00:00:05 ◼ ► Yes, I was given my second shot. I am the first one to complete my journey on the vaccination train. Toot toot!
00:00:13 ◼ ► Now the exciting part of this show is that if Casey has the fever kind of reaction to the vaccine,
00:00:34 ◼ ► And you know, what's really convenient is we're definitely going to be having a short show because there's nothing to talk about today.
00:00:41 ◼ ► I am not allowed to start with follow-up, even though I'd kind of like to because there's some fun stuff here.
00:00:55 ◼ ► And I still don't have an Apple Card. I didn't really have all that much interest in it.
00:00:59 ◼ ► But now they're adding family support to Apple Card and that's making me wonder, maybe I should look into this again.
00:01:06 ◼ ► I think the biggest miracle of this is that Apple has somehow discovered from ancient stone tablets that they dug up in the desert somewhere,
00:01:12 ◼ ► the technology that allows them to merge accounts. Or maybe Goldman Sachs found this technology and not Apple.
00:01:20 ◼ ► Maybe to Apple it is still a mystery. But that was my first question when they announced this.
00:01:24 ◼ ► Like, but what if, you know, you gave us the Apple Card a long time ago, what if like in my family, I have an Apple Card and my wife has her own Apple Card.
00:01:31 ◼ ► What are we supposed to do? It's not like they're going to let us merge accounts. No, they will.
00:01:38 ◼ ► So that's interesting. The other thing that's interesting is that you can actually put your kids on it too and somehow give them like little allowances so they can buy things with Apple Card.
00:01:46 ◼ ► This is, you know, not as easy to give your 13 year old. I mean, maybe this actually. I don't know.
00:01:50 ◼ ► I've never actually tried this, but all I know is when I was 13 years old, I did not have a credit card cosigned by my parents or otherwise.
00:01:56 ◼ ► But with the Apple Card, you can let your kids buy things apparently with your Apple Card by giving them some allowance of money. So that's cool.
00:02:05 ◼ ► So I look forward to trying this because I always thought it was a little bit silly that I had to have an Apple Card that was separate from my wife's.
00:02:11 ◼ ► Yeah. And the thing about like equal rights with equal credit building for all members who were on the card, I don't know a lot about that.
00:02:21 ◼ ► I mean, the downside to that is now you're also kind of like like they say this in the text when it gets spelled out.
00:02:28 ◼ ► Your bad credit history is now shared, too. So if you if one of the card co-owners, you know, neglects to pay a bill or you collectively neglected like the good and the bad go together.
00:02:39 ◼ ► And, you know, it's mostly billed as an upside because there were some high profile situations where someone's spouse had a terrible had a terrible much lower credit limit than the other person in the relationship.
00:02:51 ◼ ► And it seemed ridiculous since they were married and shared all their assets or whatever.
00:02:55 ◼ ► So this is trying to help fix that. And hopefully it does. But be aware that just like when your parents co-sign a credit card for you when you're a kid or whatever, you're kind of, you know, tying yourselves together and you're in the same boat.
00:03:11 ◼ ► Would anybody want to tie themselves together in a boat? That sounds like a bad idea in general.
00:03:30 ◼ ► It's a good movie. It holds up. I watched it a couple of years ago. I always loved that movie. I love Jim Carrey and I love that role specifically. I think that was my favorite Jim Carrey movie.
00:03:39 ◼ ► This is a generational bias, but every time I hear you 90s kids talking about the movies you love or the music you love or really anything you love, I just like, what?
00:03:53 ◼ ► All right, then Apple moved on to something like a minute and a quarter about podcasts. I don't remember how much it was, but it was not a lot.
00:04:03 ◼ ► In retrospect, that's what we should have done is timed ourselves and seen if we could keep this to a minute and a quarter because if we keep this to 15 and a quarter minutes, I will be stupefied.
00:04:13 ◼ ► Well, to be fair, it was a very short segment and they didn't tell us almost anything, so everything we're going to talk about now was not things that we learned from the keynote, but things that we learned after the keynote by pouring over Apple's site, et cetera.
00:04:27 ◼ ► So there is actually a bunch to know. It's just that Apple didn't have time in the keynote to talk about it.
00:04:32 ◼ ► I'm pretty sure we've taken longer to introduce the topic than Apple took to cover the whole topic.
00:04:38 ◼ ► Indeed. All right, so buckle up everybody. Let's talk about three podcasts. Let's talk about podcasts.
00:04:43 ◼ ► So Apple has said that when the Apple Podcast support launched, whenever it was in the olden times, there were 3,000 podcasts at launch. Now there are millions of them.
00:04:54 ◼ ► And they're going to be making some changes. There is a revamped podcast app coming very soon, I would guess, with 14.5.
00:05:02 ◼ ► And the, I guess, premier feature of this is Apple Podcast subscriptions. So this is Apple's attempt at letting people like the three of us take some of your money and give you, hopefully, something in return.
00:05:16 ◼ ► And so there's several different things you can do with this. You can do additional content. You can do ad-free content.
00:05:26 ◼ ► You can do access to older content. So like a lot of the big names will take their older episodes out of their feeds after a while.
00:05:34 ◼ ► So if you're a paid member, you could go back to the beginning of time. And you can also do early access to content. So sort of like our bootleg.
00:05:41 ◼ ► And there's a lot here that I think is really interesting. And I appreciate what Apple is trying to do, sort of.
00:05:52 ◼ ► But I don't think that this is really a good fit for the three of us for a lot of different reasons, which I'm sure we'll start talking about momentarily.
00:05:59 ◼ ► But nevertheless, I do find this fascinating, if also very scary. So Marco, I presume you have the strongest opinions of the three of us about this. What do you think?
00:06:12 ◼ ► So I think it's, this might be a long discussion, I think it's important to break up different aspects of this and talk about them separately. Because there's a lot that they announced, there's a lot that's changing.
00:06:23 ◼ ► And it isn't all bad. In fact, I think most of it will be probably neutral to, you know, mostly not going anywhere. At least not affecting the world like us, like the nerd world.
00:06:35 ◼ ► So if we look at it, okay, first, let's talk about structural things that are slightly different. Now, Apple Podcasts has this concept of channels, which is kind of more like, basically like a way for podcast networks to have all their shows grouped together and be able to have people follow their other shows or the combined shows more easily.
00:06:57 ◼ ► And Apple Podcasts and Apple has now also built in this whole back end management system for podcasters to be able to actually upload like separate, you know, paid or premium or locked shows into Apple Podcasts and do all sorts of stuff with them with, you know, selling access to them through Apple Podcasts and everything else.
00:07:18 ◼ ► So there's all there's like that that whole system and then there's the subscription end of things we'll talk about in a minute. But I think like, most of those structural adjustments and changes and additions are kind of going along what Apple has been doing for the last few years of like, adding new RSS tags for things like structured episode data, episode numbering, showing whether a show is is seasonal, whether it should be enjoyed, you know, chronologically reverse chronologically, all of that stuff.
00:07:47 ◼ ► I don't think I have much problem with it, if any problem. There is one one minor downside, though, is that to date, I don't think they've announced like, any kind of RSS or open ecosystem based equivalent to showing things like these channels, these network structure things.
00:08:06 ◼ ► I think that's all just in their back end. But for the most part, I don't know to what degree that specifically is really going to matter. If people want to, you know, make their shows look better Apple Podcasts by adding some of this metadata and managing on the back end. Okay, that's fine. So I don't care too much about that.
00:08:22 ◼ ► Well, you'd lumped you lumped the premium content. Oh, yeah, I'll get to that. Don't worry. I think that is very different from from the metadata related things, which are all fine. Yes. So there's a second part of this, which is the in as part of this management thing.
00:08:38 ◼ ► And I sure hope this is the kind of thing that we spend 10 minutes talking about. But then next week, something between now next week, they fix it or take it out. But and make this whole discussion move. But in case they don't, and in case they need some help with this convincing.
00:08:52 ◼ ► They added this this checkbox that when you log in to manage your podcast in Apple Podcasts, there is now a checkbox for the for your RSS feed. And this is for any podcast, public or or, you know, non public, I guess, I guess only public would have RSS feeds.
00:09:07 ◼ ► But there is now this checkbox that you can uncheck. And if you do, your RSS feed URL does not show up in the iTunes API. This matters because the iTunes API is what almost every podcast app that is not like one of the absolute biggest handful, almost every other podcast app uses Apple Podcasts and the iTunes API.
00:09:36 ◼ ► As their directory, so that when you type in a search term, they search Apple's directory, and they return Apple's results. I do this too in Overcast, I do have my own search. But I combine my results with theirs. And I use a podcast membership in their directory as a filter for whether I should show a show publicly or not.
00:09:59 ◼ ► So if a podcast is not listed on Apple Podcasts, I consider it private. And I don't usually surface that in Overcast search results, because either the creators usually don't want it surface, which is why they didn't submit Apple Podcasts.
00:10:12 ◼ ► Or maybe it's something that Apple Podcasts doesn't allow for content reasons. So maybe it's like full of pirated stuff, or maybe it's you know, hate speech or anything. And I don't want to deal with any of that. And I don't have the resources to do my own filtering.
00:10:24 ◼ ► And almost no other podcast app does. Apple maintains a staff of people who, you know, speak every language in the world who go through these and, you know, review submissions and make sure that there's that there's not, you know, a bunch of spam and stuff in the and hate in the Apple Podcast directory.
00:10:39 ◼ ► So this provides a really, really important service to the ecosystem. And Apple has run this API for free, without any obvious restrictions for years, years and years and years. And this is what has enabled small apps like mine to exist really, and to have like a, an actual directory that we don't have to maintain ourselves, so that nobody has to submit their podcast to 19 different sites.
00:11:04 ◼ ► And that 19 different apps don't need to maintain their own staff for moderation and copyright disputes and stuff like that.
00:11:12 ◼ ► So it's really important that the iTunes API for podcasts continues to exist and be available to podcast apps. What Apple has added was a checkbox that allows podcasters to remove their feed URL from the results that are returned from that API, so that you could still search the iTunes API and you can get titles and stuff like that of podcasts.
00:11:41 ◼ ► But you can't then get the feed URL, which means you can't do anything with it really. I don't know what the purpose was for adding this option at all.
00:11:51 ◼ ► And the problem when you add an option like this, it's kind of like when the M1 Macs came out and we had this wonderful ability to run iOS apps on our Macs if you want. But Apple gave everybody an opt out in the App Store. That if you don't want your iOS app to be available to install this certain way in the App Store on M1 Macs, you can opt out.
00:12:16 ◼ ► What happened? Almost every big company opted out because they didn't want to deal with the support load or they didn't even want to bother testing it or they didn't want the liability or they didn't have a certain rights thing in some of their contracts and they didn't want to deal with that.
00:12:34 ◼ ► Apple gave people an opt out and almost everyone took it. Not for good reasons. Not for reasons like we tested it and it doesn't work. Mostly for reasons like we want to cover our butts or we don't fully understand what this means and so we're going to opt out because it's not worth figuring out what this means for big companies.
00:12:52 ◼ ► Well I think the other big reason they opted out is we have other plans for the Mac where we will make money because if you opt in it's all part of the same purchase of that one app and if you want to say well we reserve the right to make a dedicated Mac app later that we're going to charge for.
00:13:06 ◼ ► Maybe but I think the much more common case is we don't fully understand this or want to deal with it so we're just going to opt out because it's safer.
00:13:14 ◼ ► By Apple adding this checkbox to the RSS thing so you can remove your feed from your API results the only thing this affects is other podcast apps.
00:13:26 ◼ ► This doesn't affect anything about the show. You're still publishing a public RSS feed for a free show. We're not talking about subscription shows yet. We're talking about free shows that have always been submitted to Apple Podcasts and have always had their feeds available through the API for any app including Apple's own app to read.
00:13:44 ◼ ► So it's changing this, it's locking this down or it's enabling a lockdown for podcasters to take. Now there's a complicating factor here that it seems like many many podcasts including ours were opted out of this as the system launched.
00:14:05 ◼ ► Something went wrong because we never opted out of it. Something went wrong and tons of podcasts were opted out of this and Apple has not at the time of recording fixed that yet.
00:14:16 ◼ ► So right now there's tons of podcasts that are just disappearing from podcast apps because no app can configure what their feed URL is because it's based on this API.
00:14:27 ◼ ► And just to be clear for people who aren't following this, he's been talking about this API and everything, right? If you use Apple's podcast app to look for a podcast you can always subscribe to it.
00:14:38 ◼ ► Everything we're talking about only applies to non-Apple apps that use Apple's API to figure out, to find you a podcast and it will find the podcast for you but then those apps can't subscribe to it because they don't know the feed URL because the API returned all the information to them, title, artworks, whatever, but didn't return the feed URL.
00:14:56 ◼ ► So like the mystery of this box and what Mark was describing is like, why as someone who is producing again a free non-subscription whatever podcast would you want your podcast to essentially only be subscribable to people who use the Apple podcast app?
00:15:12 ◼ ► Again this is a free podcast with an RSS feed that is on the internet and you are essentially hiding the feed URL in Apple search results.
00:15:21 ◼ ► I can't think of a reasonable scenario where someone with a podcast on the public internet that if you just went to their website you could probably find the feed URL would not want that feed URL to appear in the search results that third-party podcast apps see.
00:15:36 ◼ ► But only want it to be subscribable through Apple's podcast app. It doesn't even make sense from a strategic point of view. It just seems like a bug.
00:15:44 ◼ ► Like this would ever happen and the fact that it is a feature, I'm really hard pressed to think of why you would want this to happen.
00:15:53 ◼ ► The best I can come up with is maybe you want people to force people to use the Apple podcast app but in that case wouldn't you want the search result not to appear at all to third-party ones rather than to have it appear but just have no feed URL?
00:16:06 ◼ ► It's truly baffling why this feature exists at all. Setting aside the bug about it being accidentally activated.
00:16:12 ◼ ► And the thing is if you're going to offer this kind of feature you're going to get so many podcasters who uncheck the box or if it's opt-in, god I hope not, or fail to check the box who don't really fully understand the ramifications of what this means.
00:16:30 ◼ ► And I know this because I get emails from people all the time asking if I can move their feed in Overcast or if I can rename it or if I can omit it from Overcast because they only have the rights to distribute their podcast on Apple Podcasts, whatever that means.
00:16:47 ◼ ► And almost always if I email them back and kind of explain how things work, they almost always are like, "Oh, right, never mind. I don't understand things fully."
00:16:56 ◼ ► People don't really understand how a lot of this stuff works, including many podcasters. Many podcasters are under wrong impressions or they don't know the technical backing of a lot of this stuff.
00:17:08 ◼ ► Or they think Apple hosts the podcast. They think people are uploading their podcast to Apple. They don't understand that this is an existing system. It's RSS feeds hosted on people's websites that point to files that are hosted on their servers or servers of someone else.
00:17:20 ◼ ► Apple is just the directory up until this premium stuff that we'll talk about in a bit. But it looks like, just like so many people think that Apple makes all the apps in the App Store.
00:17:31 ◼ ► A surprising number of people think that Apple makes all the apps in the App Store. Many people, including people who make podcasts, think, "Oh, my podcasts are in the iTunes Store or they're in the Apple thing."
00:17:41 ◼ ► Your podcast, let's hope, is the beauty of podcasts. It is an RSS feed on a website that you control that points to files that you determine the location of, and Apple is just there, essentially making a directory.
00:17:52 ◼ ► Here are the podcasts, here's the name, here's the title, here's who makes it, here's some artwork, and here is the feed URL. And that feed URL is your feed URL that points to wherever you are hosting your files for your podcast.
00:18:04 ◼ ► Yeah, and so I cannot think of a good reason for this checkbox to exist. I hope Apple not only fixes the bug, if it's indeed a bug, that it seems like almost every podcast was opted out, which is disastrous.
00:18:22 ◼ ► Yeah, it took me a long time to be able to log in because their login system was horrendously messed up for a long time as well, but I did eventually log in and I did indeed opt us back in.
00:18:36 ◼ ► But, yeah, so this checkbox is a disaster. It should never even have been implemented. It seems like it was implemented badly and with some issues on its rollout.
00:18:50 ◼ ► I know, right. I really hope that Apple sees that this was a mistake or this is going to cause harm and already is causing significant harm and removes the ability for this opt out for public RSS feeds for free public shows.
00:19:07 ◼ ► We're not talking about subscriptions yet. This is just for free public shows that publish free RSS feeds publicly.
00:19:15 ◼ ► That you could find if you went to their website probably. They're publicly available and it's like, you know, not even security through obscurity. They're just omitting information that is publicly available in a directory.
00:19:26 ◼ ► And the whole point of the directory is to contain this information so that people can be vended to people.
00:19:31 ◼ ► Like, if you're a directory and you intentionally omit information, like, what's the point?
00:19:35 ◼ ► Like, if there was no directory, we would constantly be telling people, "Go to ATP.fm," right? Because that's where our feed is. You can subscribe to it right there.
00:19:41 ◼ ► Apple doesn't need to be involved at all. But if you search for our podcast in any podcast client, including Apple's, you will find it because we are in the Apple's directory of podcasts that has all our metadata, which points to our website and our feed URL.
00:19:53 ◼ ► Exactly. So, I also want to mention a special thanks. There's been a project running for a little while now called Podcast Index. We'll link to it in the show notes.
00:20:04 ◼ ► This is kind of like an open source alternative index for the podcasting world that is independently run and you can do whatever you want with it and everything.
00:20:13 ◼ ► So, today I actually integrated it as part of Overcast's lookup system because it's about time I supported this.
00:20:22 ◼ ► So, now Overcast will submit back to Podcast Index any new iTunes ID and feed URL that I discover and I will check them if I encounter something in the iTunes API that is missing its feed URL. I'll see if they have it.
00:20:40 ◼ ► So, we're now integrated and I look forward to looking at more of the podcasting 2.0 spec stuff in the near future. But that's going to take more time than one day to do, unfortunately.
00:20:51 ◼ ► But I'm glad to be supporting Podcast Index and I'm very thankful that they are there as it seems like Apple is really teetering on losing their reputation as a safe directory to rely on.
00:21:07 ◼ ► If I were starting a new podcast app today, just based on what Apple just did today, based on this RSS opt-out thing, I would seriously question whether I could trust them to run this directory in a way that I could actually use as a third-party app.
00:21:22 ◼ ► When I built Overcast around it, whatever that was, six, seven years ago, it was a while ago now, things were different then. And Apple has been a really amazing, benevolent steward of the open podcasting ecosystem for the entire time it has existed.
00:21:43 ◼ ► They have a lot of power in this industry. If they make a slightly wrong step, they could really do a lot of damage. And today they made one of those steps and they are doing a lot of damage.
00:21:53 ◼ ► And I really, really hope they undo this. And again, we aren't even talking about the subscription stuff yet. I actually don't think that's that big of a thing for our purposes, but we'll get to that.
00:22:01 ◼ ► I'm only talking about the ability here to lock out your RSS feed from the API. That should not be there. That is incredibly damaging and I really hope that they reconsider.
00:22:11 ◼ ► I suspect that this is an oops or, you know, even if it isn't an oops, it's a "we didn't realize the ramifications of what we're doing" because Apple, for all of the good things that it's done for podcasting, which is quite a lot, I think, especially when it comes to podcasting, sometimes they don't really think all the way through with these sorts of things.
00:22:29 ◼ ► And I suspect that's what happened here. But who knows, hopefully, like you said, by the time people are listening to this or certainly by the time the next episode is recorded, it'll be a non-issue. We shall see.
00:22:41 ◼ ► We are sponsored this week by PodSites and their new Pod.link service for podcasters. One of the great things about podcasting is that you can listen to any show in apps like Overcast as easily as you can in Apple Podcasts.
00:22:54 ◼ ► It should be that easy to share a show with everyone regardless of what app they're using. But we've all seen people do things like just link to Apple Podcasts as if that's the last word in podcasting.
00:23:04 ◼ ► Pod.link from PodSites makes it easier to share links that work for everyone. Every show automatically has a shareable landing page with links to subscribe in all the major podcast apps.
00:23:17 ◼ ► Whether you're a fan who wants to spread the word about your favorite show or a podcaster looking to grow your audience, Pod.link is here to simplify that process.
00:23:27 ◼ ► Podcasters can sign up for free to claim a memorable URL, customize the page to match your brand, and add an automized analytics to help optimize your marketing.
00:23:36 ◼ ► To claim your own show, just search for it on Pod.link and click "Claim Podcast" in the footer of the page. For example, you can see ours at Pod.link/ATP.
00:23:46 ◼ ► If you're looking to grow your show, Pod.link works seamlessly with PodSites to measure how your podcast is growing. Learn more about Pod.link at podsites.com/ATP.
00:23:59 ◼ ► That's podsites.com/ATP and check out Pod.link today. Thank you so much to PodSites for sponsoring our show.
00:24:11 ◼ ► So hey, are we going to have people subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts instead of through ATP.fm/join? Hint hint hint.
00:24:20 ◼ ► I think the better question is who is going to do that? It's not going to be us for sure immediately, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad feature.
00:24:26 ◼ ► I think we just have to sort of describe what they're doing here, right? So we've talked about this on this show and it's been discussed on many other shows.
00:24:32 ◼ ► What is a podcast? Like if you have something, like what defines a podcast? Is it just audio that you listen to?
00:24:43 ◼ ► And the technical explanation that we've usually fallen back to is like it's an RSS feed available on the internet that has a bunch of items that have an enclosure that's an audio file.
00:24:52 ◼ ► And then that feed can be read by what we call a podcast player that reads RSS feeds filled with enclosures that contain audio files and plays them.
00:25:02 ◼ ► And so it's an open ecosystem because anybody can get a website and anyone can put an RSS feed up and anyone can record audio and put the file somewhere.
00:25:10 ◼ ► And this is a thing you can do yourself. It's completely decentralized just like the web.
00:25:14 ◼ ► Like, you know, there are services that can help you. You know, you can go to one of our sponsors and make yourself a website or you can make yourself a website from scratch on hosting or whatever.
00:25:26 ◼ ► But from a regular person's perspective, maybe they define podcasts as when I launch whatever my podcast app is, which I may think is the only podcast app in the world, and I search for something and I find a show and I play it and it's like audio, but it's not a song and it's not an audiobook.
00:25:43 ◼ ► And it seems like what Apple is rolling out with this premium podcasting service is relying on the sort of more casual, less technical explanation of what a podcast is, because the first and most important thing you need to know about these premium podcasts is you can only listen to them in the Apple podcast app, which is very different from any other thing that we on this podcast would define as a podcast.
00:26:11 ◼ ► Because the whole point, kind of like a web website is if you make a website, you figure anyone with a reasonable web browser can look at your website.
00:26:18 ◼ ► But if you make a website that literally is invisible, like not looks weird or is broken or doesn't work right or looks different, but cannot be viewed by any browser except for Chrome, people would say that's probably not a great website.
00:26:36 ◼ ► And if you try to go with any other browser, even if you fake the user agent, you literally can't do it for like basically DRM reasons.
00:26:57 ◼ ► But I think it would still be unacceptable because you'd be on your iPhone, for example, you wouldn't be able to view the website because every web browser on iOS uses WebKit and WebKit is not what Chrome uses anymore and Safari is not Chrome.
00:27:16 ◼ ► These podcasts that Apple makes, for reasons that make sense from a technical perspective, but nevertheless really change the definition of podcast, can only be listened to in the Apple podcast app or in any other part of the Apple ecosystem.
00:27:45 ◼ ► And right away, as you can imagine, podcasting nerds like our show, this is not appealing in any way.
00:28:02 ◼ ► I know, but it's not a thing that we look at and you could send anything you want in a user agent string.
00:28:18 ◼ ► In the same way that we don't really care what browser you use to browse adb.fm if you go to the website.
00:28:23 ◼ ► Again, we could tell by looking through the access logs, but you can also fake the user agent, blah, blah, blah.
00:28:43 ◼ ► So for an established show with established listeners, I think there is some barrier to entry to basically say,
00:28:52 ◼ ► let's say a big show like This American Life or something, which seems like this would fall great.
00:29:02 ◼ ► So what kind of show with an established audience can afford to essentially tell all of its customers,
00:29:10 ◼ ► hey, if you want to hear this great new premium content, pay some money, and by the way,
00:29:15 ◼ ► stop using whatever app you're using to listen to this unless you're already using Apple Podcasts.
00:29:29 ◼ ► But you have to tell 30 percent of your audience, oh, hey, if you want to continue to listen to the cool premium version of this show,
00:29:50 ◼ ► And you might as well switch to it entirely because it's going to kind of be a pain to go into the Apple Podcasts,
00:29:54 ◼ ► listen to these three shows, but then go back into your preferred podcast app to listen to those two shows.
00:29:59 ◼ ► That it's not that much of a speed bump because big services do this all the time and people will adapt.
00:30:05 ◼ ► But it's enough of an annoyance that I think it would make anyone with an established show and an established audience pause a bit and say,
00:30:12 ◼ ► do we want to annoy some percentage of our customer base and force them to use a different podcast app?
00:30:21 ◼ ► Are we big enough to basically say for this one show, because this American Life has so many big fans,
00:30:28 ◼ ► And they're basically going to switch to Apple Podcasts full time because who wants to use multiple podcast apps?
00:30:46 ◼ ► If you have no existing audience and don't care about any of the things I just listed because you don't care anything about the podcast ecosystem,
00:30:54 ◼ ► you just want to put up a show that you can collect money for easily, now I think it has some appeal.
00:31:05 ◼ ► I don't have any expectations of them ever making a lot of money, but I wanted some money and I didn't want to deal with anything.
00:31:14 ◼ ► We have a store, we have an update mechanism, we have a way for you to get paid from people.
00:31:22 ◼ ► If you don't care about the open podcast ecosystem, if you don't have an existing audience that you want to perturb,
00:31:30 ◼ ► and you just want the easiest way for people to pay for a thing that's not really a podcast but that we call a podcast,
00:31:37 ◼ ► But as Marco was alluding to earlier, I really sliced that pie pretty thin at this point, right?
00:31:50 ◼ ► and all it kind of leaves is the people who just want to get off the ground really quickly without worrying about much of anything.
00:31:59 ◼ ► And also, by the way, to slice that even farther, you better not have any larger ambitions,
00:32:03 ◼ ► because just like in the App Store, you're not going to know anything about your customers.
00:32:10 ◼ ► You have no idea who they are, you can't contact them, you can't give them refunds, you can't give them extra stuff,
00:32:15 ◼ ► you can't give them a discount code on merchandise, hint, hint, ATP members, that's coming up eventually, we swear.
00:32:34 ◼ ► which is allowing access to premium episodes or feeds ahead of time and all the other stuff.
00:32:39 ◼ ► So their podcast subscription offering does have some appeal, but I think it is very narrow right now.
00:32:48 ◼ ► I don't think you're really being fair though, because you get all of this for the low, low price of...
00:32:55 ◼ ► This was a thread that was going on, and do either one of you know, I didn't get a chance to look it up,
00:33:05 ◼ ► It's just like any other app subscription, so it's 30% for the first year and then 15% for ongoing years,
00:33:11 ◼ ► assuming you're not in the small developer program, which doesn't appear to exist for podcasts.
00:33:14 ◼ ► For individual subscriptions though, like Joe Schmo subscribes, Joe Schmo has to keep subscribing for an entire year
00:33:26 ◼ ► And that's a per customer, because a lot of people online were saying, and a lot of the articles were saying,
00:33:30 ◼ ► "Oh, it's just like if your podcast is part of the store, the clock starts as soon as it's part of the store for your whole podcast."
00:33:40 ◼ ► No, because it seems very clear that this is built entirely on the App Store infrastructure,
00:34:08 ◼ ► I think it's nice to offer small podcasters a way to monetize fairly easily with fairly low hassle.
00:34:19 ◼ ► As John was saying, very similar to when you want to put up a small app in the App Store, it's no big deal.
00:34:23 ◼ ► You go to the App Store, it saves you a lot of hassle from setting up your own payment system and everything.
00:34:33 ◼ ► They're big podcasts, and people are willing to pay for them because they're well known and they're big.
00:34:46 ◼ ► I mean, number one, even at 15%, most big podcasts can make their own platform or use someone else's for a lower percentage than that.
00:35:04 ◼ ► You could find an online service, sort of the podcast equivalent of Squarespace, and there are many things in fact Squarespace itself, that'll do all this for you.
00:35:11 ◼ ► But at least you'll own your customers and you'll be able to do more interesting things with them.
00:35:17 ◼ ► And so Apple's percentage is 30, and then dropping to 15 right now we think on an individual customer basis, which is just barely competitive.
00:35:25 ◼ ► But there are so many caveats that Apple imposes due to the iTunes/App Store heritage that are not imposed by other platforms.
00:35:35 ◼ ► On the other hand, tons of people already have a way to give money to Apple by putting their face in front of their phone, which is the upside.
00:35:45 ◼ ► It's the barrier to entry to paying is lower, and that's kind of what Apple is offering.
00:35:54 ◼ ► They would say, well, we have billions of customers and we already have their payment information and we make it super easy for them to pay for things.
00:36:00 ◼ ► If you want to take advantage of that well-greased slope into your wallet, fork over 15%.
00:36:13 ◼ ► I mean, I've talked to podcasters, big and small, over the years about monetization options and integrations.
00:36:20 ◼ ► Should I make some kind of thing where in Overcast you can pay podcasters for their stuff or whatever?
00:36:28 ◼ ► No podcaster, big or small, really wants middle people to get in the way between their customers and them, especially when money is involved.
00:36:38 ◼ ► But even when money is not involved, podcasting is this wonderful open ecosystem where creators have way more control over the relationship between them and their consumers, their listeners, than in almost any other online media today.
00:37:03 ◼ ► Podcasting is an amazing success story in having a direct relationship between you, the producer, and your listeners in almost every case.
00:37:15 ◼ ► There is no algorithm we have to fight through to make sure the people who actually sign up to listen to our podcast actually get every episode.
00:37:22 ◼ ► You don't have to worry about paying Facebook to actually show people who subscribe to our page the post we are making. There's nothing like that.
00:37:32 ◼ ► We don't have to pay rent to host our files in the one and only place that's allowed to host the files.
00:37:42 ◼ ► We don't require everyone who listens to our podcast to use any particular app to sign up with any particular account system.
00:37:49 ◼ ► It's very open, much like the web. I know the web is kind of blighted by the whole advertising thing and that's a whole separate matter.
00:38:00 ◼ ► And you can build that website from nothing into something big according to your own needs and desires.
00:38:06 ◼ ► And it's generally an open market of where am I going to host my website and how am I going to monetize it, who's going to be my payment processor, and where am I going to host my files.
00:38:14 ◼ ► Those are all choices where there is competition in a fairly open manner for you to make those decisions and podcasting is similar.
00:38:21 ◼ ► Exactly. All the big podcasters have their own stuff set up. They have their own publishing systems. They have their own hosting. They have their own ad platforms. They have their own membership platforms.
00:38:32 ◼ ► Their own crappy dynamic ad insertion platforms. Those are big companies built around providing those things.
00:38:37 ◼ ► Yes. There's this entire existing massive ecosystem of podcast publishers, big and small, talking and dealing directly with their listeners.
00:38:49 ◼ ► And so even if Apple was offering a very low commission, which they're not, and even if Apple was offering a little bit more data sharing about their customers, which they're not,
00:39:02 ◼ ► I don't think many big publishers would go for this just because it's not integrated with the system they already have and it just injects Apple as a middle person into their relationship.
00:39:14 ◼ ► And that causes problems. Apple does not have the market share anymore to make this be any significant podcast's only source of a paid program.
00:39:24 ◼ ► Like if you're going to launch a paid program, you're not going to go with only a system that has 60 or 70% of the market share.
00:39:32 ◼ ► Because that's a whole lot of people who don't have that market share. And oh, by the way, the people who use third party podcast apps are probably more engaged, higher end customers who are probably more likely to pay for a premium offering.
00:39:46 ◼ ► Just putting that out there. Anyway, so if you have a podcast and you're going to launch a paid premium thing, you're not going to want to put it just on Apple podcasts.
00:39:56 ◼ ► You're going to want to put it on Apple podcasts and also have your own system. Okay, well now we have a problem.
00:40:02 ◼ ► Now you have two systems for the same membership. So you have to have ways to resolve things, ways for people to transition between them, ways to figure out, okay, if you subscribe to one and then you want to subscribe to the other,
00:40:15 ◼ ► how do you, can you like refund that payment? Can you cancel it? Can you tie it in? Can you roll it over? And the answer to almost all those questions when dealing with Apple's payment system is no.
00:40:24 ◼ ► If ATP with our membership system, which we built ourselves on our site using web hosting and stripe, and we pay like 3%, it's amazing.
00:40:34 ◼ ► If we decided to also offer our membership on Apple podcasts, not only are we now paying 30% instead of 3%, but we're also now not having a way to authenticate those users to know who has bought memberships.
00:40:52 ◼ ► So people who buy through Apple, we can't look up to see like, is this somebody we already know about? And then do we need to like cancel their stripe payment now? Because now it's a duplicate.
00:41:02 ◼ ► We can't do that. If they write in and say, Hey, I got charged incorrectly for something or I messed up, we can't issue them a refund. We can't cancel their subscription even, because we can't even look up their subscription.
00:41:13 ◼ ► We have no way to validate if somebody if we wanted to offer something like a, you know, merchandise discount, which we do coming soon.
00:41:23 ◼ ► If we want to offer a merchandise discount, or if we wanted to run like our own private, you know, slack or discord channel only for members, you can't do that with Apple system, because Apple owns the customer relationship and gives you no info about the identity of your customers.
00:41:38 ◼ ► So you'd have no way to offer those same benefits to the people who subscribe in the Apple podcast app.
00:41:46 ◼ ► And so you have all these limitations and way higher fees, and support issues and practical issues of trying to run multiple platforms and or offer things that Apple can't quite do with their system.
00:42:00 ◼ ► And it's just a big pain in the butt. That's why most podcasters have just kind of rolled their own system or gone to an existing platform provider who could who could have, you know, vended that system to them with their name on it.
00:42:11 ◼ ► That's what we actually want. We want that control. Publishing is another area where like using Apple system is now another step to publishing, their system is not going to be integrated into our CMS.
00:42:21 ◼ ► So now right now before this system, if I want to publish an episode of our show, I have to upload two files, I upload the members file, and I upload the right the public file.
00:42:31 ◼ ► And I put them both in the CMS and the CMS does the work and maintains things and that's it.
00:42:36 ◼ ► Now if I want to add Apple system, I have to add a third step to this. Now I have to go upload the file to Apple system.
00:42:43 ◼ ► Oh, by the way, Apple system because it encodes your file for you and encodes it into their DRM format has to be a wave.
00:42:52 ◼ ► So I can't use the same MP3 I use for members. That also means I can't add chapter markers. I can't add chapter links. I can't add custom imagery because I have to upload a wave that supports none of those things.
00:43:02 ◼ ► It can be a flack too, but not an alack because Apple doesn't support Apple lossless codec.
00:43:09 ◼ ► There's probably some open source tool they're using that doesn't understand alack but understands flack and wave.
00:43:13 ◼ ► Yeah, which I mean honestly, what could they possibly have found? Like everything supports alack, you know, FFmpeg, anyway.
00:43:22 ◼ ► So yeah, the actual reality of adding Apple system to your premium offering has all those downsides and then also additional work every time you publish you have to then go give that episode to Apple and have them do their stuff with it and deal with their backend.
00:43:40 ◼ ► I don't know any podcasters anywhere ever of any size who say, you know what I want, you know what I need in my workflow? More steps to publish an episode.
00:43:52 ◼ ► I have a question from the peanut gallery here. My wife just asked via messages, aren't you just describing Stitcher or Spotify?
00:43:58 ◼ ► And I think it actually is a little bit similar. Spotify, I believe, does the same thing where you can upload files to Spotify and they'll host them and stuff for their quote unquote exclusive podcast, right?
00:44:12 ◼ ► But one of the other things Spotify does is they will also crawl RSS feeds and vend files that they themselves don't actually have.
00:44:19 ◼ ► And Stitcher, I think it's similar. Like a lot of these premium podcasts, like if you think about it, this is what I was getting at before with the technical explanation.
00:44:26 ◼ ► The reason a lot of these limitations exist is because of what podcasts are, an RSS feed that's publicly available on the internet that a client can point to and find files and download.
00:44:42 ◼ ► So if you want something to be premium that people pay for, you have to somehow identify who has paid for a thing and who has not paid for a thing.
00:44:50 ◼ ► And that's not part of quote unquote podcast. That's not part of RSS. That's not part of any of this. It's a thing you would have to layer on top.
00:44:58 ◼ ► You would have to have some way to say who you are and then you have to have some way to look up, "Okay, I know who you are. Have you paid for the thing you're trying to get?"
00:45:06 ◼ ► And if you have paid for it, give it to you. And if you haven't paid for it, deny it. You need that system.
00:45:11 ◼ ► Apple has that system. They use it for apps. They use it for media. It's called the iTunes store, the App Store, whatever you want to call it. Apple ID, right?
00:45:17 ◼ ► And it's not like they couldn't make third parties apps, it's not like they couldn't make something like Overcast be able to opt into this system and allow people to authenticate and yada yada. They just didn't.
00:45:29 ◼ ► So the only app that can connect to this system and say, "Hey, here I am. This is my Apple ID. I would like to get the premium version of This American Life."
00:45:39 ◼ ► And then it can say, "Okay, I see that you are who you say you are because I validated your Apple ID and now I'll go look up at my little directory of who paid for what."
00:45:47 ◼ ► Just like it does when you try to watch a movie or play a song or use an app. "Oh yeah, this Apple ID, you did pay for this. So here you go. Here's your thing."
00:45:55 ◼ ► All over an authenticated connection from the Apple Podcast app. No other third party app can do that because Apple didn't make any APIs for doing that.
00:46:03 ◼ ► So those things are just invisible to third party applications. That is one way to do this. Similarly for premium podcasts that you can only get on Spotify or whatever, there's no public RSS feed.
00:46:15 ◼ ► The whole point is you have to subscribe to Spotify. That's why it's an exclusive or whatever, Luminary or any of the other applications.
00:46:21 ◼ ► That's why, it's not the only reason, but it's one of the reasons why most of the premium podcast things that you subscribe to where there's some big company behind it make you use their app.
00:46:31 ◼ ► There are many reasons they make you use your app, a lot of having to do with analytics and so on and so forth.
00:46:34 ◼ ► But also there needs to be a way to authenticate and of course they build that into their app.
00:46:39 ◼ ► If Apple was trying to do this in the spirit of their whatever, 15 year stewardship of podcasts, they would make some sort of open system whereby if you signed in in this way, say for example you could use Sign In with Apple to sign into ATP.fm and then we would know that you subscribe to the show and then we could still give you a discount code for your merch.
00:46:59 ◼ ► Like sort of a more open identity based system. Or yes, it would still be paying with your Apple ID, but it would be possible for other third party apps and websites to ask the basic question.
00:47:11 ◼ ► Given who you are logged in as using your Apple ID, using Sign In with Apple or whatever, have you successfully paid for ATP?
00:47:19 ◼ ► And if the answer to that is yes, then we can show you a member page that has all your other benefits or whatever, or give you access to the Discord or all that stuff.
00:47:25 ◼ ► They haven't done that yet. This is 1.0, maybe they'll do that later, but right now they haven't done it.
00:47:30 ◼ ► So it is essentially a completely proprietary way to play audio files using Apple's app.
00:47:36 ◼ ► Yeah, and I think you made the point earlier Marco that this is a not insignificant burden on most podcasters' workflows. And not only do you have to upload not MP3s, which is making the experience worse for several reasons that you cited, like no chapters and no different art per chapter and so on and so forth.
00:47:57 ◼ ► But you have to do that upload via the web. So there's no real great way of automating any of this. You have to upload to Apple's website.
00:48:06 ◼ ► And as someone who has used iTunes Connect, or I guess I should say App Store Connect, more than once in my life, I can tell you that using their website to do these sorts of things is not fun.
00:48:14 ◼ ► And beyond that, I guess the reason they're insisting on it is for DRM, which is great, but I don't know, I don't feel like DRM is something that I really wanted out of this relationship.
00:48:25 ◼ ► You can get Taylor Swift songs with no DRM, but podcasts that's going to be listened to by a person has got to be DRM encumbered. There's some baffling decisions here.
00:48:33 ◼ ► I guess, hey, why not, I suppose. But honestly, podcast piracy is not at the top of anyone's list. So many weird decisions. It's there, they can do DRM, it's supported by iTunes, media files, I understand it. But it just seems like adding insult to injury.
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00:51:05 ◼ ► Moving right along, there's new iPhone 12 and 12 mini in a very good looking purple, which is cool, very unusual in my mind, but cool. And then we come to AirTags.
00:51:16 ◼ ► So AirTags are finally a thing. If there's ever a finally, it's this. AirTags are finally a thing. You can get one for 30 bucks. You can get four for 100 bucks.
00:51:27 ◼ ► And you can get the Hermes dangly dangly thing for what, like 450 bucks that you can put your $30 AirTag in?
00:51:36 ◼ ► Yeah, I think all the accessories that Apple offers on their website either cost as much as the AirTag or significantly more to the AirTag, all the way up to the ridiculous $460 luggage tag.
00:51:47 ◼ ► This product, it's been leaked for two years now, I think, and the product that they introduced is essentially exactly what everyone thought it would be. There's a little bit of good news that we didn't know about.
00:51:58 ◼ ► I think we'd throw in one, or at least I didn't know about because I'm keeping up with it. The first bit is it does have a replaceable battery. Apple still knows how to make those. It's pretty amazing.
00:52:06 ◼ ► Not only does it have a replaceable battery, but it is not an Apple proprietary battery that you have to pay $99 for or something. It's just one of those CR2032 coin batteries. You can find it in Walgreens.
00:52:18 ◼ ► They cost almost nothing. It's user serviceable and replaceable, and it lasts a year anyway, so you're only going to be buying these things once per year. So that's pretty good.
00:52:27 ◼ ► $29 for a tag is cheaper than I thought it would be. $99 for four is a pretty good deal. I think it's a little bit bigger than I thought it would be. I expected it to be a little bit thinner, but maybe the battery is kind of defining the size.
00:52:41 ◼ ► Speaking of that, we'll link in the show notes, there's a little video that, what was it, Gee Rambo, I think, extracted from iOS of how it works. You just sort of press and turn, like opening a pill bottle, and there's the little coin battery in there.
00:52:54 ◼ ► And the second bit of fun, interesting news is how much thought they've given to the privacy implications of having a little tiny disk that could be chucked in somewhere so that people can track you.
00:53:06 ◼ ► I think maybe this is something that, I don't know, there's two sides to this. Apple thinks more heavily about this than most people do, which is good, but on the other hand, if you're thinking of using your air tags as a way to track stolen merchandise, this kind of kills that use case.
00:53:25 ◼ ► It's more like, it'll help you find your lost stuff, but if someone wants to steal it, all the same features that make it harder for someone to track you sort of defeat that. So this is from their, we'll put a link in the show notes to a couple of documents Apple has explaining this in more detail, but this is from their press release, I think.
00:53:41 ◼ ► It says, "AirTag is designed with a set of proactive features that discourage unwanted tracking." And industry first, I don't know if it's a first, but whatever. And that phase, "discourage unwanted tracking," it's basically like all the cases that you might not think about unless you have a bad relationship with an abusive ex or something and didn't want someone to be able to slip a tiny $30 plastic disk into some piece of clothing or luggage and then track you wherever you are on the planet for the rest of your life.
00:54:09 ◼ ► So that's kind of the dark case that they're trying to prevent here. It says, "iOS devices can detect an AirTag that isn't with its owner and notify the user if an unknown AirTag is seen to be traveling with them from place to place." Right?
00:54:22 ◼ ► So if someone does slip an AirTag into your pocket and you don't notice, it will let you know and say, "Hey, just so you know, an AirTag that's not yours is somewhere near you and has been there for a while."
00:54:32 ◼ ► Also, "An AirTag that has been separated from its owner for an extended period of time will play a sound when moved to draw attention to it." So again, with a thief scenario, if you put an AirTag in something and it gets stolen and it's separated from you, it will start making a noise, sort of alerting the thief that it's there.
00:54:48 ◼ ► In the same way that you will be alerted if someone sticks an AirTag into your pocket. So that's the trade-off here. I think it's the correct trade-off because the theft case, you're probably not getting that stuff back anyway, right? Because you could just wrap the thing in tin foil and you won't get any signal anywhere.
00:55:02 ◼ ► But it's going to make itself known to the thief, but it's also going to make itself known to you if someone slips someone into your stuff. Right?
00:55:10 ◼ ► And so the tech note here is what to do if you find an AirTag or get an alert that an AirTag is with you. So if that happens to you and you're like, "Where the heck did this AirTag come from?" In the nefarious scenario, it tells you how to deactivate it, right?
00:55:21 ◼ ► Which you can do with an Android phone, you can do it with an Apple phone because it's got an NFC thing on it or whatever. And I suppose you could just open it up and take the battery out too. I don't know if that's listed in the tech note, right?
00:55:31 ◼ ► And on the flip side of that, if you just lost your AirTag and it fell out of your pocket on the train and someone finds it, they can apparently get enough information to be able to contact you and say, "Hey, I found your AirTag if you want to come get it."
00:55:45 ◼ ► So it's a thoroughly thought out $30 plastic thing with a battery in it. And so for what it's supposed to do, ridiculously expensive accessories aside, I think it's a pretty good product.
00:55:57 ◼ ► I'm really interested in this. The thing is, I don't know what I want to put one on. I kind of want to try it just to experience the AirTag life, but I don't typically lose my keys. I don't typically lose my wallet. I don't typically lose my laptop bag.
00:56:11 ◼ ► The last thing that I've lost for more than a few minutes was my stupid expensive flashlight that Marco insisted I buy, which is actually quite delightful. And Michaela had run off with it and put it in her closet, I think absentmindedly, and I'd lost it for like two weeks.
00:56:27 ◼ ► But I don't really intend to put an AirTag on my flashlight, so I don't really know what I would use this on. I guess my keys is the most obvious choice, but gosh, I cannot remember the last time I've lost my keys.
00:56:39 ◼ ► I have a choice for you that we'll get to later, Casey. But I'm mostly in the same situation as you in that I can't think of a particular use case for why I want these. But products like this have existed for a while, and for people who have tried those other products, now having an Apple one that is a little bit more thoughtful about privacy and comes with the sort of Apple polish and integration with its products kind of makes sense.
00:57:01 ◼ ► And speaking of that, so the other little bit of magic this has is that it uses the U1, right? So it's got the Bluetooth low energy and beacon and people walking by with iPhones, like all the stuff we talked about that they use for COVID tracking and all that, right?
00:57:12 ◼ ► But then when you get closer to it, to let you actually find it, because when you know, again, as we talked about last show, if it shows, "Oh, it looks like my keys are in my house. Great. Thanks." Like I kind of figured that.
00:57:24 ◼ ► It's good to know that they're not back at work. But now just saying, "In my house," as you run all over the house looking, how does that help you? But the U1, the ultra wideband thing that's been in phones for a couple of years now, what is this even used for?
00:57:35 ◼ ► You know, finally, it's time to shine. And then, you know, the demo in the keynote showing like it will give you a little arrow and tell you how far you are from it and will actually let you find exactly where it is, which couches it in, is it on, is it in someone's bedroom?
00:57:49 ◼ ► You will actually be able to find it. And I think part of the ongoing like congressional hearings about like Tile, a competitor company saying that I think like only Apple can use the U1 chip for this, but Tile can't.
00:58:02 ◼ ► I don't know what the competitive landscape here looks like. But Apple's product is very well integrated with all of its hardware and available software. And it seems like its competitors are not yet that well integrated.
00:58:13 ◼ ► And I'm not sure if they can be, depending on what APIs Apple has opened up for using the U1 chip.
00:58:22 ◼ ► I think I'm going to get some. I'm in the same boat as both of you. Like, I want them because they're cool. I don't usually lose things. But I do have a bit of an anti-theft case for them.
00:58:35 ◼ ► I'm going to see if there's a good way for me to attach them to our bikes that we use here at the beach.
00:58:44 ◼ ► But it's not really going to be good for anti-theft though, because when it's separated from you, I mean there's a timer on this too. There's a bunch of configurable stuff like how long do you want it to.
00:58:52 ◼ ► But like in the end, that tag is going to make itself known to the bike thief, assuming they don't already find it.
00:58:58 ◼ ► Right. And so the question is like, what kind of theft are you protecting against here? I think if you're protecting against like casual theft, it might be useful.
00:59:07 ◼ ► So like the main reason people steal bikes here is because they're drunk. They're trying to make the very last ferry of the night and they're late.
00:59:17 ◼ ► And so they grab whatever bike they can find, ride it to the ferry terminal, dump it somewhere near the ferry terminal and run to the boat.
00:59:25 ◼ ► The reality is that's, you know, that's like, that's not like a criminal mastermind at work here.
00:59:30 ◼ ► So also it's a very dense beach town. Like the houses are all close together. There's lots of people here in the summertime. So there's lots of iPhones going everywhere all the time.
00:59:41 ◼ ► This may be the ideal use case in terms of density of people with expensive iPhones and people who are, you know, casually stealing things.
00:59:49 ◼ ► Exactly. And, you know, if it's gone missing and I can find it within a few days before it starts alerting everybody when it moves or whatever, fine.
00:59:58 ◼ ► You know, that's so for like casual theft, I think, or drunk theft, it's probably fine.
01:00:05 ◼ ► And the obvious use case of like where are my keys in the house, right? But I think it sounds like all three of us don't have the where are my keys in the house problem.
01:00:16 ◼ ► And my main barrier to finding them is I can't see without my glasses to find my glasses. But you can't really put an air tag on the glasses.
01:00:22 ◼ ► So I guess I'll have to wait for the Apple AR VR helmet and then I'll put an air tag on that.
01:00:26 ◼ ► And that brings me to one other issue with this. You know, they have all these accessories they've made, as we talked briefly about, like all these key rings and everything.
01:00:34 ◼ ► Why didn't they, well I know why, because Apple, why didn't they design a key loop hole in the air tag itself?
01:00:42 ◼ ► No, holes are ugly. The main thing I'm disappointed in is they didn't use that cool micro suction stuff that you use for your nightstand.
01:00:51 ◼ ► No, but like, so everything that Apple showed in the use cases is you take this disk, you put it in a little holder, which I'm sure you can get right now on Amazon for $7.
01:01:01 ◼ ► So please don't buy the, you know, $50 ones from Apple. And then it just dangles, right?
01:01:06 ◼ ► But it's a little disk sticking it on like a spy putting a little tracker on, you're tracking your own keys.
01:01:11 ◼ ► I mean, obviously key ring can be dangled for a thing, but like sticking it on, that's like the main use case I can think of.
01:01:16 ◼ ► And this thing is a little bit thicker and it doesn't really want to hug a surface and Apple has no way to stick it to things.
01:01:22 ◼ ► You have to buy your own micro suction thing or double sided tape or whatever, which isn't a big barrier, but I think it was a slightly missed opportunity for Apple to do something cool in the realm of non-marking sticky stuff.
01:01:35 ◼ ► Yeah, but ultimately I think like by far, like a much more useful thing would have been if there was just a hole in it that you could loop a key ring or a string through.
01:01:44 ◼ ► Like, cause that's what most people are going to do with this is not keep it loose in a bag.
01:01:49 ◼ ► They're going to put it on a key chain or they're going to like, you know, loop it around something or tie it to something.
01:01:55 ◼ ► And so the total overall setup that you have that you end up with could be so much smaller and more elegant if Apple would have just put a hole in it that you can loop a key ring through.
01:02:08 ◼ ► Now you have to get some other like, you know, 50 cent silicone thing from Amazon that's going to loop around it, try to hold it on and then offer its own loop.
01:02:19 ◼ ► Well, you just got to learn the cheese maker's craft of being able to tie a string around a round object so that it completely encompasses it.
01:02:29 ◼ ► But yeah, a hole would be much easier, kind of like tile or whatever, if it wasn't circular because if it was square and it's got that circular coin battery, the corners are a perfect place to put a hole.
01:02:40 ◼ ► But I feel like most of the accessories that Apple is selling and that everyone is cloning on Amazon as we speak are a little bit more robust than a string.
01:02:53 ◼ ► And I feel like, you know, again, typical Apple fashion, I'm not surprised this is how they did it, but they designed this thing to be a beautiful object and all of their accessories that they're selling for it, I think a little bit optimistically, are all under the pretense that this is something you're going to be displaying.
01:03:20 ◼ ► Well, they have little fun emoji that you can put on it. It looks good as a keychain if you don't already have something on a keychain, I suppose. If you want a tech nerdy keychain, you put a little extremely low contrast emoji on it, right?
01:03:41 ◼ ► I love the low contrast though. It's like someone is like, "We want to put symbols on it, but can you make them hard to read?"
01:03:49 ◼ ► Because that's much more elegant. It's like, "Oh my God, I understand the aesthetic, but at what point do we decide that it's actually important for people to be able to see things on things?" Anyway.
01:04:03 ◼ ► Alright, so next we had the most important part of the presentation, and I will accept no arguments to the contrary. Apple TV time, guys. Oh, man, am I excited. And the best part of this portion of the presentation was definitely the Ted Lasso trailer. Kindness makes a comeback on July 23rd. Holy jamolis, I am excited.
01:04:27 ◼ ► Yeah, I like to think about the Ted Lasso phenomenon. How perfect is it that like, you know, remember all the rumors that Apple wanted, didn't want shows that were too dark and, you know, or, I don't know, like too serious or touched on issues that Apple didn't want?
01:04:42 ◼ ► Yeah, they, you know, kind of wanted like a squeaky thing and somehow, some way they managed to get a show that like that actually is the shtick and we all like believe in it and buy into it. And then they can say kindness makes a comeback and it's not a joke. It's not like we're all here rolling our eyes because it actually is a good show. Like what a miracle that is. Like, I don't think you can plan that because they made a lot of shows and not all of them are sort of so centrally focused on being counter to the cynical nature of media and Ted Lasso and Ted Lasso is their biggest hit.
01:05:11 ◼ ► And so, yeah, they want you to sign up for their service and they've got to hit show and they want you to know that they're making more of it. So there you go.
01:05:18 ◼ ► Yeah, I am super, super excited for the return of Ted Lasso. We actually, Aaron and I just rewatched it, I don't know, like a month or so ago, kind of on a lark and it is such a good show. Oh my goodness. If you have not seen Ted Lasso, I cannot say enough good things about it. It is so delightful and so good.
01:05:34 ◼ ► But yeah, I'm super excited for season two and I cannot wait to watch it. But I was talking, I don't remember if we spoke about this on the show, so I apologize if we have, but I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, I don't know.
01:05:48 ◼ ► And it occurred to me that up until this event, the newest available Apple TV that existed was older than my three year old daughter. So Michaela was born subsequent to the most recent Apple TV up until Tuesday.
01:06:11 ◼ ► And that, that's just not right guys. Like it had been over three years since they had updated the Apple TV and that just ain't right. And if you recall in late 2019 on Cyber Monday of 2019, we went to Costco and got ourselves an LG OLED, a 4K LG OLED TV.
01:06:29 ◼ ► And I said to myself late in 2019, I says, there's no way I'm buying a two year old or whatever it was, Apple TV right now. They must be making a new one soon. Right. Right. Right. So to this day, I still have my 1080, like the first generation that had the swipey remote and all that.
01:06:46 ◼ ► I have my 1080 Apple TV driving probably 90% of the usage of my 4K LG TV because I didn't want to upgrade. And now, ladies and gentlemen, I can upgrade and I am super excited. I will be mashing that button like I'm trying to get a new iPhone.
01:07:01 ◼ ► I am super pumped. And not only that, not only that, but it has a new remote and I'm one of the ones that actually, I don't actively hate the remote. I don't like it, but I don't hate it either. But this new one's looking real good. I am excited.
01:07:16 ◼ ► Well, I'm excited that they changed the remote because they needed to change the remote. And I'm excited, kind of like the increasingly reliably rumored changes to the MacBook Pro, that they basically went back to something they had before that was better, even though it took them years and years and years for them to figure it out.
01:07:33 ◼ ► If you compare the new remote to some of the older Apple remotes that predate the Siri remote, you say, hey, look, some of those elements look familiar. So the first thing they did was got rid of the diving board, which is the terrible touch area on the top of the existing Siri remote.
01:07:47 ◼ ► That is a deadly area that you can never touch or else it screws up what you're watching. They didn't give up on touch because they still think touch is a good idea for swipeyness.
01:07:56 ◼ ► But they stopped making a giant flexy diving board on the whole top of the remote. And instead, they've gone back to what they did on all previous Apple TV remotes, which is to have a circular thing up there that has a, I'm assuming, physical clicky directional thing where you can click up, down, left, and right with a big circular disc, which I still think is worse than a D-pad type thing.
01:08:19 ◼ ► But it's better than just an infinite scrolling surface hinged in one side because, you know, the various gestures that you can do on the Siri remote, like, oh, click on the right edge of the diving board.
01:08:29 ◼ ► That's not an easy maneuver to pull off in a way that is satisfying, apparently, to the Apple TV. Whereas clicking on the right edge of this disk thing, I think I can probably pull that off.
01:08:38 ◼ ► You basically have to tilt the disk to the right. It will probably click down and you'll know you're doing right. You're doing left. You're doing up. You're doing down in the middle.
01:08:45 ◼ ► It looks to me disconnected from the disk, although it's hard for me to tell without touching one of these, remains the touch area, which you can swipe up, down, and left, right on.
01:08:53 ◼ ► And also, the ring thing, you can run your finger along like a jog dial, like the iPods after the one that had the moving, I think only the original one had the moving click wheel, right?
01:09:05 ◼ ► The iPods after that had a wheel, but the wheel didn't turn. You just rubbed your finger along a circular track and it used that as you're scrolling.
01:09:11 ◼ ► So this has more options, but most importantly, the directional thing, now there is a way for humans, I assume, to much more reliably do up, down, left, right, and center.
01:09:22 ◼ ► And center is a big thing, right? Because so many shows on various apps on Apple TV have the skip credits feature, right?
01:09:30 ◼ ► If you're watching a bunch of shows and this credit starts rolling, you don't want to watch the credits again. The little thing comes up in the lower right corner that says skip.
01:09:36 ◼ ► What it's telling you to do is, if you essentially press the virtual center button on your remote, I will skip these credits for you and get to the beginning of the episode.
01:09:45 ◼ ► And with the Siri remote flat on my end table, sitting there mocking me, I'm not touching it with anything else, because remember, it is a dead lead zone that you don't want to touch.
01:09:59 ◼ ► The skip thing comes up. What I want to do is press dead center on that stupid diving board such that it activates the giant white skip button that's on my screen and my success rate is 50%.
01:10:11 ◼ ► I cannot pull off this maneuver. I'm like, "What do you want from me? I'm pressing dead center straight down perpendicular to the remote that I'm not touching in any other way."
01:10:20 ◼ ► And you're telling me that's not a skip? You think that was jump forward 30 seconds? You think that was pause?
01:10:25 ◼ ► Like, what do you--oh my god. Just merely--they've made pressing a button have a 50% success rate for me.
01:10:32 ◼ ► So this, I hope, has a better success rate in that if I press the center of that circle thing, I don't think it could mean anything else, especially if I don't move my finger too much.
01:10:41 ◼ ► Then press the skip button, right? Now let's compare, though, before we keep too much praise on this thing, to an actual remote.
01:10:48 ◼ ► Let's say the TiVo remote my house is lousy with. The TiVo remote has a giant prominent pause button in the center of it.
01:10:54 ◼ ► I've never missed that button! I can hit it in the dark. When I hit it, it never does anything else. It never fast-forwards, it never rewinds, it never--just what it does.
01:11:04 ◼ ► It's a button. It's so easy to tell when my finger is over it. It's so easy to hit it. It's so easy not to do anything else.
01:11:11 ◼ ► I find that infuriating. But anyway, I haven't used this remote, so I don't know how bad it's going to be. It looks like it's an improvement.
01:11:17 ◼ ► The other thing they improved is it's thicker. Does it acknowledge the existence of human hands? No, it does not. It doesn't care about your hands.
01:11:25 ◼ ► It doesn't care about your hands any more than the Apple TV puck itself does. It is just a beautiful platonic solid.
01:11:32 ◼ ► It looks nice, and it's thicker and longer, which is good, but it has no bearing to a shape that your hand would like to hold.
01:11:40 ◼ ► It is an art object, but it is an art object that is slightly better to hold because it is thicker and it is, I think, slightly longer.
01:11:48 ◼ ► I think I have the stats in the thing here. It's 3/4 of an inch longer, 1/4 of an inch narrower, but almost 3 times as thick as the Siri remote.
01:11:56 ◼ ► And everything else about it, the buttons are basically the same. They improved the glyphs on the button. It is no longer vertically symmetrical, so it should be much easier to tell which end is up.
01:12:04 ◼ ► They moved the little speaker talking to Siri to the side, which I think will be okay, but we'll see. And the power button is in the upper right corner.
01:12:12 ◼ ► So, is this remote better than the other one? Yes, unquestionably, it's better than the worst remote ever made.
01:12:17 ◼ ► But is it better? Is it like a good remote? No, no. It is an improvement, and I welcome the improvement.
01:12:27 ◼ ► And I'm going to buy one of these. This is another thing. You can buy these and use them with any of the existing Apple TVs back to the Apple TV HD.
01:12:34 ◼ ► So I'm going to buy one of these remotes for my old Apple TV, and yes, I'm going to get one of these new Apple TVs just because I always get whatever the new Apple TV is.
01:12:41 ◼ ► So I'm glad it's here. Kudos for Apple for fixing the remote. But did they make a good remote? No, they did not.
01:12:48 ◼ ► Like, even without touching this, I can tell it's not a good remote. It doesn't mean people are going to hate it. It doesn't mean it's going to be terrible.
01:12:53 ◼ ► I know some people like to see a remote, but a good remote is a remote that is better at being a remote, that has a higher success rate for the buttons for more people, right?
01:13:03 ◼ ► That fits in people's hands, that it's harder to slip down behind couch cushions, that people don't fumble with, that people don't do accidental inputs.
01:13:09 ◼ ► Any stat that you can measure on, like, is this a successful remote? All those stats, this one is going to be worse at than the TiVo remote or than, like, the most basic, stupid rubber button cable company remote.
01:13:22 ◼ ► Because as dorky as those things look and as covered as they are in Cheeto dust or whatever, people are able to pick them up and use them and be successful at pressing the buttons they want to press at a higher percentage of the time than they will be with this one.
01:13:34 ◼ ► Yeah, I was very happy when I saw this remote, like, shown on screen for the first time, because it's uglier. And I thought, wow, modern Apple, they're learning. They are okay making this thing noticeably uglier.
01:13:59 ◼ ► Look at it compared to, remember the previous Apple TV remote that was the aluminum thing? This looks very similar to that.
01:14:04 ◼ ► But they unquestionably made something uglier because the old pretty one didn't work very well and was hard to use in reality. And they made it, it appears that it's going to work and feel way better and actually be designed for humans a little bit more than the last one was.
01:14:22 ◼ ► And yeah, I agree with you, Jon, that it's probably nowhere near a good one like a TV remote, but I am looking forward to this. They added a couple of new things to it. They added the power button to control your TV, which you could do before through CEC if you held down the home button, but no one knew that.
01:14:39 ◼ ► They added the mute button, which you couldn't really easily do before. So this can be much more easily your only remote, which for us, that usually is what happens. The Apple TV remote usually is our primary remote.
01:14:55 ◼ ► Oh, that's right. Sorry. Yeah, okay. So there was a button there, but yeah, they moved it.
01:14:58 ◼ ► Yeah, and as you mentioned, they changed it lifts. There's no more menu button. Now it's the back arrow, which makes sense because that's what menu always did. Menu meant back in tvOS. Like it didn't mean show a menu. It meant back. So it's nice to have that reflected.
01:15:13 ◼ ► I think the way I'm looking at the touch surface, it looks like the entire circular thing, including the push down corners of it. It looks like the entire thing is a touch surface.
01:15:25 ◼ ► I'm really curious to see how this works in practice because, you know, as much as we all complained about the Siri remote, there are parts of navigating the TV interface where it actually is nice to have a swipey touch surface.
01:15:37 ◼ ► And so it was always this like this weird, you know, compromise of like, well, you could have this swipey touch surface to navigate and that was better in some ways.
01:15:45 ◼ ► Or you could use an older remote and use the D pad and that was worse in some ways, better in other ways.
01:15:50 ◼ ► This looks like it's trying to actually give you both. It's trying to give you precise up down left right so that you can enter stuff more easily and be more precise and less error prone.
01:16:01 ◼ ► Right. And precise center. Yeah, because that's like the OK or enter button, but also have the swiping for like navigating large areas or, you know, scrubbing and the scrub gesture around the outside and everything.
01:16:13 ◼ ► They added jog to that, which I think is an improvement because I think like because you have a limited amount of surface, like being able to use a touch for moving the scrubber is good, but you eventually run out of diving board.
01:16:25 ◼ ► Whereas with the jog dial, you never run out. And that's kind of a proven interface to touch sensitively scrolling through stuff.
01:16:30 ◼ ► Yeah. So I'm actually optimistic. You know, none of us have touched this thing yet. I'm very optimistic, though. I think this looks like as much of an improvement as we could possibly have expected Apple to make and still be Apple.
01:16:43 ◼ ► You know, it's never going to be shaped like your hand. It's never, never, ever, ever. It's never going to be big and bulbous. It's never going to be those things.
01:16:51 ◼ ► I'm surprised they finally touched it, you know, because keep in mind and I'm going to talk about the Apple TV as a product in a second, but keep in mind going into this, many people were saying Apple's probably going to discontinue the Apple TV as a product entirely.
01:17:05 ◼ ► And so to to show that they put in decent effort into fixing what was probably the second worst thing about it and the second worst thing that was holding it back. That's really good to see.
01:17:19 ◼ ► And this is the thing I was talking about before, where Casey is wondering what he's going to do with his AirTags. Well, you're going to put one on this damn remote if you lose it, because the Siri remote does not have a U1 chip and it does not work with Find My.
01:17:31 ◼ ► So if you do want to find it when it slips down underneath the couch cushions, which granted it will be slightly less likely to do because it is three times thicker than the piece of paper that was the Siri remote.
01:17:40 ◼ ► But it is still very small, especially compared to other remote. So if you lose it, stick an AirTag on the back of that with some of that micro suction sticky stuff and you'll be able to find it.
01:17:48 ◼ ► Yeah. Or just, you know, get one of those like, you know, seven dollar silicone jackets for it on eBay or on Amazon.
01:17:55 ◼ ► You can just you just connect it to a cinder block like a gas station bathroom key, like whatever.
01:18:04 ◼ ► Real time follow up. If you look at the image link I put in the show notes and in the chat room, it's a it's from the tech specs page and it's a zoomed in view of the Siri remote. And it looks to me like the the four up down left right buttons are quite a bit larger than I would have expected.
01:18:21 ◼ ► And that that like circle for the touch area is quite a bit smaller than what I would have expected.
01:18:26 ◼ ► And there's a cut line on it, too. So it could actually be separate. Like that's what I'm hoping for.
01:18:29 ◼ ► I'm hoping I'm hoping both of those things actually move like that. The circle tilts and you can hear it click and I'm hoping the center thing actually presses in like that.
01:18:46 ◼ ► So now that brings me to the and it's great that you can get this for the old app TV. That's great.
01:18:54 ◼ ► Like so people are disappointed that it doesn't have the U1 and stuff, but honestly, I'd rather just have this thing be cheaper.
01:18:59 ◼ ► Like this is basically the apology remote. Right. Yes. For it to be the apology remote. Right.
01:19:04 ◼ ► We screwed up the remote for years. We learned some lessons. We've gone back, but we still haven't actually learned how to make a good remote.
01:19:10 ◼ ► It's kind of like the apology mouse in that they didn't really learn how to make a great mouse, but they did make one that at least you could tell which way it was up.
01:19:16 ◼ ► So this is similar. Like the most egregious sins of the past are fixed, but, you know, they didn't really they didn't really go all the way up.
01:19:23 ◼ ► They didn't really go all the way to becoming good at making my so remotes. And to that end, like what you said, Mark, of like Apple's never going to make that thing.
01:19:36 ◼ ► It is actually in the spirit of Apple to understand ergonomics like Apple made a split keyboard once way before it was fashionable to make split keyboards.
01:19:44 ◼ ► Someone somewhere inside Apple had said, you know, ergonomically speaking, split keyboards have some benefits.
01:19:49 ◼ ► Let's try making one. They didn't make a good split keyboard, but they didn't make a split keyboard. Like there is no reason that Apple that the Apple ethos of user friendliness shouldn't lead them to essentially become the oxo good grips of computer peripherals. Right.
01:20:02 ◼ ► It's just it's just that the current like multi decade rise to fame has been accompanied by this extremely minimalist, beautiful object design that is intentionally divorced from the messy humans that use their devices in several important ways. Right.
01:20:20 ◼ ► So I'm not saying it's going to happen this year or the next, but I'm saying Apple hire some people from Oxo. It's OK to make products that people hold and use in their hands that acknowledge the human that is going to be doing the holding and the using.
01:20:35 ◼ ► It's OK to do that. And the same way they do things with accessibility with what's on the screen. Everything doesn't have to be a rectangular solid. I swear nothing bad will happen if you make a remote that is big and comfortable to hold.
01:20:46 ◼ ► So let's talk pricing. So I think the remote was, I think the second biggest thing holding back the Apple TV. I think pricing has been the biggest.
01:20:58 ◼ ► You know, as as the market has moved on and commoditized these little TV boxes, the Apple TV has remained surprisingly expensive compared to the competition. And it seems like Apple has no interest in making it more mass market because to make it more mass market, they have to cut the price by a substantial margin.
01:21:20 ◼ ► And they seem like not only are they unwilling to do that, but they're probably unable to do that. And where we were before this, it's it's kind of funny how little they changed about it.
01:21:33 ◼ ► Like, I think if you would have asked if you would have said a few months back, hey, Apple's going to update the Apple TV in the spring. What do you expect?
01:21:41 ◼ ► I think we would have all hoped for a new remote, but I think what we would have expected was a price cut because that's what that's holding them back so much in this category.
01:21:50 ◼ ► And we didn't get that. In fact, I love I love this so much. All right. So the new one is the same price as the outgoing Apple TV 4K.
01:21:59 ◼ ► One seventy nine for the thirty two gig one. And for some reason they offer a sixty four gig one. Again, almost nobody needs this, but it's twenty dollars more again.
01:22:12 ◼ ► If if that's what you need for some reason and they don't tell you why you can't you almost can't afford not to get the bigger one.
01:22:21 ◼ ► Can't even buy an AirTag for twenty bucks. Yeah. So that's that's amazing. And then the best thing that I love so much about this is that they are still selling the non 4K Apple TV HD, which came out in twenty fifteen and uses the eight CPU still, which came out in twenty fourteen at the processor from the iPhone six.
01:22:43 ◼ ► They are still selling that at one hundred and fifty dollars. Now they did kindly update it to include the new remote from all orders placed from yesterday forward.
01:22:53 ◼ ► So that's nice. Which remember is cheaper than the old remote. Yes, right. Oh, yeah. I guess they didn't pass along the savings to us.
01:22:58 ◼ ► So they are they are still selling the twenty fifteen Apple TV non 4K version for a hundred and fifty dollars with its eight processor from the iPhone six in twenty twenty one.
01:23:16 ◼ ► Part of the pricing thing with these with these devices is that like in the end these Apple TVs are extremely powerful for TV connected boxes, but that power is just sitting there mostly doing nothing except for maybe in the case of like high frame rate HDR or something.
01:23:31 ◼ ► It's there so you can play games essentially. Right. And if you never play games in this thing, it's the most expensive way to get streaming.
01:23:38 ◼ ► You can buy like you can buy an AirTag size thing from Google, like a little Chromecast things that will get the job done and stream your Netflix just fine. But it's not going to be able to play the games that even the stupid hundred fifty dollar thing, you know, with the aid it can do.
01:23:51 ◼ ► And like the reason the price doesn't go down these things is they keep putting better and better chips in it.
01:23:56 ◼ ► The eight twelve is a pretty good like if you think of this as a hundred and fifty or hundred eighty dollar gaming console with no controller, it starts to make a little bit more sense.
01:24:05 ◼ ► Then you realize maybe there's not a lot of games you want to play or whatever, like that's that's the problem of this product.
01:24:09 ◼ ► Like if you think of it as a TV streaming device, it's nonsensical. Why does it cost so much money?
01:24:13 ◼ ► The only people buy it are suckers like us who want fancy Apple stuff and enjoy some part of the experience of using the Apple TV.
01:24:19 ◼ ► And in that respect, I'm kind of glad and I'm more than willing me personally to continue paying, quote unquote, way too much money to stream Netflix on a thing that I like the interface of.
01:24:31 ◼ ► OK, you know what I mean? But it's always going to hold this product back from being particularly mass market.
01:24:36 ◼ ► And actually, I think with Apple's new attitude towards its television offerings, that's much more reasonable than it used to be, because Apple TV now, as we all know, is everywhere.
01:24:46 ◼ ► The Apple is totally off of the idea that the only thing the only way you can watch, you know, movies that you buy on iTunes or whatever, like they're not locking them to their box anymore.
01:24:55 ◼ ► So now that you can get Apple TV plus everywhere, like shipping on your TV, so much weight is taken off the shoulders of this stupid little puck.
01:25:02 ◼ ► And it can just be a premium product for suckers like us without damaging their other ambitions.
01:25:11 ◼ ► And now finally, this thing is free to be what it wants to be, which is a really expensive rounded rectangle for people who host this podcast.
01:25:19 ◼ ► That's a good point. I hadn't thought about that, but I guess it does because, like, you know, I was just looking at it as like they have they had this really bizarre and seemingly totally ineffective strategy for this product.
01:25:33 ◼ ► Because now it continues. I mean, obviously, you want to sell more of them. You should probably make a more broadly appealing product.
01:25:38 ◼ ► But if you're OK with selling the amount you're selling to the people you're selling to do like we're all still going to buy them right then.
01:25:43 ◼ ► Now you've you've divorced that from your other efforts. And so now it's it is less stupid.
01:25:49 ◼ ► And it's more like, OK, well, I guess this is what they want to sell. They want to sell a premium streaming box.
01:25:57 ◼ ► I just I can't imagine like if you look at this lineup, you have one for one hundred and fifty dollars that is positively ancient and nobody should buy it.
01:26:07 ◼ ► Because if you're going to spend one hundred fifty dollars, you might as well spend one hundred and eighty dollars and get the one that's way, way better.
01:26:18 ◼ ► If you want that one hundred and fifty dollar one, just find a sucker who's going to buy this new one, because they probably have Apple TV is falling out of their house.
01:26:25 ◼ ► And they'll just give you like every time we get a new Apple TV, it just bumps out one of the older ones in the house.
01:26:30 ◼ ► So, sure, we just give it away like candy, like just find find an Apple TV sucker. They probably have that hundred fifty bucks dollar one ready to just give to you for free.
01:26:40 ◼ ► Honestly, I'm actually not entirely sure I'm going to upgrade to this. I mean, maybe I'll get one for like the main TV, but I don't see how I would how I would or why I would do the other ones if I could just get the remotes for sixty bucks and use them with the with the previous one.
01:26:54 ◼ ► Because when you look at this as an upgrade for the previous Apple TV 4K, I don't know if it makes a lot of sense for almost anybody to upgrade to it.
01:27:04 ◼ ► Well, I think here's the here's the pitch for people who buy expensive round of rectangles HDR high frame rate.
01:27:14 ◼ ► And now you have now you have a place to watch them in full fidelity on your television. So now I just sold it to you.
01:27:40 ◼ ► They already did Adobe Vision. They have HDR like the last barrier was OK, but what about Adobe Vision, but also in high frame rate?
01:27:45 ◼ ► It's like, well, where am I going to content like that from these expensive phones that we sell that can do that at the highest of the high end.
01:27:51 ◼ ► Like it's future proofing, really. Like so if you get this box three phones from now, they'll all do, you know, 60 frames per second HDR or whatever.
01:28:09 ◼ ► And they've slowly knocked those down. Variable frame rate, HDR, like Dolby Vision, the support for the different audio formats.
01:28:17 ◼ ► Like that's what I would want out of a too expensive box is you better do all those things.
01:28:25 ◼ ► Yes. For like the new home kit stuff that isn't actually out yet, but I probably will become important someday.
01:28:31 ◼ ► Can you explain to me what this thread radio thing is? Because I totally missed that whole.
01:28:37 ◼ ► I had to look it up. I first looked it up when I saw that Euro, my Euro thing supported or something, I think.
01:28:47 ◼ ► And when I saw it on this, I'm like, oh, I know about thread radio. We'll link to the Wikipedia page.
01:28:59 ◼ ► Which is a mouthful, but my guess, based on that one sentence subscription, having not read the rest of the Wikipedia pages,
01:29:08 ◼ ► And so maybe you can give everything addresses in your house and they can all talk to each other over this little mesh network with low-power radio things.
01:29:14 ◼ ► But anyway, it's kind of like the temperature and humidity sensor hiding in the HomePod mini.
01:29:20 ◼ ► Every product that goes into your home these days, there seems to be some hardware that is waiting for some other shoe to drop.
01:29:27 ◼ ► And in the case of the new Apple TV, hey, you get a thread radio. Will that be useful to you?
01:29:40 ◼ ► And speaking of what it does now, this is not exclusive to the new Apple TV, but it's a thing they added through software.
01:29:45 ◼ ► They have what looks like an extremely rudimentary calibration feature where you hold your iPhone up to the screen,
01:29:51 ◼ ► because of course you also have an iPhone, you hold your iPhone up to the screen and it runs through a bunch of colored squares
01:30:02 ◼ ► This is maybe better than nothing, but it's not great because the, I mean, I don't know.
01:30:13 ◼ ► What they showed in the video is hard to tell. It looked like it was just looking at the output of red, green and blue and so on and so forth.
01:30:23 ◼ ► You need, in particular, to see brightness levels, white levels on different screen sizes,
01:30:28 ◼ ► because if you have an OLED television, the brightness is different when you have a small region that is lit up versus the whole screen that's lit up.
01:30:34 ◼ ► And you want to see the correct number of gradations between 100% white and some percentage of gray.
01:30:40 ◼ ► Just looking at, okay, what is the red and the green and the blue output, your television is probably pretty close to that anyway.
01:30:46 ◼ ► It's better than nothing and I will definitely try it, but a full-fledged calibration app, of which there seem to be few these days,
01:30:54 ◼ ► will certainly do a better job. And I do worry that if it messes up in some way or it's used incorrectly,
01:31:06 ◼ ► A lot of the higher end TVs, when you buy them, they're pretty well adjusted out of the box these days,
01:31:10 ◼ ► which wasn't always true before, especially if you put on like Filmmaker mode or one of the other more accurate picture presets that come with these televisions.
01:31:22 ◼ ► But if you have an older television or your television looks weird, it's good to have this feature built in.
01:31:27 ◼ ► And it is not exclusive to the new Apple TV. It's apparently something you can use on the other Apple TVs as long as you have an iPhone.
01:31:32 ◼ ► So I give a thumbs up to this feature. I just wish they were more sort of available consumer level detailed calibration apps
01:31:41 ◼ ► for people who actually do want to try to get their TV closer than it comes out of the box.
01:31:45 ◼ ► But again, out of the box TV, especially higher end TVs, are surprisingly good these days.
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01:33:41 ◼ ► I'm not super into the way it looks from the front, but the way it looks from the side and back is amazing.
01:33:49 ◼ ► It looks like they're doing a very, very similar color lineup as the iPhone 12, which looks fantastic.
01:34:02 ◼ ► and then the big glass part that's now used for the chin that is still there, which we'll get to.
01:34:08 ◼ ► That's kind of more of a pastel-y kind of thing, and I don't think the chin looks very good, if I'm honest.
01:34:15 ◼ ► But the colors on the sides and back, which seem to be the all aluminum surfaces, look fantastic.
01:34:42 ◼ ► They even said this in the show, that they didn't quite want to put those big, bold colors in your face.
01:34:52 ◼ ► People like boldly colored things, but maybe you don't want that strong of a color actually in your face.
01:35:07 ◼ ► Still not exactly the same. It has a more subdued vibe than the candy colored iMac, just because it's not glossy.
01:35:25 ◼ ► It is very prominent. Maybe making up for the fact that they took it away from the chin.
01:35:29 ◼ ► It's sort of the Neo in the Matrix where they take away his mouth. Like the front of these things.
01:35:38 ◼ ► But yeah, this is great. And the colors are, in case anyone has not picked up on this from all the Apple advertising, it's the colors of the Apple logo.
01:35:46 ◼ ► Very close to the colors of the Apple logo on the back, because they're actually saturated just like the Apple logo is.
01:36:00 ◼ ► The blank chin, we're just so used to seeing the Apple logo there, but honestly, I think it was always a little bit tacky to have an Apple logo on the front facing you at all times.
01:36:20 ◼ ► And also, I want to give the Apple event invitation salutes credit for the folks who figured out that the swirly little springy thing on the invitation was the E and the L from hello.
01:36:32 ◼ ► Which actually was a hint that hello, which is the original thing they used in the original Mac, and they used it on the iMac because it was hello again.
01:36:43 ◼ ► And the background images that they show on all of the iMacs that look like the swoopy lines that people thought they looked like the old Mac OS X background images are in fact zoomed in portions of the word hello being traced out in script.
01:36:56 ◼ ► So those dots all connected. If you had that on your red yarn board, give yourself a gold star.
01:37:05 ◼ ► One more thing before we leave the superficial elements of this. I'm actually very glad that they switched the bezel from black to white, the little border around the screen.
01:37:17 ◼ ► I mean, first of all, I think if you look at these colors, they're they're they're bright and pastel colors. And the front is especially very pastel.
01:37:24 ◼ ► So I think it would have looked ridiculous to have a black border and then to have that big pastel chin under it.
01:37:39 ◼ ► And I'm sure people write it and tell me maybe it's about like, you know, the white not matching the white on the screen as easily as black can be absorbed. Who knows?
01:37:47 ◼ ► But, you know, I'm sure there are reasons why picky nerds like like many of us, many of me might have a problem with it.
01:37:58 ◼ ► Again, we'll see how it looks in person. But, you know, we've had white bezeled computers before and I've used some of them and I always thought they were fine.
01:38:07 ◼ ► And I don't think for you know, for people who are really upset about about that, I think they this might not be the computer for them anyway,
01:38:16 ◼ ► because the computer for them might be the one that a lot of people seem to think isn't going to happen.
01:38:21 ◼ ► Like everyone who keeps saying that they shrunk the iMac down to 24 inches is missing a really big part of this product strategy.
01:38:38 ◼ ► One semi-legit reason that people will be upset is what you got at before, which is the screen,
01:38:45 ◼ ► the white of the screen is never going to be able to compete with an actual white reflective surface in a situation where you have a large amount of light hitting it.
01:38:52 ◼ ► Right. So if you like, you know, it's kind of like if you want your, you know, projected image to look good dark in the room,
01:38:59 ◼ ► because then the projected image will appear brighter and won't be competing with anything.
01:39:03 ◼ ► But if you're in a well-lit room or sun is shining on your iMac or something like that,
01:39:08 ◼ ► the white of the screen will look dim and dingy compared to the white of the piece of plastic that the actual light is reflecting off of to your eyes.
01:39:21 ◼ ► So it's better than then continuing the pastel around the screen, perhaps, because that could throw off the color balance of these things.
01:39:27 ◼ ► But honestly, this is not a professional thing where people are supposed to be doing professional color work, probably.
01:39:35 ◼ ► But that I feel like is the sort of performance-based gripe about the white bezel is that it might make your screen look a little bit worse.
01:40:03 ◼ ► I think white fits with the design they made because they made it softer on the front, bolder on the back.
01:40:09 ◼ ► You know, if you look at it next to the keyboard and the mouse, the mouse and keyboard, which also are color matched, by the way, they have white keycaps.
01:40:20 ◼ ► And like I said, the lack of the Apple logo, I feel like it's kind of refreshing and serene.
01:40:25 ◼ ► After so many years of having the dead center Apple logo staring at me, I just kind of wish the one in the back was a little smaller.
01:40:29 ◼ ► Also, for those of you out there who are ordering or plan to order one of these things, please don't get the silver one. It's so boring.
01:40:36 ◼ ► Don't tell people not to get the silver. I like the silver one. Sometimes you want the silver one.
01:40:48 ◼ ► So if you want the ultimate and serene sort of just, you know, I don't want any loud colors in my face.
01:40:56 ◼ ► The only thing I wish they did different on the silver one is that that should be the only one that doesn't have a white bezel but that has silver all around.
01:41:04 ◼ ► Because if you don't like any of these colors and you can't stand it or you have a room where you have this minimal aesthetic and everything is monochrome, you know, with no color and it's just like grays, get the silver one.
01:41:14 ◼ ► Like there's something for... That's the great thing about this lineup. There is something for everyone.
01:41:17 ◼ ► All of the colors look good. The silver one is the computer for people who hate computers.
01:41:23 ◼ ► It is beautiful and minimalist, right? And so I think we should get to the physical design of this thing because like it's clear that this is... I don't know if this is the hangover from the Johnny Ive era but like clearly this is in that vein because the design spec for this thing was what if we made it as thin as possible?
01:41:41 ◼ ► Like whatever was an iPad on a stand, right? A non-adjustable stand, which is a shame. But anyway, that was the sort of design brief.
01:41:49 ◼ ► And everything else flows from that. So many things flow from that, good and bad, that again with many of these design philosophies you have to say, "Was this the right target?"
01:42:01 ◼ ► Because yes, it's cool, it's thin, but in the end, as we've said with all these IMAX, right, do people care that much about it being exactly this thin?
01:42:14 ◼ ► Whether or not they do, that's what they got. So what flows out of this thinness? The first thing that flows out of it is there's a bunch of stuff that you cannot put on the computer anymore.
01:42:22 ◼ ► You cannot put an Ethernet jack on the computer because it's too deep. You can't put a headphone jack on the back of the computer because it's too deep.
01:42:30 ◼ ► You can't put a plug on the back of the computer because it's too deep. I mean like a power plug, right? So many things you can't do because they don't fit within the width of this thing.
01:42:40 ◼ ► This thing is as thick as the original iPhone, okay? That's how thick this computer is. And it is that thickness from top to bottom.
01:42:47 ◼ ► So, so many things cascade out of this decision to make it thin. Things that impact the use of the computer. Now luckily, and to Apple's credit, they found clever solutions for almost all of these.
01:42:58 ◼ ► And in fact, the headphone limitation, the fact that you can't plug a headphone into the back of this because it would poke through the screen, that actually forced them to not put the headphone jack on the back of the computer, which was a terrible place for it.
01:43:09 ◼ ► Now it's on the side, which is better. It's better on the side because then you can find it without craning all the way around behind the computer.
01:43:23 ◼ ► Because that's, because this, all their laptops still get this wrong. I'm hoping maybe this is a sign that maybe they will relocate it to the left on their upcoming laptop redesigns.
01:43:31 ◼ ► Because that's where you want headphone jacks because most headphones that only have a cable going in one side have it on the left side and when it's on the left, it's not getting in the way of the mouse.
01:43:45 ◼ ► You're the only person who's using headphones that have a wire coming out of one of the ear cups because everyone else is using earbuds that come with Apple products.
01:43:52 ◼ ► This is a, this is a moot issue. But I see where you're coming from. But yes, they did put it on the left and that is good.
01:43:57 ◼ ► So this influenced all of the I/O. You can't fit USB-A connectors on this because they would poke through the screen.
01:44:07 ◼ ► And then the rest of, so that's the design aspect. They didn't do an adjustable stand which, you know, given the price of this thing, okay, I kind of understand but it's still kind of a shame.
01:44:17 ◼ ► But the rest of this, like from a technical perspective, like I continued, this is like the longest like tension build up in recent memory ever since, you know, not as big as the Mac Pro obviously.
01:44:28 ◼ ► But since the Mac Pro has, you know, come to fruition here, the new biggest tension build up is, you know, the one that they're going to get to the fireworks factory of Apple tech as far as this podcast concern is.
01:44:39 ◼ ► What are they going to do about products that are more powerful than the current crop of M1 Macs?
01:44:44 ◼ ► And the answer in this keynote was stay tuned to find out because you're not going to find out today because what is this?
01:44:53 ◼ ► They found another, like this ingredient, this M1 sort of system on a chip and associated I/O.
01:44:58 ◼ ► They've put in, you know, a laptop, a slightly bigger laptop, a Mac Mini and now an iMac.
01:45:04 ◼ ► And it's the same computer in many, many different cases, which is fine because it's an excellent computer.
01:45:09 ◼ ► And this computer is clearly the low end iMac targeted for people who don't need all of the fancier things.
01:45:15 ◼ ► But it just means that we have to continue to wait to find out what they're going to do.
01:45:33 ◼ ► In fact, when they showed the family slide later, they said, and here's our Mac lineup.
01:45:37 ◼ ► And to the left were all the ones that converted to ARM and to the right were the ones that hadn't.
01:45:48 ◼ ► That's not this computer, which is fine for this computer and in fact, great for a lot of people.
01:45:54 ◼ ► Because now if you want a desktop computer with a really nice screen, you can get one cheap.
01:46:05 ◼ ► And you know, the, the 27 inch iMac and like, Oh, I need a 5k screen and all that stuff.
01:46:27 ◼ ► The fact that it's not 27 inch, the fact that the bezels are smaller, the fact that it is so thin and small and slight.
01:46:33 ◼ ► Is lowers the barrier to entry to people who don't want a giant piece of technology dominating their house.
01:46:39 ◼ ► Which is why it's so smart that this looks like a fashion item and looks so minimal and it's so light.
01:46:44 ◼ ► Like weight wise, it is again, an iPad, a literal, we'll get to that in a little bit, a literal iPad with an M1 chip jammed onto a stand running Mac OS.
01:46:56 ◼ ► So if you're disappointed that you can't get this with more than 16 gigs of RAM or it doesn't have enough IO ports or whatever.
01:47:16 ◼ ► Again, a plug, like a three prong, like you know, computery plug cannot fit in this because it's too damn thin.
01:47:26 ◼ ► They solved that problem by putting ethernet on the power brick, which is something apparently the Chromecast Ultra has done or whatever.
01:47:31 ◼ ► Which is smart because like the headphone jack, I don't need to have an ethernet cable snaking up to my computer.
01:47:38 ◼ ► So if you plug it into the power brick, yes, it's annoying that it has a power brick, but it's a smallish power brick.
01:47:58 ◼ ► So this is a weird computer and I'm kind of disappointed that the stand isn't adjustable because again the iMac G4 had an adjustable stand.
01:48:12 ◼ ► Because the design brief of this thing, oh no, it has to be uniform thickness from top to bottom.
01:48:23 ◼ ► they found themselves doing something that was either neutral and cool or actually better.
01:48:44 ◼ ► So first of all, hardware wise, this is basically what I'm using now with the prettier screen.
01:48:49 ◼ ► I'm using the Mac Mini, the M1 Mac Mini. It's the same guts, although mine has more IO.
01:49:05 ◼ ► Yeah, it has the same limitations, 16 gigs of RAM, 2 terabytes storage, only a couple of ports.
01:49:11 ◼ ► Same limitations, but I know there's more ports in the higher end configuration, but still.
01:49:16 ◼ ► It is still the low end of the Apple Silicon lineup, but that is still a really great computer.
01:49:22 ◼ ► And it is still very much a high end computer compared to what we had before for many people's needs, including mine.
01:49:37 ◼ ► And when you look at who buys a 21 inch iMac, it's a lot of low end, inexpensive bulk buys for things like schools and offices.
01:49:56 ◼ ► And you need the person there to have a computer, but because it's the front desk of your business, you also want it to look nice.
01:50:13 ◼ ► And the lack of a lot of the higher end power user stuff really doesn't matter for that market.
01:50:23 ◼ ► In that way this computer nails it. This is fantastic because it has all of that M1-ness to it.
01:50:30 ◼ ► Like all that great M1-ness which is spreading even more through the product line, which we'll get to in a minute.
01:50:35 ◼ ► But it has it in still a pretty inexpensive and really nice all in one enclosure that will both meet people's budgets who are buying these things in bulk for computer labs and stuff.
01:50:52 ◼ ► And there's so many people who buy this computer that this is such a massive, massive upgrade over the previous 21 inch iMac.
01:51:00 ◼ ► So this is great. This is not the new 27 inch. This is not the new iMac Pro. We'll see those later.
01:51:07 ◼ ► I do think, I am a little bit pessimistic now about the timing of the higher end products.
01:51:31 ◼ ► And maybe all of the higher end stuff like the 16 inch and everything and the new iMac Pro is probably what they're going to call it.
01:51:46 ◼ ► So if they don't have it ready now, I think it might be a little optimistic to expect that they're going to get all those products together two months from now.
01:52:00 ◼ ► And in fact the show before when we were talking about things that they could launch where I was pessimistic there would be any Macs.
01:52:05 ◼ ► I said look, I can conceive of an iMac that can fit with the existing M1 and that's what they introduced.
01:52:10 ◼ ► There is a role for the M1 in this shaped computer just like there is for a laptop and there is in the mini.
01:52:15 ◼ ► But eventually you get into shapes where the M1 doesn't make sense anymore and you need something beefier.
01:52:20 ◼ ► The other disappointment I had with this redesign, like if they're going to do the big redesign, which they totally did, here it is.
01:52:26 ◼ ► A design that would not be possible as they emphasized with Intel things. Like this is the time to do it. Go big.
01:52:38 ◼ ► They said, and I quote, "The CPU and logic board were huge because of the old power hungry processor."
01:53:08 ◼ ► Oh you can't do it. It's wireless. It would have to be wired. They could totally do it. They did it. Here it is.
01:53:15 ◼ ► And yes, they have one that's not a tiny crippled keyboard. They have a full sized keyboard.
01:53:50 ◼ ► But like, part of the promise of you moving the Mac to the same processors as the iOS line
01:53:55 ◼ ► is that all the crap they have on the iOS computers now should be much, much easier to put in here.
01:54:13 ◼ ► And the other thing, the camera. It's a better camera than it was before, but low bar, Apple. Super low bar.
01:54:19 ◼ ► And I like the fact that they were emphasizing the computational part, because please, please do that.
01:54:25 ◼ ► That is one of the benefits of going to ARM. We can take a crappy camera, and we can make it look really good
01:54:30 ◼ ► with the image processing that we invested bazillions of dollars into making good on our phones, right?
01:54:40 ◼ ► Because the screen is staring at you all the time. The camera is never obscured. It's right there, looking at your face.
01:54:45 ◼ ► Just let me log in with my face, Apple. So, you know, maybe we'll wait for the next generation for that.
01:54:50 ◼ ► But Touch ID is super awesome. And the bonus, the super bonus with Touch ID is you can buy these keyboards separately,
01:54:56 ◼ ► and apparently they will work with any M1 based Mac. So if you have a Mac Mini and you want to log in with Touch ID,
01:55:01 ◼ ► you can get one of these keyboards. Now, I know it's weird. Again, Face ID would be better.
01:55:05 ◼ ► What if you don't like that keyboard? What if you like an ergonomic split keyboard? What if you just want Touch ID?
01:55:10 ◼ ► Like, can you get a little single key Touch ID thing that you can put on your desk? No, you can't.
01:55:14 ◼ ► So you kind of have to use the keyboard, and they rounded the corners and some of the edge keys and did some other weird things
01:55:19 ◼ ► that might not be to your liking. But progress. Kind of like using the Apple TV remote for the computers,
01:55:24 ◼ ► being able to use the Touch ID powered keyboard with any M1 based Mac is a very un-Apple-like welcome surprise.
01:55:32 ◼ ► And I love to see these iOS technologies coming to the Mac. It's just Face ID Apple. There's plenty of room on this iMac.
01:55:40 ◼ ► It really, like, I really hope that they, you know, I'm assuming they'll stick with the design, that the next generation
01:55:45 ◼ ► or the generation after that has Face ID because it's just such beautiful synergy with this computer.
01:55:51 ◼ ► Like, log in with your face, right? Just do it. Yeah. And a couple of quick things. I think, first of all,
01:55:57 ◼ ► I think that is probably more likely to come to an iMac Pro kind of model. And second of all, the keyboard with Touch ID,
01:56:04 ◼ ► you can't actually buy them separately, but I think that's a temporary thing. Like, whenever Apple has introduced a new set of input peripherals,
01:56:11 ◼ ► with a new color or whatever for first even the iMac Pro and then later the Mac Pro, you could never buy them by themselves originally.
01:56:17 ◼ ► And then later on they became available. So I think it's just a matter of time. Like, this is just a new product and new supply and everything.
01:56:27 ◼ ► All in all, though, I think this is a really aesthetically pleasing computer. I don't have any problems with the silver, you monster.
01:56:35 ◼ ► It looks like when you have a little color picker and you click on silver, it looks like something has broken on the webpage.
01:56:41 ◼ ► Like, the CSS failed to load. Oh, would you stop? It's serene. It's calming. Sometimes you just want everything to be neutral.
01:57:01 ◼ ► It's not, I don't, the MagSafe is not, do they call it MagSafe? Like, it's not safe. There is nothing safe about it.
01:57:08 ◼ ► They had to do that because the only ways to connect a power cord to something this thin in a way that it doesn't accidentally come out is essentially mechanical interlock, which they didn't want to do because it's inelegant, or fairly strong magnets.
01:57:25 ◼ ► There may have been another option. They could have actually used USB-C power delivery and had a USB-C 100-watt.
01:57:34 ◼ ► If it can fit within 100 watts, which I bet it can, like, they actually could have used USB-C PD.
01:57:38 ◼ ► But see, I think the reason they didn't want a USB-C is because if someone trips over that, that cord's coming out of your computer and, you know, your power's off on your desktop computer, right?
01:57:46 ◼ ► They need it to stay in. So my understanding is that these are fairly strong magnets because magnets were the best choice for a secure connection.
01:57:56 ◼ ► Like, you can yank out a USB-C cable pretty easily, especially as the plug goes in and out, right?
01:58:00 ◼ ► So I understand the USB-C thought of, like, 100 watts is plenty, but the connector is not well suited to this.
01:58:05 ◼ ► My expectation is that this power cord will be harder to yank out than a USB-C connector because you really don't want the power cord coming out of your desktop computer. Ever, really.
01:58:20 ◼ ► And so that's what I think explains this. And if they call it mag-safe, I don't understand what part of it is safe.
01:58:25 ◼ ► Except for it's the opposite of regular mag-safe. It's safe in that it won't accidentally get yanked out of your computer, losing all of your work.
01:58:31 ◼ ► We didn't talk about the six speakers, which is the chin. You know, why does it still have the chin? Because that's where the computer is.
01:58:43 ◼ ► You could have put that tiny computer on the back of this thing, but then it wouldn't be that thin, so we needed someplace to put the computer, and the chin is part of the thing.
01:58:50 ◼ ► So it's, again, mostly making lemonade out of lemons. We have to find somewhere to put the computer.
01:58:57 ◼ ► Hey, we can put the whole computer in the chin. And still have room for a bunch of these extremely thin speakers that I really hope sound decent.
01:59:04 ◼ ► But either way, at least they tried. It's not just one driver shooting out into the desk and hoping for the best.
01:59:09 ◼ ► They have these very thin drivers that hopefully they're reaping the benefits of their experience making very thin speakers on the iPads sound semi-decent.
01:59:18 ◼ ► And now the iMac gets to benefit from that technology because, you know, because now the iMac has to be as thin as an iPad. Why? Because Apple says so.
01:59:27 ◼ ► Yeah, and I'm optimistic to an extent on that. I mean, iPads sound pretty good for podcasts. Not so great for music, because it's really hard to do.
01:59:37 ◼ ► But the iMac Pro actually had surprisingly good speakers too. So this is obviously a lot thinner, as they kept pointing out.
01:59:45 ◼ ► So we'll see what it actually sounds like. But they've done some pretty amazing work with the audio engineering of their Macs in recent years.
01:59:58 ◼ ► One final note on the iPads. We'll put a link in the show notes to a YouTube video of an Apple ad that actually features, I think for the first time in recent memory in a non-nostalgic way, the rainbow striped Apple logo at the end.
02:00:11 ◼ ► Now granted, the logo is supposed to reflect the colors of the iMacs that are shown in the commercial, but of course those colors are from the Apple logo and it kind of scrambles the things at the end or whatever.
02:00:20 ◼ ► But it does show a real old school rainbow striped Apple logo in an official Apple advertising campaign.
02:00:29 ◼ ► Which, even though they didn't put that rainbow striped logo on the actual computers, it's nice to see it again.
02:00:33 ◼ ► Yeah, and they also have a 4.5K display, which I thought was a little bit interesting. And additionally, the base model only gets you four colors, the upgraded models, which are $300, excuse me, $200 more, gets you the other colors.
02:00:47 ◼ ► There are some definitely weird choices on this. No inverted T unless you get the big keyboard that has the numeric keypad on it.
02:00:55 ◼ ► There are odd choices, but all in all I am super into these. I don't think it's the right computer for me, although I honestly would probably get silver if I were to get it. Ahem.
02:01:10 ◼ ► I walked right into it. Anyway, the point being, I really, really think these are great looking computers.
02:01:22 ◼ ► And this looks really, really good. I don't think I'm buying this, but I'm definitely, like I said, in for an Apple TV and potentially an AirTag. But the new iMac looks really good.
02:01:33 ◼ ► Yeah, prices are good too. We didn't talk about that. But prices are good. Like all the M1s, because these computers are so tiny and apparently inexpensive for Apple to manufacture, you get a really nice looking screen and a really good computer with reasonable, you know, very good performance and reasonable storage and memory for not too much money.
02:01:50 ◼ ► No, you can't get one with 8GB, 8TB SSD. No, you can't get one with 15 cores or whatever. But for the market this computer is aimed at, it does all the right things.
02:02:04 ◼ ► You know, there's this typical product segmentation that Apple is able to do within the M1 platform, like Casey said, down to the colors. But all fairly reasonable.
02:02:12 ◼ ► I feel like any... kind of like you can just recommend everyone get the M1 MacBook Air. If someone wants a desktop computer, not that they have many choices.
02:02:19 ◼ ► But like, this is the clear winner over a Mac Mini, because the Mac Mini is like, "Okay, then what the hell do I do with keyboard, mouse and monitor?" And that is an extremely fraught discussion. It's like, forget about all that.
02:02:28 ◼ ► Spend $1500s and get a beautiful, extremely fast, really pleasant, dead quiet, colorful desktop computer.
02:02:37 ◼ ► I do hope though, that when they presumably make the big one, whatever it's called, iMac Pro most likely, I hope that it is a completely different design direction. I hope what they go for with that is something more like the XDR.
02:02:53 ◼ ► Like with a computer on the back. Because they don't need the presumed future iMac Pro. They don't need it to be this thin.
02:03:02 ◼ ► I mean, they didn't need this one to be this thin either. That's true. But they needed to have room for bigger, hotter components. And more and bigger I/O ports.
02:03:13 ◼ ► What bigger, hotter components, Marco? Well, right. It's the mystery, what? What are they going to put it in? They're just going to take three M1s and tape them together.
02:03:25 ◼ ► Yep. I totally agree with you. It's just the mystery is killing me. Because every new computer they put out, it's like, oh, it's the M1 again. Which is great and awesome and we love it and it's great, but what are you going to do?
02:03:34 ◼ ► But yeah, I don't know. When you say XDR, do you mean in terms of thickness or do you think they're going to have the little triple milling holes in there?
02:03:43 ◼ ► It wouldn't surprise me if it had a simplified version. Because one of the issues, if they're going to make a giant iMac that looks like the XDR or is anywhere near screen size of the XDR, they're obviously going to run into price point issues in making it too close to the XDR.
02:04:01 ◼ ► I think the, I would assume that the, like, you know, melon baller case of the XDR and the Mac Pro are kind of expensive to manufacture. So I'm guessing they wouldn't go for that look quite the same way just because it would just be like a place they could save some money and offer it at less than $7,000 because they're going to also have to pay for the computer somehow that's inside of it.
02:04:28 ◼ ► I know, right? What I'm hoping for is a hopefully chinless design that uses the thickness of the screen to store the components and therefore will have room for deep ports, more ports, and, you know, probably some giant heat sink somewhere in there so that they wouldn't have to run fans super fast.
02:04:50 ◼ ► And they don't even really need that big of a heat sink if they're sticking with the Apple Silicon thermal range that we know so far. I mean, yeah, and I know it would be higher, but it wouldn't be like, it's like, it's, I don't think it'd be like 300 watts or anything like that.
02:05:04 ◼ ► Well, it depends on the GPU. It all depends on the GPU. That's true. But anyway, so what I hope is that what we see from what we're thinking is probably going to be called the iMac Pro in the 27 to 30 inch screen class. I hope that's a completely different physical design also that allows them to make fewer compromises as this did for its thinness and cool lookingness and just goes all out as like, here's the Pro thing.
02:05:29 ◼ ► And it's a thicker thing, probably has a black screen bezel, probably is offered more boring colors, even though I hope they don't, but I bet they will. But hopefully it's a design that makes fewer compromises.
02:05:41 ◼ ► Moving on, we've got the iPad Pro. It's gotten refreshed and much to my surprise, it's featuring the M1.
02:05:50 ◼ ► Apple just cannot allow allow logical naming to stand. They just cannot do it institutionally. We seem to have some names that make sense here. So much sense that people actually predicted that the M1 might be the name of the first Mac arm chip. What can we do about that people? I know, I know. Wait, you there in the back. Can we put the M1 in an iPad and keep calling it the M1? And someone's just like, excellent.
02:06:14 ◼ ► I cannot believe, like put the M1 in there, fine, but just give it a different name. But no, no, they cannot allow logical naming to stand and now we have no idea what the M stands for other than, you know, I don't know.
02:06:28 ◼ ► Apple silicon. I mean, I think it's what's interesting about this. So there's a couple things about this. So like number one, I think it's interesting that like, you know, the M1 has a lot of similarities in the course and stuff to the A14 and Apple does ship an iPad with the A14, the most recent iPad Air and they call it the A14.
02:06:47 ◼ ► So I think that's interesting. But so this is a, you know, overall somewhat similar chip called the M1. But what's also interesting is that first of all, I don't, we don't, I don't, I don't think we have exact confirmation that it's like the same silicon as the Mac version of the M1.
02:07:06 ◼ ► Yeah, it has, it has the same feature set. It has the same RAM amounts. Like obviously here's the thing about the M1 being in this and same thing within the, the, and all of the M1 computers that Apple shipped and now including the iPad, even though it is the same system on a chip, I assume, and every single one of these things and basically the same type of system.
02:07:24 ◼ ► They all have very, very slightly different trade-offs related to cooling and clocking, right? You know, so, you know, down to the Air with no fan versus the MacBook Pro with, yes, it's a 13 inch MacBook Pro with a fan, two fans in the iMac and obviously no fan in the iPad.
02:07:44 ◼ ► That influences, you know, cooling, how high you can clock it, right? So are they all at the same clock speed? Are they all the same clock speed all the time?
02:07:54 ◼ ► There are variances here, even though this is quote unquote the same system, but the variances seem to be small given how, how low power the M1 is.
02:08:03 ◼ ► So I would expect the M1 in this to be somewhere between, somewhere around the fanless MacBook Air type of performance, but not be able to match, let's say the iMac with two fans in it, right?
02:08:17 ◼ ► By small amounts that you would have to benchmark to measure, but that is a consequence of it being an iPad and not being a Mac.
02:08:23 ◼ ► Yeah, but it's interesting too, like, you know, when the M1 was, you know, first being speculated about and then even when it was released, many of us thought like, well, they're going to make different trade-offs to make a Mac chip with just even the design of the chip, the things it has, the things it doesn't have, how much of its die real estate it devotes to things like, you know, ISP processing for a camera that Macs don't usually have much of, you know, versus other things like, you know, maybe it would amp up certain things that Macs use more of.
02:08:52 ◼ ► It would have a Thunderbolt controller and, you know, iOS devices have news for a Thunderbolt controller, right?
02:08:57 ◼ ► And then what happens is it comes out and it seems like it's basically the same chip and it has a Thunderbolt controller and everything.
02:09:03 ◼ ► But they did make all those trade-offs. It's just that those trade-offs are also suited to the top-end iPad. They're not suited to the phone. Like, there's totally not the trade-offs you'd make for a phone chip, but what is the one iOS device or, sorry, iPad OS device that is closest to the trade-offs that are appropriate for the Mac?
02:09:24 ◼ ► Yeah, that's true. But also, you know, the 11-inch, like, you could, like, it makes some sense why you put it in the 12-9, but to have the same thing in the 11 is also kind of remarkable.
02:09:33 ◼ ► Well, the fact that it can support it in the 11 and still get good battery life in that case is a testament to the power. Like, it's a little bit over-specced, probably, for the 11-inch, but, you know, I mean, so that gets to the heart of the deal with this thing, right?
02:09:46 ◼ ► So it's the M1, which means that, yes, it comes in 8 and also 16 gigs of RAM. No, you can't spec that separately. It's tied to storage in the typical Apple weird way.
02:09:55 ◼ ► You can get it with 2 terabytes of storage. Like, this is the M1 in another case. We've got an M1 in desktops, M1 in laptops. It's the same feature set.
02:10:04 ◼ ► Like, are you getting it? These are not five different computers. It's one computer, and we're calling it the M1, and we just put it in different packages, right?
02:10:10 ◼ ► But this one is running entirely. This one's running a different OS. It's not running Mac OS, but it's the same feature set.
02:10:17 ◼ ► And so people are looking at this and saying, "This is an insanely powerful iPad," and I've heard some people say, like, there's two threads to this.
02:10:24 ◼ ► One is, "What the hell am I going to do with all of this power? This CPU power is 16 gigs of RAM, 2 terabytes of storage. I can't use that on an iPad. My current iPad is more than fast enough." We said this on this show.
02:10:35 ◼ ► I think the thread of, like, using resources is, like, I understand where people are coming from, because it's true for most use cases, but it is trivial to find use cases that will use all these resources on an iPad.
02:10:48 ◼ ► Just use a single application, like, say, Photoshop for the iPad or anything that deals with video, and you will immediately use all that RAM and all that computation power and be waiting for things to be done, right?
02:10:59 ◼ ► Because in the end, it is an M1 computer with 16 gigs of RAM, and it is very easy to run one single application that you use for your professional work and just swamp those resources, right?
02:11:10 ◼ ► So that is not a reasonable argument. The much more valid argument is, "Okay, but I don't do that. But what I do is I run a bunch of different applications, and iPad OS is getting in my way.
02:11:19 ◼ ► I have all this RAM that I could use and all this CPU power, but your stupid OS and the way it does multitasking and windowing or whatever you want to call it gets in my way.
02:11:28 ◼ ► If I had these same resources on an iMac or on a MacBook or something, I could do the same job better, because the OS lets me use those resources in a more efficient way."
02:11:39 ◼ ► And that is a 100% valid argument, but I do think that it's not ridiculous to sell the top of the top-end iPad Pro with these huge specs,
02:11:51 ◼ ► because the people who actually want to do art with an Apple Pencil or otherwise or actual photography or video on their thing,
02:12:02 ◼ ► a 16 gig computer with 2 terabytes of storage and an M1 in it is a good computer for that, but it's by no means overpowered.
02:12:10 ◼ ► This is the reason people keep buying these Mac Pros with Afterburner cards. It's so easy to ramp up media such that it crushes this computer into dust, right?
02:12:19 ◼ ► So I say kudos for Apple to continue to push the envelope on the power here, and it just feels like an instance where,
02:12:26 ◼ ► I hate to say this because it's setting yourself up a distant point every year, but let's say it together,
02:12:32 ◼ ► maybe at WWDC they'll revise iPadOS in a way that allows people to take better advantage of the huge amounts of hardware power that are available on iPads.
02:12:49 ◼ ► By all means, release the hardware now, because again, if you're using one single application that uses resources, you'll take it.
02:12:54 ◼ ► But as Jason Snell wrote in an article, this platform is being let down by the software features related to juggling multiple things at the same time that are inherent in iPadOS,
02:13:07 ◼ ► and we keep waiting for improvements there that are slowly trickling out, but the hardware is racing away from the capabilities of the software to juggle all this stuff.
02:13:16 ◼ ► Even, so we talked about this last show, how are they going to pitch, how are they going to sell us on this Thunderbolt port, which we all thought it would have,
02:13:22 ◼ ► and lo and behold it does because that's part of the M1 feature set. It's just got one of them, kind of not great, but anyway, it's an iPad.
02:13:28 ◼ ► And the way they pitched it is exactly what we said. Are they just going to say you can do faster stuff with storage and run an XDR?
02:13:35 ◼ ► Yep, that's what they said. You can get stuff from storage faster. And the XDR support, it's not like you can suddenly put your iPadOS apps on the XDR and fill the screen.
02:13:44 ◼ ► They didn't change that, because again, that would be a software change. All they said is like, okay, now we can drive that display for applications that know how to show video on a big display.
02:13:52 ◼ ► We're capable of driving it, but the fundamental nature of how iPadOS deals with external screens has not yet changed. So again, we are left waiting for WWDC and iPadOS 15 or whatever to potentially do more with this hardware.
02:14:07 ◼ ► But the hardware is very capable, and I don't think it's a waste to release this now because it is a viable and important machine for people who just need more power on their iPad to do the things they do with it within their one or two applications that can use all this power.
02:14:24 ◼ ► It really is impressive. I'm rocking the original of the Touch ID, excuse me, I say that every time, originally the Face ID capable iPads. And I love that thing, and I use it pretty much every day.
02:14:37 ◼ ► But I don't feel like I'm longing for more power, and I don't really think there's anything about this that is making me go, "Yep, I need one." And that's fine, that's not a bad thing.
02:14:49 ◼ ► There are definitely some really great features in it, and we should talk about 13-inch in particular in just a moment, but I couldn't agree with you more.
02:14:57 ◼ ► There is so much hardware here, and it's screaming for software to support it. And I don't see that software yet, but I have a pretty strong feeling that it's coming sooner rather than later.
02:15:11 ◼ ► The three of us have been making all of these half-hearted predictions or requests for WWDC this year, and this is the one that I feel most confident in.
02:15:21 ◼ ► I really do think at WWDC we're going to see some reason for all of this hardware to have appeared in this iPad.
02:15:28 ◼ ► And I feel like this is not the first time I or we have made that speech, but there's so much hardware here.
02:15:35 ◼ ► It seems so overkill and so silly for the software that we have today, but we're just a couple of months away, not even a couple of months, less than a couple of months from WWDC, and I have a feeling a lot of that is going to change then.
02:15:45 ◼ ► And again, it's not overkill for, in this specific use case, if you use a single application that needs all this power.
02:15:52 ◼ ► Just Photoshop alone, just pulling a huge number of megapixel images and dry-running filters on it, you'll swamp the M1, and you'll use up all your memory, keeping giant bitmaps in memory and scrolling around in them.
02:16:02 ◼ ► And same thing with video, right? If you think of the high-end iPad as essentially an application console, where all day, every day, on set you're messing with huge images or video.
02:16:14 ◼ ► I keep bringing those two up because they're the only use cases I can think of that can use this power, but they can.
02:16:18 ◼ ► Images and video can use all of your RAM, 16 gigs is nothing to them, and they can use all of your computation and all of your GPU very easily.
02:16:25 ◼ ► That's available right now today. There are no software limits that are preventing you from using this.
02:16:30 ◼ ► But it's the same way that I think people look at Mac users who buy the Pro hardware. They say, "Well, my iMac from 2015, it does everything that I need. I don't understand why you need these fancy iMacs."
02:16:41 ◼ ► And you're like, "Well, I compile software." And you're like, "Well, I don't know what that is, and I never do that, so I don't care."
02:16:45 ◼ ► So it's the same way all of us are satisfied with the power level of our iPads if we have modern ones.
02:16:52 ◼ ► It's just because we don't use our iPads for anything that is demanding, and many people don't use their Macs for anything that is demanding.
02:16:58 ◼ ► But if you do use your iPad for something that is demanding, every time a new iPad comes out, they must be dancing in the street at 16 gigs, because that is a big upgrade in maximum RAM for an iPad.
02:17:08 ◼ ► Maybe they even care about Thunderbolt disk access because they actually use external storage with their iPad.
02:17:13 ◼ ► There are use cases for this, but the other thing you can do with more resources is do more of your small things more efficiently, and that's the software limit.
02:17:24 ◼ ► We should talk about the screen, which as the rumor said would only be on the big one, and it is.
02:17:29 ◼ ► The screen is fairly amazing. It's not XDR level in terms of its full capabilities. Or maybe it is. Maybe it's actually close to XDR.
02:17:41 ◼ ► It kind of is. It has the same peak nits. It's a thousand nits full screen, 1600 peak in regions.
02:17:50 ◼ ► It's so clearly newer technology though, because the Pro Display XDR is a dynamic backlight with 576 regions.
02:17:58 ◼ ► And televisions have been using this technology forever, and in general televisions are judged by how many regions they have, because obviously ideally in an OLED case, every single pixel is its own little region, and you don't have to worry about any of these issues.
02:18:09 ◼ ► But with LCD technology, we can't do that, but the more regions you have, the better, because the smaller you can make the regions, the less you get haloing and blooming around things that are bright.
02:18:18 ◼ ► And so the XDR has 576 regions, and the 12.9 inch iPad has 2500 regions, which is a huge number of regions for a high end television, and this thing is 12.9 inches.
02:18:35 ◼ ► So this screen on this iPad is fairly amazing. It's got 10,000 LEDs. This is true of televisions as well. In general, they tend to have more little light sources than they do zones, because every zone you have is an independently controllable area that software has to essentially know which ones to turn on to what intensity at what times.
02:18:55 ◼ ► So as you scale this up, it becomes a computational problem. 2500 local dimming zones is very good for a 55 inch television, let alone a 12.9 inch iPad.
02:19:07 ◼ ► So the screen on this iPad is amazing, and they made the iPad thicker to accommodate this, which I think is a good trade off, because if you want the best possible viewing experience for your pro video or photography on your portable little iPad app console thing,
02:19:23 ◼ ► yes, by all means, make it thicker, make it heavier, add $100 to the price, because this is the top of the top of the top end of iPads.
02:19:31 ◼ ► And I think the screen, just from the specs, is incredibly impressive, and I think the people who want it will be overjoyed to get it and will be more than willing to pay for it.
02:19:41 ◼ ► Because remember, like, oh, the iPad is so expensive now, it's still like $1100 for, you know, and you get this screen with the $1100, you know, iPad, granted you have to buy the pencils happily or whatever,
02:19:56 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly, you can get an inert piece of aluminum for that price to put your lesser Pro Display XDR on.
02:20:03 ◼ ► So, real time follow up, the Pro Display XDR, brightness, 1000 nits sustained, full screen, 1600 nits peak, contrast ratio, a million to one, this is the exact same statistics as the Liquid Retina XDR display.
02:20:18 ◼ ► And obviously it has fewer pixels, right, and fewer inches, because it is of course an iPad, but still, 2500 regions in that tiny amount of area is fairly amazing.
02:20:29 ◼ ► And this is the same tech that's rumored to go into the next 16 inch MacBook Pro, and so that could be, I think we're going to see that next, and it's going to be pretty amazing there too.
02:20:38 ◼ ► You know what I should do is I should get one of those $1000 stands and see how I can like duct tape a 13 inch iPad to it, and then I can use Sidecar, and I will effectively have as good, if not a better monitor than you guys.
02:20:53 ◼ ► Well, see, here's the thing about, like, yes, the quality of the individual pixels is fine, but I think you're going to find it a little cramped.
02:21:02 ◼ ► Well, I'm just saying, like, yeah, so obviously the big headlining feature for the XDR above this is that it is huge, it has way more pixels, and that is very important for our desktop.
02:21:13 ◼ ► But the display technology, and obviously in a laptop, that's the ideal use case for this, because you don't want the laptop screen to be 30 inches, because that's ridiculous, right?
02:21:25 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm going to be real sad when my beloved 13/14 inch does not get this, and the 16 does, because I am really happy to be off the 15 or 16 inch lifestyle, but, oh, if it had this fancy pants display, I would really make me think twice.
02:21:42 ◼ ► And this bodes well, I hope, for the big iMac, right? Because if the big iMac has this screen, it's like combining, it's exactly what you would want a Pro iMac to be. Can you take the Mac Pro and the XDR and squish them together into one computer that's thinner and better in a bunch of ways, and has more dimming zones and has an equally capable monitor?
02:22:01 ◼ ► Yeah, the future looks bright. It does, actually. These products are great, and the technology that they embody promises even better products, assuming they can figure out what to put in them to be the CPU and GPU, which is still a mystery.
02:22:19 ◼ ► It supports Dolby Atmos, whatever it's called. It's made of a bunch of recycled stuff. Starts at $7.99 for the 11 inch, $1100 for the 13 inch, and as with most things that we've talked about, not everything, but most things, you can order on either this coming Friday or April 30th, and then available "the second half of May."
02:22:41 ◼ ► This looks good, though. This looks real good. Again, it's not something that I feel like I need in my life, but it does look very, very good. And I am excited that whenever the time comes that I feel like I really need a new iPad, these things, hardware alone, these things are looking so phenomenal. And I could have 5G on it if I wanted it, which is kind of neat, too.
02:23:05 ◼ ► It shows that it's possible, so now we have even more reason to be angry when the Macs don't have it.
02:23:11 ◼ ► Because it's the M1, and apparently 5G can be part of that feature set, which was still, you know, we didn't know that for sure yet, because obviously 5G is part of the iPhone chips, but the iPhone chips are different chips, right? And so is the A14, again, a different chip.
02:23:24 ◼ ► But now we know that there's no barriers to doing it in an M1 either, so Apple is running out of excuses there.
02:23:30 ◼ ► These iPads present me with a bit of conundrum because I'm still using my old iPad and I wanted to replace it. I really want that screen, but I don't know if I can deal with the size, right? You know, for my iPad TV watching.
02:23:44 ◼ ► And obviously, even though the screen is amazing, given that a lot of my time is spent watching shows on my iPad in my bed with the lights off with my wife trying to sleep next to me, increased brightness and HDR may not be a feature, I really have to think about it.
02:23:58 ◼ ► I think I'd have to make like a mock-up iPad out of cardboard and just hold it and see, is this too much for me? I've never had one of the big iPads. Obviously I've seen them and used them briefly in real life, but I've never had one, so I don't know how an iPad that big will fit into my life, but boy, that screen is really tempting me.
02:24:19 ◼ ► No, I'm not holding it. It's always not a, I would get a little flappy folio stand thing, you know.
02:24:25 ◼ ► And I think the prices are still reasonable given what you get. Like, it's basically a MacBook Air without a keyboard for MacBook Air without a keyboard prices with a way better screen.
02:24:34 ◼ ► Cool. All right, well, thank you very much to our sponsors this week. Apple, obviously. Apple and Apple.
02:25:57 ◼ ► Poor Mac Mini has to be in the after show where we tell everybody that for a hundred extra dollars,
02:26:05 ◼ ► As exciting as that is, and that is exciting, there's something more exciting that we need to talk about.
02:26:22 ◼ ► and I had a couple of hiccups during the presentation where I needed to refresh the page or something like that.
02:26:27 ◼ ► It was very brief. It was no big deal. It wasn't like hearing the wrong language like we did when they were first starting to stream these things live.
02:26:38 ◼ ► And I notice there's an adorable little bit of clipart that looks like the Ted Lasso pink shortbread cookie box or biscuit or whatever.
02:27:04 ◼ ► Well, come to find out that's not the case. And who better to go spelunking and digging,
02:27:10 ◼ ► trying to figure out what this was all about, than dear friend of the show, _DavidSmith.
02:27:15 ◼ ► And breaking shortly before we recorded, _ has, in his opinion, and I am inclined to believe him,
02:27:29 ◼ ► So I know that I am going to be trying this probably over the weekend. I am super stoked to try this out.
02:27:38 ◼ ► And the secret, by the way, which you will see from looking at the images in his blog post,
02:27:43 ◼ ► is that any cookie you make with that much butter and sugar is always going to taste good.
02:28:00 ◼ ► Yep. So I am super stoked to try this. God, I'm so excited to buy that stupid box for way too much damn money.
02:28:14 ◼ ► No, I think I'll get one, because the upstairs one is a 4K. The downstairs one is still the old HD one.
02:29:06 ◼ ► And so even if you don't have a 4K TV, nobody should spend the $150 to get the Apple TV HD model
02:30:30 ◼ ► I don't order baked potatoes. They're too filling for all the Starks and everything. I'd rather have better stuff.
02:30:39 ◼ ► but one time I definitely did get the baked potato and that in and of itself was like six meals.
02:31:34 ◼ ► and then you can kind of get one of everything with a big table and everyone can try them and share.
02:31:37 ◼ ► But in a context where you have to pick your own and you're not doing all that big sharing,
02:31:49 ◼ ► Yeah, remember that dressing? It has the shredded, whatever, is it like shredded beets in there?
02:32:23 ◼ ► I like the sausage place in San Jose and the good vegan Indian place. Those are fantastic.
02:32:56 ◼ ► I love House of Prime Rib so much. First of all, I hope that I get back there before it goes out of business or closes or whatever.
02:33:11 ◼ ► But yeah, I hope that someday we have a reason to go back there because logically there's not much of a reason.
02:33:18 ◼ ► I think if there is an in-person WWDC next year, I think we have to get ourselves an Uber up to San Francisco one night and go there.
02:33:30 ◼ ► It would be like an hour, it would be a ridiculous long drive to go to one restaurant, but I'd be willing to do it.
02:33:56 ◼ ► Beat the crowd, get there before everybody. You know you're going to have a long trip back and you're going to be full.
02:34:04 ◼ ► I want to be so early that the staff is like, "People are here for dinner already? Yep, that's me."
02:34:08 ◼ ► I'll do that. I am more than happy to accommodate. So there will be an ATP date at House of Prime Rib whenever we're all in San Jose again.
02:34:17 ◼ ► Yeah, that's totally worth it. And again, I literally want to see nothing else in that city.
02:34:26 ◼ ► I like Moscone. Moscone is nice on the inside. It's kind of scenic and the Yerba Buena Gardens thing is kind of nice.
02:34:44 ◼ ► See, the perfect answer is to take House of Prime Rib and Moscone and drop them in San Jose and then I'd be good to go.
02:34:49 ◼ ► Well, do you want that though? Because it seems like there's something about San Jose that makes it impossible for most restaurants to be able to be operated well.
02:35:00 ◼ ► I don't know what it is. I don't want to blame them, but it just seems like it's not a thing that can happen there.
02:35:10 ◼ ► Yes. Miraculously, somehow the people who run the Beer and Sausage Place understand how to take your money and give you food in exchange for it in a timely manner.
02:35:19 ◼ ► No one else understands, but like, I remember the first time I went there and I made an order and then someone showed up with my food. I'm like, "Who are you? Wait, what?"
02:35:26 ◼ ► I just sat down. I just gave you money like three minutes ago. I just sat down at my table. How can you be bringing me my food, my correct food that I ordered and it tastes good?
02:35:38 ◼ ► This is so true. I cannot begin to tell you. Maybe San Jose is phenomenal any other time of year, but during WWDC time, it is so difficult to get a meal in and complete in less than 14 hours and have it correct.
02:35:56 ◼ ► No, I mean, you're lucky. What we've seen in San Jose, you're lucky if you go to a restaurant during their stated hours of operation and they're open.
02:36:13 ◼ ► San Jose is a lot like those movies where a stranger goes into town and all the locals are hiding from them.
02:36:19 ◼ ► You're like, "Where is everybody?" And you know all the locals. The town is filled with people because you came in as a stranger. Everyone is hiding.
02:36:25 ◼ ► And so every time you go into San Jose, you're looking around and it's like, "Did they see me coming?"
02:36:29 ◼ ► And all the businesses flipped their sign to closed and are hiding in the back and turned off all their lights. Where is everybody?
02:36:35 ◼ ► No, and actually going back to our Truman Show thing earlier, it's very much like you arrive and everyone there is actually just an actor and they've never had to do their job before.