00:00:00 ◼ ► This is a probably really shitty, but at the time I didn't know about a restaurant. I think it was like a guy's name, like Bernie's or something like that, that I used to love going to.
00:00:08 ◼ ► There was a place called Danny's in Wartsboro. Maybe that's what I'm thinking of. I don't know. It was really shitty, I think, but I loved it as a ten-year-old.
00:00:17 ◼ ► Everything there is really shitty. Is it really shitty, but you loved it, Casey? No, I don't know. It's very on-brand, isn't it? Out of character.
00:00:28 ◼ ► In the grand tradition, we are recording in the middle of the World Series. Was it a couple of years ago that we actually ended up live-commentating on the game? Because I think that was game seven.
00:00:41 ◼ ► I wouldn't call it commentating. Well, fair. We were talking at the same time the game was going on. We did acknowledge the existence of the game.
00:00:49 ◼ ► I believe we were trying to figure out what was going on. It was in the post-show. Yeah, it didn't make the actual edit. I tried. I really tried working it in, but there was nothing to be saved.
00:01:01 ◼ ► It was truly terrible. But Hometown Heroes, the Washington Nationals, are in the World Series in game seven, which means this is the decider to figure out who is the best baseball team in the land. I really generally don't care for baseball, but every once in a while, it's like a cup of coffee. I have two cups of coffee a year, and I'm like, "Yeah, I think today's the day."
00:01:22 ◼ ► And then I go back to not drinking it ever again. Today's the day for baseball for me. So I have it on the side. I respect the idea of sports, but I've never had a team affinity.
00:01:35 ◼ ► So I can follow what's going on in all the major sports games. I know the rules enough to know what's going on and to follow the games, but I just don't have anybody that I really care about rooting for.
00:01:44 ◼ ► Now, where this comes in handy is I actually really enjoy going to a baseball game, but I couldn't give two craps who's playing or what kind of game it is. And so the best thing to do is go to AAA games because they're super cheap. You can get great seats. It's a lot easier. Everything about them logistically is easier and cheaper.
00:02:03 ◼ ► And the food is fine. You can get a hot dog and hang out. And if you don't care if the team you're seeing is a super pro team or not, it's a great option.
00:02:12 ◼ ► We have the Richmond Flying Squirrels, which once upon a time were the Richmond Braves. And they were a feeder team for the Atlanta Braves. But I forget who they feed now. Maybe the Giants. I want to say it's the San Francisco Giants that they feed.
00:02:25 ◼ ► But anyway, I've actually lived in Richmond over a decade and have never been to a Squirrels game, which is kind of unfortunate. Nor did I go to a Braves game before that.
00:02:33 ◼ ► But Erin, her dad is a huge baseball fan and a huge Atlanta Braves fan because he grew up here and again feeder team, blah, blah, blah. And so what I've understood through many, many, many different family stories is that
00:02:47 ◼ ► Erin's dad would put her with her little curly blonde hair when she was like six years old or eight years old or whatever and put her in whatever area that is that you would get autographs on baseball cards.
00:02:57 ◼ ► And so she would get autographs from all these different baseball players and a lot of them went on to do nothing. But from what I understand, she saw, oh God, it's not Alex Rodriguez, who was the incredibly popular Yankee. Oh God, please don't put this in the show.
00:03:11 ◼ ► Gruber will murder me. I'm showing a blank now. It's been a long week. Yes, thank you, Derek Jeter, who apparently was a total animal.
00:03:18 ◼ ► I know, I know. I'm sorry. All the baseball people are so angry at me right now. But anyway.
00:03:21 ◼ ► To be fair, all the baseball people aren't listening right now because they're watching the World Series.
00:03:25 ◼ ► That's also fair. But anyway, but yeah, so Erin grew up with baseball and I just never really cared for it. However, I did go to a Nationals game years ago and loved it. And I agree with you, Mark, that going to a baseball game is surprisingly fun.
00:03:39 ◼ ► So how are they the hometown team? Is this like New England Patriots where like an entire region claims a team?
00:03:45 ◼ ► Because what do I have? I mean, is there a North Carolina team? This is as close as I get to a Virginia team. I'm trying to think. There's no West Virginia. Tennessee borders Virginia, but it's way on the other end of the state for me. Like easily, this is the closest major league baseball team to where I live.
00:04:03 ◼ ► No, no. F*** you, John. No way. So here's the thing. No, no, no, no, no. You don't understand, John. You're coming at this like a damn ***hole. So here's the thing.
00:04:12 ◼ ► The way, if you look at Connecticut, it's like a rectangle, right, that's a little bit wider than it is tall. And yes, I know Connecticut's tiny, ha ha ha. But if you split Connecticut right down the middle, which is roughly where Hartford was if memory serves, the western half of the state is the good half.
00:04:27 ◼ ► That's the state that roots for the Yankees and the Giants, or if you really hate your life, the Jets or the Mets. The eastern half of the state has been infected by Boston and they root for the Patriots and the Red Sox and all those terrible teams.
00:04:40 ◼ ► The western half, the only thing the western half has going for it is tons of extremely rich people if you consider that having something going for it, right? But the problem with the western half is that the eastern half comes by its Red Sox fandom honestly, whereas the left half of Connecticut is just wannabe New York. That's all like, other than the very rich people.
00:05:05 ◼ ► Because they wish they were in New York. They want to root for the New York teams, but they're not actually in New York and no one cares about Connecticut and it's like they're in Connecticut.
00:05:14 ◼ ► Yeah, but the right half of Connecticut is solidly New England-ish and all of New England claims the Patriots, which makes sense, and the Red Sox.
00:05:21 ◼ ► What in the hell are you talking about? At my parents' house where they used to live, I could be in the state of New York on foot and I could be in Manhattan by car in like an hour and a half.
00:05:30 ◼ ► This is exactly what people in Connecticut say. They brag about how close they are to New York. I can get the New York radio stations!
00:05:38 ◼ ► I don't have any particular opinion with you saying that Connecticut is wannabe New Yorkers or whatever. Fine, that's okay, sure.
00:05:44 ◼ ► But they are no more wannabe New Yorkers than they are wannabe Bostoners or Bostonites, whatever you call yourselves.
00:05:50 ◼ ► Bossholes? No, I feel like the Red Sox, despite them being the Boston Red Sox and not the New England Red Sox, they might as well be the New England Red Sox.
00:06:00 ◼ ► Looking no further than Stephen King, famous Red Sox fan who lives in Maine, which is much farther away than Connecticut.
00:06:04 ◼ ► You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to leave all this garbage in the show and that way we can refer back to this. Whenever anybody asks us to talk about sports, we can say, "Look at what happens when we talk about sports."
00:06:28 ◼ ► That's probably true, actually. No offense taken, that's probably true. Connecticut was a lovely place to live and I'm glad I'm not there. Anyway.
00:06:36 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly right. I have been off the grid for the last week. Literally two hours ago, I was stepping off a plane at the local Richmond airport. Am I allowed to call that the hometown airport? Is that okay?
00:06:48 ◼ ► I mean, we could have a whole Roboto-Not episode about what hometown means, but you trying to claim the Washington Nationals as your hometown team when you grew up in Connecticut and live in Virginia is weird. Anyway.
00:07:04 ◼ ► Okay. No, let's do it. What justifies a home team? How does one claim something as your home team? Is it only where you grew up? Is it only where you are right now?
00:07:21 ◼ ► That's the problem with the show. I always have to search the archives so we don't end up repeating.
00:07:31 ◼ ► I feel like hometown is the place. Assuming, this is hometown normative, but assuming you grew up in a single place, like you weren't traveling all the time and didn't move seven times before you were 18.
00:07:43 ◼ ► I feel like it's where you spend the substantial portion of your formative years. If you spend them in a single place, that's your hometown.
00:07:49 ◼ ► Sure, I think I can agree with that. But what happens if you move every two years until you get to high school?
00:07:54 ◼ ► Well, then you might not have a hometown if you move every two years. Like, what are you going to claim as your hometown? Nothing.
00:07:59 ◼ ► So that's the thing. I have lived in some portion of, actually, I've lived in Richmond specifically longer than I've lived everywhere else.
00:08:10 ◼ ► So what years are these? This is like middle school and high school? Or is it earlier than that? Like, what are we talking about?
00:08:16 ◼ ► It's certainly before 18. I'm going to say it's like, you know, sort of school age, going off into puberty maybe, like that region.
00:08:28 ◼ ► Because if you went someplace else for kindergarten and first grade, who cares? But I'm saying like, you know, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, that kind of range, 11th, that's sort of the meat of it, don't you feel like?
00:08:40 ◼ ► Oh yeah, yeah. So if you were in the same place for most of that time, this becomes a question. But if you weren't, it becomes complicated.
00:08:47 ◼ ► If you were in two places, maybe you could still try to claim both of them, like my early childhood was "this is my hometown" or whatever, but I feel like you just have to end up picking one. But if you moved a lot, you just might not have any singular hometown.
00:08:59 ◼ ► I feel like the rules are pretty clear that like, if you moved a lot, that kind of sucks. And so the reward you get for having tolerated that is you get to cherry pick at any given time for any given question.
00:09:13 ◼ ► So I get to pick like, what's the best answer for this right now? What can I claim as my hometown for this particular story or scenario right now?
00:09:20 ◼ ► Amen, brother. So John, I moved in the beginning of 8th grade, and I moved from having bounced around every two years for most of my childhood. In 8th grade, I moved to a little tiny town in western Connecticut called New Fairfield.
00:09:33 ◼ ► I was in New Fairfield, Connecticut from 8th grade through my graduation from high school.
00:09:40 ◼ ► Oh yeah, then that's your hometown. 8th grade through high school graduation, that's it. That's it right there.
00:09:44 ◼ ► Okay, so that's fair. I'm on board so far, but now as an adult, admittedly as an adult, and I am on board with what you're saying about formative years, I'm not challenging you yet, but I have lived in Virginia, and specifically Richmond.
00:09:59 ◼ ► I've lived in Richmond since 2008 and Virginia since 2000. So it's been almost 20 years that I've been in Virginia in some way, shape, or form.
00:10:12 ◼ ► There's one word you can change in this thing, and you might have, I don't recall what you said, but there's one word difference here, right?
00:10:17 ◼ ► If you say, "I'm rooting for my hometown team," that's incorrect. Your hometown team would be something in Connecticut or whatever, right?
00:10:26 ◼ ► If you're rooting for the hometown team, then that might be valid, assuming that the Nationals are the hometown team of people in Virginia. Like you said, they have slim pickings, so I guess that's it.
00:10:45 ◼ ► Maybe in the same way that people stretch out from all over New England to claim the Red Sox, could you stretch all the way down to get the Braves in Atlanta?
00:10:53 ◼ ► I think that's too far. See, that's why, what is it, who is the Panthers? Is that right, in North Carolina, the NFL team?
00:11:01 ◼ ► Yeah, no, no, no, I'm saying, I think it's slightly reasonable to claim the Panthers if you're from Richmond, because the only other choice you have is the Redskins, and everyone hates the Redskins.
00:11:10 ◼ ► So, what are you going to do? And for me, I choose to root for the New York Giants because my entire family is rooted for, well, I don't really pay attention to the NFL anymore, partially because the Giants suck and partially because the NFL really sucks.
00:11:25 ◼ ► Well, that is that as well. But anyways, so I think if I were coming of age, like so Declan, for example, if he paid attention to football, I think it would be reasonable for him to claim the Carolina Panthers, or if he really hated himself, the Washington Redskins, as his hometown team.
00:11:45 ◼ ► Because even though they're a state away, it's still, they're such slim pickings. There's not like 44 sports teams like there is around you guys.
00:11:53 ◼ ► Well, don't get Declan into football because it causes brain injury and it should be abolished.
00:12:01 ◼ ► So Marco, at this point, I know you do not believe in sports, but if you were to believe in sports, would you elect to believe in Ohio? In Ohio? The sports teams from Ohio? I don't even know how to say this. Would you root for things from Ohio or would you root for things from New York?
00:12:17 ◼ ► Oh, it would be hard. So like, you know, my home place, like my birthplace/home town is Ohio, Columbus, Ohio/Bexley, Ohio. But where I consider myself, quote, from, if somebody asks like, you know, where are you from, who's just meeting me?
00:12:34 ◼ ► I'm probably not going to say Ohio because that usually is more of a question of like, where do you live right now?
00:12:44 ◼ ► But the question is like, do I consider myself an Ohioan or a New Yorker? Presently, I'm a New Yorker.
00:12:55 ◼ ► So, you know, I am a New Yorker. I am from Ohio originally and my hometown is Columbus, Ohio.
00:13:04 ◼ ► Based on that, I feel like I could pick either one. And as long as I don't change my affiliation too frequently, I feel like I could kind of just pick whichever one has like, you know, the best record or the, you know, most fun colors or whatever.
00:13:28 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. The other complicating factor is that I'm from Columbus, not Cleveland or Cincinnati.
00:13:35 ◼ ► And those are very different places and they're, you know, like, you know, Cleveland is basically in Lake Erie and Cincinnati is basically Kentucky.
00:13:44 ◼ ► Like, Columbus is kind of its own, you know, island in the middle of a sea of corn fields.
00:13:50 ◼ ► And so I don't have, like, even when I was there, no one in Columbus gave a crap about the pro teams that were in Cincinnati or Cleveland.
00:14:00 ◼ ► And Columbus doesn't have a lot of pro teams. Like, it doesn't have an NFL or MLB team in Columbus.
00:14:08 ◼ ► So Columbus is really all about Ohio State. That's, like, that's the whole thing there.
00:14:12 ◼ ► No one there cares about the pro teams because there aren't any. So it's all about Ohio State, college, football, and basketball.
00:14:18 ◼ ► And so I would have a hard time caring about any other teams in other sports from Ohio.
00:14:25 ◼ ► Like, if I had to pick a football or a baseball team that was not college, like, I wouldn't be able to really from there.
00:14:31 ◼ ► Ultimately, though, the Ohio State red is not a great red. It's technically scarlet and gray.
00:14:43 ◼ ► Like, I don't like the red and gray combo that Ohio State uses, so I probably wouldn't actually vote for them.
00:14:48 ◼ ► But, I don't know, New York stuff, like, I don't like the way they mix in the yellow with the blue.
00:14:53 ◼ ► And so, I don't know. I don't know. I'd probably, also, I kind of feel like New York, it's like, what am I going to do?
00:14:58 ◼ ► Like, be a Yankees fan? Like, every single person on earth? Like, I feel like that's kind of, like, overdone, kind of cliche to be a Yankees fan, right?
00:15:08 ◼ ► Well, I mean, the easy option is to do what everyone else does, which is to root for the Steelers, the Cowboys, and the Yankees,
00:15:16 ◼ ► because they were good when you started paying attention, and then you just claim it forevermore.
00:15:21 ◼ ► I will say, I lived in Pittsburgh for a couple years, and it was really fun to root for the Steelers in Pittsburgh,
00:15:28 ◼ ► because they happened to be really good then, and they didn't have any of that baggage of, like, everyone loves them like the Yankees.
00:15:38 ◼ ► Well, but, and also, but, like, there was also a clear pick. Like, if you lived in Pittsburgh, you rooted for the Steelers.
00:15:43 ◼ ► And so, like, so we didn't have the problem that Columbus had, where there's kind of no pro teams,
00:15:52 ◼ ► So that was kind of fun. I enjoyed being a Steelers fan for two years, and my, I still didn't care that much,
00:15:57 ◼ ► but, like, everyone else around me did, so I was able to participate a little bit more, and, like, that was, like, I was there when they won a Super Bowl,
00:16:04 ◼ ► so that was really fun, like, to be in the town then, and everyone was all involved with that, so that was kind of fun.
00:16:11 ◼ ► I know Steelers are definitely on the list of, like the Cowboys, you know, the team that everyone roots for,
00:16:18 ◼ ► even though they have no allegiance whatsoever. Now, you get an exception here, but no allegiance whatsoever to Pittsburgh or Dallas.
00:16:24 ◼ ► Like, Gruber rooting for Dallas, I have never really understood. Or the Yankees, actually.
00:16:35 ◼ ► I beat him up for this all the time, because he has absolutely no affiliation to Dallas whatsoever.
00:16:39 ◼ ► I think it's just that when he started paying attention, they were extremely good, and so that was his team.
00:16:44 ◼ ► You see, also, Chicago Bulls years ago, back when Jordan was around, when coincidentally, I lived right outside Chicago,
00:16:53 ◼ ► But that's all right, we should probably move on from the Accidental Sports Podcast, last robot or not.
00:16:58 ◼ ► This is so bad that I want, if anyone from Apple is listening right now, and just so frustrated and yelling at their phone,
00:17:27 ◼ ► You don't have to remember to do it. You don't have to have a particular hard drive that you remember to take out of the closet,
00:17:36 ◼ ► It's just automatic, continuous cloud backup, so it just automatically runs in the background, and you always have it.
00:17:42 ◼ ► You can't possibly forget about it, and they bring this to you with unlimited transfers, un-throttled speeds,
00:17:48 ◼ ► and unlimited space for any hard drives connected to that computer for just $6 a month per computer.
00:17:58 ◼ ► I gotta say, I love Backblaze. I've been using them since long before they were a sponsor of the show.
00:18:02 ◼ ► There's a reason why I use them. I've tried the other ones, and believe me, Backblaze is the best cloud backup solution out there,
00:18:12 ◼ ► They already have 800 petabytes backed up from people like me. They've restored 45 billion files so far.
00:18:20 ◼ ► They have all the features you want. Of course, you can control the client app. You can throttle speeds and everything if you need to for your connection.
00:18:25 ◼ ► And they also have mobile apps for on-the-go access. So through either their website or through their mobile apps,
00:18:30 ◼ ► no matter where you are, say you're on vacation, you can restore one file from your home desktop computer or whatever is backing up to Backblaze.
00:18:38 ◼ ► So you can always get to your files anywhere, even if you haven't had a disaster. It's just convenient.
00:18:42 ◼ ► If you do have a disaster, they have all sorts of easy restore options from downloading things on the website all the way up to,
00:18:47 ◼ ► they will ship you a hard drive with your files on it, and if you return it within 30 days, they'll give you a refund on the price of the drive.
00:18:54 ◼ ► They even now have version history upgrades. They already have 30-day retention for any kind of change you want to make.
00:18:59 ◼ ► You can go back 30 days and recover stuff. But with version history upgrades, if you pay a little bit extra, you can get retention up to one year or longer.
00:19:07 ◼ ► See for yourself. Backblaze.com/ATP. By far my favorite cloud backup solution out there. I've been using it myself forever. I pay for it myself. It's just wonderful.
00:19:24 ◼ ► Moving on. I have been out of pocket for the last week, so I have no idea what we're talking about tonight.
00:19:37 ◼ ► And even though it's wintertime in the United States, we're going to offer some t-shirts for sale.
00:19:42 ◼ ► We're going to do a slightly different take on the existing and much beloved M-Style ATP shirt.
00:19:54 ◼ ► Okay, there we go. That's right. You always assume John. I'm breaking the first rule of ATP.
00:19:58 ◼ ► Anyway, so John came up with doing the ATP shirts in six colors, and there is both light mode and dark mode,
00:20:05 ◼ ► which is to say the //, I hope I got that right, ATP is in either white text or black text.
00:20:13 ◼ ► And then you can choose the same shirt colors. They will be available for purchase up until, or pre-order,
00:20:23 ◼ ► So if you want it for late December, for example, and actually I believe Hanukkah and Christmas both fall in late December, if I'm not mistaken.
00:20:34 ◼ ► But I would highly recommend picking one of these up. They look like they're going to be really great.
00:20:39 ◼ ► Also, we're bringing back the traditional rainbow /// ATP shirt, as well as the hoodie, as well as the hat, and the pins are always in stock.
00:20:51 ◼ ► And something I've noticed is I have a fair bit of podcast T-shirts, and they're all black or gray,
00:20:57 ◼ ► and I really, really, really don't mind introducing a little bit of color into my life.
00:21:01 ◼ ► And so now I will probably order a whole rainbow of ATP shirts, so I will be that guy promoting my own thing pretty much all the time,
00:21:15 ◼ ► So the number of permutations is very large before you even consider the returning merchandise.
00:21:21 ◼ ► That's true. I'd forgotten about that. Yes. Two of us don't mind the tri-blend, and one of us is extraordinarily particular about 100% cotton.
00:21:29 ◼ ► I like both. I have a mix, but I like there to be options. So behold, there are options.
00:21:34 ◼ ► That's, by the way, that's part of the reason why we have the colors and we have the ink that's black and the ink that's white,
00:21:39 ◼ ► is because sometimes a shirt looks better with the black, sometimes it looks better with the white, sometimes it looks good with both.
00:21:47 ◼ ► And so it's like, look, you look at the shirts, you decide which one you think looks better, and buy the one you like. So problem solved.
00:21:54 ◼ ► Jon is like the all of us nerds when it comes to this stuff. He wants to offer every single possible option for everything.
00:22:01 ◼ ► And I'm like Jon and I versus buttons. I'm like, can we just have two good options and that's it?
00:22:08 ◼ ► Just make the decision for you? Listeners, you have to understand Marco is not making this up.
00:22:12 ◼ ► This is exactly how this conversation goes every single time. Every time Jon or me, it can be either one of us,
00:22:19 ◼ ► but Jon or me decides that we should have a whole plethora of options and every single time Jonny, I mean Marco decides,
00:22:32 ◼ ► Alright, moving on in follow up, there is a new image that might be the 16 inch MacBook Pro.
00:22:41 ◼ ► Guy Rambo over at 95 Mac has uncovered this and there is a post where they put up this image and it has a touch bar and a touch ID key.
00:22:55 ◼ ► But instead of it being attached to the touch bar or like part of the touch bar in a way, there is a clear separation between the touch ID button,
00:23:03 ◼ ► you know, slash power button and the touch bar itself, which one would assume they would only do if they needed a similar style gap on the other side for,
00:23:11 ◼ ► I don't know, an escape button, an actual escape key. So this is potentially good news, we think.
00:23:19 ◼ ► Yeah, it looks just like the one on the MacBook Air. So if you've seen the one on the MacBook Air, that's what this looks like.
00:23:25 ◼ ► The other interesting thing about this picture is that you get to see at least some of the key layout and as far as I'm able to discern, there are no changes there.
00:23:32 ◼ ► The spacing between the keys looks pretty much the same. The key sizes look pretty much the same. No surprises in this photo at all.
00:23:42 ◼ ► Yeah, that to me is the only disappointing thing is that I was, again, I've been hoping that they would change a number of problems with this current keyboard,
00:23:50 ◼ ► not only the reliability issues, but also I was hoping they would change the, what I think is part of the accuracy problems that I and many people seem to have.
00:23:58 ◼ ► The keys are, the key margins are too small, like the margin between the keys, like we used to have more space between the keys and you could feel the edges of them more with your fingers.
00:24:06 ◼ ► So if you were kind of off by one or getting off by one, you could feel it more. And also the flatness of the key cap, it seemed like, I don't know, whatever it was,
00:24:15 ◼ ► the old ones seemed like you could feel where they ended and began a little bit better and the new ones you couldn't.
00:24:19 ◼ ► And it seems like they haven't really changed that. And you know what, look, if they give us scissor switches, I'll take it.
00:24:26 ◼ ► If they give us a real escape key, which it looks like they probably will, I'll take that as well.
00:24:31 ◼ ► The icing on the cake would be inverted T arrows and then a distant fourth priority would be the key spacing increased.
00:24:38 ◼ ► So if we're getting the scissor keys and the escape key, maybe inverted arrows, I'm happy with that.
00:24:49 ◼ ► And so far, there's also been rumors that since October is ending and there's no event and they just did something else this week, which we got to, that didn't include this.
00:25:10 ◼ ► We heard, a few months back, we heard from two different sources a few bits of information that have been proven so far, or at least have been most likely proven so far to be accurate.
00:25:23 ◼ ► We heard that it was going to be the one millimeter travel scissor key switch, we heard that it was going to have a hardware escape key next to a touch bar, we heard that it was going to have inverted T arrows, which we don't know if that's true yet,
00:25:42 ◼ ► And so far, that appears to all, with the exception of the inverted Ts, which we don't know about yet, all of that has come true.
00:25:50 ◼ ► We heard that from two different people a few months back. So I'm thinking that information was pretty solid, and the fact that it was coming, that they knew back then that it was going to be supported in this OS release in particular,
00:26:03 ◼ ► suggests it's coming out any day now. Because they wouldn't have these assets in this version of Catalina if it was coming out in the spring or next summer.
00:26:13 ◼ ► They would wait until a much later OS release to support this machine, and these assets wouldn't even be here. So the fact that they're here, and the fact that all this other info has panned out so far, I'm inclined to guess that this is happening imminently still.
00:26:29 ◼ ► A few other things just to make clear from this picture. It looks so much like the other ones in all other ways. It's got the little holes next to the keyboard that look like they're the same size, the same number of holes, the same position, the hinge, the, you know, everything about this picture looks exactly like the previous ones.
00:26:44 ◼ ► Obviously you can't see the fact that the size might be different because I think it's cut off before you see the edge. You can't see the arrow keys, as we've already alluded to, so we can't tell anything about them.
00:26:53 ◼ ► But it's further confirmation of the sort of iconic illustration of the computer that we talked about in the last show. But this appears to be an actual photograph. Or, yeah, it's probably an actual photograph, I think.
00:27:05 ◼ ► Alrighty, well, let's see what happens. I'm hopeful. I don't know if I'm gonna get one of these, but I'm hopeful. Moving on, iOS 13.2 is out. I waited until I got home to upgrade my phone, and it's the only thing I've upgraded so far. Is it safe to update now, for those of us who are holding out on the iOS 13 debacle? Are we good to go now?
00:27:26 ◼ ► This is the least crappy version of iOS 13 yet. There's still problems with it, but the number of problems is going down. I wish it was not growing new problems at the release, but the total number of problems is going down.
00:27:45 ◼ ► So it is getting better. If you really want to upgrade to iOS 13 and you haven't yet, then go for it. It's good enough. But if you're on 12, on a device that still supports it, and you are happy with 12, and you are relatively conservative in your software update cycle,
00:28:02 ◼ ► I would say there's not a strong reason to upgrade yet, given that it's still not rock solid. There are still issues. Again, they are getting much fewer, but there are still issues. As a developer, I'm annoyed by 13.2 that they seem to have changed dramatically how often and how aggressively apps get killed in the background for just being terminated for making space and memory.
00:28:32 ◼ ► I tweeted about this the other day and I got a whole bunch of responses from people who are seeing the same issue of basically your apps need to restart from scratch a lot more often than it seems like they used to before iOS 13.2.
00:28:42 ◼ ► They're like toddlers under a blanket. If you're not looking at the apps, they disappear. Literally, as soon as it goes off the screen, the app is gone. It's blowing my mind. I'm sideways swiping on the iPad, my iPad Pro. I'm sideways swiping on the little thing in pullover mode.
00:28:58 ◼ ► And when I sideways swipe to one app, I sideways swipe back and the app is relaunching. I'm like, "I was just looking at you two seconds ago. You're in the sidebar. What the hell?" I think it's just broken.
00:29:10 ◼ ► - Yeah, I've heard especially people are having problems with things like YouTube, which does not remember your position. Or you have to go to your history to pull up your video. You were watching a minute ago.
00:29:21 ◼ ► And Safari having to reload all of its tabs all the time. As a developer, it freaks me out because when I hear that my app is being killed in the background really quickly after you're leaving it, I think it's my fault.
00:29:32 ◼ ► It's certainly my problem. But I think, "Oh no, I'm taking too many resources." Or, "I'm holding a lock open too long and the system is killing me."
00:29:41 ◼ ► - It's not like you're running on the watch. You're running on this thing with gigs of RAM and this incredibly powerful CPU. And it's like, "Oh sorry, I kill you."
00:29:47 ◼ ► And I know it has happened before. It's reasonable for you to think about that. But it is not just your app. It's every app I use.
00:29:52 ◼ ► - In a way that's comforting because it makes it so that I guess it probably isn't my fault. On the other side of it though, I can't seem to do anything about it.
00:30:06 ◼ ► - Yeah, that's a fun trick. And if I'm playing audio, that seems to be okay. If you're playing audio or doing turn-by-turn tracking, it will keep you open in the background.
00:30:16 ◼ ► - Yeah, I was going to say, you have the easy out of like, "Look, my app literally is meant to play audio in the background so you're not going to kill me because I'm playing audio."
00:30:25 ◼ ► - Well, and literally, I'm hearing reports from lots of people now of like, they pause the app for like 10 seconds and go back and it has to relaunch after being paused for a very short time.
00:30:34 ◼ ► So, it, oh god, I just, what are they doing over there? Like, it seems like every release of this godforsaken series of OS's in 13, every version of it fixes some stuff but then breaks some new stuff.
00:30:50 ◼ ► Like, it's just, ugh, I don't know what is going on over there but they have serious problems in software quality right now.
00:30:59 ◼ ► - I'm trying to figure out like, what this whole thing is. Is this like a new regime of power saving? Is this like partly responsible for the amazing new battery life of the phones, the fact that it kills everything instantly in the background all the time?
00:31:10 ◼ ► Or is it just a bug? Like, I don't have a good explanation of this behavior but it's from a, you know, forget about a developer of like, "Oh, my app is getting killed."
00:31:23 ◼ ► The good part is they actually did make app launch faster in 13, so they relaunch really fast. And if the app is good, it does resume position.
00:31:31 ◼ ► But I can still tell it's relaunching. Like, I see the friggin' splash screen in the apps. Like, it's just, I don't understand what's going on.
00:31:38 ◼ ► And I was thinking as a user, like, oh, maybe there's some new thing that apps have to comply with to get better behavior and to indicate that they shouldn't be killed.
00:31:46 ◼ ► That might still be true, but like, it's just not a good experience. And I'm mostly cranky about this because I chose 13.2. I had planned this ahead of time.
00:31:55 ◼ ► 13.2 is my release that I'm going to update all my stuff, so I did. So I, you know, updated from 12 to 13.2.
00:32:01 ◼ ► And, you know, I haven't seen things crashing. My phone's not rebooting. None of my things got, you know, bricked or anything on the update.
00:32:10 ◼ ► And it's mostly been fine, but this multitasking thing, particularly on the iPad where I'm frequently doing multitasking and have lots of things being juggled at once, relatively speaking, it is a significant downgrade in the experience and I hope they sort it out.
00:32:25 ◼ ► It's just like, not only from the developer point of view, too, like, I am just, I am at my wits end with being an iOS developer right now. Like, I feel like every time there's a new condition that our apps get killed for, which, and I was talking about this on Under the Radar this week, too, like, there used to be back in the olden days, you had the low memory warnings.
00:32:47 ◼ ► And there's an API for that where if the system is low on memory and your app is still running, it will call a certain function in your app and post a certain notification that you can respond to to do things like drop some cached content or do something to reduce your memory usage at runtime.
00:33:03 ◼ ► And then if it needs memory still and you haven't reduced it enough, it will kill your app, like, a little while later.
00:33:08 ◼ ► But there's now a whole bunch of other conditions that your app will be killed for, things like using too much CPU time within a certain window or writing too much disk or other conditions that your app will get killed for now, but not only are these mostly undocumented, but there's also no warning API in place for any of them.
00:33:29 ◼ ► So you just get these crash reports that you just got killed for using too much CPU time, and it's like, okay, I can tell my app to slow certain things down in code if I get a warning ahead of time that I'm nearing some kind of limit.
00:33:43 ◼ ► But again, these limits are mostly undocumented, and they change between OS releases, and there's no notification API to tell me that I'm getting near a limit, so all I'm left with is, okay, I just get killed every so often for reasons that you just made up in this OS release and didn't tell me about.
00:34:01 ◼ ► And there's nothing I can do about it, and a stack trace when you have a CPU usage termination is usually not very useful, so I don't really know what my app was really doing during that, and so it's just really, combine that with stuff like this new termination problem in 13.2, and the problems of 13.0 and 13.1 that also broke all of our apps in different ways.
00:34:23 ◼ ► It's a really rough time to be an Apple developer right now. It's leaving such an incredibly sour taste in my mouth that not only can Apple not get its stuff together on their own software, but now they're making my life hard and making things bad for me and my customers for my software,
00:34:41 ◼ ► because the environment that it's running in is both unstable itself and is acting increasingly hostile towards my app. It's like they don't even want us there.
00:34:52 ◼ ► Yeah, I couldn't agree with this more, and I've been really grumpy about this lately. Not only is the documentation crap, as we've been talking about repeatedly over the last few weeks, but something I noticed is that with Vignette, I was getting killed from time to time because I was writing too many contact updates too quickly, and that is completely undocumented.
00:35:15 ◼ ► And the crashes were extremely odd and weird and not helpful at all, and there was no way for me to do anything and throttle it, just like you were saying. I mean, you were saying the exact same thing, Marco. There was nothing I could do about it because there was no limit that I knew about.
00:35:32 ◼ ► And I asked around with people I know internally and got some potential answers, but it's just extraordinarily frustrating that I am at least an okay developer, and I can work around these limitations as long as you tell me what the limitations are.
00:35:52 ◼ ► And if you're not going to tell me, then what am I supposed to do? It's absolutely infuriating. I look at what Apple's doing, and I am impressed. I don't know if we're even going to talk about the AirPod Pro.
00:36:08 ◼ ► We'll talk about the AirPod Pros today, but they're doing so much so well, and yet at the same time, so much of these fundamental things are falling through the cracks, and it's very, very frustrating at best, and just morale-killing at worst.
00:36:27 ◼ ► And I'm in this game for a lot less time than you, Marco, but it is very, very frustrating trying to keep up with all the different ways Apple changes their minds and opinions and rules and regulations, and it's tiring.
00:36:42 ◼ ► As developers, when the platform is basically quicksand below our feet, and when the platform is both rapidly changing and has a bunch of its own bugs that keep changing as well, so the APIs are changing, the language is changing, the UI framework is changing, the platform is unstable, every OS release introduces new problems that we have to deal with,
00:37:07 ◼ ► plus we have all these undocumented requirements that keep propping up in point releases and everything, add all that together, and I don't have time to work on features to make my app better, because I'm just churning, working on just trying to keep up with the quicksand that my app is supposed to be built upon, trying to keep up with Apple's changes, and the bugs and the APIs and deprecated things and changes in new OSes.
00:37:33 ◼ ► I am having such a hard time just keeping up with the bare minimum, I have no time to make my app better for my customers. I don't know what Apple expects us to do here.
00:37:45 ◼ ► Yeah, I don't know either. Alright, let's try to talk about something happier. Maybe Samsung unveiled a new foldable flip phone concept. When did Mike get access to our show notes? What's going on here?
00:37:57 ◼ ► This is what I was talking about last week, which is why it's a follow-up for the foldable phones, and I think it was like two weeks ago we talked about Mike's foldable thing, and then last week I said I was thinking about taking a "normal" size, you know, iPhone-sized phone and thinking of ways to fold that, and that's exactly what Samsung showed.
00:38:17 ◼ ► They showed a traditionally proportioned phone, and it folds like a flip phone, like the hinges right across the middle of the phone, so it becomes half as tall as it was.
00:38:33 ◼ ► And I think that's just a concept, I think, or maybe it's a thing they're making, it was more of a teaser. I saw it, and it makes some sense to me in that it is more easily pocketable, but I'm still not entirely sure of the merits.
00:38:51 ◼ ► It certainly seems like it would make a better fidget toy than the Galaxy Fold, which seems hard to take out of your pocket and idly flip open and closed, but this is much closer to the pre-smartphone feature phone, dumb phone, flip phone era where you can take it and go "flip flip flip flip flip" if they make the hinge good.
00:39:09 ◼ ► On the other hand, I still feel terrible about the screen being folded over on the inside of a phone, that really tight radius on the inside curve and the inevitable crease you're going to get there, and yada yada yada. Anyway, just a funny coincidence that their timing of the release was around about the same time we were talking about on our show.
00:39:43 ◼ ► I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
00:40:07 ◼ ► I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
00:40:27 ◼ ► I couldn't understand it, and then eventually I raised my head above the waterline of my daily routine and saw on Twitter that everyone was saying that the HomePod update had been pulled because it had been bricking HomePods, and they don't have a good way to restore them to health with a special button press or USB-C cable or whatever.
00:40:47 ◼ ► Any kind of diagnostic stuff they have is not really user accessible, so if it really, truly hoses itself, you kind of got to give it back to Apple, and the Grinch brings it to his workshop and fixes it for you and then gives it back.
00:40:59 ◼ ► So what I had heard, and this is my internal explanation of this, is that it was bricking HomePods and that Apple, in theory, stopped signing the update, so you could download it, but when it would try to validate the signature or whatever, it would fail, and then it would just download it again and try to validate the signature again.
00:41:17 ◼ ► I don't know if this is true, this is what I had been told, and it explains why my HomePod spent most of that day repeatedly downloading 900 megabytes of OS update, only to find that it could not install it.
00:41:31 ◼ ► So I guess I dodged a bullet there because it didn't brick my HomePod, and I was trying to update after that happened, and today I ran the update for real, and I got 13.2.1, and it did not brick my HomePod as far as I know.
00:41:43 ◼ ► Yeah, I just heard someone turn off the lights before I started the thing, and it worked, so that's good, but just add that to the pile of iOS 13-related disasters.
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00:42:56 ◼ ► I wear Bombas socks, I wore them all summer, and this was before they were sponsored, I heard they were good, and I bought them, and I check them out, and they're really, really nice. These are not your standard cheap 12-pack bulk pair of socks.
00:43:10 ◼ ► These are really nice socks, they're soft, they're thick in just the right places, they're really well made, they fit, because you actually order different size socks depending on how big your feet are, instead of a one-size-fits-all kind of thing, which basically means it fits nobody.
00:43:24 ◼ ► They're really nice, I gotta say, the Bombas, they're just really great socks. So, you can see for yourself at bombas.com/atp, and if you use that link, you will save 20% on your first purchase. Once again, that's bombas.com/atp to save 20%. bombas.com/atp. Thank you to Bombas for sponsoring our show.
00:43:45 ◼ ► While I was gone, Apple announced AirPods Pro, which came out, when did they release the AirPods with the Qi case? That was six months ago, something like that?
00:44:00 ◼ ► I bought a new set of AirPods whenever that happened, because my first gen bought, within the first couple of weeks, AirPods were basically useless at that point. It was apparently March 2019, says Rafola from the chat. Thank you, Rafola.
00:44:12 ◼ ► So, I bought new AirPods in March, I'm not really interested in buying new AirPods right now, but oh man, these sound good. So, I don't know, do either of you have a pair at this point?
00:44:26 ◼ ► I do. I knew Marco would have them, and he doesn't either. He's been waiting for this moment. The old AirPods didn't fit his ears, but he wanted to use AirPods, so this is potentially, and we'll hear what the result is, a solution, because these are shaped entirely different than the old AirPods, and they work differently. So, Marco, how do your ears enjoy the new AirPods?
00:44:49 ◼ ► So, I have to start this with a giant disclaimer. I've only used them for a total of about an hour so far, because they just came tonight. So, I used them as much as I could before the show, but this is still a very early, like, first impressions kind of thing, not a full review.
00:45:07 ◼ ► I love that the case is not really that much bigger than the old case. It's mostly just like the old case turned sideways.
00:45:16 ◼ ► Yeah, it really is actually. Yeah, yeah. I was afraid when we started hearing rumors about these that it would be some kind of, like, giant bulbous case that wouldn't fit in the iPod nano pocket in your jeans, but it still does. Like, it sticks out a little bit on some jeans, but, like, it's, you know, it's very similarly sized to the old AirPods case. You just turn it sideways, and it's that way. So, it's fine.
00:45:40 ◼ ► And that makes me very happy, because all I've wanted all this time is some kind of headphones I could keep in my pants pocket and always have around and be comfortable that way.
00:45:50 ◼ ► And only the previous AirPods ever really did that for me, but, again, as mentioned, I had comfort issues with them and falling out issues with them.
00:45:59 ◼ ► And I also, you know, controlling them always sucked. Like, doing, like, the double tap, that always sucked.
00:46:05 ◼ ► And so the AirPod Pros, AirPods Pro, this, oh, God, we're all gonna mess this up constantly. AirPods Pro, they fix a lot of these problems.
00:46:14 ◼ ► So, first of all, they come with three different sized tips, very similar to the way the Powerbeats do, although these aren't the same tips, they're different shapes, but, you know, three different sized tips. Very, very happy about that.
00:46:26 ◼ ► I tried them with the size that comes on them, like the medium size, I guess it is. The medium size seems to fit me great. I don't think I'm gonna change to the other two sizes.
00:46:35 ◼ ► I ran the cool test that it does, where, like, it plays some music and listens using the exterior microphones. It listens to see, like, how much sound is leaking out and how much is getting in.
00:46:48 ◼ ► And that kind of tells you, like, whether your fit is right or whether they're not sealing properly. And the test passed for me, so that was pretty cool.
00:46:55 ◼ ► So I think I will probably be sticking with the medium sized tips that come on them. And after about an hour of wearing them, I felt fine.
00:47:04 ◼ ► It wasn't as comfortable as over-ear headphones are for me, because it was still something in my ear. And if I'm gonna be wearing something for, like, an hour or more, I would rather wear either over-ears or aftershocks, the bone conduction ones,
00:47:19 ◼ ► because those, similar thing, like, they don't have anything in your ear. But if I'm gonna have something in my ear, this is the most comfortable one I've found yet.
00:47:32 ◼ ► You know, again, I'll see how it goes with longer sessions, but so far so good. Noise canceling on them, I haven't had too much time again to play with it yet, but it seems to be, like, moderate strength.
00:47:45 ◼ ► It's nothing like what you get with the big over-ear Sonys or Bose's, nothing like that at all. But it is, you know, it reduces sound somewhat.
00:47:54 ◼ ► I actually like keeping it in the transparency mode. I don't think I've mentioned on the show yet, I have the new Bose, I think it's called the 400s or something, or 300s, some number that is like the new big Bose headphones.
00:48:07 ◼ ► I have those, I got those a couple months ago. One of my favorite features on them is that you can turn noise canceling totally off, and it uses the microphones on the outside to pipe outside sound into the headphones in addition to your music.
00:48:20 ◼ ► And so it's as though you're not wearing headphones at all. So if you want to be somewhere where you want to hear the outside environment, which I always do if I'm, like, outside, you know, I pretty much only want noise canceling if I'm on a plane or something.
00:48:31 ◼ ► But, like, otherwise, I want to hear what's going on around me. Again, one of the reasons I like AfterShokz so much. But, so the Bose has this feature where it could pipe sound in from the outside continuously in addition to your music, and I love that feature.
00:48:43 ◼ ► Well, the new AirPods do that now, too. They have this feature, they call it transparency mode, and it's really, really nice. It feels like you're not wearing them at all, because you can hear what's going on in addition to your podcast or whatever.
00:48:54 ◼ ► So I love that feature. I'm probably going to keep it in transparency mode most of the time. And it's nice that it has some isolation and some noise canceling ability, because one of the problems that AirPods have always had is, like, it's really hard to use AirPods in very loud places, like on planes or, like, train station or whatever, because they just didn't seal very well, and it was very likely that your outside sound would overpower the AirPods sound, and you'd have to either crank it up to, like, unhealthily loud levels of the sound, or you'd have to, like,
00:49:02 ◼ ► I think both the improved passive isolation from the rubber tape, which is a very good thing, and the improved passive isolation from the rubber tape, which is a very good thing, and the improved passive isolation from the rubber tape, which is a very good thing, and the improved passive isolation from the rubber tape, which is a very good thing, and the improved passive isolation from the rubber tape, which is a very good thing, and the improved passive isolation from the rubber tape, which is a very good thing.
00:49:26 ◼ ► These, I think, will solve that. I think both the improved passive isolation from the rubber tips and the active noise canceling, I think, will be good enough that you'll probably be able to wear these on, like, a plane or a ferry or a train, and you'll probably be able to hear your stuff okay.
00:49:45 ◼ ► Again, I don't think it's going to be anywhere near as strong in that kind of scenario as over-ear, you know, big active noise canceling models, but for earbuds, they're great. Now, controls. They've totally changed the control scheme here.
00:50:00 ◼ ► Instead of tapping your ear, which I hated on the EarPods, because it's, like, it's already uncomfortable in there, and now you're making me, like, strike my ear, like, double tapping them to do, like, that was a terrible thing.
00:50:13 ◼ ► So with these, they built in pressure sensors into the sticks, stems, whatever they're called.
00:50:21 ◼ ► So you squeeze the stick. It doesn't actually move. It isn't an actual button. It's like a squeeze sensor, and it makes a little click sound in there. So it sounds kind of like you're clicking a button, and then it mimics the old headphone gestures.
00:50:38 ◼ ► So the old headphone clickers that they would have when they were wired, one press is play/pause, two presses is seek forward, three presses is seek back.
00:50:46 ◼ ► And then you can hold it for a few seconds, and that is, you can set it to either Siri or changing the noise canceling mode between off noise canceling and transparency.
00:50:58 ◼ ► And you can set those differently for each ear. So if you want, you could make, like, the left one change noise canceling mode, and the right one invoke Siri if you want to.
00:51:06 ◼ ► Does it announce what you're doing when you change the noise canceling? Is there a voice? Is there a sound? How do you know which mode you're in?
00:51:11 ◼ ► It plays a sound effect, and the sound effect is different depending on what mode it's entering. I haven't learned them yet, so I wish it would just announce it with voice, the way, like, the Bose and the Sonys have done that for a long time, which is very nice.
00:51:24 ◼ ► It's like noise canceling, aww, and that's really nice. This doesn't do that. This just plays some kind of pleasant apple chime, and it's three different pleasant apple chimes depending on what it's doing, so I gotta figure that out. But I'm sure if you use them regularly, you'll figure it out.
00:51:36 ◼ ► But you can customize this. You can say, like, if you never want to use, say, transparency mode, if you just want it to switch between noise canceling and off, you can uncheck transparency to be one of the options that cycles through.
00:51:49 ◼ ► So you can pick, of the three options, which two or three it cycles through, so that's pretty cool. The old tap gestures are not present here. You cannot also do double taps on them to do the old things. It's only the squeezing the sticks now.
00:52:05 ◼ ► And I've found so far in, again, very limited use so far, squeezing the stick is, it takes a little bit of getting used to it, like exactly the type of squeeze it wants, but once you get it, it seems pretty reliable.
00:52:19 ◼ ► It seems like, like once you get the hang of what it wants you to do, it's pretty good. And the little audio click sound that it makes when you've done a button press is very helpful to have that kind of feedback to know, like, I did it.
00:52:32 ◼ ► And that makes it especially helpful when you have to do a double or triple click gesture to do forward or back. The little click sound it makes makes that a lot easier to do reliably.
00:52:42 ◼ ► So I'm very happy with that. There is still no way to adjust volume on them. That's a little annoying, but, you know, if you used AirPods, you know what that's like, because that's how it's always been.
00:52:55 ◼ ► So I guess if you have Apple Watch or your phone nearby, you just do it on that. Or I guess you could use Siri, but that would suck.
00:53:02 ◼ ► I've done that though. Sometimes my hands are full of stuff in the kitchen and I do want to change the volume and I have actually asked the dingus to do it.
00:53:15 ◼ ► So control-wise, like they're not as good as headphones that have like dedicated buttons or, you know, a large touch surface. They're not as good as that.
00:53:23 ◼ ► But for tiny little earbuds, they're okay and they're certainly a lot better than the original AirPods in the control department, in my opinion.
00:53:47 ◼ ► But they do sound as good as okay full-size headphones. I would even say they sound as good as decent full-size headphones.
00:54:01 ◼ ► They're on par with the Sonys, like the Sony WH-XM1000 Mark II and III. They're similar to that in overall quality.
00:54:11 ◼ ► They're not the same tonal balance. They have a little bit better bass, a little bit smoother mid-range. They're a little weak on the treble response.
00:54:28 ◼ ► What that means in headphone terms is like, how wide does it seem like the room that you're in is?
00:54:35 ◼ ► Does it sound like you're in a big, airy open space or does it sound like people have shoved speakers into your ears?
00:54:40 ◼ ► When you have larger, better headphones, they use tricks to simulate a wide sound stage and it makes it sound more pleasant.
00:54:50 ◼ ► But again, these are earbuds. And the whole time I was wearing them, I was testing them, I was listening to all these different music tracks and things I test with.
00:54:56 ◼ ► And the whole time I was thinking like, these are earbuds. I can't believe sound this good is coming out of earbuds.
00:55:10 ◼ ► And overall, it's a very pleasing and offensive sound. Almost every headphone I've ever tested, I can point to something about its sound as being pretty severely bad in some way.
00:55:21 ◼ ► Either it's way too boomy bass that makes it hard to hear anything else, or the mid-range where all the vocals and guitars are is all sucked out and withdrawn.
00:55:31 ◼ ► Or the treble is so aggressively rolled off to make it sound warm that you get no detail in the crispness range up there.
00:55:45 ◼ ► But it's to the point where that could even just be what their audio engineers find as their personal preference of how it should be.
00:55:54 ◼ ► Again, I would like more treble if it's my preference, but overall it's just good sound all around.
00:56:06 ◼ ► It's just overall good, very pleasing, nothing like the old Beats where the bass was too crazy overpowering.
00:56:17 ◼ ► Considering the convenience factor of having something that can fit in my pocket and finally be comfortable for probably long spans here.
00:56:29 ◼ ► Another problem I had with regular AirPods is that as I walked they would fall out because as you walk your ear moves slightly.
00:56:56 ◼ ► Finally, I think I will finally be able to join the AirPods revolution here that everyone else joined two years ago, whenever that was.
00:57:23 ◼ ► And to have that in this convenient package with all the first party integration and support and everything.
00:57:34 ◼ ► That's not surprising that Marco couldn't find an AirPod that he liked until Apple made a pro model.
00:57:44 ◼ ► One other thing I heard about these, speaking of pro stuff, and I don't know if this is true, I just heard it from one person.
00:58:00 ◼ ► The other thing about these is, judging by the pictures, it looks like there's more volume in there.
00:58:14 ◼ ► Maybe I'm being fooled by the fact that the tip has nothing in it, but it looks like it's part of the thing.
00:58:22 ◼ ► They say they come with H1, like there's no H2, I think, or any other kind of chip name changing.
00:58:27 ◼ ► But I would love to see someone measure the audio latency to see if it actually is better.
00:58:32 ◼ ► I mean, the actual, the AirPod itself, if you discount the volume that is taken up by the squishy tip,
00:58:48 ◼ ► The stick length is something I immediately, like when I first looked at these, I was all thrown off by the sense of scale.
00:58:53 ◼ ► What I originally thought was that they took the AirPods case, you know, take the traditional AirPods case with the top facing up,
00:59:08 ◼ ► I've already pointed out it's not that, they turned it sideways and made it 15% bigger or whatever, which is fine.
00:59:13 ◼ ► But then I was like, "The sticks?" I'm like, "Are the sticks shorter, or am I just fooled because the proportions have changed?"
00:59:19 ◼ ► But now it turns out the sticks are shorter, which is a little bit strange to me because, I know some people think the AirPods look a little dorky because the sticks are a little too long.
00:59:28 ◼ ► But I, well, alright, so I'm in the minority here, but I don't care how dorky I look wearing AirPods for many obvious reasons.
00:59:40 ◼ ► I think during the very first three days they were out, you might have looked dorky. That time has long passed.
00:59:47 ◼ ► Because of the AirPods. But as far as I'm concerned, make the sticks longer if that gives you more battery, first of all.
00:59:55 ◼ ► And second of all, if the main interaction with these things is grabbing a thing and squeezing it, another few millimeters couldn't hurt because you're grabbing it and squeezing it.
01:00:03 ◼ ► Anyway, I haven't tried them so I have no idea if this is actually an issue. It would seem weird to me that they would decide to take that hit.
01:00:18 ◼ ► Like, I'm looking at it like there's not much room between the bottom where the stick rests and the bottom of the case.
01:00:22 ◼ ► You could angle them maybe, I don't know, I'd see like an x-ray to see how much room there is to finagle them.
01:00:29 ◼ ► And obviously it doesn't matter in terms of battery life they have, according to Apple and according to all the tests I've seen of them, pretty much exactly match the battery life of the non-Pro ones.
01:00:36 ◼ ► Which is a feat because obviously these use more battery because they're sensing with a microphone, the noise cancelling mode and everything.
01:00:42 ◼ ► With noise cancelling they knock off half an hour. So Apple says 4.5 hours per charge with noise cancelling and 5 without.
01:00:54 ◼ ► So it's not like they desperately needed more battery, but I personally wouldn't have minded more battery.
01:01:00 ◼ ► And I was looking at the cutaways and trying to figure out what the hell is the battery in this?
01:01:03 ◼ ► I'm wondering if this changes the equation on the amount of mass in the AirPods that's attributable to the battery.
01:01:10 ◼ ► All that stuff. Apple has been asked about that I think even more recently than our program about it and then continues to say that they're mostly concentrating on recyclability.
01:01:18 ◼ ► Recyclability is good, but an ability to be recycled is not the same as actually being recycled.
01:01:36 ◼ ► I'm assuming they don't say, "Yeah, we're recycling these and chuck them in the wastebasket."
01:01:40 ◼ ► But anyway, see previous episode if they did that the environmental impact would be a fraction of what it is to wrap and deliver one MacBook Pro probably.
01:01:50 ◼ ► Anyway, I am interested in the sort of potential for a battery case for your AirPod Pro.
01:01:59 ◼ ► Make the sticks a little bit thicker and give us even wider battery life because I think the battery life on these is fine when they're new.
01:02:07 ◼ ► But as someone who's on his second pair of AirPods, there's no getting around the fact that after a certain number of cycles these batteries are going to be shot and they're not replaceable.
01:02:16 ◼ ► And I don't want to have to buy new ones especially now that the price for new ones has increased to $250 if this is the model you get.
01:02:22 ◼ ► So you make that battery bigger, it lasts longer, it gets drained less severely, it doesn't go all the way down to 5% power or whatever.
01:02:49 ◼ ► And it also, again, it comes with all three different ear tip sizes of the rubber tips that it can make.
01:02:56 ◼ ► And I'm sure in three seconds there's going to be like a million on Amazon too in case these don't fit you.
01:03:07 ◼ ► So if you need more rubber tips you can apparently get them from an Apple store for $4.
01:03:16 ◼ ► Of course, but still, to buy a physical product from Apple for $4, there's not a lot of things that they sell you at that price range.
01:03:35 ◼ ► But yeah, I wasn't interested in these at all because I don't like any headphone things that go into my ear canal in any way whatsoever.
01:03:49 ◼ ► Although the first couple rounds of earbuds on the iPod were a little uncomfortable for me.
01:03:56 ◼ ► You're not actually in in my ear but you're in my ear and of course I find them very comfortable and I wear them all day long and they don't fall out and it's great.
01:04:06 ◼ ► Or if you want that in-ear experience or if you want nose cancelling, none of those things interest me.
01:04:10 ◼ ► But hearing everybody's rave reviews about them, like, well maybe you only think you don't like in-ear ones.
01:04:28 ◼ ► Say I'm on the fence about whether I want to buy these and I hear everybody talk about them.
01:04:37 ◼ ► But you don't, first of all, you probably can't go into an Apple store and try some and stick them in your ears.
01:04:47 ◼ ► And no matter how much the Apple employees wipe that thing down with their little magical cloth that's supposedly doing something other than smearing stuff around, it's probably not going to happen.
01:04:55 ◼ ► And even for people in your family or friends, you probably don't want to take their ear wax covered thing and shove it into your ear.
01:05:04 ◼ ► I mean I suppose you could bring your own tips but the tips probably get wear and tear being torn on and off.
01:05:15 ◼ ► Now you can buy them and return them as like that 14 day whatever their return window is I suppose.
01:05:28 ◼ ► Wait, before we move on, how much do you want to bet these cost less than the Mac Pro wheels?
01:05:42 ◼ ► Not because there are any particular deficiencies with the existing ones, because the noise canceling, I mean even though it's not a feature I really want, hearing that is just kind of like a more tame version of noise canceling and not as oppressive as the other ones.
01:06:00 ◼ ► There's a lot of people saying like that because there's this little air channel that it doesn't give you that weird pressure feeling, which I don't mind.
01:06:09 ◼ ► And the other thing I had been assuming, and maybe Margaret you can tell me if you've experienced this, I assumed the transparency mode wasn't just playing sounds from the outside, but was concentrating kind of like voice boost on the human vocal frequency range.
01:06:24 ◼ ► And sending those through but continuing to filter out things outside of the human vocal range. Can you tell if that's the case?
01:06:30 ◼ ► Again, this has been very limited use and only in one house like with a TV on for reference.
01:06:40 ◼ ► It doesn't sound totally unfiltered in transparency mode, but it does sound like it's not strongly filtered.
01:06:48 ◼ ► Any perceived difference in outside sound versus what was being piped in could have been chucked up to the microphone's response pattern to different frequencies rather than a deliberate filtering.
01:07:04 ◼ ► If you're in some kind of transparency mode, you don't want filtering. You want it to be as neutral as possible.
01:07:10 ◼ ► You want to hear everything so you can hear the truck that's about to run you over even though it's very low frequency.
01:07:26 ◼ ► This makes me think all the more about the future potential for Apple's health products.
01:07:35 ◼ ► But in it, Tim Cook, I think it was, once again reiterated how important Apple thinks health is in the context of the Apple Watch and everything like that.
01:07:43 ◼ ► Apple is taking baby steps into other health-related realms whether people are noticing or not by giving you a small thing that you can stick in your ear that listens to sound on the outside world and plays it amplified into your ear canal.
01:07:56 ◼ ► I mean it's not that far to go from the AirPods Pro a couple of generations down into something that perhaps isn't a purpose-built hearing aid but can absolutely serve that purpose for a large portion of the population.
01:08:09 ◼ ► And I think they could bring to it the same thing they bring to their cameras and their phones.
01:08:16 ◼ ► The room for innovation in hearing aids and other assistive devices for computational enhancement rather than just dumb amplification of sound is pretty big.
01:08:29 ◼ ► Apple could innovate in that space. They have the technology, the frameworks, the know-how, the ability to make very small, very fast hardware in a stylish package that can do a lot of sophisticated audio stuff and then having people on their staff who know how to do that programming.
01:08:51 ◼ ► They could have a product like that out by next year and although they're not positioning the AirPods Pro in any way as an assistive hearing device, I think even hardware-wise some capability for that might already be there and could even be applied to the software update if that's something Apple wanted to do.
01:09:07 ◼ ► A couple more quick notes before I forget. Number one, I think these actually might last longer than the old AirPods did simply because there's a lot less potential for the earwax to gum up the important parts on the inside because the different rubbery tip structure I think will keep your earwax further from the drivers and from the actual little speaker grill on the inside.
01:09:29 ◼ ► And then secondly, one of the reasons why I think these will sound better to a lot of people is that the kind of like loose resting there earbud style that the old AirPods were sounds very different depending on how good of a seal your ear is making with them.
01:09:45 ◼ ► If you have a good seal, you'll hear good bass response. If you don't, you won't and it's a huge variation depending on how good that seal is and with the AirPods Pro, I'm having to keep trying to say AirPods Pro.
01:10:00 ◼ ► With the AirPods Pro, the rubber tip structure there keeps a much more consistent seal. There's much less variation. You put it in and it's sealed and it stays that way. You don't have to push it or adjust it or anything like that to really get anything there.
01:10:18 ◼ ► The way that AirPods originally sound so different to different people, I think the AirPods Pro will sound good to almost everybody because of the different sealing structure it has there.
01:10:32 ◼ ► So an unfair question because you weren't the biggest fan of the AirPods. For someone like me who loves his AirPods and doesn't fly but a couple of times a year, is it worth it to get new ones? Because sitting here now, I feel like this is one of those like really good holiday gifts, right?
01:10:50 ◼ ► Other than ATP shirts at ATP.FM/store. It's a really good holiday gift in that it's something I want but I don't want to pay for myself because I have perfectly good AirPods. Where do you feel this lands? Is it something that's significantly better on account of the noise cancellation or the sound or what have you?
01:11:09 ◼ ► Or do you think it's one of those, "Yeah, next time I get AirPods, get the Pros or maybe put it on the holiday list," or something like that?
01:11:16 ◼ ► I mean, if you're an AirPods power user and you're happy with them the way they are, you know, fine, then I don't think you need to rush to get these until like your next upgrade cycle.
01:11:28 ◼ ► I would say like if you're buying new ones and you're faced with the decision of spending like whatever it is, the 80-ish dollars more for these, I would say no question, get the Pros.
01:11:41 ◼ ► They are that much better unless you are super in love with the other ones and you don't want what the Pros offer. But like the Pros are so much better in like for me, in comfort and in those features and the controls and the sound quality.
01:11:55 ◼ ► To me, it's a no-brainer. But if you are super happy with the old AirPods, yeah, keep them. But if you are unhappy with any of those factors, make the jump, man. They're so good.
01:12:08 ◼ ► If Casey was over your house and said, "Can I try out your AirPods?" Would you hand them to him and watch him stick them in his ears? Like how would you parse that socially speaking?
01:12:31 ◼ ► You can allow your bodily fluids to mingle. Some real-time follow-up from some forum posts, a couple of people did go to Apple stores and the Apple store did allow them to try the AirPods. They had disinfectant wipes and like I said, the people wipe stuff down.
01:12:46 ◼ ► What would be even better is if they did like the doctor's office ear scope thingy, you know, when they're going to look in your ear with the little thing with the light, they put on the little plastic tip, they look in your ear, they look in your other ear, they pop off the plastic tip into the little garbage can which hopefully goes to recycling somewhere and they're done.
01:13:02 ◼ ► Like they get these tips are so cheap that Apple should have like a giant bucket of them and anytime anyone wants to try out AirPods, they say, "Sure." AirPods Pro, they take out two fresh new tips, pop them in, let them try them and then when they're done, they rip those tips out and throw them into the cool little plastic recycling bin. That would be a better system than trying to use disinfectant wipes.
01:13:19 ◼ ► But disinfectant wipes is apparently what we've got. So if you're wondering whether you can try them on, you can either, if you're really good friends with Marco, try his or you can go to an Apple store and brave the disinfectant wipes.
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01:15:19 ◼ ► One small item that has been in the notes for a few weeks, only because it's one of those things I see on the internet and then don't hear anything about.
01:15:27 ◼ ► And I, you know, the obvious explanation is that it was total BS. That's why you don't hear anything about it.
01:15:32 ◼ ► But it could also be that nobody cares. Several weeks ago, someone was like, "Oh, I saw one of the new Mac Pros in the Apple store."
01:15:41 ◼ ► One other person chimed in and said, "Yeah, I saw it too." I think it was on Twitter or something. And then radio silence.
01:15:47 ◼ ► Now, there are lots of explanations for this. One is that there is at least one PC manufacturer case that looks exactly like the Mac Pro.
01:15:59 ◼ ► It doesn't actually slide off from the top. It actually just opens on the sides or whatever.
01:16:03 ◼ ► There's tons of YouTube videos of people showing this off and like, "I'm making an amazing Mac Pro."
01:16:08 ◼ ► Or sometimes they show the video making you think it's the Mac Pro. Like, it really looks dead on in a video or in photos.
01:16:15 ◼ ► But it's not. It's not an Apple case. By the way, if you're wondering how you can tell whether it's an Apple case,
01:16:19 ◼ ► the one thing that these PC case makers were not brave enough to do was put a giant Apple logo on the sides.
01:16:30 ◼ ► And I don't understand how they can continue selling that and not get sued out of existence. But that shoe hasn't dropped yet.
01:16:36 ◼ ► But anyway, that exists. So maybe these people were confused and they didn't see a new Mac Pro in an Apple store.
01:16:49 ◼ ► Second thing I thought for at least several days is, "Maybe Apple does have the new Mac Pros in the Apple store."
01:16:54 ◼ ► It's not like they don't have them. We saw them running software at WWDC in June. Like, they exist.
01:17:10 ◼ ► Nobody ever mentions those. They're invisible. Like, there's also Apple TVs probably hooked up and those are kind of meant to be invisible.
01:17:17 ◼ ► But my conclusion was, after several days of this, is that these people were mistaken and/or joking and Mac Pros are not in stores.
01:17:29 ◼ ► The only other related tidbit we have on this, people were asking like, "When is there going to be like a Mac Pro event?"
01:17:35 ◼ ► Like, they already did that. It was WWDC. There was an event. There was videos. There was music. There was a dramatic reveal on stage.
01:17:46 ◼ ► That said, there is some Final Cut Pro event coming up and other places where Apple could have a coming out party for the fact that you can now go online and pledge your children's college fund to Apple in exchange for one of these computers.
01:18:00 ◼ ► They could do that, but there's not going to be another event event. The news today was that FCC filing for this thing came through.
01:18:07 ◼ ► I don't understand how that relates to the timing of the release. Fall is a long time. I think it ends in the middle of December. I'm still patiently waiting.
01:18:15 ◼ ► I don't even care about when they ship, really. I just want to see the pricing so I can figure out how much of my children's college fund is going to disappear into this computer.
01:18:30 ◼ ► That time of recording has not yet happened and that's what I'm waiting for. I'm not waiting for an event. I don't care about the FCC filing and I'm pretty sure these machines do not exist in Apple stores.
01:18:40 ◼ ► Alright, moving on to Ask AGP. James Shield would like to know, "I have a 2013 MacBook Air that I'm waiting to replace until Apple fixes the keyboards, but should I also wait until they move to ARM? Are ARM Mac laptops and the associated huge boosts in performance and battery life just around the corner?
01:18:55 ◼ ► Or will I be hanging onto this already six-year-old laptop for as long as John is kept as Mac Pro?"
01:19:00 ◼ ► I agree that performance and battery life should get better with ARM laptops in theory, but do we really, really, really know that? I mean, of course we don't know that.
01:19:12 ◼ ► Look at the size of the battery in the iPhone compared to the size of the battery in Apple's laptops. Consider the performance numbers. Consider the battery. I mean, obviously the screen is smaller.
01:19:22 ◼ ► If it doesn't, Apple has done something terribly wrong. It will be difficult not to make an ARM laptop that doesn't have better battery life than what we see today. Better battery life performance ratio, I should say.
01:19:38 ◼ ► No, like if you need a laptop now, you should just buy one. You'll get a useful lifetime out of that before the ARM one's coming. And do you want the very first ARM laptops? You probably want to wait for the software to settle down and whatever the transition is. It is perfectly safe to buy an Intel laptop now, especially since laptops, like I was going to say, you're only going to be able to use it for six months before the keyboard starts breaking anyway, but who knows?
01:20:02 ◼ ► That's what I would say about this actually is don't wait for ARM laptops, but if you can, wait for the ones with the keyboard that works better. That's what I would wait for. I think it's still safe to buy Intel computers.
01:20:16 ◼ ► We brought this up months and months ago when I was talking about the very real possibility that I will be buying the last Intel-based Mac Pro before the ARM transition. I have no idea when and if the entire Mac line will transition to ARM or if they would just do the laptops or who knows whatever.
01:20:34 ◼ ► But I'm resigned to the fact that it could be that I spend this huge amount of money and then the next big announcement related to the Mac that Apple has is, "Guess what? Everything's going ARM." And here I am with this giant boat anchor. I'm okay with that.
01:20:46 ◼ ► I know it's a real thing. I'm signing up for it. Because of the corner that I painted myself into, I love how I've turned this question into a Mac Pro thing.
01:20:56 ◼ ► Because of this corner that I painted myself into, I've waited 10 years. If I said, "You know what? At this point, I should really wait for the ARM Macs," come on. 10 years, you've got to just, "I made my bed. Now I'm going to lie on it."
01:21:09 ◼ ► Anyway, I would say to James, it's safe to buy an Intel Mac. It's probably not safe to buy any laptop with a butterfly keyboard in any form whatsoever.
01:21:20 ◼ ► So wait for the new keyboard if you can, but don't be afraid that you're missing out on ARM stuff, especially with laptops. You'll have a laptop for a year or two, and if they transition to ARM the day after you buy the laptop, you'll still be fine spending that year or two on an Intel one.
01:21:34 ◼ ► Yeah, I pretty much agree. I definitely agree that if you're concerned about longevity, do not buy a butterfly keyboard no matter what. You cannot trust them. Even the new materials version from this past year, it's unproven. It might last a little bit longer, but we don't know that.
01:21:51 ◼ ► So you can't trust butterfly keyboards, period. So definitely wait on that. But once we have scissor keyboards, we don't know when or really even if we're going to get ARM Macs. It could be next month. It could be in five years. It could be never. We have no idea.
01:22:11 ◼ ► Also, even when the first ones come out or if they come out, you might not want the very first generation. The second generation might be a lot better. The first generation might have problems, and the first generation you're going to have to deal with the software transition in a much more rough and early way than you will if you wait a year or two.
01:22:29 ◼ ► So really, those very first ones, they probably would be compelling in certain ways. I wouldn't expect a huge performance jump. I would expect a big battery life jump, but not a huge performance jump. But those very first ones are good. They're going to have problems. They're going to have growing pains.
01:22:46 ◼ ► And you're probably not going to want to be there on day one for the software landscape. You're probably going to want to let that shake out, let all the developers update their apps for ARM compatibility for like a year or two first. That's not to say I'm not going to buy one on day one.
01:23:01 ◼ ► But I buy everything. I think ultimately, if you're concerned with longevity of a product, you can buy an Intel MacBook as soon as they have scissor keyboards again. And then you can buy ARM whenever it's time to replace that one if they're out yet.
01:23:20 ◼ ► I don't know. I was thinking as you guys were talking, would there be a compelling reason for them to maintain both Intel and ARM? Like keep the Mac Pro on Intel stuff?
01:23:34 ◼ ► If they don't want to make a big beefy Xeon class ARM thing with all of the expensive PCI express lanes and all that, if that turns out not to be something they're interested in. The big question, the only reason they wouldn't do an Intel transition is if compatibility concerns end up trumping everything.
01:23:54 ◼ ► Maybe compatibility is more important on the high end Pro line because of software and you can't get people to port ARM, but maybe not. It's not clean, but today's Apple would absolutely do that if it made sense financially and politically in terms of getting software support for your weird ARM Macs.
01:24:13 ◼ ► I continue to think that the more likely scenario is that if Intel can't get it back together, that everybody goes to ARM. Someone sent an email earlier this week, it was like, "Oh, you keep talking about ARM Macs, but I would never want that because my cool Intel Mac, I get to run Windows and Linux and blah, blah, blah."
01:24:29 ◼ ► Linux runs on ARM. Windows runs on ARM. It doesn't mean all the software is ported and that's always the problem, but you reach a critical mass and it's like, "Look, everyone's stuff already runs on ARM. We've had these alternate ARM versions. How long does it take to switch from Intel being the default with ARM as this weird sideshow to the other way around?"
01:24:46 ◼ ► It's really entirely dependent on how well Intel executes. If Intel starts making good chips again, then the rest of the industry will just breathe a sigh of relief and get back on that train, but it's not a safe bet anymore.
01:24:59 ◼ ► So in the meantime, having ARM as a potential strategy for not just Apple, for everybody. And then if everybody does it, it becomes a lot less of a hassle and it makes much less sense to keep some portion of the Mac line on Intel.
01:25:14 ◼ ► All righty. Adam Spellbring writes, "I understand the basic reason why APFS can't be used with Time Machine. APFS doesn't support hard links, but what I don't understand is why Time Machine hasn't been updated to use symbolic links instead. Do you have any insight as to why they haven't been made compatible yet? Is it a complete rewrite of the application or do you think it's just not a priority since they've made it work with HFS Plus and there are more pressing issues? Would there be any real significant benefits to making Time Machine compatible with APFS?"
01:25:42 ◼ ► First minor correction, APFS does support hard links. It doesn't support hard links to directories, which is this weird thing that Time Machine does. Sim links are not the same thing for a variety of reasons.
01:25:55 ◼ ► As I think we've touched on in a few past episodes scattered throughout, there are obvious potential benefits to a Time Machine that is built around the capabilities of APFS, the ability to detect what has changed since the last time in an efficient manner and send just those diffs with the whole snapshotting functionality.
01:26:17 ◼ ► Apple has been creeping up on that. So from the day APFS shipped everywhere, it's been clear that Time Machine, if it was going to work with APFS, shouldn't just be like, "Oh, it works exactly the same way it does with HFS Plus."
01:26:32 ◼ ► And Apple clearly agrees because they could have made APFS support hard links directories, but they didn't because APFS has many other features that are better, particularly with its snapshot functionality.
01:26:41 ◼ ► Apple has been really slow about, "Okay, well, when Apple, are you going to rewrite Time Machine to take advantage of all these cool features?"
01:26:49 ◼ ► In every release, there's been one more little thing that's a stepping stone to that. I think we talked about it when, after WWDC, the file system session.
01:26:59 ◼ ► If you watch that or listen to our episode where we discussed that, which may have been several weeks after WWDC because there were a lot of announcements, we have recently taken another big step towards that.
01:27:09 ◼ ► Does it mean that the next major version of Mac OS will have the new Time Machine rewritten for APFS? I doubt it. Apple tends to go slow on things related to file systems and even slower on things related to the Mac.
01:27:19 ◼ ► So I'm not holding my breath, but that's the reason. That's the reason why you don't just see them making it work the same way it does with HFS Plus.
01:27:27 ◼ ► If you want it to work the way it does with HFS Plus, use HFS Plus. It's your only option right now.
01:27:31 ◼ ► If and when Apple finally brings this project to fruition, we will have a much better Time Machine that is more efficient, faster, more reliable, hopefully, than the HFS Plus variant. But until then, the delay is explicable if annoying.
01:27:47 ◼ ► And finally, Andrew Myers writes, "Do you have any advice on getting started with Letterboxd or as you would say Letterboxd? And apparently Letterboxd has thoughts about how to get started on Letterboxd. So tell me, what do you do there?"
01:28:03 ◼ ► I love how I'm converting you to say Letterboxd, despite the fact that, let it be known that that is not how the product wants you to say it. They want you to say it as Letterboxd. I think they came in just at the tail end of the vowel dropping, like Tumblr and Flickr.
01:28:17 ◼ ► So it should be Letterboxd with "ed" at the end, but they dropped the "e". Anyway, that's how they wanted to say it, but I continue to say Letterboxd.
01:28:24 ◼ ► It's a website that's kind of like a social network for people who enjoy movies, but when you think of that you start to cringe, like, "Oh, social network, I don't like that." Think of it as like what Flickr was like when it was just like a bunch of nerdy, cool people doing pictures.
01:28:39 ◼ ► Or maybe like Instagram in the really, really early days. Letterboxd is still small enough, that's what it's like. It's a small community of nice people who like movies, who when they watch movies, they record something about them.
01:28:52 ◼ ► The minimum you record, the fact that you watched it. You could also give it a rating, you could also write a small review, and then you follow people on it.
01:28:59 ◼ ► And if you're interested in, you say, "What movies should I be looking for?" There's obviously the things that are new releases or whatever, but if you go to your Letterboxd homepage, you can see, "Here are the movies that are popular with the users."
01:29:12 ◼ ► So it's probably like all the new releases, or the big new Marvel movie, or whatever. Then you also say, "Here are the movies that are popular with your friends." You're five or six or ten or twenty or a hundred people that you follow, what movies have they been watching lately?
01:29:23 ◼ ► And depending on who you follow, that list is very different from the popular list. If you follow a bunch of people who are into weird arty movies, you'll see movies that you've literally never heard of, and then you get to see someone, maybe someone that you know, has watched it, maybe they've rated it, and maybe they've written a review.
01:29:37 ◼ ► Or if you know them personally, you can, you know, I've done this a few times and I don't think it's too weird, you say, "Hey, I saw that you saw this movie. I know that because you posted it publicly on Letterboxd. What did you think of it? Tell me about it."
01:29:48 ◼ ► It's how I'm into movies, and it's how I find new movies to watch, other than just being like, "Oh, what are the new popular releases?"
01:29:54 ◼ ► The way I use it is, I use it incorrectly, at least as far as the applications, I did send this feedback once. When I watch a movie, I rate it. By rating it, it also marks it as viewed, so there's two bits of metadata that appear for each movie that I watch.
01:30:11 ◼ ► There's a star rating, it's 0-5 stars. Actually, it's a half to five, I don't think you can rate it as zero, that's just unrated. And then a bit that says whether you watched it or not. It also records the date that I did that, you know, sort of implicitly when I do it.
01:30:27 ◼ ► I think what they want me to do instead is use their diary feature to record the fact that I watched a movie, because then you can, with a diary feature, if you do that, you can watch the same movie multiple times and say, "I watched this movie this month, and then six months later I watched it again," or whatever.
01:30:43 ◼ ► I don't use the diary feature, I just do the ratings. And the other thing I do with it is when there's a movie that I think I'm interested in, either because from the outside world I've heard there's a movie that I might be interested in, or because I go to the Letterboxd homepage and see what my friends are watching, I add it to my watchlist.
01:30:58 ◼ ► Like, "Ooh, a bunch of my friends have seen this movie and they're saying good things about it. I would like to see that too." It's usually like new releases, especially, you know, I don't get to the movies that often these days. So there may be a movie that's out in theaters, and lots of my friends are seeing it and they think it's good, and it seems like the type of movie I would like, but there's no way I'm going to get to a theater to see it.
01:31:16 ◼ ► I add it to my watchlist. If I didn't do that, I will forget that movie exists. I will never think to look for it on iTunes, I will just completely, you know, when it comes out on video, as we used to say, like, you know, one to six months later or whatever, I will forget about it.
01:31:30 ◼ ► So I add it to my watchlist. Anytime I want to watch a movie, I go to my watchlist, because there is a giant list of movies that I've already determined are things that I want to see. And I'll find a movie there, you can click through the site, it links to like justwatchit.com or something where you say, "Where can I see this movie?" And it lists all the streaming services, and I subscribe to all of them, so eventually I can either see it or rent it or buy it or whatever. That's how I use my Letterboxd account.
01:31:56 ◼ ► I wish that every time I rated it, it counted it as a diary entry, it counted it as me watching it, but it doesn't. I can still sort my movies by like order that I marked them as watched. Like I said, it does record that timestamp, but it's not...
01:32:09 ◼ ► At the end of the year, it gives you this fun thing that says, "Here's your year review, and here's all the movies you watch." And at the end of every year, it thinks I've watched zero movies, because it only counts that I watch them because if you do the diary entry thing.
01:32:19 ◼ ► So, I'm still struggling with that a little bit. But, anyway, Letterboxd is free, although you can give them money in various forms to keep them in business. I highly recommend you do that. I do pay them money. I don't think paying them money gives you any features.
01:32:32 ◼ ► I think it's just like, "Hey, you want to keep using this thing? Give us money?" It's really cheap. It's like, I think it's like 20 bucks a year or something. I don't know, I don't remember what it is. Anyway, pay for it, it's really good.
01:32:41 ◼ ► Kind of like Marco said a little while ago, Instagram is his happy place for social networks, where only good things happen. Letterboxd, I follow a very small number of people, and it's mostly my happy place to find movies that are out that a bunch of people that I know or trust think are good.
01:33:04 ◼ ► I forgot the little thing where the official Letterboxd Twitter account gave links, which we will put in the show notes, to their own instructions on how to use their website. I just described how I use it. I could be totally wrong. Anyway, Letterboxd.com/welcome.
01:33:18 ◼ ► And there's another one with a frequently asked question. So, please follow those links to learn how you're really supposed to use the site rather than just how I use it.
01:33:26 ◼ ► Thanks to our sponsors this week, Bombas, Handy, and Backblaze. And we will talk to you next week.
01:33:32 ◼ ► Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, cause it was accidental. (Accidental) Oh, it was accidental. (Accidental)
01:33:45 ◼ ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental. (Accidental) Oh, it was accidental. (Accidental)
01:34:06 ◼ ► C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T, Marco, R-M-N, S-I-R-A-C, U-S-A, Syracuse. It's accidental. (It's accidental)
01:34:36 ◼ ► In our garage is Tiff's new BMW i3. You guys really like getting oddly shaped BMWs, don't you?
01:34:43 ◼ ► Well, here's the thing they really don't like doing. They really don't like shopping for cars. That much is clear.
01:34:52 ◼ ► We spend so many shows talking about all the cars that you should test drive, and kind of like Casey too, rather than going out and test driving all, or let's say any of the suggestions, you go to the BMW dealership and come away with a car.
01:35:06 ◼ ► Like you go to one place and buy the first car that you see. Not that I'm saying that's the wrong choice, like I think you probably made the right choice, but you always skip over the step where you test drive all the different cars.
01:35:14 ◼ ► I will have to maybe get her on here next week, and I would like to drive it myself too, because I haven't yet, but she doesn't drive that much. We didn't care that much about this process and this pick this time.
01:35:27 ◼ ► We didn't want to spend all that time going to a whole bunch of different places, test driving a whole bunch of different things.
01:35:33 ◼ ► And there's other factors that factor in here, like by trying things from different brands, that also means you have to go to different dealerships, and certain dealerships are closer or further away.
01:35:43 ◼ ► Other dealerships that we haven't been to before are unknown of like how easy is it to get service and stuff like that.
01:35:49 ◼ ► And this was a really easy option. We had a BMW lease to turn in. We could get another one from the same company two months early and very, very easily, with a really good price, because her car that we were trading in had like no miles.
01:36:05 ◼ ► So we knew we had some strong bargaining chips, and that it would be really easy, and we know that the close BMW dealership is not only, again, close, but we know that service there is super easy when necessary.
01:36:19 ◼ ► We didn't want to test drive for like three weeks going all over the place trying to find all these models to test drive.
01:36:27 ◼ ► We really just wanted to have it be done, and this was an easy option. And it was so funny, like Tiff got in the i3, Tiff and Adam both, and they're both like, "All right, this one's good. Let's get this one."
01:36:42 ◼ ► And then like Tess drove it, and she was like, "Yep, this is great. All right, let's do it. Let's just get it and be done."
01:36:48 ◼ ► I like how Adam had an opinion. He's made of us. I mean, of course he has an opinion. So he easily got in the backseat and he's like, "I like this one," from the backseat point of view.
01:36:58 ◼ ► So again, we've only had it for like two days, so this is not like a full review or anything. Again, just like the AirPods Pros.
01:37:09 ◼ ► But initial impressions, and I haven't driven it either, but initial impressions, it's really quite nice. First of all, I love how much space we have reclaimed in the garage.
01:37:22 ◼ ► Again, the major performance attribute of Tiff's car is how much it impinges on Marco's car. That's all that matters.
01:37:29 ◼ ► It was kind of funny. The process of getting it, we went in and we're like, "Hey, we're interested in the i3. Let's test drive one." They are about to be between, or they are between model year production right now.
01:37:42 ◼ ► They no longer are making 2019s. They're starting to make 2020s, but you can't place an order for one right now. We're in a gap of a few months where you just can't order one.
01:37:54 ◼ ► So it was either wait until after her lease expired by a couple of months before getting a custom ordered one for 2020 at some unknown price, or take advantage of a really quite compelling lease special that made the 2019 one very price competitive with the rest of its category, which it usually is not.
01:38:17 ◼ ► But they had a really strong lease special to clear out the 2019s, as long as we could find one in local inventory that we wanted, because you couldn't order them anymore.
01:38:27 ◼ ► It turns out that there was one that we test drove that was a demo model that only had 100 miles on it. Because it was a demo, it was fully loaded.
01:38:37 ◼ ► The only downside maybe is that it has the range extender, the little gas engine that can add something like 60 miles or so of range to it. If we were going to order one, we would have ordered it without that, just because we don't need it, and it just adds weight and cost.
01:38:51 ◼ ► But it seems like all the local stock always has the extender. So we did have to get that by doing it this way. But otherwise, it was everything we wanted.
01:39:02 ◼ ► And because it was a lease special and a slightly used store demo model, we got a really, really good lease deal on it.
01:39:19 ◼ ► Well, it only had 100 miles on it, and the test drive route is probably a good four or five miles long.
01:39:27 ◼ ► Yeah, maybe something like that. Yeah, and so it was kind of funny too. We have put so little time into this. We've had this car in our garage now, a couple times for Aaron so far, but we still haven't charged it yet.
01:39:44 ◼ ► I still haven't found the charger. I know it came with one. I assume it's somewhere in the vehicle in some kind of compartment or something.
01:39:52 ◼ ► It took until this morning before I even found the gas hole. So I'm like, we need to put gas in it at some point.
01:39:59 ◼ ► Somewhere there's a hole that we put gas into, and I knew where the electric plug was, which is where the gas hole usually is on cars. So I'm like, well, where's the gas hole then? Eventually found it.
01:40:17 ◼ ► Oh, that's great. Like one of those little things that you carry at the gas station, that's the full tank.
01:40:26 ◼ ► Yes, it doesn't drive the wheels at all. It's like a motorcycle engine. It's just like a little generator basically. It just recharges the battery.
01:40:37 ◼ ► I haven't even disabled the incredibly loud beep of the unlock when you use the remote to unlock it.
01:40:42 ◼ ► The very first thing I ever did with any BMW was disable that beep. Thank God you can, unlike some vendors.
01:40:51 ◼ ► But so far it seems really nice. And again, we just didn't care to go do a thousand things.
01:40:59 ◼ ► So it was a super easy thing to just go get this one. It was a lot of things we wanted for a really good price because of the various specials and discounting and the trade-in that we had for her last lease.
01:41:11 ◼ ► We got a fantastic deal on what this car is because it's fully loaded. And we got a great deal even on what would have been a great deal on a base model.
01:41:27 ◼ ► And it's funny. As we were in the dealership a couple of nights, they had an M2 sitting on the floor.
01:41:41 ◼ ► I didn't want to test drive it because we didn't have time. It was blocked in by other cars inside the showroom.
01:41:47 ◼ ► So I knew it would be an ordeal to get it out. And I'm like, "I'm not going to bother with that."
01:42:02 ◼ ► They've changed very little about it. The interior is the same. It's extremely similar.
01:42:09 ◼ ► I don't know. It has proper cup holders whereas the 1M just had a little loop, didn't it?
01:42:23 ◼ ► But anyway, I was like, "You know, I wish." For the second car need, if it were up to me, my pick would just be an electric 2 Series.
01:42:50 ◼ ► You sit so low and I don't love that perspective or some of the safety issues that it has.
01:42:56 ◼ ► And with the 2 Series, you sit almost at regular sedan height but you're in a small car. I like that a lot.
01:43:02 ◼ ► So all this time I was thinking, "Man, I just can't wait. I just want BMW to make an electric 2 Series. That would be perfect."
01:43:08 ◼ ► And what's interesting is that the i3 is a lot closer to that than I expected it to be.
01:43:15 ◼ ► It actually is almost an electric 2 Series in so many ways. In an approximate footprint, in a lot of the design of the interior, a lot of the features that are offered, the features that are not offered.
01:43:32 ◼ ► And what's interesting, just being a passenger so far, the visibility inside is fantastic. You get these huge windows and you're sitting up almost at crossover or compact SUV height but not quite that high but it's close.
01:43:47 ◼ ► So you have a great perspective, you have great visibility. And it feels, again, it's still only as a passenger, it feels really zippy and quick.
01:43:56 ◼ ► Electric just feels so glorious. As soon as we got into that car and Tiff stepped on the gas, I was like, "I can't buy an M2. I can't have non-electric ever again."
01:44:11 ◼ ► So, so far, again, we've only had it a few days and I still haven't driven it. But so far, we're pretty happy with it actually.
01:44:20 ◼ ► Well, congratulations. Everyone I've spoken to has an i3 or has had an i3, swears by them. I have a hard time getting past the look of it.
01:44:32 ◼ ► Oh, it looks completely ridiculous. But you get past it real quick when you see how little space it takes up in your garage.
01:44:37 ◼ ► You were comparing it to the M2 and I understand what your point was but it is not shaped like the 2 Series at all externally. And that's the reason why it has the visibility of a big, tall, a weird van with the nose cut off.
01:44:53 ◼ ► It's a miniature minivan. And those are all good attributes. I'm just saying externally, it shares nothing with the M2. But it is a small car and it is zippy and you do sit up higher in it.
01:45:07 ◼ ► And so that all makes sense. But by the way, I think the reason why everyone's like Casey said, everyone who has an i3 loves it.
01:45:15 ◼ ► This has been true for many years and will continue to be true because we're in this period. When anybody gets their first electric car, they're going to profess that they love this car.
01:45:24 ◼ ► No matter which electric car it is. And so i3 owners are like, chances are very high this is the first electric car and they're going to rave about it up and down.
01:45:31 ◼ ► Especially because it's quirky. Because it's shaped weird. Because it has all these attributes that cars didn't have before. Because it doesn't have to have a big engine in it.
01:45:38 ◼ ► And it's got that whole tall van thing with the big visibility. Of course they're all going to say they love it.
01:45:43 ◼ ► The question to ask any of those people is how many electric cars have you owned? It's probably their first one.
01:45:48 ◼ ► Same thing with Chevy Bolt owners. Same thing with the Leaf owners. Everybody who gets their first electric car loves it and attaches a lot of love to that car.
01:45:56 ◼ ► Even the GM EV people like the EV1, the GM lead acid battery. Those people love their cars. Because it was their first electric car. Because it was anybody's first electric car.
01:46:05 ◼ ► So keep that in mind when you hear people raving. We see it in the chatroom. Anytime we mention stuff. The Leaf owners all love their Leaves. The i3 owners all love their i3s.
01:46:12 ◼ ► This is just a weird human incarnation of what Marco was talking about. Which is electric cars. They're good.
01:46:18 ◼ ► And when you get your first one, you decide that this, it's not that electric cars are good, it's that this car is good.
01:46:23 ◼ ► It's like when you get your second or third you realize actually what you like is electric cars.
01:46:27 ◼ ► Yeah. Because they're really good. Turns out. Electric cars are so disruptive. Because the only problem for so long has been price and a limited number of models.
01:46:41 ◼ ► And those are both getting better pretty quickly now. You're getting a lot more model options now in the market. And the prices are coming down.
01:46:58 ◼ ► And if you want to be extra super woke you can counter what Marco just said and say actually electric cars aren't disruptive at all.
01:47:05 ◼ ► They're just a replacement of internal combustion cars with a different way to accomplish the same thing. But they're perpetuating our car centric culture and not helping with congestion.
01:47:14 ◼ ► And what we really need is modern public transportation in cities built around people and not cars. I agree with all of that.
01:47:19 ◼ ► But on the smaller scale, what Marco said is true, they are disruptive to the internal combustion engine. So we need to do all these things.
01:47:25 ◼ ► We need to replace internal combustion cars with electric cars. But we also need to largely replace cars with better public transportation in cities built around human beings rather than cars.
01:47:36 ◼ ► Oh, fully agreed. But most of that stuff is not going to happen anytime soon in the US.
01:47:41 ◼ ► You never know. The associated meme is they show you pictures of some city, I don't remember, is it Finland? No. Maybe it's the Netherlands.
01:47:51 ◼ ► Maybe they show you what that city looked like in the 70s and it looked like a US city. And a mere 30 years later it looks totally different.
01:47:59 ◼ ► So yeah, it doesn't happen overnight, but it's also not impossible. So I hope we start trending in that direction.
01:48:20 ◼ ► Yep, yep. We should have some sort of marking, scoring scale. Marco identifies that it's a reference. There's like one point.
01:48:28 ◼ ► Marco knows it's a reference from the correct form of media, whether that be television or another point.
01:48:34 ◼ ► And then Marco knows what it's from. That's like three points. And then Marco knows what it's from and has seen it. That's like the maximum score, I suppose.