - Ah!

01:52:07   - So before everybody writes in.

01:52:08   But yeah, I think, I don't know,

01:52:10   do you ever have one of the old cars

01:52:13   that had early versions of cruise control

01:52:15   where it would do this with the gas pedal?

01:52:17   'Cause I had that before.

01:52:18   - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:52:18   - I've driven a U-Haul moving van that did that.

01:52:22   (laughing)

01:52:23   'Cause when you'd hit the governor,

01:52:24   it had like a governor like 55 miles an hour,

01:52:26   and when you hit 55,

01:52:27   the gas pedal would push back on your foot.

01:52:29   That is something that Marques said

01:52:31   on the video about this too.

01:52:32   The brake pedal will sometimes push back on you

01:52:34   in this automated weird mode too.

01:52:36   Do not like.

01:52:37   - Yeah, it made a little bit of sense,

01:52:39   or rather it wasn't too disruptive on the gas pedal

01:52:41   on those old cruise control vehicles

01:52:43   because that was kind of fixed in place.

01:52:46   it wasn't a dynamically responding thing.

01:52:49   And I feel like the gas pedal, it's okay to not quite be

01:52:52   where you expect it to be because you just lift your foot

01:52:55   off or whatever, it's less damaging.

01:52:56   Whereas the brake pedal, I feel like there should never be

01:53:00   any moments, even a split second of, oh my god,

01:53:04   where's the pedal on the brake pedal?

01:53:05   It should always be where you expect it to be.

01:53:07   It should always feel how you expect it to feel.

01:53:10   There should never be any variation or any doubt

01:53:14   in your mind that the brake pedal is where it's supposed

01:53:16   to be and about to do what you need it to do.

01:53:18   Anything that kind of plays with it and makes it dynamic

01:53:21   is just ultimately a bad idea.

01:53:23   - This is one of those things that when I read about it

01:53:26   or listen to someone talk about it,

01:53:28   I think to myself, okay, that makes sense.

01:53:30   I can get behind that.

01:53:32   But I suspect that once I got behind the wheel

01:53:34   and experienced it, that I would quickly sour on it

01:53:38   and sour on it real, real hard.

01:53:41   So I don't know, I'd be curious to try this for sure.

01:53:44   again, sitting here now, like, yeah, that makes sense.

01:53:46   Why not reflect the state of the world?

01:53:48   But, but golly, I have a feeling that not knowing exactly

01:53:53   where the brake pedal is,

01:53:54   which is the thing I need urgently,

01:53:56   like you both were saying, that I need urgently,

01:53:57   I need it immediately.

01:53:59   And I cannot be surprised about where it is.

01:54:01   I don't know if that's really gonna work.

01:54:02   - Yeah, and I think when you're going for the brake pedal,

01:54:04   what you want is to get in contact with that control ASAP,

01:54:08   because until your foot is touching it,

01:54:10   you can't do anything braking-wise.

01:54:12   Like you have to get in contact with it.

01:54:14   So that argues for both it always being in the same place and also for it being at the

01:54:19   top of its travel before you activate it because that's the closest to you.

01:54:23   You always just want to go to the brakes.

01:54:28   You want to get in that contact as fast as possible.

01:54:30   If it is in some position other than all the way up, A, it's going to be farther away and

01:54:35   B, you've got to start hunting for it.

01:54:37   And depending on how you move your foot, you could miss it entirely.

01:54:40   Like if it was depressed three quarters of the way and your heel was like you're the type of person who goes to the brake

01:54:45   without like moving your heel that much because your car is set up that way and you just press your foot down with your heel hinging

01:54:50   in a certain spot and your toe goes all the way to the floor because you like missed it entirely

01:54:53   That's potentially not a great situation now this this discussion brought up. I think it was a Quinn Nelson said somewhere

01:55:01   That he was he's like

01:55:03   I hate the people who buy electric cars and and

01:55:05   and don't put regenerative braking on a max.

01:55:07   Tesla's one pedal driving is the only way you should do it.

01:55:10   You should always have,

01:55:11   you should always be one pedal driving.

01:55:13   The old way is for internal combustion.

01:55:15   The only reason we're used to it

01:55:16   is because that's how cars used to work.

01:55:17   Everyone should one pedal drive.

01:55:18   Regen should be on max.

01:55:20   And he said, also, you're just wasting energy

01:55:23   if you don't do that,

01:55:24   because if you're not one pedal driving,

01:55:25   you're being less efficient.

01:55:27   And I was gonna reply to him, but I'm like,

01:55:29   first I said, is there something I don't understand about,

01:55:32   'cause it doesn't make any sense to me.

01:55:33   I'm like, how would it be any less efficient?

01:55:36   The way I thought it worked,

01:55:37   and apparently I was wrong about this in Tesla's anyway,

01:55:40   is whether you are applying braking power

01:55:44   by lifting up on the gas pedal

01:55:45   or applying braking pedal by pressing on the brake thing,

01:55:50   you're applying braking, right?

01:55:53   It shouldn't make a difference.

01:55:54   It's not as if in non-regen mode,

01:55:57   applying the braking doesn't do regen.

01:55:58   That would be ridiculous.

01:56:00   So I was like, maybe he means that

01:56:02   When people drive the old way,

01:56:04   they're more likely to dip into the friction brakes.

01:56:06   And what I mean by that is most electric cars,

01:56:09   when you press the brake pedal, it will do regen,

01:56:11   but regen can't stop the car as quickly as friction brakes.

01:56:16   When we say friction brakes,

01:56:17   we mean the little things squeezing the discs

01:56:18   or pressing against the drums in your wheel wells.

01:56:21   So they have to blend regenerative braking

01:56:23   with the actual old fashioned

01:56:25   hydraulic brake fluid powered brakes, right?

01:56:28   And I was thinking, maybe he means

01:56:29   when people don't do one pedal driving,

01:56:32   they tend to push the brake pedal

01:56:33   and they get past the regen part

01:56:35   where they push the brake pedal far enough

01:56:37   where the car says, okay,

01:56:38   I've given you all the regen you want

01:56:40   and you still want more braking.

01:56:41   Now I have to start pinching the friction brakes.

01:56:44   And anytime you use the friction brakes,

01:56:45   you are burning energy 'cause that's not,

01:56:47   yeah, that's just going off as heat.

01:56:48   You're losing that.

01:56:49   It's not going back into your battery at all, right?

01:56:51   So maybe he was saying like,

01:56:53   you should use one pedal driving

01:56:54   because with one pedal driving,

01:56:55   you will never engage the friction brakes

01:56:57   because that's a different pedal over there.

01:56:59   and the people who don't do that

01:57:01   dip into the friction brakes too much.

01:57:03   But what it turns out that apparently he was talking about

01:57:05   is that in Teslas, now you can correct me if I'm wrong,

01:57:07   but this is my understanding from reading the thread,

01:57:10   in Teslas, the brake pedals only do the friction brakes?

01:57:14   That can't possibly be true, can it?

01:57:15   - I always got the impression driving it

01:57:18   that when you push the brake pedal,

01:57:20   you are controlling the friction brakes, period.

01:57:23   And that the car would decide when to regen

01:57:26   if you're decelerating,

01:57:28   but you don't actually push the brake yet,

01:57:31   that's when I think it's actually using the regen.

01:57:34   But you can turn it down in the settings.

01:57:37   Now, I prefer it all the way up.

01:57:40   The thing is, in the context of when Teslas came out,

01:57:47   when they were designing these cars,

01:57:49   when they were making all these options,

01:57:50   they put in options.

01:57:51   There's like the creep mode,

01:57:53   where with an automatic transmission,

01:57:55   when you take your foot off the brake from a stop,

01:57:58   the car starts slowly creeping forward.

01:58:01   Electric cars have no reason to do that.

01:58:03   So electric cars, when you take your foot off the brake

01:58:05   by default, nothing happens.

01:58:07   Like, you know, I mean, you might start falling

01:58:09   down a hill or something, but, you know,

01:58:11   if your hill hold's not on, but, you know,

01:58:13   electric cars, there is no automatic creeping forward

01:58:16   when you stop braking, but Tesla, when they, you know,

01:58:19   when they first released the Model S

01:58:20   and trying to get people to drive electric cars,

01:58:23   they added this option called, you know, creep mode

01:58:25   or something, which sounds hilarious and fits Elon well.

01:58:28   And they added this mode to basically emulate

01:58:32   how automatic transmissions drive

01:58:34   so that people would be less disoriented

01:58:37   when they first tried an electric car.

01:58:38   And I think having the regen option be adjustable

01:58:42   is that same kind of thing of like,

01:58:44   okay, we're still kind of bringing people along

01:58:47   from the gas world to the electric world

01:58:50   and we need affordances for people

01:58:54   to be comfortable with the transition.

01:58:56   And so turning down regen as an option

01:59:00   is one of those affordances.

01:59:02   - But that's not the affordance we're talking about here,

01:59:03   though, the affordance is people don't understand

01:59:05   one-pedal driving, so we have to make it

01:59:07   that when you lift off the gas,

01:59:08   the car doesn't start decelerating

01:59:09   due to any kind of braking, right?

01:59:11   That's the affordance to make people comfortable with it.

01:59:13   But the thing we're talking about is here is,

01:59:16   okay, but what happens, what decelerates the car?

01:59:20   And in a Tesla, it's like, well,

01:59:22   If you turn regen on max and you lift up on the gas pedal,

01:59:27   we will use regen to slow the car.

01:59:29   And if you press the brake pedal,

01:59:31   we use friction brakes to slow the car.

01:59:33   And what they could have done

01:59:35   and what every other car manufacturer has done

01:59:36   and what I assumed Tesla was doing,

01:59:38   but apparently they're not, is how about

01:59:39   for the affordance mode, you make the gas pedal

01:59:41   to work just like it does in a regular car

01:59:43   where you lift up and the car just coasts, right?

01:59:45   You know, it slows down due to friction and air,

01:59:47   but no braking is being applied.

01:59:49   And then you make the brake pedal do a combination

01:59:52   of regenerative and friction braking

01:59:53   according to whatever weird ass algorithm you have to do.

01:59:55   Like the beginning of the brake pedals all regen

01:59:57   and then as you keep pressing it

01:59:59   and it needs more and more braking power,

02:00:00   it starts to add the friction brakes.

02:00:02   That would be perfectly understandable

02:00:05   to internal combustion engine driver.

02:00:07   They don't have to know what portion of the braking

02:00:10   that is being put in response to their brake pedal action

02:00:12   is regen and what portion is friction.

02:00:14   And any decent car will blend those two together

02:00:18   so you don't notice.

02:00:18   The first round of electric cars from new manufacturers

02:00:21   It's like, oh, I can feel when it goes from regen to friction.

02:00:24   But the more modern ones make that mostly transparent,

02:00:27   probably because they're brake by wire at this point.

02:00:29   Anyway.

02:00:30   And so that's how I just assumed they all worked.

02:00:33   But a car that only applies to friction brakes with the brake

02:00:36   pedal is forcing you to do one pedal driving if you care

02:00:39   at all about your battery life, or your range,

02:00:41   as they call it in cars rather than laptops.

02:00:44   Because you want to do regen.

02:00:46   You want every ounce of that electricity

02:00:48   you use to make this multi-thousand pound car start

02:00:51   rowing down the road, as you brake,

02:00:53   you want that energy back as much as you can possibly get.

02:00:56   Friction brakes throw that energy away as heat, right?

02:00:58   Regen braking gives you some of it back.

02:01:01   So it is insane to me that when you press the gas pedal

02:01:03   on a Tesla, it does not do regen braking.

02:01:05   It should, and presumably it will eventually.

02:01:08   - You said gas pedal, and I think you mean brake pedal.

02:01:10   - I keep saying gas pedal, just substitute accelerator

02:01:12   every time I say gas pedal. - Well, no, no, no,

02:01:13   in this case, I think you mean--

02:01:14   - Oh, it's a brake pedal. - It does.

02:01:16   So in this Mastodon thread, which is I think

02:01:19   what Jon was referring to, you know,

02:01:20   and some interesting thoughts, but then Technology Connections entered the chat.

02:01:24   And that's our YouTuber that we all really enjoy that does really genuinely fascinating and

02:01:31   excellent YouTube videos about all manner of interesting engineering stuff. So Technology

02:01:35   Connections, whose name I honestly don't know, wrote, I think you need to remember that this

02:01:41   only makes sense in the context of Teslas, which don't do blended braking. Most other EVs will

02:01:46   still regenerate more when you use the brake pedal. No matter what the lift off regen is

02:01:50   set to, Tesla's not doing that is to me bonkers. Also when they can also in the conditions

02:01:56   are appropriate to coast, that is more efficient because you avoid the losses from charging

02:02:00   and discharging. Alec continues, like it truly boggles my mind that Tesla decided, no, the

02:02:05   brake pedal only does the friction brakes and you need to get used to what region is

02:02:08   like and people actually defend this position. Hybrids have had blended braking since always

02:02:13   allowing people to coast when they want,

02:02:15   regen when they need to slow down,

02:02:17   and thus maximize efficiency without even thinking about it.

02:02:21   - I'm assuming he's right because he usually knows

02:02:22   what he's talking about, but I just--

02:02:23   - Exactly.

02:02:24   - He was my only source for this reality,

02:02:26   and I just still find it hard to believe

02:02:28   'cause it seems so bad, so inefficient.

02:02:31   And now here, let me make my pitch

02:02:33   for why one-pedal driving is bad.

02:02:34   I know people love it, and it's fun,

02:02:36   and it's more relaxing to not have to go

02:02:37   between gas and brake.

02:02:38   These are the same people who think

02:02:39   you shouldn't have a third pedal,

02:02:40   'cause how annoying is that?

02:02:40   You gotta cut press the brakes on me.

02:02:42   Obviously, all right, so I get the appeal of one pedal driving, right?

02:02:46   I think it is worse.

02:02:48   Again, moving on to my little safety, I think it's worse and also slightly less safe because here's the deal.

02:02:53   Regen braking.

02:02:56   Like, forget about regen braking. The gas pedal

02:02:59   that could actually

02:03:02   apply

02:03:03   all the braking that your car is able to apply

02:03:06   would be too annoying for anybody to use. What we're basically saying is you're pressing the gas pedal. When you lift up on the gas pedal

02:03:11   it's as if you were standing on the brakes. You can't drive that car. That's too much, right?

02:03:16   That's not how any car works. No one wants it to work that way. Imagine you sneeze and your foot

02:03:20   lifts off the gas pedal for a second and it's as if you are applying maximum braking, you'd be

02:03:24   causing accidents left and right. So what actually happens in these one pedal driving, when it's set

02:03:28   to one pedal driving, is when you lift up on the gas pedal, it applies regen braking to a point.

02:03:34   Even if it applies 100% of its possible regen braking, it doesn't apply the maximum braking

02:03:39   that the car is capable of applying.

02:03:43   And again, if there's some fantasy scenario

02:03:44   where a car was able to do its full braking

02:03:47   fully through regen,

02:03:48   doesn't matter for the purpose of the story,

02:03:49   but I think right now cars that do regen braking,

02:03:52   it's not the full braking of the car, right?

02:03:55   So inevitably, there will be situations

02:03:59   where you need more braking than you can get

02:04:02   by lifting up on the gas pedal.

02:04:03   You lift it all the way up on the gas pedal,

02:04:05   you're not even pressing the gas pedal anymore,

02:04:07   you still need more braking.

02:04:09   At that point, you need to A, realize this has happened,

02:04:13   and B, switch over to the brake pedal.

02:04:15   I don't like the idea that I'm doing one pedal driving

02:04:20   and I'm in traffic and I'm coming up on a car

02:04:23   and I feel like I'm gonna be able to come to a stop

02:04:25   behind that car by lifting up on the gas pedal

02:04:27   and it will be fine.

02:04:28   I lift up on the gas pedal and I just realize

02:04:29   when I hit the end of the travel

02:04:30   that that's actually not enough braking.

02:04:32   At that point, at the last second,

02:04:34   I need to go to the brake pedal

02:04:35   and apply a little bit more braking,

02:04:36   I'd feel much better about knowing

02:04:38   I'm going to need to come to a stop here.

02:04:40   Let me stop being in the accelerator mode

02:04:43   and put my foot over on the brake pedal

02:04:45   and modulate the brake pedal to come to a nice stop

02:04:48   where I intend or slow to the degree that I intend.

02:04:51   I don't like the idea that,

02:04:52   the whole idea of like one pedal driving,

02:04:54   you can't drive with one pedal

02:04:56   because sometimes you always need more braking.

02:04:58   And in fact, the times when you might need more braking

02:05:00   are the most biggest emergency situations.

02:05:02   And if you get in the mindset

02:05:03   that I just drive with my right foot on the one pedal,

02:05:05   it's one pedal driving.

02:05:06   you have to snap out of that at the right moment

02:05:09   to go over to the brake pedal.

02:05:10   It seems to me to be a more dangerous

02:05:13   and more complicated situation

02:05:14   than the much simpler one of,

02:05:15   when I'm in go mode, I use the go pedal,

02:05:17   and when I'm in no-go mode, I use the no-go pedal.

02:05:21   It's very clear what mode you're in,

02:05:22   and especially in situations where you're like,

02:05:24   I've been decelerating for hundreds of feet.

02:05:26   The whole time, my foot has been on the brake pedal,

02:05:29   pressing it to varying degrees.

02:05:31   I'm already in no-go mode.

02:05:32   I'm in the slowing down mode,

02:05:34   and if something unexpected happens

02:05:35   during the slowing down thing,

02:05:36   your foot's already in the right spot, right?

02:05:39   - Like having driven an electric car

02:05:41   with the behavior you think is the worst

02:05:44   for many, many years now?

02:05:46   - It's not the worst, I just think it's slightly less safe.

02:05:48   - Well, I can tell you that,

02:05:50   and so obviously I had a bit of context

02:05:53   in the sense that the car I had before the Model S

02:05:56   was the M5, and the M5, I had little flappy paddle shifters,

02:06:01   and I would, being a stick driver before,

02:06:04   I would downshift a lot to slow down.

02:06:06   Like that was my main method slowing down, was downshifting.

02:06:08   And so, and it had that giant engine,

02:06:10   and so it had a lot of engine suction also,

02:06:13   whenever you decelerate, and so,

02:06:15   it was actually, it felt not that different

02:06:18   going from that with all that engine suction

02:06:20   and all the downshifting,

02:06:21   to the Tesla with its aggressive regen.

02:06:24   It actually felt very similar, and so--

02:06:26   - Were you using your engine as your main braking thing

02:06:29   so you could do one-pedal driving in the M5?

02:06:30   Because, I know we've talked about this in the past,

02:06:32   but I would suggest that in most cars,

02:06:34   maybe not in the M5, but in most cars,

02:06:37   brake pads are cheaper than clutches.

02:06:40   - Not when you're leasing.

02:06:41   (laughing)

02:06:43   - That's a good point.

02:06:45   No, I am an engine braking apologist,

02:06:50   even though I know that--

02:06:51   - I do engine braking too, but I would never use it

02:06:54   as a way to do one-pedal driving

02:06:55   so I don't have to use the brakes.

02:06:56   - Well, regardless, so I'm saying,

02:06:58   when I came to this house, it felt natural

02:07:01   to have aggressive regen, and I just got,

02:07:03   It got used to it very, very quickly and I never--

02:07:06   - But getting used to it is the dangerous part though

02:07:08   because you get into the mode where like,

02:07:09   I just need this one pedal to drive the car, that's it.

02:07:11   - No, but I think the,

02:07:13   your concern that you would rely 100% on the gas pedal

02:07:19   is I think unfounded.

02:07:22   There was never a time when I felt like

02:07:25   I was using the gas pedal exclusively

02:07:27   because the engine braking, or rather the regen

02:07:31   provided by the gas pedal by letting off of it

02:07:34   would usually not be enough to bring the car

02:07:36   to a complete stop in most circumstances.

02:07:39   Sometimes you could.

02:07:40   - I'm not even talking about the last two seconds

02:07:41   of the complete stop.

02:07:42   I'm like, and you're right,

02:07:43   that I didn't wanna characterize what the regen is,

02:07:46   like what percentage of the full power of the braking

02:07:48   is available to regen,

02:07:49   but my assumption is that the percentage of braking power

02:07:52   that a car possesses that will be possible at regen

02:07:55   will just increase with time,

02:07:57   because for efficiency purposes,

02:07:58   because you want actually the most,

02:07:59   You want regen to be extremely powerful.

02:08:01   You want that energy back.

02:08:03   So the fact that you can't come to a complete stop

02:08:05   or that it's only 20% of the full braking power of the car,

02:08:09   that may be an accident of history today.

02:08:12   I feel like in a golf cart, for example,

02:08:13   you can come to a complete stop

02:08:14   'cause they go five miles an hour or whatever.

02:08:16   - Well, the other trick, though,

02:08:18   that might keep this from ever becoming

02:08:21   too much stronger than it is today

02:08:23   is that you can't always take the regen power.

02:08:26   So if the batteries are too full, for instance,

02:08:30   like if you actually, if you're about to go

02:08:31   on a really long trip and you charge to 100%,

02:08:33   you don't have regen for the first few miles of the trip.

02:08:37   - You just put that power right back on the grid

02:08:38   and the other cars get it.

02:08:39   (laughing)

02:08:41   You watch, your odometer goes backwards when you do that.

02:08:44   - Yeah, and there's also like different thermal conditions

02:08:48   that the battery might be in where--

02:08:49   - Yeah, I mean, there's lots of physics-based reasons

02:08:51   why regen is not 100% of the power of the car.

02:08:54   I just said like the trend is going to be

02:08:56   the more regen power possible.

02:08:58   And this whole thing of the variability

02:09:00   of like sometimes you can't take it and so forth

02:09:02   argues even more for there should be a go pedal

02:09:04   and a stop pedal.

02:09:05   And what the hell that stop pedal is doing

02:09:07   depends on all sorts of variables that you don't care about.

02:09:09   How much power can I regen?

02:09:10   How much power am I able to regen?

02:09:11   How it charges my battery?

02:09:13   What temperature is it?

02:09:14   But you don't care 'cause it's entirely seamless.

02:09:17   The stop pedal does some combination of crap

02:09:21   to slow your car down in a way that responds linearly

02:09:24   you're pressing it, you know, it's like there's a braking curve and the brake pedal implements that

02:09:28   and there's a going curve and the go pedal implements that and it's simple and they have

02:09:31   their jobs and the car manufacturers are free to vary all that within whereas with quote-unquote

02:09:37   one pedal driving i feel like you're building bad habits and it's just going to change too much from

02:09:43   car to car based on all the regen stuff unless you're going to start adding friction brakes as

02:09:47   you lift up the gas pedal which i suppose they could but like i said i don't think that's viable

02:09:51   because I don't think you want 100% braking when you lift off the gas.

02:09:54   I don't know. I have not spent a lot of time in Tesla's, but I've spent a fair bit,

02:09:58   especially as someone who's never owned one. And I think there's aspects of what both of you are

02:10:05   saying that are true. In my experience, I don't personally see why one pedal driving is so amazing

02:10:12   as so many EV drivers seem to think, but maybe that's my own ignorance talking. But I pretty

02:10:18   reasonably quickly acclimated to regenerative braking and kind of got used to basically one

02:10:25   pedal driving. And I don't think it's too different than like going between a car, a three pedal car,

02:10:35   where the clutch catches really low and then immediately after driving that jumping into a

02:10:39   three pedal car where the clutch catches really high. And so you just have to re-acclimate

02:10:43   yourself. And within the span of a few driving miles, usually you've got yourself re-acclimated

02:10:49   and it's fine. And I feel like my experience with one-pedal driving was basically like that.

02:10:57   Now I understand your argument, Jon, that maybe you could make an argument that it's not as safe,

02:11:02   but ultimately for anyone that's been driving for any amount of time, unless you've learned to drive

02:11:08   on a one-pedal car, which that time is happening and will happen, unless you're learning to drive

02:11:12   on a car like that, your natural reaction from the past 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 years of driving is to reach

02:11:19   for that brake when there's an emergency. You're not even going to think about it. And so I don't

02:11:24   think that we're like reprogramming our brains for emergency evasion. Yeah, we are maybe reprogramming

02:11:30   our brains for traffic. It's not so much the programming is that your foot would already be

02:11:34   on the brake, so you don't pay the travel cost, right? Because in non-one-pedal driving, you'd

02:11:39   Already be riding the brake to some degree at the point when the emergency occurs. Whereas it with one pedal driving

02:11:44   You're not even on the brake yet because you're doing the one pedal driving and the emergency occurs

02:11:48   You have to pay the cost of switch

02:11:49   There's always gonna be situations where you'd be surprised and you have to hit the brake, right?

02:11:52   But there's so many situations where normally you would be on the brake

02:11:55   I think this whole thing of like getting used to it and not being a big deal

02:11:58   relies on the current strength of region braking which is again some small portion of the total braking power of the car if

02:12:06   If regen gets more powerful and more of the full braking power of the car is done by regen

02:12:11   and that accumulates to the one pedal, it will be...

02:12:15   Because I think in this situation you're saying like, you're one pedal driving but really

02:12:19   you're one pedal drive for a little bit but you always have to eventually go onto the

02:12:22   brake.

02:12:23   So it's really just like a slight delay in what would have normally been a switch to

02:12:26   the brake.

02:12:27   But if regen becomes more powerful, more and more situations you never need to leave the

02:12:31   gas and that's where I feel like you're building the habit that you feel like I can drive

02:12:36   this entire car with the gas, which is not true,

02:12:37   although you're building that habit.

02:12:38   Like imagine if you didn't need to use the brake pedal

02:12:42   except in emergencies, which is not true

02:12:43   in any regen braking car now,

02:12:45   but if that was true and people learned on that,

02:12:47   they wouldn't have the habit

02:12:49   to go over to the brake in an emergency

02:12:50   and it would be much less safe, right?

02:12:52   And then with the current cars where you're leaving

02:12:55   and going over to the brake a little bit later

02:12:58   than you would, you're probably fine,

02:12:59   it's probably not that big of a deal,

02:13:00   but I feel like the benefit is there, I see it,

02:13:03   which is the same benefit as not having a third pedal.

02:13:06   I don't want to keep moving my foot back and forth.

02:13:07   It's annoying.

02:13:08   Stop and go traffic, it's annoying to do that.

02:13:10   It's more comfortable in stop and go traffic

02:13:11   to not have to move my foot back and forth, right?

02:13:13   That's the argument.

02:13:14   That's why people find it appealing.

02:13:16   I just feel like a brake pedal and gas pedal

02:13:19   is not too much to ask until we get self-driving.

02:13:22   [