518: Deconstructed iMac
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I've come to accept that there are certain things in life that I am not very good at,
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and washing windows is now being added to that list.
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Windows on your car?
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Oh, I can't wash any part of a car.
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That got added to the list long ago.
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Yeah, I can confirm.
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Because that is a challenge that I've been tackling for many years and I still have not
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I can confirm that Marco, for all of his many perks, is completely useless at washing a
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I've seen it with my own eyes.
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All of his good qualities.
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All of the great things about Marco, which there are many, I can tell you that being
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able to wash a car is not on that list.
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No, not even a little bit.
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So what windows are you washing then?
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So we have our main sliders to the deck.
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Normally in the summertime we can hire a window washer to come out whenever it gets really
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terrible and you can barely see through it anymore.
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We can hire a window washer and they do a good job.
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They don't work in the winter.
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So at least here, because normally it's freezing.
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So I have a few basic things.
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I have one of those big squeegee things with the brush on the other side of it.
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Whatever those window washing brushes.
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Do you have one of those planks held up by poison ropes and you lower yourself down from
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No, the good thing is this is all just at floor level so I can just walk up to it and
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And to be clear, what are you washing off the windows?
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I've never lived at the beach.
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Do you actually get salt on them?
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It's rain and dirt and salty, grimy dirt from rain and the ocean.
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But is it mostly, I'm wondering, is it a different kind of grime than you get at non-beach houses?
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Yeah, it's very like, it's like sticky.
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It's not like dry dirt.
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It's like constantly damp, slightly sticky, salty, sandy dirt.
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Sounds delicious.
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And the rest of the house I don't care about, but these windows are, they face south so
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they face where the sun comes in all day.
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So you really see when they're dirty and like, all right, I can either, you know, have them
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be dirty for the next four months until the window washer can be here.
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Or you know, do it myself.
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And yeah, what is this, your car?
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I cannot find a carwash.
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Like I, that's a whole other thing.
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You make Casey cry every time you take your car through a carwash.
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You have no, well, no, I would be happy if you even took it to a carwash.
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I'm that desperate at this point.
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I just want, I just want Marco to look at me.
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I would get, I would take it to a carwash every time I left the island if there was
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one anywhere nearby where I go.
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And as far as I can tell, there isn't one.
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I'm surprised that, Jon, you don't have some hole in the wall from when you were a kid
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that you're suggesting Marco go to.
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Well, cause it's just, that's nowhere near where I usually go.
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I did not have a favorite carwash.
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And I would be fine to just go to one of those, like, you know, just self-serve ones where
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it's just like the hose and the thing that takes quarters and you just dial in whatever
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I would, that'd be fine.
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I don't need the perfect job.
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I just need to like blast all the sand and crap off my car, but nope.
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So these are all areas that are not my expertise, but anyway.
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So I've, I've, I've watched so many YouTube videos on the technique you're supposed to
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use with the squeegee on a window to try to have no lines left after you have squeegeed.
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I cannot for the life of me perform this action.
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Well, if I can use my knowledge of a car window washing, if you're having trouble with not
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all the same thing, well, it is in this sense and that like, you know, obviously I didn't
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watch any kind of window streaks or a problem.
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I don't think it's your squeegee technique.
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I think you haven't gotten all the crap off your window yet.
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So there's nothing you can do with the squeegee.
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That's not going to leave streaks.
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You need to get the crap off your window.
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And then the question is, can I get the remaining water off the window in such a way that I
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don't get like a little line between, you know, so I think basically you're not removing
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the bad stuff from the window sufficiently before you move.
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You want to jump right to the step where you're like, Oh, I'm going to use a little squeegee
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and it'll be clean.
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No, you got to actually get all the crap off first.
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Oh, maybe I'll try that.
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Like continue to wash, like wash that whatever it is in the salt, dirt, sand, whatever it
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is, get it off your window.
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And that may take many several passes.
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And then finally when you have a clean window with just maybe a little bit of mildly dirty
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water on it, then your squeegeeing will work better.
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That's my problem.
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Cause like, cause like, you know, like when the window washers come, I mean they, they
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do it in like three seconds and it's perfect, but they're experts.
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Like they, they really know what they're doing.
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They're very good at their jobs and they, and you know, they have, they do the whole
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house in like two hours.
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I don't know how they do it.
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It took me like, it took me a good two hours to do three sliders today.
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You're calling them sliders like little hamburgers.
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That's yeah, they're sliders.
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They're sliding door window units.
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You're talking about sliding glass doors.
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Everyone calls them sliding.
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This might be an Ohio thing.
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I'm going to look this up.
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What would you call them?
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I would not call them sliders.
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What would you call them?
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Sliding glass doors.
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It's a bit long.
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I mean, why use three syllables when 17 would do?
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I'm just, I'm just telling you what they are.
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Sliders are tiny hamburgers.
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In the context of talking about windows.
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Well, anyway, those are probably easier to clean.
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The hamburgers?
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Clean them right off your plate.
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Yum, yum, yum.
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You clean your insides, that's for sure.
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Well, you clean your own insides out after eating too many of those.
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Listen to this guy.
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That's just White Castle.
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I haven't had White Castle in probably five years.
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There's no one, none of them anywhere near me.
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Yeah, so I did a Google search for it and I came up with slider services, professional
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sliding door maintenance, right?
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But this is the Midwest's most experienced specialty contractor.
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So I'm wondering if sliders is a Midwestern thing.
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I'll have to ask my wife about it when the show's over.
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I don't know.
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I never had one sliding glass door growing up and I was too young in that house to really
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talk about it by that name.
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So I don't know what we said there.
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Oh my goodness.
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So out of curiosity, I thought to myself, you know, I should look and see if there is
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a White Castle anywhere near me and there isn't.
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But as I'm looking at the White Castle locator, it says, you know, it's no castles found.
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And then there's a checkbox that reads, "Only show castles accepting Valentine's Day reservations."
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So when I think, even I, I mean, I have the world's worst taste in everything, allegedly,
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but maybe, maybe it's somebody's favorite restaurant.
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Oh, I'm not judging.
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It's just, that's so, wow.
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I'm more surprised that they take reservations.
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Like even for the people for whom that is their favorite restaurant, like I would never
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think to even check to see if they take reservations.
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I don't know.
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Do you need reservations at White Castle?
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You want to get the good seat by the dirty window?
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I don't know.
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Well, they probably have professional window washers.
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That's right.
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They don't have Marco clean in their crap.
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John, you want to tell me about what you've put in the show notes as the chicken hat dregs,
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Yeah, I think I kept, I should have looked this up.
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I kept trying to think of the phrase that they say on the Apple earnings calls when
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they're trying to say that there is sufficient supply to meet the demand, like supply and
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demand are in balance or something.
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There's some, there's some like little phrase that they use all the time that I can't remember.
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But anyway, I think that finally the chicken hat supply and demand are in balance.
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We got the final, final, final, final shipment of chicken hats like before the last episode,
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but I didn't mention it on the show cause I just wanted them to sort of drain out of
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the system naturally and they more or less have, we have a handful of them left.
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I think everybody who has any interest in a chicken hat now has one.
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So congratulations to everybody.
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But if you are super duper desperate, we do have a handful of them left.
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They're probably just going to honestly sit there for like the next year, kind of like
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the ATP pins where everybody who wanted an ATP pin got one.
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And then we had like 50 pins in the, in our stock inventory for like a year and a half.
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So that may happen with the chicken hats, which if it does fine, but if not just letting
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everybody know, if you want a chicken hat, go to ATP.fm/store.
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There is a handful left.
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And frankly, I don't know how this happened that with all the ordering we were doing that
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somehow we weren't left with a thousand chicken hats.
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Like like all of a sudden, oh, the demand stops and then we have a thousand left.
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So a little bit behind the scenes stuff.
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One of the orders that we, one of the many multiple orders that we made, like a box of
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hats got lost and it can, I think it was a box of like 150 or 300, no it was 150 hats
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or something like, oh, we, we were supposed to have a box of these and it went missing.
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And so the manufacturer just, you know, manufactured another box of 150 hats for free and then
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And then they found the missing box.
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And so we had actually an extra 150 hats on top of the amount that we wanted to have.
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And that all, all of that sort of fumbling around and multiple shipments put us in a
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position where we have, you know, a small number of hats left for anybody who wants
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And that's what we're going to have to do.
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We'll see if this section even makes it in the release show because the bootleg people
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might get to it and decide.
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Everyone has the bootleg has already got a hat if they want it.
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All right, we'll see.
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Speaking of bootlegs and members, now would be a pretty good time if you haven't already
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gone to ATP.fm/join to do so.
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We are writing a wrong that we as a collective unit made, or at least that's the story I'm
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sticking with.
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Was it just you?
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I really was trying to plan this off on all three of us.
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I thought we could take this fall together, but seems not.
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I will dive on my sword.
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I will commit seppuku.
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No, John was particularly embittered at my selection for the trilogy that we had done
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of a movie, you know, reviews or whatever you want to call them.
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ATP movie club is what I meant to say.
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John was very upset at me for my selection for ATP movie club, even though the rundown
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for multiple reasons, the rundown is an unquestionably good movie.
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We all agreed.
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Just listen to the episode.
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I thought it made for a very good episode of our show.
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But none of us were culturally enriched by it.
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You know, can you just let me get through this one piece, please?
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And thank you.
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Apparently not.
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I'm new here.
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Have you heard the show?
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We're going to right my wrongs.
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And we're going to, tomorrow night, we're recording this episode obviously right now
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tonight, but tomorrow night as I sit here, which is Thursday night in the One Shoe Time
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Zone, we are going to record an episode of ATP movie club about the hunt for October,
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the hunt for red October, which I will spoil only to say it is one of my favorite films
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of all time.
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And John, I think, I think we'll have not altogether negative things to say about it.
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And Marco, let's verify you have not or had not seen it or have not seen it at the time
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we are recording right now.
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I'm going to watch it tomorrow.
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So it's fresh in my mind when we record.
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I actually plan to do the same, even though I think I could probably recite the entire
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movie by heart, but nevertheless, we don't know when this episode will be released.
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I would say sometime no later than the end of next week.
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It's up to whenever Marco has time to edit it, but in the next week or so, we are going
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to do ATP movie club, the hunt for October.
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And again, if you go to ATP.fm/join, then you can get not only this forthcoming episode,
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but also the three episodes prior and also the bootleg and discounts on our limited time
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store offerings.
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So that's not available right now, but it will be probably shortly before WWDC.
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So check it out.
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I'm really, really looking forward to recording this.
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I am extremely excited to talk to these two fine gentlemen slash my mortal enemies about
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one of my favorite movies.
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So wish me luck.
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And again, that'll be out sometime in the next week, week and a half or thereabouts.
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And we do have some other ideas for members special content, but we couldn't nail them
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down in time.
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And I just wanted to get some member special content out because we felt like it was, it
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So we're doing the easy one, which is fixing Casey's earlier mistake.
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Thanks, dad.
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So, and honestly, you know, this is a little inside baseball, but we, we have many, many,
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We don't have any particular timeline about when we're going to execute on any of these
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We don't know, you know, which one we're going to do next.
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It may be several months before we do more member exclusive stuff.
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And we're, we're going to continue to try to do things that we don't feel like would
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fit in the main show.
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You know, we don't want to, we don't want to take away from things that we think we
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would feature in the main show.
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And we're just trying to like, you know, scroll them off to the side and make you pay to get
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You know, where this is stuff that, Hey, if you don't listen, that's fine.
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We'd prefer you did, but if you don't, it's not gonna hurt our feelings.
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Some day cooking with John.
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I don't know how we're going to do it, but someday we're going to figure out a way to
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Cooking works so great in podcast form.
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We could, I'm telling you, we can't do any cooking podcasts.
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I should look that up.
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I'm sure there are just the sound of pots clanging around.
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It's just a bunch of Foley artists.
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It would be amazing.
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I'm telling you, it would, it would be phenomenal.
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What we should do is we should have like John watch as I described to Marco how to cook
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or vice versa.
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Actually, probably better vice versa.
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So John is watching.
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Casey, you have to be the one trying to follow John's directions.
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That's that's really, that's the formula here.
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I don't want the show to end.
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John writes down something that is like the perfect, his perfect formula for sauce or
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whatever, and then you have to actually do it.
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And with him watching, it'd be like that episode where I had to describe a picture to Tiff
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and Julian and the whole time you're like waiting to see what they're doing at the end.
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It would be like that.
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So I'd be describing describing what Casey is supposed to do.
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And at the very end, he would like put on his camera and show me what he's done.
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It would just be not what I described.
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I would like the show to continue.
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I don't want the show to end.
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And so because of that, I might veto this entire plan, even though it would be a very
00:13:52
◼
►
funny end to this program.
00:13:53
◼
►
But I think the chat room points out that Adam Ragusea has a cooking podcast.
00:13:57
◼
►
I watch his YouTube channel and he puts his podcast up on YouTube.
00:14:01
◼
►
Those are the videos that I never clicked through because I don't want to watch a YouTube
00:14:03
◼
►
video of a podcast, but I guess it does exist.
00:14:05
◼
►
I actually listened to the audio version of that podcast and I can tell you while it is
00:14:09
◼
►
a podcast by a YouTube cooking person, it's not really a cooking.
00:14:15
◼
►
If you're thinking about what a cooking podcast would be in the sense of like a cooking show,
00:14:21
◼
►
it's not that.
00:14:23
◼
►
It's good though.
00:14:24
◼
►
I do enjoy it actually, but it's not a cooking show.
00:14:27
◼
►
So one way or another, we're going to work on member stuff, but again, no promises on
00:14:30
◼
►
timeline, on content, on what it is, et cetera.
00:14:32
◼
►
But we are promising that sometime in the next week and a half, you'll hear another
00:14:36
◼
►
member special if you are a member about the hunt for red October, again, ATP.fm/join.
00:14:42
◼
►
Let's do some follow up.
00:14:43
◼
►
Getty Images is suing the creators of AI art tool stable diffusion for scraping its content.
00:14:48
◼
►
Ruh roh shaggy.
00:14:50
◼
►
What's going on here, Jon?
00:14:51
◼
►
That's exactly what you would think from the article.
00:14:53
◼
►
Getty Images said it believes that stability AI unlawfully copied and processed millions
00:14:57
◼
►
of images protected by copyright to train its software and the Getty Images has commenced
00:15:00
◼
►
legal proceedings in the High Court of Justice of London.
00:15:03
◼
►
So we talked about this when we talk about AI stuff.
00:15:06
◼
►
There's going to be court cases.
00:15:07
◼
►
This is going to be lawsuits.
00:15:08
◼
►
They have begun.
00:15:09
◼
►
This seems like a pretty big one.
00:15:10
◼
►
Getty Images is a, you know, we're talking about like these cases, the outcome of these
00:15:13
◼
►
cases might be determined by how big the people involved are.
00:15:17
◼
►
Getty Images is pretty big.
00:15:18
◼
►
They have a lot of images.
00:15:19
◼
►
They were surely scraped.
00:15:21
◼
►
That's what this lawsuit alleges.
00:15:23
◼
►
And there's a second one, which is a little bit different.
00:15:25
◼
►
This is on behalf of a few artists.
00:15:29
◼
►
Sarah Anderson, I don't know if you know Sarah Anderson from Sarah Scribbles.
00:15:33
◼
►
If you click through on the URL that will be in the show notes, the URL is stable diffusion
00:15:39
◼
►
litigation dot com.
00:15:42
◼
►
I think you can see some of Sarah Anderson's work.
00:15:44
◼
►
You've probably seen her comics online.
00:15:46
◼
►
You're like, oh, yeah, that one.
00:15:47
◼
►
I've seen those.
00:15:48
◼
►
Anyway, she's one of three litigants.
00:15:51
◼
►
Kelly McKiernan and Carla Ortiz have filed a class action lawsuit against stability,
00:15:56
◼
►
AI, deviant art and mid journey for the use of stable diffusion.
00:15:59
◼
►
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:16:01
◼
►
Same type deals as hey, you're using our stuff without our permission and your things.
00:16:05
◼
►
And you know, we're suing you over it.
00:16:06
◼
►
So I don't think this is the best way to come up with a reasonable way to deal with this
00:16:16
◼
►
But in practice, you know, it takes a long time for lawmakers to grapple with an issue.
00:16:21
◼
►
It takes less time for people to decide to sue.
00:16:24
◼
►
And very often the courts get the first crack at this.
00:16:27
◼
►
Different jurisdictions, different courts, different cases, different results, which
00:16:32
◼
►
may be appealed to higher courts and so on and so forth.
00:16:34
◼
►
But just to let you all know, the ball is rolling.
00:16:38
◼
►
And I'm sure we were we are in for years and years of these things until and unless, you
00:16:44
◼
►
know, the various laws of the lands get a grip on this.
00:16:47
◼
►
Yeah, I think it's going to be a really kind of messy and ever moving thing, you know,
00:16:54
◼
►
and for probably the next decade, at least, you know, just how the legality around using
00:16:59
◼
►
copyrighted material for training and AI and you know, whether that counts as as violating
00:17:05
◼
►
those copyrights without permission or whether it you know, whether it's the same as a human
00:17:08
◼
►
just viewing things and then being able to create things in that style.
00:17:12
◼
►
I again, I kind of lean towards the latter.
00:17:15
◼
►
But we'll see how it all works out both legally and culturally.
00:17:18
◼
►
Those are those are such unknowns right now.
00:17:21
◼
►
And I think, you know, whatever we say now, again, I think we're gonna look back in five
00:17:25
◼
►
or 10 years and like, wow, we were so wrong.
00:17:27
◼
►
And you know, in one in either direction, and I can't really say which we know where
00:17:30
◼
►
it's gonna go.
00:17:31
◼
►
The Getty image of them was fun, because one of the one of the images related to it, I
00:17:35
◼
►
don't know if it was in this article that we'll link or elsewhere.
00:17:38
◼
►
But it was like a generated image from stable diffusion or whatever.
00:17:43
◼
►
And it had the big Getty images.
00:17:45
◼
►
I had the big images like low like watermark logo over the thing.
00:17:50
◼
►
Of course, slightly mangled or whatever.
00:17:52
◼
►
That's amazing.
00:17:53
◼
►
Yeah, I mean, that's where you get into existing law, like, you know, trade dress and trademark
00:17:58
◼
►
or it's like, no, you can't sell an image that this has Getty.
00:18:01
◼
►
Because, you know, we have a trademark and Getty images and blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:18:05
◼
►
And so like, that's, you know, we'll see how these these court cases end up going.
00:18:09
◼
►
But you get the right judge and they can say, well, I don't need to make up any kind of
00:18:12
◼
►
new law or new decisions.
00:18:14
◼
►
Our existing laws already covered this.
00:18:16
◼
►
And the fact that this is even possible, even though it's like, we didn't do it on purpose.
00:18:19
◼
►
We didn't mean for it to show Getty images.
00:18:21
◼
►
It just did.
00:18:22
◼
►
We can't control it.
00:18:23
◼
►
The judge is gonna be like, no, you can't, you can't sell things with the Disney logo
00:18:26
◼
►
You can't sell things that say Getty images across them if you're not getting images.
00:18:30
◼
►
But you know, stranger things happen in court cases.
00:18:33
◼
►
So we'll see how this goes.
00:18:36
◼
►
And then you are coming to us again live from the CES show floor with one last tidbit.
00:18:40
◼
►
This is like the back room type thing.
00:18:42
◼
►
This is like a YouTube video that I saw of like some something off to the side.
00:18:46
◼
►
Some I just thought it was fascinating.
00:18:48
◼
►
And maybe it's like an existing thing that is just, you know, been around for years.
00:18:52
◼
►
This is the first I had heard of it.
00:18:55
◼
►
Solid state cooling is relevant to our lives because we're gonna talk about some products
00:18:59
◼
►
soon that have, you know, microprocessors and stuff in them that produce heat and are
00:19:05
◼
►
Solid state cooling.
00:19:06
◼
►
You know, so solid state active cooling is exactly what it sounds like.
00:19:09
◼
►
Active cooling means instead of just having, you know, a piece of metal stuck to something
00:19:15
◼
►
with fins on it or whatever, and you just like allows the ambient air to cool it.
00:19:19
◼
►
Active cooling means something is actively cooling it usually by moving that air across
00:19:24
◼
►
those fins with the use of a fan or if it's active water cooling by pumping water to and
00:19:30
◼
►
That's active cooling.
00:19:31
◼
►
It's a distinct from passive cooling.
00:19:33
◼
►
Solid state active cooling is active cooling with quote unquote solid state technology
00:19:40
◼
►
as in like microchips and stuff.
00:19:41
◼
►
It's like, well, how do you, how do you actively cool something with like silicon microchip
00:19:47
◼
►
Well, this company whose name I have difficulty pronouncing it is for or systems F R O R E.
00:19:55
◼
►
It's a YouTube video where you see somebody also try to pronounce something.
00:19:59
◼
►
Anyway, this is what it looks like.
00:20:01
◼
►
It's actually an SSD only it's not an SSD, but it's maybe like 2.8 millimeters thick
00:20:07
◼
►
and the same dimensions as an SSD and it's hollow inside and inside are a bunch of these
00:20:13
◼
►
little tiny MEMS, micro electric mechanical systems, M E M S.
00:20:18
◼
►
I'll put a link to the Wikipedia page and that tiny little silicon based like microscopic
00:20:23
◼
►
machines that vibrate shoving air downward at up to 120 miles an hour.
00:20:31
◼
►
And it's like little, little tiny, it's kind of like what we're talking about.
00:20:34
◼
►
There's 5,000 micro micro lenses on the micro lens of light on each, on each pixel.
00:20:39
◼
►
These are tiny microscopic little moving things on a piece of silicon that shove air downward
00:20:45
◼
►
onto the surface of a thing they want to cool.
00:20:48
◼
►
And so it's basically, it's, you know, it looks like an SSD, but when you plug it in
00:20:52
◼
►
and apply power to it, air comes rushing out of it.
00:20:54
◼
►
It moves air without fans.
00:20:57
◼
►
I mean, is it really solid state if it has moving parts though?
00:21:01
◼
►
I, you know, it's solid state in the sense that it uses like silicon, you know, tech,
00:21:06
◼
►
you know, same kind of technology you use to print circuits or whatever, but they're
00:21:09
◼
►
actual machines, actual physical moving machines.
00:21:11
◼
►
They're just very, very, very tight.
00:21:13
◼
►
They're microscopic.
00:21:15
◼
►
So you can quibble with it, but it's definitely not a fan.
00:21:17
◼
►
I mean, I feel like the actual, like the real solid state active cooler is a thermoelectric
00:21:21
◼
►
plate or that, you know, the Peltier, whatever.
00:21:24
◼
►
Like those, I mean, they're, they're hilariously inefficient, but they do actively cool.
00:21:28
◼
►
I mean, you can even get like little tiny desk fridges to, to kind of cool a few cans
00:21:33
◼
►
of soda, like on your desk with the, one of those, you know, they, they do work, but you're
00:21:37
◼
►
not moving the air then you're just moving the heat.
00:21:39
◼
►
That's more like a heat pipe kind of, I know it's not the same thing as you're applying
00:21:42
◼
►
electricity, but no, I think it's, it's, I think there's no question that a thermoelectric
00:21:46
◼
►
plate is active cooling.
00:21:48
◼
►
It's just doing it in a really kind of weird and hilariously inefficient way.
00:21:53
◼
►
So the, the deal with these things and why we might care about them is obviously you
00:21:57
◼
►
can make these pretty darn thin, right?
00:22:00
◼
►
Cause I'm like a fan that has to be a certain thickness to, you know, hit the air and move
00:22:04
◼
►
These little guys work you know, with very little room.
00:22:07
◼
►
Like I said, it's less than three millimeters high.
00:22:11
◼
►
Still probably kind of thick to put on top of an SOC, but you, what you can do, what
00:22:15
◼
►
they recommended in the, in the video, the thing that's the CEO or founder of the company
00:22:18
◼
►
was saying you'd have a heat pipe going from your hot chip and then you'd put this solid
00:22:24
◼
►
state cooler on top of the heat pipe.
00:22:27
◼
►
So this thing would be alongside the thing you're cooling and it would just be a thin
00:22:30
◼
►
heat pipe connecting to things, you know, vapor chamber, whatever.
00:22:34
◼
►
The specs in it are interesting.
00:22:36
◼
►
It produces more, what they call back pressure, more, more of a vacuum than a fan of equivalent
00:22:43
◼
►
It's not even close.
00:22:44
◼
►
It's sometimes more pressure than a fan than a fan that is much larger than this noise
00:22:49
◼
►
wise, which I care about.
00:22:51
◼
►
They call it completely silent and it's like 21 decibels or something.
00:22:55
◼
►
It's basically silent, right?
00:22:59
◼
►
Well, it does move air.
00:23:00
◼
►
So if the air hits something and makes noise that could happen, but it's going to be more
00:23:05
◼
►
quiet than a fan for sure.
00:23:06
◼
►
Just because of the nature of how it works, all those tiny little things instead of a
00:23:09
◼
►
thing that's spinning and all that stuff.
00:23:12
◼
►
They claim that it is able to move air so powerfully that, as one of their big product
00:23:18
◼
►
claims, that you can dust seal the laptop so you don't have to have completely open areas
00:23:25
◼
►
for air to get sucked in and air to get pushed out.
00:23:27
◼
►
You can actually have like, you know, filters there.
00:23:29
◼
►
Normally you can't do that because the fan isn't powerful enough to shove air through
00:23:34
◼
►
And so you end up with dust getting inside your laptop and gumming up the fan and everything
00:23:38
◼
►
Now obviously dust will...
00:23:39
◼
►
Like, we've tried this before in the PC building worlds and the answer is you can suck air
00:23:46
◼
►
in through filters, but then the filters just get full of dust.
00:23:51
◼
►
Dust has to go somewhere.
00:23:52
◼
►
You may be moving the problem from one place to the other, but it's possible to have...
00:23:57
◼
►
If it moves air forcefully enough, it's possible to have dust filters that are not self-cleaning,
00:24:02
◼
►
but that you can...
00:24:04
◼
►
They're placed in such a way that you can keep them reasonably clear.
00:24:08
◼
►
It's not going to be like the lint filter on your dryer that you have to scrape a bunch
00:24:11
◼
►
of stuff off.
00:24:12
◼
►
I think it'll last a pretty long time.
00:24:13
◼
►
And I have had computers in the past that have had dust filter things, and they do get
00:24:18
◼
►
clogged, but I've had dust filters on computers that I haven't cleaned for the life of the
00:24:22
◼
►
computer, and just, you know, when I was done with it, I put it away into the attic and
00:24:26
◼
►
it served for five years and never got cleaned.
00:24:28
◼
►
If you have a cat in your house, maybe that doesn't work, but you know.
00:24:30
◼
►
After that, you're going to pull a whole cat off of that thing.
00:24:34
◼
►
By the way, remind me at some point to tell you how I destroyed Tiff's office with a hilarious
00:24:37
◼
►
Shopvac problem, but yeah.
00:24:39
◼
►
If they're directional, you got to make sure your switch is in the right direction.
00:24:42
◼
►
No, that wasn't the problem.
00:24:44
◼
►
The problem was at some point I emptied her Shopvac and did not put a new bag or filter
00:24:51
◼
►
Oh, whoopsies.
00:24:52
◼
►
And then she used it to suck up really fine glass grinding dust and basically filled her
00:25:01
◼
►
office very quickly with this cloud of fine white hazardous powder.
00:25:08
◼
►
It was horrendous.
00:25:09
◼
►
Anyway, I had to get her a new Shopvac that day.
00:25:13
◼
►
It was so bad.
00:25:14
◼
►
You need one of these.
00:25:17
◼
►
What are they called?
00:25:18
◼
►
They're called AirJet.
00:25:19
◼
►
Not a great name.
00:25:20
◼
►
Anyway, this company has partners that they would, there's partners on the website that
00:25:25
◼
►
are listed in Intel, Qualcomm, I forget the other company, but they're all mysterious
00:25:28
◼
►
about who the partners might be.
00:25:30
◼
►
I look at this and I really hope Apple is one of the partners because this would be
00:25:35
◼
►
great in a thin laptop.
00:25:36
◼
►
Now, the only thing I have questions about that wasn't addressed in the video that we're
00:25:39
◼
►
going to show is obviously this thing like a fan, it takes power to remove power.
00:25:44
◼
►
And so this thing can, you know, removes 10.5 Watts of heat by taking a maximum of 1.75
00:25:51
◼
►
Watts of power.
00:25:52
◼
►
He never said how that compares to how much power a fan takes.
00:25:56
◼
►
Like what is the ratio of like you give a fan this many Watts and it removes this many
00:25:59
◼
►
Watts of heat.
00:26:00
◼
►
I do wonder if this is less efficient than a fan in terms of power consumption.
00:26:05
◼
►
And I wonder about longevity.
00:26:07
◼
►
Obviously this is a brand new technology.
00:26:09
◼
►
Are these things going to get gummed up?
00:26:10
◼
►
Are they going to break after a while?
00:26:13
◼
►
You know, it's a, it's an unknown to me at least.
00:26:18
◼
►
Maybe this is the type of technology that's been around for ages in some other industry
00:26:21
◼
►
and it just now coming to personal computers, in which case there's some background on it.
00:26:24
◼
►
And somebody who works in an industry will undoubtedly tell us later, but I was excited
00:26:29
◼
►
by seeing this, this, you know, sort of off to the side at CES, not a big booth, not a
00:26:35
◼
►
flashy company, a startup that will probably be bought by somebody if their product is
00:26:39
◼
►
any good anyway.
00:26:40
◼
►
But you know, me and the idea of cooling things without noise.
00:26:45
◼
►
And in this case it's fanless, but it still makes air flow through it.
00:26:50
◼
►
I think that's cool.
00:26:51
◼
►
Yeah, it's a really cool concept.
00:26:52
◼
►
I do have some doubts about it.
00:26:55
◼
►
It's use in computers in particular because if they're only showing off this 10.5 watt
00:27:00
◼
►
heat removal capacity on this one, like that's not a lot for a computer chip.
00:27:05
◼
►
Oh, it's for, it's for laptops.
00:27:06
◼
►
They were clear about that in the interview.
00:27:07
◼
►
Like the interviewer was like, what about doing GPU's or whatever?
00:27:11
◼
►
And the guy was like, no, we can't like, that's too much.
00:27:13
◼
►
They're very, very thin.
00:27:15
◼
►
This is the one you see here is the big one.
00:27:17
◼
►
The smaller one only removes like five watts.
00:27:19
◼
►
That's the thing.
00:27:20
◼
►
But even a big one, like even if the big one is 10 watt heat capacity.
00:27:24
◼
►
Yeah, these are all for like laptops, very thin laptops.
00:27:28
◼
►
That's not even for most laptops.
00:27:31
◼
►
It's for like, you know, the old MacBook adorable.
00:27:33
◼
►
Remember, it's removing that many watts in heat.
00:27:38
◼
►
It's not saying the SOC has to consume that many.
00:27:40
◼
►
So basically if you take, for example, if you put the small one of these in a MacBook
00:27:47
◼
►
Air, it would never throttle, right?
00:27:49
◼
►
Because right now the MacBook Air is fanless and it throttles.
00:27:52
◼
►
But the smallest one of these in there, no more throttling there.
00:27:56
◼
►
You could also probably clock up the MacBook Pro a little bit higher if you put one of
00:28:00
◼
►
these on in place of the fan, because it would be quiet and you could run it and move more
00:28:05
◼
►
air across it.
00:28:06
◼
►
And now you can clock the thing up and make it a little bit hotter.
00:28:08
◼
►
Like that's, that's the application of these.
00:28:09
◼
►
They're very, very tiny.
00:28:10
◼
►
So honestly, I think the, I think even, even the M1 fan based systems or the, you know,
00:28:17
◼
►
the M2 now, like maybe the base M2 you could, but even the M2 Pro is way above 10 watts.
00:28:23
◼
►
Like I think you, you cross that threshold pretty soon.
00:28:27
◼
►
These, the small one of these cool, you know, moves 10 times as much air as the fan that's
00:28:32
◼
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in the 16 inch MacBook Pro.
00:28:34
◼
►
You know what I mean?
00:28:36
◼
►
So you could replace both of the fans.
00:28:40
◼
►
I guarantee you they're like the, the, the cooling capacity of the MacBook Pro's cooling
00:28:44
◼
►
system is way more than even two of these, like 10, 20 watts.
00:28:48
◼
►
You should look it up.
00:28:49
◼
►
Like I bet the SOC in there is over 50 watts at full load.
00:28:54
◼
►
But that's how many watts of power that the SOC takes.
00:28:56
◼
►
It's not how many watts of power the cooling system removes from it.
00:29:00
◼
►
That's that's what you're seeing here is a measurement of how many watts of heat are
00:29:03
◼
►
removed from the thing by the cooling system.
00:29:05
◼
►
No, I, well, okay.
00:29:07
◼
►
I think those numbers are close, more closely related than you think, but that's fine.
00:29:10
◼
►
You could be right.
00:29:11
◼
►
I, I think at any rate, I think this is, this is going to be for low power devices.
00:29:15
◼
►
This is not going to be for even mid range laptops.
00:29:18
◼
►
I think you could definitely help on a mid range laptop, especially if you put more than
00:29:21
◼
►
one of these things.
00:29:22
◼
►
Again, the number we need to know is power consumption, right?
00:29:25
◼
►
They told you how many Pascals of back pressure and you can probably get that number for fans.
00:29:29
◼
►
Like how much, what is the, what is the back pressure of the fan system?
00:29:33
◼
►
But what we don't know is how much power do the fans take?
00:29:35
◼
►
Do the fans take 0.1 watts?
00:29:37
◼
►
Do they take five watts?
00:29:39
◼
►
Because that's part of the equation is how much power do I have to put into the cooling
00:29:43
◼
►
system to take heat out of the rest of the system?
00:29:45
◼
►
So anyway, they're, you know, they don't look like they're particularly close to coming
00:29:49
◼
►
to market, but we'll see.
00:29:51
◼
►
I'm sure there'll be in a PC first and let Apple buys them.
00:29:54
◼
►
No, it was a fascinating technology.
00:29:56
◼
►
And you know, the, the PC world discussion was pretty good and they have a couple of
00:30:00
◼
►
videos on their website that I thought were very interesting.
00:30:02
◼
►
And yeah, to say that they shoot out air at 120 miles an hour or whatever, it's just bananas.
00:30:07
◼
►
They don't shoot it out of the side.
00:30:08
◼
►
They shoot it downward at the thing they're cooling at 120 at which point it smacks into
00:30:13
◼
►
it, breaks through the boundary layer and then just tumbles out at a leisurely pace.
00:30:17
◼
►
You know, it's not, it's not, it's not a, you know, a, an air laser that's going to
00:30:20
◼
►
cut your finger off, but it does shove the air downward and that tiny one millimeter
00:30:24
◼
►
cavity at the thing they're cooling very quickly.
00:30:26
◼
►
It's like one of those Dyson hand blade things.
00:30:28
◼
►
It's like the most awkward to use hand dryer ever in a bathroom.
00:30:32
◼
►
You ever seen the germ spreaders?
00:30:34
◼
►
Like really you basically, you almost have to, it's like playing operation.
00:30:36
◼
►
You almost have to touch everything on the way up and down, but maybe if you get a few
00:30:40
◼
►
of these together, maybe it could be a really weird hand dryer.
00:30:46
◼
►
We are sponsored this week by sofa.
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00:32:29
◼
►
Twitter decided to kill off all of the good third party, third party Twitter clients.
00:32:38
◼
►
A few days ago, I don't, uh, I don't remember exactly when it was, but a few days ago, uh,
00:32:42
◼
►
all of a sudden tweet bot was showing like authentication errors.
00:32:45
◼
►
Uh, Twitter, if it was showing errors, at least on iOS, if not on the desktop and a
00:32:50
◼
►
few other clients, I don't remember which one's off hand.
00:32:53
◼
►
And it seemed pretty clear pretty quickly that this was likely to be a deliberate act,
00:32:59
◼
►
but nobody really knew.
00:33:01
◼
►
And then, um, I think it was yesterday, uh, the Twitter developer account tweeted the
00:33:09
◼
►
Twitter is enforcing its longstanding API rules that may result in some apps not working.
00:33:16
◼
►
Thanks guys.
00:33:17
◼
►
That's real helpful.
00:33:20
◼
►
I really appreciate your, uh, really appreciate your hard work on that.
00:33:21
◼
►
Really clearing things up for us.
00:33:23
◼
►
Uh, but yeah, it seems like, uh, and allegedly SpaceKaren has, has made the call on this.
00:33:29
◼
►
It seems like Twitter's cut off all the good third party, third party clients and, uh,
00:33:34
◼
►
pour one out for Twitter because, uh, I'm, I mean, I'm, I don't plan to use the official
00:33:40
◼
►
client because I know there are fans, fans amongst people I know and respect, but I find
00:33:44
◼
►
their first party client to be frigging terrible.
00:33:46
◼
►
So, uh, yeah, uh, this sucks.
00:33:50
◼
►
Um, there's been a lot of, uh, podcasts that came out earlier in the week that have already
00:33:53
◼
►
covered this pretty well in certain angles.
00:33:55
◼
►
And I, and I think I agree with some of the large themes like, you know, Ben Thompson
00:33:58
◼
►
has been on the record for years basically saying like Twitter probably should have killed
00:34:03
◼
►
third party clients a long time ago.
00:34:04
◼
►
And I think, you know, you could make a case for that.
00:34:07
◼
►
Um, you can make a case for this being, you know, a reasonable decision to have been made
00:34:13
◼
►
and on the topic before you move on for it.
00:34:16
◼
►
I don't actually agree with that.
00:34:17
◼
►
Like the, the, the, the idea that, uh, it's good to cut off third party clients.
00:34:21
◼
►
It makes sense only at the, like the first level of, of logic and thinking about it.
00:34:26
◼
►
And the idea there is, um, once, once, once Twitter decided to go to an ad based model,
00:34:32
◼
►
um, since third party apps didn't show ads and since Twitter never added apps, added
00:34:38
◼
►
ads to the third party API, which they could have done by the way, um, it's like, well,
00:34:42
◼
►
we need to control the client because if we're gonna have an ad based business, people can
00:34:45
◼
►
skip ads if they can do third party clients or whatever.
00:34:48
◼
►
So it's like, Oh, well see, once they chose that as their business model, it makes perfect
00:34:51
◼
►
sense to get rid of third party clients.
00:34:54
◼
►
Only if you think the only two factors here are third party clients don't show ads.
00:34:59
◼
►
We want to show ads, therefore bad third party clients, but third party clients as they existed
00:35:03
◼
►
on Twitter, there's more to them than just their clients that you people use and they
00:35:09
◼
►
don't see ads.
00:35:11
◼
►
So first of all, so few people in terms of like percentage wise of Twitter's customers
00:35:16
◼
►
use third party clients, right?
00:35:18
◼
►
And you could say, well, that's because they killed the API or whatever, but either way,
00:35:22
◼
►
even in their heyday, I feel like the first party client was massively dominant.
00:35:26
◼
►
So the third party client Twitter users, I mean, just, you know, for the people listening
00:35:30
◼
►
to this show, I bet like how many people use third party clients?
00:35:32
◼
►
We have probably one of the nerdier audience and I'm sure most people use the official
00:35:37
◼
►
There's such a small number that they're not really hurting your ad sales that much.
00:35:42
◼
►
And the people who are using those third party clients are probably more likely to be the
00:35:47
◼
►
most engaged Twitter users.
00:35:49
◼
►
Maybe they produce the most content or whatever.
00:35:51
◼
►
Now they're saying this for a fact, but it is potentially the case that the people who
00:35:56
◼
►
are using the third party clients provide more value than they're removing by not seeing
00:36:02
◼
►
ads, because they're already opting out of it.
00:36:04
◼
►
They aren't going to click on your ads anyway, and they may be providing value to the platform
00:36:08
◼
►
by adding content.
00:36:09
◼
►
And that's why I think that just the blanket idea that they should have killed them because
00:36:13
◼
►
they're going ad based doesn't take into account that this was a tiny minority that was weird.
00:36:17
◼
►
It was a weird minority.
00:36:18
◼
►
And I said, I guess I don't know for a fact that they're a weird minority that is particularly
00:36:23
◼
►
lucrative or not, but it's possible.
00:36:26
◼
►
And obviously only Twitter would know or Twitter back when they were competent and actually
00:36:29
◼
►
understood anything about their business and could look this up.
00:36:31
◼
►
When was that?
00:36:33
◼
►
I bet in the past they had people, when they had employees, they had it too.
00:36:37
◼
►
They had that, but when did they ever understand their business?
00:36:41
◼
►
That's I think asking a lot of the previous administration.
00:36:44
◼
►
Because the third party things are just such a sideshow.
00:36:47
◼
►
It's taken this long for Twitter to even bother doing anything about them.
00:36:49
◼
►
They're just such a tiny sliver, but that tiny sliver had attributes about it.
00:36:55
◼
►
It had a history behind it.
00:36:57
◼
►
They were enthusiastic users.
00:36:58
◼
►
They were people who were doing complicated things with Twitter.
00:37:02
◼
►
Maybe they produced more content.
00:37:05
◼
►
As Ben Thompson has also pointed out in Mr. Gregory, they were also the tiny little sliver
00:37:10
◼
►
that was probably the easiest to monetize.
00:37:12
◼
►
Because back in the day, they were the most invested in the platform.
00:37:15
◼
►
So you could have started charging them money and made the API good and charged for API
00:37:20
◼
►
Twitter didn't do any of that.
00:37:21
◼
►
But setting that aside, I just feel like the accepted wisdom that they should have just
00:37:25
◼
►
gotten rid of all third party clients when they went to advertising, I don't think is
00:37:28
◼
►
entirely a slam dunk.
00:37:30
◼
►
There's more nuance to it than that.
00:37:32
◼
►
And only the past more competent Twitter knows the answer to that because we don't get to
00:37:37
◼
►
see the information on the inside.
00:37:40
◼
►
But I think you could make a case-- I mean, look, I run a web service that has a private
00:37:45
◼
►
API that my app uses to talk to the web service.
00:37:47
◼
►
I frequently get requests from people who are like, hey, when are you going to make
00:37:51
◼
►
an Overcast API?
00:37:52
◼
►
I want to play with it or make my own alternative stuff or whatever.
00:37:56
◼
►
And my answer is, sorry, no, I'm not doing that.
00:37:59
◼
►
I want to control what this does.
00:38:01
◼
►
And I could see the argument for that.
00:38:02
◼
►
And you could also say lots of other things like, hey, how about leaving the third party
00:38:08
◼
►
API where it was but just making it only available to paid subscription members?
00:38:13
◼
►
So if I wanted to use a Twitter app--
00:38:15
◼
►
What was I saying?
00:38:16
◼
►
To monetize the API.
00:38:17
◼
►
They're the easiest to monetize because they're already invested.
00:38:21
◼
►
I would have gladly-- assuming I was still using Twitter for other reasons, I would have
00:38:23
◼
►
gladly paid the $10 or $20 a month per account to access it via API.
00:38:30
◼
►
And you have to worry about the development cost to develop the functionality.
00:38:34
◼
►
But you're never going to make tons of money off them because they're such a small sliver.
00:38:38
◼
►
But it also means that you can zero them out.
00:38:41
◼
►
Whatever harm you think they're doing to your ad business, you can cancel that out pretty
00:38:45
◼
►
easily with lots of different techniques to just say, well, these users were taking 1%
00:38:50
◼
►
of our ad revenue away.
00:38:51
◼
►
Can we get that back?
00:38:52
◼
►
Can we get 1.2% of the ad revenue they would have made back by charging for API?
00:38:56
◼
►
And now they're just off to the side.
00:38:58
◼
►
And that sits there.
00:38:59
◼
►
And even if you just ignore them and neglect them, they're not hurting your balance sheet
00:39:02
◼
►
anymore and you could allow it to exist.
00:39:05
◼
►
And it would produce goodwill.
00:39:07
◼
►
And all the historical baggage of API use with Twitter-- because it's not just arbitrary
00:39:11
◼
►
like, hey, I want an overcast API.
00:39:13
◼
►
Twitter grew up with the API.
00:39:15
◼
►
That API and those apps are an important part of Twitter's history and the development of
00:39:19
◼
►
the platform.
00:39:20
◼
►
And the people who are using it are the most enthusiastic and engaged users because of
00:39:24
◼
►
that history.
00:39:25
◼
►
So it's not in a vacuum like a business case.
00:39:28
◼
►
Should we have an API?
00:39:29
◼
►
Should we charge for it?
00:39:30
◼
►
In the specific case of Twitter, the API and the apps built around it really helped build
00:39:35
◼
►
the platform.
00:39:36
◼
►
I'm not saying they're owed anything.
00:39:37
◼
►
But I'm saying the historical baggage of that means that those API users are not the same
00:39:44
◼
►
as the regular Twitter users in terms of influence, engagement, ability to be monetized.
00:39:51
◼
►
They are kind of a special case.
00:39:52
◼
►
And it was in some ways right for them to be treated as a special case for a long time.
00:39:57
◼
►
It's just they were treated as a special case of neglect.
00:39:59
◼
►
And now they're treated as a special case of getting [BLEEP] over.
00:40:03
◼
►
And wow, did they.
00:40:04
◼
►
I mean, talk about mishandling a situation.
00:40:08
◼
►
I mean, this is, again, classic Elon Musk.
00:40:12
◼
►
Well, more classic toddler, let's say.
00:40:14
◼
►
Because I can't think of another-- can you think of-- try to think of it like an indie
00:40:19
◼
►
business, like a one-person app, like a literal one-person app who has handled something this
00:40:25
◼
►
badly, who has cut off some service that people were using for a decade with zero notice and
00:40:33
◼
►
zero communication.
00:40:34
◼
►
I can't think of one.
00:40:36
◼
►
Zero notice, I could probably think of like, oh, some person got into a car accident and
00:40:41
◼
►
they had to stop developing an app and they just cut it off and said, yeah, I'm sorry.
00:40:46
◼
►
You're not getting your money back.
00:40:47
◼
►
I can't develop this app anymore.
00:40:49
◼
►
Sorry, I'm a one-person thing.
00:40:52
◼
►
But they would still communicate that.
00:40:54
◼
►
They would write a post on their blog and say, sorry, I can't work on my cool app anymore.
00:41:00
◼
►
I also can't give you the money back because I needed to pay my rent later.
00:41:04
◼
►
And this is like-- This is worse than that.
00:41:07
◼
►
This is a multi-billion dollar company where they literally didn't say anything.
00:41:11
◼
►
They didn't even send a form email that said, yeah, we're cutting off your app.
00:41:15
◼
►
Just literally nothing until for a week.
00:41:18
◼
►
At least like when the app store d*cks you over, they tell you.
00:41:20
◼
►
Yeah, they send you a form email that says section 3.1.2, you're violating blah, blah,
00:41:26
◼
►
No, they don't explain, but like you get something.
00:41:28
◼
►
And even when it's total BS, yeah, you-- Because like, you know, no one knew for those first,
00:41:32
◼
►
you know, first couple of days, no one really knew whether the API just had like some downtime,
00:41:38
◼
►
like because that's also plausible with how many, you know, Twitter has been breaking in
00:41:43
◼
►
weird subtle ways.
00:41:44
◼
►
So it's like, you know, it could have been just like, oh, something was messed up and
00:41:47
◼
►
no one knew.
00:41:48
◼
►
I mean, again, the way they did this, like I like how Jason Snell put it.
00:41:51
◼
►
Like he said, like it was, you know, not only was it like, you know, badly done, but it
00:41:54
◼
►
was also just cowardly.
00:41:56
◼
►
Like dishonorable, cowardly, just terrible.
00:41:59
◼
►
I mean, look, you know, just from my point of view as a user, Twitter to me has always
00:42:04
◼
►
been the third party app I'm using.
00:42:07
◼
►
You know, for a while I used Twitterific for a while, I used Tweety for a while, and for
00:42:11
◼
►
most of the recent last few years I've been using Tweetbot.
00:42:13
◼
►
Like to me, Twitter is Tweetbot.
00:42:17
◼
►
If I would ever have to use the website, it almost felt like I was using a whole different
00:42:21
◼
►
like foreign thing because it was so different.
00:42:24
◼
►
And so on some level I can kind of see if Twitter wants to have, you know, ultimate
00:42:28
◼
►
control over what their product is, I can kind of see, well, if they look at an app,
00:42:33
◼
►
that's a pretty different experience.
00:42:34
◼
►
I've never seen a Twitter ad ever.
00:42:37
◼
►
All the new products they would launch and things they would try, all the trends and
00:42:40
◼
►
the follow, you know, the hot hashtags or whatever.
00:42:43
◼
►
I never saw any of that crap.
00:42:45
◼
►
I had a very different experience of Twitter as a service.
00:42:48
◼
►
My experience of Twitter was Tweetbot.
00:42:51
◼
►
And so as a user, to have all of us who were having that experience or all the people who
00:42:57
◼
►
were using Twitterific or whatever, any other apps that were cut off, to have us all of
00:43:01
◼
►
a sudden just say, oh, you know what, screw that, now just use the Twitter app.
00:43:04
◼
►
To me, I mean, I was already gone really, but if I wasn't already gone, that would have
00:43:09
◼
►
been the last straw.
00:43:10
◼
►
I'm sorry, like, I'm not going to just jump from this nice experience that I've been having
00:43:15
◼
►
for like a decade and all of a sudden jump into this total crap show of whatever their
00:43:21
◼
►
first party stuff is, which is so radically different.
00:43:25
◼
►
And so again, not only was this poorly done, not only was this like the most cowardly chicken
00:43:31
◼
►
poop way to do this.
00:43:32
◼
►
It was like, you know, talk about like the quality of person you're dealing with here.
00:43:36
◼
►
I mean, this shows the worst character.
00:43:41
◼
►
It's like a little kid when they do something and don't want to talk about it.
00:43:45
◼
►
Why would you ever, why would anybody ever build anything against Twitter again?
00:43:49
◼
►
Why would anybody ever invest in Twitter again?
00:43:52
◼
►
Hell, why would anybody ever advertise on Twitter again?
00:43:56
◼
►
Like you're seeing the character of the person who now runs it.
00:44:00
◼
►
Every week that goes by, he's revealing himself to be a worse and worse person.
00:44:05
◼
►
It's like when Trump was president and you know, we knew it was going to be bad even
00:44:10
◼
►
at the beginning, but it just seemed like every single day there was some new scandal
00:44:14
◼
►
and some new lows that we were reaching every day.
00:44:18
◼
►
And it was like, I can't even believe how bad it, you know, every day you're like, it
00:44:21
◼
►
can't possibly get worse than yesterday.
00:44:24
◼
►
And then something would happen and it would get worse.
00:44:26
◼
►
That's what he is.
00:44:28
◼
►
Like that what now that we have an Elon Twitter, he is revealing himself to be that same level
00:44:33
◼
►
of terrible, incompetent, rash, cowardly chicken person.
00:44:40
◼
►
He is so he's so bad.
00:44:42
◼
►
Like some common moves like the one there was a story a couple of weeks ago of like,
00:44:47
◼
►
just like Trump didn't like to pay his bills.
00:44:48
◼
►
Elon's way of saving money is we're just not going to pay rent and we're not going to pay
00:44:51
◼
►
bills anymore.
00:44:52
◼
►
Like aside from firing everybody and doing all that stuff, it's just like, well, let's
00:44:55
◼
►
just not pay rent because it's going to take a while for, you know, it's a calculation.
00:44:59
◼
►
It's going to take a while for this stuff to wind its way through the court and we'll
00:45:02
◼
►
battle them and blah, blah, blah.
00:45:04
◼
►
We can save a lot of money right now by just not paying bills, you know, and Trump has
00:45:07
◼
►
famously would just, you know, not pay vendors for things and say, oh, if you don't like
00:45:10
◼
►
it, come sue me.
00:45:11
◼
►
It's just, you know, it's so terrible.
00:45:14
◼
►
Like it's, that's why I keep trying to compare it to like the smallest possible thing.
00:45:19
◼
►
Forget about a multi-billion dollar company has any individual human.
00:45:21
◼
►
Maybe that's not fair because individual humans might have feel like shame or guilt or something,
00:45:25
◼
►
but like even like a medium business, like just no matter how bad, you know, how bad
00:45:30
◼
►
somebody handles something, at least they own, like, like at least they communicate
00:45:35
◼
►
the fact that they're doing something.
00:45:36
◼
►
This is, this is like, cause we, to this day, we still don't actually have any clear communication
00:45:41
◼
►
to any of these individual developers that the thing that happened to them was intentional
00:45:45
◼
►
because that tweet doesn't reference anybody specifically.
00:45:49
◼
►
And that tweet also mischaracterizes it.
00:45:50
◼
►
Like they actually like the tweet basically, yeah, it said something on the lines of like,
00:45:54
◼
►
we're, we're enforcing our rules.
00:45:56
◼
►
Some, some apps might not work.
00:45:57
◼
►
So first of all, it doesn't, it doesn't name any apps and it doesn't say what rules and
00:46:00
◼
►
also they weren't breaking any rules.
00:46:03
◼
►
Like Twitter was, Twitter has changed the API rules over the years and the, and you
00:46:08
◼
►
know, these high quality apps that were using them had, first of all, relationships with
00:46:11
◼
►
people in Twitter and they would go back and forth and they would, but you know, but they
00:46:16
◼
►
would make sure they were following whatever the rule as the rules would change.
00:46:19
◼
►
These apps would work with Twitter and follow them.
00:46:22
◼
►
They were following all the rules.
00:46:24
◼
►
They were not breaking any rules.
00:46:26
◼
►
So not only was this like poorly communicated, the thing is the current management, their
00:46:30
◼
►
current employees at Twitter probably don't know what the rules are.
00:46:33
◼
►
That is one, that was one of the plausible theories is that like many of these apps had
00:46:36
◼
►
specific special deals because of the, again, the history that I was talking about before
00:46:41
◼
►
and the people who knew about those deals or knew where they were written down have
00:46:44
◼
►
long since been fired.
00:46:46
◼
►
But but again, so pretend all that's true and it's just a bunch of new employees who
00:46:50
◼
►
don't know any of this information.
00:46:51
◼
►
And they're like, oh, this rule says you're only supposed to have 10 of these and you
00:46:54
◼
►
I'm going to cut off your app.
00:46:56
◼
►
Okay, then do that and be incompetent and then send out a form email that says we cut
00:47:01
◼
►
off your app because you had 10 of these, 20 of these things and you're supposed to
00:47:04
◼
►
Like communicate, tell people what you're doing.
00:47:07
◼
►
Don't just like secretly turn off the light switch and run out of the room and then put
00:47:11
◼
►
your fingers in your ears and go, I can't hear you.
00:47:13
◼
►
La la la la la.
00:47:14
◼
►
Like we literally don't know anything about this other than this one tweet that doesn't
00:47:18
◼
►
address any individual app.
00:47:20
◼
►
So we just all have to assume you're a bunch of jerks.
00:47:23
◼
►
You're too scared to say to the people that you did a thing and you're just hoping it
00:47:30
◼
►
will go away.
00:47:31
◼
►
It's like ghosting someone on text.
00:47:32
◼
►
It's the closest thing I can come up with is like, I don't want to deal with you anymore.
00:47:35
◼
►
I'm just never going to respond to your text.
00:47:37
◼
►
I'm going to block your number.
00:47:38
◼
►
Yeah, but it's but with some implied slander as well.
00:47:41
◼
►
Yeah, but it's and it's your fault because you did something wrong, right?
00:47:46
◼
►
Not only am I not going to talk to you, but I'm going to say in public that you broke
00:47:47
◼
►
the rules like that.
00:47:49
◼
►
Without naming you.
00:47:50
◼
►
They could sue.
00:47:51
◼
►
Like, I mean, they're not going to, of course, but like, they can't the way, I mean, my God,
00:47:56
◼
►
like just these are like, he's such a terrible person.
00:47:59
◼
►
Like it just, it just keeps digging and digging.
00:48:02
◼
►
Like my God, I just, I can't believe how like this is going to go down.
00:48:08
◼
►
I mean, look, couldn't have happened to a worse person, right?
00:48:10
◼
►
I mean, maybe, maybe he and Zuckerberg can get coffee sometime, but like, I am so happy
00:48:15
◼
►
to see how much, not only how much money he's losing, but how much his reputation is just
00:48:21
◼
►
going down the toilet.
00:48:24
◼
►
Reputation is going up with sociopaths though.
00:48:27
◼
►
They love him.
00:48:28
◼
►
I, and I say this as previously a very big Tesla fan.
00:48:31
◼
►
I want to see him fail.
00:48:33
◼
►
And you know, normally I'm not that much of a vindictive person, but he's just such a
00:48:38
◼
►
shithead and he just keeps showing it more and more and more.
00:48:42
◼
►
I will enjoy continuing to see him fail.
00:48:46
◼
►
And I feel bad for the people who are affected along the way, but he deserves this.
00:48:51
◼
►
Just like Zuck, the amount of value that he has either lost, destroyed or both, depending
00:48:56
◼
►
on how you characterize it, in such a short time is astounding.
00:49:00
◼
►
And if he goes down in history as the person who lost the most money the fastest, oh, that
00:49:05
◼
►
would be such sweet, such sweet revenge.
00:49:08
◼
►
I think probably he still has too much money to face any consequences for his actions because
00:49:13
◼
►
that's the kind of place we live.
00:49:15
◼
►
Well, I mean, I think Tesla's other shareholders might have different opinions on that, but
00:49:20
◼
►
I'm not a financial person, but, but you know, part of Tesla's fall over the last few months
00:49:23
◼
►
has been because of other factors, you know, global factors, industry factors and everything.
00:49:28
◼
►
But there's also no doubt that a large part of it has been him and what he personally
00:49:32
◼
►
has done and the reputation that he personally is destroying of himself and his brand.
00:49:38
◼
►
And like, so, you know, there is no, no doubt that a large part of the decline is his fault
00:49:44
◼
►
and you know, it sucks for the other Tesla investors.
00:49:47
◼
►
But again, there are very few people in the world who deserve to lose as much as he does
00:49:53
◼
►
And so I'm looking forward to his continuing unnecessary proving to the world that he is
00:49:58
◼
►
a terrible person and also that he is super incompetent.
00:50:03
◼
►
We'll keep watching, but I'm watching from increasing distance and yeah, I'm totally
00:50:07
◼
►
gone from Twitter now.
00:50:09
◼
►
I mean, I don't plan on looking at Twitter unless for some, I have a compelling reason
00:50:15
◼
►
You know, I used to pop open tweet bot from time to time, just make sure nothing was really
00:50:20
◼
►
And now, you know, if I open a link on Twitter or to Twitter on my phone and thus the official
00:50:26
◼
►
app opens and maybe I'll pop into my notifications or something, but I am not going to Twitter
00:50:31
◼
►
actively at all anymore.
00:50:32
◼
►
I mean, like I deleted the other day cause I'm like, you know, I'm never going to follow
00:50:37
◼
►
Like if I open up the webpage, fine, whatever.
00:50:38
◼
►
Um, but like, bad idea.
00:50:40
◼
►
Cause like anyway, but what I'm saying, but you know, because of what I was saying earlier
00:50:44
◼
►
about how, you know, my experience of Twitter, the service has always really been, you know,
00:50:49
◼
►
tweet bot the app.
00:50:51
◼
►
When I switched over to ivory, yes, I'm bragging about being in the ivory beta and Oh God,
00:50:54
◼
►
I'm dying for a Mac version.
00:50:56
◼
►
But I'll tell you what, I have tried every Mac client that everyone says is like, Oh,
00:51:01
◼
►
this is a good Mac Mastodon app.
00:51:02
◼
►
And I, I have yet to find one where that's the case.
00:51:05
◼
►
Uh, anyway, um, that's, that's a separate day.
00:51:07
◼
►
If anybody has any recommendations that for some reason I haven't tried yet, please let
00:51:11
◼
►
Um, but I want to be able to manage multiple accounts and have a tab that can show mentions
00:51:16
◼
►
and not all combined mentioned and notifications.
00:51:19
◼
►
And it seems like none of the apps are really good at that, uh, or offer it at all.
00:51:24
◼
►
Some, like some of them don't offer it at all.
00:51:26
◼
►
Anyway, because my experience of Twitter was always tweet bot, really.
00:51:31
◼
►
Once I got onto ivory, which is just tweet bot for, for Mastodon, basically, it was like
00:51:37
◼
►
a drop in replacement.
00:51:39
◼
►
Like because almost everyone who I followed on Twitter was over on Mastodon already.
00:51:44
◼
►
And like, seriously, for me, it's like a very large percentage of the people I followed
00:51:49
◼
►
on Twitter, like using a tool like move to Don, a very large percentage of them aren't,
00:51:53
◼
►
I was able to just find a follow on Mastodon very, very easily.
00:51:55
◼
►
Um, and so it was just a drop in replacement.
00:51:59
◼
►
And so it doesn't actually feel any different to me now that I'm using Mastodon instead
00:52:05
◼
►
I, it was, I was able to replace it very easily.
00:52:07
◼
►
And you know, this is part of the reason why companies like Twitter don't like having third
00:52:12
◼
►
party clients because they don't want someone else to be able to build an alternative network
00:52:16
◼
►
and have everyone just kind of scoot right over there super easily.
00:52:19
◼
►
You know, they want to build more of a moat or whatever.
00:52:21
◼
►
Um, but because I really wasn't using Twitter, the client, I was using Twitter, the backend.
00:52:28
◼
►
I was able to just move over and it's fine.
00:52:31
◼
►
And the only hole in my, in my formerly Twitter occupied user life is the Mac app.
00:52:37
◼
►
It's driving me nuts though.
00:52:38
◼
►
Oh, it's bad.
00:52:40
◼
►
Like I'm just not even checking it until like I'm on my phone like at night or whatever.
00:52:43
◼
►
Which is great.
00:52:44
◼
►
It's being, honestly, it's being great for my productivity.
00:52:46
◼
►
Like I, I've been getting so much more done on my computer because I'm not constantly
00:52:49
◼
►
browsing Twitter on the side.
00:52:52
◼
►
But yeah, it's, I am, uh, once we have a decent Mac Mastodon app, um, I won't feel like I'm
00:53:00
◼
►
missing anything.
00:53:01
◼
►
Like I'm already not missing Twitter itself.
00:53:03
◼
►
I'm kind of just missing the way things were.
00:53:06
◼
►
But once you have your app situation settled out, um, you won't miss it at all.
00:53:12
◼
►
And that's where I am now.
00:53:13
◼
►
I don't miss Twitter at all.
00:53:16
◼
►
And you know, we'll see what happens whenever there was like the next big world news event
00:53:19
◼
►
that's breaking and you know, you want to get up to date now, now, now, you know, that
00:53:22
◼
►
it might be a little bit different then.
00:53:24
◼
►
Um, and, and again, and we don't know how Mastodon is going to scale, you know, community
00:53:29
◼
►
wise and you know, certain things, there are certain challenges and potential pitfalls
00:53:35
◼
►
But as of now, it's great.
00:53:37
◼
►
Most of the community I want to follow is already on Mastodon and it's fine.
00:53:43
◼
►
And so to me, I'm just like, all right, you know, peace out Twitter.
00:53:46
◼
►
I, you know, I, I don't need Twitter for anything anymore.
00:53:49
◼
►
So part of this non non action, non announced BS, passive aggressive grade school nonsense
00:53:58
◼
►
that's going on is the fact that not all third party Twitter clients were killed.
00:54:04
◼
►
Just some of them.
00:54:05
◼
►
It seems like it was probably the most popular, but who can say when the company doesn't say
00:54:10
◼
►
a damn word about it.
00:54:12
◼
►
But anyway, what this means is that for me, cause I still do use Twitter cause it's not
00:54:16
◼
►
everyone I follow is over on Mastodon.
00:54:18
◼
►
I tried using the first party client.
00:54:20
◼
►
I honestly, I, I can't do it.
00:54:23
◼
►
It's it's, it's terrible.
00:54:25
◼
►
It's too bad.
00:54:26
◼
►
It's I can't do it.
00:54:28
◼
►
So I just, there's a bunch of other third party clients that are smaller third party
00:54:31
◼
►
clowns clients that now I'm using them instead.
00:54:34
◼
►
And then, you know, we mentioned, alluded this earlier.
00:54:37
◼
►
Twitter's been not down, but differently functional.
00:54:42
◼
►
Let's say over the past several weeks, uh, Gruber mentioned this.
00:54:46
◼
►
I thought I was, I thought it was just me until he mentioned it as well.
00:54:49
◼
►
Like I look at my mentions, right?
00:54:51
◼
►
I'm a Twitter completionist.
00:54:53
◼
►
Twitter doesn't seem to be showing me my mentions anymore.
00:54:56
◼
►
Forget about the official client.
00:54:57
◼
►
Forget about the website.
00:54:59
◼
►
Third party clients that, you know, that don't do any algorithmic anything.
00:55:04
◼
►
It's just, when I look at my mentions, there's like nothing there.
00:55:07
◼
►
Gruber was getting the situation where he was seeing like five mentions in the official
00:55:13
◼
►
first party app and 200 in a third party app and 100 in a different third party app.
00:55:19
◼
►
It's like broken.
00:55:20
◼
►
Like you can't, there's no place you can go anymore to if you, and obviously it's just
00:55:25
◼
►
me, who cares?
00:55:26
◼
►
But my weird Twitter completionist things, if I want to know that I'm seeing all the
00:55:28
◼
►
tweets in my timeline, it's just literally not possible anymore because of Twitter's
00:55:32
◼
►
semi-brokenness.
00:55:33
◼
►
But to the extent that I'm looking at Twitter at all, I'm doing it through different third
00:55:36
◼
►
party applications.
00:55:38
◼
►
The final FU thing on this whole Twitter third party app is, aside from destroying the livelihood
00:55:44
◼
►
of all these developers who have popular third party Twitter applications, there is an aspect
00:55:50
◼
►
to it that may actually end up costing them money because a lot of these applications
00:55:53
◼
►
are a subscription type thing and you pay like an annual or monthly subscription.
00:55:57
◼
►
And if someone paid for a subscription to this app for a year and then two days later
00:56:03
◼
►
the app was killed by an API change, they're probably going to ask for a refund.
00:56:07
◼
►
And so now the developers have to give back the money that they thought they had because
00:56:11
◼
►
their app was killed by Twitter.
00:56:12
◼
►
And that, you know, again, too, if it's like an individual developer or a small group of
00:56:16
◼
►
developers that can be a big financial hit.
00:56:18
◼
►
Hey, I thought I had all this money, but guess what?
00:56:20
◼
►
You got to give back, you know, this much of the revenue that you already thought you
00:56:23
◼
►
got because Twitter killed your app and all the users who are using it now can't, who
00:56:27
◼
►
paid for a year of your service can't get it.
00:56:29
◼
►
So they want their money back or they want half their money back or something.
00:56:32
◼
►
It just sucks all around.
00:56:34
◼
►
So it's not, you know, this is not a victimless crime.
00:56:35
◼
►
It's like, oh, boo hoo, you can't use a Twitter client you like.
00:56:38
◼
►
The developers have their business killed and the developers may owe money, have to
00:56:43
◼
►
return money they thought they had as income.
00:56:45
◼
►
And it's not like these developers are rolling around with, you know, Bugatti's or whatever.
00:56:51
◼
►
They're getting by selling a third party Twitter app, which is not, you know, the big bucks.
00:56:55
◼
►
It's not, you know, Candy Crush or whatever.
00:56:57
◼
►
So yeah, that's the thing.
00:56:58
◼
►
It's like, it's like this is one of the reasons why the way they did it was so crappy because
00:57:02
◼
►
like in a regular operating environment with a business run by adults and decent people,
00:57:08
◼
►
you would give people warning and, you know, something as major as we're going to kill
00:57:12
◼
►
the entire basis for which your app is allowed to exist.
00:57:16
◼
►
You might give them a warning of like a year.
00:57:17
◼
►
You might say like, all right, on this date next year, the API is turning off for apps
00:57:22
◼
►
Sorry, that's it.
00:57:23
◼
►
Because what they were doing, despite the horrible passive aggressive message on the
00:57:27
◼
►
Twitter dev account, what these apps were doing was totally allowed.
00:57:31
◼
►
It was within the rules.
00:57:32
◼
►
It was permitted.
00:57:33
◼
►
It was explicitly permitted by Twitter.
00:57:35
◼
►
They were totally allowed to do what they were doing and monetize it and everything.
00:57:38
◼
►
So they were they were doing nothing wrong or unexpected to the Twitter company.
00:57:42
◼
►
And they had this really complicated system from back from the last time Twitter screwed
00:57:45
◼
►
with the API where they're only allowed to have a maximum number of X customers after
00:57:49
◼
►
that they can't have any more.
00:57:50
◼
►
It was like this very draconian system that they had to work within with where they would
00:57:53
◼
►
dole out a fixed number of tokens that you could sell.
00:57:56
◼
►
So it's not even like it was a free for all like it was back in the old days.
00:57:59
◼
►
That's why app.net launched.
00:58:01
◼
►
It was in response to that.
00:58:04
◼
►
The last time Twitter tried to screw over third party developers, it did it in a less
00:58:09
◼
►
crappy way than this.
00:58:10
◼
►
And yeah, and you remember like the four quadrant thing?
00:58:12
◼
►
It was a whole thing.
00:58:13
◼
►
And it was a big scandal back then.
00:58:14
◼
►
But but they at least even then, even when they were being crappy back then, you know,
00:58:18
◼
►
they did it in a much more reasonable way.
00:58:21
◼
►
They gave dates they gave, they communicated their crappiness.
00:58:24
◼
►
Yeah, exactly.
00:58:25
◼
►
You didn't have to guess.
00:58:26
◼
►
They didn't just break one day.
00:58:27
◼
►
And then they just said, we're not saying anything.
00:58:28
◼
►
Nope, we don't have a communications department.
00:58:30
◼
►
Don't bother asking us any questions.
00:58:32
◼
►
Anyway, I'm glad we have happier news to talk about this week because I have the Twitter
00:58:39
◼
►
But you know, again, like, I can't I can't urge this enough.
00:58:42
◼
►
Switch to Mastodon.
00:58:43
◼
►
Like if you're on Twitter, get off of it.
00:58:45
◼
►
You know, if I know there are certain communities and certain people who haven't moved off of
00:58:51
◼
►
You all first of all, I'll ask our audience two things on this topic.
00:58:55
◼
►
Number one, please move off of Twitter.
00:58:57
◼
►
Like this is not a company you want to support.
00:59:00
◼
►
And especially Oh God, this person running it.
00:59:04
◼
►
And number two, I would ask you please, if you have a subscription to tweetbot or Twitterific
00:59:09
◼
►
or any other any of the other Twitter apps that were just killed, please don't ask Apple
00:59:14
◼
►
for a refund on it.
00:59:16
◼
►
You know, look, these are these are small developers like that.
00:59:19
◼
►
No one could have foreseen this really.
00:59:22
◼
►
So I mean, yeah, obviously cancel your subscription.
00:59:25
◼
►
But like, don't ask for a refund for the for the unused portion that now can't work because
00:59:30
◼
►
you're going to really, you know, that's going to really possibly hurt and, you know, consider
00:59:36
◼
►
it consider it your risk that was taken also.
00:59:38
◼
►
And you know, hopefully we'll move on to better pastures.
00:59:41
◼
►
All right, so we have one more piece of slightly unhappy follow up and then I'll end on a happy
00:59:48
◼
►
piece of follow up.
00:59:50
◼
►
The unhappy ish follow up is actually follow out to this week's upgrade actually specifically
00:59:55
◼
►
upgrade plus episode 442 zombie arms and toaster fridge in the very, very end in the members
01:00:01
◼
►
only portion.
01:00:02
◼
►
Jason and Mike went on a tear about filing a feedback and Oh, baby, I was here for it.
01:00:09
◼
►
Oh, it was good.
01:00:11
◼
►
It was great.
01:00:12
◼
►
And so I'm not I'm not gonna get myself riled up about this.
01:00:15
◼
►
I'm just gonna move right along.
01:00:16
◼
►
But if you want to hear the two of them just go off on how how awful fire filing feedback
01:00:22
◼
►
is, how obnoxious it is to to hear that from Apple, and how it's kind of victim blaming.
01:00:28
◼
►
Oh, it was so good.
01:00:29
◼
►
It was so good.
01:00:31
◼
►
So incredibly good.
01:00:32
◼
►
Upgrade Plus, which is the members only stuff 442 zombie arms and toaster fridge, please.
01:00:37
◼
►
And thank you.
01:00:38
◼
►
And thank you, Mike and Jason for your service.
01:00:41
◼
►
I mean that non sarcastically.
01:00:43
◼
►
The only thing that bothers me is that Apple is never going to hear this because I don't
01:00:47
◼
►
know if you know any Apple people are are members of upgrade.
01:00:50
◼
►
I hope they are.
01:00:51
◼
►
They should be.
01:00:52
◼
►
They should be because it's such a great program.
01:00:53
◼
►
But anyways, check it out.
01:00:55
◼
►
And then finally, the happy news from the listener cool places file.
01:00:59
◼
►
We got this which I don't know if it was intended to be anonymous or not, but I will just assume
01:01:03
◼
►
it was intended to be anonymous.
01:01:04
◼
►
We got the following letter.
01:01:06
◼
►
I deployed last year aboard America's fastest deepest diving submarine and before leaving
01:01:10
◼
►
the pier downloaded some older episodes to listen to offline underwater.
01:01:14
◼
►
Now that I'm back, I'm happy to say that ATP has now been played some unspecified deep
01:01:18
◼
►
depth somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.
01:01:21
◼
►
Most of my listening time was spent as I exercised between the main steam piping just behind
01:01:25
◼
►
the reactor compartment, which is heavily shielded from radiation, so no health worries there.
01:01:29
◼
►
When I returned to shore, it was good to catch up on the episodes I missed since there's
01:01:32
◼
►
zero connectivity with the outside world on a deployment.
01:01:36
◼
►
I just think this is so freaking cool and very timely since we're talking about hunt
01:01:38
◼
►
for October.
01:01:39
◼
►
Again, atp.fm/join.
01:01:41
◼
►
So if you if you listen to the show in a weird, odd, unusual or cool place, I feel like I'm
01:01:46
◼
►
channeling a little bit of hello internet here, but I don't care.
01:01:49
◼
►
Let us know.
01:01:50
◼
►
I'm going to share it and I appreciate this anonymous listener for writing it.
01:01:53
◼
►
Yeah, if hello internet wants to stop us, they can come back on the air.
01:01:57
◼
►
We are sponsored this week by the LunchPaleVC podcast.
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That's the LunchPaleVC podcast.
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You can listen to it wherever you get your podcasts.
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Thank you so much to LunchPaleVC podcast for sponsoring our show.
01:03:07
◼
►
Apple has announced the new M2 Pro and M2 Macs, MacBook Pro, and then even before that
01:03:14
◼
►
the new M2 Pro and M2 Mac Mini.
01:03:22
◼
►
So all sorts of new treats for everyone.
01:03:24
◼
►
We can start with the Mac Mini.
01:03:27
◼
►
It is a little bit bigger than the old one, and it's silver only, no space gray.
01:03:32
◼
►
When you say a little bit, you mean a little bit.
01:03:34
◼
►
I didn't look up these numbers, I'm just trusting Dan Moore and his six colors, but 7.75 inches
01:03:40
◼
►
instead of 7.7?
01:03:44
◼
►
1.41 inches high instead of 1.4?
01:03:47
◼
►
I thought these Mac Minis had been the same size for years now.
01:03:50
◼
►
It's like, "Oh, the Intel one, then they switched to the M1 and it was the same case, and blah,
01:03:54
◼
►
blah, blah."
01:03:55
◼
►
And then they make a new case and it's slightly differently sized.
01:04:00
◼
►
I mean, unless you're making some really tightly fitting Mac Mini jeans, I don't think you're
01:04:05
◼
►
going to notice this difference.
01:04:06
◼
►
Maybe the rack mount people, but the reason it's weird is because it's not like it was
01:04:11
◼
►
cramped in there.
01:04:12
◼
►
Like the M1 Mac Mini was hilariously spacious.
01:04:14
◼
►
Like you'd open it up and it was just this little tiny motherboard and this giant cooler
01:04:18
◼
►
and power supply, and the M2 one is a little bit less like that, but it's not like it was
01:04:23
◼
►
tight in there.
01:04:25
◼
►
I would love to know what in the world happened to this computer that needed to get 0.01 inches
01:04:31
◼
►
bigger on its side.
01:04:34
◼
►
I can't wait to see the teardown.
01:04:36
◼
►
Like did they buy a third party thing that needed that extra 0.01 inch?
01:04:43
◼
►
Anyway, it looks the same on the outside.
01:04:44
◼
►
I mean, and these products are pretty straightforward, but of all the things, this is the one that
01:04:49
◼
►
baffles me the most.
01:04:50
◼
►
The Mac Mini changing size in a tiny, tiny way.
01:04:54
◼
►
Well, spoiler alert, but the same thing happened to the HomePod for what it's worth.
01:04:58
◼
►
Yeah, well, the HomePod's a totally new design and the laptops, when they get a little bit
01:05:02
◼
►
thicker, like, you know, I understand that.
01:05:03
◼
►
Like things are so tight in a laptop, like every little fraction of a millimeter counts
01:05:07
◼
►
or whatever, but the Mac Mini, it's like the Mac Pro getting 0.01 inches bigger or something
01:05:12
◼
►
like in the current case.
01:05:13
◼
►
Like what did you not have room for in there?
01:05:16
◼
►
It's just a little, anyway.
01:05:18
◼
►
All right, regardless.
01:05:20
◼
►
So silver only, no space gray.
01:05:22
◼
►
There is an optional 10 gig ethernet for a hundred bucks.
01:05:24
◼
►
Yeah, that's not new.
01:05:25
◼
►
I thought it was new, but apparently that was already on.
01:05:26
◼
►
I was going to say that.
01:05:27
◼
►
That's not the new, but it is the same.
01:05:29
◼
►
The M2 starts at 600 bones, 8 gigs RAM, 256 gig SSD.
01:05:33
◼
►
And that's a hundred dollars less than before, right?
01:05:35
◼
►
For the old M1 one?
01:05:36
◼
►
I think that's right.
01:05:37
◼
►
I actually have an M1 one, but I don't remember what I paid and I think I got it refurbed anyway.
01:05:42
◼
►
Two Thunderbolt 4 ports, the M2 Pro in the Mac Mini, which is exciting, $1,300.
01:05:47
◼
►
You get a 10 core CPU, 16 core GPU, 16 gigs RAM, 512 gig SSD.
01:05:53
◼
►
You can upgrade from 10 to 12 core CPU for 300 bucks.
01:05:57
◼
►
You get anywhere between six and eight performance cores, four efficiency cores, anywhere between
01:06:01
◼
►
16, 19 GPU cores, the 16 core neural engine, 200 gigs a second memory bandwidth versus
01:06:08
◼
►
100 gigs a second in the regular M2.
01:06:10
◼
►
You get 16 or 32 gigs RAM.
01:06:14
◼
►
And then the M1 Pro by comparison was same amount of performance cores and efficiency
01:06:20
◼
►
cores, same cores on the neural engine, but 14 to 16 GPU cores instead of 16 to 19 same
01:06:27
◼
►
RAM profile.
01:06:28
◼
►
And again, in this case, you get four Thunderbolt 4 ports, which is exciting and perhaps more
01:06:34
◼
►
interesting than anything else, no more Intel Mac Mini, which is very, very exciting as
01:06:41
◼
►
- Yeah, this was great.
01:06:42
◼
►
This is like the one, when people would look at the Apple Silicon transition, everyone
01:06:48
◼
►
knows we haven't done the Mac Pro yet, but most people quickly forgot that there was
01:06:52
◼
►
actually still an Intel Mac Mini also in the lineup because the Mac Mini, it covered, from
01:06:59
◼
►
the 2018 update, it went from being an only low-end product prior to that to in 2018 becoming
01:07:06
◼
►
a product that had some low-end options, but also went pretty, pretty solid into the mid-range
01:07:14
◼
►
performance territory and had some really great higher-end chip options and things like
01:07:20
◼
►
And that was not replaced when the M1 Mac Mini came out.
01:07:22
◼
►
They only had the lower-end configuration with the M1.
01:07:27
◼
►
And it took until now, now that we have in the M2 generation, now that we have the M2
01:07:31
◼
►
Pro variant, that was the first time they actually really replaced what was still the
01:07:38
◼
►
only Intel one in the lineup, which was kind of the higher-end CPU options and more ports
01:07:42
◼
►
and more Thunderbolt bandwidth and stuff like that.
01:07:45
◼
►
So now we have that role filled, leaving only the Mac Pro unfilled, but this is great.
01:07:53
◼
►
I mean, when they first made the Mac Mini, that kind of mid-range performance level in
01:07:58
◼
►
2018, that was a pretty big move.
01:08:01
◼
►
And that really gave that product a lot of life and really was able to be a lot of people's
01:08:08
◼
►
desktops and servers and accessory rolls, things like that.
01:08:12
◼
►
It was a great product.
01:08:13
◼
►
And so to have that finally be really fulfilled in the Apple Silicon era is really nice.
01:08:20
◼
►
So I'm really happy to see this.
01:08:21
◼
►
And in fact, if you look at what would it take, suppose you wanted to have a bunch of
01:08:26
◼
►
Apple Silicon compute power in a data center or a server situation or whatever.
01:08:32
◼
►
You look at the Mac Studio, you look at the other Mac Minis, this is actually a pretty
01:08:36
◼
►
great deal for the amount of processing and GPU power that you're getting per dollar in
01:08:45
◼
►
that kind of environment.
01:08:46
◼
►
So it looks great.
01:08:48
◼
►
The bigger version with the Pro has four USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports instead of two.
01:08:54
◼
►
So you have more bandwidth, more ports, higher RAM ceiling, obviously more processor power.
01:09:02
◼
►
Throttles are gonna be a question mark until we actually get these devices.
01:09:07
◼
►
I do worry maybe it's gonna be loud with the fan or maybe it will throttle.
01:09:11
◼
►
I don't know.
01:09:12
◼
►
It probably won't throttle, but it might be loud under heavy load like the Mac Studio.
01:09:17
◼
►
I don't know, but we'll find out.
01:09:19
◼
►
I have high hopes and I'm really happy to see the Mac Mini and where it's going and
01:09:27
◼
►
what they've been able to do with Apple Silicon.
01:09:28
◼
►
I'm very, very happy with this.
01:09:30
◼
►
To be clear, the M2 Pro is not on a new process size.
01:09:34
◼
►
It's the same as the M2 as far as we can tell.
01:09:37
◼
►
I know they have variants of the 5nm processor or whatever, but it's not 3nm is what I'm
01:09:42
◼
►
So the power consumption would be what you would expect from an M2 Pro, which has more
01:09:47
◼
►
of the M2 stuff in it.
01:09:48
◼
►
More cores, more GPU cores, so on and so forth.
01:09:51
◼
►
I don't think the thermal conditions inside a Mac Mini are too rough unless they totally
01:09:55
◼
►
screwed up the cooler like they did on the Mac Studio.
01:09:58
◼
►
It should be fine probably.
01:10:00
◼
►
These are good machines.
01:10:01
◼
►
They're straightforward.
01:10:02
◼
►
I like the fact that there's an M2 Pro.
01:10:04
◼
►
I guess they didn't put an M2 Max in there.
01:10:06
◼
►
Maybe because of cooling and maybe because you'd start going into the Mac Studio territory
01:10:11
◼
►
and you just want to separate the lines a little bit, which is fine.
01:10:13
◼
►
The price drop on the low end M2 one is nice, but the problem with these Mac Minis is, as
01:10:19
◼
►
always, I feel like this...
01:10:21
◼
►
I don't know why I feel like this more on the Mac Mini than other things.
01:10:23
◼
►
Maybe because they don't come with a screen or a keyboard or anything else.
01:10:26
◼
►
It's just the computer.
01:10:27
◼
►
But it always highlights to me just how disconnected from cost of materials the upgrades on these
01:10:37
◼
►
So if you don't want a base config, everything you can add to this costs money.
01:10:42
◼
►
It's just all pure profit.
01:10:44
◼
►
If you want to go from 8GB of memory to 24GB, it's an extra $400.
01:10:50
◼
►
What planet?
01:10:51
◼
►
Oh, it's special memories on the SoC.
01:10:54
◼
►
If you want to add 256GB of storage, it comes with 256GB, but if you want to go to 512GB,
01:11:01
◼
►
the additional 256GB of SSD storage is $200.
01:11:04
◼
►
No, that's not how these things...
01:11:07
◼
►
And it's profit.
01:11:08
◼
►
It's what the market will bear.
01:11:09
◼
►
I understand that.
01:11:10
◼
►
But speccing one of these up to the way you actually want it, especially when it comes
01:11:13
◼
►
to storage, like, "Oh, you want a 2TB drive?"
01:11:16
◼
►
Add $800 to the price.
01:11:18
◼
►
A 2TB SSD does not cost $800.
01:11:24
◼
►
It's actually a 1.75TB SSD because the 256 comes for free.
01:11:28
◼
►
This is $800 above...
01:11:30
◼
►
The pricing is brutal.
01:11:31
◼
►
And we just suck it up because it's like, "Hey, it's a cool computer.
01:11:34
◼
►
It's a Mac Mini.
01:11:35
◼
►
That's how much they cost," or whatever.
01:11:36
◼
►
I do feel like on the Mac Mini, because there is nothing else in the equation and it's just
01:11:41
◼
►
a box that you're not going to touch or manipulate, it's just like an elemental slab, a container
01:11:46
◼
►
for Apple's 75% margins on its upgrades.
01:11:49
◼
►
It's just brutal.
01:11:52
◼
►
And that's not the fault of this generation or this chip.
01:11:55
◼
►
It's just the way things are on the Mac, and it kind of burns me up a little bit.
01:11:58
◼
►
- How do you really feel?
01:11:59
◼
►
No, I'm excited about this.
01:12:00
◼
►
I have an M1 Mac Mini that's running Plex and Channels and in some of my Docker containers.
01:12:09
◼
►
I am excited that this exists.
01:12:11
◼
►
I have been extremely satisfied with my M1 Mac Mini, which is a 2020 model that I bought
01:12:16
◼
►
mid to late last year.
01:12:18
◼
►
I am not presently looking to upgrade.
01:12:20
◼
►
Jon, do you have any M1 or any Mac Minis of any sort actually in the house?
01:12:25
◼
►
- I don't have any.
01:12:26
◼
►
I've never had a reason to use a Mac Mini.
01:12:28
◼
►
I think they're cool machines, and especially with the ARM ones being so fast and so quiet
01:12:34
◼
►
It's a great machine if I ever had a use of one.
01:12:36
◼
►
I suppose maybe if I didn't have a Synology, but I had rolled my own Synology type thing,
01:12:41
◼
►
I would probably have a Mac Mini hooked up to a bunch of different things, but I do have
01:12:43
◼
►
a Synology, so no Mac Minis in my life.
01:12:46
◼
►
Or maybe there was no Apple TV.
01:12:48
◼
►
I'd have one hooked up to my TV at this point, but you know.
01:12:51
◼
►
- And then Marco, I don't recall.
01:12:52
◼
►
Do you have one still?
01:12:54
◼
►
I know you have and then have and then have and then have and different memory serves.
01:12:56
◼
►
What is your current situation?
01:12:58
◼
►
- I still technically own the one that was being the iSCSI host to my Synology for many,
01:13:05
◼
►
I have since retired that role, but it's still just sitting in my TV cabinet in Westchester.
01:13:11
◼
►
It's like the old, I think it's like a 2015 or 2016 model.
01:13:16
◼
►
It's quite old by today's standards and runs a very ancient version of Mac OS.
01:13:23
◼
►
And then I did briefly use the M1 Mac Mini as my desktop for a while during that transition.
01:13:31
◼
►
And it was great.
01:13:32
◼
►
And then it lived in the water closet and then I traded it into Apple.
01:13:36
◼
►
- Nice, okay.
01:13:37
◼
►
- Yeah, that's the other role this fulfills.
01:13:38
◼
►
Now that there is an M2 Pro one of these, but there's still no big, fast iMac, and in
01:13:42
◼
►
fact the iMac is still on the M1, let alone any variant of the M2, you get an M2 Pro one
01:13:47
◼
►
of these and you hook it up to an Apple Studio display and you have a, what do you call it?
01:13:52
◼
►
Deconstructed iMac essentially for probably a little bit more money because like I said,
01:13:57
◼
►
the Mac Mini is pretty expensive once you spec it up and that monitor is not cheap,
01:14:00
◼
►
but you get a full, well, not a full Mac system.
01:14:02
◼
►
You still have to buy a mouse and a keyboard, I suppose.
01:14:04
◼
►
But anyway, that's a pretty good system because an M2 Pro Mac Mini is gonna be no slouch.
01:14:08
◼
►
The Apple Studio display is nice if you ignore the camera and it's all Apple stuff and so
01:14:13
◼
►
I feel like they're filling, this is the hole in the market that we were talking about back
01:14:17
◼
►
when they didn't have the big iMac.
01:14:19
◼
►
Now they have something there.
01:14:20
◼
►
The M2 Pro Mini fills that pretty well until they can get off their butt and deal with
01:14:24
◼
►
the iMac, which it seems like they're, is the iMac gonna skip a generation and the next
01:14:28
◼
►
iMac we're gonna see has an M3 in it?
01:14:30
◼
►
Maybe, but like, and those iMacs are great.
01:14:33
◼
►
I see them in the Apple Store all the time and the M1 is no slouch, like it's not a bad
01:14:36
◼
►
computer by any stretch, but as the rest of the line sort of leaves it behind, it'd be
01:14:41
◼
►
nice if they looked back at that iMac line and came out.
01:14:43
◼
►
Because when that line came out, it was like, wow, these are great machines.
01:14:46
◼
►
Like for the price and the features and the size, like it's, you know, no complaints about
01:14:51
◼
►
them, but as they age and of course stay the same price because that's the Apple way, they're
01:14:56
◼
►
starting to get left behind now.
01:14:58
◼
►
- Yeah, well and frankly, I mean, I think the Studio display I think is too expensive
01:15:04
◼
►
to have Studio display and Mac Mini be an iMac replacement for a lot of people.
01:15:09
◼
►
It's just, it's not--
01:15:10
◼
►
- No, it's not gonna replace the 24 inch for sure, but like the 27 inch, like a 5K iMac,
01:15:14
◼
►
a specked out 5K, let's do the math.
01:15:16
◼
►
So like if you get a decent M2 Pro Mac Mini with like a one terabyte SSD and like 32 gigs
01:15:22
◼
►
of RAM, that's $2,200 and $1,600, that's about the territory.
01:15:27
◼
►
It's a little bit more maybe than like a good 5K iMac with similar specs and plus you have
01:15:32
◼
►
two separate boxes, right?
01:15:33
◼
►
So it's not horrendous, but it's, the people who are buying a 24 inch iMac are not in the
01:15:38
◼
►
market for a $3,700 computer or whatever.
01:15:43
◼
►
Anyway, Mac Mini, thumbs up.
01:15:47
◼
►
- So Marco, also not ordering anything at this time.
01:15:50
◼
►
Well, I'm sorry, with regard to the Mac Mini, I know you're ordering some stuff, but with
01:15:54
◼
►
regard to the Mac Mini, no orders at this time.
01:15:56
◼
►
- I did not order a Mac Mini.
01:15:57
◼
►
- Okay, all right, now let's talk laptops.
01:16:01
◼
►
The time has finally come, I had ordered the laptop that I'm using to speak to you fine
01:16:06
◼
►
gentlemen right now.
01:16:07
◼
►
I'd order this laptop whenever it was announced in like October, November of 2021, is that
01:16:15
◼
►
And it has been probably the best Mac I've ever used ever since.
01:16:20
◼
►
I had been living well over a year in bliss with nothing better on, that had come out
01:16:26
◼
►
and made this thing look like a piece of garbage.
01:16:29
◼
►
Until today, it is now a piece of garbage.
01:16:30
◼
►
No, not really.
01:16:32
◼
►
But this is the replacement for my M1 Max 14-inch MacBook Pro.
01:16:39
◼
►
We have the 14-16-inch M1, or excuse me, M2 Pro and M2 Max MacBook Pros.
01:16:46
◼
►
The 14-inch MacBook Pro is a touch thinner at 0.06 inches instead of 0.061 inches.
01:16:55
◼
►
And the 14-inch M2 Max adds 0.1 pounds.
01:16:59
◼
►
Interestingly, and I really want to find an excuse to spend the money on these even though
01:17:04
◼
►
it's completely wasteful because I don't need it.
01:17:06
◼
►
But interestingly, they have color matched MagSafe charging cables now, which is really
01:17:12
◼
►
And that is not something that I should be bothered by.
01:17:15
◼
►
And I wouldn't say I'm bothered by the fact that I don't have a color matched MagSafe
01:17:18
◼
►
cable, but I would have preferred a color matched one.
01:17:21
◼
►
Are they metal matched as well?
01:17:23
◼
►
By color matched, I mean like the braided cable itself is colored to match your thing.
01:17:26
◼
►
But the other complaint was that the metal part of the MagSafe connector was always silver
01:17:30
◼
►
even if you got a space-free one.
01:17:32
◼
►
Ah, that's true.
01:17:33
◼
►
Yeah, I believe they fixed that after the Airs launched.
01:17:35
◼
►
Because when the new Airs launched, they finally made color matched MagSafe cables for the
01:17:41
◼
►
different metal colors.
01:17:42
◼
►
And then they swapped those for the Pros as well.
01:17:44
◼
►
I believe, and I don't know if they even did it for the old Pros, but because these
01:17:49
◼
►
Pros came out after those cables began to exist, that's why the new Pros have it.
01:17:56
◼
►
So in any case, the M2 Max, eight performance cores, four efficiency cores.
01:18:02
◼
►
So this is the weird thing about this.
01:18:04
◼
►
The M1 Max had eight performance cores and two efficiency cores.
01:18:09
◼
►
And the M2 Max has more stuff than the, obviously the cores are different, it's got the M2
01:18:13
◼
►
cores or whatever, right?
01:18:15
◼
►
But it has two more efficiency cores.
01:18:19
◼
►
Instead of adding power cores, like this is the max chip, it's like for performance
01:18:23
◼
►
or whatever, they had more transistors to spend.
01:18:26
◼
►
And the way they decided to spend them was keep the number of performance cores the same,
01:18:30
◼
►
but add two more efficiency cores.
01:18:32
◼
►
No, honestly, this, again, Jon, you don't know.
01:18:36
◼
►
I know, I'm sitting right here in the Mac studio right there, I know all about efficiency
01:18:41
◼
►
No, no, but you don't know for two reasons.
01:18:43
◼
►
Number one, you're still using a Mac Pro.
01:18:44
◼
►
Number two, you don't run iStat menus.
01:18:47
◼
►
So you don't know that on Apple Silicon Macs, a lot of tasks are delegated to those efficiency
01:18:56
◼
►
I understand what the efficiency cores do, but I'm saying it's on the M2 Max when you've
01:19:00
◼
►
got transistors to spend.
01:19:03
◼
►
Was it hurting for efficiency cores?
01:19:05
◼
►
Did it need more of them?
01:19:07
◼
►
I mean, you could say it's a battery saving thing because like, "Oh, I don't want anything
01:19:09
◼
►
to be running on the power cores unless I'm doing serious work, so I need more efficiency
01:19:14
◼
►
Makes some vague sense, but the reason I'm saying this is because that M2 Max, I look
01:19:18
◼
►
at it and I don't see just the chip that's going to be in this laptop, but I also see
01:19:22
◼
►
the chip that's going to eventually be shoved head to head with another M2 Max to make the
01:19:27
◼
►
M2 Ultra in the studio and whatever the hell they're going to do in the Mac Pro.
01:19:31
◼
►
And there I think you're going to be oversubscribed on efficiency cores as you start tacking these
01:19:35
◼
►
things together.
01:19:36
◼
►
So maybe for a laptop makes sense, but it's an interesting choice.
01:19:40
◼
►
One of the theories I'd heard about this that makes some sense is I think all the M chips
01:19:47
◼
►
entirely with the exception of the, maybe all the M2 ones, I think they're all going
01:19:51
◼
►
to have four efficiency cores per unit, right?
01:19:55
◼
►
And maybe that makes it easier in terms of scheduling to just say, "Oh, we're always
01:19:58
◼
►
going to have four efficiency cores in the whole M2 things.
01:20:01
◼
►
For each building block there's four efficiency cores."
01:20:03
◼
►
Shouldn't make that much difference in the schedule or we'll work it out as it is, but
01:20:08
◼
►
it's an interesting choice and it really, I feel like, shows how Apple is thinking about
01:20:14
◼
►
They're not thinking about the Mac Studio.
01:20:15
◼
►
They're certainly not thinking about the Mac Pro because that's just too many damn efficiency
01:20:20
◼
►
If you ever did make that quad thing that we just said in a past show that basically
01:20:23
◼
►
the rumor was they canceled it, you know how many freaking efficiency cores there would
01:20:27
◼
►
just be too many?
01:20:28
◼
►
You'd have to just be running background jobs to occupy them, right?
01:20:30
◼
►
Because when you do any serious work it's going to wander all of them on the power cores
01:20:34
◼
►
and there's going to be like 30 of those or whatever, however many there are going to
01:20:38
◼
►
be, but you'd have all these efficiency cores just milling around, looking at each other,
01:20:41
◼
►
twiddling their thumbs going, "You got anything to do?"
01:20:43
◼
►
"No, I'm just doing nothing.
01:20:46
◼
►
Maybe a cron job will run sometime, I don't know."
01:20:48
◼
►
Like me and 15 of my friends here.
01:20:50
◼
►
And it's because, like we talked before, it's a cookie cutter thing.
01:20:54
◼
►
You get each building block has X performance cores and Y efficiency cores.
01:20:58
◼
►
It's just a lot of damn efficiency cores.
01:21:00
◼
►
And to be clear, the efficiency cores are good.
01:21:02
◼
►
They're not crappy.
01:21:03
◼
►
They're really amazing.
01:21:04
◼
►
They're also really very efficient, but at a certain point you just get too many of them.
01:21:08
◼
►
So anyway, I thought that was an interesting choice with the M.2 Macs.
01:21:12
◼
►
We'll have to wait until people do the benchmarking and everything because, like they showed in
01:21:16
◼
►
the little diagram, the M.2 Macs is bigger than the M.1 Macs, but not horrendously bigger.
01:21:22
◼
►
It's the same process.
01:21:23
◼
►
It's got a little bit more stuff in it.
01:21:25
◼
►
The M.2 performance cores are a little bit bigger than the M.1 performance cores.
01:21:29
◼
►
There's a little bit more stuff.
01:21:31
◼
►
I think they cut back on the, I didn't write this down in the notes, but I think for the
01:21:35
◼
►
video processing, it doesn't have, like the M.1 Macs had like double the number of video
01:21:40
◼
►
encode/decode things, and the M.2 Macs doesn't have double.
01:21:43
◼
►
It just has one of each, but I think the one of each that it has are better.
01:21:48
◼
►
I'm sure this will all shake out in the benchmarks.
01:21:49
◼
►
It's just interesting to see how they shuffle the blocks on the floor plan to make slightly
01:21:55
◼
►
different choices than the M.1 Macs.
01:21:57
◼
►
Presumably these choices were made informed by the M.1 Macs and the experience with that,
01:22:03
◼
►
but it's a really nice apples to apples comparison because it's the same process.
01:22:06
◼
►
So the only thing that they had in mind is, let's take another bite of that apple.
01:22:11
◼
►
We have a similar footprint and a similar power envelope to try to make a better chip
01:22:15
◼
►
than the M.1 Macs.
01:22:17
◼
►
And what they chose to do was add efficiency cores, make all their cores a little bit better.
01:22:22
◼
►
I think this does not, remember the rumor, I don't know if we talked about it in the
01:22:25
◼
►
show of like there was supposed to be a new GPU architecture for the A16 that got canned
01:22:30
◼
►
and it was like a rare miss for the apple silicon team.
01:22:32
◼
►
Like it was going to have this all new GPU cores.
01:22:33
◼
►
They were really amazing and they just couldn't do it because it was taking too much power.
01:22:37
◼
►
So the A16 just got the regular GPU cores.
01:22:40
◼
►
As far as I know, these M.2 Macs and pro also don't have any radical new GPU cores.
01:22:46
◼
►
So it's really straightforward apples to apples.
01:22:49
◼
►
Let's just massage the very similar guts to the M.1 Macs to try to make a better chip.
01:22:57
◼
►
Apple's claims were all in the ballpark of like 20% faster at this, you know, 30% faster
01:23:03
◼
►
But we'll wait until people start getting these and start doing the hardcore benchmarks
01:23:06
◼
►
to see like in real world applications, depending on what you're doing, how much better is
01:23:09
◼
►
the M.2 Macs than the M.1 Macs and how does it do on battery life?
01:23:14
◼
►
And that's, did we mention that already?
01:23:16
◼
►
I forget where the apple made the claim, but for one of these machines, apple made the
01:23:18
◼
►
claim that it was like the longest battery life of any Mac that ever made.
01:23:22
◼
►
You remember which one it was?
01:23:23
◼
►
Yeah, for the, that was for the 16 inch.
01:23:25
◼
►
And it's, it's basically, it went from like 21 hours of whatever test they're basing this
01:23:30
◼
►
So it's, it's a little bit longer than the one I have that, you know, the M.1 Macs or
01:23:34
◼
►
pro or whatever.
01:23:35
◼
►
The M.1 16 inch, it's a little bit longer than that.
01:23:38
◼
►
And they didn't make that battery bigger cause they can't, it's as big, I believe it is right
01:23:41
◼
►
up against the a hundred whatever watt hours.
01:23:43
◼
►
Yeah, it's like 99.5 watt hours I believe.
01:23:46
◼
►
And the chip is the same process, a five nanometer, again, maybe a tweaked version of it.
01:23:50
◼
►
So any savings they're getting, any power savings that they're getting with this setup,
01:23:55
◼
►
it's not by removing stuff cause this, the M.2 Macs has more stuff in it, it has more
01:24:00
◼
►
transistors, it has more cores, it has mostly more stuff in it than the M.1 Macs.
01:24:04
◼
►
It's all just about efficiency gains of like, maybe the cores are a little bit more efficient.
01:24:08
◼
►
Maybe the video encode decode blocks are a little bit more power efficient at doing the
01:24:12
◼
►
same job as the old ones are.
01:24:14
◼
►
It's just, you know, so I'd, the claims like, wow, amazing battery life.
01:24:18
◼
►
It probably is better than the old one, but don't expect it to be radically different.
01:24:21
◼
►
The other one was already great.
01:24:23
◼
►
This one is also great.
01:24:24
◼
►
I feel like they just, you know, added 0.05% to the battery life and it's the new champion,
01:24:31
◼
►
So it's not anything, it's not like a, you know, a huge leap like the M.1 was over the
01:24:35
◼
►
Intel things.
01:24:36
◼
►
So just real quick, the M.2 Macs, like we were starting to say, four efficiency cores
01:24:41
◼
►
instead of two, 30 to 38 GPU cores instead of the M.1 Macs is 24 to 32.
01:24:48
◼
►
But I think perhaps most interestingly on these machines, other than, you know, the
01:24:51
◼
►
standard spec bumps, is that it now has, Jon, help me out.
01:24:55
◼
►
It's like HDMI 2.1.
01:24:56
◼
►
Do I have that right?
01:24:57
◼
►
Oh no, you skipped over one other important thing.
01:24:59
◼
►
96 gigs of RAM.
01:25:00
◼
►
Oh, I'm sorry.
01:25:01
◼
►
You're right.
01:25:02
◼
►
I totally missed that.
01:25:03
◼
►
On the 16 inch only, the 16 inch, but I'm sure they could have, you know, whatever they
01:25:06
◼
►
they're segmenting the line.
01:25:07
◼
►
The 16 inch, you can get 96 gigs of RAM.
01:25:09
◼
►
Oh, not on the 14.
01:25:11
◼
►
Not on the 14 as far as I could tell.
01:25:14
◼
►
And which is kind of weird, whatever.
01:25:16
◼
►
And I think this is all just done through increasing the density of the chips.
01:25:19
◼
►
Like it's not like it has additional RAM chips.
01:25:21
◼
►
If you look at the SOC with the little RAM chips around the side, like little ears, it's
01:25:24
◼
►
just higher density RAM chips, right?
01:25:26
◼
►
So the speeds are the same.
01:25:27
◼
►
There's just more of it, right?
01:25:28
◼
►
And again, looking at this and thinking about the 14 offers it by the way, 14 is 96 as well.
01:25:33
◼
►
You need the M2 max, but that's also true on the 16.
01:25:37
◼
►
All right, there you go.
01:25:39
◼
►
Anyway, so 96 is a RAM.
01:25:40
◼
►
Look at this and you think, well, this is what the M2, you know, what's the max RAM
01:25:44
◼
►
on the M2 ultra going to be, right?
01:25:46
◼
►
What is it going to be on the Mac Pro?
01:25:47
◼
►
The 96 gig sort of telegraphs where things are going in that direction.
01:25:51
◼
►
I was happy about that.
01:25:52
◼
►
Like I didn't mention on the Mac mini as well on the M2.
01:25:55
◼
►
Well, the M2 already had 24 gigs of RAM, so that's not big, but like bumping up the RAM
01:25:59
◼
►
ceilings, even though these are otherwise quote unquote boring upgrades, oh, you have
01:26:03
◼
►
slightly better cores and a little bit more of them, whatever.
01:26:07
◼
►
But bumping up the RAM ceiling I think is important because it shows they're not going
01:26:10
◼
►
to say, oh, you know, 16 gigs will be enough for anybody forever and the pro machines can
01:26:15
◼
►
No one wants more than that.
01:26:16
◼
►
It's like, no, please more, give more.
01:26:17
◼
►
And so the M2 max on their top end laptops, you can get 96 gigs.
01:26:21
◼
►
I give that a huge thumbs up, despite the fact that I'm now afraid to go to the configurator
01:26:25
◼
►
and see how much it's going to cost.
01:26:26
◼
►
It's probably ridiculous.
01:26:27
◼
►
- I mean, but it's just, again, like this is just one more continuation of, you know,
01:26:32
◼
►
these the M1 Pro and max versions of these that came out, whatever it was 18 months ago,
01:26:37
◼
►
whatever that was.
01:26:38
◼
►
It's amazing that not, you know, not only is this computer amazing, but that the 14
01:26:44
◼
►
inch and the 16 inch have the same options and the same performance.
01:26:48
◼
►
Like the 16 inch and the only differences are bigger screen, bigger battery and bigger
01:26:54
◼
►
cooling capacity of the 16 inch.
01:26:56
◼
►
And so, but like, you know, but you can get, I mean, you look at the size of a 14 inch
01:27:01
◼
►
MacBook Pro and that machine is available with the highest CPU, 96 gigs of RAM, eight
01:27:07
◼
►
terabytes storage.
01:27:09
◼
►
Like it's, that's incredible.
01:27:12
◼
►
And you know, and I'll tell you, look, I've had both of these laptops now for whatever
01:27:18
◼
►
it's been, when did these come out?
01:27:20
◼
►
18 months ago, whatever it was.
01:27:23
◼
►
These are incredible machines.
01:27:27
◼
►
I am so happy with them.
01:27:29
◼
►
Oh, the 16 inch was slightly better acoustics, you know, larger speakers, but it's, even
01:27:34
◼
►
the 14 inch speakers are pretty incredible for what size they are.
01:27:38
◼
►
Like these are incredible machines.
01:27:41
◼
►
I have been so happy.
01:27:43
◼
►
I still am incredibly happy with my 16 inch as my desktop laptop.
01:27:48
◼
►
And then when I, you know, when I travel, I usually do bring it so I can have, you know,
01:27:50
◼
►
all my work stuff with me.
01:27:52
◼
►
I love this computer so much.
01:27:55
◼
►
I've still now, you know, even now almost a year and a half in, I've still never heard
01:27:59
◼
►
a peep from the fan, except for that one time I was training an ML model.
01:28:02
◼
►
Other than that, like I've never heard the fan in any other usage.
01:28:07
◼
►
It is an amazing machine.
01:28:08
◼
►
It's been rock solid for me living most of its life in clamshell mode.
01:28:13
◼
►
It has just been an incredible machine.
01:28:16
◼
►
I am, I don't have any envy of the Mac studio.
01:28:21
◼
►
I don't have any envy of anything else in the lineup right now.
01:28:25
◼
►
And so what they have done is taken these two amazing computers and now made them a
01:28:32
◼
►
little bit better.
01:28:33
◼
►
And so the result is it's still amazing.
01:28:36
◼
►
They did a speed bump update.
01:28:37
◼
►
That's all we've asked them to do for most of the time for most of their products.
01:28:41
◼
►
They did an amazing, you know, an amazing job with these machines in the first place,
01:28:46
◼
►
you know, a year and a half ago.
01:28:47
◼
►
And now they're a little bit better with, with, you know, improvements with time.
01:28:51
◼
►
That's great.
01:28:52
◼
►
I am just, I'm so, so happy that they are doing such an amazing job at what I think
01:28:59
◼
►
is probably their most important Mac.
01:29:00
◼
►
And because this is their highest end, you know, laptop product, like I said, in the
01:29:06
◼
►
Mac mini, these, these, uh, you know, the upgrade prices feel more egregious, but you
01:29:11
◼
►
know, they've got the 96 gig RAM option that is to be clear.
01:29:15
◼
►
It is adding 64 gigs of RAM.
01:29:16
◼
►
And if you want an additional 64 gigs of RAM, that's 800 extra dollars.
01:29:20
◼
►
I know it's special RAM, but I know planet does 64 gigs of RAM cost $800.
01:29:24
◼
►
Similarly the eight terabyte SSD is please add $2,200 big margins, but like this is a
01:29:31
◼
►
full complete machine.
01:29:32
◼
►
That used to be a lot more.
01:29:34
◼
►
This is the full complete machine.
01:29:35
◼
►
Uh, despite the fact that Marco uses it in clamshell, these screens are pretty amazing
01:29:39
◼
►
on these laptops.
01:29:41
◼
►
To 1600 nits, like just totally thin, tiny, thin little things that have amazing color
01:29:46
◼
►
and amazing HDR.
01:29:47
◼
►
Uh, it helps that they're small so you can, you know, they can do the brightness across
01:29:50
◼
►
the entire screen and blah, blah, blah.
01:29:52
◼
►
But you know, it's, they're very impressive and like, we'll have to see how the heat goes
01:29:57
◼
►
on these cause the Mac book areas with the M2 are a little bit sweatier than the M1 ones.
01:30:01
◼
►
So we'll wait to see people, uh, you know, exercise these.
01:30:03
◼
►
I think there'll be similar cause again, if you look at the, you know, how big is the
01:30:06
◼
►
M2 max and the M2 pro compared to the M1 counterparts, they're similar in size.
01:30:10
◼
►
I don't think it will be radically different.
01:30:13
◼
►
I do think that if you know, if, if they are a little bit hotter, that kind of adds value
01:30:19
◼
►
to Marco's computer and Casey's experience.
01:30:22
◼
►
Cause like the M1s are, you know, that's not going to happen anytime soon.
01:30:26
◼
►
Again, where that kind of leap from the Intel to the M1 and because the M1 was so amazing
01:30:31
◼
►
and because they were so low power and because they were put into enclosures that were so
01:30:34
◼
►
overmatched for the amount of heat they produced, it was just, it was just ridiculous.
01:30:38
◼
►
Whereas now I think over time, I feel like Apple is going to start creeping back up to
01:30:42
◼
►
the idea of like, we have so much thermal headroom.
01:30:45
◼
►
Can we push performance a little bit more, which I think is appropriate on the highest
01:30:49
◼
►
But I feel like, you know, on the M4 16 inch Mac book pro, you may be able to make the
01:30:54
◼
►
fans audible more than Marco Canon and his M1, you know, Mac book pro right now.
01:30:59
◼
►
But I'm telling you though, there, I mean, there's so much headroom in this design that
01:31:03
◼
►
I already have.
01:31:04
◼
►
I'd be shocked if, if the new one though, I know, but like I'm saying that there's just,
01:31:09
◼
►
there's so much headroom.
01:31:10
◼
►
Cause like, cause like now that I, you know, when I was doing the ML training, like what
01:31:14
◼
►
now that now I, now that I know what it takes to get the fan to be audible, like it took
01:31:19
◼
►
me maxing out the CPU and GPU for like four hours before I could hear the fan.
01:31:27
◼
►
It takes a lot to even make, and it wasn't loud.
01:31:31
◼
►
It just became audible at that point.
01:31:33
◼
►
So there's a lot of headroom in this design.
01:31:36
◼
►
So even if the M2 version runs like 15% hotter, like that's, that's not going to be enough
01:31:42
◼
►
to make it that different.
01:31:44
◼
►
I don't think.
01:31:46
◼
►
So John, tell me about the HDMI differences in these machines.
01:31:49
◼
►
So confusing.
01:31:50
◼
►
I was trying to figure out like, do they upgrade HDMI 2.1?
01:31:53
◼
►
I don't see that term used.
01:31:56
◼
►
But maybe I'm making that up.
01:31:58
◼
►
So as we discussed on past shows, HDMI 2.1, the, the, whatever consortium defines that
01:32:03
◼
►
thing recently changed it so that you can essentially claim HDMI 2.1 compliance.
01:32:08
◼
►
Even if you only use the HDMI 2.0 subset of the features like HDMI 2.1 is like a cafeteria
01:32:14
◼
►
Do you want to support this?
01:32:15
◼
►
This is, everything is optional.
01:32:16
◼
►
I support that, that, you know, it's just, so you can't just look at something and say,
01:32:21
◼
►
I know what that is.
01:32:22
◼
►
You have to look at all the fine print and see all the different things.
01:32:24
◼
►
Apple doesn't even seem to claim HDMI 2.1, but what they do say in extremely confusingly
01:32:29
◼
►
worded passages on their web pages, which I will now read, that if you get an M2 Pro
01:32:34
◼
►
in your MacBook Pro, you can power quote, up to two external displays with up to 6K
01:32:39
◼
►
resolution at 60 Hertz over Thunderbolt, or one external display with up to 6K resolution
01:32:44
◼
►
at 60 Hertz over Thunderbolt and one external display with up to 4K resolution at 144 Hertz
01:32:50
◼
►
So again, the reason they're giving these combinations is like it's just one SOC with
01:32:53
◼
►
a bunch of video stuff in there.
01:32:55
◼
►
So you have to basically decide how many things do you plug into your Mac and through what
01:33:00
◼
►
connectors and then what can their maximum resolutions be.
01:33:03
◼
►
It can also drive one external display at 8K resolution at 60 Hertz or one external display
01:33:09
◼
►
at 4K resolution at 240 Hertz over HDMI.
01:33:12
◼
►
240 Hertz over HDMI is not part of the HDMI 2.0 spec, I believe, but they don't claim
01:33:19
◼
►
Anyway, these are the specs, right?
01:33:20
◼
►
The point is, I don't think you could drive 8K at all before and now you can drive 4K
01:33:24
◼
►
at really high refresh rates.
01:33:26
◼
►
Apple doesn't sell a 240 Hertz monitor, but other people do.
01:33:30
◼
►
So if you want to buy that and run the three games that run well on the Mac, you could
01:33:36
◼
►
And then on the M2 Max, you could do up to four external displays, up to three external
01:33:41
◼
►
displays with 6K resolution at 60 Hertz over Thunderbolt and one external display with
01:33:44
◼
►
up to 4K resolution at 144 Hertz over HDMI or up to three external displays, up to two
01:33:51
◼
►
external displays with 6K resolution at 60 Hertz over Thunderbolt and one external display
01:33:55
◼
►
with up to 8K resolution at 60 Hertz or one external display at 4K resolution at 240 Hertz
01:34:01
◼
►
We need parentheses, people.
01:34:02
◼
►
Clear as day.
01:34:03
◼
►
We need parentheses to disambiguate because the precedence rules of English are not that
01:34:08
◼
►
clear and it's not entirely clear.
01:34:10
◼
►
Anyway, the whole point is all these machines can power monitors at higher resolutions at
01:34:16
◼
►
higher refresh rates than the past.
01:34:17
◼
►
So another good thing to see because like I said, the guts of this is not a radically
01:34:21
◼
►
new GPU or anything like that, but they can do more better than the M1 variants when it
01:34:27
◼
►
comes to video driving.
01:34:28
◼
►
So I'm glad to see that the specs are being pushed in all directions because they didn't
01:34:34
◼
►
have to change how many displays they could drive.
01:34:37
◼
►
It's not like the past one was like, "Oh, I can't drive enough displays from my 16-inch
01:34:40
◼
►
MacBook Pro.
01:34:41
◼
►
It was fine.
01:34:42
◼
►
It was fine for a laptop.
01:34:43
◼
►
I'm not expecting 12 displays out of it or whatever."
01:34:44
◼
►
But they pushed it.
01:34:45
◼
►
8K, higher refresh rates.
01:34:47
◼
►
Again, even though Apple does not sell any monitors, they do that yet.
01:34:51
◼
►
Please Apple.
01:34:53
◼
►
Pretty impressive update all around.
01:34:55
◼
►
The only question mark on these entire machines is what are the thermals and noise like compared
01:35:00
◼
►
to the M1 ones because they have some big shoes to fill.
01:35:03
◼
►
But the performance looks like it's going to be a nice speed bump and a nice spec bump
01:35:08
◼
►
So I have not ordered one.
01:35:10
◼
►
I'm sitting here now.
01:35:11
◼
►
I don't plan to.
01:35:12
◼
►
I know a lot of times I say that, but it's very unusual that I decide to change my mind
01:35:16
◼
►
on a $5,000 computer.
01:35:19
◼
►
I plan to sit this one out.
01:35:20
◼
►
But Marco, what's your intention?
01:35:22
◼
►
Well, they said in the video.
01:35:25
◼
►
There it is.
01:35:26
◼
►
There it is.
01:35:27
◼
►
They specifically called it Xcode and they said up to 25% faster than the previous ones.
01:35:34
◼
►
Right now, my productivity is limited by my brain not compiles right now.
01:35:40
◼
►
There are different times in my developer life where those factors are different.
01:35:46
◼
►
Right now, 25% is a decent amount, but there's an up to before it and it's for large projects.
01:35:54
◼
►
My project, I'm not building Photoshop or anything, so I'm going to sit this one out.
01:35:58
◼
►
But it's only because I am just so damn happy with my M1 Max 16 inch MacBook Pro that the
01:36:06
◼
►
difference going from the M1 to the M2 is not significant enough for my needs to justify
01:36:11
◼
►
all that expense and hassle and everything.
01:36:13
◼
►
But if for some reason I needed a new desktop laptop today, I would 100% jump on this.
01:36:19
◼
►
But yeah, what I have now is so close and so good.
01:36:22
◼
►
And like I said, I feel like the M1 line of computers is going to go down in history as
01:36:26
◼
►
like those are the good ones because I don't think, not only the leap from the previous
01:36:30
◼
►
generation but just because they're so sort of like overpowered for the electricity they
01:36:37
◼
►
consume and I do believe that Apple will start pushing the envelope with the M2, M3, M4 and
01:36:43
◼
►
on upwards that holding on to an M1 may be a good idea if you don't desperately need
01:36:49
◼
►
the performance bump.
01:36:50
◼
►
In terms of compiling 25% faster or whatever, if you're not a developer, you might think,
01:36:56
◼
►
oh, Marco says he has a small program so he doesn't care about that a little extra time.
01:37:00
◼
►
But you may not really appreciate the scale, like how big do programs get and how long
01:37:05
◼
►
do they take to compile.
01:37:06
◼
►
Marco's thing takes a minute or two to compile.
01:37:09
◼
►
Who cares if I shave 25% off that maybe a big program will take five minutes, right?
01:37:14
◼
►
Big programs don't take five minutes as opposed to one minute.
01:37:16
◼
►
Big programs take 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour for a clean build, right?
01:37:22
◼
►
When you're giving numbers like that and if your build takes a half an hour and we say
01:37:26
◼
►
we can save you 25%, yeah, you're upgrading from the M1 to the M2 to get that because
01:37:32
◼
►
25% of a half an hour we're starting to talk about real time, right?
01:37:37
◼
►
People aren't doing clean builds, obviously doing incremental builds, but the range of
01:37:41
◼
►
how long it might take to do a task has wide, it's bigger than you think it is, right?
01:37:47
◼
►
It's orders of magnitude, not just compiling, but whatever your task is, encoding video
01:37:50
◼
►
or whatever.
01:37:52
◼
►
Doing small things can be done in a minute or two and those percentages seem meaningless,
01:37:56
◼
►
but once you get into taking a half an hour, two hours, multiple hours, even a 1% gain
01:38:02
◼
►
is worth it.
01:38:03
◼
►
That's what the high end market is like.
01:38:05
◼
►
People who are willing to replace, not throw out, but trade in a perfectly good computer
01:38:10
◼
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for one that is a few percent faster, you will do that if that few percent literally
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I think I know why, Marco, you haven't bought any of these machines and it's because it's
01:40:28
◼
►
finally happened.
01:40:30
◼
►
You finally run out of money because how many of the new HomePod have you bought?
01:40:39
◼
►
You've got a lot of money left for any of us.
01:40:41
◼
►
You've got a stockpile in the basement like cheese graters.
01:40:45
◼
►
I was patting myself on the back for not buying a MacBook Pro.
01:40:50
◼
►
And then you bought, did you buy a baker's dozen?
01:40:54
◼
►
A half dozen?
01:40:55
◼
►
How many HomePods have you bought?
01:40:57
◼
►
Can you, first of all, can we just pause for a minute?
01:41:00
◼
►
Can you believe this happened?
01:41:01
◼
►
Can you believe we got a new full-size HomePod?
01:41:04
◼
►
I can because we talked about the rumor on a past episode.
01:41:06
◼
►
Yeah, but look, there's rumors about a whole bunch of stuff that doesn't actually come
01:41:10
◼
►
Once you talk about them in this show, they're going to happen.
01:41:12
◼
►
Oh, is that how it is?
01:41:13
◼
►
Once the rumors bubble up to the point where we're willing to talk about it on this show,
01:41:16
◼
►
it's probably going to happen.
01:41:18
◼
►
So let's pause.
01:41:19
◼
►
Dirty secret for everybody.
01:41:21
◼
►
So there is a new HomePod, a big HomePod.
01:41:24
◼
►
It's $300, which is $50 cheaper.
01:41:26
◼
►
It's still a lot of money.
01:41:28
◼
►
And also, to be clear, the old big HomePod, while it was officially $350, for most of
01:41:34
◼
►
its life, was kind of backdoor discounted to $300 through Best Buy and other retailers
01:41:41
◼
►
who work closely with Apple.
01:41:42
◼
►
So the old one was basically $300 for most of its life.
01:41:46
◼
►
So this new one, 2mm shorter, 2mm wider, 2/10 of a kilogram lighter.
01:41:52
◼
►
But more interestingly, it has five tweeters instead of seven.
01:41:57
◼
►
It has four microphones instead of six.
01:42:00
◼
►
The I/O, it's 802.11n, I can't even keep up with what's most modern these days.
01:42:06
◼
►
There's a reason for that.
01:42:08
◼
►
So everyone's complaining that it doesn't have 802.11ac at least, or whatever, AX or
01:42:12
◼
►
WiFi 66e, 6x, whatever.
01:42:16
◼
►
The reason for this is because the old HomePod was based on an A8 processor from, I mean,
01:42:23
◼
►
what the hell is that, the iPhone 3GS?
01:42:26
◼
►
It's some ancient, I know it's not that, but it's some ancient phone model and it was very,
01:42:32
◼
►
And for a device that has no screen, really, there is some deal of GPU power that's being
01:42:39
◼
►
wasted there.
01:42:40
◼
►
The CPUs are super old and slow.
01:42:43
◼
►
So when the HomePod Mini came out, the HomePod Mini used an Apple Watch SoC.
01:42:48
◼
►
It uses, I believe the Mini uses the S5 or S6 SoC.
01:42:52
◼
►
I think the S5.
01:42:53
◼
►
- It's the S5.
01:42:56
◼
►
- Which makes a lot more sense, 'cause you figure, okay, it's a higher spec processor,
01:43:01
◼
►
smaller, cheaper, and less GPU power than a phone chip would have, because you don't
01:43:06
◼
►
need those things in a speaker chip, but you do need something a little bit more modern,
01:43:11
◼
►
a little bit faster cores, a little bit more Siri-compatible processing power.
01:43:16
◼
►
And so with the HomePod Mini, they moved the HomePod to the Watch's tech stack on the hardware
01:43:25
◼
►
end basically.
01:43:26
◼
►
And they're continuing this now with the new big HomePod.
01:43:29
◼
►
It's very similar in many of those tech spec capabilities to the HomePod Mini.
01:43:35
◼
►
And that's a very good thing, because the old HomePod had horrendously slow processor
01:43:41
◼
►
performance.
01:43:42
◼
►
I know this 'cause I still use them every day.
01:43:45
◼
►
I've gone through a few since they keep flaking out and dying, but I still use them every
01:43:51
◼
►
day in my kitchen.
01:43:52
◼
►
I use a stereo pair.
01:43:53
◼
►
And the bugginess is just comical.
01:43:56
◼
►
The performance is just comical.
01:43:59
◼
►
They're so slow to respond to anything.
01:44:02
◼
►
They're so buggy.
01:44:03
◼
►
They're so unreliable.
01:44:06
◼
►
And a lot of that is just because it's old buggy hardware.
01:44:11
◼
►
The old HomePods had a few physical design flaws.
01:44:13
◼
►
There's a bad capacitor, something like, people who know more than I do about electronics
01:44:18
◼
►
have spotted, there's a few hardware flaws that slowly kill them over time.
01:44:23
◼
►
But the biggest thing for me as a HomePod user has been they're just ungodly slow.
01:44:27
◼
►
Also Siri sucks, but that's a separate discussion.
01:44:30
◼
►
So they're just so slow.
01:44:32
◼
►
And I also have some HomePod Minis in the smaller rooms of my house.
01:44:36
◼
►
And the HomePod Minis are way more responsive.
01:44:41
◼
►
Not even close.
01:44:42
◼
►
There's a night and day difference.
01:44:44
◼
►
They sound way worse because they're much smaller.
01:44:46
◼
►
They only have one speaker in them basically.
01:44:50
◼
►
It's a much simpler, cheaper device.
01:44:52
◼
►
But you deal with the HomePod Mini and you deal with the big HomePod and the difference
01:44:56
◼
►
in responsiveness is night and day.
01:44:59
◼
►
So no question, the Apple Watch SoCs for this use are way faster than using a really old
01:45:08
◼
►
And so the new HomePod, the new big HomePod is actually faster.
01:45:12
◼
►
It uses, so in the Watch SoC land, the S6, 7 and 8 are all basically the same processor.
01:45:19
◼
►
The HomePod Mini uses the S5, right before those.
01:45:22
◼
►
And the S6 is faster than the S7.
01:45:25
◼
►
And this new HomePod uses the S7.
01:45:28
◼
►
So it's basically one processor step faster than the HomePod Mini.
01:45:32
◼
►
And the reason it only has 802.11 Wi-Fi is that the Apple Watch only has 802.11 Wi-Fi.
01:45:38
◼
►
All of them, even the currently, even the nicest Apple Watches today only have 802.11
01:45:44
◼
►
Because 802.11 AC I think requires like larger antennas and has higher power and everything.
01:45:49
◼
►
And everything about the Apple Watch is all about saving power.
01:45:52
◼
►
And the Apple Watch hardly ever uses its Wi-Fi capability.
01:45:57
◼
►
Which by the way, it's so funny.
01:45:59
◼
►
Literally 48 hours ago I was drafting a blog post.
01:46:03
◼
►
I was going to make my first post on my blog in whatever, it's been a year, I don't know.
01:46:09
◼
►
And what it was going to be about is like a few small software changes that I wish Apple
01:46:15
◼
►
would make to some of its product lines to make them dramatically better.
01:46:18
◼
►
And one of them was about the Apple Watch.
01:46:21
◼
►
I was about to say I wish they would give them a preference or a setting somewhere on
01:46:27
◼
►
the Apple Watch where you could say prefer Wi-Fi over Bluetooth to my phone for internet
01:46:35
◼
►
connectivity.
01:46:37
◼
►
Because if you've ever used an Apple Watch when it could not reach its phone via Bluetooth
01:46:43
◼
►
but it was still on Wi-Fi, it's a radically different experience.
01:46:48
◼
►
It's way faster to do anything over the network.
01:46:51
◼
►
But Apple Watch is because they're so power constrained, so like radically so.
01:46:56
◼
►
Everything with the Apple Watch design is all about saving power.
01:46:58
◼
►
Because of that, the Apple Watch still to this day, it makes a network request.
01:47:04
◼
►
If your phone is within Bluetooth range, it will communicate the network request through
01:47:09
◼
►
your phone via Bluetooth and have your phone use its Wi-Fi with its bigger battery to actually
01:47:15
◼
►
go to the network.
01:47:16
◼
►
And Bluetooth is way slower than Wi-Fi and in my experience with the Apple Watch, way
01:47:21
◼
►
less reliable as well.
01:47:23
◼
►
And so that's why things like syncing music or podcasts directly to your Apple Watch, if
01:47:29
◼
►
you want to listen to them away from your phone, syncing them over takes forever unless
01:47:33
◼
►
you turn off Bluetooth on your phone.
01:47:35
◼
►
And then the transfers go way faster because the watch is then forced to use Wi-Fi instead
01:47:39
◼
►
of Bluetooth.
01:47:40
◼
►
Anyway, the other day, I was doing some Siri stuff on my watch.
01:47:44
◼
►
I sent some timers and my phone was way out of range.
01:47:47
◼
►
I forget why.
01:47:48
◼
►
I think it was like rebooting for a software update or something.
01:47:49
◼
►
My phone was unavailable and Siri on the watch was remarkably fast when it was using Wi-Fi.
01:47:57
◼
►
So the watch has the processing power to do it when it's using Wi-Fi, but the watch usually
01:48:02
◼
►
does not use Wi-Fi to conserve battery power.
01:48:06
◼
►
Anyway, this new HomePod, which is restricted only to 802.11n because it only has the watch
01:48:11
◼
►
hardware, it will be plugged into the wall.
01:48:15
◼
►
It will always have power and it, as far as I know, doesn't have Bluetooth or at least
01:48:19
◼
►
won't be using that part of the chip if for some reason it's built into the SLC or whatever.
01:48:23
◼
►
It does have Bluetooth.
01:48:24
◼
►
That's Bluetooth 5.0.
01:48:26
◼
►
Anyway, but it's plugged into the wall, so presumably it will be always connected to
01:48:30
◼
►
Wi-Fi and will always use that for network requests.
01:48:32
◼
►
And so if you've ever used an Apple Watch that actually is using the Wi-Fi for the network
01:48:37
◼
►
request, you can see like, wow, for Siri it actually is extremely responsive.
01:48:43
◼
►
So that's why this device only has 802.11n, I think, is because it's using the watch hardware.
01:48:48
◼
►
It's also, look, for this kind of device, the difference in bandwidth and things between
01:48:53
◼
►
802.11n and 802.11ac or later, I don't think you're really going to notice this difference
01:48:58
◼
►
in most situations in most people's homes.
01:49:01
◼
►
So I don't think that's a thing that matters, really.
01:49:04
◼
►
The only thing that's ever going to have to be due is streaming music, which is never going
01:49:07
◼
►
to take up, you know, it's a finite amount of bandwidth, even at lossless.
01:49:11
◼
►
You can do the math and say, maximum, even the silly audio file, highest bit rate, lossless,
01:49:17
◼
►
you know, blah, blah, blah.
01:49:19
◼
►
Like, that's the worst case scenario.
01:49:21
◼
►
And downloading software updates, which is asynchronous and no one is ever waiting for
01:49:28
◼
►
It's not like the Apple TV, which, you know, people who don't have ethernet to their TV
01:49:30
◼
►
are relying on that to stream video, and the quality of video is just going up over time
01:49:35
◼
►
as services get more and more daring in terms of the highest bit rate they're willing to
01:49:40
◼
►
So, you know, it's wanting your HomePod to have the best Wi-Fi, you know, standard doesn't
01:49:47
◼
►
make any sense unless there's something your HomePod is doing that requires more bandwidth
01:49:52
◼
►
or lower latency or both than 802.11n, and I can't think of a single thing.
01:49:57
◼
►
So yeah, so that's, you know, that's the thing people are nitpicking on about the specs,
01:49:59
◼
►
but that doesn't matter at all in practice for this kind of product.
01:50:02
◼
►
So it'll be fine.
01:50:03
◼
►
But anyway, what I am most excited about is that faster chip.
01:50:09
◼
►
And then for two reasons.
01:50:10
◼
►
Number one is just because it's way, way faster.
01:50:14
◼
►
And that's the biggest thing.
01:50:15
◼
►
And I think that's, that is what we are most likely to notice most often because again,
01:50:21
◼
►
trying to do anything with the old first gen HomePod is so slow, not even just Siri, but
01:50:27
◼
►
even, you know, dealing with AirPlay, like when you're trying to send music to it.
01:50:30
◼
►
Oh my God, it's, it could be 15 seconds before you get anything to play.
01:50:34
◼
►
And even then it might fail.
01:50:35
◼
►
Like it just, it's so slow to do anything.
01:50:39
◼
►
It does hear you remarkably well, and then takes forever to execute the command that
01:50:44
◼
►
you told it to do and fails a lot.
01:50:46
◼
►
So that's going to be the number one thing that I'm looking forward to is the speed.
01:50:52
◼
►
I am slightly concerned about the decontenting of the audio gear inside.
01:50:56
◼
►
You know, it has fewer tweeters, fewer microphones.
01:51:00
◼
►
That being said, the old one was, I think, over specced in those areas.
01:51:05
◼
►
And given what Apple was able to achieve audio quality and microphone quality wise with the
01:51:11
◼
►
HomePod mini, which has way less hardware inside of it, I'm confident that they're probably,
01:51:18
◼
►
they probably did a pretty good job with this.
01:51:21
◼
►
The woofer looks like it's probably the same.
01:51:24
◼
►
Like they don't, they don't come out and say that it's the same, but it looks like it's
01:51:26
◼
►
like the same size.
01:51:28
◼
►
It's the same placement inside.
01:51:29
◼
►
If you look at like the PR photo of like the x-ray view of the guts inside of it, how things
01:51:33
◼
►
are laid out, you can look at old, at that same view from the previous HomePod, from
01:51:37
◼
►
like old blog posts and everything.
01:51:39
◼
►
And it's a very, very similar internal structure, very similar layout, just a few fewer parts
01:51:44
◼
►
inside, like a couple fewer tweeters and things like that.
01:51:47
◼
►
So it's probably going to sound really good.
01:51:49
◼
►
It's probably going to be way more responsive.
01:51:52
◼
►
And the second reason I'm excited about it basically being like a juiced up HomePod mini
01:51:57
◼
►
is that the HomePod mini kind of runs a different software stack too.
01:52:02
◼
►
Like when the first HomePod came out, I believe internally it was running something called
01:52:06
◼
►
Audio OS or Audio OS or something like that.
01:52:09
◼
►
And I think when the HomePod mini came out, it was actually running different software.
01:52:15
◼
►
And then I think over time they've slightly merged a little bit, but the HomePod mini
01:52:19
◼
►
always had better and more reliable features and implementations than the big HomePod did.
01:52:24
◼
►
Now this will unify them.
01:52:27
◼
►
Now they're going to be running basically the same guts and have basically the same
01:52:31
◼
►
hardware capabilities and especially other things like the thread rate, or excuse me,
01:52:35
◼
►
matter radio, the temperature sensor.
01:52:39
◼
►
It's going to be running all the same stuff.
01:52:41
◼
►
And so that's more likely also to make the software more reliable over time.
01:52:46
◼
►
Apple is only going to have one hardware platform to target here, running similar processor,
01:52:51
◼
►
otherwise same hardware.
01:52:53
◼
►
So it's more likely to be more reliable over time.
01:52:56
◼
►
Because the other problem with the HomePod is that it's not an area of significant focus
01:53:04
◼
►
They're going to neglect it.
01:53:05
◼
►
They're going to put the B team on parts of it.
01:53:07
◼
►
It's going to be a low priority.
01:53:09
◼
►
It's going to have a lot of bugs that don't get fixed for a long time.
01:53:12
◼
►
And so the less work you give them, the better.
01:53:15
◼
►
So to have a unified hardware ecosystem and software ecosystem around this product, like
01:53:20
◼
►
they did a pretty bad job managing the first HomePod's software ecosystem.
01:53:26
◼
►
The HomePod mini, they've been doing a better job.
01:53:28
◼
►
So this will be lumped in with the HomePod mini in terms of what it will take Apple to
01:53:31
◼
►
maintain it and keep it updated over time.
01:53:34
◼
►
And so that is more likely to result in good outcomes for owners.
01:53:39
◼
►
And look, I wish their hardware lasted longer.
01:53:43
◼
►
I wish the first generation one didn't have as many problems as it did.
01:53:45
◼
►
I wish they didn't have this premium price product that they put a slow processor in,
01:53:49
◼
►
even at the time it was slow.
01:53:51
◼
►
But hey, the first gen HomePod is in many ways like the first gen Apple watch, where
01:53:58
◼
►
it proved to have some good ideas, but you saw significant benefits from the first couple
01:54:04
◼
►
of hardware revisions after it.
01:54:06
◼
►
So hopefully this is going to be really good.
01:54:09
◼
►
It remains to be seen, whether it still sounds as good with the fewer speakers or whatever,
01:54:14
◼
►
I think it's going to be pretty good.
01:54:16
◼
►
So I ordered a pair of them.
01:54:18
◼
►
White, of course, white is clearly the better color.
01:54:20
◼
►
I will take, I will hear no alternatives, no dissenting opinions on that, because if
01:54:28
◼
►
you think black HomePods are better, you're just wrong.
01:54:30
◼
►
The white ones are so much better.
01:54:33
◼
►
But anyway, so I got a pair of white ones.
01:54:36
◼
►
And if they're good, you know, maybe I'll replace one more pair that I have still in
01:54:41
◼
►
operation that's barely working.
01:54:44
◼
►
But I started with one pair.
01:54:46
◼
►
We'll see how it goes.
01:54:47
◼
►
And I'm so excited that this product is being updated.
01:54:51
◼
►
When the first HomePod launched at $350, we all made fun of a few pretty big flaws about
01:54:58
◼
►
Number one, it was too expensive for the market.
01:55:00
◼
►
And number two, it didn't have a line in, and it lacked a lot of kind of enthusiast
01:55:07
◼
►
Siri was super slow and unreliable and stupid compared to Alexa or Google Assistant.
01:55:13
◼
►
And you look at the competitive market today, you know, they brought the price down a little.
01:55:18
◼
►
But what makes the price easier to take is that there's the HomePod mini, and it's
01:55:23
◼
►
It's 100 bucks.
01:55:24
◼
►
It's, I think, one of the best values in Apple's lineup.
01:55:27
◼
►
It's a pretty good small speaker.
01:55:29
◼
►
It sounds way better than any other small speakers from all the other companies.
01:55:33
◼
►
Like, you know, the other companies have better sounding bigger speakers, but they're small
01:55:36
◼
►
ones that didn't even come close.
01:55:39
◼
►
And I think the HomePod mini, I think, is a success.
01:55:41
◼
►
You know, it's not taking over the world, but I think it's an overall successful product
01:55:46
◼
►
that they're doing a pretty good job with.
01:55:48
◼
►
It comes in a bunch of fun colors.
01:55:49
◼
►
It's good for them, you know.
01:55:50
◼
►
Now that the HomePod mini exists and is doing fine, I think the pricing pressure for the
01:55:55
◼
►
bigger one is greatly relieved because it is not the only option.
01:56:00
◼
►
So they can actually make it a premium one.
01:56:02
◼
►
And in that premium market, not only is there very little competition, but the competition
01:56:09
◼
►
that's there is more expensive by a good amount.
01:56:14
◼
►
You know, like if you actually want something that is like smallish, tastefully designed,
01:56:19
◼
►
but has the audio performance of this big HomePod, you're not going to find much.
01:56:24
◼
►
And the little that you will find is going to be, you know, from like the boutique brands
01:56:28
◼
►
like B&O or is it name, naim, I don't know how it's pronounced.
01:56:33
◼
►
And they're all way more expensive.
01:56:34
◼
►
So what they're, what they deliver here, assuming that it's as good as the first one in terms
01:56:39
◼
►
of audio quality and assuming that it has the performance of the HomePod mini at least
01:56:43
◼
►
in its responsiveness, should be a pretty great product.
01:56:48
◼
►
It's not going to be for everyone because not everybody wants a $300 smart speaker,
01:56:52
◼
►
let alone a stereo pair of them, which I think is still going to prove to be awesome.
01:56:55
◼
►
But I would, again, I would challenge you to spend $600 for the stereo pair of, try
01:57:02
◼
►
to spend anywhere near that money on anything that sounds better at this size.
01:57:07
◼
►
You won't find it.
01:57:09
◼
►
Even possibly at any size.
01:57:10
◼
►
Like it's, it's that they're, they're that good.
01:57:14
◼
►
If you're in that market.
01:57:15
◼
►
They still retain the capabilities of being used as speakers for Apple TVs.
01:57:20
◼
►
I've never tried that, but I know people have, and it seems to work well for people from
01:57:24
◼
►
what I've heard.
01:57:25
◼
►
Can we, can we talk a little bit more about that?
01:57:26
◼
►
I did not realize, apparently I was supposed to know, maybe we talked about it on this
01:57:30
◼
►
very program and I forgot, but apparently even the HomePod mini, and I think the original
01:57:35
◼
►
HomePods could work in concert with an Apple TV to be an, to receive eARC from the TV and
01:57:45
◼
►
then broadcast that to the HomePods.
01:57:47
◼
►
Let me translate that into English.
01:57:49
◼
►
You could be watching or playing a video game, like playing your PlayStation on your TV or
01:57:54
◼
►
watching your cable box on your TV.
01:57:56
◼
►
And if your TV supports eARC, it would send the audio to the Apple TV.
01:58:02
◼
►
Even if you're not doing anything else, the Apple TV, the Apple TV is otherwise idle.
01:58:05
◼
►
It will send the audio to the Apple TV, and the Apple TV will rebroadcast to your HomePods,
01:58:09
◼
►
such that your HomePods can be your TV speakers.
01:58:12
◼
►
I knew that you could have the Apple TV for Apple TV stuff broadcast everything to the
01:58:19
◼
►
I had no idea that you could do this in the same style that my Sonos setup does, where
01:58:24
◼
►
whatever it is you're watching on the TV will be broadcast to the HomePods.
01:58:30
◼
►
And I was talking about this on Mastodon today, and as with all things, about half the feedback
01:58:34
◼
►
I got was, "Yes, it works pretty consistently, but not perfectly."
01:58:38
◼
►
And the latency is great, and half the feedback I got was, "Yes, this is something you can
01:58:42
◼
►
do, but the latency is awful."
01:58:44
◼
►
Well, in this scenario, your Apple TV is acting as a little software-powered receiver, essentially.
01:58:50
◼
►
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:58:51
◼
►
That's all you receive, right?
01:58:52
◼
►
But unlike an actual receiver, Apple does not have all the weird controls for messing
01:58:58
◼
►
with the delay and everything.
01:59:00
◼
►
And yes, as we talked about in the past, the thing we were talking about syncing stuff up,
01:59:04
◼
►
the HDMI spec itself has some synchronization stuff in it, but setups can be wonky, and
01:59:08
◼
►
so I feel like the reason you get that disparity is sometimes the automatic synchronization,
01:59:14
◼
►
latency, blah, blah, blah, HDMI stuff works fine with people's setups, and other times
01:59:17
◼
►
it doesn't, and when it doesn't, Apple has not yet added all the little picky features
01:59:22
◼
►
to fix it and go through that whole thing that I described on a past episode.
01:59:26
◼
►
So I kind of understand that.
01:59:28
◼
►
And I think the reason you don't remember it is because we just talked about it in the
01:59:31
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context of, "I'm just going to use my," like when the HomePod first came out, "I'm just
01:59:36
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►
going to use my HomePods as my TV speakers."
01:59:39
◼
►
And you didn't think about what that meant, but what that meant was like, "No, whatever
01:59:42
◼
►
I watch on my TV, the sound comes out of the HomePods," and the only way that worked is
01:59:46
◼
►
with that feature that introduced like a year or so ago that basically uses your Apple TV
01:59:50
◼
►
as a little miniature software-powered receiver to do eARC, blah, blah, blah.
01:59:55
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►
That's why, Casey, this is why you didn't know about this feature, because it wasn't
01:59:58
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►
there at launch with the previous ones.
02:00:00
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►
It was added later in software.
02:00:03
◼
►
We should also mention very quickly that these things support spatial audio.
02:00:07
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►
They also added sound recognition for smoke alarms or carbon monoxide alarms, and it can
02:00:13
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►
send a notification to your devices, which is pretty cool, although that's coming apparently
02:00:16
◼
►
in the spring.
02:00:17
◼
►
Yeah, that's a great feature if it works well, but again, it isn't out yet, so we won't know
02:00:23
◼
►
Yeah, that's coming out in the spring.
02:00:25
◼
►
Stereo pairs require the same generation of HomePod.
02:00:27
◼
►
You can't take an old one and a new one and pair them, which I mean, that's not surprising.
02:00:31
◼
►
Because I've just got the old one, and I might even consider a new one if I could pair them,
02:00:35
◼
►
but I can't, and now it's like, ugh.
02:00:37
◼
►
And I understand why.
02:00:39
◼
►
I mean, there's software reasons why.
02:00:41
◼
►
There's also hardware reasons if you're going to have a pair of speakers of one of them
02:00:44
◼
►
that has a different number of drivers than the other.
02:00:45
◼
►
It's a little bit weird.
02:00:46
◼
►
Like, I get it, but it's kind of a shame.
02:00:49
◼
►
Looking at this product, the thing that strikes me about it is how Apple has not really rethought
02:00:57
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►
the HomePod.
02:00:59
◼
►
Like, it's kind of like you mentioned the Series 0 watch.
02:01:01
◼
►
Imagine if the follow-up to the Series 0 watch came like years later.
02:01:05
◼
►
Like, they just didn't do anything.
02:01:07
◼
►
People wondered if they were ever going to make another watch again, and they came out
02:01:10
◼
►
with a new one, and it looked like the Series 1.
02:01:12
◼
►
What was the one after the Series 0?
02:01:13
◼
►
It was just called Series 1, or was it called Series 2?
02:01:16
◼
►
No, this confused everybody.
02:01:18
◼
►
There was the Apple Watch with no number, which we called the Series 0.
02:01:22
◼
►
Then the next year, they released two models called Series 1 and Series 2, which had the
02:01:27
◼
►
same processor as each other.
02:01:30
◼
►
So there's one called the Series 1, but it was really part of the second-generation family
02:01:35
◼
►
of Apple Watch.
02:01:36
◼
►
It's like Xbox naming, you know?
02:01:40
◼
►
But similarly, when those watches came out, they didn't rethink the Apple Watch.
02:01:43
◼
►
They were very much like the Series 0, and this is the same way.
02:01:47
◼
►
This product is not like the current generation of MacBook Pros.
02:01:51
◼
►
People were like, "Oh, we screwed up. We're going to put a good keyboard and an SD card
02:01:54
◼
►
slot in HDMI port."
02:01:55
◼
►
No, this thing does not have audio input.
02:01:57
◼
►
You cannot use these as speakers.
02:01:59
◼
►
The power cord is not removable.
02:02:00
◼
►
Like, none of that stuff.
02:02:01
◼
►
They didn't do any of that.
02:02:02
◼
►
I don't know, the power cord is removable.
02:02:05
◼
►
We don't know yet, I don't think.
02:02:07
◼
►
It's removable.
02:02:08
◼
►
Alright, so on the original generation HomePod, the power cord is also removable.
02:02:12
◼
►
It's just hard to remove.
02:02:14
◼
►
It's like you're not really supposed to remove it.
02:02:17
◼
►
If you had used a standard plug, you would have to pass the UL labs, whatever, in the
02:02:21
◼
►
United States to like it.
02:02:22
◼
►
And so they didn't do that, so it's not user-removable.
02:02:24
◼
►
And that allows them to sidestep having to put an ugly standards-compliant, safety-compliant
02:02:31
◼
►
So that's why it's technically not removable.
02:02:32
◼
►
But anyway, the point is, this product does not have a bunch of ports on the back.
02:02:36
◼
►
People aren't going to buy this to just use it, to Marco's point, like, "What if I just
02:02:39
◼
►
want a really good-sounding spear?
02:02:41
◼
►
Can I use these as just good-sounding speakers?"
02:02:44
◼
►
There's a software component that needs to be AirPlay, needs to go through your Apple
02:02:47
◼
►
TV, blah, blah, blah.
02:02:48
◼
►
They're not just stereo components.
02:02:50
◼
►
They're not.
02:02:51
◼
►
So they didn't rethink that.
02:02:52
◼
►
The other way they didn't rethink it, although they're kind of leaning in that direction,
02:02:56
◼
►
is they didn't do the thing that we've always wanted them to do for ages, is like, "Hey,
02:02:59
◼
►
can you make something that's like my whole home hub?
02:03:01
◼
►
Make it my Wi-Fi hub.
02:03:03
◼
►
Make it my HomeKit thing.
02:03:05
◼
►
Make it my Siri thing.
02:03:06
◼
►
Make it play music, blah, blah, blah."
02:03:08
◼
►
They didn't do that, but they kind of like, "Okay, well, what if we put temperature and
02:03:12
◼
►
humidity sensors on there?"
02:03:13
◼
►
No, it's not a home device.
02:03:15
◼
►
It's still just a speaker, but they're small.
02:03:17
◼
►
We can put them in there.
02:03:18
◼
►
And then, oh, if it hears your smoke detector go off, it'll do something.
02:03:21
◼
►
And it is plugged in all the time, so it probably will be your HomeKit hub, unless the Apple
02:03:25
◼
►
TV steals it from it.
02:03:27
◼
►
They're not ready to say, "This is the new hub for your house."
02:03:31
◼
►
Because first of all, as we all know, if it was going to be the hub for your house, it
02:03:33
◼
►
would have to be a Wi-Fi mesh network thing.
02:03:35
◼
►
Apple left that space a long time ago and seems not interested in going back into it.
02:03:39
◼
►
But they do still do a HomeKit thing.
02:03:42
◼
►
And this is looking slightly more HomeKitty, thread radio, temperature sensor.
02:03:48
◼
►
You can talk to it to control stuff in your home.
02:03:51
◼
►
But predominantly, it is still the product it was, which is basically a wireless speaker
02:03:56
◼
►
that integrates with Apple stuff.
02:03:58
◼
►
That sounds really good, but I feel like they're leaving money on the table by not doing a
02:04:03
◼
►
little bit to make this a potential purchase of people who aren't super-duper bought into
02:04:08
◼
►
the Apple ecosystem, but just want a good speaker, and also to give it longevity, assuming
02:04:12
◼
►
this thing doesn't burn out like the other one does with a bad diode, a bad amplifier.
02:04:20
◼
►
There's some fatal flaw, some weird uncharacteristic from Apple fatal flaw in the HomePods that
02:04:26
◼
►
makes them the original generation of HomePods.
02:04:28
◼
►
Hopefully this one is better there.
02:04:31
◼
►
If this is the rate of development of the HomePod, it's going to be a long time before
02:04:34
◼
►
this thing goes in any direction.
02:04:36
◼
►
But if it's leaning in one direction or the other, it is not leaning in the direction
02:04:39
◼
►
of this is a good speaker for people to buy who are into audio, like in terms of outside
02:04:43
◼
►
the Apple ecosystem, but it is leaning a little bit into this is your home hub, which I think
02:04:49
◼
►
I don't expect this thing to sprout a screen anytime soon or anything, but it is plugged
02:04:52
◼
►
in all the time and it's probably in a nice location in your home, and it's just sitting
02:04:56
◼
►
there, so why not have it keep track of temperature and humidity?
02:05:00
◼
►
Why not have it speak to it to turn the lights on and off or whatever?
02:05:05
◼
►
I know, Marco, you're excited that the S7 is way faster than the old chip, but I look
02:05:10
◼
►
at this and I say it's $300 and the best we could get was a watch chip.
02:05:14
◼
►
I'm sure it'll be great.
02:05:15
◼
►
I'm sure it'll be fine, but if this thing is going to sort of grow into being an actual
02:05:19
◼
►
home hub, when the Apple TV, what does the Apple TV have now, A15 or something in it?
02:05:23
◼
►
The Apple TV is so massively overpowered compared to this thing, and it's so tiny.
02:05:29
◼
►
I think if you had to elect something in your house to be your home hub, which I don't actually
02:05:33
◼
►
know if you can do that, I think it just picks on its own or there's some way that...
02:05:36
◼
►
Yeah, as far as I can tell, you have no control over that.
02:05:38
◼
►
It'll tell you which device is the current home hub, but you can't pick it as far as
02:05:44
◼
►
But if I had to elect one, I'd elect the thing with an A15 in it, but it would be kind of
02:05:48
◼
►
cool if Apple eventually figured out what the home pod's going to be when it grows up.
02:05:54
◼
►
Right now, what it is is the second generation of the exact product that they made before.
02:05:59
◼
►
It's just they took a long vacation in between to, I don't know, think about stuff for a
02:06:04
◼
►
Because if this had come out a year after the home pod, we'd be like, "Oh, the next
02:06:08
◼
►
home pod out, and it's better than the first one."
02:06:09
◼
►
Marco probably wouldn't even have had time to have all of his fail, because he just would
02:06:12
◼
►
have replaced him with the new one anyway.
02:06:14
◼
►
And then we would have moved on.
02:06:16
◼
►
There was this weird time in the wilderness where they didn't know what they were going
02:06:18
◼
►
to do, and they came out of the wilderness and they said, "Let's just do what we did
02:06:22
◼
►
And so there they go.
02:06:23
◼
►
They did what they did before, presumably slightly better.
02:06:28
◼
►
I'm kind of disappointed in the fact that they didn't take the lessons other than the
02:06:35
◼
►
reliability ones, we hope.
02:06:36
◼
►
In the same way that the laptop says the lessons of the previous line of laptops that people
02:06:39
◼
►
had complaints about.
02:06:40
◼
►
I mean, one of the lessons, as you said, Marco, was like, "Maybe the lesson was we should
02:06:43
◼
►
have a cheap one."
02:06:44
◼
►
And they do now, so great.
02:06:46
◼
►
And then we don't have to worry so much about the price.
02:06:47
◼
►
But then they de-contented this one.
02:06:49
◼
►
To save 50 bucks?
02:06:50
◼
►
If it sounds just as good, then good.
02:06:53
◼
►
You made it cheaper and it sounds just as good, so that's fine.
02:06:56
◼
►
But we'll see.
02:06:57
◼
►
I don't feel like they took...
02:07:00
◼
►
There are lots of lessons they could have taken from the original HomePod in terms of,
02:07:04
◼
►
again, picking two directions.
02:07:06
◼
►
To go more into the generic audio device direction or to go more in the HomeHub direction.
02:07:11
◼
►
And it seems like they leaned a tiny little bit in the HomeHub direction, but then just
02:07:16
◼
►
stopped and said, "It's just another HomePod.
02:07:18
◼
►
It's a big one and it replaces the previous big one."
02:07:21
◼
►
And presumably because of the synergies of the platform with the Mini, they're more committed
02:07:26
◼
►
to this big one than they were to the other one.
02:07:28
◼
►
But this may be the new Mac Mini in terms of the product that never gets updated, something
02:07:32
◼
►
aside of the Mac Pro.
02:07:33
◼
►
The Mac Mini used to be the product that was like, "Oh, we got a new Mac Mini.
02:07:37
◼
►
It probably won't be another one in three years."
02:07:38
◼
►
Maybe that's the HomePod now.
02:07:40
◼
►
Yeah, I mean, at this point, I'm just happy that they are still continuing this product
02:07:45
◼
►
line at all.
02:07:46
◼
►
Yes, my wish list...
02:07:48
◼
►
I wouldn't say they're continuing it.
02:07:50
◼
►
They resumed it.
02:07:51
◼
►
They stopped.
02:07:52
◼
►
I feel like they stopped and then they resumed.
02:07:56
◼
►
There's definitely a gap there.
02:07:57
◼
►
There's a gap there.
02:07:59
◼
►
And we don't necessarily know the reasons why they stopped it.
02:08:02
◼
►
They're all breaking.
02:08:03
◼
►
That might have had something to do with it.
02:08:05
◼
►
And they also stopped it in kind of early COVID days.
02:08:08
◼
►
And so it could have had to do with supply chain, because maybe the A8 they were manufacturing,
02:08:14
◼
►
maybe they couldn't get any more of those made.
02:08:17
◼
►
If you look at what chips Apple ships in their current product line, over the last 18 months
02:08:23
◼
►
or so, they have dramatically eliminated products that were using older chips.
02:08:30
◼
►
Most of their product line now is using the same very small set of very modern chips.
02:08:37
◼
►
Different levels of them, for sure.
02:08:39
◼
►
But if you look around, all the old stuff that was using old A12s or whatever, those
02:08:43
◼
►
are all gone from the lineup.
02:08:45
◼
►
They have systematically replaced all of that old stuff over the last 18 months or so.
02:08:50
◼
►
And so it could have had to do with chip supply issues.
02:08:53
◼
►
It could have had to do with the hardware failures, whatever it was.
02:08:56
◼
►
I don't necessarily, we can't really necessarily know that when they killed the old HomePod
02:09:02
◼
►
that they were saying, "Well, that didn't work.
02:09:06
◼
►
Maybe it was really just like, we can't replace this yet, but we can't keep selling this one
02:09:10
◼
►
because of Reason XYZ.
02:09:11
◼
►
So we'll just go without it for a little while."
02:09:14
◼
►
But even before they killed it, they weren't updating it.
02:09:16
◼
►
You just kind of sat there.
02:09:18
◼
►
It sat there long enough for the ones in the field to start to fail due to heat issues
02:09:23
◼
►
or components burning out.
02:09:25
◼
►
And then they stopped selling it.
02:09:28
◼
►
It definitely doesn't seem like, even when they came out with the Mini, they didn't have
02:09:33
◼
►
a new version of it ready then.
02:09:36
◼
►
It obviously wasn't part of their grand plan for this product line until, I feel like the
02:09:42
◼
►
Mini was like, "Look, if the Mini doesn't go anywhere, then we're just bailing on this
02:09:45
◼
►
whole thing."
02:09:46
◼
►
But I guess the Mini was successful enough.
02:09:47
◼
►
They said, "We should probably do the big one."
02:09:49
◼
►
It's so hard to tell from the outside with the timelines and these things, but it definitely
02:09:52
◼
►
doesn't look like a coordinated effort to say, "We did the big one.
02:09:54
◼
►
We learned some lessons.
02:09:56
◼
►
Now we're going to try again."
02:09:57
◼
►
And what they tried again was with the Mini.
02:09:59
◼
►
And then it seems like that was enough for them to go for the big one again.
02:10:04
◼
►
But there was definitely a period of time where they were not committed to the idea
02:10:07
◼
►
that the big HomePod would remain a product that they'll line up and get updates on some
02:10:14
◼
►
regular intervals.
02:10:15
◼
►
So I'm glad they have come back to it, but like I said, I'm a little bit disappointed
02:10:18
◼
►
that they've come back to it with basically the same thinking as before.
02:10:21
◼
►
Yeah, but again, I think, again, this is not a high priority product line for Apple.
02:10:28
◼
►
So we don't want them to be too ambitious if they can't keep up.
02:10:33
◼
►
And again, this is setting the bar pretty low.
02:10:36
◼
►
This is going in with pretty low expectations, but it's also realistic.
02:10:38
◼
►
Apple is not very good at multitasking.
02:10:40
◼
►
Even as the company has gotten so much bigger over the last decade, they're still not good
02:10:44
◼
►
at multitasking and managing many different product lines sufficiently.
02:10:49
◼
►
So if this is what they can give us, I'll take this over abandonment.
02:10:55
◼
►
This is much better.
02:10:56
◼
►
And yeah, down the road, there are still some pretty significant holes in the HomePod lineup.
02:11:02
◼
►
What I would most like to see, some kind of HomePod port or HomePod amp kind of thing
02:11:08
◼
►
where you could have the HomePod functionality with maybe like a microphone unit and then
02:11:13
◼
►
some kind of line output to be able to drive any speakers you want with a HomePod-like
02:11:20
◼
►
functionality leading the way.
02:11:22
◼
►
That would be great.
02:11:23
◼
►
And then secondly, I would love some kind of portable battery-powered HomePods.
02:11:27
◼
►
You could bring it out onto your deck or something.
02:11:29
◼
►
That would be great too.
02:11:31
◼
►
And I understand those are relatively specialized use cases, but already products exist to kind
02:11:37
◼
►
of hack that on now.
02:11:38
◼
►
That's why you need to get a Rivian.
02:11:41
◼
►
It comes with one of those.
02:11:43
◼
►
Like I currently have.
02:11:44
◼
►
There's some $30 Amazon battery-based thing from some no-name company.
02:11:50
◼
►
Those party speakers.
02:11:51
◼
►
Someone on Twitter was talking about party speakers.
02:11:53
◼
►
That's a whole thing now.
02:11:56
◼
►
They're not like the RGB festooned gaming PCs, but it's a similar vibe where they just
02:12:01
◼
►
take basically a big battery-powered speaker, but they make it look ridiculous with like
02:12:06
◼
►
chrome and shiny things and colors and vents and wings.
02:12:10
◼
►
It's just a party speaker.
02:12:13
◼
►
That is actually a surprisingly big market.
02:12:15
◼
►
And I think Sony's doing really well there.
02:12:16
◼
►
Anyway, but if you look at the Amazon Echo series of products, they learned pretty early
02:12:23
◼
►
on that this was a thing people do.
02:12:25
◼
►
And so the Echo that I bought two years ago, the little ball one, which otherwise has been
02:12:29
◼
►
total garbage and they kept failing and it's a totally garbage product, but that product
02:12:37
◼
►
comes with on the bottom of it a little tripod screw mount hole and little pogo pins.
02:12:43
◼
►
And other companies can make battery and they have made battery bases for it.
02:12:47
◼
►
The product directly supports it with no hacks.
02:12:50
◼
►
It literally screws into the tripod mount so it mounts itself to the bottom.
02:12:53
◼
►
It powers it through those pogo pins.
02:12:55
◼
►
Like Amazon designed the Echo with this use case in mind for people to make these accessories.
02:13:00
◼
►
I have a similar thing for the HomePod mini.
02:13:03
◼
►
The HomePod mini makes no effort to enable this.
02:13:05
◼
►
And so you have to like run the cable of the HomePod out the back into this thing and then
02:13:10
◼
►
loop it around to bunch it all up because it's like this fixed length cable.
02:13:13
◼
►
And then you have and then like it has to like wrap around the HomePod mini with these
02:13:17
◼
►
big plastic like clamp things.
02:13:20
◼
►
And it dramatically reduces the sound quality because some part of how it's designed to
02:13:25
◼
►
resonate doesn't work well with this.
02:13:26
◼
►
And so it makes it sound like garbage, but it does work.
02:13:30
◼
►
And actually the HomePod mini is way better at this than the Amazon Alexa thing because
02:13:36
◼
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the Alexa thing when you pick it up and move it, it does not do well with like transitioning
02:13:40
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to a different Wi-Fi node.
02:13:41
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If you have like a multipoint Wi-Fi setup, the Echo just drops it and fails.
02:13:46
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And so you bring it like as soon as you bring it outside, if it switched to a new AP, you
02:13:49
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got to like reboot the Echo for it to work.
02:13:51
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Whereas the HomePod works perfectly.
02:13:53
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It like transition between the Wi-Fi access points perfectly.
02:13:56
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It's fast, it's responsive.
02:13:58
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Like the HomePod mini I'm saying.
02:13:59
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Like so the HomePod mini is a great product for this and Apple just makes no effort to
02:14:03
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enable it whatsoever.
02:14:04
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So like this is the kind of thing like if Apple wants to keep making the HomePod product
02:14:10
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line, keep developing it further, I would, again, I would love to have those two products.
02:14:14
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A battery powered portable option that you could bring out onto your deck or whatever,
02:14:17
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your front yard, whatever it is.
02:14:19
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And also some kind of like HomePod with a line out that you can connect your own speakers
02:14:26
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And that way, you know, if you already have speakers that are good, use them.
02:14:30
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Or if Apple's, you know, if Apple starts to make speakers that suck or, you know, if they
02:14:35
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have some part of their product line that they're not filling very well, that product
02:14:39
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helps fill those gaps.
02:14:40
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Kind of like the Mac mini.
02:14:41
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It's like you can fill in the gaps that you're not thinking of because they're not, you know,
02:14:45
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mass market enough, but everyone has something like that, you know.
02:14:48
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So I would love to see those down the road.
02:14:49
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But for now, I am very, very happy that we have a new HomePod big.
02:14:54
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And I can't wait to get it.
02:14:56
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You know, I'm not getting it until the first deliveries are February 3rd.
02:15:01
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So you know, I'm not getting it for a few weeks.
02:15:03
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But oh, man, I'm looking forward to it.
02:15:05
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I know this doesn't matter to you.
02:15:07
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But does the is the Echo actually waterproof?
02:15:09
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Doesn't matter to you?
02:15:10
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I don't use it in the rain.
02:15:11
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Know what I'm saying?
02:15:12
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Like for like outdoor, those party speakers, not that all the party speakers are waterproof,
02:15:16
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but I feel like a battery powered portable thing would have would probably have to be
02:15:20
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significantly more water resistant, let's say, than any of the HomePods.
02:15:24
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Frankly, I'll tell you, I've been using the HomePod mini that way for, you know, maybe
02:15:28
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half a year.
02:15:29
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See, I told you it didn't matter.
02:15:31
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It's been so right.
02:15:32
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But I don't leave it out all the time.
02:15:34
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Like it's different from, you know, a camera's out there all the time, a HomePod mini, I
02:15:37
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bring it out if we're like going to be hanging out there, and then I bring it inside afterwards.
02:15:42
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But but yeah, it's the home.
02:15:44
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And I'm telling the HomePod mini in its stupid little battery thing.
02:15:48
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It's so even even in this terrible contraption from this cheapo Amazon brand that actually
02:15:52
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makes it sound worse than when it's not an it still sounds better than every portable
02:15:56
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Sonos thing.
02:15:57
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I've trust trust me, I tried them all sounds better than all of those.
02:15:59
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It sounds better than every JBL thing I've seen sounds better than that little B&O thing.
02:16:03
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It's like, like, has like little leather handle on top.
02:16:05
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►
Like I've heard all these things.
02:16:07
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►
The HomePod mini can beat them all if Apple chooses to address this market.
02:16:11
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They can literally just make a HomePod mini with a battery base, and they would destroy
02:16:16
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this market.
02:16:17
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But they and they I don't think they're gonna do it like that.
02:16:20
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That's not really their style of thing to do, but I wish they would.
02:16:23
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But anyway, I'm happy with what I have so far.
02:16:26
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I hope they continue to expand this line.
02:16:28
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And I and ultimately, I really, really hope that this new HomePod is as much more responsive
02:16:34
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with Siri as I think it will be with this new chip.
02:16:37
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And it look and we can get into Siri another day.
02:16:40
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Siri is still comically bad compared to its competitors.
02:16:45
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And that's a whole different thing.
02:16:47
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But you know, that's probably that's probably a whole different part of the company as well.
02:16:50
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So I'll pick on them some other day.
02:16:51
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But for now, super happy with the HomePod update.
02:16:55
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I don't have it yet.
02:16:56
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So you know, but I don't think it's gonna be bad in person.
02:16:59
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►
I think I think I'm gonna be really happy with it when I get it.
02:17:03
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Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Sofa, and the LunchPaleVC podcast.
02:17:09
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►
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
02:17:11
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►
You can join at atp.fm/join.
02:17:14
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And we will talk to you next week.
02:18:19
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►
So just very quickly, I wanted to give an update for something that I don't think anyone even realized.
02:18:24
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Because I don't think I talked about it.
02:18:26
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But I ordered one of those Belkin... I don't even know the name of this thing.
02:18:29
◼
►
And I'm gonna have to dig up the name and the link for the show notes.
02:18:32
◼
►
But suffice to say, the Belkin DooDad that you put on top of your studio display
02:18:36
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►
so the camera isn't garbage.
02:18:38
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►
Oh cool. Your phone sticks to it and you can use your phone?
02:18:41
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►
Right. Yep, that's exactly right.
02:18:43
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►
And I would do a demo. I have all the lights off because it's been forbidden for me to have the ceiling fan on while we record.
02:18:50
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►
And I'm too lazy to do the little yanking on the chain thing to turn the fan off and the light on.
02:18:55
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►
So the lights are off.
02:18:57
◼
►
So otherwise I would give you two a demo of what I look like with the fancy new continuity camera setup.
02:19:04
◼
►
But this Belkin thing was like 30 or 40 bucks from Apple. Something like that.
02:19:09
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►
There is a version for notebooks that's not the one I'm talking about.
02:19:12
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►
The one I'm talking about is the version that goes on displays.
02:19:16
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►
The version for notebooks is $30. I don't have the link in front of me for the full version.
02:19:21
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►
But I think it was 40 bucks, which is kind of ridiculous.
02:19:24
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►
Yeah, it's at the bottom in the "you might also like" thing on that page.
02:19:27
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►
Oh, thank you. There you go.
02:19:29
◼
►
So yeah, it's okay. The instructions it came with were kind of useless.
02:19:36
◼
►
And when I plopped it on top of my display, it just wanted to fall over as soon as I put any weight on it, like have the phone on it.
02:19:43
◼
►
Eventually I was able to deduce what they wanted me to do.
02:19:47
◼
►
But it's not one of those things where it like clamps to the top of the display, which kind of makes sense, right?
02:19:51
◼
►
Because you don't want a lot of pressure up there.
02:19:54
◼
►
But it wasn't immediately obvious to me what it is I was supposed to do to get this thing to not flop around.
02:20:01
◼
►
But I was able to figure it out.
02:20:03
◼
►
And I now am using my studio display as a hub insofar as I have my last year's iPhone 13 Pro up there.
02:20:12
◼
►
And then it's connected via lightning to USB-C to the back of the studio display.
02:20:17
◼
►
Really just for the purpose of power, because I think the video is transmitted over Wi-Fi or whatever anyway.
02:20:22
◼
►
But, coincidentally over the last 48 hours I had a FaceTime call this morning with a friend of the show, James Thompson, and yesterday with Underscore.
02:20:31
◼
►
And I used the continuity camera and this Belkin Doo-Dad both times.
02:20:35
◼
►
And when you put it in normal mode, it works really, really well.
02:20:40
◼
►
So like, not center stage, not any of the portrait background blurring, studio light or whatever they call it, that actually works pretty well.
02:20:49
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►
But I will say, as soon as you put on center stage, which I am a center stage apologist, I really like the feature in general.
02:20:55
◼
►
But the second you put on center stage, even with a one year old top of the line iPhone, the image quality goes to garbage.
02:21:02
◼
►
It's just awful.
02:21:03
◼
►
And so, but if you leave it on the standard version, then it really does look quite good.
02:21:11
◼
►
And way better than the studio display camera. Way, way, way better.
02:21:15
◼
►
Which I know surprises nobody, but this is your apology camera, just like there was an apology mouse way back when.
02:21:20
◼
►
And I do like it. It kind of sucks that I have this one year old probably worth $800 or whatever iPhone up there.
02:21:29
◼
►
That's now just going to live up there.
02:21:31
◼
►
And I had to buy this $40 Doo-Dad to do it.
02:21:34
◼
►
But it does work out really well.
02:21:35
◼
►
The only problem I do have, and maybe this is user error, but I very briefly tried to turn on desk view.
02:21:42
◼
►
And it was easily like 8 inches above the surface of my desk.
02:21:48
◼
►
Now, as you recall, I do have a glass topped desk, which I know everyone thinks is very weird.
02:21:54
◼
►
And honestly, I'd like to get a new desk at some point.
02:21:56
◼
►
But for whatever it is, whatever the difference that may or may not make, maybe it wasn't detecting the desk surface because it's glass.
02:22:04
◼
►
I have no idea. I didn't think it was that smart.
02:22:07
◼
►
But one way or another, I tried to use desk mode, and it was basically the area in front of my chest mode instead rather than the desktop.
02:22:17
◼
►
But in general, I do like it.
02:22:20
◼
►
I would say if you have a need for this sort of thing, which if you're a studio display owner, you probably do, I give it one thumb up.
02:22:28
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►
It's not great. It's a little too expensive. But it's better than nothing, and it works.
02:22:32
◼
►
So there you go.
02:22:33
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►
A glowing review.
02:22:35
◼
►
Blowing, glowing review.